Jim Carrey parodies Matthew McConaughey Lincoln ads

This is the best commercial parody I have seen on SNL in years.

Hook your bank accounts to Snapchat with Snapcash

No effing way.

Amazon Cloud Drive and Cloud Player

Amazon recently rolled out their cloud player and cloud drive systems, and I am a believer.  I have been a long time Amazon MP3 customer for a number of reasons:

1.No DRM
2.I already use Amazon
3.No crappy software tying me to an OS I don't want to be using (I'm looking at you iTunes)

Amazon mp3 has been great for me, but I always feared the loss of my precious mp3's since you can't go back and download them for free.  Now, you have the option to save them on your amazon cloud drive.  Once there, you can freely download local copies, stream them directly, or create playlists.  You can also upload your own music to your free 5GB space or shell out at $1/gigabyte per year for more space.  Any mp3's you purchased before cloud drive will have to be uploaded like other non-Amazon music, but Amazon purchases stored on the cloud drive at purchase time from now on will not count against your space. 

It may raise some privacy issues since you are trusting Amazon not to report on your files to various IP gestapo agencies if they are of suspect origin.  I probably wouldn't go dumping pirated files on there if you had any.

Anyway, that price for cloud storage is very good IMHO.   It comes in cheaper than Ubuntu One by quite a bit, and Amazon is known for having reliable web services.  It doesn't preserve directory structure for files, so you would have to tar any directory backups you wanted to make if you were to use it for that purpose.

At first, I thought all this was pretty cool.  I get a nifty new service for free.  I get to archive my purchased files online, play them on any computer, download them at will, upload my own files, and make playlists which can then be played on any web-connected computer.  Then, however, I saw that they have updated the Amazon MP3 app on android to work with cloud drive, and I knew this was a game changer for me and likely many others.

Changing The Game
How does this change the game you may ask?  I, like most Americans, have an iPod.  I got it back before I was a card-carrying Linux geek.  Long ago, I got a car stereo with an iPod connector, and I used my iPod for workday listening and in-car audio.  My iPod does not play well with any Linux music apps so I load it with songs from a copy of iTunes on one of my dual-boot boxes which can run windows.  Whenever I got new music from Amazon in the past, it would be auto-downloaded to my fileserver by an Amazon downloader app on my Linux boxes like Clamz or Pymazon.  After that, I had to get my iPod out of my car, reboot that one computer into Windows (since it registers with the iPod so you can't synch it on another box), load the music, then plug everything back in out inside my car.  Playlists are then problematic for use anywhere outside of the iPod or iTunes.

Fast forward to now.  The android Amazon mp3 app lets me choose to have it auto-download any new purchases placed on the cloud drive (any it sees within the last 90 days that it doesn't have on the device).  It also grabs playlists, and I just confirmed that it is smart enough that it won't attempt to stream a file it already downloaded even when you are playing it on the "cloud drive" tab.  What this means for me is no more being tied to a computer to sync my tunes.  I only need to load all my existing music once, and anything I add in the future will be on my android device without any intervention on my part.  This is freeing, and this is how it should be.

I am so excited about this that I am now ditching my old car stereo for one with bluetooth audio support which I will be able to use to control the media player on my phone and stream my music seamlessly.  I am breaking free of my iShackles.  Will you join me?

 

Wal-Mart Helps us OBEY

Wal-Mart wants you to know that they are helping us to stop all thought crimes in a cooperative effort with the Department Of Unchecked Authority Homeland Security.  That's right boys and girls.  You can help Uncle Sam catch the Reds of the 21st century by obeying the talking face of Janet Napolitano as she helps turn you into a paranoid agent of fascism who fears anything that is not 100% 1984-style conformism.

That guy with the five cans of tuna might just be The Tunabomber.  Tell someone NOW!  The lady with the heavy flow maxi pads is likely harboring biological weaponry below the belt!  Report her before it is too late.  Is somebody buying paint thinner?  He must be plotting to create a meth lab so he can funnel money back to his Al Qaida overlords!  Learn to see the Truth around you so you can help your government keep you safe.

