OgleEarth observes that GPS-enabled cameras (many of them, at least) lose or restrict their GPS capabilities when in China.

"Panasonic, Leica and FujiFilm prevent their cameras from displaying location information when in China. Nikon and Samsung appear to restrict location information in some other way. "

GPS is the most commonly disabled function, but not the only one:

"Wherever local laws prohibit the sale or use of a personal electronics device able to perform a certain function, manufacturers have traditionally chosen not to sell the offending device in that particular jurisdiction, or — if the market is tempting enough — to sell a crippled model made especially for that jurisdiction.

For example, Nokia chose not to sell the N95 phone in Egypt when the sale of GPS-enabled devices there was illegal before 2009, whereas Apple opted to make and sell a special GPS-less iPhone 3G for that market. Early models of the Chinese iPhone 3GS lacked wifi, while the Chinese iPhone 4/4S has firmware restrictions on its Google Maps app."

There's nothing surprising about this; "business" will typically facilitate tyranny, just as IBM collaborated with Nazi Germany, Shell Oil (et al.) supported totalitarian regimes in the Middle East and Africa, and so on. This is completely independent of any political opinions held by humans within those organizations, of course.

This indicates a shortcoming in the current model of human organization: that a given organization has collective motivation in one sphere of activity alone. A business organization, in other words, exists only for monetary gain, and is in a sense blind to all other spheres. Business does not "want" politics to be tyrannical, nor does it "desire" environmental damage or harmful side effects of manufacturing. A business, as an organization, has almost no way to be aware of those things. What we (we the humans, that is) need is a more complete approach to organizing our collective behavior. It's not necessary that organizations are dangerously simple; it's just the way we do it at the moment. 

"...democracy has unique benefits as a form of collective problem solving in that it potentially allows people with highly diverse perspectives to come together in order collectively to solve problems. Democracy can do this better than either markets and hierarchies, because it brings these diverse perceptions into direct contact with each other, allowing forms of learning that are unlikely either through the price mechanism of markets or the hierarchical arrangements of bureaucracy. Furthermore, democracy can, by experimenting, take advantage of novel forms of collective cognition that are facilitated by new media."

From Cognitive Democracy, a fascinating paper posted on Crooked Timber by Henry Farrell and Cosma Rohilla Shalizi. It can be slightly heavy going if your "reading academic prose" muscles are as badly out of shape as mine. Some really interesting thinking though.

Designing user experience has a lot in common with "punditry design". If you're making predictions about a product, industry, company, or political question or movement, you're observing something complex, simplifying based on your understanding of human perception, sequencing things based on your understanding of cognition, providing emphasis that you know will be memorable to the audience, and basing everything on your analysis and understanding of context. 

The ux design process, initially intuitive, became explicit and available to practitioners because of much work by many people over many years. Delving into why a design worked, how it came about, what was better about it led to an ability to lay out steps and practices that function well when followed carefully — and with enough implicit understanding and judgement, because there are still aspects of the process that haven't been completely laid out explicitly.

The "punditry design process" (it's not really called that, of course) is something I'm not as familiar with, but there are certainly aspects of it that are explicated in great detail, and that effort continues, aimed at particular topics rather than the general area of producing easily digestible prognostications. Horace Dedieu at www.asymco.com is doing some fascinating work trying to identify what it is about markets, corporations, products contexts that result in success and failure. I suspect there are people doing similar work in, say, political punditry.

Punditry and UX design also differ, of course. One major factor is that punditry is almost entirely verbal. That aspect has been pretty well detailed, of course, going back at least 2500 years to Aristotle. He was, by the way, dead set against sophistry, which he believed was an attempt to manipulate people using appeals to emotion rather than fact and reason. Some forms of punditry fit this description rather well, and so do some forms of UX design. For instance, ux design is widely practiced in service of advertising. I think I know what Aristotle would have had to say about that.

"People tend to blame each other for failures and this is the main discussion topic in Finland: who’s to blame. The failure of a company is rooted in complex decision processes which usually take years to run their course. It’s quite futile to lay blame on persons, especially since the same persons were celebrated for their wisdom at another point of time."

-Kenny Ho (of the Chosun Times, Korea)

"If you tap into the human need to be consulted you can get some interesting reactions."

"The web is not, despite the desires of so many, a publishing medium. The web is a customer service medium."

-Paul Ford

The brilliance of the iPhone and iPad is how little time you spend learning. 

-Rands

I've taught, written how-to books, designed user interfaces, and created software; thinking about and testing learning is central to all of them.

Why the Pentagon did not lend their jets to the Avengers movie:

"It just got to the point that it didn't make any sense, said Strub." 

I hear ya. Hulk is not that under control in, er, reality.

Corporate interests in the music and movie industries spend a great deal of money to change copyright laws, extend the term of copyright, and broaden penalties. Copyright grants to holders have been increased on the average about every two years for the past three decades. This is a zero-sum game; whatever is given to the holders is taken from the other parties in copyright, which is everyone else. "Everyone else" in this case includes creators and consumers, as the holders are corporations. 

The most common argument put forth to support this is piracy, specifically bolstered by claims of monetary loss. These claims are fatuous at best; many if not all of them are simply fantasy. 

There are lawyers and accountants in these corporations; they clearly know the basis of this argument is false. Their employers are not losing staggering amounts of money to piracy. 

What, then, is the real motivation driving the engorgement of copyright? I would argue that it's suppression of innovation and consequent reduction of competition.

There's thoughtful discourse, then there's sophistry — words strung together in a fashion that follows grammatical rules perfectly well and appears to be reasonable and thoughtful, but either there's nothing of substance there at all, or it's well-crafted deception. Usually trying to persuade you in some way. Forbes magazine is mostly sophistry. This silly piece by somebody named Adam Swann is notably vapid. He's associated with something or other called "gyro", which claims it "...creates ideas that ignite business decisions", whatever that's supposed to mean. As they say on ESPN: come on, man.

Apple captured 73% of phone industry profits and Samsung captured 26%. HTC took 1%. Everybody else lost money.

-Horace Dedieu

This is not well put; there is not a pot of "phone industry profit" that companies dip into and grab a percentage. There may be a very ill-defined amount of revenue associated with the phone industry, although it would be very difficult to be precise about how much it is. But how much of that revenue is profit is defined by the business operations of each company involved.