The most prominent new feature of Safari 4 Public Beta is Apple's Google Chrome-inspired tabs-on-top combination tab/title bar. It's not a bad idea, but the design, while clever, is flawed.

Tabs-in-the-middle has always bothered me. It doesn't make sense conceptually. The tabs control the visible page, sure, but all the controls above the tabs also reflect which tab is frontmost. They belong inside the tabs. That the tabs-in-the-middle is conceptually irregular is evidenced by Apple's bizarre original decision to turn the tabs upside down. Apple wasn't comfortable with their position either (though it had already been established as the standard position by Firefox), so they reconnected the tabs with the controls and disconnected them from the page. Same problem upside down.

Tabs-as-title-bar is its own kind of confused. The two competing interests of tabs and title bar overwhelm each other. The title bar is the only way to move the window, so dragging must move the window. That means you need an extra widget to drag the tabs. Clicking a title bar brings the window to the front, same as clicking a tab. But now clicking a tab in the background brings that tab and the window to the front. You can even close tabs while the window is in the background; since Safari still has no undo for closed tabs (without Saft, that is), you have to be extra careful where you click to bring the window forward. It's no longer a "safe click", leading to distrust. That's not good UI.

That said, I'm happy to see Apple experimenting like this and doing so publicly. That's a dramatic and welcome shift in behavior. They haven't fundamentally changed any aspect of window controls or behavior in years. So maybe it took Google building a browser out of WebKit to get someone over at Apple to start thinking outside the (window) box. Either way, I'm glad they're doing it. I just hope they're not too stubborn to evolve it into something more useful and less anxiety provoking.

Free exercise and enjoyment of religion without discrimination or preference are guaranteed. This liberty of conscience does not excuse acts that are licentious or inconsistent with the peace or safety of the State. The Legislature shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.

Since marriage now specifically supports one religious viewpoint, marriage as a legal entity is unlawful.

Way to go, Prop 8 supporters! You saved marriage!

This was a triumph
I’m making a note here: huge success
It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction

Democrats and republicans are both calling the bill out as a poorly written, panicked response to a problem we knew has been building for years. Even Newt Gingrich is decrying it as "a very, very bad idea", pointing out that the proposal's author, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, has spent the last year and a half saying there was no problem at all and now wants $700B to solve that lack of a problem.

But this being a Bush Whitehouse plan, the proposal is deceptive. A large part of the outcry focuses on the provision that there be no judicial oversight, no accountability, no way to track nearly three quarters of a trillion dollars as they flow directly into the pockets of Wall Street's wealthiest. This is all subterfuge: by putting in a clause so outrageously extreme, Bush has given himself a convenient bargaining chip. He can easily concede those terms without giving up any significant part of the real proposal. Congress gets to say they pushed back and won concessions while Bush and his cronies walk away with the biggest payday in history.

The feigned urgency with which Bush, Bernanke, and Paulson are pushing this plan belies their true intentions: given a moment of analysis, Congress and the world would see the scam for what it is. For a crisis to have materialized in a matter of weeks with such urgency that action must be taken within days to avert a global economic meltdown would require a sudden economic shift of gargantuan proportions.

The Bush administration's stubborn denial of any economic worries for the last several years, in spite of endless and repeated warning signs, followed by sudden calls to action can be explained one of two ways: either they were lying to us then that there was nothing wrong and are now panicking because it's already too late; or they are lying to us now about how dire the problem has become in order to shove through legislation that borders on criminal. (For the time being, I will set aside the third option, that they are colossally inept and honestly did not see this coming.)

Whatever the genesis of this proposal, it is clearly fundamentally flawed, in that it seeks to erase the debts that Wall Street incurred with little or no penalty on the perpetrators, while foisting the entire burden on those who can least afford it. Any bailout, if such action is truly necessary, should be crafted in such a way that it pays the minimum amount possible to keep these banks afloat.

It should hold the banks and their $73M-a-year executives accountable for their actions (just as Bush does our nation's shamefully underpaid teachers).

Tax the executives at 90% (they'll survive on the remaining $7.3M) and see how many loans you can buy back.

And reinstate the regulations that were designed to prevent this sort of unrestrained corruption from taking control of our economy—and our government—in the first place.

Someone thought that slogan was a good idea. For real. Must not have occurred to them which organ's color is affected by by spray-on tan.

