Obligatory iPad and Flash post.

Now that I've gotten to play with an iPad a bit more, I understand a bit more why someone would be interested. I still don't want one.

I admit that I'm completely in love with my iPhone, so perhaps I'm jaded or there's a sense of been-there, done that. Still, I was on the iPhone for less than five minutes before I wanted one.

I'm an MacHead. I admit it. And I've never been a fan of Flash--I'm on record more than once complaining about it, loudly, since 1999ish--but web surfing on my phone without Flash-ability has definitely been an annoyance. But it's my PHONE. This is not a deal-breaker.

Something like the iPad bothers me more.

My friend Emre told me that you can make a ton of money reselling iPhones in Turkey, because there's such a huge demand for them. He has a friend who funds his vacations that way: buys five iPhones, sells them for the equivalent of $1K apiece while he's there, and he's covered his trip and then some.

The reason they're in demand is that 3G is the only way to access ALL the Internet--that is without government censorship.

What would they give for a 3G iPad, true Internet access in a screen larger than a deck of cards? Except it's not the entire Internet. There's no Flash.

Sure, Apple is right that they aren't required to provide access to the entire Internet. And people are right to question Adobe elevating Flash to a position alongside html, CSS, js and other web standards.

But Flash is a bit of a de facto standard, if not de jure. And whether censorship is corporate or governmental, to me, it's just wrong. We can tart it 

So yeah, maybe I'll buy an iPad--when it supports the Plugin I Hate Most in the World. Because I may disagree entirely with your web architecture, but I will fight for your right to use it. 

Somehow, that's just not the catchy ending I had wanted.

Lords of Finance

Great quote:

"It was great theater [...] a reenactment of an old morality play that had divided the republic since its founding--between those, like Hamilton, who believed that great wealth was the reward for taking risks and those, like Jefferson, who believed that prosperity should be the reward for hard work and thrift." (Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed. pg. 317. Penguin 2009)

My first debate is of course, that Jefferson even if he believed that didn't quite follow it--he spent like a dot-com with VC funding in 1999. And I would add a third: the people who still believe that wealth is deserved when inherited (which I find decidedly anti-American).