In all seriousness, it is quite alarming IMHO that the DHS has expanded its mission and started seizing US domains to fight piracy because it is such a huge threat to our national security and because it isn't good enough to just have just one federal agency (FBI) handling such an essential task.  Now the DHS is putting video screens in public so they can drill their messages of fear and threat levels into us?  I have to say that 2010 is shaping up to be a eerily like 1984 what with this and the suspension of our 4th amendment rights every time we fly.  Also, the US citizen whose friend's car had an FBI satellite tracking device mounted on it because he made comments about how we have security theater with high security in certain places while, for example, there is very little security to prevent someone from bombing a shopping mall.  In our brave new USA, this is enough to get you on a list and have your tax dollars used so that government agents can track you and threaten you if you don't give them back their spy toys.

America, I think we are fucked on a global scale.  Politicians like Palin and Tom Flanagan (of Canada) are calling for Julian Assange to be hunted down and assassinated because he showed us factual information that made our government officials embarrassed in an unprecedented act of actual journalism (newspapers and media corporations take note!).  Corporations (banks, DNS providers, and server providers)  are working with various governments to bring Assange down so he can be prosecuted for sex crimes alleged by a non-credible CIA puppet.  As mentioned in my last post, congress has its panties in a bunch because they can't seem to justify the $65 billion dollars required to extend unemployment for millions of Americans while they accept that we have no choice but to cut taxes on the richest folks which will short the Federal government $700 billion dollars in the coming years.  Add to this that at such a pivotal time, we have net neutrality evaporating such that we have no guarantees of unrestricted access to information on the web.  We will be limited to whatever corporations, who can easily be manipulated by governmental agencies by threats or for special treatment (as this week has shown), decide we should be able to see.

I foresee America slipping into a true Orwellian fate in the next few decades, and nobody in power has any reason to fight it.  We will all be docile citizens and employees when everyone is spying on you for their own gain.  I suspect people will fondly think to themselves (because talking about it will be too risky) about how things headed downhill after 9/11 and how we should have gotten more upset as the government trampled our freedoms quietly at first and then loudly as they got many of us to think it was for our own good.  Hindsight is usually clearer, but it is a maddening time in our nation's history to have foresight.

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized. -- Orwell

Politicians Completely Abandon Pretenses Of Serving Majority Of Citizens

From Reuters:

Democrats want the payments extended for another year, and also want to make tax cuts permanent for families who make less than $250,00 a year, or $200,000 for individuals.

Republicans argue tax cuts must be made permanent for everyone to avoid sapping spending while the economy is still weak. They also say Congress should have a plan to pay for the estimated $65 billion cost of extending jobless aid, in order to avoid adding to the country's high and rising debts.

Let's be clear, the Republicans see Bush-era tax cuts as a built-in for the budget.  They are not concerned with the continuing gigantic loss in tax revenue this causes.  Rather, they want Democrats to come up with a plan to cut spending for the cost of unemployment extension before they will allow such an extension.  Fuck everything about this.  If this were France, congress would be under siege about now.

Ground Zero "Mosque"

1. It isn't a mosque.  It is going to be a community center with YMCA-like facilities plus a side of religious bullshit.
2. It isn't at ground zero.  You have to go two blocks away and around a corner.
3. You know who is funding the damn thing?  The Saudi prince al-Waleed, also known as NewsCorp's second largest shareholder, made donations to the organizations trying to build it.  NewsCorp is the parent company for Fox News.

Now, even if it was a mosque being built at ground zero, I would argue that we can't block it legally because it would be unconstitutional.  However, I would argue it is in poor taste to build such a facility in such a scenario, but that scenario isn't happening.  This is a lame attempt to fabricate news and make the president look like even more of an evil Muslim to the idiotic masses.

Spirit Airlines Capitalizes on Jetblue's Fiasco