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Gruber has posted an exposé

March 22, 2007 by Michael Boyle

about a company called LogoMaid that has ripped off Dan Cederholm’s SimpleBits logo. I’m going to post a long quote from Gruber’s site with links intact, because, as he said, it’s a good thing when high PageRank sites spread the word about crap like this (this isn’t as high as Daring Fireball, but it’s OK).

Anyhow:

LogoMaid is an outfit that sells off-the-shelf logos and corporate identities for a couple hundred bucks a pop. Unsurprisingly, their work is not very original or good, and in some cases, is a flat-out rip-off. Dan Cederholm spotted this knock-off of his SimpleBits logo, on sale at LogoMaid for $199, and posted it to his Flickr account.

White House Press Secretary

March 22, 2007 by Michael Boyle

Tony Snow today was trotting out a new talking point: that Congress has no oversight authority of the Executive Branch. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has the story and provides a strong opinion about all of this that should be read. To me it’s just the latest in a long line of really remarkable efforts by the White House to completely re-configure US governance from the top down.

It brings to mind an important question: has the Bush administration’s primary and overarching goal been to strengthen Executive power beyond anything recognizable in US history?

Every policy that has been pursued by the Bush administration – and I include the Iraq War in this – can easily be seen to have been done in the service of increasing Executive power. And when you consider that many of the muckety-mucks – including most notably Cheney – came out of the Nixon era, it starts to look like a pretty reasonable theory.

When we look at why something like the invasion of Iraq happened, people bring out all kinds of theory about NeoCon dreams or restoring American force in the world or (even) a justifiable response to presumed terrorism and terrorist intentions on the part of Saddam. But what if all of those reasons are simply incidental? What if the ultimate reason to start a war was just to cultivate more fertile ground for strengthening the Executive Branch?

The implications are staggering when you turn the equation around like that – not Executive privilege as an outgrowth of the needs of wartime, but as the underlying reason for the war in the first place.

Roughly Drafted Magazine

March 8, 2007 by Michael Boyle

published an interesting piece called How FairPlay Works: Apple’s iTunes DRM Dilemma at the end of February. It’s a must-read in the context of the very open Apple-DRM file. At the bottom of the article there are links to several other interesting pieces as well. Well worth your time.

A thinker whose work I struggled with

March 6, 2007 by Michael Boyle

for some time, Jean Baudrillard, has died in Paris following a long illness. One of the best places to read him and about him in English is CTheory, which is where I was first immersed in his writings.

Paul Wells is a great blogger

March 3, 2007 by Michael Boyle

as well as a great columnist, but unfortunately when Macleans re-launched his blog, Inkless Wells, in a new blogging system that has been integrated with the rest of the magazine’s site, they forgot to turn on the RSS feeds. They still use RSS, but not on a blog-by-blog basis, which betrays a deep lack of understanding of the weblog format and may hurt him and the rest of Macleans’ bloggers. No matter how great Wells is, I won’t monitor an over-large RSS feed just to get my attention that he’s posted something. And, for me, no RSS means that he won’t get my attention. Macleans now has to hope that I remember to check in, despite the fact that I have almost a hundred other media outlets that ARE competing for my attention via feeds and so are almost sure to have it first. I hope they fix this soon – though it has already been a month, so I’m not holding my breath.

Update: I just got an email from Sheldon Sawchuk, the General Manager of Macleans.ca, and they have turned on the feeds for Macleans’ blogs. Good news! I’m happy to be subscribed again. [Update March 6, 2007]