EFF still confused

EFF's headline says Court Crushes Online Journalists' Rights.

The body says:

[T]he court did not restrict its ruling to online journalists, instead deciding that all journalists could be required to reveal confidential sources when a claim of trade secret is raised.

But somehow, that little bit of fact in there didn't actually cross the consciousness of the EFF. The whining about "Apple's picking on bloggers!!!" continues.

Friday Cat Blogging

Apple conspiracy theory of the week

The good news is that 48 hours after leaving town for repair, my laptop is back, in fine condition. The bad news is that I have, as a result of this, come up with a new Apple Computer Conspiracy Theory:

Given: Apple ships Macs with too little RAM for real usage.

Given: Apple overcharges by a large margin for RAM purchased with a new machine.

Given (and I quote from the letter that came back with my PowerBook):

During the testing process, it was determined that a part Apple has not approved for use with your product resulted in your product's failure. When the part was removed, your product successfully passed all Apple diagnostic and reliability tests…

Continued use of this part (or parts) may cause another failure or damage to your Apple product, which Apple will not cover in a subsequent repair.

The part (or parts) that did not pass Apple's diagnostic tests for your product is identified below:

    X     RAM Memory         Other

Note what's not mentioned anywhere: which problem I reported. I reported two separate, unrelated issues. Which one was "fixed" by removing my RAM? According to the detail sheet, both the display and the inverter were replaced, so it wasn't either of those.

Or in other words, the AppleCare Protection Plan that I purchased is now void, and Apple's covering its butt for the future by stating that anything that goes wrong, ever, is because I installed perfectly good third-party RAM.

I don't like it, but it does answer the question as to why Apple ships its machines with so little RAM and charges so much extra for more: it's because if you don't buy their RAM, you don't get hardware support, even if you paid for it.

Note to self: never, ever, ever, again admit to Apple that a machine had third-party RAM installed.

Hand over the fish, and no one gets hurt

This is why I sometimes, to Dori's great derision, feed our cat Pixel scraps at the dinner table: Cat shoots owner. A news story that I'm not sure that I believe, but hey, better safe than sorry.

Journalism and revealing sources

There's been a lot of hoohah around the blogosphere recently about the whole Apple suing "weblogs" deal, and I wanted to get my point of view out in the open, given that I've been found occasionally practicing journalism without a permit:

In my opinion, reporters ought to be required to reveal sources if, and only if the source was breaking a law or legal contract in revealing the information, and there is no public interest being protected by the revealing of that information. Note, please, that "in the public interest" doesn't mean that the public is interested in the information; it means that people would be damaged if this information wasn't released. Pentagon Papers? In the public interest. Information about unreleased Apple products? Not a chance.

Yeah, that means that I think that the EFF is on the wrong side of this, and so are most of the articles that I've read. OTOH, it appears that in general, Chuq and Damien may agree with me.

Side benefit: if this was the actual status quo, Robert Novak would either have to go to jail or give up his source (who would then go to jail). Works for me!

If you think I'm wrong, tell me how. And please note that nowhere above did I say anything about "bloggers," as I'm neither trying to define what a blogger is nor am I trying to differentiate what Novak did from what Ciarelli did. I say, throw the book at both of 'em and tell 'em to talk or face the consequences.

Annual San Francisco Wine Auction

Thomas Hawk pointed me to the 29^th Annual San Francisco Wine Auction. At $250/person for the dinner (before you even start bidding on wine!), it's a little pricey for our pocketbooks, but it looks like it's for a good cause.

Okay, I have to say that my first thought upon seeing the PDF of their invitation was that for that price, they should have been able to hire a copyeditor, but maybe it's just truth in advertising that they refer to part of the evening as the "Silent Suction"?

Houston, it's on its way

Following up on the PowerBook saga, and as a reminder to myself: the laptop finally hit the road today on its way to the Houston repair center. While Apple paid to get the shipment box to me early yesterday, DHL doesn't guarantee delivery here in the morning as we're too rural. Consequently, I couldn't flip it back around for next-day return, so Apple won't get it till tomorrow. If the stars align perfectly, it could be fixed Thursday afternoon or Friday morning and shipped back out again for Saturday delivery, but the chances of that are about, I figure, 2%. Monday's a much better bet.

What I want to remember the next time this happens is to just drive the damn thing to the store over the weekend. If I had, it would have been at Apple yesterday (versus tomorrow), and I'd almost definitely have it back this week, not next week. <kick to self>

Too much crap over the phone

I just got the same push-poll that jenniebee did:

A push-poll kind of group, calling themselves "Dove" called me this morning, wanting to screen me to see if I wanted to be inundated with calls from an outfit called "Feature Films for Families"...

Because, as they said, most families felt that movies and entertainment were just getting too darn filthy these days. Sheesh.

And because I've never had a chance to use nofollow before, here's the relevant links of the perpetrators of this stupidity: The Dove Foundation and Feature Films for Families.

Macs in Bioinformatics

We're interested in bioinformatics as one of the fields that our son Sean may pursue in college, so it was interesting to see this article about the use of Macs and XServes in the field. A Perfect X, by John Russell for Bio-IT World, is packed with the usual dumb shots at "fanatical Mac users" typical of lazy writers unfamiliar with the platform, and it has several outright mistakes, but it also has much good information about Macs in the bio field. Worth a read.

Technorati makes a misstep

Okay, follow the links: Jason Kottke blogs about Niall Kennedy's blog and Niall's subsequent comment at another blog. The short version:

All Technorati employees have been asked to review weblog posts with staff members before posting.

In the last year or so, Technorati has hired a cartload of Smart People, and done a lot of Smart Things. This isn't one of them. My guess is that this is either going to be reversed quickly, or it'll backfire badly.

This ain't news

My notes below about my PowerBook problem, for some reason, got linked by MacSurfer and My Apple Menu. The post about LinkBack got referenced by MacNetJournal.

Slow news day, I guess.