"A proposal by the Prince George’s County Board of Education to copyright work created by staff and students for school could mean..."

"... that a picture drawn by a first-grader, a lesson plan developed by a teacher or an app created by a teen would belong to the school system, not the individual."

Board Chair Verjeana M. Jacobs (District 5) said she and Vice Chair Carolyn M. Boston (District 6) attended an Apple presentation and learned how teachers can use apps to create new curricula. The proposal was designed to make it clear who owns teacher-developed curricula created while using apps on iPads that are school property, Jacobs said.

God forbid that teachers might become entrepreneurial about their creations and amass personal wealth. It's important to keep them inside the system, teaching their wards that the government needs to possess everything in order to ensure that no one gets more than her share.

"Google Now does a much better job, moment to moment, in anticipating the information that a user needs than Siri."

"So what can Siri do better? Have an emotional relationship with a user...."

Google Now does not attempt personality, merely efficiency, and given that company’s strengths, I think this is a good design decision. But if Apple cannot compete on sheer efficiency, can it make up for it with charm?

This is in fact one of the main uses for “personality” in humans—to make up for deficits....

Here's an illustration of how that works:



Once you know the programming is designed to smooth over the shortcomings of the product, will it still work? Maybe so. Another question is whether Apple will give us some alternative personalities. Siri comes across as a relatively perky and warm young female. That's not what everyone wants! I'd like to see some more amusing approaches. Why not a witty, bitchy older woman or a comical guy? Unfortunately, Apple won't associate itself with anything sexual, but I'm sure many users would like their computers' voice to take daring liberties with them.

ADDED: "The human brain is built so that when given the slightest hint that something is even vaguely social, or vaguely human... given the slightest hint of humanness, people will respond with an enormous array of social responses including... reciprocating and retaliating."

"There are some good things" about being "robotic."

"Discipline comes to mind. But it sounds like there is just no emotion. People that know me, I don’t think they would say that. I certainly am not a fist-pounder. That isn’t my style. But that and emotion are two different things. One is just a way of expressing it, basically. So, anyway."

Says Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple (picked by Steve Jobs).

Skeuomorphism — mimicking real-life objects on the computer screen — may have died along with Steve Jobs.

And it seems doomed if it's viewed as cute or ornamental, but there's also the argument based on functionality.

You might wonder why beauty for it's own sake won't work as an argument, but the problem is those in a position to decide probably committed to an aesthetic that aligns beauty and simplicity.

Apple Maps screw-ups.

Pictures of Applefail.

"So why did Apple sue Samsung, the Galaxy hardware manufacturer, and not Google, maker of the phone's Android software?"

"Apple sees Google as its chief competitor—this is no secret."

Steve Jobs so hated Google's Android that, even as he struggled with cancer, he told biographer Walter Isaacson: "Google . . . ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off. I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. . . . I'm willing to go thermonuclear on this."

The left/right split on the question who invented the internet.

1. President Obama — in his notorious "you didn't build that" riff — said "The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all companies could make money off the Internet."

2. Gordon Crovitz — in the WSJ — said that's a myth: "The truth is a more interesting story about how innovation happens—and about how hard it is to build successful technology companies even once the government gets out of the way."

3. Farhad Manjoo — in Slate — says: "Crovitz’s entire yarn is almost hysterically false. He gets basic history wrong, he gets the Internet’s defining technologies wrong, and, most importantly, he misses the important interplay between public and private funds that has been necessary for all great modern technological advances."

British judges says Samsung tablets don't infringe on iPad because they "are not as cool.”

Samsung lacks the simplicity of Apple. Or as the judge put it — with a Samsung-like failure to simplify — they "do not have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design."

Why does the NYT have a 4000-word article about Apple Store workers only making $11.25 an hour?

"By the standards of retailing, Apple offers above average pay — well above the minimum wage of $7.25 and better than the Gap, though slightly less than Lululemon, the yoga and athletic apparel chain, where sales staff earn about $12 an hour."

So what's the problem? What's the issue? Why is this a story? The presumption seems to be that because Apple makes so much money, it ought to redistribute more of it to the people who happen to work in the stores. But why?

Much of the debate about American unemployment has focused on why companies have moved factories overseas, but only 8 percent of the American work force is in manufacturing, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Job growth has for decades been led by service-related work, and any recovery with real legs, labor experts say, will be powered and sustained by this segment of the economy.

And as the service sector has grown, the definition of a career has been reframed for millions of American workers.

“In the service sector, companies provide a little bit of training and hope their employees leave after a few years,” says Arne L. Kalleberg, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina. “Especially now, given the number of college kids willing to work for low wages.”

