When I first got my iPhone 4, I tried tethering via BlueTooth, but was unable to get the BT pairing to go through, so I forgot all about it. My 3G modem gives me all the coverage I want, and with my MacBook Air I can share the connection with my (WiFi-only) iPad. Today, however, I was nudged to try the iPhone 4 tethering, and this time everything worked flawlessly. Right now I’m composing this on my tethered MacBook Air.
Of course, all of this “tethering” stuff feels antiquated compared with the mobile hotspot features on the latest Android phones, but it’s good enough for now.
The week's twitterings – 2010-07-11
- At the Shoreline Amphitheater SF Symphony pops+fireworks show. We've been here a year, but this is our first time at Shoreline. #
- Oh well; arguably Holland should have been down to 10 men from the very start (that boot in the chest). But 7 goals in 8 games? #
- Sorry, I meant 8 goals in 7 games. Still a record low, isn't it? #
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To look forward, or to retreat into the past?
Quote for the day: PZ discussing Bronowski’s wonderful TV series “The Ascent of Man”:
A dead civilization is one that has stopped progressing, that ends that dynamism in the stasis of preservation and numbing reverence for the past — when a 2000 year old myth becomes the greatest knowledge worth knowing, we have abandoned the process and begun the contraction into the shells we built while still vital.
This is one of my deepest objections to the religious stance. When one encounters a source of wisdom – an idea, a book, a teacher – the responsible attitude is not to worship it, but to ask, “How can we learn from this and do even better, so that others may learn from us?” This is the human experience, going back over tens of thousands of years. It is also our future: it’s what human beings do. The religious impulse to ascribe supernatural perfection to people and ideas of the past is defeatist. It is, ultimately, inhuman.
Herbert Hoover, redux
Quote of the day:
I’m not an economist, but we’ve got five applicants for every single job opening. If you tell me that the best response to that situation is to lay off hundreds of thousands of teachers, I will not accept that this means that you’re smarter and more expert than I am. I will instead conclude — regardless of your prestige or position or years of study — that you’re a moral imbecile.
— Fred Clark at Slacktivist
Those who voted for Cameron in the UK: is this really what you want?
The week's twitterings – 2010-06-27
- I was hoping for a decent vCloud vs. AWS discussion. Instead we get this piece of self-serving non$en$e from BlueLock: #
- How Rackspace's API compares to Amazon's EC2 – (via @rackcloud). Self-serving, of course, but not offensively so. #
- Buyers beware: Security is a relative term now a days. #structureconf (via @krishnan) < But it always was. Were you confused about that? #
- Countdown: I'll get my iPhone4 tomorrow, unlock my old iPhone 3G, insert China Mobile SIM, and I'll be ready to head to Shenzhen on Saturday #
- Listening to the new Divine Comedy album "Bang Goes The Knighthood". http://amzn.to/9AW8Zi Brilliant! Tip: get the import CD w/bonus disc. #
- In line at Apple Palo Alto. Location: http://j.mp/b9Qco5 http://twitpic.com/1zin1y #
- Frustrated that iOS4 seems to crash a lot. Starbucks app kills it reliably. OS principle #1: apps mustn't be able to bring down the platform #
- RT @Cisco_Mobile #Kmart and #Sears to launch a streaming video service http://tinyurl.com/2gxvux5 < Odd move for bricks-and-mortar dinosaurs #
- iPhone 4 – beautiful, fast, good audio. BUT remember to carry a paper-clip: I've had the "NO SIM" problem twice #
- Can't tell if this is humorous or just clueless: @craigbalding One of the problems w/Amazon AWS – they only support Itanium processors. #
- Anyone managed to get Bluetooth tethering working between an iPhone 4 and a Macbook? I can't pair them… #
- Boarding in 25 minutes (SFO-HKG). Will my upgrade happen? Almost certainly not. However UA grabbed my credit card copay info just in case… #
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So here I am again….
I arrived at SFO this morning, looked up at the flight information screens, and saw that my flight was shown as “Scheduled 1:20PM, Actual 1:10PM”. Optimism, perhaps, given that departure was still over three hours away. And as it turned out, the cleaners took longer than usual to prepare the 747, and we boarded late. Oh, well.
The flight was full. Not, I think, as oversold as the Singapore flight a couple of gates away, but I didn’t see a singe empty seat. I had a middle, between two people each of whom had bulky carry-on bags which they had placed under the seat in front of them. Not only did their bags remove a lot of my legroom; both of them kept on diving into their bags to retrieve or stow items. This inevitably meant them bumping and crowding me, and the upshot was that for the first time in years I didn’t get any sleep on the long flight. And since United’s 747s don’t have personal in-flight entertainment systems, I was reduced to listening to music while wearing eye-shades. At least we had Channel 9 for the last few hours….
After the very uncomfortable flight, the rest was easy: bought a ferry ticket, took the train to the new Sky Pier, caught the 7:30 ferry, zipped through passport control at Shekou, got a few minutes sleep in the taxi (the best way of coping with Chinese driving), and I was checked in at Baicao Gardens just after 9. I turned on the TV, and they were showing the European Grand Prix from Valencia. I watched laps 47 to 53, and then suddenly they cut away to squeeze in a huge block of advertisements before the start of the England-Germany world cup match, which is on right now as I type this.
I’d like to watch, but I think I’m going to have to sleep instead. Good luck, England!
Who would have thought that flying to China would become routine?
I’m heading off again tomorrow – SFO-HKG, then the ferry to Shekou, and a taxi to the Huawei campus in Shenzhen. I’m trying to pack light, with no camera and no books (except for Kindle books on my iPad). No toiletries – I can get them cheaper in Shenzhen. I’ll take my laptop, iPad and both phones (iPhone 4 for the US, Android G1 for China). I had hoped to unlock my iPhone 3G and use that in China, but I haven’t been able to download a copy of the relevant IPSW firmware without MD5 errors.
This is just a short, one week trip. This means that I won’t miss too much of the World Cup….
Unambiguous
Via Michael Cohen, here’s the part of Article 88 of the Uniform Code which deals with insubordination:
Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Transportation, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Territory, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.
Americans are fond of quoting John Adams’ description of their country as “a nation of laws, not of men.†So when do the courts-martial start?
UPDATE: I was just reminded of Truman’s wonderful assessment of MacArthur:
I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the President. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.
The week's twitterings – 2010-06-20
- Long-winded but ultimately persuasive: the Tea Party as disillusioned nihilism: NYTimes: The Very Angry Tea Party http://nyti.ms/chZ2jq #
- Great lunch and discussion with @adrianco, @geoffarnold, @vdasan (via @RichardMcDougll) <The nucleus of the ex-Sun "Extinguished Engineers" #
- Booked next Shenzhen trip: June 26-July 3. Unlike my recent RTW, this is on @UnitedAirlines, SFO-HKG. Only middle seats were available 🙁 #
- Lovely review of "Hitch 22" in the NYTimes: Do I Contradict Myself? http://nyti.ms/bJKNcJ – the Bosnia observation is spot-on #
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Clear evidence of a nation that has gone stark staring mad
Via Andrew, this graph shows the US Incarceration Rate from 1880 to 2008:
As the CEPR report cited in the original post points out, the financial cost of this absurd policy is astronomical. “[A] reduction by one-half in the incarceration rate of non-violent offenders” would save U.S. state and local governments at least $14.8B/year, and would still leave the incarceration rate quite high in historical terms.
So what tipped the country into collective lunacy in 1980? Ronald Reagan? Or was he just a symptom?