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The best smartphone

Posted on May 12th, 2012 at 18:30 by John Sinteur in category: Apple, Microsoft

Siri, on the iPhone, mostly uses Wolfram Alpha as a search engine. Since it has a fairly limited set of product reviews, you can get hilarious results like this:

When you ask the Nokia Lumia 800 what the best smartphone ever is – thus using Microsoft’s TellMe service in combination with Bing – the first result you will get is this Business Insider article with the following headline:


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Comments:

  1. They don’t lack humility. Inevitably they are now better than most humans.

JPMorgan Chase’s $2 Billion Loss

Posted on May 12th, 2012 at 18:19 by John Sinteur in category: Robber Barons

[Quote]:

Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, can be clear as a bell when he denounces financial reform. But on an emergency conference call with analysts on Thursday to announce the bank’s stunning $2 billion trading loss, his message was frustratingly vague.

The loss, according to Mr. Dimon, was in the bank’s “synthetic credit portfolio,” which presumably means it involved the same type of complex derivatives that played such a destructive role in the financial crisis. And Mr. Dimon said that sloppiness, bad judgment and stupidity — his own and his colleagues’ — had led to the loss.

[..]

The fact that JPMorgan’s loss — which Mr. Dimon has warned could “easily get worse” — is not enough to topple the bank, is not the point. What matters is that JPMorgan, like the nation’s other big banks, is still engaged in activities that can provoke catastrophic losses. If policy makers do not strengthen reform, then luck is the only thing preventing another meltdown.


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Three Days Before Elections, Largest German State Censors Pirate Party From The Net

Posted on May 12th, 2012 at 12:00 by John Sinteur in category: Indecision 2012, Intellectual Property

[Quote]:

Reality sometimes does exceed fiction. Three days ahead of the elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, the Piratenpartei‘s website has been discovered to be censored in schools. These state-run institutions do not allow people – voters – to read what policies the challenger party stands for.

Specifically, it is the election program of the German Pirate Party that is being actively censored in schools, under the category “illegal drugs”. It is no secret that the German Pirate Party wants to change the law to regulate, rather than prohibit, cannabis. Apparently, expressing a desire to change the law is seen as just as dangerous as breaking the law – just questioning the current policy: enough to suppress freedom of speech in the state-run schools.


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MPAA: We’re No Pirates! You Are Thieves! Or?

Posted on May 12th, 2012 at 11:56 by John Sinteur in category: Intellectual Property

[Quote]:

The MPAA is outraged and offended by “The Pirate Bay and their apologists” who “seek to justify profiting from digital theft” by referring to Hollywood’s founders as pirates. Not true, they claim. Instead, the early inhabitants of Hollywood were independent filmmakers who were censored by a copyright monopoly. They were freedom fighters who saw no other option than to infringe patents for the sake of creativity.


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Pirates

Posted on May 12th, 2012 at 11:30 by John Sinteur in category: shutupandtakemymoney


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Court allows NSA and Google to keep their ties secret

Posted on May 12th, 2012 at 11:24 by John Sinteur in category: Do you feel safer yet?, Google, Privacy

[Quote]:

A federal appeals court has refused to force the US National Security Agency to explain any involvement it has had with Web giant Google, citing that a revelation could threaten the entire United States government.


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This is What an Insane Anti-Gay Wingnut Looks Like

Posted on May 12th, 2012 at 10:43 by John Sinteur in category: Pastafarian News

This is the only proper response to that.


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Comments:

  1. Although it may be politically incorrect of me to say this, everyone she hates has more fun and better dress sense than she does…I ask for our readers pardon on behalf of a mad old woman who was taught by nuns to bathe while fully clothed.

  2. I grew up in Lincoln, and it was, for the time, a very progressive town, probably due to the influence of the university. This poor lady obviously has never left her house until now, and only watches Fox News on TV…

  3. [Quote]:

    Meet Jane Svoboda. She is a 52-year-old woman diagnosed with schizophrenia Svoboda lives at an assisted-living facility in Lincoln and is listed as a protected person, according to Journal Star. Her brother, Patrick Svoboda, is her conservator because she is incompetent, the documents say.

    “To me, it shows how little society really cares about people with mental health issues,” Patrick Svoboda told Journal Star. “She does have a very tender heart … but anything she says is certifiably schizophrenic … she’s not some crazy conservative.”

    He was unaware of the video’s popularity, but wasn’t surprised — he knew it would be a matter of time before she got in trouble somewhere.

  4. The horrifying thing is, for a moment, people thought this was how low the debate had become. We whine and complain but secretly we like the spectacle; the rush of self-righteous indignation.