My Kindle Fire review… sort of

I couldn’t disagree more with this usability study of the Kindle Fire (linked by @SGgrc) in a number of key ways. Don’t worry, though, this isn’t just me rushing to point out that someone is wrong on the internet, but I have to comment on an analysis that is the exact opposite of what I’ve found using the Fire.

The primary example of them being wrong is their findings about web browsing. They say that mobile websites are the way to go, because it’s hard to click the small buttons and text fields on desktop websites. To reinforce this, they point to a user having trouble logging in to the Facebook mobile site. The buttons are too small and the text boxes are hard to click. On a desktop website, you would fix this by pinch-zooming to make what you wanted to select bigger. But on mobile websites, there is no such ability. You’re stuck with the tiny, sparsely filled screen and you can’t make it bigger. That login screen to the Facebook mobile site takes up maybe a quarter of the screen.

They summarize by saying that browsing mobile sites is “luxurious”. Once again, I disagree. Mobile sites look thin and stretched, like cloth spread over a too-large frame.

   
The Facebook and CNN mobile sites on the Fire

In short, web browsing on the Kindle Fire is fine. You have to pinch-zoom and double-tap your way around the web, just like on any mobile device, but the hardware makes it fast enough that you don’t notice.

I will agree, though, that the user experience of Facebook on the Kindle Fire sucks. But that’s because, for whatever reason, there is no Facebook app. There is a Facebook “app” icon in the app drawer, but it just opens the web browser to m.facebook.com. Fail.

Also, from the article, they say that the Fire is heavy, making it hard to read for long periods of time, and the lack of hardware page-turning buttons make it hard to use. The Fire is my first Kindle, so all my experience is from using the Kindle app on my 4inch-screen Captivate. That said, I don’t find it heavy or hard to turn pages at all. I’ve held it in my hand to read for a 45-minute stationary bike ride, and for an hour or more on the couch.

Finally, the article also indicts the Fire for the lack of hardware Android buttons. I, too, was skeptical of this, as well as skeptical of Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich, the most recent Android releases that do away with hardware buttons in favor of on-screen buttons that can be hidden and are always at the bottom of the screen, no matter how you turn the device.

The Kindle Fire has sold me on the on-screen button idea.

It takes a little getting used to, but that’s because it’s new and different. Innovation always comes with a learning curve.

So don’t take this as an unreserved endorsement or review of the Kindle Fire. But it is innovative and polished and very pleasant to use. I agree that it has flaws, but this article misdiagnoses most of them.

The biggest problem of the Fire is currently the lack of the Android Market, to give you access to the app ecosystem there, like the Facebook app and all your purchased apps. This is a result of the Amazon App Store currently being an also-ran, because before the Kindle Fire there was no reason for app developers to mess with it. With the Fire selling as well as it is, I see this problem being remedied within a few months.

As an Android-savvy early-adopter, I’m okay with rooting and unrooting my device to install the Market while I wait for the Android ecosystem to catch up. Until then, next time you see me, ask to play with my Fire. I guarantee I’ll have it on me.

How’s that for a review?

I don’t remember how the conversation started, whether I just decided to thrust my musical tastes on him, but the part where my recollection begins is with myself at thirteen years old playing “Aerodynamic” by Daft Punk for my father and relating to him that it contained my favorite guitar solo.

Of course, at this point, my music collection consisted of Eiffel 65′s Europop (synth-pop) and the first two Linkin Park studio albums (nu-metal that was noted for its lack of guitar solos), so in effect, what I really meant was “This is the best and only guitar solo I’ve ever heard!” And it’s only pure luck that the Daft Punk album, which was classified as house-influenced synthpop, had a guitar solo at all. But it was mine and I loved it.

So, after sitting through middle school me playing some techno song for him, my father tried to engage me and play his favorite guitar solo for me so that we might bond, as father and son have for decades, over a shared affinity for music. I’m not sure exactly what song he played, but it was almost certainly a Men At Work song, (“Overkill”, if I had to guess) with Colin Hay playing a sublime guitar melody over the traditional rock accompaniment of guitar and bass and (depending on the song) synth.

Unfortunately for him and his effort to find common ground with his kid who was developing tastes for genres that didn’t exist when he was born, I misinterpreted his attempt to find common ground for an attempt to show me how the stuff that I liked wasn’t special (I was young). In a territorial defense of my musical taste, I invoked the No true Scotsman argument to narrowly re-interpret the “guitar solo” to be something where the guitar plays by itself, without any other instruments, as in my beloved Daft Punk song.

