I have Private Beta invites for Geeklist( @gklst ). The following link should get you in:

RT @Macworld: If you missed our live coverage of Tim Cook's D10 talk, we've got highlights from his session:

As more newspapers move to paywalls, it comes clearer to me that publishers are attempting to use a Band-Aid to cover a bullet hole. I share an anecdote:

I asked my class of 20-year-old Elon University students how many were on Facebook. All 33 raised their hands. Many of them suggested they were addicted to the social network. (It was all I could do to keep them off Facebook during class.) I asked how many would pay $1 a month for Facebook membership. All raised their hands.

“Five dollars?” I asked. A few dropped out.

“Ten dollars a month?” I asked. Nearly every hand stayed down.

“No one?” I said. “I thought you guys were addicted?”

A student piped up with an explanation: “Someone will invent something else to take its place that is free.”

I shared this anecdote with a newspaper executive when we were talking about newspaper paywalls. I said that if people wouldn’t pay for Facebook, they wouldn’t pay to get through a newspaper paywall. His response was dismissive. “They aren’t our readers anyway.”

No, they’re not, even though they should be: college-educated, inquisitive, relatively well-to-do and can afford the price of a paper or paywall. They won’t be newspaper readers in five or 10 years, either, when newspapers traditionally have expected them to subscribe to the newsprint edition and, presumably, the paywall. They will have been trained not to go to the newspaper website.

I can understand paywalls as a leaky short-term strategy, catching some newspaper readers who are addicted to their local papers. But without significant “value-added” content, that won’t last. Paywalls can’t be a long-term strategy; the audience will not be there.

What is the long-term strategy? Looks like it’s paywalls . And more paywalls .

Or, they could listen to what their prospective customers are saying and doing , and try something else.

I'm a huge fan of Amercia

RT @haacked: Blogged: Using GitHub for Windows with repositories.
If you absolutely must. :) # ...

RT @haacked: Blogged: Using GitHub for Windows with repositories.
If you absolutely must. :) # ...

RT @BuzzFeedAndrew: The Romney campaign's new iPhone app misspelled America.

RT @aza: Austerity survival guide.

The Caucus: Complaint Claims Illinois Senator Violated Campaign Finance Law (via Instapaper)

Liked: Keeping it classy at #atd10 staff and family party by karaswisher

Liked: La lanterna della cupola. by _kevinangel

Liked: Had an amazing time at the @namugaji Memorial Day luau on Baker Beach yesterday. Awesome restaurant in the Mission, worth a visit! by mikeyk

Liked: Minor construction job. by parislemon

Liked: A repost from my Brannan days for @sanfranmag featuring the lovely @laurynfay by moneal

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RT @thinkgeek: Shut up and take my money, birthday card makers!

Picking up the tux (@ Mens Warehouse)

Voting in the primary (@ Elk's Lodge)

RT @pixelworkers: 25% off everything on the shelf until Friday. Go get 'em.

RT @pierremartin: @predominant Totally, I already said that and was not alone :)

RT @pierremartin: @predominant Totally, I already said that and was not alone :)

RT @tomcoates: How far human radio broadcasts have reached in the Milky Way. /via @spacearcheology

RT @pierremartin: #CakePHP 3.0 with PHP5.4+ support?

RT @hackernewsbot: The Universal Standard Library...

RT @hemantmehta: How gay marriage threatens straight marriage:

Everyone knows women can be bitches sometimes, right? Unless they’re cougars, that is, on the prowl — or if they’re a bit younger, they’re more like vixens, kinda foxy. They henpeck when married and go wet and wild when single. They can take out their claws out or put them away. (Who doesn’t love a good catfight?)

Less dangerous are the girls and the young women, softer and fuzzier, who are more like bunnies, or, as the English say, like birds. Either way, diminutive and harmless. Girls like these are more like pets. Chicks or kittens.

Everyone does it, using language that renders women as animals;the list is endless. This culturally ingrained misogyny, as reflected in acceptable language that dehumanizes half the world’s population, is not limited to any one country or religion, or followers of one or another ideology.

But in U.S. politics, a particular trend has emerged among a certain set of conservatives: that of equating a woman with a farm animal. When, last week, Safeway Senior Vice President General Counsel Bob Gordon stood before a shareholders’ meeting telling a quot;jokequot; that portrayed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi as being worth less than a pair of hogs,he clearly had no reservations about publicly making this joke and obviously thought it was funny. After all, he was only elaborating on a meme that’s been evolving among right-wing Republican politicians in state legislatures.

Dear ICO. On behalf of web developers everywhere, what the frolicking duck?

As the body responsible for policing the infamous Cookie Law in the UK, you don’t exactly have a popular job, to be fair.

