263: Bird Flu Epidemics

This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by the new Eero and Eero Beacon. For free overnight shipping to the U.S. or Canada, go to Eero.com, that's E-E-R-O dot com, select overnight shipping, and use the code GOG to make it free. Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. We do not have Dave Bittner this week, he's off on a secret mission, so he will be returning with us next week. Ooh. Yeah, I don't know what he's doing, he's probably just screwing off with his kids. I think he's seeing Solo again.

Ah, could be, could be, which I still haven't seen, but I'll try to. Yeah. So, the collective world basically had its heart broken this morning, because we're recording this Friday morning on June 8th, and we woke up to the news that, I know one of my heroes is now gone, Anthony Bourdain.

Yeah, um, yeah. We've talked about him on the show a lot, so I thought it was... We've talked about him on the show a lot, I've enjoyed all of his shows as a family with my wife. Kid's too young, obviously, but, you know, Kitchen Confidential, amazing book. His cookbook, gorgeous.

His recipe's amazing. You know, so many thoughts, I'm really heartbroken right now. There's no other way to describe it. I've got to stop keeping my phone in my room, because that's not, you know, you roll out of bed and you grab your phone now, and, boy, it can set the tone of the day, and to kind of roll over and tell my wife, Anthony Bourdain, committed suicide.

Man, it's been a shitty day. Yeah, it's a shocker. It's a shocker. You never know what's going on with someone. So, for someone who seemed to be living the exact life he wanted to be living, you know, and had seemed to have found extreme happiness just recently with Aja Argento, so much so that he couldn't stop stuffing her onto the show, which was getting a little annoying.

You know, it's, yeah, I'm just, I'm super bummed. You know, last night, I was watching the Ontario-Canada elections come in, and that depressed me. All my friends in Toronto are very sad, because the far right has kind of come into power. Caveat, their far right is equivalent to our far left, but for Canada, it's still crazy.

So, I was bummed out last night and didn't feel like doing much in terms of show notes, and then I wake up this morning, and I'm like, oh, man, if Anthony Bourdain can't find happiness, what chance have we? Well, you know, here's the thing. You can, I'm not going to compare myself to him in that case.

I'm doing the best I can, and everybody else does the best they can, but I think in the spirit of Tony and what he did with his show, I think we should just buckle down and give people the best damn show we can, because that's all you can do. That's right. So, let's crap on birds in a few minutes. In a few minutes, we'll get there.

Trust me, there's a lot of bird shit today. My favorite, or one of my favorite stories of the week, Benedict Cumberbatch hailed as a hero after fending off four men who were attacking a Deliveroo driver. Yes. A couple people sent us that because of your impassioned Deliveroo delivery.

Deliveroo. So, yeah, he jumped out of his Uber and beat off four dudes, and he was doing it right down the street from 221B Baker Street. So, everybody thought it was pretty surreal to see Sherlock Holmes beating up some baddies right next to where Sherlock Holmes was from. If only he was wearing the hat.

I know. I know. But we'll be getting to his new show later on in the show, because I've been watching it. Oh, good. I'm interested to see what you think of it. Now, apparently, somehow, we have become the Flashpoint vanguards of bird resistance. Oh, right. We are the resistance.

Literally, everyone is sending us stories now. So, I pulled a bunch of stuff that would normally have been in our feedback section, because it's a lot of people. Everybody's just sending us these stories. Martin Swinney sent us, saw that you had no bird stories in the last episode.

I figured I would alter that. And you and everybody else. Yes. Uber reportedly joining the San Francisco scooter fray. So, Uber, you know, there is, Uber saw an opportunity to be horrible and could not be left out. Exactly, man. Like, we can't, we got to get in on this.

Yeah. And then Scott sent us, found this story on the BBC and thought about your love for bird and other such services. This is a story over the BBC, how cheap dockless hire bikes are flooding the world. And I think I've been on record saying that I, again, I don't dislike the services. The dockless issue is the real problem.

People are the real problem. Well, people are the real problem. Yeah, well, these companies rely on people being good, and they aren't. It's an interesting read, because it just talks about mainly how the technology has given this to us, how we have crapped on ourselves yet again with cheap, you know, cheap rechargeable batteries, GPS everywhere, app economies, and, you know, people needing extra money to go around and charge things.

It's like, we've done this to ourselves, so we have no one else to blame. Yeah. Dan writes in, hello, Grumpy Doo. I would like to inform you that dockless electric scooters are coming to my hometown of Portland, Oregon. Oh, great. This comment is just a start to all the updates I can bring you guys on the impact of these on the community here.

I look forward to seeing how these vehicles are going to stand with Portland's strong bicycle community. I expect many clashes there, my friend. Yeah. Will they unleash devastation like we have never seen before? Well, here's the thing. I'm wondering how those things work in the rain, how stable they are, because it rains a lot in Portland.

That's true. That's true. Jason sent us, Denver may start removing electric scooters from city sidewalks. So Denver is looking into pulling them. As we found out early last week, bye-bye San Francisco scooters as Bird, Lime, and Spin go on hiatus. Basically, the city has shut them down and said, all right, well, let's do this legally.

You got to get your permits. Yep. And that permit process is what let Uber join in. Yes. Yay. Yay. So, and we both had this one in here. Well, I think like 17 different people tweeted this to us or sent this to us as well.

So this is the, in the Guardian, uh, scooters littering us city streets, shout at police, unlock me or I'll call the police or shout at people. Sorry. So there, there are built in alarms in these things. If you thought the bird chirping was annoying, my God, what is wrong with these people?

Doesn't anybody think about the impact of these things and what, what happens? Well, to, to be honest, the shouting starts when you stand on the scooter and don't unlock it with the app. Right. So it's probably like they think you're stealing it by just pushing it away. Well, I mean, if you're just going to leave it everywhere in a dockless system, you should, you should plan on that.

Well, this is how they planned on it. I'm calling the police. I'm calling the police. Right. So there was another one that a couple of people sent us from Kevin Roos over the New York Times. It's how I learned to stop worrying and love electric scooters. Yes. And so he spent some time in Santa Monica and learned how to do the, the scooting down there, the scoot scoots.

So I recently, I went to Santa Monica yesterday. Yes, you did. To see you and drop off some equipment and pick up some stuff. And man, it is so much worse than I thought it was. Have I been exaggerating, Jason?