This is where the memory gets fuzzy again, but my sense is that my argument totally deflated my dad, and left him with no real way to continue after my rhetorical torpedo. I’m not sure if he managed to salvage the conversation or justifiably patted me on my head, said “that’s nice” and moved on. At any rate, to this day, that conversation and my abrupt nullification of my own father’s attempt to share something he loved has haunted me.

Sorry, Dad.

If you asked me today, I’d probably say “Soldiers of the Wasteland“ by Dragonforce was my favorite. If you made me stick to a genre that existed when I was born (Dragoforce is loosely categorized as epic speed metal), I’d probably say “According to You“ by Orianthi. By borrowing from the solo for Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child of Mine”, it communicated that she had studied the titans of rock and roll, and by having a ferocious shred section, it said that she also at least had the mechanical skill to keep up with the greats. 

The appeal of Minecraft

I’ve abortively begun to write a post trying to explain to the world (and secretly, myself) why I have spent so many hours playing Minecraft, each time devolving in to describing the emergent narrative of the game and deleting the draft because no one really cares about one randomly generated world. But someone else didn’t give up, and wrote an article that includes the best summary of the heart of Minecraft that I’ve ever read:

 I started on an island that was no more than 12 squares in total area. As far as my eye could see, there was nothing but ocean. I was stranded on few spaces of grass and soil amidst the endless, flickering blue. Not even a tree. It almost immediately began to rain.

With my bare hands, I dug down. Deep into the soil, then the rock, I spiraled my way down in the staircase pattern I had created on a dozen worlds before. Slowly the rain faded into the distance above me. Then it was gone completely. I was enveloped in darkness. Without wood, I couldn’t make torches. Without wood, I couldn’t make a pick. My progress was slow, and I was completely defenseless, a digital grub burrowing into the soil. I was doing it this way because I needed a change of pace, needed to give myself a challenge.

It was then that the zombies began to call out to me through the stone. Instead of avoiding them, I purposefully dug towards them. I knew that they would be in a pocket of open space, that maybe that open space would lead to a lava deposit more quickly than if I were to dig down myself literally by hand. Near the lava and its light I might gather a little time and space for safety, build a little room to hole up in, away from the dark and the cold rain.

The fight was long. I punched three zombies to death. With two hearts left, I did the only thing I could do: I feasted on their rotting flesh. I was sickened, but slowly I regained my health. I had to eat so much of it… so much dead, rotting corpse flesh. But it made me a kind of healthy, and my sickness faded, and my health was full.

Hours later, I broke through into an abandoned mineshaft. At last: wood! I hastily made a workbench and pick, then began to harvest stone, and iron, and coal. Up until that point, the only thing in my inventory had been gravel, dirt, and flint. Quickly I had a breastplate, a sword, an iron pick, dozens of torches, and several stacks of wood. I resolved to return to the surface with my riches, build a boat, and leave this forsaken island for good.

Because the island I started on was so small, digging straight up would have let in the sea and spelled my doom. I had to backtrack, up through the empty, dark spaces where the zombies and skeletons would have re-spawned. The tunnels were thick with them, and after more fights and meals of rotting corpse flesh, I could see the opening back towards my improvised staircase. It was then that a creeper got me. I corpse-ran back half a dozen times, but I had brought out too many monsters. There was no way back, and I deleted the world.

 

Minecraft is not a game with an end, not an experience with a goal. Deleting the world was not a move of admitting defeat, it was the end of that chapter of the procedurally-generated, personally-unique experience. Minecraft is a game about a journey, of incrementally building something better than what you had yesterday, and when that dream is lost, you wipe the slate clean and begin anew. It is an incredibly satisfying game of exploration where you have a thousand tiny goals: build a shelter, make fire, cook food, make weapons, survive.

But each experience is yours and yours alone.

Inadvertently following the Unix Way

I was able to rewrite Robert Berry’s B-Movie Title Generator today in ruby (thanks to the quasi-magical Sinatra web framework) because he, almost certainly unwittingly, followed the Unix Way. By way of a definition, Ted Dziuba recently gave a pretty good summary of the Unix Way in a recent, inflammatory, and otherwise unrelated essay:

A long time ago, the original neckbeards decided that it was a good idea to chain together small programs that each performed a specific task, and that the universal interface between them should be text.

