Jeff Stahler for December 22, 2014

A Bored Game.

Lose iPhone as in misplaced, stolen or grounded by a governing body?

I won’t participate in your socialism, sizeofpea. What’s your next step? Oh yeah, change the law…and enforce it with a gun. Eric Garner was killed by a police officer, enforcing a law against cigarette sales passed by a government using socialist principles to save us from ourselves.

For our children: for every hour we allow them to play an electronic, computer-based video game, they must spend another hour playing a board game, with ANOTHER HUMAN PLAYER. It will do them a lot of good!

“…Android is NOT your friend. Unless you grant full, unfettered access to any part of your life Google wants, to gather any information it wants, for any reason it wants, from any source it wants for any purpose it wants, you can’t use your Android device. As much as I hate Crapple (and iOS is based on Unix too by the way) at least I can tell the app No, I don’t want to share and still can throw birds at pigs. Try that with Android and you will get shut down. Why does the app need to access your phone, your contact list, you browsing history, your text messages and every other part of your phone in order to allow you to knock down some shoddy construction with avian projectiles?…”<.p>I’ve been asked more than once to design applications that give the illusion of control to a user. Personally, I will not use a commercial smart phone as there is too much proprietary hardware which cannot be accessed through user interfaces on the hardware. Neither iOS nor Google Android feel like my property; just something I’m renting and the landlord has hidden cameras and microphones everywhere. I use Linux and FreeBSD for computers and Linux and Open Source Android for mobile devices. The Genie is out of the bottle for OSes and the Cloud is the area where the money is now. I am experimenting with the Raspberry Pi and Beagle Bone Black as replacements for desktop computing and many other Internet appliance needs.