I thought you were just being hyperbolic with all of these stories of scooters everywhere. And oh my God, no, you're not. They're everywhere. They're everywhere here. It is. It is a public menace here. Every other block there were, if there weren't like five lime scooters, like lined up on the corner, ready to go, then there were piles of bird scooters on other corners.

Yeah. And as soon as I pull off PCH and start going, you know, going towards your place and, you know, this like, you know, 65, 70 year old woman is tooling down the sidewalk on hers, big old shit eating grin on her face, like going down to the Santa Monica pier, no helmet on the sidewalk.

And as I'm coming up the, like towards main street to your place, this guy comes jetting across and going the wrong way on the other side of the street, jumps a median and like pulls out into traffic on my side and, you know, basically almost gets plastered three times.

And I'm like, okay, now, now we're getting somewhere. We're getting somewhere. And just in, it's like two miles from PCH to your house and 10 instances of people just being dumb asses. And I was on the street in Santa Monica for a whole of like 15 minutes.

I am still shocked that absolutely, I am absolutely shocked. No one has died yet because that's normal. That, that is normal. That is just the way people use them here. So this is his article. He talks, he was here for a week and he thought they were fantastic, which is what I've, what I've been saying.

They are fantastic for tourists. Try living with them. Yeah. He got to go home. You got to go home and leave and not be around this mess. You only dipped your toe in my friend. So I disagree with all of his main points here. He says that scooters are a public safety hazard. And then he goes on to say that they aren't.

You in 15 minutes saw three to four different, different examples of a public safety hazard. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And when I was leaving though, I did see a unicorn. I spotted a unicorn. I saw a 70 year old ish man in the street, not riding on the sidewalk, wearing a helmet.

And he actually used a hand signal to make a turn. Yes. That's a unicorn. Yes, that is a unicorn. His next point is that he says that people complain about scooters are cluttering sidewalks, roads, and other public spaces. And he considers this a function of their novelty. We're noticing them because they're new.

You know what? Go out inside, go out in front of my place right now, right now, because there are five in the sidewalk. And I had to, this morning when I took my kid for a walk, I had to move them out of the way to get my stupid kid down the street. So this isn't just a novelty.

These dockless systems, people just dump them everywhere. Everywhere. But it's new, Brian. You're not embracing technology. You're being a Luddite. His third point, scooters are annoying symbols of tech world elitism. True. It is true.

Ding, ding, ding. Ding, ding, ding. This is not solving transportation issues for poor people. This is a fun little way to get a couple blocks. What are you going to do? Nothing. You do remember not too long ago that we had another techno revolution, the hoverboards.

Remember the hoverboards? Yes. Those went away pretty quick. Yeah. They're not really around too much anymore. The only place you still see them is on the, and again, this is the biggest problem, at least for me with the scooters, is on the bike path. The bike path has now become completely unusable because all the tourists are just shooting down them, doing stupid things on their scooters.

And if you're a, if you're a bicyclist, get ready for this Portland. If you're a bicyclist, give up. Yeah. Well, here's the thing. I think the bicyclists in Portland are going to be a little bit more aggressive than the bicyclists in Venice. That is true. I'm nice. I should stop being nice.

Yeah. I mean, those guys are like lumberjacks up there. You're, you know, you're a little ex-techie. So you were never really a fighter. So I think that, uh, Portland is going to have a different, uh, basically reception for these things.

It's going to be interesting. And I'm sure, I think we have some more bird comments later and I'm sure next week we'll be talking about bird again. Well, yeah, we'll see what's in the news next week. So I wanted to give a little follow-up on going back to Firefox after we've gotten some news that Opera might not be the best browser because of the shady Chinese connections now.

And the fact that my code signing certificate decided to not work with a little snitch. So I'm going back to Firefox and, uh, my God, what a pain in the balls. This is why I haven't done it yet. Like I just finished setting up all my bookmarks and getting things to work the way I wanted to an opera.

And, uh, so the Chinese are still getting some information from me, but I will switch because you kind of have to. Yeah. I mean, the things that are in opera that I really like, well, Hey, I've figured out where the closed tab button is on opera now. So now it's back on the other side. Hate that.

All of my little widgets that I have going in opera, not all of them work. Yeah. Um, the biggest one that I can't get to install is Facebook purity, which is, no, I need that dude. I've, you know, I was on Facebook all morning because of the news and using Firefox. I'm like, Nope, screw it.

Open it up opera again, because it's really bad on a regular browser and even getting the news for this show was tough. So I had to go find a new ad blocker because it doesn't come built in and the ad blocker even popped up ads for me. And I'm like, Oh my God. Oh, can't we just love the Chinese?

Can't we all get along? Can't everybody just stop stealing other people's data? And I can keep my beloved opera? No. In the news. Now technology sometimes is annoying.

Like if you had, say, a bird. But this is an interesting story out of London. They just launched the world's first contactless payment scheme for street performers. Okay. Yes. The mayor, along with a, was it a actual professional organization for buskers called Busk in London, teamed up with a Swedish payment firm called Isetel.

Isetel? And it's a company that was just bought by PayPal for $2.2 billion. And what you can do is set up a contactless reader for your busking and people can just tap you and pay you from the cell phones since people don't carry cash that much anymore. Right.

I think it's a pretty cool idea. I think it's a great idea. I mean, London has a long and rich history of busking. I mean, that is something that is socially acceptable there and a lot of kind of fun, really, and part of the charm of the city. So it's not like they're just random people setting up on any corner.

This is expected. This is part of the culture. So I like it. Now, what if you busk for a living and you can't afford a phone or a bank account? Like you had some bad history with the banks and you can't get a bank account and you basically make your living busking. And this is going to tip people more towards auto payment and not tipping with cash, which might actually spread the economic divide.

What do you think about that? I think you're probably right. But let's face it, cash is going the way of the dodo. So we're going to have to figure out something for people because, yeah, I mean, a lot of people just don't carry cash on them much anymore. People are always shocked when I pull out my wallet and I'm like throwing cash around at bars or things like that.

