Orson Scott Card Talks Ender's Game in Rare Interview | Underwire | Wired.com

Orson Scott Card Talks Ender's Game in Rare Interview | Underwire | Wired.com: As it’s written, Ender’s Game is unadaptable. The book takes place entirely inside Ender’s head. If you don’t know what Ender is thinking, he’s just an incredibly violent little kid and not terribly interesting. You have to find ways to externalize what he’s thinking. But he can’t be the kind of person who explains himself to other people. That would weaken him.

The Real Reason It Doesn't Matter That Amazon Is Losing Money | Wired Business | Wired.com

The Real Reason It Doesn't Matter That Amazon Is Losing Money | Wired Business | Wired.com: Amazon’s flexibility in overseas markets — where sales have grown by 29 percent over the past nine months — is just one more piece of what investors love about Amazon: its diversification. What other sellers of books, clothes, and gadgets can also boast a $600 million cloud-computing contract with the CIA, a video-streaming service to rival Netflix, and hardware that competes credibly with Apple?

Tech Time Warp of the Week: The Apple Lisa, 1983 | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

Tech Time Warp of the Week: The Apple Lisa, 1983 | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com: What we can say is that Apple took these ideas to the next level. All six of Lisa’s software tools — LisaWrite, LisaDraw, LisaGraph, LisaCalc, LisaProject, LisaList — were integrated together, so you only had to learn one set of skills that translated from one program to the next. That made Lisa much easier to use than previous systems. One of its signature functions was “Undo Last Change,” which BYTE called a “tremendous security blanket that enables you to experiment and work without worrying about making an irrevocable mistake.”

Apple’s software as a service strategy

Apple’s software as a service strategy: Bajarin writes, “An investment in Apple’s hardware is an investment in future software upgrades at no additional cost. The value of the software is now built into the value of the hardware. Apple is telling customers that they are committed to bringing them quality software as a service to their quality hardware. This is Apple’s vision for personal computing.”

Book of Lamentations – The New Inquiry

Book of Lamentations – The New Inquiry: The best dystopian literature, or at least the most effective, manages to show us a hideous and contorted future while resisting the temptation to point fingers and invent villains. This is one of the major flaws in George Orwells’s 1984: When O’Brien laughingly expounds on his vision of “a boot stamping on a human face – forever” he starts to acquire the ludicrousness of a Bond villain; he may as well be a cartoon – one of the Krusty Kamp counsellors in The Simpsons, raising a glass “to Evil.” Orwell’s satire of Stalinism, or Margaret Atwood’s on the religious right in The Handmaid’s Tale tend to let our present world off the hook a little by comparison. More subtle works, like Huxley’s Brave New World, are far more effective. His Controller, when interrogated, doesn’t burst out in maniacal laughter and start twiddling his moustache. He explains, in quite reasonable terms, why the dystopia he lives in is the best way to ensure the happiness of all – and he means it. Everything’s broken, but it’s not anyone’s fault; it’s terrifying because it’s so familiar.

Ready To Cut The Cable TV Cord? Here's How To Do It - Forbes

Ready To Cut The Cable TV Cord? Here's How To Do It - Forbes: The moment for me when the idea of dropping TV service became a long term prospect rather than just a short term experiment so I could write this article, was when I plugged in the antenna. The fact that I can get such high quality output, for network and PBS channels I had been paying for makes it hard for me to envision going back to a cable TV subscription.

NYCC | ‘The Venture Bros.’ Creators Joke With Fans, Dodge Season 6 Questions – Spinoff Online – TV, Film, and Entertainment News Daily

NYCC | ‘The Venture Bros.’ Creators Joke With Fans, Dodge Season 6 Questions – Spinoff Online – TV, Film, and Entertainment News Daily: As they’re writing the next season, they were being tight-lipped. “It’s not like sex, where you say what you’re going to do the entire time, and then do it very badly,” Hammer said.

Dante: The Most Vivid Version by Robert Pogue Harrison | The New York Review of Books

Dante: The Most Vivid Version by Robert Pogue Harrison | The New York Review of Books: The basic “plot” of The Divine Comedy has to do with the pilgrim’s efforts to complete a long, self-interrogating, and transformative journey at the end of which his inner being—which, like human history, suffers from the perversion of self-love—becomes harmonized with the love that moves the universe. Salvation means nothing more, and nothing less, than such harmonization. It is not until the very last lines of Paradiso that the Comedy’s story reaches its conclusion.

Hands-on with Square Cash, a free, dead simple way to send money via email | Macworld

Hands-on with Square Cash, a free, dead simple way to send money via email | Macworld: Square's war against PayPal continues with a new free service that lets you transfer small amounts of money between friends using nothing more than email.

Called Square Cash, the new service is available now to anyone with a U.S. bank account and is dead simple to use. Seriously: It couldn't be easier. Unlike PayPal, Square Cash doesn’t require you to sign-up for a Square account first, and all funds are transferred directly between bank accounts with no third-party holding account.

Square Cash lets anyone send money by e-mail -- for free

Square Cash lets anyone send money by e-mail -- for free: First launched as an invite-only beta, Square Cash is now available to everyone. The free service lets anyone send and receive cash simply by sending an e-mail, no account required. [Read more]

Jonathan Rée reviews ‘Newton and the Origin of Civilisation’ by Jed Buchwald and Mordechai Feingold · LRB 10 October 2013

Jonathan Rée reviews ‘Newton and the Origin of Civilisation’ by Jed Buchwald and Mordechai Feingold · LRB 10 October 2013: By that time he had settled into a steady habit of suspicion: he trusted nobody, and refused to believe anything that he couldn’t reduce to mathematical terms and prove for himself from first principles. In particular, he trained himself to doubt the evidence of sensory experience: sensible qualities were events in our bodies rather than features of the objective world, and sense organs, like any other mechanical instruments, were liable to bias, inconsistency and malfunction.

Report: Oregon a 'haven' for sex offenders

Report: Oregon a 'haven' for sex offenders: An Oregonian investigation published Wednesday finds that the state has one of the worst records in the country for following federal standards intended to keep registered sex offenders under supervision.

FreedomPop launches free mobile phone service, 200 free minutes

FreedomPop launches free mobile phone service, 200 free minutes: The service includes a guaranteed use of 500MB of data and 500 text messages. [Read more]