jwisser:

Rick Perry:

I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian, but you don’t need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.

This is one of the most breathtakingly offensive and reality-denying political ads I’ve seen from an American politician. It suggests that Christians are somehow persecuted, rather than the dominant religious and political force in the country. It suggests that gay people serving the nation that has long denied them full citizenship are something other than selfless heroes. And it states outright that children can’t “openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school”—both of which are blatant lies, unless something significant has changed without me hearing about it in the last six years. No, teachers can’t lead children in prayer—you may recall the establishment of religion clause, Governor Perry—but that didn’t stop a group of Christian students from gathering around the flagpole of my high school to pray several times a week.

Rick Perry is the same presidential candidate who yesterday said that improving the lives of gay individuals abroad was “not in America’s interests” and suggested that not being killed or imprisoned in nations like Uganda is a “special right”.

I’d really like to hear Rick Perry explain why it’s okay to burn over a trillion dollars to kill brown people overseas, ostensibly to prevent them from killing people, but it’s not okay to make American aid to foreign countries conditional on those countries not killing or imprisoning their own citizens based on sexual orientation.

Somehow I doubt Jesus would agree with Governor Perry’s priorities.

“Religious heritage”???

Correct me if I’m wrong, but the Pilgrim Fathers came to ‘The New World’ because of religious persecution and the wish for religious freedom.

Furthermore I think someone should slap him with the First Amendment until he understands it — and not only the parts regarding religious freedom, but also those on freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and interference with the right to peaceably assemble.

One last thing: Could this man be kindly reeducated on one of the pillars of modern democracy? It’s called ‘The Separation of State and Church’.
A quick quote from Thomas Jefferson:

“… I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.” 

If this guy gets elected president he might put the Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades to shame. I’m German—brought-up strictly catholic, turned agnostic—and I cannot do anything against scum like him, but crap like this video makes my blood boil.

Yesterday the sequel to ‘Infinity Blade’ by Epic Games was released. The initial reviews on gaming centric websites were almost unanimously positive.

I downloaded the game this morning and took a few minutes to check it out.
What I saw was impressive to say the least:

• Incredible graphics, diverse, changing environments and cutscenes
• Gone is the tedious repetitiveness of the first title
• New enemies with new moves and attacks, old enemies with a few new tricks up their sleeves
• Improved sound effects, voice overs and music
• New upgrade system for your inventory and a sleuth of new items

There are a few bugs, mostly small graphics glitches, imperfect localisation (I also couldn’t find a way to set the subtitles from German to English) and it’s still annoying to see advertisements for game-related things left, front and centre. I didn’t have any crashes so far, which wasn’t the case for the first one, and I’ve noticed that the game manages to get my iPhone 4S pretty warm.

I can’t wait to spend more time with this game. Go get it.

chartier:

Zach Holman:

The problem with shit work is that no one likes doing it, but an awful lot of people say they do.

I disagree with almost everything in this piece. It’s based entirely on one core assumption that is wrong in so many ways, I told Siri to set a timer for how long I can take to respond to this.

Holman hates managing Twitter lists, Google+ circles, email folders, and task priorities, and leans on a couple anecdotes and process-alergic indie contractor Merlin Mann to argue that no one actually gets any value out of doing these things. That’s fine for the people who don’t really get these things, or those who don’t work in an environment where they are ever necessary. But a lot of people do get value from these processes in a variety of ways, from simple entertainment, to maintaining privacy while sharing online (which Holman shrugs off), to staying on top of crazy work schedules and informed on current events. Aside from the inevitable edge case examples, developers aren’t spending all this time on features no one asked for.

One of Holman’s punching bags is Twitter lists. He doesn’t like them, doesn’t see the point, and doesn’t know anyone who thinks otherwise. I love and increasingly use Twitter lists, and I personally know a bunch of people who do as well. Stepping beyond my single anecdote, though, you don’t have to spend much time to find plenty of others who do as well. I also found great Twitter clients that do good things with lists and make them easy to use, and isn’t that half the challenge almost any work imaginable? If your tools suck, doing the work will likely suck.

I don’t need to trudge through every one of Holman’s “shit work” examples for you to get the picture. Just because you or like Merlin Mann doesn’t get or like a process doesn’t mean there’s no value in it, or that it’s “shit work.” Plus, leaning on a couple anecdotes to judge the big picture is just plain lazy. Writing these processes off because you don’t get them or don’t work in an environment where they can be useful is arrogant and ethnocentric.

I read the post by Mr. Holman and I came to a similar conclusion. If Mr. Holman doesn’t like those tools, fine, but writing them off because of it, is self-centered punditry that we can do without.
It’s black-and-white thinking of the highest (lowest?) order: “If a tools isn’t perfect from the get-go, the way I want it, it is shit altogether and nobody should even try to make it useful for them!”