A year ago you graciously granted us an extra year to comply with the law, announcing your decision just 24 hours before the law came into effect. Last week, 24 hours before the really-we-mean-it-this-time law took hold, you changed it completely.

Any web developer who actually tried to comply with the law in either case has been royally and totally screwed, for no reason other than your blithering incompetence. Thanks for that.

Curiously – and don’t think we haven’t noticed – a lot of big sites, like the BBC, Guardian, BT, Channel 4 etc. all revealed solutions which comply with your revised guidelines just prior to you announcing it. We assume you’ve enjoyed long and comfortable consultation periods with all of them, which you decided to share with us one sunny Friday morning a day before it becomes law. You know – the same lazy day everyone is making their solutions live.

Now you might say you’ve already spoken out publicly about what a light touch you’ve been aiming for, which is true. However anyone who’s been following the law for the past year can agree on one thing – no one had a bloody clue what they were meant to do. Not the Wall St Journal, or The Guardian, or WebTrends, or Adobe, or half-a-bazillion web devs. We’re been floundering in a wind of ignorance while the one body with the responsibly to clarify anything sat on their collective asses and changed their mind last minute.

Apple’s filing doesn’t try to defend the five publishers the DOJ has accused of colluding to fix prices. In fact, it basically throws them under the bus, pointing out that if there was a price-fixing conspiracy among its co-defendants — as alleged — they kept it secret from Apple.

Meanwhile, the government’s lawyers are going to have a hard time proving that Apple violated antitrust laws because the company’s market share in the e-book business before the launch of the iPad was essentially zero.

They can’t make a case against Apple for collusion because whatever the publishers may have said to one another, there’s no evidence that Apple conspired with its competitors.

They can’t even use as evidence the blunt quotes taken from the Steve Jobs biography because they are hearsay.

The one element of the government’s case that seemed to give Apple’s lawyers a hard time was the charge that the most-favored-nation provision Steve Jobs added at the last minute was “designed to protect Apple from having to compete on price at all, while still maintaining Apple’s 30% margin.”

In its response, Apple’s legal team can’t even bring itself to name the provision, referring to it repeatedly as MFN. But they manage to shoot some holes in the government’s argument, pointing out, among other things, that the 30% cut Apple takes is hardly pure profit margin. It costs money to run the iBookstore, and while Apple doesn’t claim to lose money on e-book sales, that’s not where it gets the big bucks.

You can get the gist of Apple’s filing in those first six introductory paragraphs. The rest is an item-by-item refutation of the government’s case and a summary of Apple defenses, should it come to that.

Moving from programmer to entrepreneur () (via Instapaper)

Many of the people over at BarCamp are working on/struggling with the transition from programmer to entrepreneur. While I was never a truly “hard core” programmer (meaning lock me in the basement with Mountain Dew for a week and I’ll come out with 100,000 lines of code) I did have to make this transition. Also, doing the entrepreneur thing for the last few years with HelpSpot has really given me some insights into why many people fail at this transition. So here’s a few observations:

For Java, the question of whether there’s a FRAND licensing obligation under antitrust law is a non-issue: FRAND licenses for clean-room implementations are already available.

The Java example shows that FRAND is different from a fair use exception in some ways. While fair use denies that a creator is entitled to a payment, FRAND licenses are typically royalty-bearing. And it’s no less important to consider that FRAND licenses are often made available only to those who create a fully compliant implementation of a standard (whether a near-compliant implementation qualifies for FRAND under antitrust law is a separate question).

If Google made Android fully Java-compatible, it would be entitled to a FRAND license. In light of that, I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect Judge Alsup to depart from the standard for copyrightability (by a factor of 1,000 or more) or to invoke “fair use” when there actually is a FRAND option.

FRAND also has an advantage to implementers. For example, FRAND licenses relating to a standard typically cover all categories of intellectual property — including patents that are essential (i.e., they are inevitably infringed by a reasonable implementation of a standard). Patent law doesn’t have a “fair use” exception, and if you want to talk to a patent office about the public policy considerations Google puts front and center in the Android/Java case, good luck: patents are granted based on strictly technical criteria, and public interest exceptions only come into play under exceptional circumstances (such as in the event of an epidemia or national security concerns).

Antitrust law can’t impose a FRAND licensing obligation in connection with every API, but it doesn’t have to. If there are viable alternatives to an API, there may not be a FRAND obligation, but in that case, market dynamics will give the more available and affordable API a competitive advantage. But in those cases in which the market can’t take care of itself, competition law can come to the rescue.

Just to be clear: I don’t categorically reject competition-related arguments as far as intellectual property law itself is concerned. As far as my personal position is concerned, I’d like patent examiners to have to justify the grant of a patent in light of the fact that a patent is a (time-limited) monopoly. But we have to make a proper distinction between the way we’d like the law to be shaped and the way in which it can be reasonably applied today.