Oh, yeah. Because they're like, what? You carry cash? I'm like, yes, I always have like 100 bucks on me. Always. So I always pay at Trader Joe's in cash and they look at me like I've got three heads. OK, that is weird. Sorry. You know how slow those systems are. It's faster to do cash than it is to do those stupid pads that they have.

It used to be. But then there was your story about people not understanding how to make change anymore. Right. But that was in Naperville, Illinois with college age kids. Here, the Trader Joe's people are a little more seasoned and I don't have any credit left on my credit card.

So I can't use Apple Pay. So I have to pay in cash. Right. But yeah, it'll be interesting. Maybe this busking London company can like, you know, rent out phones in the morning to people or like when they go on their busking shift. Right. Then they can bring the phones back and then just get cash for the money that they made that day after a small transaction fee.

That's not a bad idea. Yeah. Which means it probably will never get done. Of course not. Now, speaking of cash, it's been a while since we've talked about Bitcoin. What have we said about Bitcoin? That it was bullcrap. So marketplace.org has an article.

Are traders messing with the price of Bitcoin? And why should you care? This is a rare case of the Betteridge's law being incorrect. Yes. Because the answer is yes. And why is that second line a question? And why should you care? I don't know why there is a question mark on that, but it is what it is.

Anyways, the Department of Justice has opened an investigation into whether traders are manipulating the price of Bitcoin and other digital currencies, as we've said they've been doing all along. And this is why he should probably not get involved in it. By the way, have you noticed that the whole cryptocurrency and Bitcoin thing has kind of dropped off the public radar?

Well, except for another story we have coming up in a little bit about John McAfee. I had to mute him today because of the news about him, and I'm just so tired of hearing about cryptocurrency, and that's all he talks about. Most of the people I know have stopped talking about crypto, though. Yeah, it's kind of, it's not the pressing topic anymore, because I think people have kind of figured out it's a load of crap.

Everybody's gone to invest in birds. Yes, we, it's just a platform, literally. I've stumbled across an interesting story over on Medium. Capitalism has failed, and Jay-Z's streaming scandal is proof. Now, I didn't even know that there would ever be news about Tidal ever again.

Right, I thought it was done. Apparently, there is. A Norwegian newspaper, Dagens Nilsgårdslav. I think you nailed it, nailed that one. Nailed that one, right? Has done an explosive investigative report containing damning allegations about the business practices at Tidal, the streaming service owned by Jay-Z.

The paper obtained a hard drive alleged to contain internal streaming data from Tidal. What have we always said? Statistics are crap, but this is the real report that they're keeping for themselves. An examination of its contents revealed that data had been manipulated to inflate streams of Beyonce's Lemonade and Kanye West's The Life of Pablo by a combined 320 million plays.

Both of these projects were exclusive to Tidal at the time of their releases, a huge coup for the fledgling company. If true, and Tidal has maintained that they are not, these allegations will land Jay-Z and Tidal in hot water because they would have fraudulently allocated additional streams to his wife and close friend of the owner of the company.

Unjustly enriching them and depriving other artists of their fair share. Oopsies. I want to know who leaked that hard drive. Me too. I bet Jay-Z does too. I'm sure Jay-Z would very much like to know. The interesting thing about this entire article, it's not even so much about Jay-Z in Tidal.

It's about the economics of technology like we've been talking about. And it's a long read, but I think she nails a lot of things that we've been talking about as well. And if you want a good summary of how she sees the black community and black business people getting screwed as things go forward by their own petard and our own petard, it's a very fascinating read because she's Jamaican, not even American.

And she sees it from her country's point of view where capitalism has just screwed everybody. Then they're going to have so many problems in the future with all these megastorms hitting and nobody's going to be able to get ahead because they're starting over and over and over. She's like, no micro loan or small business seminar is going to fix the fact that we don't have food and water.

Right. So I like she was she's spunky. She's very spunky. It was a great article. Yeah. I mean, I definitely highly suggest that everybody read the whole thing. I was just kind of focusing on Tidal being crap, but a way to bring the social consciousness, Jason. All right. I do my best. I know. And related to that, something we talked about a little while ago, we were talking about what Spotify was going to do and how the labels have kind of gotten in bed with somebody that we think is going to screw them by signing by becoming a label themselves.

And they are. So there's that. Yeah, I've actually I actually had this down in media candy, but we'll talk about it now because it is it is kind of interesting how they're just kind of like trying to pay off people early, skip the labels and pseudo become become a pseudo label is what they're trying to do. They're not exclusive, though, which labels would be and then they would be on all the services.

But for their services, like here, let's just give you some cash up front. You don't have to pay the label anything. And then you can come and be on our service. Right. And it probably makes a lot of sense for a lot of artists to do that, because the idea of being on a label these days is confusing to me because they don't do artist development anymore.

You're expected to do that yourself and the label will hire you once you've actually gotten to a certain amount of followers and things of that nature. So they don't help with that. So what do you need them for? Right. And I think somebody at Spotify has been watching the Netflix story. Yes, exactly.

That's exactly what's happening there. Now, Microsoft has made a big play, which has upset a lot of Uber geeks. They are buying GitHub for $7.5 billion. That's a lot. That is a lot. And GitHub is definitely useful. Is it $7.5 billion? I don't know.

Yeah. It's a bunch of code repositories that anybody can pick up and take with them at the same time. GitHub is like SoundCloud. Yeah. It really is. For code. Yeah. It's all it is. But at least on GitHub, people generally tend to create things instead of stealing other people's stuff.

And if they are stealing it, they are doing it so they can improve on it, which with most of the remixes I've ever heard on SoundCloud, that is not the case. No. Oh, man. And this has been going through the news now. Facebook gave device makers deep access to data on users and friends.

And this seems like I want to say it's the tempest in the teapot, because a lot of this stuff is when you sign it, when you were using your phone and you access Facebook through the built in apps. So some of the data leaked over to the actual device makers and people are going to be going on about this for a while now because Cambridge Analytica story is done, right?

Yep. So now they're trying to find any other place that data, the word data can be used in a headline. And I think it's kind of silly that this is a thing because, I mean, this is just one of those ones that we kind of knew about being builders, right? Well, yeah, but I think it's a sign of the fatigue that we have that it's actually not as big a story as it probably should be even to us.

