Remember to stock up on booze, stay safe and look at Google’s storm porn
Archive for October 29, 2012
You Have Zero Privacy Anyway Get Over It
In 1999 Scott McNealy, former CEO of Sun Microsystems, infamously said “You have zero privacy anyway, get over it.” In 1999 I was riding the tech boom and working at a startup expecting to have champagne wishes and caviar dreams in the not to distant future. I was also a huge Sun fanboy, I made my living writing Java code on a Sun Sparc Station. Sun was the future of ubiquitous computing “write once, run everywhere” and “The Network is the Computer” were two of Sun’s mottos that I saw as THE FUTURE. When I read about this quote, I was furious, a lot of people were furious.
Now fast forward 13 years to 2012, your Gmail account is free because Google peeks at your messages to show ads that are relevant and even goes as far as suggesting whom else should be on your to line based on past email chains. Amazon suggests what items you should buy based on what you’ve looked at over the last couple of days. Every time you go to the grocery store and swipe your “customer loyalty card” they offer you coupons based on what you’ve bought in the past. In an extreme case a Target figured out a daughter was pregnant before her father knew. So I find it amazing that people still think they are anonymous on the on the internet.
The episode of Family Guy
Category: DCDan, Technology |
Des Moines Register Registration
I followed a link to an article posted on the Des Moines Register website today and on the bottom left a little popup window told me I had 10 articles left to read unless I subscribed. Usually subscription is something like the Washington Post wherein you sign up but there is no charge. Not so says the Des Moines Register you have to pay $10 a month to read more than ten articles. While other sites are trying to get as many page views and hits as possible the Des Moines Register is actively working to lose viewers.
When asked “Why is journalism dying?” You can give this as an answer.
Tracking Poll Skewerage
When the polls don’t fit the narrative, Andrew Sullivan explains, absurdity ensues:
Of course, I thought – silly me – that there must have been two battleground tracking polls and they were just showing different results. Nope. This is exactly the same poll. It turns out that Fred Barnes just outright ignored the actual top-line results and extracted the more subjective of Republican analyst’s (Ed Goeas) take on them (in a memo sent out to GOPers), based on much more subjective ideas of the intensity of the vote – as conducted in a snap poll for their model on one day.
Category: politics |
Buns on Girls
The project tries to connect people who like to take pictures, and girls who like to be model.
[NSFW]
The Art of the Horrible Toast part II
Timberlake apologizes:
Sometimes, you are confronted with challenges in life that perhaps are not your own. And, when those moments arise, the right thing for a man to do is accept that responsibility, whatever it may be, and face it with honesty and humility.
Too much?
Category: bad at life |