Google’s position on competition and IP is contradictory in itself. On the one hand, Google endorses and now directs Motorola’s abuse of standard-essential patents. On the other hand, Google wants free-of-charge and unrestricted access to certain Java-related IP and twists and turns the case law, suggesting that fair use cases established an actually non-existent conflict between copyrightability and compatibility and advocating that copyright holders should become victims of their own success. Right in the middle between those two extremes there’s a balanced solution called FRAND.

Latest Identity Theft Scam: Fake Tax Returns

Besieged by identity theft , Florida now faces a fast-spreading form of fraud so simple and lucrative that some violent criminals have traded their guns for laptops. And the target is the United States Treasury .

With nothing more than ledgers of stolen identity information — Social Security numbers and their corresponding names and birth dates — criminals have electronically filed thousands of false tax returns with made-up incomes and withholding information and have received hundreds of millions of dollars in wrongful refunds, law enforcement officials say.

The criminals, some of them former drug dealers, outwit the Internal Revenue Service by filing a return before the legitimate taxpayer files. Then the criminals receive the refund, sometimes by check but more often though a convenient but hard-to-trace prepaid debit card.

The government-approved cards, intended to help people who have no bank accounts, are widely available in many places, including tax preparation companies. Some of them are mailed, and the swindlers often provide addresses for vacant houses, even buying mailboxes for them, and then collect the refunds there.

Postal workers have been harassed, robbed and, in one case, murdered as they have made their rounds with mail trucks full of debit cards and master keys to mailboxes.

The fraud, which has spread around the country, is costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars annually, federal and state officials say. The I.R.S. sometimes, in effect, pays two refunds instead of one: first to the criminal who gets a claim approved, and then a second to the legitimate taxpayer, who might have to wait as long as a year while the agency verifies the second claim.

J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration, testified before Congress this month that the I.R.S. detected 940,000 fake returns for 2010 in which identity thieves would have received $6.5 billion in refunds. But Mr. George said the agency missed an additional 1.5 million returns with possibly fraudulent refunds worth more than $5.2 billion.

Florida, with its large population of elderly residents and health care facilities, provides a wealth of opportunities for swindlers. South Florida, which had the highest rate of identity theft in the nation, and Tampa have been hit hardest.

The financial firepower that fueled the rise of a network of conservative advocacy groups now pummeling Democrats with television ads can be traced, in part, to Box 72465 in the Boulder Hills post office, on a desert road on the northern outskirts of Phoenix.

That’s the address for the Center to Protect Patient Rights, an organization with ties to Charles and David H. Koch, the billionaire brothers who bankroll a number of conservative organizations.

During the 2010 midterm election, the center sent more than $55 million to 26 GOP-allied groups, tax filings show, funding opaque outfits such as American Future Fund, 60 Plus and Americans for Job Security that were behind a coordinated campaign against Democratic congressional candidates.

every amused at the questions in math textbooks relive those days all over again

Before World War 2, the middle-class in the developed world struggled to afford basic needs. In the post-war boom, standards of living rose dramatically, and people consumed far beyond what they needed. It was the age of conspicuous consumption: a race to own bigger cars and houses, and accumulate more stuff. The mean income in the developed world became sufficient to provide for a comfortable life.

Today, people increasingly realize they own more than enough stuff, and don’t want to pay for feature-rich versions of that stuff. Four blades in your razors are enough. In the language of Clay Christensen’s disruptive innovation framework, the product economy overshot the mass market’s needs.

An economy of experiences is emerging in its place. Experiences make people happier than products (a fact that scientific studies support). The popularity of experiences like music concerts has skyrocketed compared to corresponding products like music recordings. Apple, the most valuable company in the world, maniacally focuses on product experiences, down to minute details like the experience of unboxing an iPhone. Customers want to know where their food and clothes come from, so they can understand the experiences surrounding them. The emphasis on experiences also helps explain other large trends like the migration to cities. Cities have always offered the trade-off of fewer goods and less space in exchange for better experiences.

The trend toward experiences is important for technology startups. The era of competing over technical specifications is over. Users want better experiences from devices, applications, websites, and the offline services they enable. It is no coincidence that interaction design is replacing technical prowess as the primary competency at startups. People who create great experiences will be the most valuable to startups, and startups that create great experiences will be the most valuable to users.

Ministers are preparing to publish a Justice and Security Bill in the next few days that could allow some cases to be held in their entirety behind closed doors.

David Cameron agreed to the change after pressure from the security services, MI5 and MI6, it was reported.

Whitehall sources said officials were “dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s” on the plans, which have exposed a rift at the heart of the Coalition.

The publication of the Bill has been delayed after the Liberal Democrats objected. The legislation is now due to be published this week.

