ThinkGeek.com: Tauntaun Sleeping Bag
Love the intestinal pattern on the inside! No word if it comes with authentic Tautaun smell on the outside.
ClickToFlash is my new favorite plugin for Safari on the Mac. It blocks Adobe Flash on websites, replacing Flash content with a button. The button allows you to activate the Flash animation if you want it. The main benefit to disabling Flash is speed. Both browsing speed and general computer responsiveness. So many webpages use ads in Flash and they’re constantly running, sucking up CPU power. On my older Mac Pro G5 Dual 2.0 GHZ, the difference between running Flash and is very noticeable. It’s a great way to make browsing on older computers much snappier. 
UPDATE: ClickToFlash blocks the Google Flash Ad that sometimes shows up on my blog. Oh well, no more ad profits for me!
NYTimes.com: European Farmers Protest Fall in Milk Prices
That’s some impressive aim and distance.
NYTimes.com: Trail of E. Coli Shows Flaws in Inspection of Ground Beef
Ground beef is usually not simply a chunk of meat run through a grinder. Instead, records and interviews show, a single portion of hamburger meat is often an amalgam of various grades of meat from different parts of cows and even from different slaughterhouses. These cuts of meat are particularly vulnerable to E. coli contamination, food experts and officials say. Despite this, there is no federal requirement for grinders to test their ingredients for the pathogen.
It’s hard to eat ground beef after reading this story.
Microsoft should consider replacing Steve Ballmer with Fake Steve Jobs. While Steve Ballmer is giving interviews and talking about “attack vectors” and “mama don’t let your phones grow up to be PC”, Fake Steve Jobs is giving insight on hybridized content:
New technology spawns new ways to tell stories. That’s the really exciting thing here. Not the tablet itself, but what it means for news, for entertainment, for literature. Gasp. Geddit? Is the fucking light going off yet? This is what Anton Chekhov meant when he said that the medium is the message. This is why the Tablet is so profound.
There is no point in moving to digital readers if we’re just going to do what we did on paper. That’s why Kindle is such a piece of shit. All they did was pave the cowpath. And that’s why we’ve held back on our Tablet — not because the technology wasn’t ready, but because the content guys are such fucktards that they still can’t create anything that makes it worth putting the Tablet into the world.
The media companies are stuck with the ideas of defined media and their old way of thinking. This is a book, this is a newspaper, this is an album, this is a TV show, etc.
My guess is that the truly revolutionary content is not going to come from the old-guard publishers. It’s going to come from new guys, kids who have grown up digital. This notion of mashing together elements comes naturally to them. And somewhere out there, a genius is waiting to be discovered — the Orson Welles of digital media, someone who will create an entirely new language for storytelling. If you’re reading this, Orson Jr., please get in touch. I’ve got something I want to show you. Okay? Peace.
FakeSteve.net: Tablet Part Two: The true significance of the Tablet
Techcrunch.com: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer: Chrome And Safari Are Rounding Errors
From CNN.com: Secret Service investigating Facebook poll on Obama
The social networking site Facebook on Monday pulled a third-party application that allows users to create polls after a site member built a poll asking if President Obama should be killed.
…
The possible responses to the poll were “yes,” “maybe,” “if he cuts my health care” and “no.”
This is appalling but not surprising. The anonymous nature of the internet has created a culture of people saying anything without consequence. You can see this in any comment section of any article. It’s a coarseness and disagreeableness that’s carrying over into everyday life.
UPDATE 9/30/09:
From primebuzz.kcstar.com: GOP Cong. Trent Franks calls Obama “enemy of humanity”
Do they Republicans have anything useful to add to the discussion besides rabble rousing?
Toyota really needs to bring the Toyota IQ to the United States market as soon as possible. While the Smart car looks like a fragile novelty, the IQ, while only a foot longer seems more solid as a car. I could definitely see driving this as an urban commuter. I saw this one at Toyota showroom in Paris.
I like the more normal look of the Toyota treatment over the rumored 2011 Scion version for the U.S.
I like the more normal look of the Toyota treatment over the rumored 2011 Scion version for the U.S.I saw the Season 2 premiere of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse and it’s starting off with a bang. Dollhouse took a while to get going, but I think it’s one of the most intriguing and intelligent shows on TV. As an added bonus to Battlestar Galactica fans, the season 2 premiere guest starred Jamie Bamber (Lee Adama).
If you’re new to Dollhouse, it’s essential to start with Season 1. Keep in mind that the first 5 episodes are moderately interesting, but the show starts to pick up quickly after that.
Reviews and info about the Season 2 Premiere:
LATimes.com: Dollhouse’ premiere: ‘Vows’ not broken
LATimes.com: ‘Dollhouse’: Jamie Bamber talks about his marriage to Eliza Dushku’s Echo
From Arstechnica.com: Viagra spam brings bulging returns of more than $4,000/day
Pharmaceutical spam can generate more than $4,000 per day in sales, confirming that spam continues to thrive because of those gullible few who click through and ruin it for the rest of us. And that’s not just an estimate: a security researcher from Sophos have combed through sales logs as part of his investigation into the growth of spam networks, noting that Russian affiliate partner networks–also known as “partnerka”–are responsible for some of the largest Canadian pharmacy spam businesses.
Well, this pretty much explains why we get SPAM. As long as people keep making money from SPAM messages, it’ll never end.
Huffingtonpost.com: Ford China Plant: Automaker Will Build $490 Million Facility
The factory, to be built in the central Chinese city of Chongqing, will make the next-generation Focus compact car, which Ford plans to sell globally.
It’s one thing if you’re making cars in China for the growing Chinese market, it’s another if you’re making cars in China to bring back to the United States because of cheaper labor costs. Is this another step towards the end of U.S. auto manufacturing?