Gassee in MondayNote:

[...] for all Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto, the company has now reached a point where the more it excels, and it often does, the more it is perceived as a threat by individuals and governments around the world.

I’d add a corollary: The more it tries to bring solutions to everybody and for everything, the more their “Each individual served with relevant ad” goal becomes just a mere byproduct.

There’s no difference between Google reaching its goal and an increasingly powerful and over-responsible government; they both can say they pursue the best for each and every individual, but never mention the cost that individual has to pay. That cost is very hard to measure until it’s already too late: it’s usually called freedom.

Frederic Filloux writes on Monday Note: “It’s all about accountability”.

The argument is easy: because French don’t have a culture of correcting what they have already published, the articles have to come out as good as they can get; there’s no second chance to correct and rectify them. Therefore, the government found appropriate to cut Twitter and Facebook from the sources of mass media because:  a) Those sources aren’t always reliable b) Social media is always an open door for abusers.

The government thus considers the new age social media cannot be made or hold responsible for the data it generates and transmits.

(Filloux says these are the arguments, not necessarily that he embraces them)

I like the argument; it expresses entirely my feeling that the main differentiator between socialism and capitalism (at their core) is that capitalist journalism lets you know what’s happening around you, while the socialist journalism tells you what you need to know about what’s happening around you. 

The tyranny of the accountability has its roots in the mindset that the public has to understand precisely and specifically only those certain things it’s told and nothing else. The socialist public is not allowed to see the picture and then let to form its own opinions about it; that’s way too risky. In the socialist countries the public is told what the official or “natural” opinion is about something or anything. You don’t taste the strawberries, you’re only told how they taste.

It’s only then the media gatekeepers get the feeling of “over-accountability”: when they feel responsible for what people might understand by their own.

In this line, besides accountability, I’d add a second argument for French government getting against Twitter and Facebook: these social networks differ from “curated” media maybe by being “unreliable”, but most important by being “un-curatable”. Which is “extremely hard to be censored”.

I am convinced this is not a correct or fair mindset, no matter which time, country or medium; after some more other years of decay, this usually ends up in bloodbaths, when hundreds of years of evolution are wiped out in hours.

Killing good ideas is killing babies.

It took Elop 2 days to kill another new born Nokia engineers strove too hard to give birth.

It turns out the N9 is just a dummy, a mere prototype of future WP powered Nokias. Elop carefully misses every opportunity to enter Nokia’s history; he’s busy building Microsoft’s with Nokia’s flesh and blood.

I wonder whether MeeGo could have become a solid technological and architectural competitor to iOS, both Android and WP being just simple hoaxes against it. I also wonder whether Jobs could use such a sound competitor as a secondary route.

(via Daring Fireball)

There is no direct or natural connection between human values and money. 

Money is a symbol, the same way a word is a symbol. Money is also a mutual agreement saying “This is just a paper, but it certifies that this product has human value of X; I am, therefore, X”.

The similarity between money and words is that both are symbols and agreements. The difference, though, lies in how they are that “symbol”. A word says “I am a symbol which could never be substituted for the thing it means”. You never equal the word “horse” to the real animal. 

With the money, things are just the opposite: money is a symbol that stands more and more for the real value it symbolizes. The more “money” stands for “human value”, the more we’re driven away from reality. 

Skype was 8 billion. Apple has 60. None of these cash piles has any real connection to human value. If you’re looking for real values you have to look at people, and not at what stands for them, but at what they are standing for. 

Don’ know.

When I say “ugly”, I say futile, un-beautiful, hard to understand, non-intuitive, crooked, difficult, sterile thing.

An ugly GUI is something you only use because you need the service behind that GUI. The companies that don’t care about it, they don’t care about their users. Or, worse, they are so lazy and are making so much money, that there’s no way they would change anything for their customers.

The uglier an interface, the more probable the developers forgot they were building things for human beings; instead, these developers are building things for… things.

The Silver Medal goes to Gmail:

The Gold Medal goes to Facebook settings panel:

The only problem is those two giants are spreading their “ugly love” in almost every digital soul of the WEB.

This is “Microsoft-ugly”.

N9 video

Oh my God, you’re looking at a MeeGo OS running on a Nokia, which looks and feels some 255 times better than a Windows Phone 7…!

There are two very bad news, though:

First, the N9 is supposed to be launched in September, therefore, perhaps, it’ll be entirely overshadowed by the launch of iPhone 5 and iPad 3.

Second, this would have been a killer in 2009 – 2010, when Nokia was trying hard to forget entirely abut their new born at that time – the Maemo project. I don’t see Microsoft paying for this.

The developing platform for N9 would be QT. I have no idea who are the developers though.

Janet Echelman – at TED

“Sharing the rediscovery of wonder“… At 08:38 I’ve started to feel something awfully important is going to be revealed: the sharing of the rediscovered wonder.

This wonder was apparently made possible by Janet Echelman alone; on a second look, you’ll notice there are thousands of people involved, from mere fishermen to mayors, designers, engineers, NOAA, all along 14 years of pursuing Janet’s dream.

The real wonder is neither a laced net transformed into art nor are Janet’s wild dreams, nor are those seven art schools that rejected her.

The real wonder is making those thousands of people fall in love with her dream, a love that deep that it transformed the cotton into steel.

And we are only half the way; the other half of the wonder is revealed by Janet’s friend, the attorney from Phoenix: the cotton turned into steel was not just art, it was magic. The laced net turned out to be… Magic.

I feel like I’ve seen that before…

(via Creativebits)

Nokia wants patent on self-regenerating phone batteries, piezoelectrics and much magic involved — Engadget., quoting Symbian-Freak

It seems Nokia has figured out to port the watches’ kinetic technology into its phones. This means you will be able to recharge the phone while walking, as you do now with your watch.

I’ve been using smartphones since first S60 and I can tell you these toys are really power greedy!

I can’t help imagining people running their buts in the afternoons in order to replenish the battery for an important call or email…

(thanks to www.crossfit.com)