I'm friends with some artists, and the problem with Zazzle (and many other sites like them) is that actually stolen content gets submitted all the time, and they probably got sick of getting 1000 emails from an artist and all of that artist's fans for someone effectively stealing a design and submitting it as their own.

This guy doesn't have a leg to stand on, but it doesn't mean that nobody ever has a reason to complain. The reality is that the internet is a place where people try and pass things off as their own constantly. That's bad enough, but when someone starts making money off of your art--your original, actual art--it becomes really damaging to you. People start thinking YOUR design is the fake, even though it's the original. It sucks.

So yeah, this is lame and bit lazy, but not immediately responding to an infringement notice is also lame and lazy.

I'm waiting for Bruce Schneier's final take on this.

Right now he is throwing up his hands and saying "WTF?"

https://www.schneier.com/blog/...

Remember, Apple bought Soundjam and released iTunes something like 6 months later.

Buying something that already exists is much faster than rolling your own, even if you COULD roll your own. It's probably worth Apple's time not just for licencing reasons but for software reasons as well.

I'm predicting that iTunes will be phased out over the next couple of years in favour of the Beats software. Everyone agrees at this point that iTunes has sort of run its course, and this will give Apple something to transition to. This will unify all of Apple's music service, and Apple can merge the App Store stuff together on the Mac and release a stand-alone iDevice app store for windows.

This is wild speculation on my part, I admit, but it makes so many things so much easier.

The headphones business is just a nice way to make sure the company is paying for itself right away. This is an acquisition that won't lose Apple any money over the short term, and will make their long-term prospects in the space a lot better.

Sony phones have had ANT+ built in for quite a while. I'm sure they'd be surprised to hear that they have a long way to catch up.

I've been able to take my heartrate on my iPhone 4 for a long time using the camera and the flash. The HR apps are plentiful and free. I haven't seen any evidence that the S5's HR monitor is, in fact, any better than that low-tech solution, or actually even reliable at all. Most of the reviews I read when it came out said that the HR monitor was clumsy and never actually terribly accurate. So maybe it's reporting variability in your heart rate, but it may just be reporting variability in the phone's ability to detect your heart rate.

And, of course, third party HR straps have been available for iPhones for a while. I'd like to see them add an ANT+ sensor into the iPhone because I'm a cyclist and have ANT+ gear already, but if I went insane and wanted to use my expensive phone as a cheap bike computer, I could've bought an HR monitor without any problems.

I have an objective sense of smell, honest. I've had jeans that stunk. I've had these jeans smell bad. But after a while, the smell is gone. I have a partner and I work in mixed company, and I KNOW someone would've mentioned it if they were terrible. (My partner is honest; some of the people I work with are reasonably tactless.) I've been caught out at a restaurant unexpectedly in jeans that I was embarrassed to be wearing because they smelled terrible.

I shower and wear clean clothes and different jeans. If you held these up with any other pair I have, I doubt you'd notice a difference. They don't smell like laundry soap, but they don't smell like crap, either. Try it. You'll be surprised.

I've done this. I was working with a pair of raw denim jeans, and the advice is to not wash it until you've worn them for 6 months.

The first month is the worst, but after that, they stop smelling like anything at all. As long as you're not doing deep lunges in the summer sun while you're going commando, it's probably fine. Actually, even that might be fine.

Those jeans have gone their whole lives with only two full washes and that's it. They still look good and like I said, they don't smell like anything at all, even when you put your face up to them to test them. I think maybe we just have to get used to the thinking that we overwash EVERYTHING.

I had one of those 3D headsets, and I used it with Descent. It was terrifying. One of the best game experiences I've ever had.

I'd probably grab Descent and an Oculus if a proper reboot happened.

I might buy it if he took anything with him other than his brain. I greatly suspect that Oculus and Carmack will argue that he left ZeniMax with nothing except his know-how, and they can't own that, no matter how he came by it. He's just a clever guy. He re-invented everything in a different way when he got to Oculus, and that's that. Zenimax can use anything that Carmack left behind, but this is all new.

