And that’s how some people want to approach the issue of illegal immigrants in the USA. Everything I know and understand about life aligns clearly to say that building a wall between the US and Mexico is a horrible idea. It’s not like Mexico is mounting an attack and we have to defend the castle. They’re sneaking into the country to find jobs. To cover the issue from my own perspective, I’ll offer three planks and then a plan.

Plank 1: The actual problem.

The most widespread problem with illegal immigrants is the notion that they are a cost burden on government funded social services. This is a legit issue, but it’s also an overly exaggerated issue. There’s also a pile of attached issues that fall out of immigrants being “out of the system.” As an example, an undocumented immigrant can’t obtain a license to drive nor insurance – leading to an increase in uninsured motorists.

Plank 2: Recent rise in illegal immigrants.

From my own memory, illegal immigrants were considered more of a “resource” in the early 90’s, rather than a burden. In any significantly large southern city you’d find a street corner were mostly Hispanic laborers would gather waiting to snag a job. Somewhere around the turn of the millenium it seemed that the attitude shifted. It also seemed that the numbers of illegal immigrants what on a rapid rise. It seemed this way because it was on the rise. After 9/11, the number of illegal immigrants coming into the US increased well over 20%.

Plank 3: We made legal immigration harder.

Something else happened right around 9/11 that just might relate to that huge increase in illegal immigrants. The US made it significantly harder to legally come work in the US. You can find out about some of this here and here and here. It does seem logical that making it harder to do something illegally might increase the number of people doing it illegally. Take, for example, our completely failed war on drugs.

Solution: An easy legal path.

Immigrants flock to the US for one main reason – opportunity. Illegal immigrants take low paying labor intensive jobs. These are jobs that Americans, no matter what they claim, generally don’t want. To the laborers, these jobs provide better income than what they’re able to find at home. If we lose all of these laborers, I strongly believe it will increase the cost of goods and services across the board. Regardless, building a wall and increasing the amount of man power at the borders has not only cost us enormous amounts of money, but it has completely failed. More ironic is the fact that, as our economy tumbles, we’re seeing far fewer illegal immigrants. Unfortunately, we need them now more than ever.

Given all of this, why not create an easy to access foreign worker program. This isn’t a new idea. In fact, it was proposed by George Bush. This was the Bush plan previous to 9/11 and was related to NAFTA. Such a program could make it easy to document and track workers. This would create a system where we can regulate access to social services and track the impact of migrant workers.

Wrap Up

The problem is that we’ve resisted the flow instead of working with the flow. Any surfer or martial artist knows what happens when you try to fight a flow of energy much larger than your own. It’s a huge investment. However, catching the wave can take you on a ride you could never otherwise achieve. Unfortunately, I think that most of the public discourse on illegal immigration has turned into petty racial hatred and blaming. When so many lives are negatively impacted, the way our economic slump has done to so many, folks really want someone else to be angry at. Getting “tough” on illegal immigrants is like going outside and kicking the dog when you get mad at your spouse. If we use this negative energy to create our immigration reform, like what we’ve seen in Arizona, we’ll only be digging a deeper hole.

The post Solving America’s Illegal Immigrant Problem appeared first on zasKoda.

Interoperability

Remember when we first adopted technologies such as RSS feeds and publicly available Web application APIs? The design change was a shift to better interoperability for the user. The result was a better overall user experience on the Internet.

This concept is echoed all over in webOS’s design fundamentals. The recent cat and mouse game with Apple over iTunes is the most widely known and obvious example. This was never an issue for me. I use Ubuntu as my desktop operating system. There’s no version of iTunes for Ubuntu. Even if there was, I wouldn’t use it. I prefer to simply copy my DRM free music right from my hard drive onto the Pre. Increasingly, people want the media they buy to play on all the devices they own. With webOS on the Pre, it’s just that easy – without installing any additional software.

Palm introduced us to the world of device syncing a long time ago. This is how most iPhone and iPod users update their music now. Unlike these devices, the Palm does not require any additional software installations for the user. In fact, information like calendars, phone numbers, and even your facebook accounts are all kept in sync over the wireless connection.

Palm is making it a point to have webOS openly communicating in every way it can. In a way, a Pre running webOS is a well established little node of your social network. If you’re chatting with a friend over google chat and they go offline, you’ll automatically switch to sending text messages to their phone. The experience is seemless from your point of view.

Application Development

I recently installed the Palm Mojo SDK and built my first test app. With my existing CSS knowledge, I laid out a simple tile based grid with a sprite on top. I was surprised to recognize the MVC architecture of the framework. I’m familiar with MVC from building Web applications. Any Web 2.0 era developer will likely remember how things changed with MVC frameworks first came on the scene. The big difference here is that the language is javascript and the application runs on the smartphone client instead of a web server.

