Ever since the RIAA crackdown on illegal downloading, there’s been quite a drop in CD sales. And iTunes sales have gone up substantially. But the reason isn’t that users feel that DRM is bad, just that illegal downloading and iTunes are both cheaper. The Kindle not selling enough? Maybe because it’s $400. [no citation available, just see for yourself] At least the books are cheap.

Perhaps, it’s not about restricting rights all the way to the point of controlling everything we see and do. Maybe it’s just about the money.

Me: I hate windows mobile.
Tim: Why?
Me: In what universe do you get a smart phone that’s too smart to make calls with?
Tim: Yours must be defective, i’ve never had a problem with that.
Me: No, it’s not. I’ll explain.
Me: My mom got a palm treo 750.
Me: This should have incited my “ruh roh” response.
Me: somehow it didn’t.
Me: That was fine, even though she never uses mobile web
Me: but then, she got this plantronics headset
Tim: ruh roh
Me: and she was telling me how she couldn’t get the regular phone speaker to work anymore
Me: she disabled bluetooth
Me: but she could still only make calls with the headset
Tim: hmm
Me: soo, I removed the device from the partnership. Now, it still doesn’t work, bluetooth’s off, and when i call i don’t hear anything.
Tim: Did you check the volume?
Me: Furthermore, it requires some ridiculous YES I CHECKED THE VOLUMEFDSFDSF
Tim: and does speakerphone work
Me: –anyways, ridiculous passkey (no speakerphone doesn’t work)
Me: and without the pass key you couldn’t reattach the headset
Me: So now i couldn’t talk on the phone,
and couldn’t talk on the headset.
Me: ==with a palm treo and winmobile, you can do everything but make voice calls
Me: We called tech support
Me: They had us do a hard reset
Me: The lady’s basic explanation was “you have to think of the phone as a little computer. and just like your computer builds up cookies and stuff and slows down, your phone can also get cookies and slow down as well, so you need to turn it off regularly”
Me: (I congratulated myself on keeping a straight face through that one)
Me: but it seems to have worked
Tim: treos suck

Tim: the phone is clearly better than my old one
Tim: but the cpu sucks, and the screen configuration is retarded

Me: it’s totally unacceptable to have to whip out a stylus just to turn off the headset
Tim: there’s not a button on the headset?
Me: there is….it doesn’t work
Tim: my friend josh has a blackjack and bluetooth headset and has zero problems with it
Tim: it’s clearly the treo that sucks
Me: menu->cancel bluetooth
Me: so….go to the MENU menu
Tim: whaaa
Me: i want to find the idiot who dreamed that one up
Me: and give them their phone back
Me: with my fist
Me: the button on the headset hangs up
Tim: funny
Me: not when mom’s on a 2 year contract
Me: there are three buttons on the headset
Me: volume up, volume down
Me: and the “multifunction button”
Me: which i believe is mainly for hanging up

Here’s one all-too-familiar example:


The Terms of Service, or TOS, are a standard prerequisite for signing up for almost everything on the internet, from Amazon to Neopets to Flickr. This document usually contains all the rules required to join the service. These cover all sorts of policies, from standards of behavior to giving away your phone number to telemarketers [1] to waiving your right to legal action. [2]

Try applying principles of UI design to a TOS. You should notice immediately:

Everything about your average TOS screams out, “Don’t read this, but skim it and check the box that says you did.”

(1) The box is usually packed into an unnecessarily small space (in the nVidia example, it’s actually clipping most of the available room!)

(2) The page looks like it’s from the Web 0.1 era. Ever see links on a TOS?

(3) It’s totally impossible to read. Look at any TOS. It’s called a table of contents, geniuses. Use it.

(4) Doesn’t contain any interpretation. The legalese is required to get through in the courts, obviously. But why shouldn’t they provide a side-by-side translation or basic explanation?

(5) The check box almost never requires you to read the agreement.

This is something that has been around since the pre-Internet days; the fine print is nothing new.