If you develop on a Unix platform and you abide by this principle, the operating system will reward you with simplicity and prosperity. As an example, when web applications first began, the web application was just a program that printed text to standard output. The web server was responsible for taking incoming requests, executing this program, and returning the result to the requester. We called this CGI, and it was a good way to do business until the micro-optimizers sank their grubby meathooks into it.

In practice, the Unix Way looks something like this: you might use wget to fetch a webpage as it’s HTML source, pipe that to grep to use regexes to pull out the bits you care about, and then pipe that to cut to select only certain columns and pretty-print the data. Wget, grep, and cut are three separate, single-purpose programs that communicate by way of the universal language of streams of text.

So how did Bob accidentally flex his neckbeard and abide by the founding principles of our unix ancestors? Backing the Title Generator is a database that has one table that lists all the different types of creatures that the generator can spit out, and another table for all the places, and tags, and so on. You can actually get a full dump of the database as sweet, sweet plaintext.

I am positive that this page is a vestige, a sandbox test that was never removed. But because it stumbled on to the Path of Unix by making an easy export of the database available, anybody with half an hour and a decent grasp of regular expressions can extract the data from it and use it to fuel their own implementation of the B-Movie Title Generator. Which is exactly what I was able to do today. The source is also up on GitHub (check out bmovie.rb for all the magic).

Cyberterrorism and cyberstatecraft

Let’s start with a review: StuxNet was a virus created to specifically infiltrate Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities and physically and irreparably damage the centrifuges used to weaponize nuclear material. It was transmitted over USB flash drives to be able to get in to computer networks that weren’t connected to the internet. It was extremely specifically targeted to only activate when it detected the exact type of industrial machinery used to run the centrifuges, and stealthily attack those. Otherwise, it sat dormant and simply spread.

Once the payload was activated, it would cause the centrifuge to subtly run outside parameters in order to permanently damage it. To do this, the people who created the virus (an estimated 8 to 10 people over a period of six months) had to have access to the exact centrifuges in use by the Iranians, which points very heavily to the assistance of a national government.

Given the target, reasoning backwards points to either Israel or the United States (or both). This is very likely a piece of electronic statecraft, an attack to limit the Iranian nuclear capability in the same way that the Israelis bombed a nuclear reactor under construction in Iraq in 1981.

Why is this important? The United States is saying that a “cyber attack” (nee hacking) can constitute an act of war and be grounds for retaliation.

LulzSec, a hacking group that has just recently started popping up in the news, has taken issue with that. They have hacked a website associated with the FBI for a few reasons. One, they believe the good guys are just as bad as the bad guys. That link talks about one of the supposed “white hats” offering to pay LulzSec to hack his competitors. Two, to expose what they consider to be hipocrisy: the US is engaging in cyberattacks while saying that it is an act of war. Three, to prove that dismantling a decentralized organization is even harder on the internet than it is in the Middle East.

They close by saying “Now we are all sons of bitches”, a famous quote after the Trinity nuclear test pointing out that nukes (like cyberwarfare) are a terrible weapon with incredible power, but they can never be un-discovered. In short, they are saying “This is how the game is played. Still want to play?”

Stone Mountain Travelogue, Part 1

Driving in to Stone Mountain State Park, you see a high mountain ridge ahead of you, between two pillarboxes of trees, with two tiny houses nestled on top. That’s the first warning: this isn’t really a vacation, a rarefied constructed reality you find at resorts or cruise ships. This is a place where people live, and staying here is the art of staying alive.

Now, admittedly, the deck was stacked in my favor as far as staying alive. I was coming in with a backpack full of equipment, including a tent, sleeping bag, isobutane stove, and a small crate with a good amount of food. Surviving wouldn’t be the challenge, but it would take me five days to really learn what life was like out there.

That first day, Monday, I passed through Elkin, the last town along Highway 21 on the way to Stone Mountain. I should have stopped for supplies, since I didn’t nearly have all the things I would need for the week, but I didn’t know that yet. And even if I did, I doubt they had jeans I would have bought, not knowing how much I would wish for them later.

