Hank’s Tumblr: Equality in America
The rest is pretty superfluous in light of that simple statement. Like with interracial couples, there will be a small group of Americans who will never think its OK. But the vast majority either never cared to begin with, or will adapt.
I’ve only been using PopClip for a day but wow has it made an impression.
This is definitely one of those little touches that once you have it and use it, you wonder why Apple didn’t include it as part of their “Back to the Mac” approach to OS X Lion; and by association, you wonder if it will be included in Mountain Lion or a future release.
The essence of it is, when you select text, you get a popover giving you a few actions (cut, copy, paste, search), similar to how selecting text works on iOS. It removes the step of right-clicking to get the context menu for copy and pasting. The Search feature actually works better, especially in Safari, as it will open the search in a new tab, instead of the current tab.
At $5 it was a bit pricey for what it is, but its a timesaver, and I’m not willing to wait to see if Apple will have anything similar in 10.8 (or 10.9, or 10.x).
Finally.
Just put a set of these on my ‘3. They are replacing a set of Michelin Pilot Sport A/S Plus’s, so they have a lot to live up to. That said, I paid over $200 / tire for those Michelins, and these Coopers I got for < $115 / tire.
Marks the 3rd set of tires in 65,000 miles, but high performance tires combined with my “spirited” driving doesn’t bode well for tread life. 23,000 out of the stock Goodyear Eagle RS-A’s (terrible tires), and now 42,000 out of the Michelin Pilot Sport A/S’s (stupendous tires, but stupendous prices). If these get me close to 100,000 I’ll call them winners.
On the drive home they felt stable and just as capable as the Michelin’s, but I’ll give them 500 miles or so to break in and give me time to find the proper tire pressure for them before I comment about them beyond that.
We shouldn’t read too deeply into a string of incidents fifty-years ago. With that out of the way, the whole article about Romney’s high school days mirrors the way I feel about Romney more generally. I knew guys like Romney. It’s not just that I don’t want them to be President. It’s that I want to see everything they stand for repudiated. I wanted McCain to lose the general election. I’d like to see Romney crushed.
Agreed. Romney’s dignity and ego, ground to a fine power and blown out to sea.
So to encourage people not to engage in piracy, they’re going to force everyone to watch yet another annoying, time-wasting, gratification-delaying warning screen that can only be avoided by engaging in piracy. They’re purposefully making the movie-playing experience worse for honest paying customers.
Here’s the thing the industry doesn’t seem to get about piracy: Being “free” is among the least of its advantages over the current media offerings. Not having to put up with dumbass warnings, previews, hideous menu systems, etc., are all advantages that trump even the low low price of $Free.
Anybody want to take bets on which will die first: traditional media distribution or cable tv?
This is a significant update with many fixes and new features, including a new iBooks-Style Pagination option:
New iBooks-Style Pagination option. The old animation is available in Fast Pagination mode.Other features:
- All-new Fast Pagination mode, a complete rewrite from the old…
Love Instapaper.
Barack Obama (via newsweek)
Should this really surprise anyone? That said; I’m glad its on the official record now. Now if his civil rights and privacy polices would just move back into something of a liberal direction…
The line between “libertarian” and “anarchist” is a pretty damned fine one, depending on which libertarian you are talking about.
Our country has some problems. We’ve got the national equivalent of a leaky roof, some creaky floorboards, and probably some lead paint. My rule for home repairs is to figure out what we can live with, figure out what we need to fix, and find the easiest and least disruptive way to do the repairs.
The libertarians (an anarchists!) are more inclined to bulldoze the place and pitch a tent.
So Dick Lugar, incumbent senator from Indiana, lost the GOP support for not towing the tea party line. In his place, they supported the guy who allowed almost half a billion dollars (that we know of so far) to go unaccounted for on his watch.
Seriously? What the frak are people using as the basis for their voting any more? They demand financial responsibility and that is who they come up with as the face of it?
To be fair, the money misplacement probably isn’t directly the fault of Mourdock. But even so, he has been State Treasurer since 2007, in a state that has been kneecapping education programs, forgoing roadway maintenance, cutting budgets in every department, all in the name of trying to save money since our state economy was in such dire straits, while many departments are forced to run at huge deficits since they simply couldn’t cut their budgets and continue to do their jobs (The Marion County Sheriff’s office and the IMPD being two such examples).
I wish I could say we will see a blue challenger who will kick this guys ass, but I know that collectively, Indiana isn’t that smart; even if we came up with a brilliant democrat who could mop the floor with this guy on any number of topics, he would barely get enough votes to start a fight.