Are you seeing the issue? There's some idea that these college-kid jobs need to be turned into careers... because... people need careers?

“It’s interesting to ask why we find it offensive that Wal-Mart pays a single mother $9 an hour, but we don’t find it offensive that Apple pays a young man $12 an hour,” [said Paul Osterman, a professor at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management]. “For each company, the logic is the same — there is a line of people eager to take the job. In effect, we’re saying that our value judgments depend on the circumstances of the employee, not just supply and demand of the labor market.”

It's interesting that we're not offended by even more things. That's assuming that you were already offended that sales workers at Wal-Mart only get $9 an hour. But why is that offensive? I don't get Osterman at all. He's trying to shift us from thinking about which people we have empathy for to which companies we feel hostility toward.

"This week, Google is spending $18.7 million to snatch up territory in 'the greatest Internet landgrab' in history."

There will be all these new top level domains — in addition to the old .com and .org and so forth. It costs $185,000 to apply for one... and then there's the competition:

[Google] wants .google, .youtube, .goog and .plus. It was the only applicant vying for .fly, .new and .eat. But it is going to have to fight Johnson & Johnson for .baby, Microsoft for .docs and .live, and Amazon for 17 top-level domains: .wow, .search, .shop, .drive, .free, .game, .mail, .map, .movie, .music, .play, .shop, .show, .spot, .store, .talk and .you. Amazon also went after .tunes, .got, .author, .smile, .song, .joy, .bot, .like and .call… The most sought-after extension is .app, with 13 applicants though not Apple, which popularized the mobile application.

Facebook applied for none. Not even .facebook.

If the Web is truly on its deathbed, as Wired has claimed, those spending money on this may be .throwingitaway. Their money would be better spent on better mobile apps.

"It’s unclear how Apple and Google will respond to Posner’s surprise pounding of them. .'"

Says WaPo noting Judge Posner's decision to dismiss the patent case and his related blog post:

In his remarkable ruling, U.S. Circuit Judge Richard Posner stated that there was no point in holding a trial because it was apparent that neither side could show they had been harmed by the other’s patent infringement.....

Posner’s decision to descend from the 7th Circuit to oversee the Google-Apple trial suggests he wished to step in and do something directly about the patent system. (Ordinarily, Posner would never hear a patent case as all patent appeals are sent to the DC-based Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit; that court has maintained an ideological bias in favor of patent owners despite repeated rebuffs by the Supreme Court).

And this is from the blog post, which spoke generally about capitalism and included the phrase "dysfunctional patent system":

We have a huge public debt, dangerously neglected infrastructure, a greatly overextended system of criminal punishment, a seeming inability to come to grips with grave environmental problems such as global warming, a very costly but inadequate educational system, unsound immigration policies, an embarrassing obesity epidemic, an excessively costly health care system, a possible rise in structural unemployment, fiscal crises in state and local governments, a screwed-up tax system, a dysfunctional patent system, and growing economic inequality that may soon create serious social tensions. Our capitalist system needs a lot of work to achieve proper capitalist goals.

Apple considers pee a "biohazard" and it will not accept a peed-on MacBook for repair.

Nor will it accept for repair the 30 MacBooks — valued at $36,000 — that one 11-year-old boy peed on at Upper Allen Township Elementary School in Pennsylvania.

"Apple was a pioneer of an accounting technique known as the 'Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich'..."

"... which reduces taxes by routing profits through Irish subsidiaries and the Netherlands and then to the Caribbean. Today, that tactic is used by hundreds of other corporations — some of which directly imitated Apple’s methods...."

Apple is only taking advantage of opportunities that exist in the tax code. Why do they exist?

A completely separate question, woven through the linked NYT article, is the way some states — notably California — take so much in tax that they drive businesses away. There's a competition among the states, and it punishes them for getting too greedy.

I get the impression the NYT would like to shame corporations into willingly forking over more money to the government. Here's a great anecdote:

In one of his last public appearances before his death, Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, addressed Cupertino’s City Council last June, seeking approval to build a new headquarters.

Most of the Council was effusive in its praise of the proposal. But one councilwoman, Kris Wang, had questions.

How will residents benefit? she asked. Perhaps Apple could provide free wireless Internet to Cupertino, she suggested, something Google had done in neighboring Mountain View.

“See, I’m a simpleton; I’ve always had this view that we pay taxes, and the city should do those things,” Mr. Jobs replied, according to a video of the meeting. “That’s why we pay taxes. Now, if we can get out of paying taxes, I’ll be glad to put up Wi-Fi.”

He suggested that, if the City Council were unhappy, perhaps Apple could move. The company is Cupertino’s largest taxpayer, with more than $8 million in property taxes assessed by local officials last year.

