Ismael Sobek

I hate the potential of moments

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“Apple’s 4th version of the iPhone — not to be confused with a 4G iPhone — is due this summer, and it’s not likely to be any different than the past three.”

Apple adds screen orientation lock to iPad

“By pretending the broken system can work—and will work, in just a moment, after just one more Democratic win, or another, or another—the big green groups are preventing the appropriate response from concerned citizens, which is fury at the system itself. They are offering placebos to calm us down when they should be conducting and amplifying our anger at this betrayal of our safety by our politicians. The US climate bills are long-term plans: they lock us into a woefully inadequate schedule of carbon cuts all the way to 2050. So when green groups cheer them on, they are giving their approval to a path to destruction—and calling it progress.”

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Danger / Xing

TRON

FPO: Kraken Black Spiced Rum

“What’s different here is that Jay-Z is not Bruce Springsteen. Jay-Z is a half-dangerous rapper who grew up in the gat-happy projects of the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. He sold crack on feral corners and shot his brother for stealing his ring. Badass, for real. So it’s a little weird, isn’t it, that he can make reporters and presidents alike giggle?”

“If the iPhone didn’t exist, I would have the Nexus One in my pocket right now—but then again, if the iPhone didn’t exist, the Nexus One wouldn’t either.”

“One salient example is our education system. Like a role playing video game, one educational challenge leads to the next, with each challenge being trivial for the people who are at the right level to undertake it. After years on a treadmill that’s too easy to fail at, players—students, in this case—are acclimated to the game of education, rather to real achievement. Their work for those years is not valuable at all, and often doesn’t even simulate what valuable work would be like: they have only managed to repeat patterns they’ve been shown back at the educators. This is the game.”

“So it is not cord cutting that cable has to worry about. Lost in all the hype over the battle for the living room is the simple fact that young, new subscribers are not replacing older subscribers. As they leave college or their parents’ homes to start their own households, the only subscription they want is broadband.”

“Websites have been trying to use their RSS feed to monetize their site for nearly a decade. But much of it is based on the same idea that “impressions equal value”. Impressions do not equal value, impact does. And impact comes through trust.”

“We’re Americans, goddammit. Ye shall know us by the tang of our bitter and untenable jadedness.”

Instapaper Pro 2.2 now available

“As the publishing industry wobbles and Kindle sales jump, book romanticists cry themselves to sleep. But really, what are we shedding tears over?
We’re losing the throwaway paperback.
The airport paperback.
The beachside paperback.
We’re losing the dredge of the publishing world: disposable books. The book printed without consideration of form or sustainability or longevity. The book produced to be consumed once and then tossed. The book you bin when you’re moving and you need to clean out the closet. These are the first books to go.
And I say it again, good riddance.”

“It doesn’t matter if you go running every morning, or you’re a regular at the gym. If you spend most of the rest of the day sitting — in your car, your office chair, on your sofa at home — you are putting yourself at increased risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, a variety of cancers and an early death. In other words, irrespective of whether you exercise vigorously, sitting for long periods is bad for you.”

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But what if Apple had patented these things in 1984, and had successfully protected these patents from being used by other U.S. companies? (Or at least the features and designs which weren’t derived from earlier work at Xerox.) It’s not just Microsoft that would’ve been blocked from creating Windows as we know it. A company called NeXT would have been blocked from creating NeXTStep. Every single Mac feature I described above was part of the NeXT UI as well.

Good ideas are meant to spread.

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