Tom Vanderbilt on the autonomous car: Levandowski has a point. I was briefly nervous when Urmson first took his hands off the wheel and a synthy woman’s voice announced coolly, “Autodrive.” But after a few minutes, the idea of a computer-driven car seemed much less terrifying than the
Esquire’s Daniel Voll has a very good piece on Omar, an Iraqi counterterrorism officer that’s worked with American forces since 2004 to arrest or kill some of the worst terrorists in Iraq: Amira, an electrical engineer, had done some work for the Americans in the Green Zone when
Chris Martucci on United States v. Jones: So it is unfair to say that Scalia overemphasizes trespassing. His argument is more subtle. To suggest that he overemphasizes physical intrusion would be to make the same mistake the lower court makes, i.e., to assume that a test used in one
Jason Snell wrote a terrific piece about why iBooks Author is a big deal for publishers, and if you haven’t, you should read it. He pointed something out that hadn’t occurred to me about iBooks Author. He wrote: I look at iBooks Author and wonder if it might
The Tax Policy Center’s Howard Gleckman: The multinationals’ minimum tax would be entirely unworkable. Even if Congress passed the levy, which it won’t, those firms will find ways around it. Minimum taxes are Band-Aides for a flawed tax system. The solution is not to create a new
David Wineman: Apple is trying to establish a rule that whatever I create with this application, if I sell it, I have to give them a cut. And iBooks Author is free, so this arrangement sounds pretty reasonable. Watts Martin responds: So Apple’s “audacity” is that they’ve created
Apple announced three things today: textbooks for iPad, a new iTunes U app for teachers to manage classes and for taking them, and a free iBooks authoring application for the Mac. I’m going to talk about the iTunes U app and textbooks, but I do want to say that
Big thanks to the guys at Literature and Latte for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed. Scrivener is one of those Mac applications that feels very Mac-like to me—the geeky, made precisely for this kind of user because we are that user, kind of application. When I first
Instagram’s CEO Kevin Systrom released a few details about their plan for how to do advertising: “I think the advertising experience is going to be extremely engaging,” Systrom said. “It’s much harder with text,” but Instagram offers photos, and brand names such as Audi, Kate Spade, and Burberry
Thank you, he said. Maybe you don’t need me to say it, because I think you know, I think we’ve always understood each other, in that quiet and unacknowledged way, where you don’t say much but I know exactly what you’re saying, what you really mean—
The Labor Department announced today that the economy added 200,000 jobs in December and that the unemployment rate dropped to 8.5 percent. Most encouraging, though, is the decrease in the unemployment rate was not primarily due to people dropping out of the job market, as has been true
Tim Ricchuiti takes exception with my characterization of Greece, Italy and Spain’s problem as being too much debt: Not quite. It’s not the heavy weight of debt (as Krugman has posted about at length the past week, most notably in this column) that’s causing European nations to