Mokka mit Schlag

Serenity is out on HD-DVD. That’s almost enough to convince me I want an HD-DVD player, though personally I suspect BlueRay is going to win in the end.

Early Sunday I travelled up to the Bronx with the Brooklyn Bird Club (despite an exhausting day on Saturday) for some bird banding along the Bronx River. Chad Seewagen and Eric Slayton are in the third year of a study on feeding habits of migrants passing through urban parks. They’re concerned that the same factors that make urban parks so great for birders may make bad sites for birds: many birds in a small area full of lots of invasive and ornamental plants.

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You may remember that at various times from January through march I spotted a Banded Goose H7H6 in Prospect Park. Originally I thought this goose was from Quebec. However, I’ve now received a different certificate for the same goose with the same band number that indicates it’s not from Canada at all but rather from Coming, Indiana.
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Seems FreeBSD wants to reach feature parity with desktop Linux. Excuse me while I guffaw for a minute. That’s like saying you’re designing a car and want to reach feature parity with a Yugo. When FreeBSD starts aiming for feature parity with the Mac, then I might take them seriously.

Why, oh why, do so few developers of free software know or care about user interface design? Or reversing the question, why do so few developers who know how to design user interfaces have any interest in working on desktop Linux? What little effort there is, is simply applied to imitating Windows. For a couple of years I saw some hope at Eazel, but then the money spout got turned off and the developers who actually knew what they were doing lost interest and moved on to other things.

While surfing the Web to find the exact text of the Tennessee law that requires companies to extend warranty protection for the amount of time a product spends in repair, I found this gem on the website of the Tennessee Dept. of Commerce and Insurance:

LexisNexis Law publishes the Tennessee Code Annotated. This is the only company authorized to publish Tennessee Consumer Laws on the Internet.

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I was glancing at my AppleCare contract today before I filed it when I noticed this surprising clause:

Tennessee Residents

This Plan shall be extended as follows: (1) the number of days the consumer is deprived of the use of the product because the product is in repair; plus two (2) additional days.

How civilized! Doubtless this is the result of some specific law in Tennessee; but why couldn’t Apple (and other manufacturers and warranty providers) extend this same courtesy to non-Tennessee residents? It seems like the least they could do if we’re losing time due to their faulty products. It would also be a small incentive for them to expedite turn-around and make sure they have an adequate inventory of spare parts.

The Federal Trade Commission appears to have statutory authority to impose similar, though not quite as stringent, requirements on all U.S. providers of warranties and service contracts. However I don’t think they’ve done so.

I’m afraid this is likely a relic of earlier, more democratic state legislatures. I find it hard to imagine the bought-and-paid for legislatures you find today enacting such a sensible and fair provision. Even if one or two did, doubtless the lobby pigs would simply pay the U.S. Congress to preempt stronger state legislation with some nice-sounding bill that promised to protect consumers and in fact did the exact opposite. Still, I’d love to be proved wrong.