Jwill's Log

Source: Release Candidate One
Read Post

This is an awesome post about having a sort of “Services” menu for the iPhone so you can take things from one application and use them in another (for example, send an e-mail with the selected text or upload a selected image to Facebook). Having a universal menu such as this would be amazing because it would reduce the need for app developers to create these “droplets” and services on their own and simply make something that any application can use right out of the box. I hope Apple’s listening.

Read it for yourself, and if the jargon gets to you, just watch the video.

Read the news in this article (Source: boston.com).

The new data plans from AT&T ($15/month for 200MB, $25/month for 2 GB) were announced today (aka, no more unlimited data plans) but only applies to new customers. I was at first bothered by the news, but then I checked my usage and realized that I used no more than 500MB in any given month (I’m around my computer quite a bit and I use Wi-Fi networks whenever possible). Also, since the old unlimited plan is grandfathered in, I don’t have to worry about changing from unlimited. But to think that I could possibly save $5 a month by dropping my cap to 2 GB when I don’t even use 25% of that in a given month. AT&T stated that about 98% of its customers will do just fine under then 2 GB plan while 65% of customers will be fine under then 200 MB plan.

Perhaps they should have had these plans in the first place so they wouldn’t have as much of a dangerously bad reputation. But now they do for new customers. What would be especially nice is if I spent the majority of my time in a Wi-Fi network – then I’d only use up to 200 MB and thus would be able to save $15 a month. I mean, I’m not streaming video or doing anything seriously heavy duty on my phone – that’s what a laptop or desktop computer is for. I think the bigger hit is really for the iPad users who will be streaming video and watch things on their device that take up a lot of bandwidth.

Source: boston.com
Read Article

In a narrowly split decision, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority expanded its limits on the famous Miranda rights for criminal suspects on Tuesday — over the dissent of new Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who said the ruling turned Americans’ rights of protection from police abuse “upside down.”

Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion, said a suspect who goes ahead and talks to police after being informed he doesn’t have to has waived his right to remain silent.

So if you’re arrested and Mirandized and then you start talking, you’ve given up the right to remain silent and the police can continue to interrogate you. My interpretation of “you have the right to remain silent” and “anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law” was that you could stop the interview at any time (thereby exercising your right to remain silent). Also:

This decision means that police can keep shooting questions at a suspect who refuses to talk as long as they want in hopes that the person will crack and give them some information, said Richard Friedman, a University of Michigan law professor.

Can you imagine the poor, innocent people who would get terrorized by this and then crack under pressure because they don’t want the police in their face anymore, admitting to something they didn’t do? True, the police should know for sure if the person they are interrogating indeed wants to invoke his or her Miranda rights. But I can imagine a lot of people being in the wrong place at the wrong time and being immensely intimidated by the notion of police officers yelling at them. I agree with Justice Sotomayor’s written dissent of the ruling:

Criminal suspects must now unambiguously invoke their right to remain silent — which counterintuitively requires them to speak. At the same time, suspects will be legally presumed to have waived their rights even if they have given no clear expression of their intent to do so. Those results, in my view, find no basis in Miranda or our subsequent cases and are inconsistent with the fair-trial principles on which those precedents are grounded.

It’s the whole “I’m gonna assume you don’t mind talking to me” mentality that this change can bring up that’s discomforting.