Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

You can accomplish this in a few simple steps:

• Add ice cubes to a tall glass
• Fill 3/4 with ginger beer
• Top off with dark rum
• Stir until the rum storms down to the bottom

Don’t over stir it! You want the rum / ginger beer mixture to be ununiform and chaotic, representing the stormy nature of the drink.

Pocket Lint has an article today, Nokia: Youths are fed up with iPhone, baffled by Android. I’d like to say that it’s not true. Perhaps, at twenty-seven years old, I am no longer a youth, but my iPhone, iPhone 3GS, and now iPhone 4S have left me completely satisfied. Ever since the first iPhone that combined an mp3 player (iPod) and a phone (i thew away my Motorola Razr), I’ve been delighted to find such a wide range of functionality in a single device.

I’m well known to be a cranky Apple fan, begrudging them of praise, but the Pocket Lint article steps too far over the line:

“What we see is that youth are pretty much fed up with iPhones. Everyone has the iPhone,” he said. “So we do increasingly see that the youth that wants to be on the cutting edge and try something new are turning to the Windows phone platform.”

Yes, it is pure PR, coming from Nokia.

It’s also pure BS.

Every iPhone user I know, universally, love their phone. Apple, in producing a single phone productline, has ensured a consistent end-user experience that blows any other handset manufacturer or OS provider out of the water.

Obama wasn’t content to rest up after his illegal assassination of Osama bin Laden back in May, this time stepping up his game to take out American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki with a predator drone / Hellfire missile in Yemen. The audacity of conducting public assassinations on the territory of sovereign nations aside, the New York Times picks right up on the issue of due process:

The strike appeared to be the first time in the American-led war on terrorism since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that an American citizen had been deliberately killed by American forces, a step that has raised contentious constitutional issues in the United States. It was also the second high-profile killing of an Al Qaeda leader in the past five months under the Obama administration[.]

The White House decision to make Mr. Awlaki a top priority to be hunted down and killed was controversial, given his American citizenship.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which fought unsuccessfully in the American court system to challenge the government’s legal justification for its so-called targeted killings program, which was used to take aim at Mr. Awlaki, condemned that program in reaction to the news of Mr. Awlaki’s death. “As we’ve seen today, this is a program under which American citizens far from any battlefield can be executed by their own government without judicial process, and on the basis of standards and evidence that are kept secret not just from the public but from the courts,” Jameel Jaffer, the A.C.L.U.’s deputy legal director, said in a statement.

For what it’s worth, Foreign Policy’s blog agrees that Anwar was a US citizen due an appropriate trial. The correct course of action would have been extradition from Yemen to the US for trial.