mattmelvin:

Sometimes, correctly using apostrophes makes things way more confusing.

SELL YOUR KIDS.

marc:

jeffrock:

Dashboard Radio

I’m a huge music-nerd and a huge nerd-nerd so I wrote a Safari Extension that allows you to listen to your the music in your Dashboard, iTunes style.

Features:

• Transport controls. Play, pause, next and previous track.
• Liking. You can like and unlike right from the transport controls.
• Reblogging. Love a track? Put it on your blog.
• View original post. Clicking the track name opens a new tab and loads the post that the track originated from.
• Autoload. When you get to the end of the tracklist Dashboard Radio gets the next set and keeps the music playing.
• More features coming soon…

Hope you enjoy it!

Download Dashboard Radio (requires Safari 5.0.1).

After installing be sure to set your Tumblr account details in Safari > Preferences > Extensions.

Nicely done, sir!

Very well done

well, where to begin? I guess it started the second the Inception premiere ended…then again right after I saw footage of James Gunn’s “Super” at Comic-Con…and then again as soon as the Scott Pilgrim premiere ended.

“What happened after these movies” you ask? I desperately wanted to tweet…for a…

squashed:

Regulation, Disclosure, and Tiger Pits

Unsolicited Analysis and I seem to agree that comparing the practices of the credit card industr to hidden tiger pits is a fruitful analogy. The hidden fees and insistence on using every nasty trick they can find to wring a profit out of consumers is pretty vicious. (I should note that by “tiger pit” I meant a hidden pit full of stakes meant to catch tigers. But I think a hidden pit full of stakes AND tigers is probably cooler.)

I see tiger pits as, generally, a bad thing. Unsolicited Analysis sees them as the greatest tool for Social Darwinism since fishing in thunder lightning storm.

There have been a number of regulatory approaches to predatory consumer practices. One approach is the do nothing approach. This approach says that those of us who are exceptionally careful can avoid falling into a tiger pit. If you fall into a tiger pit, it’s your own fault. If people keep digging these pits and filling them with tigers, that’s how the real world works. The suckers get eaten by tigers. We should avoid any attempt to prevent people from falling into tiger pits in high traffic areas because it might have unintended consequences.

Disclosure Statutes

In the United States, our usual approach to tiger pits is a disclosure statute. We don’t want to infringe on anybody’s freedom to dig a pit and fill it with hungry, hungry tigers. But we feel bad for all the people who get eaten by tigers. So we make them disclose that there are tigers in the pit. So we make them put up ”here there be tigers” sign. Or, more likely, we make them put up a sign that says somewhere, probably buried in pages of boilerplate that there are tigers in the pit and that they aren’t responsible for injury or death caused by tiger-related mauling. If it’s still a problem, we say that the disclosure must be sufficiently prominent. So a section of the boilerplate goes in ALL CAPS. “By walking down this path, you acknowledge that the FUN TIME CAKE COMPANY is not responsible for death if you fall in a pit, including but not limited to death caused by falling, impalement, OR BEING EATEN BY A TIGER. The company further disclaims …”

The tiger pit industry lovesdisclosure statutes. Or, rather, they like disclosure statutes a whole lot more than the alternative. Because disclosure statutes say that you can do whatever you want, so long as you tell people what you’re going to do first. And in the credit card industry—if not in the tiger pit industry, those disclosures can be made in a way that people will not understand. What, for example does “0%* APR on purchases” mean? Does it really mean that you don’t need to pay interest? Or does it mean that you don’t need to pay interest if you perfectly follow a very specific set of instructions that aren’t clearly disclosed and are subject to change without notice. A disclosure buried in pages and pages of boilerplate is no disclosure at all. You don’t read the fine print. Nobody does. And we know that nobody does. But when somebody gets bitten by something buried in the fien print, we say, “How negligent. He should have read the fine print.” We feel superior because we’ve been luckier so far.

Disclosure is better than nothing. But a properly constructed disclosure statute should be as clear and as understandable as possible. In this case “understandable” doesn’t mean “decipherable by an attorney.” It means that it delivers the relevant information in a manner a typical consumer can understand. Of course, in finance, there is a fair amount that a typical consumer can’t understand.

Substantive Regulation

The recently passed Financial Reform bill contains actual, substantive regulations. It has some “thou shalt nots” rather than simply “do as you will—but let people know what you’re doing.”

There are valid reasons to be concerned about restrictions on tiger pits. Some people might like tiger pits. Maybe a tiger trainer wants to live on the edge. Maybe tiger pits are awesome in some way we haven’t thought about. But generally, they’re a public nuisance. If we don’t want to ban them entirely, perhaps we can at least keep them out of the public thoroughfares.

I don’t mind laws that severely restrict behavior with no public benefit and significant public costs. And I don’t consider hurting people who aren’t as clever as other people a legitimate public benefit.

Wow

jacob:

Download Naked YouTube

A simple Safari 5 extension I wrote that removes virtually everything from YouTube’s player pages except the actual video. Expect some more updates in the near future as well.

fuckyeahcomputerscience:

thedailywhat:

Strong Is As Strong Does of the Day: North Korea is strong. How strong? Well, the source code of the official webpage of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea pretty much speaks for itself, doesn’t it? (i.e., very strong).

[biotv / thedailywtf.]

tomoatmeal:

A DETECTIVE STORY!

After the corpse had been removed, the other detectives and I continued to poke around the crime scene, taking note of anything out of the ordinary.

“Look here.  The mirror has been removed from the wall,” said one of the detectives.  “Something like this suggests that perhaps the murderer has issues with his physical appearance.”

“Yeah,” said the other detective.  “Maybe he’s disfigured or something.”

I decided to chime in.  “Or maybe he was eating a whole container of Cool-whip with his hands because he gets so lonely and he knew that catching a glimpse of that type of grotesque vulnerability in the mirror would make him feel worse.”

The other detectives stared at me.

“Actually I think you guys are right.  I’ll bet he’s disfigured.”

marco:

A large number of video-content publishers and video-device manufacturers are coordinating a common DRM scheme:

The idea behind DECE is the same idea behind the push to drop DRM, except that DECE would preserve the DRM part. Both sides want users to be able to use their content on more devices and be more flexible with where and when things can be watched; DECE would merely employ a DRM system that would allow any device to authenticate against a cloud-based Digital Rights Locker whenever a user wants to watch a video on a new device. In theory, this would free the user from being locked down to a single device where he or she bought the content from, but still allow the content providers to control who is watching the content at any given time.

Do we really want to give the big video-content providers more control? This time, they can give us something even more frustrating than unskippable DVD warnings and menu animations. I absolutely don’t trust them to use any new technical control scheme in a way that’s a net benefit to customers.

Video publishers have repeatedly demonstrated that they despise their customers, and they have taken every technically feasible opportunity to increase restrictions and outright hostility.

Every purported benefit of UltraViolet needs to be run through a strong bullshit filter, as if it were a Bush-era law, like “No Child Left Behind” or the “PATRIOT Act”, that’s named in a way that sounds like it accomplishes the opposite of what it really does. UltraViolet is not about being “flexible”, it’s about being locked down. It’s not “freeing” users, it’s controlling us. And it almost certainly won’t be used to give us more abilities overall.

Assuming otherwise requires a very short-term memory of the actions of the major publishers involved.

Fortunately, there’s a major setback: Apple’s not participating in this scheme. (Neither is Disney.)

So let’s take a step back for a minute. With all of this talk of abstract “devices”, which devices, exactly, are people likely to demand compatibility with?

Might any of them have an Apple logo?