Apple is a hardware company. They sell hardware. Always have, and likely always will. They are successful and make a ton of money. I don’t think anybody will have a differing opinion. Likewise, Google is a search engine company. Always provided great search functionality and likely always will. They are successful and make a ton of money from their revolutionary online advertising venture. Then their huge success somehow turned them into an advertising company in the minds of a bunch of people. I, however, still liken them to Ferrari in that Ferrari is a racing company that sells cars to fund their racing. Google sells ads to fund their search engine technology related desires. Not everybody remains focused on their initial product. Similarly, Nintendo used to sell playing cards (which is hilarious because I own 2 decks) and now they sell electronic gaming addiction.
— Patrick, AvG or GvA
You’re not paying Facebook for their service, so they’ve got virtually no incentive to create the best experience for you to stay in touch with your ‘friends’. It’s just a means to an end for them, anything barely adequate will suffice. Their real incentives lie with providing advertisers with as much of your info as possible, so that they can drill down and target you with their god awful ads, in an attempt to maximise their click through rate. That goal takes priority over everything else, even that pesky privacy stuff. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. This should not be surprising.
— Facebook vs. Facebook Users by Layton
I, Guru, am writing this letter to my fans, friends and loved ones around the world. I have had a long battle with cancer and have succumbed to the disease. I have suffered with this illness for over a year. I have exhausted all medical options.
— Keith Elam, aka Guru, dies at age 43.
“I remember one woman walking by. She was carrying a huge bag, and she looked like she was heading toward us, so we lit her up with the Mark 19, which is an automatic grenade launcher, and when the dust settled, we realized that the bag was full of groceries. She had been trying to bring us food and we blew her to pieces.”
— Jason Washburn, a corporal in the US Marines who served three tours in Iraq, speaking at the Winter Soldier hearings that took place March 13-16, 2008, in Silver Spring, Maryland.
After a while we said good-night and left. Walking home, Rinaldi said, “Miss Barkley prefers you to me. That is very clear. But the little Scotch one is very nice.”
“Very,” I said. I had not noticed her. “You like her?”
“No,” said Rinaldi.
— From A Farewell to Arms. That’s some classic Hemingway.
Me: I don’t think i’ll own a leica any time soon — if ever. It seems like a total luxury.
Rishi: Word, you might one day. Not having a license will save you from ever buying a car, which is a lot of money. You could walk around taking awesome pictures with your Leica, while everyone else is stuck in traffic.
— An email conversation, January 2008. I bought a Leica 6 months later.
Dear Ram, With all our love from the redacted folks! We miss you so, so, much. The prayer room has been converted to a shrine of vigil, anticipating your return. The tears have been often, and plentiful. Yours, The redacted Team.
— A card from my awesome co-workers
Only one carry on? No electronics for the first hour of flight? I wish that, just once, some terrorist would try something that you can only foil by upgrading the passengers to first class and giving them free drinks.
— Bruce Schneier on the stupidness that is flying in/through/to the United States.
Coming from the arid north of the country, where nothing grew except children, the Tamil man’s chief industry was the government service, and education, English education, his passport.
— Ethnic cleansing in Sri Lanka, by A. Sivanandan.
What Ahmadinejad needs right now is Katherine Harris, some hanging chads and Chief Justice Rehnquist. Oh yeah, and a totally docile public.
— Adam Isacson
To this day I remember when I was in eighth grade and my father first explained to me that there was a man named Alan Greenspan who ran a government agency that watched with an eagle eye for the day when there might be an insufficient number of unemployed people. If too many people had jobs, he was supposed to swoop in, tighten the money supply, and make sure some people lost their jobs. Otherwise, wages might get too high!
— Matthew Yglesias, Monetary Policy is Policy; The Fed is a Government Agency (via RC3)
Israel will never turn armed might into strategic security. If need be, it could win a war against all its enemies combined. But if it wants peace it must face the decision it has avoided for 40 years: withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories. Military victories and land grabs are futile. Security will come only with political resolution.