An hour or so before I went through Elkin, I’d driven through a rain storm so heavy that it’d given me trouble staying straight on the road going even ten under the speed limit. But I passed through it, but not out from under the clouds. As I came in to the park around 6 PM, I found that I’d missed my chance to register at the Visitor Center and I’d have to make do with claiming a camping spot at the Contact Station, a little white hut where they take money and give out maps. They were open until 9.

Talking to the nice old couple there, they showed me a map of the campground and offered to let me pick a spot after driving around to scope them out. I’d later figure that this is very much the standard procedure, after learning to be forewarned of oncoming fellow campers by seeing a new car driving around in the middle of the afternoon.

“Nah,” I shrugged, not wanting to seem too much like a tourist. They asked me if I wanted to be near the bathhouse and in or out of the trees. Near the bathhouse, in the trees, I told them. Spot number 1, they told me. I skipped on firewood then. After all, I have my stove, right?

Driving to the spot, I was a little surprised, but only because I didn’t really know what to expect. What I found was a gravel pad about twenty feet square, with a spot to park my car next to it, and containing a picnic table and a metal ring to hold a fire. Just like the other 36 campsites on the circle, each with about twenty feet between them.

I was new to camping, but I knew that shelter was key, especially with the clouds overhead and the forecast taped to the contact station window saying that rain was coming that night. So I hauled my 25 pound backpack out of the back seat of my car, and took it the ten feet over to where I decided to put my all-important tent. I started thinking while I unpacked the bag and the tent, and set to erecting it, which I’d had demonstrated to me the day before in a sunny garage by the friend lending me the gear. I was reassured that if nothing else, I’d have somewhere dry when it rained.

Laying out the tent and staking it in to the ground, I found the latter was tricker than I would have guessed. I wasn’t able to get a single one of the six 6-inch stakes sunk all the way in to the gravel before each hit what seemed to be a different rock buried somewhere in the ground I was trying to stake through. I never did figure out whether that was just the way the gravel pads were, if the ground had just hardened, or if there really were just a ton of rocks everywhere I tried to stake.

But not knowing if this was normal or not, I forged ahead and did my best with what seemed weakly-planted stakes, and put the tent up. Shelter secured, I moved on to food. I was only slightly hungry, but I knew that my first camp meal wouldn’t be easy or quick, so I set to figuring it out. It was about then that I realized I didn’t have the necessary implement for eating even the most well-prepared camp meal: an eating utensil. Of course, I didn’t have anything to eat out of either, no mess tin or camp bowl or makeshift plate.

So with some misgivings, I set off for the country store I’d stumbled on earlier after overshooting the park and missing my turn off of Highway 21. I wasn’t keen on leaving my tent just sitting there all alone, but I couldn’t really afford to pack it up and take it with me, just to set it back up in twenty minutes, could I? Sure enough, the store had what would do the job: a pack of 50 styrofoam bowls and a 24-piece set of plastic forks, knives, and spoons. Eight bucks and change all together for the only supplies I’d end up being able to get for the week.

The store also had one of those ATM kiosks, where I pulled $80, enough for three more nights in the campground at twenty bucks a piece and four nights of firewood at five each. Couldn’t hurt, right? And on my way back in to the park, I stopped at the contact station, and handed over five dollars for a bundle of nice, dry firewood. While the man went to grab the bundle, the woman asked me if I’d reconsidered how cold it looked to be tonight. Looking up, and still feeling pretty pleasant in my jean shorts, I blithely commented that it actually didn’t look that bad, but it couldn’t hurt to have the wood, right?

In fact, that whole evening, I stayed pretty warm. After cooking a store-bought “boil for seven minutes” packet of oriental pasta, I set to work trying to light a fire, more for the sport of it than the need for warmth. Not really understanding the dynamics of fire, I first tried using just five or so of the two-inch-square cross-sectioned pieces. The fire finally took, but only after I scrambled around in my car for kindling to get it going and keep it going, and realized I would have to add more wood for it to last longer than a few minutes.

After the sun went down, I kept the fire lightly fed, trying to conserve the wood for a non-specific purpose while not letting the fire wholly die. I sat on the picnic table and, by my headlamp — it turns out that firelight is actually really difficult to work by — began recording the hectic week and weekend previous (four exams, two weddings, and a graduation). A few times, the sky threatened rain with a few flecked droplets landing on my arm or the page of my journal, which I was very protective of since this particular volume stretched back over a year. I would later learn that this was just another game the rain would play, being coy and never really warning when it would really rain or just lead you on for hours.