A significant section of the tech community criticized the SDK. It’s entirely true that developing games that take advantage of the machine’s hardware is not possible in the SDK. However, early homebrewers had 3D videogames running on the Pre before the SDK was released. The Pre and webOS have the capacity for gaming level graphics.

The Mojo SDK creates a low barrier of entry to thousands of Web developers interested in building smartphone apps. If you want a simple interface for your Web app, building it on the Pre is extremely easy.

Conclusion

If you’re like me, and you’re a fan of Clay Shirky, you might already see the formula that’s at play here. Palm opened up channels to lots of existing technology by improving interoperability in webOS. Then, Palm made it easy and inviting to come contribute to this new exploration. Palm didn’t just release a great smartphone, they created an architecture for participation. Thank you Palm.

The post webOS: A New World Open appeared first on zasKoda.

Pirates

The file sharing rant has raged on for years. While the media industries claim that file sharing has hurt their market share, the movie industry is seeing record sales. For many, it’s obvious what is going on. With the advent of new media, we saw a shift in how things work in our world. Once upon a time, you had to have a lot of money to record media and distribute it. This need gave rise to a collection of media industries, music and movies in particular. Now, recording and sharing media is very cheap and very easy. The MPAA and RIAA are no longer important. However, with their size and power, they will do anything and everything they can to keep the status quo.

Some would argue that we have to protect copyrights and the artists. Tell that to Nine Inch Nails or Radiohead. The RIAA and MPAA monopolized distribution channels and decided what media we consumed for decades. They took huge margins and left the original artists, most of them, with a small fraction of the green. This has all been discussed, at length, many times before.

What we have going on is a rebellion. It’s also a large scale rebellion. Before I discuss that point, I want to say something a bit harder to grasp. Intellectual property rights are dumb. I have many an artist friend from musicians to writers who do not like it when I say this. They feel their livelihood depends on these laws. Meanwhile, we have the AP going after their own members for content they, themselves, posted online for sharing. We also have the most significant figurehead against the file sharing movement, Metallica, admitting openly to downloading copyrighted content. Patents themselves don’t really protect the little guy. Who can afford to enforce them? No, patents are there as a tool in the battlefield between giants like Apple vs Palm or Microsoft vs TomTom. Empires like Walt Disney were built not from using copyright laws to protect original works, but from using them to copyright public domain works.

That isn’t to say that artists don’t deserve credit for their works. However, there’s a long running misunderstanding of the intent behind US intellectual property law. We almost had none. However, we decided to grant very short term monopolies on IP to stimulate invention. There was a clause allowing congress to extend the length of these copyrights. This power has been used and abused to the extent that there are people alive today living off of royalties for works they had nothing to do with. This is not stimulating invention, this is milking a broken system. This is hacking. This is black hat hacking. This is, also, somehow socially acceptable?

So back to the topic at hand, the Pirate Bay and the revolution. I’m overwhelmed with where to begin. It’s amazing what you can find on the Bay. It’s like the Wikipedia of the commercial media industry. It’s loaded with out of circulation media and wonderful rare finds. It’s one of the treasures of the Internet. Today, four people involved in the existence of the Pirate Bay were sentenced to jail time for copyright law violations in Sweden. Story and video can be found on the BBC and the Telegraph.

When we first started file sharing, we blatantly broke the law with applications like Napster. We were a bit surprised to find out that we did not own the music we thought we owned. Turns out, we have a limited use license. So, along comes a revolutionary technology called bit torrent. By breaking a file down into small chunks and spreading it around, bit torrent allows groups with limited resources to distribute large chunks of media without having to suffer the bandwidth charges of serving the full files to users. As a wonderful side effect, it also negates laws related to file sharing as no one is guilty of giving the file away.

And this is the game that played out over the last many years as The Pirate Bay kept changing how they did things to remain legal. The Pirate Bay contains no copyrighted materials. The copyright infringement is occurring only because of the involvement of thousands (millions?) of people working together to make it happen. There in lies a truth that needs to be seen. If IP law is right and true, why are so many people both eager and willing to violate IP law? If the majority of world citizens do not want a law, do not want to respect a law, then why does the law exist? This is absolutely crucial to examine. Knowingly or not, everyone who downloads a file is part of the revolution.

No one wants to tell an artist, of any kind, that he or she does not deserve to be acknowledged and rewarded for their contributions. This does not mean that copyrights and patents are inherently good. At best, they’re a broken system. I tend to believe their an irrelevant system. Michelangelo seemed to do just fine without IP law. However, now that we have IP law, someone scarffed up the rights to that dead artist’s work. How is this not sick and twisted?

The four “so called” founders of the Pirate Bay will now spend a year in prison for leading a revolution against the corporate giants that have monopolized our media channels. Four men will lose a year of their lives for what they believed in. How will the media portray them? As criminals who rightly deserved what they got? Wait, isn’t that the same “media” that put them there? Go figure.