Financiers are an oppressed minority!
It was (sorta) fun while it lasted.
Actually, it wasn’t all that fun. Plus, I always felt like there was the very real possibility that in the end, stupidity would win out. As it will.
Can’t believe it lasted this long. Still in disbelief that it worked at all.
Cable companies must die. The sooner the better.
We’ve been hearing a lot about the war on women, which is real enough. But there’s also a war on the young, which is just as real even if it’s better disguised. And it’s doing immense harm, not just to the young, but to the nation’s future.
Let’s start with some advice Mitt Romney gave to college students during an appearance last week. After denouncing President Obama’s “divisiveness,” the candidate told his audience, “Take a shot, go for it, take a risk, get the education, borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business.”
The first thing you notice here is, of course, the Romney touch — the distinctive lack of empathy for those who weren’t born into affluent families, who can’t rely on the Bank of Mom and Dad to finance their ambitions. But the rest of the remark is just as bad in its own way.
I mean, “get the education”? And pay for it how? Tuition at public colleges and universities has soared, in part thanks to sharp reductions in state aid. Mr. Romney isn’t proposing anything that would fix that; he is, however, a strong supporter of the Ryan budget plan, which would drastically cut federal student aid, causing roughly a million students to lose their Pell grants.
So how, exactly, are young people from cash-strapped families supposed to “get the education”? Back in March Mr. Romney had the answer: Find the college “that has a little lower price where you can get a good education.” Good luck with that. But I guess it’s divisive to point out that Mr. Romney’s prescriptions are useless for Americans who weren’t born with his advantages.
… What should we do to help America’s young? Basically, the opposite of what Mr. Romney and his friends want. We should be expanding student aid, not slashing it. And we should reverse the de facto austerity policies that are holding back the U.S. economy — the unprecedented cutbacks at the state and local level, which have been hitting education especially hard.
Yes, such a policy reversal would cost money. But refusing to spend that money is foolish and shortsighted even in purely fiscal terms. Remember, the young aren’t just America’s future; they’re the future of the tax base, too.
A mind is a terrible thing to waste; wasting the minds of a whole generation is even more terrible. Let’s stop doing it.
” —Paul Krugman, The New York Times, “Wasting Our Minds.”
Go read the whole damned thing.
(via inothernews)
Romney is going to get wiped out in November. I can’t wait to watch the trainwreck the first debate will be.
It’s two-thirds the inequality, stupid.
Forbes.com: The University of Florida announced this past week that it was dropping its computer science department, which will allow it to save about $1.7 million. The school is eliminating all funding for teaching assistants in computer science, cutting the graduate and research programs entirely, and moving the tattered remnants into other departments.
Students at UF have already organized protests, and have created a website dedicated to saving the CS department. Several distinguished computer scientists have written to the president of UF to express their concerns, in very blunt terms.
Meanwhile, the athletic budget for the current year is $99 million, an increase of more than $2 million from last year. The increase alone would more than offset the savings supposedly gained by cutting computer science.
Jesus, guys! You know, Computer Science wasn’t on the list of shitty majors. Not that I think they’re actually shitty majors, but really? Computer Science?
SCIENCE BAD! SPORTSBALL GOOD! WAY TO GO AMERICA!
The Oatmeal on Yahoo’s latest round of stupidity…
Why am I not surprised by any of this.
I wouldn’t vote for him if he was running for dog catcher. Are there seriously people out there who think he is the solution?
Then we have the whole “identity theft” problem. Go to a credit reporting agency’s website. It’s plastered with promises to protect you from identity theft for a small extra fee. (“For a mere $9.99 a month we will help you determine whether the information we sell people about you is accurate. You can pay us to protect you from us.”)
Much like healthcare, it makes no sense to me that this is a private, for-profit business.
In Mountain Lion we’ve seen iCal become Calendar, the introduction of a Notes application, etc. Why not carve the behemoth that iTunes has become up into small, fast, task-specific pieces that could be integrated to work well together without being a single bloated mess?
iOS has Music, Video, iTunes, and the App Store, all separate, all great at their dedicated purposes. Why couldn’t a similar approach work for OS X?
Elizabeth Warren (via manicchill)
I love this woman. I wish I could vote for her, or that we at least had such scrupulous liberals running for office here in Indiana.
Mark Zuckerberg turns 28 on May 14. That is a Monday.
It is both awesome and depressing to me that he and I are the same age.
