TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Jason Snell wrote a terrific piece about why iBooks Author is a big deal for publishers, and if you haven’t, you should read it. He pointed something out that hadn’t occurred to me about iBooks Author. He wrote:

I look at iBooks Author and wonder if it might be, even now, an alternative for publications that don’t want to build an app—or feel that the app they can afford to build won’t be very good. What if periodical publishers could get access to Newsstand by publishing issues using a tool more like iBooks Author, to a standardized format? What if people could buy subscriptions to magazines and newspapers in the iBookstore? Instead of building an expensive container, we could spend our money on the stuff we put inside that container.

I think it’d be better if new editions showed up in the Newsstand folder, but that’s not the point: this is a really, really good idea. Publishing on the iPad right now is not very nice; magazines tend to be static images, even for text, and as you’d expect, the experience is terrible for readers. Creating a full-fledged application for their publication is prohibitively expensive and very difficult, so they haven’t done it. They’ve chosen a route which largely fits their existing workflow but results in a poor experience for readers.

iBooks Author could help eliminate that. Publications can create new issues that are really nice to read and are tailored to fit their own identity, without ever creating their own application. Publications would get the convenience and the unique design for their own publication, and readers would get a good reading experience.

Apple has to be thinking about something like this, because it makes too much sense not to. Building an application isn’t the solution for publishing on the iPad, because it’s not something everyone can do. Creating a workflow that is largely similar to a publication’s current one is. Working with iBooks Author, or whatever the application becomes, would be an addition to their work—additional work for sure—but it also largely fits what they’re already doing.

The Tax Policy Center’s Howard Gleckman:

The multinationals’ minimum tax would be entirely unworkable. Even if Congress passed the levy, which it won’t, those firms will find ways around it. Minimum taxes are Band-Aides for a flawed tax system. The solution is not to create a new penalty for firms that learn to manipulate the law, it is to fix the basic law in the first place.

If Obama wants to prevent companies from gaming the system, he could lower the corporate rate and eliminate tax preferences. He raised this in last year’s state of the union address but did nothing about it. That’s too bad. With a low enough domestic tax rate, companies would have less incentive to shuffle income overseas.

This proposal in particular was bewildering. Obama (rightly) acknowledges that American companies face one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world, and it hurts our competitiveness. His solution, perplexingly, is to tax multinational companies a minimum tax rate, while using it (apparently) to lower the tax rate on companies which hire more people in the U.S.

This proposal symbolizes the administration’s general approach: use law to punish people. Instead of lowering our corporate tax rate to be more competitive, Obama wants to increase taxes on companies that don’t repatriate income, and then provide deductions or tax credits (“tax loopholes,” as the president is wont to call them) to companies that stay here to make the too-high corporate tax rate more palatable.

He needs to think through this a bit more. He derides a complex tax system which allows individuals and companies to pay “too low” of an effective tax rate, yet here he is trying to make the problem worse.

Last night, President Obama claimed—again—that Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. Problem is, that probably isn’t true. Greg Mankiw explained why that is—nearly five years ago:

Another piece of the puzzle is that Mr. Buffett’s tax burden is larger than it first appears, because he is a major shareholder in Berkshire Hathaway.

When the C.B.O. studies the tax burden, it includes all federal taxes, including individual income taxes, payroll taxes and corporate income taxes. In its analysis, payroll taxes are borne by workers, and corporate taxes by the owners of capital. For the richest 1 percent of the population, 9.3 percentage points of their 31.1 percent tax rate comes from the taxes that corporations have paid on their behalf. The corporate tax would undoubtedly loom large if the C.B.O. were to calculate Mr. Buffett’s effective tax rate.

Ross Douthat on the president’s State of the Union address:

The more serious peril, though, has to do with policy rather than politics. A campaign narrative premised on more places this administration on a collision course not just with the Republican Party, but with budgetary arithmetic itself.

Thanks to MindNode for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed.

MindNode is an elegant, easy-to-use mind mapping tool for Mac and iOS. Whether you’re brainstorming for your next project, organizing your life, or planning your vacation, MindNode lets you collect, structure, and expand your ideas. And thanks to built-in Dropbox and WiFi sharing, even your biggest ideas can go anywhere your iPhone does.

MindNode is easy mind mapping for your Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Try out Mindnode Pro and MindNode touch today!

Tom Goldstein says that the Supreme Court’s United States v. Jones ruling did not mean a warrant is required to track individuals with GPS:

Here is the upshot. Five Justices join the holding of the “majority” opinion (per Scalia) that by attaching and monitoring a GPS device the police conduct a “search”; four Justices (those in the Alito concurrence) reject that view. Five Justices join or express their agreement with the portion of the “Alito” opinion concluding that the long-term monitoring of a GPS device violates a reasonable expectation of privacy; four Justices (those in the majority, minus Sotomayor) leave that question open.