Ministers are justifying extending closed trial procedures to civil cases because they want to be able to contest compensation claims, rather than settle them to avoid any disclosure of documents that could be damaging to Britain’s national security.

Sami al-Saadi and Abdel Hakim Belhadj, who allege that they were taken by rendition by Britain to Libya eight years ago, are expected to begin legal proceedings against Jack Straw, the former foreign secretary, and the Government next month.

Under the new Bill members of any jury hearing the case, as well as those suing the Government, would be unable to view some intelligence if it risked national security.

The measures have been criticised by civil liberties groups, forcing Kenneth Clarke, the Justice Secretary, to narrow the proposals solely to cases that compromise national security. MPs and peers on the Joint Committee on Human

Rights have said that the proposals amount to a radical departure from the “UK’s traditions of open justice and fairness”.

There is also concern that it falls to ministers, rather than a court, to decide when the closed-trial system would apply.

A member of the National Labor Relations Board accused of leaking inside information has resigned, the agency announced Sunday.

Terence Flynn had been under pressure to leave since March, when the board’s inspector general found that Flynn committed ethics violations by improperly revealing confidential details on the status of pending cases.

Flynn, a Republican, shared the information with two former board members, including a one-time labor adviser to presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s campaign. That adviser, Peter Schaumber, left the Romney campaign in December, around the time the investigation into Flynn began.

Flynn submitted a letter to President Obama and to the board’s chairman, Mark Pearce, late Saturday saying he would resign effective July 24, but would recuse himself from all agency business until he departs.

While Flynn did not mention the allegations against him, he had previously denied any wrongdoing. Flynn’s personal lawyer had claimed any discussions about board proceedings were not illegal.

Flynn is one of five members of the board, which oversees union elections and enforces labor laws. It has been the focus of intense partisan wrangling, with Republicans and business groups complaining that it leans too heavily in favor of labor unions.

Obama bypassed the Senate to appoint Flynn and two Democratic nominees to the board in January. Republicans had filibustered the nominations for months.

In two separate reports, the board’s inspector general said Flynn improperly leaked information about the status of cases, how other board members planned to vote, and the board’s internal strategy for handling litigation against it.

In one instance, the inspector general found that Flynn secretly helped Schaumber draft an opinion column denouncing a board decision that favored unions.

The alleged ethical violations occurred in 2010 and 2011, when Flynn was a staff lawyer for the board.

The case has already been referred to the Justice Department for a separate investigation. It also has been forwarded to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel to investigate potential violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in partisan political activity.

Congressional Democrats and union leaders had been calling on Flynn to resign, saying his disclosures compromised the agency’s integrity.

Is there a setting on Google Analytics to suppress use of cookies for users who have not yet given consent

The airlines would note that they still make efforts to seat families together. But it’s becoming increasingly difficult to make such arrangements online, in advance. Sometimes, you have to call a special number listed in the fine print that many customers may not notice.

In 2010, Mr Schumer got five big American airlines to promise not to charge fees for carry-on bags, so it’s possible that a voluntary pledge could resolve this, too. But airlines struggling to expand profit margins in a not-very-profitable business are going to keep running into customer pushback and threats of government regulation as long as they keep introducing policies that are easy to criticise. (Advising politicians to stop weighing in on these issues is as futile as telling grass to stop being green.)

Here’s a hint: politicians and consumer advocates are going to have a very hard time protesting against increases in base ticket prices. If airlines think the market will bear it, they should just charge more and stop making everyone’s life more difficult with complicated added fees. We’re moving towards a system that both hides the true price of flying and adds to travellers’ annoyances. That’s too bad. There’s something to be said for simplicity.

To truly compete, he would also have to solve consumer’s expectations for instant gratification and delivery. Jeff needed a complete production, distribution, and fulfillment model. He has likely shocked a lot of people by building one in his own backyard.

Essentially, Jeff installed a printing press to close the inventory gap with Amazon. The Espresso Book Machine sits in the middle of Harvard Bookstore like a hi-tech visitor to an earlier era. A compact digital press, it can print nearly five million titles including Google Books that are in the public domain, as well as out of print titles. We’re talking beautiful, perfect bound paperbacks indistinguishable from books produced by major publishing houses. The Espresso Book Machine can be also used for custom publishing, a growing source of revenue, and customers can order books in the store and on-line.

You can walk into the store, request an out-of-print, or hard-to-find title, and a bookseller can print that book for you in approximately four minutes. Ben Franklin would be impressed.

But you don’t even have to go into the store to get a book. If you live in Cambridge and neighboring communities, you can order online and get any book delivered the same day by an eco-friendly Metroped “pedal-truck,” or a bicycle, as I like to call them. Beat that Amazon.