Maybe if we can't afford to treat the animals properly, we don't deserve to see them.

As we've all hashed it over several times in this story, keeping the animals in a tank that small is basically torture and significantly reduces their lifespan. There's no way to do it properly. We're killing them, and I'm sorry for the kids that don't get to see the animals, but let's be real here: if you've got enough money to travel to San Diego and pay the fee into SeaWorld, you probably have the scratch to go down to the docks and take a quick guided tour on a boat. Whale watching tours aren't actually that expensive, and they guarantee that you'll see whales that day or your money back.

It's not that there's no place for zoos in this world, it's that there's no place for badly run zoos that can't provide the facilities for the animals so that they live a decent life. Bird parks and petting zoos are all fine, but keeping an Orca in captivity is several orders of magnitude different.

True enough; intelligence is certainly not a specific measure of worth. The only reason it's worth bringing up in this case is because something that's smart understands how bad the situation is. I don't like it when bees die (and frankly, the issue of bee intelligence isn't solved either; they've got quite the vocabulary, and there's evidence of voting and democracy in hives), but I think on an individual level, they're likely unable to comprehend their situation. But I can't really prove that. :)

So, yeah. We agree.

The research that we get from animals in captivity is usually useless, frankly. It's like trying to understand human behaviour by going to a jail. Even insects and fish are affected by this; I keep species of snails in my tank that have never been bred in captivity.

All you can learn from animals in captivity is how they behave in captivity.

I understand that the handlers and the scientists TRY. They really do. But more often than not, they also quit and move on because they can't handle the conditions the animals are in, or they're fired because they're becoming a nuisance for advocating for the animals. Just read any of the stories that have come out of MarineLand in Ontario. It's brutal. Honestly, completely brutal.

Really, I think what you want are marine parks rather than zoos. It's really just not feasible to give these animals enough space to move inside the boundaries of a land-based park. It's insane, really, if you contemplate it. This is a creature that's intelligent and migrates thousands of kilometres a year. Even if you remove the migration component, the amount of space you need to not drive it insane is unbelievable. They're animals that need to be in motion. We just can't provide it to them.

Maybe what we should be doing instead is designating zones of the ocean as inviolable and make sure that we protect the animals and water in those zones as best we can. Then if you want to go to the 'zoo', you take a tour ship out. This is how the safari model works, more or less, and those give a reason for the local people to take care of the area rather than exploit it.

No, I think that planning and collaborating count as 'highly intelligent'. Human children are bad at nearly all the things that were mentioned (long term planning, teaching, general communication, etc.)

Our inability to measure animal intelligence by our human-centric values doesn't indicate that they're not intelligent, it indicates that we know less than we think about how to quantify that sort of thing. By nearly every measure, those orcas would find us USELESS in the water. Orca scientists would lament our ability to think effectively in 3 dimensions and do all sorts of things that they're cognitively evolved to do.

Human hubris keeps us from recognising that other animals have exceptional intelligence because we're so concerned about measuring their abilities against ours. Our accomplishments as a species are undeniable, but to a certain extent, our dominance on the planet is a bit of an accident of timing and luck. If you've read Guns, Germs and Steel, you'll understand the parallel I'm trying to draw--sometimes the winner isn't necessarily the smartest or best, but the ones that had some luck early on and have circumstance on their side.

In any case, we almost certainly agree that keeping animals of this level of intelligence--whether we agree precisely on the degree or not--in captivity is immoral. It's effectively torture and cruelty; however you measure human intelligence, we should be able to recognise THAT.

Well done, chopping off the subordinate clause in that sentence. Here's the whole thing again. See if you can get to the end of it all in one go.

"They're out to make money, and they've relatively little regard for the environment at large and the long-term prospects for it."