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Steve Kaiser
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- Hitler. iPhone 4 Antenna. You Know The Drill
It seems like everyone is up in arms about the iPhone 4 antenna issue. You know, the one Apple CEO Steve Jobs suggested you fix by avoiding “holding it that way.” That “way” being the way just about everyone holds their phone. As such, it should be no surprise that Hitler is upset about this issue as well.Michael Ingram Jr. made the excellent video below.
The choice lines in this one:
- “Even with the MicroCell we lost signal”
- “Jobs email said to hold the phone differently. Or get a case.”
- “I don’t feel like paying more money to make my $300 phone work like it should!”
- “Bumpers are multi colored and cost only $29.”
- “Multi colored? Are you serious?”
- “Damnit, how am I supposed to have an online flamewar with all those Android fanboys?”
- “MG Siegler laughed it off in his latest post talking about ‘that’s what she said’”
- “Maybe it’s time to look elsewhere. I heard those Google boys make a mean mobile OS.”
Information provided by CrunchBase
2 months on
Steve K's shared items in Google Reader - Errol Morris: The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is In his ongoing series of fascinating NYT essays on the "influence and uses of photography," documentary filmmaker Errol Morris interviews David Dunning, co-author of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which says stupid people are too stupid to realize they are stupid.
Morris opens his piece with the story of attempted bank robber MacArthur Wheeler, who rubbed lemon juice on his face before entering the bank because he believed it would render him invisible to security cameras. "If Wheeler was too stupid to be a bank robber," writes Morris, "perhaps he was also too stupid to know that he was too stupid to be a bank robber — that is, his stupidity protected him from an awareness of his own stupidity."
DAVID DUNNING: Well, my specialty is decision-making. How well do people make the decisions they have to make in life? And I became very interested in judgments about the self, simply because, well, people tend to say things, whether it be in everyday life or in the lab, that just couldn’t possibly be true. And I became fascinated with that. Not just that people said these positive things about themselves, but they really, really believed them. Which led to my observation: if you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent.
The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is (Part 1)ERROL MORRIS: Why not?
DAVID DUNNING: If you knew it, you’d say, “Wait a minute. The decision I just made does not make much sense. I had better go and get some independent advice.” But when you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is. In logical reasoning, in parenting, in management, problem solving, the skills you use to produce the right answer are exactly the same skills you use to evaluate the answer. And so we went on to see if this could possibly be true in many other areas. And to our astonishment, it was very, very true.
2 months on
Steve K's shared items in Google Reader - BNSF, Washington State to Pioneer HSR Negotiations
Shared by Steve K
Thank you BNSF for being the only large railroad to work toward a high speed passenger rail agreement!
BSNF rail car in Seattle.
Class I railroads and the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) are making another attempt to reach an accord over high speed rail disbursement guidelines.
Most of the large railroads that are targeted for federal high-speed-rail grants are upset at the ground rules insisted upon by the FRA. The guidelines dictate what should be in stakeholder agreements that railroads and state departments of transportation must sign before federal money is spent to improve those railroads for higher-speed passenger trains. They have expressed their displeasure to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.
Most of the Class I railroads complain:
- the guidelines were drafted without any consultation with the railroads or for that matter any of the state’s DOTs.
- they are required to guarantee on-time performance even better than present levels with draconian penalties if goals are not reached.
- that the federal government will be the arbiter of how new capacity will be allocated between passenger and freight traffic.
More after the jump…
One of the few railroads not to voice any opposition, however, is BNSF. BNSF is involved in HSR projects in both California and Washington State. BNSF asked for a two-week grace period where they can negotiate directly with WSDOT and draft a stakeholder agreement directly that could then be used as a framework for other railroads. Such an agreement would contain language that the other Class I railroads would find acceptable for their own projects.
This request has been granted by LaHood and the FRA will participate in the negotiations. This has been confirmed by WSDOT.
With at least three of the Class I railroads unwilling to sign any agreements whose terms are dictated by the FRA guidelines, the White House finds BNSF’s willingness to find common ground to be worth watching and may help boost their priority within the current administration.
Click here to view the stakeholder agreements.
2 months on
Steve K's shared items in Google Reader