To be clear: I don’t cherish the fact that I sometimes have to sit down and sort people into Twitter or Facebook lists. But the 15 minutes I spend doing this increase the value of both tools immensly for me. Same goes for RSS feeds; fairly regularly I weed through them, checking which ones are still worth reading and which aren’t.

Here are two examples:

• Twitter lists: While I don’t follow many people, I have a few key lists set-up. One of those is a list of friends and people whose opinion I value. Using this list in Tweetbot, I can quickly catch-up on recent happenings and discussions when I don’t want to go through 10 hours of my timeline.
  Mr. Holman might object by saying that this isn’t the way to use Twitter. Who in their right mind will spend time reading tweets so far back? Well, I sometimes do.
• Facebook’s new subscription feature: This is one of the most welcome additions to the service for me so far, because it allows me to select whose updates appear in my timeline. There’s a number of people I am friends with on Facebook, that I simply keep there to have a means of getting into contact without giving them my email address, but I don’t need to see every update of.

I know this will sound stupid to some people, but it feels like a friend has died.

I’ve never met Steve Jobs, I don’t even work in an industry connected to Apple, I’m just a consumer who’s been using Apple products for a few years.

Still I feel connected to this man, through his legacy that is Apple Inc. and the products which have made my life more pleasant and my job easier.

Thanks Steve.

David Chartier: Apple’s fall from grace - BGR

chartier:

Zach Epstein:

But an interesting takeaway from yesterday’s announcement may simply be that Apple has fallen from grace in some respects. Apple is fallible, even if the 4S ends up being a success. A company that could do no wrong in recent history just, well, did wrong in the eyes of pundits who had previously viewed every Apple product announcement as a gift from the heavens.

Oh no, not the poor, never-wrong-in-a-million-years pundits! Say it ain’t so, BGR.

Related: can anyone offer a rational explanation as to why BGR is worth reading? Its rumors are consistently wrong and, in the last year or two, it’s stooped to publishing baseless pre-event bullshit for pageviews.

I think Apple doesn’t give a shit what most of the pundits think and why should they. The disconnect between what pundits value and what consumers value is growing bigger and bigger and thus the irrelevance of pundits who equate their own needs with those of the average consumer.

These people will undoubtedly slam a feature like ‘Find my Friends’ because they don’t understand it or have no real use for it, and because of that it has to be worthless to everybody else. John Welch nicely paraphrased it in this tweet.

As to BGR: It, Gizmodo, Engadget and the likes mostly exist so the kind of person I was talking about in the first paragraph can still feel relevant.

Curious Rat: First the TouchPad, Now the PlayBook is On Sale

Via Electronista:

Best Buy hinted at possible sluggish sales of the BlackBerry PlayBook by starting a new sale on RIM’s tablet. The deal takes $50 off of the 16GB and 32GB tablets and a much steeper $150 off of the 64GB version, putting it at the exact same price as the 32GB model. The retailer hasn’t said how long the sale will last

I’ve seen how this story ends - the boat sinks.

Horace Dediu talked on his podcast about how HP’s fire sale of the TouchPad might negatively affect consumers’s price expectations for Android tablets and I think this is just the beginning.
Anything that isn’t the iPad competes on price with each other and HP has just made RIM’s life a lot harder. 

So, I contacted a company that produces in ear monitors three times over the last two years, with questions regarding their $400,- products, one of which I was considering to buy.

I never received an answer. Once I received an automated response, telling me that my email had reached them and that I would be contacted shortly, but the promised response never showed up and believe me, I checked my SPAM filter.

Yet today I received an email informing me of an amazing offer —to be honest, it is pretty good— even though I never signed up for any newsletters or requested promotional emails.

Really?

I don’t usually link to Cult of Mac, but this article merits an exception. Mike Elgan, former editor of the Windows Magazine realises that he has —slowly but steadily— become an Apple fanboy.

Even though I resent the term and he clarifies that he means “satisfied Apple customer” by that in the end, it is a nicely written piece, showing just how rationally thinking persons can ‘fall’ for Apple products.

This is the money quote:

Other companies could do extraordinary things in the future. Apple could falter. If all that happens, I’ll be happy to switch again. I have no unreasonable loyalty to Apple. I’m just a satisfied customer.

But my story should be a cautionary tale for the entire industry. At this particular moment, Apple has struck upon a devastating strategy for taking control of the consumer electronics industry and mainstream computing: Build simple, elegant, functional and beautiful devices at all points in the consumer electronics chain. The cheap little devices like iPods and iPhones charm people, and build trust and affinity for Apple, predisposing them to choose Apple for the bigger-ticket items.

Thanks to Kontra and Glenn Fleishman for the link.

In this blog post Craig Hockenberry comments on the latest developments in the software licensing and patent business.

What he writes makes me angry and very sad, because broad software patents like the ones Lodsys possesses will lead only to less diversity and less quality in all software markets. Patent trolls like Lodsys are like bullies; they go after the small developers first and don’t take on the bigger companies because know they’ll lose.