Around 11 PM, I got tired of it, and crawled in to my tent and sleeping bag. I sat up reading my current book of choice, a wildly impractical novel by Peter Hamilton that Amazon lists as being 9.2 by 6.5 inches and just under three inches thick. But for camping out of my car, it was fine, since I had all the space I could need in there. However, by midnight, I was tired of reading, and tired of waiting for the threatened but still unapparent rain, so I decided to try sliding down in my sleeping bag, laying back on my three-quarters length sleeping pad and resting my head on my inflatable pillow.

The whole assembly was a poor simulacrum of a bed, but provided just enough comfort to allow me to drift off after I let some of the air out of the sleeping pad to make it a little more giving and the bag warmed my body to the point where I was able to sleep. It didn’t last, though, and I woke up every ninety minutes or so through the night, which I would learn was pretty much the norm for this trip. Maybe it’s the way I sleep or maybe it’s the gear I was sleeping on; I don’t know, but I’ll have to find out the next time I go camping.

That night, I also learned that the glow-in-the-dark treatment on my $20 Timex watch did, in fact, glow in the dark, and for the whole night, too. I’d been disappointed to find that it didn’t seem to work when I’d tried to read it at night before, amidst civilization. Turns out it’s not so much that the glow of the watch isn’t good enough, it’s that the dark of civilaztion wasn’t dark enough for the glow to be of any use. I guess civilization wins on that one.

That first morning, Tuesday, I woke as the sun came in to my tent around 6:30 AM, as it would every morning I was at Stone Mountain. What was different about this morning, was that I actually rose then. What I didn’t realize at the time, but is obvious in retrospect, is that the sun is correlated with warmth, but on a four hour lag. The sun goes down around 8:30, but it doesn’t get cold until past midnight; it rises at 6:30, but it doesn’t get warm until 10.

At this point, I was wearing just jean shorts, a polo shirt, and an undershirt, and the temperature was around 50 degrees Fahrenheit. It had rained during the night, and the morning was wet, and I was shivering. I was miserable. My crisis of faith had arrived.

To attempt to assuage my distress, I decided to eat, digging in to a pack of Quaker oatmeal I’d picked up, on the recommendation that it makes a quick and easy breakfast. Boil some water, pour it in, and eat right out of the packet. No messing with dishes, no cleanup. Unfortunately, these days, oatmeal packets come with all the flavoring sugar and cinnamon on the bottom, so pouring in water meant that I ate a packet of half un-seasoned and half over-seasoned oatmeal. The taste lingered for a while. Needless to say, this didn’t help my mood. The thought that kept bouncing around my head was simple: “I’m cold and the food sucks.”

My Love Letter to Linux

Note: what follows is the lengthiest Facebook message I’ve ever written, in response to a friend‘s query about whether to wipe Windows off her bloated laptop and install Linux.

I use Ubuntu, which is the Linux distribution with by far the most non-commercial (i.e. laptops instead of servers) users. Ubuntu has a lot of users because it was designed to be less arcane than the other distributions. It isn’t perfect, but it’s better.

As a function of that, as well, there are a lot of people out there who have posted questions about almost any problem I run in to, making troubleshooting easier. It can still be pretty arcane, but it’s better than the kernel nerds who tell you to “Use the source, Luke“.

I use Linux because it makes my software development work a lot easier, and I’ve been using the command prompt long enough that it’s actually easier to do most things in it these days. To give you a sense of the length of the path of mastery, I started using Linux in 2006, and I probably wouldn’t have preferred the command line until 2009 or so. However, it is a skill to be mastered like guitar or martial arts or programming: the more you dabble and “practice”, the faster you will gain mastery.

Anyway, as for gaming, I actually find that WINE, which lets you run most Windows programs, is a beautiful hack. I’m sure the internals are a gory mess, but it works most of the time. I find WoW runs better on my laptop in Linux under Wine than it did under Windows 7. Wine can reliably run any game older than, say, 2 or 3 years. My laptop can’t do nearly that, so Wine is good enough.

I’m glad I picked up and worked with Linux. It’s made me a better programmer and a smarter computer user: it doesn’t hide nearly as much from me. There have been, and are today, struggles. Sometimes it won’t play a DVD right. Sometimes when I put my laptop to sleep, it shuts off the screen never goes to sleep.

