Happiness is. (Taken with instagram)
An explanation of why SOPA is dangerous
SOPA:
- Gives the government the right to unilaterally censor foreign websites.
- Gives copyright holders the right to issue economic takedowns and bring lawsuits against website owners and operators, if those websites have features that make it possible to post infringing content.
- Makes it a felony offense to post a copyrighted song or video.
Heald gets a little bit out to the weeds, gets a bit overexcited about some aspects of SOPA, but all in all, this is a pretty damn good post that you should link people to when they ask what SOPA is, why it’s bad, and why we should care. And we should be hearing a lot more questions from people who aren’t necessarily tech-savvy when major sites go into their blackout phase within a matter of hours.
Notification Control, for those who can't navigate settings
Ben Lang and Tim Kendall’s new Notification Control offers up a handy list of links for quickly accessing email notification settings on several popular — and some not-so-well-known — social networking sites. Notification Control gathers direct links to those notifications settings pages, saving you from blindly clicking around Facebook or Pinterest in vain.
I was surprised because I, at first, thought it was a central system for changing notification settings on all my social networks. But alas, no - they’re just links to where you can change your email notification settings. Still useful to have on hand for sending out to any technopeasant friends you might have, but really not that much of an accomplishment all around.
I was thinking the other day - who am I kidding, I’ve been thinking about this for years. We need notifications that aren’t tied to email. Now with push notifications ubiquitous on our smartphones and other computing devices, email seems a really outdated model for notifications. Let email be for communication - we should have a new system for centralized notifications. How stupid was it when Twitter added email notifications for mentions, retweets, follows, listings - and then opted us all in without warning?
No, what we need is a new notification scheme with a powerful and open API that can (I said can, not will - that’s a whole other battle) be built into OSes that want to stay relevant. Sort of like Boxcar, if Boxcar didn’t suck. What can push to it? Anything that wants to. Anything that currently notifies by email or push with app badging. I’d want my Calendar events to be able to push to them, too.
And it needs to be just as accessible on desktop as it is on mobile. I grow increasingly frustrated when awesome mobile systems aren’t available or aren’t as good on desktop (like iOS push notifications) or vice versa (like Growl).
Don’t mind me, just another pipedream of mine. I’ve got many impractical wishes brewing, as I’m sure everyone does.
But the real difference between Razer and the other PC makers that Tan is slogging? Details. “We’ve had products pulled two days before launch… I’ve seen guys cry, but at the end of the day it’s about perfection.”
Details are key. The drive for perfection is key. Uncompromising quality is key.
The Singapore-born Tan has a curiously studied and smooth blend of accents—it’s hard not to believe every word he says, or at least believe that he believes every word he says, no matter how grandiose.
For me, it’s the fact that he talks like he actually has a clue of what’s going on. Maybe he’s not surrounded by yes-men. Maybe he’s actually analyzing the market, understanding it, and seeing where the roads lead two, five, ten years from now. Listening to him speak, it’s not like listening to Schmidt or Ballmer or Lazaridis - men who are indeed giants in their own right, but seem to be living in their own little world. He’s got that je ne sais quoi. That charisma. And I’m looking forward to see what he does next.
Source: Gizmodo
Whose Problem is Android Fragmentation?
Next time you say/hear “fragmentation sucks/is not a problem” consider for whom.Fragmentation will cause Android to continue to grow.Google has lost control of Android due to fragmentation.
This should definitely become the insignia and motto of some mechanized element (for drive-through purposes). Death before Dismount? Forget that. Death before Decaf.
(via poetryandvodka)
Source: yasmeen
Off with his head.
Suicide King is always my favorite card. That it’s the King of Hearts just adds to the poetry of it all.
Source: bawdyyy
What is SOPA really the solution to?
In my experience at O’Reilly, the losses due to piracy are far outweighed by the benefits of the free flow of information… Most of the people who are downloading unauthorized copies of O’Reilly books would never have paid us for them anyway; meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of others are buying content from us, many of them in countries that we were never able to do business with when our products were not available in digital form.
I keep hearing the same thing whenever piracy gets brought up. I don’t know if that’s just because of the sources that I read and listen to, if it’s confirmation bias, or if that is, in fact, the hard cold truth. But everything from what I’ve been following of SOPA seems to me that O’Reilly is asking the right question here - what is it supposed to be the solution to? And is it a valid, effective, and viable solution?
Allow me the utter geekery of quoting a line from Orson Scott Card’s Xenocide: “We never forbid where we do not also have the power to prevent.” There are a lot of things that are forbidden that aren’t preventable (or, I should say, easily preventable) and piracy seems to fall under this umbrella in many cases, especially when international jurisdictions are involved.
They should take a long, hard look at what the real problems are and what the realistic solutions could be - if there are any. Of either one.
Source: daringfireball.net
I have some serious geeklust for the ePawn Arena
The display uses a custom magnetic system to track the position, rotation and identity of physical game pieces in real time… more importantly, the software is platform agnostic, and doesn’t reside on the screen itself. Your smartphone is the computer, and it connects to the ePawn Arena over Bluetooth.
I was just thinking the other day after playing Conquest of Nerath how awesome it would be if we had that tabletop gameplay available to us with new technologies. Yes, it’s awesome that the ePawn Arena tracks physical pieces on a real board - I’m geeking out over how awesome this would be for tabletop gaming. But it also syncs over the Internet, which is doubly awesome.
I totally want one of these for hardcore nerd-sessions, but I also want to see more quality multiplayer tabletop games all over the place! I’d pay good money for Nerath on the iPad so I could play with friends who don’t live in the same city as me. Beats the hell out of trying to set up Skype tabletop sessions.
Of Google and Monopolies
Monopolies happen over the control of physical resources. And this isn’t about resources: search isn’t a physical product that can be controlled through normal monopolistic powers. What Google has is something far more nebulous: mindshare.
This is an excellent post that makes some powerful points with reference to the word “monopoly” being bandied about in the recent shitstorm of personalized Google search results. I don’t recall if I personally used the word myself, but if I did, then I will no longer.
To reiterate my point from various arguments across the web: my issue with Search+ is not because I think that Google is necessarily misusing its search product to boost its social product. They are not a public good, and they’re not beholden to the consumer. The reason I’m annoyed is because I think it’s a disingenuous way of going about it, which is why I think it behooves them to go the opt-in route instead.