Marketers know that success comes from a complex formula, and Jeff’s strategy includes many moving parts. Harvard Bookstore pays fanatical attention to customer service with an unrivaled staff of passionate and educated booksellers. They have spent years building a local brand. They bring people together with over 300 public events a year. They’re exceptional retailers with a frequent buyer program. They understand technology, and you can expect them to continually adapt.

Of course, Amazon has got nothing to fear, but that’s not the point. Harvard Bookstore defended their market and they did it by leveling the playing field with a giant. You shop there because it’s the most effective and satisfying experience.

json is used a ton in our work, why not make it better meet JSON5 JSON for the ES5 era

10 candidates in Texas in tommorrow's primary are pro-choice

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In short, an excess of 20 percent of the voters flagged as “non-citizens” in Miami-Dade are, in fact, citizens. And the actual number may be much higher.

An analysis of the state-wide list by the Miami Herald found that “Hispanic, Democratic and independent-minded voters are the most likely to be targeted” as ineligible by the list. Conversely, “whites and Republicans are disproportionately the least-likely to face the threat of removal.”

Late last year, Scott ordered his Secretary of State, Kurt Browning, to “to identify and remove non-U.S. citizens from the voter rolls.” Browning could not access to reliable citizenship data. So election officials attempted to identify non-U.S. citizens by comparing data from the state motor vehicle administration with the voting file. That process produced a massive list of 182,000 names, which Browning considered unreliable and refused to release. Browning resigned in February and Scott pressed forward with the purge.

The Fair Elections Legal Network, which is challenging the purge, noted that database matching is “notoriously unreliable” and “data entry errors, similar-sounding names, and changing information can all produce false matches.” Further, some voters may have naturalized since their license information was collected.

Yet Mr. Christie has been adamant that New Jersey is on the way back, and that this makes room for, you guessed it, tax cuts that would disproportionately benefit the wealthy.

Last week reality hit: David Rosen, the state’s independent, nonpartisan budget analyst, told legislators that the state faces a $1.3 billion shortfall. How did the governor respond?

First, by attacking the messenger. According to Mr. Christie, Mr. Rosen — a veteran public servant whose office usually makes more accurate budget forecasts than the state’s governor — is “the Dr. Kevorkian of the numbers.” Civility! By the way, even Mr. Christie’s own officials are predicting a major budget shortfall, just not quite as big. And the two big credit-rating agencies, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, have recently issued warnings about New Jersey’s budget situation, which S.& P. called “structurally unbalanced” because of the governor’s optimistic revenue assumptions.

New Jersey, then, is still in dire fiscal shape. So is our tough-talking governor willing to reconsider his pet tax cut? Fuhgeddaboudit. Instead, he wants to fill the hole with one-shot budget gimmicks, including reneging on a promise to reduce borrowing for transportation investment and diverting funds from clean-energy programs. So much for fiscal responsibility.

Will Mr. Christie’s budget temper tantrum end speculation that he might become Mr. Romney’s running mate? I have no idea. But it really doesn’t matter: whoever Mr. Romney picks, he or she will cheerfully go along with the budget-busting, reverse Robin Hood policies that you know are coming if the former governor wins.

For the modern American right doesn’t care about deficits, and never did. All that talk about debt was just an excuse for attacking Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and food stamps. And as for Mr. Christie, well, he’s just another fiscal phony, distinguished only by his fondness for invective.

Fiscal Phonies (via Instapaper)

RT @asymco: Unforgiven: There has never been a recovery from failure in phone markets.

Today's ruling, coupled with Tuesday's, have presented police efforts to criminalize protest activity "a temporary roadblock," Stolar said, adding that the profusion of cameras at Occupy Wall Street protests have made it harder for police to get away with fabricating stories to justify arrests.

"I've seen this from the first arrests back in September," Stolar said. "Some people are charged with resisting arrest (which ups the stakes to a crime) and police are claiming in complaints that people are kicking their legs and twisting their bodies. And then when you look at the video, it's just not there -- the people are being totally cooperative, and those charges were just put in there to make the person arrested look bad."

Despite this pattern, Stolar said that police officers' qualified immunity mean it's unlikely they'll suffer any consequences for misrepresenting the facts to justify their arrests of protesters.

RT @migueldeicaza: 4th Century Bibles had clearly a liberal bias. Conservapedia to the rescue!

Friedman channels Krugman

RT @jennifurret: Wtf RT @RckBeyondBelief: Christian calls my infant daughter "ugly":

RT @dcurtis: Elon Musk's determination

RT @mperham: The American two party democracy: a success around the world.

