Nintendo Switch Price Gouging on Amazon

Gamestop, Best Buy, Target et. al. list the Nintendo Switch console with Gray Joy-Con at $299. Yes they are sold out. The lowest price that Amazon lists for the Switch is 50% higher. I don't want to pay a premium to get the item in 2 days, I simply want to pay a fair price and wait for availability.

When I visited Nintendo's official Switch web page I learned that $299.99 is the suggested retail price for the console. The first retailer they link on the page is actually Amazon. Following the link leads you to the product page I linked above where the lowest price listed for the Switch is $449.99. There is a total disconnect at Amazon here. The large $150 discrepancy only makes Amazon appear ravenously greedy.

I have been bothered by the pricing gouging trends on Amazon for the past couple of years. The current pricing for the Nintendo Switch is an excellent example. These practices erode their customer base and encourage buyers to consider competitors (Jet.com, Target, Best Buy). If I have to wade through a slew of gougers whenever I shop at Amazon, I will spend less time relying on them and put effort in to find better store options.

Google pushing cookie responsibility on bloggers

Yes, the European Union is a pain in the arse. Britain clearly tired of their shenanigans. But when European law and Google's business model collide on a blogger's page, Google makes it clear that the blogger is legally responsible to give notice of Google's data mining practices. "European Union laws require you to give European Union visitors information about cookies used on your blog. In many cases, these laws also require you to obtain consent. You are responsible for confirming this notice actually works for your blog, and that it displays. If you employ other cookies, for example by adding third party features, this notice may not work for you. Learn more about this notice and your responsibilities." Well, Google, well European Union... for my response, I refer you to the photo of the right-honourable gentleman, Linus Torvalds, displayed moments ago.

Office 365 marching backwards in time

Particularly in the Apple ecosystem, users enjoy consistency of software user interfaces. At the company where I work, they have made the unfortunate decision to use Office 365 as an exclusive company wide email/calendaring etc. software suite. I have found Office 365 on the Mac to have poor HID guideline compliance but had noticed some incremental improvements over time that seemed to suggest that Microsoft was on a slow trajectory to create software that could one day integrate comfortably with Mac OS. Then entered 15.22 On the Mac, native applications with embedded text editors near universally utilize one of the few actual fruits of object oriented design (though there may seem to be many when you consider OOP strictly at the operating system API scale): the NSTextView. The NSTextView provides many conveniences to developers, but more importantly, to users. In particular it supports some basic Emacs keybindings to allow you to quickly navigate and delete text a bit more easily. WebView on the Mac also supports similar conveniences, and I have always been frustrated working with WebApps, in particular Jira and Confluence by Atlassian, which have the hubris to intercept and block these keybindings which are normally supported in Safari. Today after updating Microsoft Outlook to version 15.22, these keybindings have vanished. I invoke the image of Linus Torvalds to share appropriate sentiments. I am sure that Linus has gestured similarly to Microsoft before, not just nVidia.

Magic Trackpad 2 "burns" my fingers

I was really excited about Apple's new Magic Trackpad 2, particularly its advertised pressure sensitivity, and placed an order for it last week. This might sound like a spooky tinfoil claim at first, but it seemed, just by using it for a minute with my fingers, that my new Magic Trackpad 2 was generating a significant electric field. Fortunately, I am left-brained and nerd enough to own a TriField Meter which I produced and measured the said field of the device. The device generated a consistent background field of approximately 3 milli-gauss (mG), which very often peaked to 10mG during consistent use. As my hand left the device, I was often able to trigger an EMF spike that exceeded 50mG. While EMF safety is still under debate, this field strength consistently exceeds the commonly believed safe EMF range of .5 - 2.5mG. It is true, that if I place my meter directly on the LCD of my iMac, I measure background fields of 40-50mG, however, the strength of this field produced by my iMac at my normal head position while using my computer has a background EMF of only .3mG. I used to experience headaches working at old school CRT monitors, which produce far more EMF radiation than modern LCD monitors, and have been glad they have largely disappeared.

For a device that I will touch for hours during the day, the EMF field strength of the Magic Trackpad 2 is too strong. The subtle burning sensation in my fingertips that I notice during use of the Magic Trackpad is unfortunately irritating and seems to linger in my pointer finger for some time after I discontinue using it. Ok, I will get out the Reynolds Wrap now and make it official.

Swift doesn't have much Objective-C ancestry

I have been reading The Swift Programming Language with interest today. While it is possible that the ebook is a living document, my current opinion is that Swift inherits much from C++ but at the expense of the runtime flexibility of Objective C. I feel it is a mistake to consider Objective-C as an ancestor to Swift in its currently documented form. The most glaring disappointment is the lack of runtime introspection. Introspection capabilities seem to be limited to the is and as operators; there isn't mention of an equivalent for Objective-C selector types, and no mention of any introspection for class structure. While there are obvious influences from Ruby in Swift, again any introspection capabilities of Ruby do not appear, at least in the current documentation.

