With the passing of James Kim this week, people who are reached by this story will ask themselves how such tragic events could be avoided. In my mind there are two things that keep coming up in attempts to prevent this sort of terrible thing from happening again. The first is an issue of public information, and the second is an issue of ubiquitous communications.

This morning’s Chronicle article about the pilot with a hunch has become the tipping point. It was this man’s knowledge of a common wrong turn made by out-of-towners that lead him to find Kati Kim and her daughters. ” ‘I saw the picture of the kids in the paper,’ Rachor said. ‘I really know that area well. I live out there, so I know it better than most. I fly over it once a week.’ “ I’m obviously thankful that Mr. Rachor was correct in his assumption and was able to help rescue Kati and her kids. However it leaves a nasty taste in the mouth when you consider that both governmental and privately-contracted search teams weren’t looking where this local man knew to look. To me it shows that not finding the Kim’s earlier was an issue of privatized knowledge. While clearly not on purpose, Mr. Rachor and others familiar with this particular area of Oregon, have failed to publicize and share their knowledge with the world. Could the road network in Oregon be better mapped by its own citizens using OpenStreetMap?

The other aggravating part of this story is the inability of the Kim family to simply ask for help. I think it’s a safe assumption they had a mobile phone, though they were probably in an area without network coverage. Here on my desk is a Helio Drift with assisted GPS technology. While more accurate directions could not have helped the Kim family combat a snowed-out road, the ability for such a device to report its own location could have proved invaluable. All of this however is dependent on the reach of the network, something that is typically dictated by capitalist market forces. The single largest reason there is no network coverage is a lack of demand and/or revenue potential.

I have for some time functioned under the belief that the purpose of a government is to accomplish those tasks that persons cannot accomplish on their own. To control, rule, regulate, manage, or guide is how the Englishmen from Oxford define governance, and the story of the Kim’s reminds that our government is failing us. While our representatives spend their time arguing over farm subsidies and oil drilling and abortion rights, the innovations that can help prevent meaningless losses of life like James Kim are left to the market. How much longer will we stand by while a universal communication network is overlooked as a necessity of modern life? The EU recognizes that broadband is critical to its development and success. Show me the people who will make access to the network the priority in their political careers, and I’ll show you who I’m voting for.

I love a good Apple rumor as much as the next geek, but this one is just a bit too stinky. The Appleinsider article published on the rumored Apple mobile phone this morning at 11:00 EST. An excerpt from the article:

…Shaw Wu told clients in a research note on Tuesday. “We believe this smart phone has been in development for over 12 months and has overcome substantial challenges including design, interference, battery life and other technical glitches.”

Now enter TheStreet.com and Senior Writer Scott Moritz. This TheStreet.com article was posted at 13:06 EDT, and features the following quote:

“We believe this smart phone has been in development for over 12 months and has overcome substantial challenges including design, interference, battery life, and other technical glitches. As we have seen in the smart phone space, it is very difficult to produce a converged product of high quality,” [Peter] Lin writes.

First off, how exactly does TheStreet.com occupy a different ribbon of the 4th dimension from Appleinsider?

Aside from these two sites and their war on time, MacNN and ArsTechnica have both published similar articles featuring some collection of the names Peter Lin and Albert Wu.

Is anyone here checking their facts? I mean it’s obvious there aren’t any real facts to check, but come on people this is just bananas.

I got this in my inbox this morning. My favorite new travel tool Farecast has added RSS support. Using this simple form, I can generate a feed that will push their cost predictions to me as they change. Tres cool!

Well that was a nice rest. Spending a week in Paris does a lot for one’s sense of Americana; the lack of smoking, good coffee, and malaise. I really bit down hard on the euro lifestyle, as it’s taken me another three weeks to truly get my mind back in gear. Maybe when I go back next year (bet your ass) I won’t be so wide-eyed as to neglect my inner geek.

Thirty days without blogging has certainly given me ample time to find things to talk about. Here are just a couple that came out of catching up with my beloved Slate:

From last week’s Sinister and Rich: The Evidence that Lefties Earn More:

Learning and working in a world of machines designed for majority righties, lefties are at a disadvantage. Tools like the screwdriver work well for both. But others, like the scissors and the standard classroom writing desk and the electric food slicer and the band saw—not to mention writing from left to right, with all the smudges and blackened fingers that entails—are explicitly designed for righties. This ought to make lefties less productive. (Hence the basis for Ned Flanders’ Leftorium, the fictional store for left-handed people on The Simpsons.)

I don’t grant the premise that because scissors were designed to be used with the right hand it was harder for me to learn to cut construction paper, or that my handwriting took longer to develop because I smudged the ink. I smudged some of my writing early on, but you know what? I learned very quickly how I had angle the paper and my hand in order to avoid it. I wasn’t measuring myself against the other kids and thinking, “Why do they hold their pens differently than I do?” I was too busy learning how to hold the pen for fuck’s sake.