I would enjoy sitting down and spending hours talking about this with anyone who’s truly curious enough to discuss it with an open mind. I would enjoy sharing this message with the world. If I were a multinational media conglomerate, I could just use my overwhelming power to quietly push my message into the minds of millions. Unfortunately, I’m not. I’m just a guy who turned off the television and picked up a mouse in the early 90’s. I spends my hours programming games that I gave away for free while listening to music that other people gave away for free. (Special thanks to Skaven, Purple Motion, and the rest of the scene btw.)

I don’t expect to change the world to my way of thinking. I don’t even expect this blog post to be read by more than maybe a few people. Chances are, most folks will scan it and utter TL;DR. I do wish that I could somehow share with the world, even for just an instant, the utter insanity I see in all of this. If I’m wrong, show me – because I’m tired of being frustrated by the idiocy and, more so, the wide acceptance and support of the idiocy.

Note: Photo taken entirely without permission from the Times Online who credit Bob Strong from Reuters but w/out link or information.

P.S. One aspect of this entire debate I failed to mention relates to the videogame industry. I’ve been active in the industry for more than a decade and have noticed that it does not operate, at all, like other media industries. While the music and movie industries are slow to change and use the law to hold their ground, the videogame industry more frequently looks to technological solutions. The game industry is largely self regulating. While the movie industry adopted a ratings system because it was legally forced to, the gaming industry developed their own rating system. Publishers all jumped on board and the system tends to work as well, if not better than the movie industry. The game industry is also constantly exploring distribution models to see what works. While I can’t cite the game industry as a positive role model, I can say that they’re doing much better than other media industries. At least they’re trying to grow and evolve. I may write a post specifically about this some time in the future – provided I’m inspired – and less upset. Enough for today.

Edit 4/21/09: Additional reference link – Study finds pirates 10 times more likely to buy music.

The post On The Pirate Bay Sentencing appeared first on zasKoda.

My approach was simple. I did a series of 6 searches for specific words and phrases and took note of how old the last post on the first page was. There are always 15 entries on the front page. Thus, the age of the last entry gives you a concept of how often the word is used. If the last entry is 3 hours old, that means the word or phrase is used about 15 times in 3 hours. Simple enough. Lets begin.

Search for “misogyny” : 15th result was 21 hours old.

Search for “misandry” : 15th result was 25 days old.

Search for “I hate women” : 15th result was 3 days old.

Search for “I hate men” : 15th result was 1 day old.

Search for “women suck” : 15th result was 5 days old.

Search for “men suck“: 15th result was 1 day old.

Note: Love Added 4/14/09 for reflection:

Search for “I love women” : 15th result was 5 days old.

Search for “I love men“: 15th result was 1 day old.

So the spread between the use of “misogyny” and “misandry” is huge. The term “misogyny” is used considerably more frequently. However, open expressions of hatred towards men were significantly more frequent than expressions of hatred towards women. There definitely seems to be some kind of imbalance here.

Conclusion: While there is a significantly higher use of the term related to woman-hating, there’s more evidence supporting the occurrence of man-hating.

Why I Did This

My introduction to the term Misogyny came from an interaction with a girl. We were having a conversation on dating etiquette. I brought up a common question I often ask during that type of discussion.

“If a woman is seeking a relationship and a man is seeking a sexual experience, assuming the women has not expressed her intentions, and assuming she never explicitly asks, is the man responsible for expressing his intentions before a sexual act happens?”

I know, asking a question like that is asking for trouble. However, it also exposes a lot of important personality information you may want to know before dating someone.

Her response was that the man has the responsibility of expressing his intention because, when it came to what the woman wanted, “he should know better.” I thought this was unbalanced. I felt the woman should be responsible for verifying that the man’s intentions matched hers before choosing to sleep with him. That was about the time she called me a Misogynist. I had to go look the word up. That was years ago. It set a bit of a negative connotation to the term for me.

Now, I keep seeing the word used. I just ran into the word again, on Discover Magazine of all places. The author brought the word up while citing unwanted compliments. It kicked up a few emotions in me. I’ve heard that word so much lately, and I find it a bit frustrating to see it used, so often, in a context that I believe is unwarranted. The spark of frustration motivated me a bit. Hence, this post.

Random Footnote

While composing this post, I noticed that the term “misogyny” was in my spell check while “misandry” was not.

The post Twitter Stats On Misogyny and Misandry appeared first on zasKoda.

Consider the Wikipedia entry on the topic:

Social media is information content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies that is intended to facilitate communications, influence and interaction with peers and with public audiences, typically via the Internet and mobile communications networks.

I highly recommend reading the rest of the entry. Unfortunately, the perception of the existence of “social media” isn’t much older than the popularity of the term itself. If you ask Amy Nut, she thinks social media began with MySpace:

As the Internet began to permeate into every home, teenagers found a new way of expression via the Internet. One way teens found of sharing common interests with other like-minded teenagers was through MySpace.

