I did a podcast a couple of days ago and forgot to post it to my feed here. 

It's 22 minutes, about Katrina, earthquakes, Repubs.

Enjoy! (And I'll try to remember not to forget next time.)

 7/13/2012; 5:32:35 PM.

I've been the CEO of a company.

Not on the scale of a Mitt Romney, but I had a board of directors. I was not the sole shareholder, but I was the largest. I was both chairman and president.

I didn't have any illusions about who was responsible for the company.

Romney is supposed to be such a sharp and savvy business pro. But get this.

1. He was the CEO, chairman, president, sole shareholder of a company.

2. But he wasn't responsible for what the company did.

Even for a member of the ruling class, this is some pretty heavy inbreeding.

Look, this is scary. This level of incompetence in presidential candidates hasn't been seen before, not even from Republicans.

 7/13/2012; 1:09:21 PM.

I wrote about this a long time ago but there was little if any uptake.

Let's try again.

Suppose someone invents something but doesn't want a patent, but wants to prevent anyone else from getting a patent.

More than ever, we need a pro bono legal function that's funded as a charity that patents these items, makes a public record of who the inventor is, for kudos purposes only, and thereby prevents a huge company from patenting it.

I understand that a new patent "reform" will become law soon that changes things from first-to-invent to first-to-patent. So there's some urgency to putting this system in place.

 7/13/2012; 11:31:00 AM.

Simple idea. You should be able to follow a hash tag. And unfollow and block.

And of course there should be a block-with-timeout for all kinds of follows.

 7/13/2012; 11:28:06 AM.

This is one of those moments when I'm ashamed to be an American.

Read this NY Times story about how the U.S. is "purusing a middleman in web piracy." Sounds ominous, but it's not.

He's a 24-year old who ran a search engine that found torrent files. His mum, who was interviewed for the story, says whatever money he made is gone. "He would take his mates to the cinema and pay for them." This is what the US legal system has been reduced to. Humiliating.

Meanwhile, to see just how cowardly this is, if you go to Google, a multi-billion-dollar company whose execs serve on blue-ribbon White House commissions, you can get exactly the same information.

Here's an example search which returns torrents for an awful Hollywood movie that has grossed almost $1.5 billion so far.

So Google, too, is a "middleman in web piracy." This isn't new. Google has always returned these results, and they're right to. That's what search engines do.

BTW, it would be nice if the Times pointed out the humiliation of the US government, being paid off by Hollywood to do its dirty paranoid work.

 7/13/2012; 9:40:19 AM.

Follow-up on yesterday's rambler.

What people don't get about The Newsroom is they are hacking cable news.

How so? By reporting on current events, the way Sorkin wishes the real cable news people would do it. When a liar lies on camera, ask why she's lying. So what if they won't come back. Hey it's fiction. The characters aren't real. (And if real politicians start showing up on the fake news, it isn't fake anymore, and they'll lose their credibility. If that happens, it'll be over.)

More evidence. Will McAvoy has a Twitter account.

Yes, the young producer has a fax machine next to his bed.

And they all use Blackberries and Nokias with embarassing ringtones. They should of course be using iPhones and Androids.

Their email system has bugs which allow people to accidentally send personal messages to huge numbers of people.

Yes, it is supposed to be taking place in 2012.

And yes, it seems they are going to totally screw with the mediocrity of the cable news system.

Which makes the rest of it look like serious head-fake.

Hey we get Breaking Bad and The Newsroom on Sunday nights. This is going to be a lot of fun.

Update: Another way Sorkin is hacking news. McAvoy goes for a walk with the network demographics guy. He says Will's numbers would go up if he tossed a bone to conservatives. Next show he says something nice about Sarah Palin. He gets his wrist slapped by the EP, who says he can't do that. He says OK. A tutorial for media slaves (hamsters) on How It Really Works. May be boring or subtle, but it's also truthful. This way the show is also The Wire for News.

 7/13/2012; 8:57:40 AM.