Like, we're kind of just like, we knew this already, whatever. No, it's a big deal. You say so. I do think it is. I think it's just another nail in the coffin of what Facebook is doing with our data and another nail in our coffin because we don't seem to give a shit.

Just stop giving them your data. That's the easiest thing to do. That's the easiest thing as we both log into Facebook. Yeah, with all of my information is not really my own. That's true. So, yes. Never give them your birth date. Never give them a real answer to a security question. All of the little things that we've always talked about.

And have you noticed that Facebook has removed the trending block? I learned from the trending block that it would be going away. Yeah, I did too. Which is pretty funny. Yeah, I'm actually bummed. I don't know why. I mean, obviously, it's a knee-jerk reaction to fake news and things of such sorts.

It's also, you know, theoretically, they were actually paying real people to kind of curate that and probably don't want to do that anymore. I miss it. I liked it. I have no problem with it. I liked seeing what was trending right there. Now I just go over to Twitter. Exactly. Yeah, for me, it was a two-second look into the zeitgeist.

Exactly. And I could look and say, okay, nothing's going on. Go about my day. It was much easier than digging it around in other places because Facebook trending generally isn't that good. No. So I don't get the point in removing it. Obviously, they're going to try to replace it with something, but I would have waited to have that replacement ready to roll out, wouldn't you?

Yeah, you'd think. There must have been something going on there that they had to pull it early. That's true. We don't know what that is. Yeah, we don't know what that is. And speaking of Facebook and its effects on other people, BuzzFeed is laying off about 20 people, but hiring 45 more in another reorganization. Basically, they are restructuring themselves because they want to move away from Facebook and toward other revenue sources because Facebook has cut the legs out from under everybody.

And we've been screaming about that for five years, but hey, BuzzFeed, you finally figured it out. Yeah, probably a little too late. This episode is sponsored by Eero. Look, we all have Wi-Fi.

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Now, back to the show. Ups and doodads. Well, there's some big computer thing going on in California this week, I hear. Yes, the thing that we never cover. Yeah, the old WWDC, or the Dub Dub.

Dub Dub Dickies. Yeah. And I glanced at some of the stuff. Apparently, they got their keynote down much shorter this year. And there's a bunch of new stuff coming out for things that I can't do, because I don't have one of the fancy new phones with the Animojis, things like that.

More stickers. Yes. Just what everybody wants. I think the interesting thing about this whole shebang is that they didn't announce any new hardware. Everything was software-based. No new hardware this time. Yeah. It's all software, which makes sense. Yeah, because it's been broken.

Well, that and the rush to have new versions of everything all the time has gotten silly and stupid. And I see people out in the wild still using iPhone 5s and quite happy with them. Yeah. Yeah. My friend Jason was in town from England. He's got one of the iPhone 5 form factor ones.

And I'm like, damn, I wish the cameras were better, because I'd get one. But they're not, so I won't. So it makes sense for Apple to kind of sit out a couple cycles in terms of hardware development and just focus on fixing their damn software. Yeah. I'm sure we'll get something later this year, because they've got to keep selling the hardware.

But I'm glad that they're stepping back just a little tiny bit to make this stuff not so janky. We'll see, though, because there still are a lot of new features. Yeah. I was looking through everything. Nothing too much on iOS that I thought was that interesting. It's mostly just pretty and fun stuff.

The watch stuff, nothing really too great there. I mean, better podcast integration, which is nice. The walkie-talkie feature is kind of cool, I guess. I like that one, because that way, you know, if we're getting ready for the show, I can walkie-talkie you from the shitter saying, I need a few more minutes.

Had too much Chinese last night. See, that's the kind of information I don't necessarily need to get that well. So that's why I'm kind of not so sure about it. But improve notifications is nice. I did look at that. The student ID card is kind of clever. We need that for driver's licenses.

Yeah. The fact that we don't have electronic driver's licenses at this point. Because I think about that all the time, like especially if I'm going, if I'm just going to go to Whole Foods, I know they take Apple Pay. And I wouldn't really need to take my wallet, except for the fact that I have to drive and then I need to have my license on me.

So, you know, that would be a, I would love to see some form of electronic ID people. I know that might lead to the number of the beasts and all that, but let's get on it. Oh, you know it, man. You know it. Chemtrails and tinfoil hats. That's what comes out of that. And don't you forget it. Yeah. Oh, and the one thing about the new OS 10 that looks nice, or whatever, sorry, OS Mojave now, I forget what the, it's just Mac OS, that's what they call it.

I'm still used to OS 10. But the Mojave preview has a really nice feature called dark mode, which I really, really like. But I'm still running Sierra on all my computers because audio software sucks every time they update their OS and audio software engineers obviously suck too, because things will just randomly stop working.

And when you make your living using high-end audio equipment, you need the software to work with it. Yeah. So I guess I need to hold off too, since we've updated my little home studio. So. You should be fine. You'll be fine. It's just a USB thing. Like, it's fine. As we found out that half the software that I thought worked with yours doesn't.

No, that was a good 30 minutes of a showtime there. Yeah. Yeah. Next time we'll, we'll record it for Patreon. Oh wait, we couldn't record it because the shit didn't work. That's right. And I do have a little rant here. I'm, I'm very upset. I'm very upset with Adobe and I'm very upset with Apple because of these new versions of the shit that Apple has been putting out with these high capacity images that you take on your phones.

Now they don't really run with everything, which is a problem like Lightroom, which I have used faithfully since version one. And guess what? What? No go. No go. Cannot import any of the photos I've taken since I got an iPhone eight plus or whatever the new operating system is.

I think it just came out with iOS 11, maybe 10. I got a lot of them. There's a couple thousand of them. So I can't use them in Lightroom, which means I can't organize them. So I went and looked and I'm like, oh, that's what they're doing now. Apparently the new version of Lightroom CC, the Creative Cloud Edition, you can use them.

Yes. Yes. And they're not going to be updating the older version. So why would they do that? Of course. Why would they do that? So looking into that, I am not going to pay a monthly subscription where I have to put three terabytes of my photos in Adobe's cloud. I'm sure there might be an option for just local storage, but my stuff so complicated, it's going to be a pain in the ass.

So I call up a friend of the show, Seth Miranda over at Adorama Camera and the host of some of their new podcasts, which we will link in the show notes because I don't have the name of them yet. He turned me on to Capture One and he said he's been using this thing forever and it's awesome.