Ms. Wang dropped her suggestion.

Cupertino, Ms. Wang said in an interview, has real financial problems. “We’re proud to have Apple here,” said Ms. Wang, who has since left the Council. “But how do you get them to feel more connected?”

Feel more connected.... Absurd! The article ends with a quote from the president of a Cupertino area community community college complaining that companies like Apple are "philosophically antitax, and it’s decimating the state." I'd love to hear what Steve Jobs would say to that. It's the pro-tax philosophy that decimates a state.

IN THE COMMENTS: Maguro said:

Needs an "Apple is like Elizabeth Warren" tag.

"Amazon must be unbelievably happy today."

"Had they been puppeteering this whole play, it could not have worked out better for them."

"Making people care" — Mike Daisey's justification for folding fake drama into a more or less true story.

David Carr analyzes the theater/journalism borderline, looking at Daisey's "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" (the subject of this week's "Retraction" on "This American Life") and "Kony 2012" (the viral video whose producer, Jason Russell, was found, last Friday, naked and ranting on the streets of San Diego). Daisey says he "was terrified" that if he "untied" the fake parts of his theater monologue (to meet the standards of "This American Life") that "the work, that I know is really good, and tells a story, that does these really great things for making people care... would come apart in a way where, where it would ruin everything."

I listened to the "Retraction" episode of "This American Life," and was captivated and repulsed by the replays of the "The Agony and the Ecstasy," with Daisey's heavy-handed phrasing and gulping passionate voice. He injects Apple is eeeevvvilll directly into the theatergoer's brain. You hear the audience reaction and feel them in his manipulative hands. This is art! But it's journalism too. All you have to do is say it has fictionalized elements, and you're in the powerful realm of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "The Jungle."

Carr says:

I am a longtime fan of “This American Life,” but I have never assumed that every story I heard was literally true. The writer and monologist David Sedaris frequently tells wonderful personal yarns on the show that may not be precisely true in every detail....

Yes, what exactly is the difference between Sedaris and what Daisey did? One is humor and the other drama? But both humor and drama employ exaggerations, composites, and invention. One is only trying to entertain and the other is trying to incite political action? That's more like it. One is an author telling stories on himself (and his friends and family) and the other has identified a target and intends a vicious attack that will cause real harm. That matters.

Now, Daisey stresses the victims of his victim: the workers in China, the people he made the audience care about by making up dramatic scenes that, it turns out, never happened, like the man with a hand that was mangled making an iPad who gets to touch, with that mangled hand, a finished iPad, and he strokes it and calls it "magical." This is a version of what is the classic melodramatic encapsulation of the plight of the factory worker: He labors over the creation of a product that he can never own.

Carr — writing in the NYT — turns to the NYT journalists who published a series of articles "investigating Apple’s suppliers... that may have contained a bit less drama, but landed hard." I presume these articles are accurate, but how do I know? Carr anticipates the reader's skepticism about the trustworthiness of professional journalists (who can't make the I'm-an-artist defense when they are caught faking). He ends his article with a coy reference to "an e-mail to someone I know who is an expert on journalistic malfeasance [askins] if, in a complicated informational age, there was a way to make sure that someone telling an important story had the actual goods." We get a quote from this character, a quote that's only worth quoting to get to the revelation that it's Jayson Blair. Somehow the NYT expects you to remember who Blair is... or they're hoping we've forgotten.

I put that link on Blair's name. It's not in Carr's article — and it's even a link to the NYT. Blair's articles seemed so good because they included vivid details that extracted empathy from the reader:

Some of Mr. Blair's articles in recent months provide vivid descriptions of scenes that often occurred in the privacy of people's homes but that, travel records and interviews show, Mr. Blair could not have witnessed.

On March 24, for example, he filed an article with the dateline Hunt Valley, Md., in which he described an anxious mother and father, Martha and Michael Gardner, awaiting word on their son, Michael Gardner II, a Marine scout then in Iraq.

Mr. Blair described Mrs. Gardner ''turning swiftly in her chair to listen to an anchor report of a Marine unit''; he also wrote about the red, white and blue pansies in her front yard. In an interview last week, Mrs. Gardner said Mr. Blair had spoken to her only by phone.

Why lie about pansies? Red, white and blue pansies. To make you care. You can't be relied upon to care based on journalistic facts alone. Those who would manipulate your political opinions know they need to pull at your heart. They give you flowers. They give you an old man with a shaking, mangled hand.