On the other hand, a lot of shit just works. When I wanted to develop for my Android phone, I didn’t have to install any drivers. When I want to tether my phone to my laptop, it does it automatically and without drivers. The window manager is miles ahead of Windows. Things like being able to resize windows to fit a grid so you can have multiple windows share your screen perfectly (each time the window resizes, that’s one keypress). Or the ability to zoom in on things on your desktop so they fill the whole screen, instead of trying to fiddle with increasing the size of the window.

I can watch Hulu on my laptop “fullscreen” (so the picture takes up the whole screen) by zooming in on the video. The full-screen button in Flash makes the video chug and screen-tear, even on my gaming desktop.

So, that’s the tradeoff: you’ll have to work to get it to work sometimes, but the rewards are, in my opinion, worth it. And the “having to work at it” part is why Linux spreads socially. The only way people stick with it is if they have someone to ask when they run in to problems. That’s why there are Linux User Groups with mailing lists and meetings to talk about cool Linux stuff and hard Linux problems. NCSU has a LUG (I’m the treasurer >.>), and so does The Triangle (it meets on Centennial, at the corporate HQ of Red Hat, the biggest commercial Linux vendor in the world).

I wouldn’t give up Linux on my laptop, and I’m trying to switch my computer at work from WinXP to Linux because it helps me get shit done. It’s worth it, to me, to learn, and I’m definitely here to help if you have any problems.

If you manage to load all your critical files on a thumbdrive or Dropbox or something, I’d definitely recommend just blowing away Windows and installing Linux. Keep all your files portable (thumbdrive, Dropbox) in case you need to go back, but at the same time, really commit to using it and I think you’ll like it.

P.S. Ubuntu comes out with new releases and new features every six months. How long are we going to be waiting for The Next Big Damn Windows Release?

Additional note: I tried to avoid this kind of rhetoric in my note because it seemed like it might be discouraging to a beginner, but learning to really use Linux is a process of mastery. (So is learning to use Windows, for that matter, but it’s a mastery that we gain a basic proficiency in as a cost of being a member of modern society.) I use the word mastery very deliberately, because George Leonard’s book Mastery has profoundly evolved my thinking on the topic. Particularly in the fact that mastery is something you gain, not achieve; that is, you never learn everything and “finish”.

Likewise, Leonard stresses that mastery requires regular practice, in particular of kata which are the same from the day you enter the dojo until the day you leave. The set of Linux/Unix command-line kata is fairly small, but by practicing and learning them separately, you gain mastery and the ability to use them together to do very powerful things.

North Carolina’s smoking ban, one year later

WRAL has a story remarking that it’s been a year since the ban on smoking in bars, restaurants, and “lodging facilities”, claiming that, by a mysteriously-hyphenated measure, “Air-quality has improved by 89 percent in those locations since smoking was banned, according to studies by the state Division of Public Health.” I would imagine that there’s probably 100% less tobacco smoke, but that doesn’t really tell us anything scientifically meaningful.

Anyway, what gets me is from the bottom of the piece:

Paul M. Stone, president and chief executive of the North Carolina Restaurant and Lodging Association, said his membership is pleased with the law.

“The consensus is that this ban has had an overall positive effect on restaurants and hotels in North Carolina,” Stone said in a statement. “It also has been very well received from the public.”

I ask this question in earnest: if it was so good for business, why did it take an act of legislature to implement it? If businesses are pleased with being forced to do something, why didn’t they do it by themselves?

The obvious (to me) answer is imperfect knowledge: they underestimated the benefits and overestimated the costs of implementing this policy. It’s hard to see how that’s true, though: you ban smoking in your restaurant, and you gain business from people who don’t want smoking, and lose business from those who do.

But maybe restaurants were afraid they’d lose all their business to smoking restaurants. On the one hand, good! The market would be working. On the other hand, why not organize via the North Carolina Restaurant and Lodging Association, and form an industry group? If everyone agrees to ban smoking, no one loses business to other restaurants.

But who is this North Carolina Restaurant and Lodging Association? They have a website, and looking at their benefits of membership page, they seem to fall in to two categories: group bargaining discounts, and lobbying. (emphasis mine)

Legislative Benefits: NCRLA has three lobbyists on staff that will work towards the betterment of the industry and protect your interests when lawmakers attempt to pass harmful legislation.