RT @gabrielgironda: WE ENCOURAGED PEOPLE TO LEARN TO PROGRAM AND JUST LOOK AT WHAT HAPPENED

BERLIN (Reuters) - German solar power plants produced a world record 22 gigawatts of electricity per hour - equal to 20 nuclear power stations at full capacity - through the midday hours on Friday and Saturday, the head of a renewable energy think tank said.

The German government decided to abandon nuclear power after the Fukushima nuclear disaster last year, closing eight plants immediately and shutting down the remaining nine by 2022.

They will be replaced by renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and bio-mass.

Norbert Allnoch, director of the Institute of the Renewable Energy Industry (IWR) in Muenster, said the 22 gigawatts of solar power per hour fed into the national grid on Saturday met nearly 50 percent of the nation’s midday electricity needs.

“Never before anywhere has a country produced as much photovoltaic electricity,” Allnoch told Reuters. “Germany came close to the 20 gigawatt (GW) mark a few times in recent weeks. But this was the first time we made it over.”

The record-breaking amount of solar power shows one of the world’s leading industrial nations was able to meet a third of its electricity needs on a work day, Friday, and nearly half on Saturday when factories and offices were closed.

Government-mandated support for renewables has helped Germany became a world leader in renewable energy and the country gets about 20 percent of its overall annual electricity from those sources.

Germany has nearly as much installed solar power generation capacity as the rest of the world combined and gets about four percent of its overall annual electricity needs from the sun alone. It aims to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020.

To oversimplify for a moment, here’s Penney’s problem. They told the world that retailers only offer their best prices during crazy sales, and Penney stores would no longer host them. Sensible consumers apparently took that information to heart and decided to simply wait for such sales at other stores. As an added benefit, Penney lowered consumers’ search costs, because they now knew they didn’t need to bother driving to a Penney’s store anymore.

That’s probably not what new Penney CEO Ron Johnson had in mind when he decided to spend his marketing budget on those witty DeGeneres ads. A former Apple Inc. executive who took the Penney’s job in November, he thought he was lifting the store out of the brutal commodity clothing market. He may ultimately succeed at that. But he won’t do it by telling customers the firm’s pricing is fairer than at other stores, Gabaix believes.

“It will be a very, very uphill battle,” Gabaix said. “So, sorry for them.”

There have been a few other celebrated efforts by companies to educate consumers that their higher prices are really lower prices after hidden fees. During the last decade, Intercontinental Hotels experimented with up-front pricing that included all fees on its website. Executives at the firm told the New York Times that customers left in droves, choosing competitors with lowball prices.

More recently, Southwest Airlines has undertaken the most aggressive anti-shrouding campaign to date, picking on other airlines’ baggage fees. The profitable carrier is holding its own with its “Bags Fly Free” campaign, but there are indications that the firm won’t be able to resist all that free money forever. In what may be a sign of things to come, Southwest elected to leave AirTran’s baggage fee structure in place after it acquired the competitor last year.

Shrouding isn’t the only reason Penney’s pricing plan is flawed. The firm is also leaving a lot of money on the table by rejecting a phenomenon known as “price discrimination.” Some people have more money than time, and some have more time than money. Some shoppers don’t mind spending hours to save $20; others would gladly give a store $20 to escape quickly. Smart retailers get money from both. By killing couponing, Penney has eliminated its ability to satisfy price discriminators.

And as others have pointed out, markdowns serve the age-old retailing trick of “anchoring.” For some reason, even very smart consumers feel better paying $60 for something if you initially tell them it costs $100, and then reduce the price.

But the real problem is Penney’s ill-fated attempt to cast itself as the only fair poker player in a game of cheats. Shoppers just aren’t buying it. However unsophisticated consumers are, very few of them believe a pair of shoes bought at Penney’s everyday low price will be cheaper than a pair of shoes bought at Macy’s on clearance with a 25 percent off coupon.

Like it or not, hidden fees – and secret discounts – are here to stay.

*Follow Bob Sullivan on Facebook.
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RT @ZachWeiner: Gay marriage.

The Caucus: Could Obama Win the Military Vote? (via Instapaper)

At the height of the Iraq war in 2004, veterans gave President George W. Bush a 16-percentage-point edge over his Democratic rival. Four years later, Barack Obama trailed among the former military members by 10 percentage points.

But Mr. Obama’s campaign said it thinks his three and a half years as commander in chief have turned the tables on the issue, giving him a good chance at winning the veteran vote this year.

One of Mr. Obama’s first campaign ads — released just this week — was aimed directly at war-weary service members and their families.

“It’s because of what they’ve done that we’ve been able to go after al-Qaeda and kill Bin Laden,” Mr. Obama says in the ad. “And when they come home we have a sacred trust to make sure that we are doing everything we can to heal all of their wounds, giving them the opportunities that they deserve to find a job and get the education that they need.”

The ad is part of Mr. Obama’s efforts to capitalize on a very different profile than is typical for a Democratic president.