It is pro level storage and management. Right. And I had no idea this thing really existed. I remember Capture One just being for tethered capture for cameras and I started digging into this thing and transferring over some of my Lightroom libraries and man, is it sweet.

It is really, really sweet. It's not that much. It's like 299 bucks I think, but you own it and they're going to update it. You own it. There is no, I'm not doing a subscription program for it. I own it, but it's pretty damn sweet. I got to say, I'm not, haven't completely transferred over yet because three terabytes of photos takes kind of a while transfer, but if you're into photo management and are sick of the bullshit

from Adobe and Lightroom, probably like you MXV and a couple of my other friends who store a lot of photos in Lightroom, you might want to take a look at Capture One. It's pretty sweet. Very cool. Well, one thing that I've been trying to manage recently and that Apple has made very difficult is my text messages and they have finally sort of come in there, fixed it.

Not really. There's a link in the show notes to Lifehacker, how to find and set up messages in iCloud on the just released Mac OS 10.13.5. So finally, now, if you put your messages in the cloud, they will sync between your computer and your phone. You know where they still don't sync?

Where? The one place it's most difficult to delete text from, your Apple Watch. Oh, man. Still no syncing there, which drives me crazy because that's the one place it's the hardest to delete them because you have to find the messages, then you have to swipe, then you have to click delete, and then you have to click trash.

You have to click on the stupid little watch like three times just to delete a message, but at least they're syncing between the phone and the computer now, which is very nice. Oh, yay. Although, I will say, what could possibly go wrong storing your text messages in the cloud? Right, Hollywood actresses?

Yep, yep, yep. Just going to mention that. Okay, okay. So, some pictures have come out about that red Hydrogen One phone. Mm-hmm. Looks kind of cool. It looks kind of cool. You know what it looks cool?

If you were, like, in the first William Gibson movie and you were accessing the internet from that thing, what the hell is this thing? I don't know. It looks, it's industrial design for sure. Like, I would have, like, back when I was, like, a rivet head and I was going to Control Factory, the club, this would have been the best phone in the world.

No doubt. This is, I mean, this is, like, right out of Neuromancer. Yeah. It really is. It's interesting looking, but, you know, still no idea what the holographic display is really going to be or do or look like. Everybody says you have to see it in person because it just doesn't work in photographs, which makes sense. Right. Yeah, it does make sense.

It makes total sense. But I'd kind of like to see one now, even though they're, yeah, they're only showing you the back of it in these pictures. And it's weird looking, man. Yeah. It's a weird phone. For that price, it better have something going on up front. That's all I got to say. It looks like it's got, like, a SCSI port on the back of it.

It does. It's very odd. I don't know. I don't know. And Dave & Buster's. Ever been to a Dave & Buster's? I have. One of my friends had his bachelor party at Dave & Buster's. He was a little bit square. I was going to say.

I wasn't at that one. No. No, no, the girls that are from those bachelor parties would not be allowed in Dave & Buster's, most likely. But, yeah, they're going to be installing more than 500 HTC Vive VR headsets in its arcades across the U.S. and Canada. Very smart.

We'll see. Yeah, because I bet they can get them at a discount because nobody else is buying them right now. That's true. No, I mean, it makes sense for a company like this to do it. And it makes me happy because I can go and I can try out some VR stuff and have beer at the same time without having to invest in any of it myself.

Now, we also talked a long time ago about how when autonomous cars get here, how filthy they're going to be. How filthy do you think these VR headsets are going to get at Dave & Buster's? Well, I would never, ever, ever even get close to one without my own personal wipes. Yeah, you got to bring your wipes.

We're going to be wiping those things down. Oh, that's our new business model. VR wipes. Ooh, VR wipes. I bet we could do some cool branding. We could make it look like that red phone, you know, very rivety, high-tech, neuromancer style. It'll be great. I'm thinking like when you rip open the little packet and you unfold it, it's basically like a yarmulke.

And you stick it on your head and you swirl it around. Nice. Because, you know, this is for after using it. Or you could stick your fist up in it and whip it around in the thing, but then you might get some on the glass. Or VR doilies, VR condoms, basically. But, you know.

Right. It's coming, people. We got to think about this stuff. The future is almost here. And you better lube up.

Media candy. Brian, we already talked about Benedict Cumberbatch in the beginning. Yes. And his cumberbitches. He's got a new show on Showtime called Patrick Melrose. Yes. You see the ads for it everywhere. Well, I don't go anywhere, so I didn't.

But my roommate saw the ads and said, hey, that looks like something that we should watch. So got the first couple episodes. It's five total, four out now. By the time this airs, all five will be out. And it is interesting.

The first episode is like train spotting. It's a great, it's great. I loved it. But then from there, it goes completely other places, which if I talk about, we'll spoil it. But it's an odd show, is all I'm going to say. Benedict is fantastic in it, of course, obviously.

But the story is a little bit odd. And Agent Smith plays his dad in it, too, which is pretty good. It's got great casting, great acting. Interesting story. I do recommend it. It is. It's a good it's a good tale. I I'm dying to see how they wrap it up, though.

And I don't know if there's going to be a second season of this. All right. Well, let me know. I mean, for me to get into this means I would have to actually pay for Showtime again, which I haven't because I got. Oh, yeah. There's well, there's Sweden because I got sick of Homeland and that was it for Showtime for me.

So Sweden, it might be. It's a it's a good watch. Five episodes, like I said, and I think it is going to be a standalone story. You could at least watch this as a standalone story. OK, cool. I also want to talk about a quick podcast. It's a revisionist history. Malcolm Gladwell's podcast.

It's been decent. You know, some of them are hit or miss. But I got to say, the free Brian Williams episode that came out this week was stellar. I loved it. Did you get a chance to listen to this? I listened to it on my bike ride this morning. I came back in. I went to go put it in the show notes and found out that you already had it here.

It's actually I think you need to go back. It's not just the free Brian Williams one. That one is great. But you should listen to the one that's just previous to that as well, because it's the continuation, really. That's right. Of a deep series that he did two episodes basically on memory and how sucks. Basically, our memory sucks.