Each year, NCRLA saves the industry countless thousands of dollars in unfair taxes and fees, and unfair mandates by using its resources and power to stop legislation in its tracks. NCRLA also has a political action committee which works to elect officials who understand the needs of the industry.

So, basically, the largest restaurant lobbying group in the state was asked to comment on restaurant legislation that was successfully lobbied for and passed, and they commented positively. Of course they did.

So I genuinely wonder what about the businesses who aren’t a part of this lobbying organization, many of whom continued to allow smoking until they were fined after being reported. Are they happy with it? Is their voice being heard?

And the whole rest of the article aside: let’s take it as a lemma that the ban was a good thing for restaurants. The government coercively showed people where their best interests lie. The people have no been enlightened and know that banning smoking is the best thing for business.

So we can repeal the law, right?

Striking Gold

Minecraft is a damned odd game. It’s being made by one (veteran) developer. It has no art assets to speak of, because the thing is more blocky and 8-bit than any other 3D game I can think of, including, say, Runequest. There is no narrative, no goal, and no quests.

But it’s making money hand-over-fist. Six digits per day. For an alpha version. I attribute a lot of this to a nearly perfect storm of publicity and accidents. This is such a different game, that some important people are taking notice. The ones I heard about it through were the guys at Penny Arcade, who found the game hard to put down.

But it’s also gotten some inadvertent attention from disasters. As the article points out, the first was when PayPal shut down the developer’s account with hundreds of thousands of Euros in it because of “suspcious” behavior.

The clincher, though, came last week when the game got enough paying customers that it brought down the authentication server. What with the recent publicity stunt by GOG.com of faking their own demise, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was “accidentally on purpose”, since the developer made no effort to try and prop up the faulty registration system, perhaps out of his own faith in the goodness of men.

No, he left the authentication server down and declared it an inadvertent free demo of the game until a new one could be erected. Interestingly, it worked. Not only is the post-server-debacle spike in sales attributed to it, I have to admit it snared me. I picked up the game and tried it.

Half because I was curious about the game, and half because I was curious if it was cross-platform. Sure enough, the whole game fits in a Java JAR that you download and run on Linux, no installation or hassle required.

I’m still not sure quite what to make of the game. I don’t understand how the game will have staying power, but I also want to keep playing just a bit more….

Will work for… experience?

On a very deep level this column from John Stossel (no permalink, read it quick!) has struck a chord with me:

Do you employ unpaid student interns — college students who work in exchange for on-the-job training?

If so, President Obama’s Labor Department says that you’re an exploiter. The government says an internship is OK only if it meets six criteria, among them that the employer must get “no immediate advantage” from the intern’s activities.

…

My interns often told me that working — unpaid — at WCBS or ABC was the best learning experience of their lives: “I learned more from you than at college, and I didn’t have to pay tuition!” It was good for them and good for me.

The most offensively ignorant thing is the complete economic ignorance of the person who Stossel is debating:

But what’s wrong with a free internship if a student learns something about the career he wants to pursue?

I was a little stunned by Kamenetz’s answer: “Employers could say we cannot afford to pay anybody, so why should we be forced to pay the guy who cleans the floors?”

Of course, I don’t need to reprint his answer. It’s the first law of economics: people respond to incentives. Not all benefit from an internship or job is monetary.

But unpaid internships are a topic near and dear to my heart. When my one-semester high school internship at Raleigh Little Theatre ran out, I decided to keep going anyway. I wasn’t getting class credit for it anymore, but I was learning and, let’s be honest, getting a good workout!

However, I suspect that the only thing that would save me from willingly donating my time to the Theatre in this case would be the fact that they are structured as a volunteer organization. If I had been interning through the school at a for-profit business, I imagine I would have been turned away if I wanted to keep working, pro bono, because they would be legally required to pay me, which they couldn’t do.

But all of that is over and done with. However, my girlfriend is currently trying to break in to the commercial advertising business, which is a field that runs on internships. I’m not sure how many are paid or unpaid, but I surely know this: if ad firms stop being able to have unpaid interns, things are going to be much harder on her. She needs to have this experience to be credible when going for an interview for a full position at one of these agencies that she dreams about working at.

It’s a very rare and surreal experience to have the White House try and directly contravene something you would dearly love to do, but in this case, that’s exactly what’s happening. And I’m really not sure what we can do about it.