Having come into the White House on an antiwar platform, Mr. Obama nonetheless increased American involvement in Afghanistan even as he began drawing down troops in Iraq. Now, both wars are winding down — a
relief to many military members and their families.

In addition, Mr. Obama has embraced the use of drones to assassinate terrorist leaders. And he authorized the raid that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden.

“President Obama is committed to ensuring that all of our men and women who’ve served in uniform can find work when they return home, receive the health care and benefits they’ve earned and have the chance to get a college education through the post-9/11 G.I. Bill,” said Clo Ewing, a campaign spokeswoman.

Working in Mr. Obama’s favor may be the changing face of the American military, which is becoming younger and more diverse. Advisers to the president note that he actually won in 2008 among veterans who were under 60 years old.

The military is also changing in its attitudes toward social issues, the Obama campaign believes. Mr. Obama’s decision to end the “don’t ask, don’t tell” ban on gays serving openly will be a benefit, they say.

There is little recent polling to suggest how the two candidates are faring among veterans. But advisers to Mr. Romney scoff at the idea that Mr. Obama will steal away a traditional Republican advantage come Election Day. They argue that the president’s economic policies have been especially detrimental to veterans and their families.

Facebook’s stock should trade for $13.80 () (via Instapaper)

Don’t like that answer? Try focusing on earnings rather than sales, and you get only a marginally different result. Assuming its profit margin stays constant (instead of falling as it could very well do as it grows), assuming its P/E ratio in five years will be just as high as Google’s is today, and assuming that its stock will produce a five-year return of 11% annualized, Facebook’s stock today should be just $16.66.

How can Facebook investors wriggle out from underneath the awful picture these calculations paint? By assuming that its revenue and profitability will grow faster than the average IPO between 1996 and 2010 — and not just by a little bit, either, but a whole lot faster.

Of course, it’s always possible that Facebook will be able to pull that off.

But, as Professor Ritter pointed out to me earlier this week, “the bigger a company gets, the harder it is to maintain percentage growth.” And Facebook is already huge — larger, in fact, than all but 47 other publicly traded companies in the U.S., by market capitalization.

So my back-of-the-envelope calculations for this column could very well be too optimistic rather than too pessimistic.

Given all this, Ritter said that a market cap “of $63 billion … five years from now seems like a very reasonable scenario.”

Governor Perry’s office and anti-choice lawmakers in the state have rallied behind the claim that “There are more than 2,500 qualified providers in the WHP that operate more than 4,600 locations across the state,” downplaying the significant role Planned Parenthood plays in bringing WHP access to low-income women. What Perry’s office doesn’t mention is that most of those providers are small clinics and individual doctors that aren’t currently equipped to take on the tens of thousands of women who will have to leave Planned Parenthood should the courts rule in favor of the State of Texas.

I set out to test the WHP’s non-Planned Parenthood provider listings over the past week and found that while initial searches of TexasWomensHealth.org turn up what appear to be hundreds of available providers, many of them don’t provide any kind of contraceptive care, don’t take Medicaid Women’s Health Program clients, or are simply misleading duplicate listings.

In Austin, for example, many WHP clients visit the Downtown Austin Clinic for contraceptives and cancer screenings. What if a resident of the 78702 zip code who formerly relied on Planned Parenthood had to suddenly find a new doctor?

A search for providers within 30 miles of 78702 turned up 137 doctors and clinics–initially, a very promising number. But once the duplicates were weeded out there were just 49 individual providers, including those like the Austin Endoscopy Center. When I called to try to make a gynecological appointment there, I was understandably turned down: “This is a colon cancer center,” the operator told us. No women’s health care there.

Several times, locations listed on the Texas WHP website weren’t taking new Medicaid clients, were only taking those within a limited age range, or simply did not accept Medicaid Women’s Health Program patients. The People’s Community Clinic, which serves low-income and uninsured clients, said they were only taking adolescents or pregnant women—and pregnant women are, by definition, excluded from the WHP.

The Austin Regional Clinic, which has several locations in Austin, looked promising, but they don’t accept Medicaid WHP clients. Neither does the similarly situated Austin Diagnostic Clinic.

Ultimately, I found nine providers within a 30-mile radius of the selected zip code that accepted the WHP and were taking new patients—some could see a patient for an annual exam as soon as the following day. Provided, of course, that clients are able to travel. The Lone Star Circle Of Care, which also focuses on underserved populations, had appointments in neighboring cities.

But for a WHP enrollee who may not have a car or who can’t afford to take a day or a half-day off from work, it may be a matter of having to make the difficult decision of choosing between several hours’ worth of pay—which could mean making rent or buying baby formula—or getting her annual exam.

