Tag: stupid

Idiot Phones

It is lumbered with a bewildering array of unnecessary “features” aimed at idiots, including a mode that scans each text message and turns some of the words into tiny ani- mations, so if someone texts to say they have just run over your child in their car, the word “car” is replaced by a wacky cartoon vehicle putt-putting onto the screen. There is also a crap built-in game in which you play a rabbit (“Step into the role of Bobby Carrot – the new star of cute, mind-cracking carrot action!”).

another reason to opt out of phones. not that i need one

SUV Terrorism

From the inside, he watches the judicial system spend a small fortune in taxpayer dollars prosecuting, imprisoning, and then drumming up paranoia among prison guards and prisoners over a college kid who went on a vandalism spree against Hummers. “Here we have [our] politicians, who are not charged with crimes, setting this planet on a disaster course for some fleeting political advantage, while others are sent to prison for taking a stance against this”

SUV, safety fetish, prison state, religious nuts, this story has everything that is wrong with the US

Don’t Arrest Andrea!

Andrea Sandberg is a female graphics designer living quite close to where I grew up. She has a past as an officer in the Swiss navy, but recently decided to aim for a career as an artist. But she does a bit of consulting for the biotech company Pentapod Corporation. Andrea is fictional, a persona I use when I have to sign up for websites and do not feel like disclosing my personal information. No doubt she has millions of relatives, many living at zipcodes such as 123 45 or with email addresses like foo@foo.no. But a new EU proposal will seek to outlaw using fake information to set up email accounts or websites,

Germany Media Luddites

Mathias was able to download a complete copy of a current German bestselling book, which was quite delicate considering the company behind VTO supported a lawsuit against Google Book Search because Google allegedly didn’t protect well against the downloading of book texts. But maybe that’s the core of the problem: they want to compete against a tech company (Google) in a technical space (the web), but they’re non-technical themselves, possibly lacking the means to judge the quality of the outsourced work