Depressing news from the courts today - where jurors think "a rectangle with rounded corners" is worth awarding $1.5 Billion to the eternally thieving Cr-Apple.

For shame.

I swear no crapple product will cross my threshold or get ANY of my money ever. Its WRONG to use legal loopholes and the ignorance of a technically challenged and biased jury to level competition. This is what a bully does. First steal all possible pre-existing designs, then use intensive PR to pass it all off as if you "invented" the entire thing, recruit sheep who clearly have no independent thought and then play these sheep to find in your favor.

Today is a dark day that clearly shows just how backwards the legal system in the US is and how any company, given enough PR efforts can effectively obscure their own shady thieving past to make people believe that they own all of their designs. "Original look and feel"?! What a load of crap(ple).

Apple, I hope people realize how much of a bullying fraud you are some day. You are a disgrace to the future of technology.

(e:Paul), I know you are pretty fond of your new toy but Crapple is now clearly the new Micro$oft. Same rotten techniques and the same loathsome tactics to suppress open-source innovation. I am having some trouble understanding how you can forgive the atrocities that Cr-apple is heaping on the FOSS community enough to buy from them again. I am starting to view them as a feudal cult-following fiefdom of sheep.

There is also a slight ironic edge to all this legal warring that Crapple is heaping in the courts. I read somewhere that the iphone contains many components that are made by Samsung. It could be that Crapple has just bitten the hand that feeds it raw materials. I wonder what the repurcussions would be...

But my appspace is pretty colourful.

Did you know that a simple page is visualized like this by LaTeX?


But I am convinced M$hitWord must view it like this:


I am seriously so annoyed right now that I need to suffer through Word (in addition to wrestling with LaTeX) just because people haven't even heard of LaTeX. Why do I have to even make a crap Word document when I have already compiled a good enough PDF from tex? Why??

Because of the decades of misthinking and mistakes M$hit has heaped upon the world, that's why.

"If it looks like a troll and walks like a troll, it must be Apple."

The company just fell to a new low of what it is to be an ultimate champion in hypocrisy.

It just filed a patent for haptic feedback - a super convenient feature that has ALWAYS been around in Android. No doubt the next step would be some stupid patent office clerk signing off on this and then Apple suing the Android world to get its grubby manicured camouflaged paws on even more profits that is definitely not theirs and then claiming that they came up with the idea to begin with.

Disgusting practices +++

Given these hideous underhand dirty market practices coupled with snooty elitism and a horde of facade-driven sheep creeps, who feel they have inherited some kind of glory by using CrApple products, is it any surprise that even considering buying any kind of CrApple seems revolting?

Maybe it's all a bit too much, but is it?

I currently use:

A laptop with fedora (Heavyduty (for me!) computing, coding and writing)
A laptop with an ubuntu derivative (madbox) (experimentation with linux)
A laptop with a lean modded WinXP (communicating with the non-clued in world. Read: people who don't know what LaTeX and linux are, live in the past and deal with the painful M$hit word.)

A tablet with honeycomb and considering dual boot with ubuntu LXDE. (Heavyduty PDF reading)
A smartphone with Ice cream sandwich (Camera with panorama)
A smartphone with gingerbread (Alarm Clock with fancy tunes.)

At work:
A paleolithic machine with some ancient slow version of WinXP (good for pretty much nothing really, because its so slow and terrible).

I bet (e:paul) has more devices (actually I would love to see your list, (e:paul). :)) and whatnots but what about you all?

Traditionally, it has been very tough or very unsatisfactory for virus-creating hackers to target the Linux OSes because the field is so fragmented. There are as many distributions as there are stars in the sky... and possibly more.

I was recently wondering about the situation in Android because the field is somewhat unified with limited number of variants. Anyone who writes an application can get entry into the Android market and peddle their apps. This is great for reaffirming the open source and free nature of the Android operating system but is quite a nightmare in terms of security.

And sure enough, I spotted this article:

I am kind of spooked. I try out random apps all the time and I certainly am one of those people who just says yes to the permissions screen. No one, apart from expert hackers can actually tell whether or not an app is going to cause extensive harm just by looking at them in a cursory fashion. But everyone can definitely pay more attention when it comes to what apps they choose to install.

I am going to start a running list of apps I have on my android devices here, I started this for chrome apps a while back but it has fallen into oblivion. I need to revive that as well. Hacking chrome is somewhat tougher but the basic playing ground is the same. I think, for non-hackers, knowledge about the apps they are using is 3/4ths of the battle against the viruses. The other 1/4ths is resisting temptation to download chunks of the whole marketplace willy nilly.

I went to check how much a simple 32 GB micro sdhc memory card was. All these choices and classes tumbled out of the closet.