— Some valedictory reflections offered by Ehud Olmert, Israel’s outgoing prime minister, when he announced his resignation last September. (The peace has been lost to Israel’s military victories)
The cost to the United States of helping defeat Adolf Hitler, liberate Europe from fascist rule and halt the holocaust came to roughly $3.6 trillion, adjusted for inflation. The cost of the bailout, to date, comes to about $4.6 trillion. World War II was a steal — and with the $1 trillion difference there’s still enough left over to cover the past costs of the Marshall Plan and the The New Deal.
— Ken Silverstein, for Harpers.
The wild getups, the in-yourface bumper-stickers, the foul language at the restaurant, the snarky tone in the weekly newsmagazines, the loud bass thumping from the thousand-dollar woofers, the Lee Atwater approach to public discourse—what are these if not the mating calls of a neutered body politic, of people who can allow the full-scale invasion of a country that never attacked them but who will come to blows over a parking space? Or, if you want to push it all the way: what are these displays if not the cultural patrimony of ancestors who could tolerate chattel slavery and be incensed to the point of open revolt by a tax on tea?
— Garret Keizer, Of Mohawks and Mavericks
4 November 2008, terribly early in the morning
Americans will start voting today. I will sit and watch. I’m hoping there is going to be record turn out, that young people and minorities actually get off their asses and vote, and that at the end of the day a black dude who grew up in Kenya is the new President of the United States of America. I won’t lie: I’ll probably still think America is a piece of shit evil-ass country. That won’t change the fact that Americans electing a black dude to run their country is anything short of amazing.
Then they all gathered around Sonny and Sonny played. Every now and again one of them seemed to say, amen. Sonny’s fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained so many others. And Sonny went all the way back, he really began with the spare, flat statement of the opening phrase of the song. Then he began to make it his. It was very beautiful because it wasn’t hurried and it was no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, and what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did. Yet, there was no battle in his face now, I heard what he had gone through, and would continue to go through until he came to rest in earth. He had made it his: that long line, of which we knew only Mama and Daddy. And he was giving it back, as everything must be given back, so that, passing through death, it can live forever. I saw my mother’s face again, and felt, for the first time, how the stones of the road she had walked on must have bruised her feet. I saw the moonlit road where my father’s brother died. And it brought something else back to me, and carried me past it, I saw my little girl again and felt Isabel’s tears again, and I felt my own tears begin to rise. And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky. — James Baldwin, Sonny’s Blues.
Any Americans reading this: vote. For the love of god, vote.
[1] Current Events | Quotes
To put [undecided voters] in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”
To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.
— David Sedaris on Undecided Voters in the Current Election
You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
‘And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’‘
— Lee Atwater in a 1981 interview explaining the evolution of the G.O.P.‘s Southern strategy
With Palin we have two generations of shotgun weddings. It’s like she thinks it’s a core value to preach abstinence and get knocked up.
— Wil Shipley
If you need to appear on an internet list to know whether you’re someone’s friend, you may have problems a computer can’t solve.
— Merlin Mann)
I’ve been told that like liberty, you can’t put a price on owning an iPhone.
— Rishi Suchak
In the 80’s, MAD magazine responded to every complaint letter with “thanks for your concern, the person responsible has been fired.”
— Adam Koford
Ramanan: It’s really slow. The first part is alright. Then there is a lot of nothing. Then the end.
Mezan: Just like life.
— discussing Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
In human society, all violence can be traced back to these seven recurrent blunders: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, and politics without principles.
— Mohandas K. Ghandi, Young India, Oct. 22, 1925 (via Harpers)
Which brings me to the jackassiest comment of the day regarding Amazon MP3, from Jupiter Research analyst David Card to the Associated Press: “In and of itself, (Amazon MP3) isn’t enough to change any market share. They have to do a good job at building their store.”
Well, perhaps Amazon can find a book or something about how to build a successful high-volume online store.
— John Gruber, More on the Amazon MP3 Store
Riley: (showing the chair brawl scene to Huey) ‘Ey. You ever noticed whenever someone throws a chair…a brawl jumps off?
Huey: Aren’t you worried about Grandad?
Riley: (slight pause) Look. You wanna see it again? (shows chair brawl scene again) ‘Ey look. Look. Look-looky look, see? I bet you don’t even have to hit nobody with the chair. And niggas would still start wilding out.
— Boondocks (Episode 5 Grandpa Fight)