Friday, December 5, 2008

Shaming Commission for Bushies

Nice idea, but I think a war crimes tribunal is more in order.

CEO Differences

Animal Farm Friday - Sheep Surfing



(h/t Kitten!)

The Goog v MS

I wouldn't have been able to articulate the Google advantage over Microsoft in this way. Indeed, it is a bit of an a-ha, although I had a bit of a sense of it. What I can articulate is this: Google makes my life easier; Microsoft makes my life more difficult.

Perhaps it's generational, but Google products seem to work with the way I naturally expect them to. In the rare instance that this doesn't happen, the learning curve is usually slight. MS, on the other hand, is a massive pain. It's like they don't want you to use their products. There are obstacles thrown at you at almost every step, until you a forced to conform to the confusing user-interaction standards they have designed. Google's designs are smarter, if not just as visually unappealing (hey, neither is Apple). Their UIs are deftly layered. Rather than shove every option available in your face at once, Google gives you what you need to do the basic job the app is designed for. You want more features? They're right there. You just have to expose them.

I could go on, but suffice it to say that I think Google's asymmetrical approach to problem solving and business solutions will soon propel them to the top, leaving MS struggling to keep up. The ability to anticipate what people need, and then be able to make it easy to use, and quickly modify and adapt those products based on user demand is absolutely essential. Too bad MS is still struggling to figure this out. They continue to develop the next "[random cool product] killer" instead of creating the products that every competitor wants to kill. Meanwhile, the only killer products they develop are products their customers want killed.

Thursday, December 4, 2008

Roger Ebert demolishes Ben Stein

I love it when fools are dragged into the public square and humiliated before the mocking gaze of their peers.

Ben Stein is only getting warmed up. He takes a field trip to visit one
"result" of Darwinism: Nazi concentration camps. "As a Jew," he says,
"I wanted to see for myself." We see footage of gaunt, skeletal
prisoners. Pathetic children. A mound of naked Jewish corpses. "It's
difficult to describe how it felt to walk through such a haunting
place," he says. Oh, go ahead, Ben Stein. Describe. It filled you with
hatred for Charles Darwin and his followers, who represent the
overwhelming majority of educated people in every nation on earth. It
is not difficult for me to describe how you made me feel by exploiting
the deaths of millions of Jews in support of your argument for a
peripheral Christian belief. It fills me with contempt.

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Rolling Stone: NO on 8 ran a lousy campaign

Yes, blame Mormons. Blame Catholics. Blame Blacks. But also blame general complacency on our side, and those who ran the campaign against Prop 8.

From Rolling Stone:

Election postmortems have been quick to scapegoat minorities for
the loss. The right pointed out that African-Americans voted
overwhelmingly against gay marriage; the left blasted Mormons who
obeyed an unprecedented dictate from the church's leadership in
Salt Lake City and donated 45 percent of the funds for a campaign
to pass Prop 8.

But evidence of entrenched homophobia and religious intolerance
obscure a more difficult truth. Prop 8 should have been defeated
— two months before the election, it was down 17 points in
the polls — but the gay-rights groups that tried to stop it
ran a lousy campaign. According to veteran political observers, the
No on Prop 8 effort was slow to raise money, ran weak and confusing
ads, and failed to put together a grass-roots operation to get out
the vote.

"This was political malpractice," says a Democratic consultant
who operates at the highest level of California politics. "They
fucked this up, and it was painful to watch. They shouldn't be
allowed to pawn this off on the Mormons or anyone else. They
snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, and now hundreds of
thousands of gay couples are going to pay the price."





Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Fun Find

Close your PayPal accounts now

Last week my PayPal account got hacked, and my bank account was completely wiped
out, which put me in the hole for $600 in overdraft coverages, plus another $200 in overdraft
fees. This was despite PayPal's assurances that the transactions would
not post to my bank account, since the fraudulent activity was
supposedly caught in time. It has been a week now and there has been no
refunds or any efforts towards restitution from PayPal. They tell me
that as far as the overdraft fees, the best I can do is to go to my
bank with a letter from PayPal and hope that they will honor it.



This is not the first time I've been screwed by PayPal, but I guarantee it will be the last.



If you think your PayPal account is safe, you are seriously mistaken. I had a very strong password of a long string that included numbers and capital letters, and that didn't help.

I
highly encourage anyone with a PayPal account to close it. PayPal may
be convenient for you now, but just see how convenient PayPal is when your
bank account gets wiped out.

Monday, December 1, 2008

Real Americans DON'T TORTURE!

Because it doesn't work, and because it is completely immoral. (Strange that the most religious of the developed nations is so confused by the definition of morality.)

Further proof that Ohio sucks

As if any more proof was necessary.

Animal Farm Friday the following Monday

Friday was a down day, but to make up for it, I present you an example of a cat entertaining itself.

A day in the life with brands

Kind of an old post but still fun, especially around 10:18 PM

Change you should be afraid of

Benji is co-opting Obama's brand in a pitiful attempt to remake his own image. If this ass-clown succeeds in getting back into power in Israel, we're all in a lot of trouble.

obama_netanyahu_change.jpg

New blog of worth

UPDATE:

Another great atheist blog and post on the Christianist attack on free speech. Then there's this total WTF website.




Hooray, an atheist blog! And a brilliant post.

I think it's high time atheists had a community organizer to demand equality and respect, just as the GLBT, Blacks, and Hispanics had.

Of course, getting the respect of those who still believe in magical beings and fairy tales might be too much to ask for.

AMERIKA: Rising Police State - No. XI

How does 20,000 trained soldiers on American soil sound to you? It sounds like America is becoming more and more like the Soviet Union, nay China, every day.

Atheist headstone

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/180/415565083_0fee72006e.jpg?v=0

I want a Mapple myPod!