Talk To Your Friends for $7

October 10, 2012 by justin | 7 Comments

Enhanced Podcast [ 1 h 05 min 42 s | 32.01 MB ] Download

Standard Podcast [ 1 h 05 min 42 s | 30.08 MB ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Episode 39: If you’re reading this you are one of the few chosen by some combination of luck, geography and hard work to live a life comfortable enough to give you access to earth’s information. You are powerful.

Don’t just congratulate yourself: do something with your power. Build a website, an application. Find relevant information and share it. Hack old hardware to work for you instead of constantly buying the latest thing. Re-purpose instead of recycling. Use your knowledge to make your community a better place.

But do it later; you’re busy for the next hour, because it’s time for Technophilia 39: Talk To Your Friends for $7.

A UK judge jailed handed out 12 weeks of jail time for posting a distasteful joke on Facebook. We discuss the free speech implications.
Facebook lets users pay $7 to promote poss to friends. No price gets rid of the crippling loneliness you feel, sadly.
Steve Ballmer to shareholders: “fundamental shift is underway”. Apparently they’re aiming to be devices and services, not OEM centric.
Mysterious algorithm was 4% of trading last week. What does that mean? We’re not sure, but it sure sounds bad.
Apple reveals secret Taiwan base. Is that really a problem?
A shady company is putting up bad reviews on small businesses and offers to take them down. For a small fee, of course.
Apple and Google spent more on patents than R&D last year. And patents are helping innovation how?
No one reads the Terms of Service, ever. TOD-DR aims to facilitate that by reading them and giving them ratings. Very useful.
HTC took a huge dive in profits, down 79% from Q3 last year. Dave makes a bad joke about James’ HTC, because he’s dumb.
EA updates FIFA roster, rebrands Wii game as new. That’s kind of how sports games operate.
Listener Alex lets us know about Easytag. He also wants us to clean up our ID3 tags, but James is lazy.
Justin points out PrivacyFix, a great tool for checking your privacy settings on Facebook and Google.

All this and your questions. Listen now!

Thanks to listener Mike Calvet for letting us use his awesome music. Check him out on SoundCloud.

Paradoxick

I’m currently listening to the m4a download, but am finding the volume variations quite annoying.

At an average level, Justin Pot in particular can go from deafening to sounding like he’s talking while re-tying his shoelaces...

Any chance of you guys maintaining a consistent distance from your microphones, or using some form of automatic gain control?

The dynamic range between mumbling, normal and bellowing (an example of the latter is at 20:30) is starting to give me a headache, and making me want to unsubscribe.

Scutterman

Area 52 does exist. The whole of that location is divided up as a grid, with each square being an "area". I think it was originally used for nuke and other weapon testing, and each area was a potential testing ground. It just so happens that the base of operations was placed in the 51st area. I think that's right anyway, I may be way off. You can see a nuke test crater near the base here

https://maps.google.com/maps?q=area+51&hl=en&ll=37.175227,-116.039722&spn=0.015097,0.033023&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=60.417788,135.263672&t=m&hq=area+51&z=16&iwloc=lyrftr:h,11122380998287389221,37.177176,-116.046116

I never buy anything online if it only has positive reviews. Nothing's perfect and I prefer to make a balanced judgement.

Terms of Service reflect general law. Loopholes are allowed far too easily so a TOS has to be complex enough to cover any and every past, present, and future lawsuit that could possibly be brought against them. I think the legal system needs to be re-wired to place much more focus on the clear intent of laws, legislation, and contracts, but that would require a delicate handling because the legal system is precedent based.

It's shocking to read about HTC, it had such a strong position a little while ago. I hope it bounces back, because they make really good quality phones.

I play the M4A version using Winamp. It's usually pretty good, but sometimes the plugin glitches and doesn't display the artwork. It's been pretty good recently though, it may have been fixed in an update.

James Bruce moderator

@Scutterman Yep, I blame America and their stupid litigation culture for making the concept of waivers and TOSes a thing, and forcing them on the rest of the world. We couldn't give a shit about TOSes in England, because no one would sue iTunes. Why is the American answer to everything "I'll see you in court!"