You know, every morning when I wake, there are seven $0.99 apps on my phone telling me that they have updates. iOS gets large updates once a year, with many bugfixes and incremental updates. I’m told that Android gets regular updates, although not everyone gets to install them. OS X and Windows on my $3k laptop, $5k desktop, and $1.5k desktop update monthly if not weekly. No charge.
Yet the $Nk DSLR I bought from Nikon, along with god-help-me $$$ on lenses, got one firmware update in the six years I’ve been using it. And it didn’t fix anything commonly used, like auto-setting a minimum shutter speed based on ISO and zoom lens position, or making the settings banks useful.
Do they really think that I’m going to upgrade to another $Nk camera through the method of annoyance (“the new camera has the old bugs fixed so I’ll spend the same amount again even though this one works fine!”) rather than pleasure (“wow, they’re really good about giving me new useful features, so I think I’ll tie my whole $$$$ lens ecosystem into this manufacturer!”).
Or will I just use my smartphone for everything and wish it would give me RAW files?
Sorry, that’s a rhetorical question. The invisible hand of the market is fixing that one. Too bad, because there really are times when you need a better camera, but I wonder if there will be such a thing in a decade?
When I was in grad school:
Back in the 90s, a Yosemite Park ranger claimed he was shot by someone he stopped acting suspiciously. Turns out, he shot himself and made up a story about a deranged gunman to cover it up. A manhunt ensued, the usual (innocent) suspects rounded up, and about six months later, park rangers everywhere had gone from helpful conservationists and guide to armed and obnoxious LEOs. They used the incident to ask for guns, got them, and even though it was bogus, never looked back. And now you can get tooled by an armed ranger anywhere in the ditch.
It’s no coincidence that that’s when the Center of The Universe was shut down.
I give it six months before the TSA goons are armed. Even though they have no police training, are basically minimum wage slaves, untrained, and wear uniforms. They’ll be up before Congress saying that the LAX incident proves they need guns. Then next time you’re going through the useless billion dollar porno-scanners, it’ll be an untrained minimum wage slave with a gun that you’re dealing with.
I predict more citizens shot waiting in TSA lines in the near future. And of course, every shooting will be justified. As every shooting is now. No matter how many of the shots are in your back.
In other news, the NYC marathon went off without a hitch, due to high levels of security. Don’t expect that to go away anytime soon. Even though the next attack won’t be at any such highly guarded target.
Washington says Snowden leaks about spying on allies caused tension with allies.
Or you know, maybe it was the spying.
Given the recent past of US security chiefs committing perjury, and failing to understand operational security, it's not hard to believe that they might also have no concept of diplomacy and blowback.
What could possibly go wrong?!?
Well, so far, nothing. No events of consequence yet. Except the now inevitable, slow-moving, but inexorable process towards a closed and non-interoperable web. The network will now begin to look like China. Each country will have its own firewall, its own backbones, and the world will slowly move off into true walled gardens, little AOLs and Compuserves. Though that process was beginning in other ways, with all the information on the social networks being walled off from the rest of the network.
Maybe it was never really that open and free. But the illusion created a trillion dollar industry from scratch. What will the inevitable blowback from the upcoming fence-building create? Aside from more jobs at the NSA.
So when the NYC Police put undercover agents/provacateurs in Occupy Sandy, Occupy Wall Street, Critical Mass, political protesters, and anti-war protesters, it’s ok. Just don’t expect the same guy to act like a cop when there’s an actual crime going on. There’s no duty to protect amongst our new professionals.
There is an old, old joke:
A group of cavemen (it’s old, I said) are sitting around a fire. They’ve known each other so long, and so well, that they’ve simply assigned numbers to all the jokes. So they’ll sit around the fire, and one will say “23”, and the others laugh uproariously. “53”, says another, and they roll on the cave floor.
One night a fellow from the tribe on the other side of the hill visits, and after butts are sniffed and beer quaffed, he observes the locals in this ritual. He asks what’s going on, and Ug tells him. After a few more beers, he decides to try his hand at it. “42”, he hollers out.
Silence.
The party breaks up, and he pulls Ug aside to ask if 42 is an unfunny joke, or not assigned. Ug says “No, it’s funny. It’s just how you told it.”
In the online circles I frequent, that role has now been taken on by xkcd. In any comments section, someone will link to an xkcd cartoon, and it’s gotten to where I only have to see the number and context to know which it is.
For what it’s worth, one of my climbing buddies says the same things so often, I assigned them numbers, and for a while, we’d just say 2, or 5, or 21, and the locals knew which one you meant.
Tagged xkcdNSA didn’t interdict the communications of the Nairobi mall terrorists, despite their Twittering.
Defund them. Scatter their ashes to the wind. Their productive operations are illegal, and their legal operations are unproductive.
No more
About 10 million deaths. About 65 million participants. The last died in 2012, at the age of 110. Soon enough, there will be no one on this planet who remembers the first Armistice Day.
The entire population of the planet, all seven billion and rising, turns over completely every 120 years. No exceptions, no reprieves.