What’s different now is that the Internet has made everything so much easier that, when it comes to Terms of Service, it’s blatantly obvious that they don’t want you to know what you’re agreeing to. We should demand better.

From now on, the Blog of Justice will have its own TOS, available here.

Man’s unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true rather than what the evidence shows to be likely and possible has always astounded me. We long for a caring Universe which will save us from our childish mistakes, and in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary we will pin all our hopes on the slimmest of doubts. God has not been proven not to exist, therefore he must exist.

Academician Prokhor Zakharov
“For I Have Tasted The Fruit”

This struck a chord with me, and I later found that this idea – that humans believe what they prefer to be true – has a scientific name: Confirmation Bias. Actually, confirmation bias is the tendancy people have to interpret information in a way that supports their preconceptions, which is quite similar to what “Zakharov” said. The end result of confirmation bias is that we tend to believe some pretty crazy stuff. The earth is flat. Cold weather makes you sick. People would explode in the vacuum of space. None of these are true. It makes you wonder how many other crazy things we take for granted as being true.

Take, for instance, recycling. Recycling has become one of those cultural icons that has become accepted accross political lines. It would likely be a very bad move politically to oppose recycling, for a Republican or Democrat. As a universally accepted “fact”, few people stop to question the actual benefit that we get from recycling. Examine paper recycling: In order to recycle paper, we burn a large quantity of fossil fuels in order to transport the paper between local recycling stations and paper mills, and even more oil and energy in the paper manufacturing process. All this to save… a renewable resource called forests. Of course, it is common knowledge that we are running out of trees, isn’t it? Well actually, no, it isn’t. The number of trees is at its highest point now than any time in this century. What about landfill space, aren’t we running out of landfill space? Again, no. We could continue producing trash at our current rate for the next 1000 years, and we would only need a landfill that was 35 square miles.

On the assumption that recycling is an inherently good thing, the US government has poured billions of dollars into recycling subsidies. The cost of recycling one ton of garbage in NYC is $239, compared to $132 to put it in a landfill. If the city would stop all recycling efforts, it would save $56 million a year. Imagine what we could do with that money if we put it towards conservation efforts, or research into alternative energy? However, there is one shining point of economic beauty in this quagmire of wasteful recycling: The cost of recycling aluminum cans is significantly lower than the cost to extract aluminum from raw ore. This results in the only class of recycling that is economically profitable.

Thinking without confirmation bias requires thinking outside the box. It’s not a natural way to think, and requires serious introspection on preconcieved ideas and beliefs. For more information about the recycling controversy, check out this video of Penn and Teller calling Recycling Bullsh*t.

“Ah…(waving his arms to try and quiet the crowd) Stop! Shh! Ah, I’d like to thank God, my mom, my dad, my beautiful fiancee who I love more than anything in the world, General Hospital, wonderful cast; Sarah Brown, Kimberly McCullough, Ron Hale, Tony Geary, Maurice Benard; John Homa, I love you, ABC, Wendy Riche, Elizabeth Courty, Bob Guza, Mark Teschner, Jeff Ballard, Jim Warren, thank you, I LOVE YOU!!!”

2. Honor societies

Golden Key is a mission focused, values based and demographics driven organization.

Mission: To enable members to realize their potential by connecting individual achievement with service and lifelong opportunity.

Values: Integrity, Collaboration, Innovation, Respect, Diversity, Excellence, Engagement.

References

[1] http://www.geocities.com/hollywood/lot/8416/emmyspeech98.html

[2] http://goldenkey.org/GKweb/WhatIsGoldenKey/MissionValuesStrategicPlan/

Coming next: greenwashing and excellence

Perhaps the best part of this company is their commitment to intensity, even in their typeface. Like, I’d totally want to work there and OMG they even have BAGEL FRIDAYS. LMAOMMMMG!!1one

(Needless to say, they’ve already got my résumé.)

On a job description for an analyst position:

We value assertive individuals who “think outside the box.”

The fascinating thing about the phrase thinking outside the box is how inside the box it’s managed to become. When did the phrase thinking outside the box become so cliche that it actually became its own antithesis?