Daylight Savings Time Strikes Again!!!

Its that time of year again. Benjamin Franklin proposed the idea of a standard daylight savings time but time and time zones had not even been standardized yet. The United States didn't start using Daylight Saving Time until March 19, 1918 when it was promoted by Robert Garland as the U.S. was entering World War I. It was used in times of war and optionally by each state otherwise until congress finally enacted the Uniform Time Act of 1966, which was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on April 12, 1966.

Since then we manage to cram more duties into daylight hours during the summer to be a more productive society. Personally I don't care for it. Losing that hour of sleep the first night of DST manages to throw me off for several weeks. On top of that, people get even more overworked during the summer months than they usually are in the winter. Its just another example of how corporate hands always seem to be in the politicians pie. If there was nothing to be gained for our capitalistic society, we wouldn't have bothered passing the law to begin with. It all boils down to money. Which means I dedicate today's rant to the corrupt foundations that Daylight Savings Time seems to actually be based on.

Turn Signals are Obsolete

Have you ever stopped to think about why car manufacturers bother to put turn signals in cars? The times they would be most useful to fellow drivers no one bothers to use them. Its those times when traffic is pretty bad but hasn't come to a standstill yet. Your driving along and out of nowhere the 1.5 car lengths of space you were allowed before suddenly becomes basically none as someone swerves into the lane. This causeing you to suddenly slow down to create space, which causes the people behind you to suddenly slow down etc... until finally the reason that traffic jams occur has taken its toll on thousands of other drivers on the road.

As much as I curse the people that don't bother to signal lane changes, they can't all be blamed for their actions. A large number of them are actually not the cause, but instead the effect. They are the result of inconsiderate drivers everywhere. At some point in their life there is a good chance they used to use their turn signal. But as time has taken its toll these people have grown tired of the other crowd. You know, the ones that actually speed up when you hit your blinker so that you have no room to change lanes. The ones of a mentality that you changing lanes in front of them would be like cutting in line at Six Flags. So today's rant goes out to all of those drivers that refuse to make room for merging traffic and people that need to change lanes.

Alpha is the new Beta, Beta is the new Release.

I can't recall exactly when it became ok for software development companies to release their product when it reached the 75% complete milestone, but I can't even describe the things I'd to whoever set the trend. I can remember a day when you could go buy a piece of software off the shelf, take it home, install it, and then actually run it without having to update it or patch it first. Then it seems like overnight every game company out there started releasing games in "beta" condition. Unfortunately some of those games were highly anticipated and were sold despite not being a complete and finished product. And thus the precedent was born.

I have been unable to pin down who the first culprits were that actually turned this into a standard, but I'd appreciate any info or help tracking them down. Ok, so at that point it was only game companies releasing unfinished software as the norm, but it seems over the past few years that trend has leaked over into the business application world. As both a gamer and an IT professional, I can see how game companies got away with it, but I simply can't wrap my brain around huge companies putting up with flawed software after shelling out huge wads of cash. My stance on many things in life has always been "vote with your money", and I think its time for consumers to set software companies everywhere back on the right track.

*disclaimer - A certain OS and application company was excluded upon writing this rant on the basis that this rant is directed at an entire industry and not a particular company. And it would have thrown the entire basis of the rant off to include it.

The Evil that is our Patent System

Patent Farming, for those that are not familiar with the term, referers to an individual or group that does nothing other than sit around applying for patents all day everyday. They have no intent whatsoever of ever producing any product that resembles any of these patents, infact they prefer to receive their patent as quietly as possible and not tell anyone about it. What is even worse, quite often the patents they are applying for and receiving are for technologies or ideas we've been using for years, but no one bothered to patent because they seemed like "no brainer" ideas.

So, what do they do with all these patents for ideas already in use or could start being used someday? Nothing. They sit on them waiting for enough people to adopt the idea/technology that their patent covers. Then they demand licensing fees retroactive to when the patent was received, or when the idea started being used. The worst part of it all is this is completely legal. Nearly everything in this system is broken and should be scrapped and started over. The current system discourages actual progression of technology because no one knows what obscure patent might be out there covering your invention or a part of your invention.

So is anything safe from the patent farmers or our flawed patent system? It seems not. When I heard Amazon had received a patent for a "1- click checkout button" on a website I knew we were in trouble. Yeah, thats old news now, and to my knowledge its still in appeals courts. But appeals courts aren't a solution, they just compound the situation. This problem grows worse by the day, if we continue down this path what will happen to inovation in America over the next 10-20 years?

Sheep of Society

People of society today are seemingly incapable of forming opinions on their own. Its simply easier for everyone to turn the TV on, flip it to the news channel and then agree unconditionally with whatever BS flows into their brains. They don't bother to educate themselves on anything because that would require too much effort, so they simply take everything presented to them from the news as fact. The hypocrisy comes in when they go home and tell their children not to believe everything they see on television. This behavior has fostered a lose/lose scenario with many of today's headlines. Everything from security, war, and human rights to convincing society that a celebrities death is worth a month of headlines and more important than the lives of our soldiers. News is no longer news, its now the official opinion and moral standard of the "Sheep of Society". And since bad news is the only news according to those who watch the ratings, all I can say is God help us all.