Time to act: (A Letter to the U.S. President)

Dear Mr. President:

We have a moral responsibility to assist Mexico, in a far greater capacity, to help end our drug war. We need to share greater intelligence, surveillance technologies, special forces, and even large and effective numbers of military troops (should they be welcomed). We should offer any and all assistance we can make available to end the murderous lawlessness that rages in Mexico. It is our problem. Americans perpetuate the violence by providing enormous revenue for the drug cartels, our laws have failed to stop this drug consumption for decades. We need to own up to our responsibility and fight the violence with far greater attention, commitment, and moral resolve.

Violence is escalating at our southern border and our national inaction is beyond disgraceful. Americans consume roughly 50% of the entire world market supply of marijuana and cocaine -- much of which is trafficked through Mexico. Regardless of the legality of these narcotics in the United States, our citizens are providing a vast market for obscenely brutal and violent criminal organizations. It is understatement to suggest that our attempts to thwart American drug consumption have failed for decades. While I do believe legalizing these narcotics and distributing them through government regulated channels would ultimately eradicate drug violence and reduce drug addiction, I do not advocate this here as most American politicians, including the Obama administration, find such a painfully obvious solution to be an unthinkable political anathema, regardless of the moral reprehensibility of ignoring an obvious solution to an increasingly tragic problem.

Arizona has passed exceptionally xenophobic legislation allowing state officers to enforce immigration laws. You have commented on this but, in my opinion, have not provided an effective alternative. The political hysteria in Arizona is directly related to the astronomical rise of murders in Mexican cities bordering the United States. Arizonans are beginning to believe that the violence is beginning to spill over into the United States. Regardless of where the violence is happening, and where it might happen in the future it is our responsibility to stop it. We made this mess and we need to clean it up.

American citizens were reputedly tortured and killed in Mexico this week in Ciudad Juarez. An American citizen Rafael Morales was taken from his wedding in Ciudad Juarez, tortured and murdered. His body left in the bed of a pickup truck. While the Mexican death toll does not seem to matter much to the United States, and it seems far more important to spend billions in two wars on the other side of the world, American deaths in the drug war are beginning to multiply. How many are required before you assert leadership and do something tangible and effective about it?


http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/05/11/mexico.wedding.violence/index.html?eref=igoogle_cnn

Sincerely,

Christopher Penrose

The Hypocrisy of the Associated Press

Reflecting on:

http://associatedpress.com/iprights/

and

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/03/ap-blasts-obama.html

The Associated Press has irrevocably embarassed itself with its needless and unwarranted attempts to "protect" its "intellectual property" by filing a counter suit against artist Shepard Fairey. First, the allegedly "infringing" image of Barack Obama is isolated by AP and is taken out of its original context -- words such as "HOPE" and "PROGRESS" are included in Fairey's politcal imagery of Barack Obama. Furthermore, the Associated Press ignores the glaring fact that Shepard Fairey's images, allegedly derived from an AP photograph, are unique art works. They are unequivocally divergent from the original AP photo in color, form and presentation. Furthermore, the cultural, political and artistic activity of Shepard Fairey to create and disseminate these works has had enormously more cultural significance than that of the Associated Press photo in question.

The assertation that the Associated Press owns Shepard Fairey's work, and that Fairey's images infringe upon Associated Press ownership rights rely on the belief (and legal acceptance of it) that photographic perspective is in fact ownable. What is hypocritical about this stance is that without this very perspective, Barack Obama himself would be the owner and arbiter of this image. Furthermore, if Shepard Fairey did in fact utitilze an Associated Press photograph to create his images, the new resulting art work enjoys an equivalent latitude for ownership that the "original" Associated Press photo is assumed to enjoy: Shepard Fairey is providing a new aesthetic perspective and context for an Associated Press perspective. What right does the AP have to dictate the boundaries of perspective, when their photographers have carte blanche to provide it themselves? Shepard Fairey has created, perhaps from a photograph, a work not only vibrant, unique and new, but successfully resonant to millions of Americans.

Again, the cultural resonance of the Shepard Fairey work clearly speaks to the fact that the Associated Press simply owns a photograph and Shepard Fairey has created an original and new work of art. The Associated Press, intoxicated by its greed, is trying to steal an American cultural artifact from its creator, and from the nation that acknowledged it and brought it to your attention. Shame on your pettiness. Shame on your lack of respect. Shame on your philistine hypocrisy. Shame on your contempt for America.