From the "This American Life" transcript (boldface added):

Mike Daisey: And everything I have done in making this monologue for the theater has been toward that end – to make people care. I’m not going to say that I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard. But I stand behind the work. My mistake, the mistake that I truly regret is that I had it on your show as journalism and it’s not journalism. It’s theater. I use the tools of theater and memoir to achieve its dramatic arc and of that arc and of that work I am very proud because I think it made you care, Ira, and I think it made you want to delve. And my hope is that it makes – has made — other people delve....

And I stand by it as a theatrical work. I stand by how it makes people see and care about the situation that’s happening there. I stand by it in the theater. And I regret, deeply, that it was put into this context on your show.

Make people care. This is the what we are exposed to when we encounter text. An author is trying to make you care. And maybe you feel that upwelling of caring — empathy... ah, the twinges of humanity. Aren't you a good person to surrender to the injection of caring about the thing you've been manipulated into caring about?

Make people care. May I suggest that you shift your focus from "care" to "make"? Someone is trying to make you feel/think what they want you to feel/think. They'd like you to directly internalize the viewpoint they have chosen and do not want to try to prove on facts and reason alone. Resist!

There. Was that dramatic enough to make you care about resisting the writers who are out to make you care?

"Yeah. We have different worldviews on some of these things. I agree with you truth is really important."

Says Mike Daisey to Ira Glass, who responds: "I know but I feel like I have the normal worldview. The normal worldview is somebody stands on stage and says 'this happened to me,' I think it happened to them, unless it's clearly labeled as 'here's a work of fiction.'"

Some artists (and propagandists) will disagree, but I hope Glass is right.

ADDED: You can listen to the new "Retraction" episode of "This American Life" here (where there is also a link to the transcript PDF).

Ira Glass: You put us in this position of going out and vouching for the truth of what you were saying and all along, in all of these ways, you knew that these things weren’t true. Did you ever stop and think, okay these things aren’t true and you have us vouching for their truth?

Mike Daisey: I did, I did. I thought about that a lot.

Ira Glass: And just what did you think?

Mike Daisey: I felt really conflicted. I felt... trapped.

Fascinatingly, it turns out that Daisey had once done a story about that "Million Little Pieces" guy, James Frey, who got into so much trouble for palming off a fictionalized story as a memoir. A big part of the trouble was that Oprah Winfrey had promoted Frey's book. The section of the interview where Glass brings up Frey ends like this:

Ira Glass: I have such a weird mix of feelings about this, because I simultaneously feel terrible, for you, and also, I feel lied to. And also I stuck my neck out for you. You know I feel like, I feel like, like I vouched for you. With our audience. Based on your word.

I was your Oprah!

Mike Daisey: I’m sorry.

"I have difficult news," says Ira Glass.

Ira Glass, of the much-acclaimed Public Radio show "This American Life":

We've learned that Mike Daisey's story about Apple in China - which we broadcast in January - contained significant fabrications. We're retracting the story because we can’t vouch for its truth. This is not a story we commissioned. It was an excerpt of Mike Daisey's acclaimed one-man show "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," in which he talks about visiting a factory in China that makes iPhones and other Apple products.

The NYT also must retract:

Some of Mr. Daisey’s stories about Foxconn were also included in an online-only Op-Ed article that he wrote for The New York Times last October. He wrote, “I have traveled to southern China and interviewed workers employed in the production of electronics. I spoke with a man whose right hand was permanently curled into a claw from being smashed in a metal press at Foxconn, where he worked assembling Apple laptops and iPads. I showed him my iPad, and he gasped because he’d never seen one turned on. He stroked the screen and marveled at the icons sliding back and forth, the Apple attention to detail in every pixel. He told my translator, ‘It’s a kind of magic.’ ”

According to Mr. Schmitz, the translator said that did not happen. On Friday afternoon, The Times added an editors’ note to the Op-Ed article that reads: “Questions have been raised about the truth of a paragraph in the original version of this article that purported to talk about conditions at Apple’s factory in China. That paragraph has been removed from this version of the article.”

Unveiling the new iPad.

Live-blogged.

"Apple has its feet firmly planted in the post-PC future."

"Did 'The Woz' Slag Steve Jobs In FBI Interview?"

Asks The Smoking Gun.

(But nothing quoted from the FBI file tells us anything we don't know from reading the biography "Steve Jobs.")

"My hands are so cold, I can't even blog."

"I'll be right back. Can't afford to lose any more followers."

This Samsung ad that got my attention:



Notes:

1. Bloggers don't call their readers "followers." That's Twitter talk.

2. I know from browsing through other Samsung ads, looking for this, that the people camping out are waiting in line to get into an Apple store, but when we saw the ad — during one of yesterday's football games — we thought the campers were "Occupy Wall Street" folk.