Author: Alesh Houdek

Six things the iPhone and iPad still can’t do

  1. Download an image from the internet, crop it, and upload it to a blog
  2. Post a video you find on Twitter to your Tumblr
  3. Download a song from a website and save it to your music app (or generally get music, or anything else, on or off the phone on anything but its “home” computer)
  4. Run Flash (and spare me, the $199 Kindle Fire does it)
  5. Check the weather from the home screen (or display any information other than the date: the calendar app customizes its icon with the current date, but no other app can do this)
  6. Adjust the size of text on a web page

Lessig’s new fight

Copyright activist Lawrence Lessig has given up the fight — he’s realized that before anything else, there’s a more fundamental problem that has to be solved: the corruption of congress by money. In this video, he does a remarkable job of outlining the problem. He does a somewhat less then perfectly convincing job of suggesting a solution. Specifically. Since congress is unable to reform itself, he has a strategy that would — eventually — lead to a constitutional convention, per Article 5 of the Constitution. Bold stuff. This guy’s serious: there is soon coming a book, and here’s his presentation at the Conference on the Constitutional Convention, which he organized, at Harvard, where he teaches:

We should be freaked out about the speed of light being broken

I’m not sure why we should be freaked out about the speed of light being broken. Yes, it “invalidates” Einstein’s theory of relativity. But it does so in the same sense that relativity “invalidated” Newtonian physics: that is, for a tiny sliver of edge cases that mostly apply just to theoretical physics. Just as bridges didn’t start to collapse after Einstein, nuclear reactors are not going to begin exploding if it turns out to be true that neutrinos travel slightly faster than the speed of light. EVERYBODY CALM DOWN!