Category: personal
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Why I have no respect for design behaviors at Microsoft
I’ve received my new laptop and am working on getting it outfitted and up to speed. (This process, by the way, is distressingly like moving to a new home and is equally as frustrating and potentially as traumatizing.) After logging in for the first time, the system helpfully suggests that you create a system backup. …
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Days of miracle and wonder, indeed
For about ten years, I’ve been running a project in my Honors Physics course called Days of Miracle and Wonder (yes, title taken from a Paul Simon song). In it, the students are asked to create a business case for a product or service not available today but likely to be so by 2030. Although…
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Seconded…
This piece from the Atlantic captures my feeling pretty close to exactly, re: the recent Rand Paul flap on the Civil Rights Act and his alleged “courage”. In particular, the conclusion: Now, after the police dogs, night-sticks and fire-hoses have been beaten back, Rand Paul wants to reopen the question, while, to be sure, claiming that…
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Brilliant remix of the Dark Knight Trailer…
… using footage from — amazingly! — the Toy Story franchise! via Ezra Klein
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Even better visualization of Facebook’s vanishing privacy
This (http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/) is an animated illustration of how Facebook has been increasingly defining your personal data as “open to everyone”.
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Facebook’s vanishing privacy
The EFF has an excellent timeline of the changes in the privacy policy at Facebook. It’s worth a read for anyone who might consider Facebook either (a) private in any sense or (b) ethically reliable in any sense. These changes bother me less than other people because I’ve always assumed Facebook would screw us over…
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Deep pondering
Does this story serve to expose the hypocrisy of the Republican Party’s self-proclaimed credentials as the “party of family values” (in that the RNC paid for an evening at “a bondage-themed nightclub featuring topless women dancers imitating lesbian sex”)? Or does it serve to expose the hypocrisy of the equally fictional Republican claim to being…
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Republican Party to disband, according to RNC Chair Michael Steele
I mean, what else might he have meant when he said: We will not hand our children a poorer, weaker America than the one we inherited. After eight years of surplus-to-deficit magic, unfunded giveaways, two wars (one of which was of choice), and a demolished financial system, followed by a year marshaling the troops to…