I've been weaning myself off cable in stages. Six months ago I realized that I wasn't watching Starz enough to justify the $40/month charge, so I dropped it.

Now I'm coming to the realization that I watch Hulu+ and Amazon Prime as much if not more than cable, so now I'm on the verge of cutting my cord to Comcast and just steaming through my pokey old AT&T DSL line. It's not quite fast enough for a 1080p stream, but it looks acceptable to me at standard def on my 55" plasma. So there you go. Comcast has just priced themselves out of my life.

Human beings are incapable of sufficiently modifying their material expectations, and hence their behavior, to address this crisis. The underlying cause of our current global environmental emergency is overpopulation. There are simply far too many of us and we continue to multiply at an obscenely accelerating rate. We've been too successful as a species for our own good, but our increase in numbers has not been met with an increase in wisdom or political will to deal with our own trashing of the biosphere. We're screwed. We won't reduce our population and we're too lazy and cheap to deal with the problem. We're going down, but before we dissolve into a gigantic cesspool of our making we'll take most higher animal and plant species with us.

And next week the big news will be they found a rock in the shape of Justin Bieber's ass. Can we please not devote precious pixels to such inanities? It's not like browser pages grow on trees.

It's an obvious strategy for a Honey Trap. What's not so obvious is whose Honey Trap it might be. Maybe it's the NSA, but it could just as easily be Russia's SVR or Israel's Mossad or China's MSS.

It would be naïve to think that with all of the massive crytographic resources at their disposal, the NSA can't hack into this phone's communications at the push of a button.

Liar liar car on fire!

You're goddam right I'd sooner trust a tech company to build a sef-driving car. Because, as we all know, computers never crash.

Just as there's mass hysteria and a lot of unfounded accusations around the rubella and other vaccinations, there will be with the HIV vaccine as well. Ignorant parents will insist it made their kid autistic or ADHD or a gangbanger or whatever.

And so it begins, once again. Just as North Korea begins to appear less belligerent and people like Dennis Rodman are talking up Kim as a "cool dude", North Korea turns on a dime and proves it's still Pariah #1 on the world stage. So what will it be this time, Chubs? Last time you threatened to unleash a nuclear holocaust on the You gonna invade Orlando and take Mickey and Goofey hostage? Crash the moon into the White House?

When considering a response to the use of poison gas in Syria, the U.S. has several choices available to it.

1. Do nothing. This is the least desirable option for most Americans, whether or not they believe we should bomb. A majority prefer some kind of response.

2. Assuming that gas was used on Assad's orders, punish him by dropping bombs on something important to him, but being careful not to hurt him so badly that his regime fails and Al Qaeda-backed forces assume power.

3. Resolve the situation diplomatically. Use third parties to pressure Assad to turn over his chemical weapons arsenal to international control.

A strong case can be made that options 1 and 2 are the least likely to achieve a desirable outcome. That leaves option 3, which as of last Monday has a real chance of happening. The most reasonable course of action appears to be laid out before us. The time is now for Obama to think out of the box, have the courage to reconsider his strategy and show the world that he really did deserve his Nobel Peace Prize.

Religious psychos don't need an invasion to provoke them. They kill people simply for disagreeing with them.

When bad guys use encryption to conceal their activities, we need to be able to decrypt it. Crippling the NSA is not the answer. The real problem is oversight. FISA is little more than a rubber stamp for whatever the intelligence services want to do. We need stronger oversight to protect the privacy of law abiding citizens, not a weaker ability to catch bad guys.

I'll bet a truckload of dead pigs that it won't result in any measurable improvement in China's environmental quality. China's environmental crisis has been brought about with the blessings of the Communist Party. Expecting them to now fix it by executing a few factory owners is very naïve indeed.

Introduced 29 years ago, by Steve Jobs.

Introduced 13 years ago, by Steve Jobs.

Introduced 12 years ago, by Steve Jobs.

Introduced 5 years ago, by Steve Jobs.

Introduced over 2 years ago, by Steve Jobs.

See where I'm going with this? We all know Apple's history. The point is: what insanely great innovations have they unveiled since the death of Steve Jobs?
Answer: NONE.

The aside about IBM exiting the x86 server business has me wondering. Perhaps the "International Business Machines" corporation needs to change its name to the "International Software as Services" corporation. Or how about the "American Software as Services" corporation? I prefer the acronym generated by that name.