MySpace launched in 2003. Sure, 5 years feels like an eternity in our rapidly evolving world of the Internet. However, I’d like to take a moment to introduce potential users to some of what existed before there was MySpace.

Forums: Forums have long been online social gathering points for small and large crowds. Still popular all over the Internet, forums have been around since 1996. That’s a full 7 years before MySpace even existed

Wikis: Today, Wikipedia is one of the most well known successes in social media. Much to many a social media marketer’s demise, there’s no room for promotion. However, for the record, the first Wiki went live in 1995, making it 8 years older than MySpace.

IRC: The ultimate grandpa of Internet chat has to be IRC (Internet Relay Chat). The technical difference, from a user perspective, between IRC and Twitter really boils down to the minor variation between having a “chat room” and a “follow list”. Dating back to 1988, IRC is 15 years older than MySpace. (and 18 years older than Twitter)

Usenet: In the very early days of the Internet, a system known as Usenet came online. This system was the inspiration behind the before mentioned Forums. The system was hugely popular and still exists today. The system went online in 1979, making it 24 years older than MySpace. Admittedly, there were relatively few Internet users back then.

BBS: The BBS (Bulletin Board System) scene was popular before the wide spread adoption of the Internet. A BBS ran on a host computer and a user’s computer connected directly via a modem. While the precursor of the BBS systems came online in 1972 (before I was born), the first true BBS cropped up in 1978. That’s a whopping 25 years before MySpace.

Finger: Born in 1977, the Finger protocol is pretty old. It wasn’t until id Software‘s used the protocal that it suddenly became popular – at least within the gaming scene in the mid to late 90’s. All but dead now, replaced by blogs, the technology was born 26 years before MySpace and 32 years before I the writing of this post (on WordPress).

The concept of social media, unlike the buzzword itself, is not new. It’s not even close. In fact, the Internet was designed to exchange data. In a way, the Internet has always been social.

The same way old fashion becomes new again, technology concepts keep being reborn with new terminology. Trends pick up and everyone gets this feeling that things have somehow changed. Perhaps they have. However, before you get excited and anxious, take time to consider how far back the path goes.

In 1996, I started composing weekly updates about a game I was working on. It was my Web based progress log filled with bits of personal chatter. I may not have known it, but it was, basically, a blog.

Everything old is new again; and the world keeps spinning. Remember where we came from.

The post On The History Of Social Media appeared first on zasKoda.

First, there’s this popular link over on GOOD showing the amount of calories in gasoline. Meanwhile there’s a considerably less popular link to NutriStrategy’s calories burned per exercise. From the first link, we know that gasoline has 31,268 calories per gallon. A Ford Escort gets upwards of 40mpg. Lets make the math easy and say it gets 31.268 mpg. (See what I did there?)

31,268 cpg / 31.268 mpg = 1,000 calories per mile

This car weighs almost 2,500lbs. The average American is slightly lighter. According to that NutriStrategy chart, running at 10mph for 1 hour burns 1126 calories for a 155lbs person. Can you run at 10mph for a full hour? Holy crap. Anyway, lets pretend you can. In 1 hour at 10mph, you’ll run (approximately, I’m no mathematician) 10 miles. (See, I’m doing it again.) So, lets do the math.

1126 c / 10m = 112.6 calories per mile

Neat.. so we’re looking at a car using somewhere between 8 and 9 times as many calories per mile. Now less toss weight in. The car was 2500lbs (not including the person) and our person is 155lbs.

2500lbs / 155lbs = 16.1

The car is moving the same amount of weight as 16 people. Now, you might say “but a lot of that car weight is the engine itself…” True, but the same is true for the human, no? So lets keep going a moment. Let see how many cpm per pound we’re using.

Car: 1000cpm / 2500 = 0.40 calories per mile per pound…

Human: 112.6 / 155 = 0.73 calories per mile per pound…

Assuming a car speed of around 60mph, that means a human uses almost twice as many calories per pound to move at 1/6th the speed of the car. That is assuming no extra load for either. Toss in another person or two and a couple of hundred pounds of gear, what do you think is the best way for you and your mates to travel over long distance?

You may also want to visit Technomono directly to their website https://technomono.com/best-shoes-for-after-bunion-surgery article and learn further information about foot injuries.

Now that I’ve blogged in support of the automobile, I’d like to say that I’m not a big fan of America’s addiction to cars. I’d like to see better use of trains, actually. However, pretty pieces of art showing calorie use compared is kind of a load of crap. Speaking of crap, I wonder what kind of numbers you would get if you compared the emissions per calorie consumed for a car versus a human? Ewww….

The post Running vs Driving appeared first on zasKoda.