Appropriate for Tablet-eve, Joel Johnson writes:
The reason I bought the van is that even when I am in the process of wanting to drop out of society, "get back to nature," etc., I can't do it without spending $5K on a fuel-snorting machine. It's what tech dorks do when we look at the world: try to find a thing to purchase through which to realize our fantasies.
With that in mind, consider what it's like to be a technology writer, especially on the consumer side of the business. It's not like we sit around trying to get people to buy things that they don't need, but we're sort of fundamentally part of the problem. I mean, we take some comfort in the fact that we ostensibly are steering people toward the best items for purchase, but, isn't the world shaking itself apart? Aren't we running out of oil and rare earth metals and kids in Liberia are smoking heroin and raping their neighbors and the entire civilization is ready to collapse?
In addition, by moving Microsoft Office Excel 2010 to the cluster, customers are seeing linear performance scaling of complex spreadsheets — spreadsheets that before would take weeks to complete, and which are now completing their calculations in a few hours.
Wild. Press release.
I don't foresee a scenario in which millions of people that hope to finally get some conclusion in Lost are pre-empted by the president.
-White House spokesman Robert Gibbs
Belle de Jour explains the messages underlying her critics' snark:
When someone says:
"I have similar factors in my life and didn't choose this route."
What they mean is:
"I am unfamiliar with the notion that free will more or less assures that people will makes decisions I would not have done."
Ted Dziuba on trolling and politics:
But I can tell you that from the inside, generating butthurt is big business. Every time I've knocked an article out of the park for The Register, there's been a decent troll element to it. Not all trolls succeed, but the ones that hit a nerve really bring in the page views and comments. That's just the IT world. If I could get a job trolling politics, I'd be damn sure to demand a page view bonus. I can't knock the hustle.
Michael Lewis on his family motto:
Do as little as possible, and that unwillingly, for it is better to receive a slight reprimand than to perform an arduous task.