I’ve photographed and written extensively about the Chevy Volt since last January. But until a few days ago I hadn’t actually sat in it. With all that I know about this car and what it will hopefully become, this is what I want my next new car to be. It’s cool looking, environmentally friendly and could represent the way cars will be powered for some time to come.

Just in case you haven’t been paying any attention for the past six months there is a new cell phone going on sale next week. Some company called Apple is putting it out. Apple apparently has a reputation for great industrial design in their products and this phone sure looks cool. Now looking cool and actually working well don’t necessarily go hand in hand. Certainly an iPod looks cool and the click wheel interface definitely works great, but the touch screen interface of the iPhone is a whole new ball game. It remains to be seen how well it work and it may be great. Or not! Not having actually tried an iPhone I’ll stick to outlining some other reasons not to buy one regardless of how well it works.

1. AT&T. This alone should be all the reason anyone needs to stay away from the iPhone regardless of how good it may be. AT&T has cooperated willingly in the NSA domestic spying program and for that they should be punished by everyone refusing to do business with them. They have also recently announced plans to monitor the data that their DSL customers are sending and receiving so that they can notify the extortionists at the RIAA and MPAA when suspect content is being transmitted.
2. Cost. The 4GB model will be $499 and the 8GB version is $599. These are the kinds of prices usually charged for unlocked phones that can be used with any cellular provider. Usually when you buy a phone from a company like AT&T or Verizon they subsidize the price in exchange for signing up for a one or two year contract. If you leave your contract early you pay a hefty early termination fee. AT&T will be charging the ETF even though they are not subsidizing the phone.
3. More Cost. The phone goes on sale next Friday and AT&T has just released the service plans for the iPhone and they start at $60 a month for 450 minutes.  If you have a family plan you’re SOL, no sharing minutes.
4. If you currently have a GSM phone and plan, you can’t just buy an iPhone and pop in yor SIM card.  You have to sign up for a new two year service plan with AT&T
5. With a regular iPod you can enable disk mode and drag files onto the drive and use it for portable storage.  The iPhone has no disk mode.
6. With most phones today you can drop any mp3 file on the phone and use it as a ringtone.  The iPhone you can’t use your own files as ring tones.  You’ll have to buy from AT&T.
7. You can’t record video with the iPhone camera, stills only
8. You can’t swap out the battery.  If you have a cell phone that you use with any regularity you know the chances of the phone having any useful life by the middle of the second year is slim.  Presumably you can open up an iPhone like an iPod and replace the battery but it’s not trivial.  No one should sell a phone or media player without a user replaceable battery.
9. The durability of the glass face on the iPhone is still a very open question.  I’d wait and see on that one.
10. Finally and most importantly, AT&T is the only service provider. See reason No. 1 above.

Last weekend Mark Helprin published an op-ed piece in the New York Times that essentially argued that copyrights should exist in perpetuity. The essence of his argument is that if he writes something, his descendants for all time should be able to earn a living off of that. That’s kind of like saying that my current employer should continue paying my children and grandchildren and great grandchildren ad infinitum for the work I do now. This is an absurd argument on the face of it and Helprin comes across as a fool for even putting the idea forward. Today Techdirt has a wonderfully articulate rebuttal of Helprin’s idea starting from an explanation of the difference between physical and intellectual property.

The purpose of property is to better manage the allocation of scarce resources. Since the resource is limited and not everyone can have it, property rights and property law make complete sense for a civilized society, allowing those with rights to the property to buy, sell and exchange their property. This allows for resources to be efficiently allocated through commerce and the laws of supply and demand. It’s a sensible system for the best allocation of scarce resources. However, when it comes to infinite resources, there’s simply no need to worry about efficient allocation — since anyone can have a copy.

Perhaps what we need to do to make some progress in this whole discussion is to change the terminology to words that are more accurately represent what we are talking about. The whole term intellectual property should be discarded immediately in favor of Ideas. Once we are talking about Ideas the tone of the argument changes. When a company like HBO or Disney starts talking about getting a perpetual monopoly (and a copyright or patent is a government granted monopoly) on an Idea, it might start getting average people’s attention so that they stand up and say NO MORE! Check out the rest of Techdirt’s article here.

The big car-makers take a lot of grief from electric vehicle fans over why they seem to be so slow to use new battery technology. I wrote a fairly long article drawing on my two decades in the industry trying to explain why they seem to want to move so slowly, and you can find it over at Autobloggreen.

I’m on the Ypsilanti Public Schools technology committee, and right now we’re trying to figure out what the technology needs of the district are in preparation for the upcoming bond vote.  The technology in the schools hasn’t been significantly updated since the last bond 10 years ago.  Although much of what was implemented at the time was pretty state of the art, ten years on, the computers are aging and a lot of stuff needs to be updated.  The timing of a bond, assuming it passes of course, means that it’s going to be probably another two years before we get any infusion of new hardware.  Nonetheless we need to determine a direction and figure out what our needs are going to be now.

Right now we are looking at what the kids need to learn and be able to do and figure out how technology can make that happen.  We’re also looking at the district’s tech infrastructure needs to determine what will be needed to support that both to optimize productivity and minimize operating costs going forward.  As part of this effort, I set up a special blog at ypsdtech.wordpress.com as a place where anyone who’s interested can participate in the discussion.  We’ll be posting questions on there and looking for the community’s input.  If you have some ideas about how technology can be useful, please feel free to head over there and participate by commenting in response to the questions.  The comments are moderated, and if you have any suggestions about what questions we should be asking, send me an e-mail.

I finally managed to successfully combine a old Palm III sync cable with a USB cable, which in partnership with some open source software tools allows me to use a CVS camcorder repeatedly. CVS Drugs (and some other drug stores) sell a video camera made by a company called Pure Digital for $29. The camera records to internal memory and has a capacity of 20 minutes. When you buy one, the connector is covered with a sticker and the battery compartment is locked. Normally, after you record to the camera, you take it back to the store, pay them another $13, and they will put the video on a dvd for you. They then keep the camera, put a new sticker over the connector, and sometimes fresh batteries, repack it and sell it to someone else. Once you have a cable made, you just peel off the sticker, plug it in to your computer, and download the videos. The camera uses AA batteries and has pretty decent video quality.

If you’ve been trying to access the site in last day and a half you’ve been out of luck. Shortly after I put the last post and the poll on the Volt, my hosting provider started having DNS issues that made all my sites and mailboxes inaccessible. Hopefully it will stay up now, but I’m going to start looking for a new host. Any recommendations?

I’ve put a new poll in the right sidebar about the Chevy Volt. I’ve written a lot about the Volt recently which if you haven’t checked out AutoBlogGreen is an electric car with an on-board gasoline powered battery charger. The articles on ABG have generated a lot of comments, and I’m curious about how much people might be willing to pay for such a car. Such a car has the potential to dramatically reduce fuel use and carbon emissions. None of the EVs built up until now have appealed to me personally, but this is definitely one that I’d buy.

I wrote a series of stories that went live today on the new GM electric car, the Chevy Volt and it actually made it to the front page of Digg this morning. Go check out the articles here, here and here and their’s more coming later today. Don’t forget to hit the Digg this button on the story. This is a very cool car and a great example of what’s coming to the road in the next few years.

I published an essay over on AutoBlogGreen today about the end of the fossil fuel monoculture. I talk about what a monoculture is and the much more diverse energy future we are moving in to. Go check it out here. If you think it’s any good, please go digg the article.