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Bert and Ernie tying the knot
I was excited to hear that a petition was going around to Sesame Street’s creators suggesting that Bert and Ernie finally get married. Given the strides we have been making for gay rights this year, I feel like it’s really the right time for this to happen, and Bert and Ernie are great candidates for…
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A case for cellular carriers becoming the dumb pipe
Despite being on the approach of an effective duopoly with the AT&T-Mobile merger, cell carriers are living in fear right now of losing control over the user experience. Â The focus is shifting from things the provider has controlled to a focus on the phones and the software they are running and the user experience that…
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Will Facebook Messenger kill SMS? (spoiler: a little)
The announcement of it caught me by surprise today, but Facebook released a new app called Messenger, a standalone iOS/Android app that handles just your Facebook messages. It adds a couple features to make it well suited to phone-to-phone communication and group planning, but it’s mostly a pretty simple app. I used it a bit…
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Life without Flash
I decided a couple months ago to just remove Flash from my computer outright. I’m not really outwardly in a pissing match against Adobe or their technology offerings (though I feel like they no longer represent the pinnacle of great creative software like they did before they bought Macromedia, and incidentally I think Macromedia’s products…
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How I will know when Republicans are serious about the deficit
1. The defense budget will start coming under serious scrutiny. Our military is the absolute archetype of inefficient government bureaucracy and lack of accountability to boot. We are #1 in military spending per capita by a long shot. 2. There will start to be a serious conversation about drug legalization. For one thing, making drugs…
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So Steve Jobs calls me up
So I’m having my Pop Tarts this morning, when all of the sudden, I get a call on my phone from Cupertino. Immediately I recognized the number and picked up. “Steve, how’s it going, man?” “Aaron, it’s been awhile since I called. Â Sorry about that.” “No worries, man!” We shoot the breeze for a bit.…
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Confession: I am a god (thanks to technology)
So I’m walking down the alley way to go to the gym (seriously) and undecided that waiting for my Bluetooth headphones to get replaced by the OEM was far too much of a first world problem for me to handle, so I took it upon myself to order a new pair using Amazon’s app. Note…
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Yeah, I’ve got a few complaints about Lion
Make no mistake. My advice to you is that you unequivocally should be upgrading to Lion if you haven’t already. Â Almost all apps that were working fine on Snow Leopard are working just fine in Lion (unless the developer of your software is enough of an asshole to not get with the program and support…
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A dead simple tax code that will fix our deficit
I’m tired of hearing people quibble over who’s getting unjustly taxed. Here’s a simple system for calculating one’s tax burden. This will cause the budget to always be balanced and unambiguously make sure everyone is paying their fair share of taxes. Best of all, it ensures that even when there is a wealth gap, our…
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On misunderstandings of Apple and 1984
People LOVE to notice new behavior in Apple hardware and software and liken it to an Orwellian future in which Apple is harshly dictating what you may and may not do with your computer. Maybe you have looked at a new Mac machine with less IO than before and cringed, or you saw that documents…