It's horrible. And we we just don't remember things at all the way that we think we do. I found these two episodes both to be absolutely fascinating. Yeah, and this is a theme that I've heard in other podcasts recently. I think even it was on Adam and Dr. Drew. They talked about it a little bit. And Penn and Teller, definitely.

There's Penn Sunday School. He talked about it because, you know, he'll be listening to a story that Teller is telling and he was there and the stories are completely different. Like nothing matches up because when you we know from the science, when you remember a story, you modify it. So every time you're accessing a memory, you are modifying certain parts of it, losing some and then reinforcing others.

And that whole that whole field is like fascinating to me. And it just it's kind of interesting that it's come back in such a short time into the zeitgeist in such different shows. Yeah, well, it's really interesting because we're discovering this more and more because we have records of everything now, right?

Like so we have something to go and compare because we have the history. Everything is being recorded. Everything is being documented. So what Brian Williams is just a really unfortunate guy that he's one of the first high profile figures that's really been caught with this because the record is there. We were able to go back and see what he said at the exact time.

Never before in human history have we had this. So we're really discovering just how bad our memory really is in comparison to real events because we've got them all recorded. Yeah, it used to be just hearsay and how somebody remembered it or wrote it down at the time, which still might have not been accurate. And now we just go back and watch them actually say it again.

It's like, oh, sorry, buddy. That's not really the way it happened. And also our memories have become atrophied greatly because of that, because of the technology. I used to be able to remember everybody's phone number and I could remember your phone number on the first listen.

I was a highly tuned phone number machine. But now you tell me a phone number. It's like, I'm like, text me your number. Here, here's my phone. Just text me the number. So I just have to push the button to add it to my thing. That's it. That's it. So I'll grab the link for the other show before this one as well.

But yeah, it's a really good series. On memory. Yeah, I really enjoyed it a lot. So hopefully I remember it correctly. I'm sure I don't. I finally watched Thor Ragnarok. Ragnarok. Ragnarok. It tells you exactly how into this stuff I am.

Because you even misspelled it in. Oh, yeah. I misspelled it in the show notes because, yeah, I just needed something stupid and silly to watch. Everybody had told me how good it was. It's on Netflix, so it was free for me. And I watched it and I think it had been over typed by everyone.

It was fun. It was fine. I didn't. The people were saying this is the best superhero movie that's ever been made. It's so funny. It's so tongue in cheek. Ha ha ha. It's so great. It was all right. Did you see Hunt for the Wilderpeople? No. I reviewed that on the show a while ago. You should go back and watch Hunt for the Wilderpeople because half of the people in that movie are in Thor Ragnarok.

So it was much more fun if you had seen Hunt for the Wilderpeople first and then seen them all in these crazy roles in Thor Ragnarok. But I enjoyed it. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was fine. I just think it was built up too much for me because everybody was saying how great it was. Well, you know, we've had some pretty big stinkers recently.

So Batman versus Superman and shit like that. So this one, I think by virtue of it not sucking, it was the greatest thing ever. Okay. I can see that. I can understand that. This is my superhero movie logic. Right. And finally, Robert Smith from The Cure has given a pretty big interview for the first time in quite a while as he's getting ready to curate the Meltdown Festival and play a bunch of shows.

Curate. I see what you did there. Ha ha. Well, it's also true. I know. It is the word one uses. Yeah. And it was just a good interview. I really liked it. He talks about how he used to be much more optimistic when he was young and writing doom and gloom songs.

And now he's really pessimistic about the state of the world and he writes happier songs. So it's interesting. Great interview with him. Really interesting. I can't believe the dude is 59 years old. That's just crazy to me. We are getting old. Yep. Yep. Yep. At the library.

I read a book. Woo. I know. I still haven't. I, uh, I listened to head on by John Scalzi, of course, read by Will fucking Wheaton. And it's been a while since I've heard a book by Will and I didn't mind him this time.

It was just when every book that I ever listened to was read to me by Will Wheaton. And, uh, he's gotten better actually. He's gotten a lot better from even just a couple of books ago, getting more voices down. It was pretty good. I forgot it was him. Like after the first hour, I'm like, oh, he's getting really good.

Right. So this is a follow-up to the 2014 book lock in both by John Scalzi. And, uh, I liked lock in a lot and was worried that there was not going to be a follow-up, but turns out there is, and it's called head on. And it's the same, same main protagonist in, in the world of this place where people have like, you know, bodies that they can tell a presence into because there was some disease that literally locked people in their bodies.

So they fast track the technology that have neural implants so they could get out of their body and be productive members of society or be in cyberspace or whatnot. And I love the world. The books are well-written, extremely well-written and the plot's really fun. So both of these books I find extremely enjoyable and highly recommend them.

Very nice. And I just got a notification from Amazon about Terry Pratchett. I've been missing Discworld dearly recently, and they're putting out a Discworld diary for 2019, which will include little bits of Discworld trivia. So this may take the place of my moleskin for next year.

I think it would be very pleasant. That's pretty cool. I like it. I like it. Yeah, I looked at it and I'm thinking, hmm, it's pretty neat, but it doesn't come out until October. It does not come out until October, but it's okay because it's for 2019. This story, Brian, gives me hope for the future.

Really? Because we could use some of that. Yes. It's a story in the Atlantic. It's called Climate Change Can Be Stopped by Turning Air into Gasoline. Okay. More gas is going to help us save the planet. Well, the thing is, a team of scientists from Harvard University and a company called Carbon Engineering, they announced on Thursday that they have found a method to cheaply and directly pull carbon dioxide pollution out of the atmosphere.

Okay. And it's cheap, is the thing. That's good. Yeah. It was as recently as 2011. A panel of experts estimated that it would cost at least $600 to remove a metric ton of carbon dioxide from the air. Now, this new paper says that they can remove the same ton for as little as $94.

Wow. And not more than $232. At those rates, it would cost between $1 and $2.50 to remove the carbon dioxide released by burning a gallon of gasoline in a modern car. Hmm. So, there's your new gas tax. That's okay. I'm fine with that. Mm-hmm. But yeah, they basically had found a way to scrub the atmosphere and get stuff back out of it, but produce gasoline.

So, basically, you're only renting gasoline in the future. Oh. I have my gas app. There you go. Oh, man. And in other interesting news, Microsoft just put a data center on the bottom of the ocean. Keeps it cool. Does keep it cool.