That alignment of Justices importantly leaves two questions unanswered. First, does the “search” caused by installing a GPS device require a warrant? The answer may be no, given that no member of the Court squarely concludes it does and four members of the Court (those who join the Alito concurrence) do not believe it constitutes a search at all.

Second, assuming no warrant is required for installation, is a warrant required for short-term monitoring of the GPS device? Again, the answer may be no, as the majority conspicuously avoids addressing this issue and four members of the Court (again, those who join the Alito concurrence) squarely say that the answer is “no” (Alito op. at 13). Justice Sotomayor alone says that this scenario “will require particular attention.”

(Via .)

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that tracking someone’s vehicle using GPS is a search under the Fourth Amendment, and thus requires a warrant. Antonin Scalia wrote:

“We hold that the government’s installation of a GPS device on a target’s vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a ‘search’ ” under the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, Scalia wrote.

That it took the Supreme Court to decide that placing a GPS tracking device on someone’s car—for a month—should require a warrant is a statement to just how bad a state we are in.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on a similar (and more egregious case) in 2010, where the DEA not only tracked a person’s car without a warrant, but trespassed on his property to place it on his car. They ruled in favor of the government.

Thorstein Heins, RIM’s new CEO:

“At the time, the company was growing but still acting as a startup,” said Heins. “But startup processes don’t scale. Every company goes through that phase. I had the opportunity to learn about RIM here. I don’t think that there is a drastic change needed. We are evolving our tactics and processes. I don’t feel that I was held back in any way to do what I needed to do.”

I see that re-arranging the deck chairs is a popular pastime at RIM.

Evi is a new app for iPhone and Android that’s similar to Siri, except it can do more. Evi can answer questions about how to make a certain dish, who was president during a certain time period, and other kinds of questions that Siri would kick you off to a web search for.

If you don’t have an iPhone 4S but want Siri-like functionality, you’ll want to check it out.

Seth Godin on how to become untrusted as a writer by using your influence as currency with others:

The problem occurs when the trading of favors become mercenary, when alert individuals start manipulating the system for personal gain. Suddenly, every favor is suspect, measured and not at all generous. Suddenly all the likes and links and blurbs become nothing but currency, not the honest appraisals of people we can trust. It means that bystanders have trouble telling the difference between honest approval and the mere mutual shilling of traded favors.

This kind of writing is only valuable insofar as it’s honest. That’s the most important part. Without it, it’s worthless.

David Wineman:

Apple is trying to establish a rule that whatever I create with this application, if I sell it, I have to give them a cut. And iBooks Author is free, so this arrangement sounds pretty reasonable.

Watts Martin responds:

So Apple’s “audacity” is that they’ve created a snazzy creation tool that, from all appearances, only works with their viewers. Wineman is correct in that it’s the license, not the technology, that prevents you from taking a .ibooks file and selling it somewhere other than Apple’s store. But you don’t have much reason to sell something this thing creates outside Apple’s store, ’cause it ain’t gonna be creating those snazzy multimedia books for your Kindle Fire.

The new version of xScope is out, and if you’re a designer of any kind, you’ll want to get it. I did.

Brad Plumer has a great overview of SOPA and PIPA and why they’re so dangerous. Here’s one reason:

The bills allow sites to be taken down without legal oversight. As Public Knowledge has pointed out, one little-noticed provision in both PIPA and SOPA would grant Internet service providers broad immunity if they voluntarily block perfectly innocent users or Web sites from the Internet. Copyright holders like the movie and record industries could draw up sweeping lists of sites they didn’t like (even sites that should be protected under fair use) and pressure Internet service providers to take action. As long as the providers could claim they were acting “in good faith,” those sites and users could be blocked without any oversight by the courts — all because Hollywood was feeling a bit vindictive.

Big thanks to the guys at Literature and Latte for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed. Scrivener is one of those Mac applications that feels very Mac-like to me—the geeky, made precisely for this kind of user because we are that user, kind of application. When I first became a Mac user in 2005, that’s what struck me most about it: the people making software for it did so because they really love the Mac, have some functionality they want to build for themselves in particular, and they want to do so in a way that honors what the Mac is all about. That’s still what I love about the Mac, and it’s something completely unique to it.

Scrivener is exactly that kind of application. If you’re a writer, or write decently long papers for school, take a look at Scrivener. They’ve built an application that’s for writers.

Writing a book or research paper is about more than hammering away at the keys until it’s done. Research, shuffling index cards to find that elusive structure – most software is only fired up after much of the hard work is completed.

Enter Scrivener, a content-generation tool that lets you compose and structure long and difficult documents based on material from multiple sources. Adopted by novelists, screenwriters, journalists, lawyers and academics alike, the program allows users to split the editor and view documents, PDF files, multimedia and other research materials next to each other. A virtual corkboard and outliner help with structuring or providing an overview of the draft. Collate, read and edit related text without affecting its place in the whole using Scrivener’s Collections feature. Close out the world in Full Screen mode. And when you’re finished, export to e-readers or the most popular word processing programs for submission.

Available for Mac OS X and Windows at Literature and Latte.