I think the point of math class is probably to teach people math, but what many of the best developers I know actually learned in math class was how to program. Nearly every high school math class I took was really, really boring. Not through the fault of the teachers; they were actually awesome. But I consistently knew just enough to be bored, yet not enough to actually skip the class. At first, I tried to act like I was paying attention, which meant that my face had to be vaguely directed…

Google’s motto is, “Don’t be evil.” I’ve always found that motto disturbing for two reasons. First, a company that can differentiate itself—successfully, no less—from its competitors merely by promising not to be evil implies that the average company is ridiculously corrupt. A person who announced, “My motto is, ‘don’t shoot people’” would be notable because no one thinks you should shoot people, making the promise weird and redundant—not because the promise represented some great sacrifice. …

Because the main thing I’m hearing about Bill Gates’ TED talk is, “Bill unleashed mosquitos!”, I want to encourage everyone to watch his entire speech. Bill Gates gave an outstanding explanation of the problems with the American education system, including a solid overview of how we can start to fix this problem. Teachers in general are diametrically opposed to being held accountable for their work. With some luck, Gates and others can help get the situation changed, enabling us to fix our…

Bell Canada is currently engaged in a lovely kerfuffle with the CRTC (Canada’s rough equivalent of the FTC) for throttling BitTorrent traffic. The CRTC recently ordered Bell Canada to release its bandwidth numbers, and Bell Canada, after some protestations, complied. The little teensy problem with their data, as Ars Technica points out, is that the numbers indicate that any problems Bell Canada is experiencing have nothing whatsoever to do with BitTorrent, and can be trivially and cheaply…

Tim Bray makes the same argument I’ve been making for months on why ISO-certified OOXML won’t actually make a lick of difference. At least the ISO has successfully proved how corruptible they are for all geeks to see, so I suppose the approval process wasn’t totally useless.

I’ve been against software patents for a long time now, but when I read about stories such as satellites being turned into space garbage because the only way to fix the orbit is patented, I’m forced to question the wisdom of patents in general. I love the idea of patents; I’m just dubious that the current implementation actually works. More often than not, I see patents used not to protect a novel invention, but as a legal stick to bludgeon small competitors. That runs completely against the…

A few days ago, I watched Who Killed the Electric Car?, a documentary covering the growth and decline of electric cars in the 90s. The movie focuses on the GM EV1 as its poster child, interviewing several EV1 drivers, sales personnel, and parts manufacturers. Because I had only a dim memory of the EV1, or even of the concept of electric cars being on the road, I found a lot of the documentary fascinating. To be sure, the documentary has a clear message: the electric car was killed because it…

From Slashdot, which is slowly redeeming itself, comes a link to Microsoft admitting that it bribed members of the Swedish ISO committee to vote for OOXML. Unsurprisingly, the Swedish ISO committee just voided its own vote. Due to time crunch, they will not be casting a vote at all in the Open XML ratification process. I find it depressing but predictable that I’m unsurprised.

I think that the Wall Street Journal does a fairly good job covering technology from a consumer’s perspective, but I feel that they struggle whenever they try to cover more industry-focused issues, making outright mistakes and failing to understand what in the debate is actually important, which leads them to follow up (or fail to) on the wrong points. Today was no exception: in an article entitled “‘Office’ Wars,” they attempted to cover the politics revolving around Microsoft’s efforts to get…

Ars Technica reports that used CDs are going to be subject to waiting periods and resale restrictions in Florida, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, and Utah. Ken Fisher writes: In Florida, Utah, and soon in Rhode Island and Wisconsin, selling your used CDs to the local record joint will be more scrutinized than then getting a driver’s license in those states. For retailers in Florida, for instance, there’s a “waiting period” statue that prohibits them from selling used CDs that they’ve acquired until…