Now, the interesting thing is it keeps it cool because it's warming up the ocean around it. Because it warms up the ocean. Yeah. And they put this thing out in the Orkney Islands outside of Scotland because of just the way that the geography works there. And the Orkneys have basically a huge infrastructure for renewable energy.

The entire data center is run on renewable energy and cooled by the ocean. It's kind of cool. It's pretty cool. Yep. Yep. It's 12 racks loaded with 864 servers. Nice. That's a decent amount of servers. It's a decent amount. I thought it'd be somewhat bigger if you're going to all the expense of putting it down in the ocean.

Well, that's the thing. I mean, they should be able to put these down there in 90 days instead of like two years to build a data center. Right. Which is good. And you can pull them back up. So they can't be too big. You don't want to be, you know. Right. It's like, you know, when you pull servers from Iraq, you don't want to have to pull up a building.

That's a good point. But, you know, a container-sized tube is not too bad. And it looks pretty good. So we'll see how it goes. And one of the interesting things here that was in the article that I found kind of fascinating says, considering that over half of the world's population lives within 120 miles of the coast, submarine data centers can ensure that major cities are always close to the physical servers that comprise the cloud.

Right. So that's kind of interesting, you know. Very interesting. But that just means that more of our data is going to be on somebody else's server. In the ocean. Josh and Pavel on Twitter and about 55 other people sent us this link this week.

It's, yeah, a man dies on Mount Everest during Ask FM cryptocurrency promotional stunt. Derp. Derp. Now, to be honest, the guy that died wasn't actually part of the stunt. He was one of the Sherpas that got left behind. Yeah, which kind of sucks for him.

Yeah. It's like, bro, where's my Sherpa? Uh, dude. Dude. No, he's, he probably went back to dig up the cryptocurrency. Probably. If I was up there with him and I saw where they buried it, I'd grab the, grab the, the crypto wallet, just head down the other side of the mountain.

Yes. But they haven't found this guy yet, so they're probably assuming he's dead. That's probably a good assumption and very sad, which sucks. So, uh, we have a whole lot of morons because I found this awesome, awesome list over at SciBabe, a very great site. This is an incomplete list of complete bullshit websites.

It's going to be incomplete because that list is going to be long. Yep. It's long. So it's worth a scan, worth a quick scan through. It's a, even if some of these sites are a little smaller, if you've never even heard of them, obviously you've got the big ones like Goop and Info Wars, but the takedowns on all of them are fantastic.

It's been, the original post has been edited 15 times now where they just keep adding more and more because people are sending them in. This is absolutely fantastic. And it kind of perfectly shows everything that's wrong with the internet. So that's just something else to check before you, uh, send off that email with a link to somebody.

Yes. First check Snopes, then check this list. Yes. Make sure that nothing comes from there and, and read this before you drop a bunch of butter in your coffee because yep, we'll put bulletproofs on there too. Feedback loop. We have some new Patreon subscribers, Keith, Michael, Marco, Paul, Gabe, Gabe, who also writes in, Hey guys, just started my Patreon pledge when I realized I can't imagine making it through a week without getting my GOG on.

I'm a computer scientist turned to bio information, informatician that builds, say that 10 times fast, that builds clinical genetic analysis software. So if you ever want an insider read on the world of personal genomics, genomics and security would be happy to chat. Well, can you tell me what the fuck my dog's made of?

That would help. And send me Jason's data. I want to put it out on the deep web. Thanks a lot, Gabe. Uh, Jesus also subscribing at Patreon. Woo. Woo. Uh, yeah. Thank you, man. Uh, Gil upped his pledge. So thank you very much. And he also wrote it and said, greetings again from Portugal.

I upped my contribution to this remarkable podcast that I've been listening to since episode 53 or so. You've been my companion on my commute for a damn long time. And well, I guess you deserve a bit more of my monies. Hope this helps. Keep the lights on and the beer flowing for you both. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much.

And Phil upped his pledge as well. So thank you very much, Phil. As did Jay Cummings. Nice. We appreciate it. Yes. Yeah. Oliver finally wrote in to give us his band name that he wanted us to pimp. So he wrote, uh, shit, I forgot to send you my band. We're called pterodactyl problems.

Paradactyl problems, right? Yeah. We play hard rock, but have a wide range of influence all the way from death metal to Ed Sheeran. Here's a song from our EP and we're nearly finished recording our first full length record. Hope you enjoy. And we've got a link to his YouTube in the show notes there. Okay. A couple of things here. First, love the song.

It's right up my alley. Uh, second, Toronto. Yay. And, but third, your band camp page has shit credits. I don't know who's who. And, uh, there's no way to kind of find the lineup credits until I dive into an actual track. And that's how I found out Oliver is the drummer. And I, but I really liked the song totally in my wheelhouse, but probably not so much for you, Brian.

Yeah, it's totally not my thing, but I can appreciate the musicianship. And, uh, you guys are recording like 10 minutes away from my in-laws house. So that's kind of awesome and beer with them next time you're up there. Yeah, definitely. And, uh, Cohen also wrote in after intro talking about us healthcare, I've decided to post this when I do see some conservative us politicians talk about healthcare or gun control over here in the media.

I have the urgent need to call Euro poll. These politicians seem to have taken some relatively new and very illegal drug. I don't know about. They've lost any connection to reality, seem to be living in a parallel universe and lost the ability to process common sense. So we need to tackle it before it reaches Europe or we are doomed.

Seriously, what can be wrong with some elemental healthcare for everyone enforced by the government? Even a dictator like Castro figured this out. The irony is most voters are lower or middle class and would benefit from it. Typically, Scandinavian countries have the highest standard of living. Maybe, just maybe, America should look and see what's happening here.

Take the best ideas and try to improve them. Especially for social security, Americans don't get much bang for your buck. I would recommend the documentary Where to Invade Next from Michael Moore. The facts about the European countries are not fabricated. I was shocked about what he had to say about the U.S., so I'm not sure that they are representative of the U.S.A. as a whole.

Well, that basically is almost every conversation I have with friend of the show, Carl Wallinger. He just screams at me about all this stuff, too. Hard to argue with you. Where to Invade Next was a fantastic film. I did enjoy a lot of that. And, you know, we don't know. It's not what we're voting for here.