And if Planned Parenthood is excluded from the WHP in Texas, there’s a good chance that WHP patients wouldn’t have the good luck to find nine available providers if, as a George Washington University study predicts, existing providers simply will not be able to fill in the gaps left by Planned Parenthood. From the study:

In FY 2010, PPFA clinics accounted for approximately 49 percent of all WHP-financed care, furnishing services to 51,953 WHP clients out of 105,998 WHP clients served. Of the 1,469 providers that billed the WGP in FY 2010, 908 (62 percent) served 10 or fewer patients, while 368 (25 percent) served only one patient. The authors conclude that the WHP program lacks any reasonable access alternative.

Multiply just one caller looking for care by 51,953, and it’s easy to imagine that a morning of phone calls to doctor after doctor—again, if a woman working and managing a family had the time to dedicate to it—might turn up no available appointments, or appointments that could only be made months in advance.

It’s also important to remember that an imagined Austin-based client lives in a major metropolitan area with public transportation and multiple hospitals and women’s health centers. WHP clients in other areas of Texas, especially those in rural towns, will have even fewer options.

I asked a Texas Planned Parenthood representative what area of Texas the group thought would suffer most if it could no longer participate in the WHP. The results were dismal: based on their research, nearly 80 percent of WHP clients get their care from family planning clinics, and they turned over a list of 25 cities that have no family planning clinics other than Planned Parenthood that serve WHP clients. The top four results–Edinburg, McAllen, San Juan and Weslaco, Texas—are all located near the Texas-Mexico border, an area that has been hit especially hard by clinics closing.

And if women in South Texas can’t see their Planned Parenthood doctors and nurses for WHP care, the Texas WHP website won’t be much help either: A search for doctors within the McAllen zip code on the WHP site turned up anesthesiologists, pediatricians and a night clinic in their top results–plus one provider that did not take WHP clients.

If the State of Texas wants to exclude Planned Parenthood from the Women’s Health Program, they’re going to need to go beyond technical support for their website to invest huge sums of money increasing access to care throughout the state, replicating the system they are seeking to eliminate.

But at the high-quality end of the Internet’s curve — how do you sort and rank the very best information? What if the information returned by two sites — Google Places and Yelp, for example — is nearly identical? Those decisions are judgment calls, coded into Google’s algorithm by humans. Not neutral, not the unbiased calculations of a machine, no matter how it works in a given instance. Volokh’s paper rests on this idea (he uses the word judgment 34 times) that in exercising judgment, Google’s engineers are essentially acting as editors, curators, or, even, parade organizers — all of whom the First Amendment protects in their decisions to include or exclude content, even when they themselves are not the creators of that content.

There’s a lot of support for Volokh’s argument including two lower court decisions (2003 and 2007), and, as First Amendment and technology law expert Marvin Ammori argues, other courts — and even the Court — would likely agree. The result would be greater protection for Google and its preference for its own products — something we may not like. But the First Amendment has never been interested in curating society to our liking — quite the opposite in fact. The results of a strong First Amendment are often distasteful in varying degrees, with hateful speech at the extreme end. But the converse is much worse — would we really want the government to have a say in the content of Google’s returns? Could you imagine what it would like to do with something like this?

The law is always under revision as new technologies emerge and challenge the old categories we had created. Is Google like a publication — such as the New York Times — or a utility like the gas company that merely conveys information “neutrally”? Which set of laws should we apply? These comparisons never work perfectly, and refining their raggedy edges is the work of the courts and the participants in their adversarial process. In the case of Google, its search results do seem more like the handiwork of a newspaper editor or a parade organizer than an electrical utility. But the impact of its choices — judgment, if you will — are so much greater, so much more central to our civic life that it can be scary to give it such free reign. But that free reign is at the core of our grand experiment with free speech and a free press, an experiment you just have to hold your breath and hope for, because the alternative is much, much worse.

A German court has ruled that Motorola Mobility infringed a Microsoft patent which allows long text messages to be divided into parts and then reassembled by receiving handsets.

It marks the first patent ruling against Google since it completed its takeover of Motorola.

Microsoft can now demand a German sales ban of Motorola products, although it signalled it would prefer a licence fee.

Google said it may appeal.

Google’s chief executive had previously said that his firm bought Motorola and its patents “to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies”.

NWO Headquarters (via Instapaper)

I’m not sure whether I’d dub this the perfect storm, but Facebook is currently on track to be the biggest IPO flop in recent memory, with all three CEOs taking the blame.

If the Facebook IPO has taught us anything, it’s that not all social-media companies are automatic buys. Zynga (Nasdaq: ZNGA ) shareholders, for instance, have learned that the hard way. With more than 90% of its revenue tied to Facebook, Zynga shares are now well below their IPO price.

Facebook, we really do need a “dislike” button for last week’s fiasco.