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Uncategorized

Go Microsoft!

Seriously, I really hope MS prevails here, the US government has completely gotten out of control. Global jurisdiction? Sure, why not?

Anyway, its beyond time for everyone to just encrypt all the things and for all cloud services to use TNO end-to-end encryption. The government (all of them) has shown it cannot be trusted with the power it claims.

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Uncategorized

No Thanks Twitter

Buried in a Twitter support page:

To help build a more personal Twitter experience for you, we are collecting and occasionally updating the list of apps installed on your mobile device so we can deliver tailored content that you might be interested in.

The big questions is, how does this get past iOS app review? This is quite possibly the creepiest thing I’ve seen on the platform since, well forever. Luckily there’s an easy fix:

IMG 0098

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Uncategorized

–> Two people have been arrested for leaking ‘The Expendables 3’

From The Verge:

Two men have been arrested in connection with the leak of The Expendables 3 this past July. A DVD-quality version of the entire film found its way onto torrent sites three weeks before The Expendables 3 premiered in US theaters….

We’ve heard that lecture many times now, so here’s the lesson you should take away from this case: steal money from Sylvester Stallone, and they’ll never stop hunting you down.

The obvious question is: When are they going to arrest Stallone for continuing to make Expendables movies?

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Uncategorized

Me on Gruber on Ive on the  Watch

DF:

“Just yesterday, somebody was saying, ‘Wow, do you know what I just did? I set the alarm in the morning, and it woke just me by tapping my wrist. It didn’t wake my wife or my baby,’” he recounted. “Isn’t that fantastic?”

How exactly is that going to be useful if you need to charge it nightly?

More than that, I seriously doubt a gentle tap on the wrist is ever going to wake me up in the morning. I need my alarm to blast me out of bed and my coffee to slap me in the face.

Categories
Adobe lab

Zero Tolerance

Ars:

A movie theater industry group and the Motion Picture Association of America updated their anti-piracy policies and said that “wearable devices” must be powered off at show time.

The joint statement Wednesday, meanwhile, said “we maintain a zero-tolerance policy toward using any recording device while movies are being shown.”

And that would be why I have a zero-attendance policy towards movie theaters.

Seriously, I haven’t stepped foot in a movie theater since the first Captain America movie in 2011. I see everything first via iTunes or Blu-ray.

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Uncategorized

RMS and LLVM

To paraphrase our toe jam-eating friend, RMS, since clang and LLVM don’t share the same political views I do, and let anyone, even that bastion of evil, Apple, use it to compile software I don’t think should exist, you should still use our old, inferior compiler because reasons.

Like unicorns.

With neckbeards*.

I swear, if I didn’t already have LLVM running as my default compiler, I would switch just because of this.

*Don’t run an image search for “unicorn neckbeard”. My eyes are still bleeding.

Categories
personal

Easier AND Better

Great video explaining the video rental store (with just a touch of walking uphill, both ways). Clearly they’re a lot more nostalgic about it than I am, but maybe I’m weird for not appreciating having to spend 2 hours driving all around the city to find the one Blockbuster that still had a copy of whatever we were trying to watch that night.

Somehow, I don’t think I’ll be wanting to trade in iTunes, Netflix, Amazon Prime and my media server for a return to that any time soon.

Categories
personal

Cross Platform

I’m kind of surprised that Gruber missed the real zinger of Frank Shaw’s comment that MS Office is cross-platform, while iWork isn’t.

• … come with full versions of Office 2013, including Outlook, not non-standard, non-cross-platform, imitation apps that can’t share docs with the rest of the world.

In what universe is Office cross-platform? Yes, there is a suite called MS Office [$YEAR] for Windows and for OS X, but those are in no way the same apps, and don’t even read documents the same way! Hell, Office is even incompatible with itself, with how many different formats over how many different versions, spread across two platforms? Shaw’s definition of standards and compatibility clearly differ from mine.

Categories
personal

Solving the Congressional Crisis: A Proposal

Its a terrible movie, but an excellent idea:

Categories
politics

Real Reasons

I’ve been having trouble writing about the shutdown and impending economic apocalypse because its just so stupid. And insane. One thing is clear, this is entirely the fault of the Tea Party for being a pack of selfish xenophobic assholes, and the rest of the GOP, John Boehner in particular, for being cowards.

The other thing that’s clear is that the Tea Party and the GOP leadership are lying about their motivations. If they really cared about the deficit, they wouldn’t be cheering a shutdown that’s costing hundreds of millions of dollars every day and harming countless small businesses. They wouldn’t be threatening to violate their oaths of office by destroying the United States’ financial standing. Its becoming increasingly clear that this is just the same song its always been. Paul Krugman said it best today:

It’s about anxiety over a changing America — the multiracial, multicultural society we’re becoming — and anger that Democrats are taking Their Money and giving it to Those People.

You can’t see it right now, but I’m totally making my shocked face.