All apostrophes and spaces as printed:

Dr'Brown's Repair

When It Break's Down Call Dr'Brown
Washer's/Dryer's/Ref//Oven's/Hotwater Heater's

35$ estimates
24hr service

The cabling system has a base-plate connector of prefabulated amulite, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two spurving bearings are in a direct line with the pentametric fan. The main cable winding is of the normal lotus-o-delta type placed in panendermic semi-boloid slots in the stator, every seventh conductor being connected by a nonreversible tremble pipe to the differential girdlespring on the 'up' end of the grammeters.

As it turns out, the new Express N looks and quacks like a duck, but is not a duck at all. The hardware and software interfaces look the same as the previous Express, but function very differently. In fact, to achieve the same operational result, you have to configure them -- using the same set of controls -- in opposite directions.

A simple test case: two Express base stations, one old and one new, both of which you want to connect to the same Airport Extreme N base station and both of which you want to share their respective ethernet connections with wired clients. On the old Express, you tell it to participate in a Wireless Distribution System (WDS). This setting alone is enough to allow ethernet clients to share the connection, but there is nothing in the user interface which reflects this state. You can optionally disallow wireless clients on this base station, but wired client sharing is implicitly always allowed.

Contrast this with the new Express which, if set up to participate in a WDS, will not share its Ethernet connection (but again, with nothing in the user interface reflecting that state). However, if you instead tell the new Express to simply join the existing wireless network, not extend it (which setting on the old Express would explicitly not share its network connection), the previously available "Allow wireless clients" setting mysteriously changes with "Allow Ethernet clients". Check that box and suddenly all your wired devices are online. Note however, that wireless clients are now implicitly disallowed, since this Express is no longer participating in a WDS.

Dear Apple: this is not user-friendly, easy plug-and-play wireless networking. This is obscure, opaque barely-functional wireless networking that makes blindingly apparent why those less technically inclined often feel anyone who can actually make these devices work is a practitioner of the dark arts.

AAA sent a Ken Betts truck, but decided a service truck would do, even though I asked for a tow. Turns out, no, I didn't just need air; there's a gash in my tire. Sorry, it'd be another 45 minutes on top of the 30 I'd already waited.

After an hour, I called to find out where the truck was. Just another 40 minutes, sir. Sorry, that's just how long it takes. Increasingly frustrated calls to AAA followed, but all they could say was that calling another towing company could take just as long.

ETA for the proper Ken Betts truck? 4:02. Too late to get a simple flat tire repaired and a full two and a half hours after my initial call. At that point, they would have had to leave it for the weekend at a random Big O Tire in the middle of Oakland. No, thank you.

So I turned to my six-days-remaining factory warranty to have it towed to the dealership. The dealership is already closed, needless to say, but at least they'll cover storage in a secure location for the weekend. And the wait for the new truck from another company? Just 70 minutes, but "probably sooner" I am assured.

75 minutes later, I'm on the phone again. No truck. It is now 5:30 PM and No. Fucking. Truck. There was a mix up. The towing company was waiting for a call back from BMW who had called me around 5 to verify that I still had a warranty (yessir, for six more days, I sure as hell do) and then neglected to call the towing company. "They're sending a truck now. It'll be there in 30 minutes."

Forty minutes later I am just getting my phone out to make another call when the truck finally turns the corner onto the cul-de-sac on which I have been trapped for the last five hours.

Now all I have to do is catch a cab.

Even if the 1970's era industrial design may be forgiven (though even that's a stretch), the terms of service are too much, too restrictive, too ripe for 1984-style abuse.

Act I: The act of buying

When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.

Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author’s Guild, 2002

You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party...

Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service, 2007

You would think, given Amazon's stature in the book-selling world, that they could demand better terms from publishers. Apparently they couldn't even demand reasonable pricing and will be losing money on every best-seller sold.

Update: I just watched Amazon's Kindle introductory video, wherein is contained the information that Amazon charges "a small fee" for each file you email yourself to read on your Kindle. You can't even read your own documents without paying Amazon.

There is USB built into the Kindle and no word on Amazon about whether you can also transfer files that way. If that is the case, it's unfortunate that customers will have to know that depending on their choice of transfer mechanism, they'll be receiving a bill at the end of the month. That's not very user-friendly, Jeff.

Anyone wanna do the math to figure out what a rebate is worth if it takes a year and a half to get it? I'm sure the implications on the other side are plenty rosy:

Patrick Crowley: "Hey Dave, our earnings are gonna be weak this [month/quarter/year]. Nvidia's beating our pants off again. What ever shall we do?"

Dave Orton: "No problem Patrick, just ask our rebate processing center to cut the contract down to one person."

Crowley: "But sir, they've got millions of rebates backlogged. It'll take years to get through them all."

Orton: <blank stare>

Good thing Earl over at MegaMail Processing & Co. is such a diligent and determined employee.