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]

Mapping agency builds all of Great Britain in Minecraft

Mapping agency builds all of Great Britain in Minecraft: British governmental mapping company Ordnance Survey has re-created the entirety of Great Britain in Minecraft using real-world data.

America’s Best Unknown Writer by Jonathan Raban | The New York Review of Books

America’s Best Unknown Writer by Jonathan Raban | The New York Review of Books: Gaddis arrived in New York with a pile of pages that by March 1952 had grown to “almost 100,000 words,” or “just barely more than half finished.” For the winter of 1952–1953 he holed up in a borrowed farmhouse outside Montgomery, New York, emerging in the spring with a completed novel of around 500,000 words. By then, he had also signed a contract with Harcourt, Brace, and collected an advance of $1,000, which enabled him to work full-time on revising his enormous manuscript, and ditch his part-time job with the US Information Service, writing propaganda pieces for the magazine America Illustrated. That winter of hectic composition shows. For all its life, inventiveness, and seriousness of intent, The Recognitions is riddled with clumsy sentences to which an author in less haste would have mailed rejection slips. As Homer may sometimes nod, Gaddis can take disquietingly long naps.

JIM STERANKO Slams AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. Premiere

JIM STERANKO Slams AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. Premiere: The NICK FURY: AGENT OF S.H.I.E.L.D. writer/artist calls show disorganized and without menace.

"Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." Dominates Tuesday Ratings

"Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." Dominates Tuesday Ratings: With 11.9 million viewers and an impressive 4.6 rating, the debut episode of "Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." is the highest-rated TV drama premiere in nearly four years.

Roku channels its efforts into updated hardware, new content options | TechHive

Roku channels its efforts into updated hardware, new content options | TechHive: M-Go customers on Roku will also get two free movie rentals to try out the service. (Note that M-Go is available only in the U.S.)

To show how serious M-Go and Roku are about the partnership, M-Go is getting a dedicated launch button on the new Roku remotes, alongside Netflix, Amazon, and Blockbuster. M-Go tries to distinguish itself from other non-subscription video services (Vudu, iTunes Store, Amazon, and so on) by focusing on features related to personal relevance: custom lists (Cards) for quick access to favorite shows, movies, actors, and directors; the capability to fine-tune recommendations; and even links to other services that offer the content you’re looking for.

Roku unveils trio of new boxes, M-Go integration: Hands-on with restyled $50 Roku LT, $60 Roku 1, and $80 Roku 2 | Digital Media Receivers - CNET Reviews

Roku unveils trio of new boxes, M-Go integration: Hands-on with restyled $50 Roku LT, $60 Roku 1, and $80 Roku 2 | Digital Media Receivers - CNET Reviews: The upside with M-Go is that Roku owners won't need to sign up for any new account, as it works with your Roku account and the credit card that's required during setup. (This fact still irks some Roku buyers.) M-Go will also allow you to link your UltraViolet account, giving you access to any content have stored in your digital locker.
The software update is coming in October to all "current-generation" Roku boxes, which includes the Roku LT, Roku HD, Roku 2 HD, Roku 2 XD, Roku 2 XS, Roku 1, Roku 2, Roku 3 and Roku Streaming Stick.

The 7 best things about iOS 7 | iPhone Atlas - CNET Reviews

The 7 best things about iOS 7 | iPhone Atlas - CNET Reviews: I decided to round up my favorite parts of iOS 7 that I think are truly useful and stand out from the other changes. Tomorrow, I'll be writing what I think are the 7 worst things about iOS 7, so don't get caught up thinking this is just an iPhone fan-fest.