11. Profit!
12. People are using bitcoins to fund illegal online purchases, and are willing to accept the extra cost to obtain "black-market", untraceable currency. After all, mafias are willing to declare revenue on empty restaurants/hotels as a way to launder money.
No wonder they had advanced tools for retouching pictures. The Soviets were masters at removing officials from pictures (after they'd been thrown out of the party and/or sent to the gulags) almost from the beginning of their rule.
Examples here:
http://www.tc.umn.edu/~hick0088/classes/csci_2101/false.html
Heh... Function follows need I guess.
Well, the river between China and North Korea is not very wide. I can see a data delivery solution involving a slingshot and a USB thumbdrive
The interesting part is that they use Chinese cellphone networks, which leak into North Korea at the border, to get the videos out. (The Burmese opposition also does that, connecting to Bengladeshi networks.)
I wonder why China lets that happen, as it would be trivial for them to ban any data coverage in this area and/or report any suspicious activity to the North Korean authorities. Maybe it's a way for them to put some pressure on their North Korean "ally", which has become somewhat of an embarrasment to them lately.
If cell phone coverage goes down, they could still use carrier pigeons to send Flash drives to China or South Korea...
Cool down everybody. The Launchpad is just the OS X version of Launcher we had on Classic.
During the keynote nobody said Launchpad would be restricted to the App Store and frankly I don't see Apple forcing you to put your apps in two different places depending on whether you've bought it from them or not.
Apple also knows damn well Adobe, Microsoft and the other big software publishers will NEVER want to give Apple 30% of their revenue, they're not going to restrict non-App Store installs unless they want to kill the Mac platform altogether. Maybe in future releases of Mac OS X they'll embark on some dirty tactics to force publishers to be on the App Store exclusively, but it will be an uphill battle: unlike on the iPhone, other software distributions channels exist and are well-entrenched. Also, why would they have helped Valve port Steam on the Mac if they wanted 100% control of distribution?
I really, really liked how in the midst of all the panic, chaos and destruction, all the cellular networks and intercontinental connections are still running just fine, just so that the Indian researcher can give one last call to his family. How incredibly convenient!
Possibly the worst movie ever (well maybe Transformers was even worse). I need to see it again. Drunk.
I would say VersionTracker, but it appears cnet Downloads now owns them and made it as useless as cnet downloads.
Indeed, hadn't been on VersionTracker for a while and was surprised by the crap it's become. It was the one easy-to-use Mac software repository. I would point it out to all the new Mac users when they were looking for specific shareware, usually they found what they wanted pretty quickly.
Sad.
When someone uses Bing's search engine to look for a new car or a book, she can see which ones her friends liked.
Wait, what? This is a good idea how exactly, apart from Facebook and Bing cashing in big on gullible marketers who still think that "personnalized adverts" are the next big thing?
Newsflash: being friends on the web doesn't say much about what people have in common. Parsing my friends' list on Google, I can't honestly find more than 10 people that may suggest things that I may like. They also tend to be my real-life friends, and will give me this information in REAL LIFE CONVERSATIONS.
Pitching specific search results based on user profiling is also completely broken (in my case). I happen to work on two very different topics, and my Google searches for either topic are frequently polluted as Google thinks I am looking for information related to the other one. Which forces me to reset my Google search preferences and cookies every now and then. Also, Google will tend to rank up contents similar to websites/articles I've visited. When researching political topics (which is my job) it gets in the way of getting a clear, comprehensive picture of the issue at hand.
Even for more mundane stuff such as online shopping, "personalized" ads are usually pointless. Case in point: last week I made an online reservation for a hotel in a certain country. Now half the ads I see are for hotels in the same city. Great, except that I've completed my trip and won't be going back there for the next 2-3 years...
Say "twenty-three-skiddoo" to logout.