It blows my mind that someone actually took the time to benchmark all these cards:

Sandisk 16 GB Class 2 Read: 7.5 MB/sec    Write: 5.5 MB/sec    
Samsung 8 GB Class 6 Read: 16.8 MB/sec    Write: 7.6 MB/sec    
Lexar 32 GB Class 10 Read: 20.3 MB/sec    Write: 8.1 MB/sec    

And those numbers don't tell the entire story. Apparently the higher classes have a tendency to burn out faster.

Nothing is simple anymore. I should have known that.

My wacom stylus has started some crazy erratic behaviour. Its eraser-end works but the pen tip does not. I recently found this "cure" on the internet:

You just whack the stylus against a padded surface (for example, your palm) till it starts behaving. The technique works around 70% of the time. For the 30% of the times it doesn't, even if you are tempted to search ebay and random shady websites for replacements, grit your teeth and whack the stylus a few times more. Chances are, the beating you gave it earlier is not sufficient enough to make the errant stylus realize who is the master here.

Wacom. Whack 'em.

NB: I am really not sure how much more whacking the pen can take. Maybe I should get a replacement.

The Susan G. Komen foundation just reversed its miscalculated decision to withdraw funding to Planned Parenthood. Whose victory and war was this? I say, it is Twitter's and the internet's victory over powerlessness and voicelessness as a whole.

I think the power of internet in democracy and public opinion has FINALLY arrived and not a minute too late. The mother (freakazoid) teresa approach that Komen seemed to have adopted was made public on Tuesday. It took just THREE days for the voices across the net and social media to speak up and rise to a crescendo against this ridiculously medieval move by Komen.

I sometimes wish that toxic hag teresa's evil, ignorant, petty and insular mind* that wrecked lives for Irish women and made it hell for many women in India were blown to smithereens by public opinion as strong as this.

The reversal of Komen's recent asinine policy in response to social media and public outcry makes me hopeful that not all causes are lost yet. Given the right power and voice women all over the world can better their lot and fight against barriers that sometimes stifling society and always misguided religions place over them.

I am somewhat amused at all these regulatory bodies that have suddenly decided to take affront at the simplified transparent Google privacy policy.

The new privacy policy is clearly written, brief, well-worded, has no legalese and states clearly that all Google products are from... surprise, one company, Google. Every time you log in to use one of their several products, Google will track your online usage to make the Google experience, as a whole, more personalized and better at finding what you are searching for. You can opt out of sharing your data by simple going to your dashboard and turning all data collection off. It makes you aware of the fact that if you don't want your data to be collected ever, use anonymous geographically-remote proxy servers, anonymous names, stay logged out of ALL services (i.e don't ever accept any cookies in your browser) and use incognito mode all the time. All of these are doable but people just don't care that much. But they do have an option. It's not as if Google is taking this freedom away. It's just shaking you up and telling you about it in simple words.

If you are paranoid and believe that ignorance is bliss, you can always use Micro$hit's Bing or Hotmail and ignore their ginormously long, terribly dry, completely dense, loopholes-ridden legal privacy policy and stop using Google. What is the point here? The minute you are online people will collect data about you, like it or not. It is how the internet operates; on collected data, and personalization. (e:Paul) is collecting data about your browser, about your OS and recording your IP as you are reading this. So are ALL the sites you go to. With the IP everyone can pretty much localize where you live if they want to. In addition, your information can also tell (e:paul) and everyone else how long you have been on any particular site, where you came from, which links you are clicking on and what you are doing at this very moment. Are you freaked out about that? If you are on Freakfacebook, it has access to ALL that you and your extended circle of family and friends said, did and/or posted. It's privacy policy is about a zillion pages of no-one-can-understand-this legalese.

Some bring transparency to the process by making it simple for you to understand what data is being collected, some hope you won't read those zillion page legalese tomes and some don't tell you at all.

The reaction of various thick-in-their-heads government agencies to Google's new policy is funny. Because they suddenly seem to have woken up to the basic nature of the internet. And pointing fingers at the one company that is actually taking some pains to make it transparent while conveniently ignoring the really intrusive privacy policies (search for the Apple privacy policy that (e:Paul) posted sometime back*) that are tougher to understand but are probably more invasive than Google will ever resort to. It is clearly another classic example of how all governments are made of morons who probably can't do anything else and have lied their way into slimy politics, and who take the shooting-the-messenger always a bit too far, because they are probably are too dumb to recognize the messenger even.

Well, the people are not as dumb as you, dear government. We have options and we will utilize them, if we want to. Why don't you go and do something more productive that does not involve bringing crap censorship to the internet and fear mongering about online services? I suspect you cannot. Because you don't really know how to help the people you manipulated and coerced into voting for you in the first place.

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• itunes privacy policy: (e:Paul,54481)
• data collection on the internet: (e:paul,54665)