Whatever the news may be.
Seriously. Developers. Build this.
I can get behind all of this, with the exception being that I *do* care about the past. I, too, want a calendaring app to focus on the here and now, and taper the level of detail of future events by time-proximity, it should still retain the ability to easily jump back a [day|week|month]. It shouldn’t need to be said, but I wanted to point it out none-the-less.
ALEC, the corporate-backed group that’s been pushing and even drafting legislation, says it stands for free markets. Crony capitalism is more like it.
First see this:
Penny Arcade - Space is the Place
And This:
Penny Arcade - Space is the Place (Blog Post)
Then the follow up blog post is the cherry on top:
Penny Arcade - Getting A Lot Of Requests
Nerd humor is so awesome.
So I finished reading Freedom™ early this morning. Its the sequel to The Daemon, both written by Daniel Suarez. More info about the author and both books can be found here
Once I hit a tipping point just over halfway through the book, I couldn’t put it down. Stopping wasn’t an option and I didn’t have any early commitments today. The writing was fast-paced and engaging. After the build-up in the first book, Suarez was able to dispense with all character-building nonsense and focus solely upon kicking the narrative into high gear. At one point, one character is torturing another and I seriously almost had to stop reading; the imagery painted a picture in my head so vivid I was becoming physically revolted at the thought. They are written in a modern vernacular, so I’m sure literature snobs wouldn’t agree, but they are some of the best written books I’ve read recently (right up there with the Harry Potter series).
For a geek, they read like some kind of wet dream. Barely a page goes by without describing some action or gadget or widget that any self respecting technologist would love to have.
I don’t want to get into the story and plot lines, other than to say that its like Terminator, except instead of the AI enslaving humanity, its goal is to genuinely save humanity and build a better world; a world where reputation and hard work actually matter in ways they really don’t any more. The road is bloody, largely due to the Powers That Be wanting to do everything they can to maintain the status quo.
It is going to take me a lot more reflection to form coherence around my thoughts about the plot, what it represents and, honestly, if I believe such a change could ever be made possible.
If Consumer Reports wants to know what a computer “getting hot” really feels like, they can come examine the exhaust coming out of my Mac Pro. I’m looking at memory risers in the 170º range, and my CPU is idling along at 133º. THAT is hot. But as Marco so elegantly points out, 116º can barely be considered “warm” by computing standards, especially relative to the iPad 2.
From this:
Despite this fact, the President’s budget refuses to address runaway entitlement spending, and instead imposes nearly $500 billion in defense cuts over the next decade.
Emphasis mine. For crying out loud. Over 10 effing years? That’s $50 Billion a year, on an almost $700 Billion budget. That’s what? A ~7% reduction year over year?
Saying: “$50 Billion per year, for the next decade”, or even better: “reducing the military budget from $683 Billion to $633 Billion this year” is more honest, but doesn’t have that same “punch” that throwing out a big number like $500 BILLION. Just ask Dr. Evil.
And really. They are worried about entitlement programs, but they actually want to keep our $700 Billion military budget completely intact? How about we focus a little less money on trying to kill people in some fictional World War III War Game, and spend a little more on improving our society. Start with research that can keep people healthier, and we won’t be spending so much on those entitlement programs which primarily exist to keep people alive.
We will deal with World War III if/when it comes. The amount of posturing we do, pissing away our GDP on the hunch that we’re going to be required to suit up and blow the hell out of a country is laughable at this point.
Especially when we are so impotent we can’t even get a collation formed around taking out actual threats like Iran and North Korea’s nuclear programs.
In a stunning display of headline exploitation and playing upon the ignorance of the masses, the Wall Street Journal lobs a sure-to-grab-attention headline on top of a bullshit user profile.
That said, it does speak volumes about how, in this era of high-def content and streaming video, any per-unit costs of data consumption are going to be have to be measured in gigabytes, and priced much more reasonably than the current rates. $10/GB for overage is ridiculous, almost as ridiculous as AT&T’s already inflated pricing scheme
If I could pay a service fee for data, say $10/month per device, then buy throughput in GB Chunks, say $3-5/GB, pooled across all my devices, AT&T would get their fair share (they are at least going to get $13-15/month for a gig of data), they get to charge heavy users more, but it comes off as an actual business model instead of the customer rape so many of their other polices appear to be.
Today’s show with Jonah Lehrer explains why we should have a ping-pong table in the Fresh Air office. (Pretty please?)
There is much wisdom in this.
