Kamikaze Congress - NYTimes.com Delay and Default
Gail Collins: Knowing When to Worry (September 21, 2013)
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That is the House Republicans’ brilliant plan in their last-ditch effort to block implementation of the Affordable Care Act. It is a plan that threatens to grind the government to a halt and wreak havoc on the economy.
If they can’t take over Washington, they’ll shut it down. It’s their way or no way. All or nothing.
Behold! Jonathan Ive's Apple | Apple - CNET News
With iOS 7 and the iPhone 5C, Apple signals that the company belongs not just to CEO Tim Cook, but also to its world-famous head of design.
iOS 7 review: Radical redesign is more than skin-deep | Macworld
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Design may be the watchword of iOS 7, but as Steve Jobs once noted in a sound bite destined to be repeated as long as history remembers him: “Design isn’t just how it looks. Design is how it works.” iOS had in some ways reached a plateau over the last six years, with successive updates reduced to picking off the increasingly sparse low-hanging fruit. So Apple has done more than just change the way iOS looks and feels. It has also reimagined the way iOS works."
Apple’s new iPhone lineup pricing and positioning – MacDailyNews - Welcome Home
MacDailyNews Take: Bzzt. Android is simply not going to go 64-bit and have a working biometric security system that the world of commerce will trust within the next 6-9 months. Ain’t gonna happen.
Evans writes, “When you only make a handful of products, all of your moves are carefully considered. All of them have an agenda, and all of them are intended to achieve something. In other words, I’m cautious of applying the word ‘just’ to anything Apple does. There’s generally a plan.”
“Apple did not spend the last 12 months running advertising for the iPhone 4S. That was an “old phone”, and it was a phone you bought if you wanted an iPhone 5 but couldn’t afford it. The 5C is different. It’s a new iPhone, and indeed I think it’s the main iPhone. The iPhone 5S is the high-end one for people who want the latest tech – the 5C is the one for normal people. The same money now buys you a cool new phone, not a discounted old one,” Evan writes. “If you spend all of your time looking at this space you can miss this point. You know that the iPhone 5c is mostly the same as the 5 – ‘just’ the 5 in a new case, more or less. But consumers neither know nor care. They don’t go into the shop and ask how new the chipset is – they look at the phone itself as a buying proposition.”
Read more at http://macdailynews.com/2013/09/17/apples-new-iphone-lineup-pricing-and-positioning/#vOx4Zku7OoPekU18.99
Magnepan's ultraskinny speakers make big, fat sound
The Super MMG system ($1,199) sounds very different from any box speaker I've ever tested in this price class. The sound is more open and spacious, and vocals are incredibly natural, more human, and real-sounding; that was consistent with every reasonably good recording I tried. Then there's the Super MMG's clarity; it's a vivid sound that draws you in. Rickie Lee Jones' new CD, "The Devil You Know," sounded more fully developed and natural with the Super MMG than any other speakers you're going to hear for the price. Magnepan doesn't refer to the DWM as a subwoofer, it's a woofer that extends the system's low bass down to around 40Hz, but any decent sub will reach a lot farther down. So if you crave really deep, pants-flapping, room-shaking bass the DWM won't cut it.
Netflix follows the pirates to decide which shows to pick up
In a separate interview with Tweakers, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said the company is trying to position itself as an alternative to piracy sites that he said actually creates demand for his company's pay service.
"Certainly there's some torrenting that goes on, and that's true around the world, but some of that just creates the demand," said Hastings, who believes ease-of-use will help convert illegal downloaders. "Netflix is so much easier than torrenting. You don't have to deal with files, you don't have to download them and move them around. You just click and watch."
Hastings claimed in an interview in May that usage of the popular file-sharing protocol BitTorrent in Canada has declined significant since the streaming service's launch in that country three years ago.
