February 2009
Ubuntu v OSX smackdown →
I myself am contemplating a switch back to Linux (and Ubuntu flavored) from Mac OS X, but that would entail dumping the iPhone (unless there exists a pain free method of using the Apple phone with Linux OS) for the Android phone (or other mobile phone compatible with Linux, if any…).
“Communism aspired to be the universal creed of the twentieth century, but a more...”
– J.R. McNeill
Personal branding in the age of Google →
A friend advertised on Craigslist for a housekeeper.
Three interesting resumes came to the top. She googled each person’s name.
The first search turned up a MySpace page. There was a picture of the applicant, drinking beer from a funnel. Under hobbies, the first entry was, “binge drinking.”
The second search turned up a personal blog (a good one, actually). The most recent...
Wireless Electricity Is Here (Seriously) →
But strap on your rubber boots; Tesla’s dream has come true. After more than 100 years of dashed hopes, several companies are coming to market with technologies that can safely transmit power through the air — a breakthrough that portends the literal and figurative untethering of our electronic age. Until this development, after all, the phrase “mobile electronics” has...
Why the Dark Secrets of the First Gulf War Are... →
Caving into bullies (aka, here we go again) →
We’re worse off with the Kindle because if the right get set by the industry that publishers get to control a right which Congress hasn’t given them — the right to control whether I can read my book to my kid, or my Kindle can read a book to me — users and innovators have less freedom. And we may be worse off with Google Books, because (in ways not clear when the...
“I’d like to see them let these people go bankrupt, let the bankrupt go...”
– Jim Rogers
12 million people in USA still use dial-up →
“So, where did this contemporary practices come from? When did we start going...”
– Alan Knox
“So Gerson wants to credit the drop in violent crime in the 1930s to Tom Joad and...”
– Radley Balko
Citing Cost, States Consider Halting Death Penalty →
Meet Ray Kurzweil →
Kurzweil’s most ambitious plan for life after the Singularity, however, is also his most personal: Using technology, he plans to bring his dead father back to life. Kurzweil reveals this to me near the end of our conversation. It’s a bright, clear afternoon, and we can see the river that runs behind the trees outside his wide office windows. The portrait of his father looks down over...
“Kurzweil is very specific about when this epic shift will take place. By 2045,...”
– When Man & Machine Merge
What I've Learned from Hacker News →
Privacy in the Age of Persistence →
A “life recorder” you can clip to your lapel that’ll record everything you see and hear isn’t far behind. It’ll be sold as a security device, so that no one can attack you without being recorded. When that happens, will not wearing a life recorder be used as evidence that someone is up to no good, just as prosecutors today use the fact that someone left his cell...
“I don’t really understand why Santelli thinks that allowing judges to...”
– slacktivist
Malevolent voices that despise our freedoms →
Are we conscious of being watched, as we sleep? Are we aware of an ever-open eye at the corner of every street, of a watching presence in the very keyboards we type our messages on? The new laws don’t mind if we are. They don’t think we care about it.
We want to watch you day and night
We think you are abject enough to feel safe when we watch you
We can see you have lost all...
“One of the things Christians often seem oblivious to is that they are bearing...”
– Ben Witherington
“In exchange for this convenience, though, the Kindle locks you down with more...”
– Farhad Manjoo
The 1993 Budget Act →
What followed was the longest economic expansion in US history and the fastest economic growth in a generation. Over 23 million jobs were created (compared with a total of 5 million during the 12 years of BOTH Bushes combined – much less than the increase in the labor force during those years). The stock market surged during the Clinton presidency with the S&P 500 increasing by 300%. Clinton...
“Arizona is in worse shape than most places because of 1) Over-reliance on real...”
– Rogue Columnist
“But there’s a lot here to like and the Kindle 2 truly nudges the platform...”
– Andy Ihnatko
Comments v. Reblogs (II)
dlifson wrote:
What I love most about reblogging is how it is a mechanism for the spread of ideas through overlapping social networks. In this case, the set of people who read Marco is not exactly the set of people who read azspot, and the set of people who read my tumblog is yet again not 1-to-1 to the union of the other two.
As such, ideas (or pretty pictures or great deals or memes) are...
They let these companies magically turn themselves...
AmEx is one of several credit-card issuers that have closed accounts and increased late fees and interest rates for cash advances in recent months. After converting into a bank-holding company late last year, AmEx received $3.4 billion from the U.S. Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program in exchange for a stake in the company.
Writing as somebody who served 8 years of employment at...
Politicos Love the Twitter →
You can generally tell how involved people are in a meeting by how focused they are on their BlackBerrys. At least, that’s been my experience. But this trend isn’t limited to corporate management. Igor Kossov wrote a post in the Political Hotsheet blog on CBSNews.com in which he revealed how many members of Congress were using Twitter during President Obama’s address to a joint session of...
“…America continues to grow in terms of population, but the percentage of...”
– David T. Olson, director of the American Church Research Project
Comments v. Reblogs
Marco wrote:
This is exactly the rationale behind using reblogs as a means of debate and discussion.
The main reason I don’t allow comments is that I want to inspire debate. I think people do their best writing when they’re forced to defend their ideas on their own turf. It’s one thing to leave a comment on someone else’s blog, but quite another to put your argument in front of your own...
The Joe-the-Plumberization of the GOP →
“The Shack is a metaphor for the place behind a religious facade “where you hide...”
– William Young
How I almost killed Facebook →
“In the midst of an economic crisis that’s getting scarier by the day,...”
– David Vine
FiveThirty ... Nine? →
And it looks like the number of votes in the Congress will in fact be changing. On Tuesday, the Senate achieved cloture (broke a filibuster) on S.160, the District of Columbia House Voting Rights Act of 2009, which would (1) permanently expand the size of the House from 435 to 437 members and (2) give one of these additional seats to the District of Columbia. This measure is quite likely to...
“Simple question: Who was more popular — Robin Hood or the Sheriff of...”
– slacktivist
The Seven Deadly Sins of my spam trap →
Do the Markets Hate Obama? →
There is no denying that US markets have declined sharply since Inauguration Day. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is in fact off 11 percent since the eve of inauguration, which is awful. Given, however, that the current recession is more than a year old, and the most recent downward cycle didn’t somehow start the morning of January 20, we need to put the post-inauguration market...
“…active labor market policies. This is how Scandinavian countries, such as...”
– How Should We Support the Unemployed?
Michael Steele is a Nitwit and Wolf Blitzer is a... →
When Blitzer interviewed Steele, the plan had yet to be voted on by Congress. I paraphrase but Steele said this about it: “The government has never created a single job.” I did a double take. What??? Not one job? So the $787 billion dollars the Congress had just approved won’t put anyone to work? It is bad enough that monetary policy hasn’t worked. Now fiscal policy won’t do the trick either,...
Reinventing the Kindle (part II) →
“…I think Bobby Jindal is a very promising politician, and I oppose the stimulus...”
– David Brooks