Also I don’t like the grammar in that Simpsons reference. Is it the store that’s fictional, thereby inferring that show may not be? And if you haven’t figured out that the Simpsons isn’t real, then using the awesome power of the Internet you should be able to deduce from one picture of those yellow-5 freaks that there isn’t a Leftorium.

And from this morning’s The CEO Real Estate Scame: The Newest Infuriating Perk for Corporate Executives:

Since the beginning of this summer, at least a half-dozen companies, including eBay and Nike, have disclosed in their routine Securities and Exchange Commission filings that they’re now protecting their executives from real estate market forces. The terms in the filings vary—”protection against loss”; “loss protection”; and “price protection”—but the meaning is the same: They are essentially guaranteeing that executives’ homes will sell for a good price. In other words, companies that depend on free markets are making sure their own executives are safeguarded from them.

Are we really foolish enough to argue logic in the face of human greed? I’d love to live in a world where we all understood that you don’t get your employer to pay for things that aren’t a legitimate cost of doing business, but at that point I might as well wait around for Elizabeth Shue to show up at my door with the keys to an LP640 between her teeth.

America’s corporate elite, for the most part, got to their towers of power (YEA!) by being greedy bloodsucking bastards. If they can figure out how to expense the sleep necessary to be concious in the office the following morning, then by fuck they’re going to do it.

So did I miss the meeting where Israel declared war on Lebanon? I didn’t catch the memo when this became a thing. I haven’t got a map to lead me to the place where something like this occurs. It’s one thing to occasionally volley missles into Palestinian territory; I’ve always considered that to be the full-scale version of throwing rocks at your neighbor who you can’t stand.

This is on the other hand is like walking across the street to your neighbor’s house with a knife in your teeth, slashing his tires, and kicking in the door. And lest we forget, when Hezbollah declares “war on every level” it’s like the neighbor you’ve picked a fight with happens to be an MMA fighting champion. These guys invented modern terrorism, so Israel is really humping a hornet’s nest on this one.

According to some quick web searching, Beirut is home to around 1.3m people whereas San Francisco is home to .75m. Beirut has 10 Starbucks for crying out loud. Do you know how many Starbucks there are in Tel Aviv? ZERO.

When’s the last time a country without a Starbucks attacked a country with a Starbucks?!

On the heels of the trainwreck that has been the next generation DVD format, there’s some light at the end of the mobile network tunnel. Almost every major mobile provider (Vodafone, Sprint/Nextel, TMO…) have joined together to form the Next Generation Mobile Networks initiative to build a strategy for 4G network creation.

By the end of the decade, the NGMN hopes to be rolling out an entirely IP-switched mobile network protocol to replace the current disparate standards. This is what 3G was supposed to do, but I’m leaning on the axiom past performance has little bearing on future performance.

The possibilities for savings in software development and cross-carrier interactions are immense, not to mention the hope of a tremendously simplified device design. One ring to bring them all…

(via Phonescoop)

Well not exactly, but that sure got your attention. Today marks the beginning of Bill’s two year transition toward a part-time role at Microsoft. By July of 2008 Bill will work full-time at the Gates Foundation. Ray Ozzie has been immediately promoted to Chief Software Architect.

Update: Bill and Steve interviewed in the Green Room at MS Studios. Nice panning Chazz.

Sure it’s a first generation device that will be overshadowed within six months, and sure it’s priced a little too high, and sure the battery life isn’t what most would call ‘minimally acceptable’. None of these facts prevent me from loving the UPMC. The kids at Gizmodo present some lustful Samsung Q1 unboxing pictures for us to enjoy.

Microsoft launched Windows Vista: See How It’s More Than an Operating System (SHIMTAOS) today. There are a number of short videos that demonstrate some of what developers can produce using Vista it’s cadre of technologies. If you saw the MIX06 sessions then most of these are old news, but look at the package they’ve been wrapped in!

Set aside for a moment the irony in an man who’s pushing 80 years of age presenting 21st century technology, and instead realize just who is showing you Vista. He’s known to most of people my age as Commander Mike Metcalf, callsign Viper.

I can only hope that Mr. Skerritt’s appearance here hints at a Tom Skerritt learning AI that will launch with Vista:

It looks like you’re trying to fly the F14 right to the edge of the envelope, faster than you’ve ever flown before…and more dangerous…”

In 7 days around E3, Xbox Live delivered a great deal of content. Trailers for Halo 3 and Nacho Libre were viewed by over a million people, as well as add-on game content and celebrity multiplayer sessions. And keep in mind most of this content, if not all of it, is presented in High-Definition.

During those 7 days, over 600 terabytes of data were pushed out to Xbox Live members (The Library of Congress contains about 20 terabytes of printed material). It should then come as no surprise that Xbox Live is now the largest High-Definition On-Demand platform. On the other hand though, Sony’s got…

(via PC Vs Console)