No, no. But I will say the news today from Anthony Bourdain did get me to start the process of getting health insurance. So, in case I hit the bottom again, I have somewhere to go to get help. Yes. So, that was at least one plus for the day. There you go. And over at PayPal, we have a recurring donation that came in from William, and we've got a donation from Isaac, who wrote, Well, it finally happened.

After chuckling along with your rants on companies like Bird and the like, I noticed Lime Bike had made it onto the military bases. Oh, what can go wrong there? The first instance involved a booth at a highly trafficked area where they had pretty girls convincing the younger folks how easy it is to do. At first, the idea seemed great since a lot of us walk for 20 minutes, if not longer, to get around, and surely military folk can put the bikes in proper spots to keep good order.

All it took was a week. These things are everywhere, next to dumpsters, around blind corners, you name it. I can spin in a circle and find at least two wherever I am. I sure hope they don't have bounties like Bird. The last thing we need is a civilian getting shot trying to scale the base gates to charge a bike. Okay, I got one thing to say about this, and I wish Dave was here so he could chime in on it.

The military is letting basically consumer-grade electronics onto their military bases. With GPSs on them. Without, yeah, remember even, what was that Strava app? Yes, the Strava app that tipped people off to some secret military bases. Yeah, well, I'm sure they're not, Lime is not like shuttling these birds over to Afghanistan, you know, for the secret bases.

I bet they really wouldn't run in the sand that good. But imagine some creative person took a Lime bike or a bird home to charge it, decided to put in a Stingray or some other, you know, cell listening device, and then released it back onto the military base to listen to the communications.

How about that? How about that? Yeah, I'm thinking that the big boxes of consumer-grade electronics zipping around mapping a military base probably isn't the smartest idea. So somebody on your base, Ike, should maybe have a look into that. Maybe. And I just got to say, I mean, my point about the dockless stuff, this nails it home for me.

The most disciplined people on the planet. Yep. The military, the U.S. military, with the finest level of discipline on the planet, cannot manage to put these damn bikes away properly. So what are we doing here? There's no hope for the rest of us. There's no hope for the rest of us.

There is no hope. I can't even make my bed in the morning. And these people can bounce quarters off their beds, and they still can't put their bikes out of the way. Yep. Yep. Paul sent us over at Facebook, fancy creating your own AI driverless car? Don't forget the blockchain. You can now download the world's largest self-driving data set.

That's pretty interesting, actually. You can build your own. I did. And it's funny. It's at interestingengineering.com. Yes. I went and looked at this article. There's a lot of data. This is definitely by far the world's largest data set by, like, a lot. Public, though, right? Like, we don't know what Tesla has.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's that. Tesla's not releasing that. Yeah. But the thing is, it's all 2D, so there's no... But it does have GPS info in a lot of different pieces to go with it. So this is like the starter kit for your own self-driving car empire.

I'm going to make self-driving scooters, Jason. Okay. You can do that. Drive them. If you can, drive them right up to Santa Monica Pier and right off the end. Perfect. Ted writes in, I saw this, found it funny as hell, and thought of you guys. Fox is claiming this poll is big news. Yet when you look at the bottom of the poll, it says, This study was completed among a random sample of registered voters who responded to an email invitation to complete the survey.

This is like believing one of those Facebook polls you jokingly fill out. No way to tell if the emails actually reached people in the community. Fox are idiots. Maybe they should have had a question about bird usage. Yes, I started listening only a few months ago, but being an IT pro for 20 years and being around the same age as you guys, I find a lot of relevance in what you talk about.

Thank you for the voice of reason and the voice of us geeks who are, feel old, and are grumpy. Okay. Guessing this was typed from a phone. So the study is Bay Area Exodus. Nearly 50% of Californians say they want to move out soon, poll finds.

And I looked at it, and yeah, this is definitely a small sample size and a self-selecting sample size. Yeah, which is two bad things about actual polls. Also, by the way, everybody that's lived in California, at least my entire life, has always said we got to get the hell out of this state because it's too damn crowded and the traffic's too bad and the prices are too high.

And all of us are still here, even Jason, who leaves and comes back. Yeah, at least I take a break. I have a California vacation every now and again. So, you know, after a year or two, I find I should come back and get fed up again. Yeah. Over on Twitter, Thomas wrote and said, Hey, Jason, remember that episode from the Orville?

And includes a link, China has started ranking citizens with a creepy social credit system, which we've talked about that a couple times on the show, actually. So, yeah. Yep, yep. And I do remember that episode of the Orville, and I can't wait for the Orville to come back. Because that's a happy place for me now. It's a happy show. Brian should watch, but he won't.

No. And Matthew writes in, Hey, look, John McAfee says he'll run for president in 2020. This is why I had to mute John McAfee today. Because his feed just went insane with really bad artwork and talking about crypto prez.

He at least comes out and says that he knows he's not going to win. He doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell, but he wants to be up on the stage with the people who are running to try and give legitimacy. It's a cryptocurrency. Yeah. So. Okay. And I just, I mean, I'm sorry. I watched the documentary about John McAfee.

And if you listen to what the girls like to use to do to him, you just can't get the smell of that mustache out of your mind. Oh, boy. Yeah, it's gross. It's gross. All right. We got roped into some discussion about Apple at some point. So Quantum Leap tweeted us and said, I was once a diehard Mac evangelist in the think different era.

Today, I'm just a Mac user. I wouldn't mind letting you guys point out some weak points in their lineup and screw up the whole WWDC presentation. I said, I'm one of those guys still buying and downloading music so I can use my player solution of choice. I do use iTunes to manage my library. Nothing more. It's not the best piece of software, but for just managing your library, it's okay for me.

Yeah. Well, it's kind of one of the only games out there, sadly. And fortunately, it's also destroyed my library so many times that I've given up on it and I don't even go back and fix it anymore. Yeah, yeah, and I have a folder of MP3s and that's it. Every now and again, I'll grab one and try and find the convoluted ass way to get it on whatever device I need to get it on.

But I miss the days of the Rio. Please bring back the Rio. Yeah. And Joseph writes in, hope you guys have a better week. Well, I was. We were. But you know what? Things are going to look up. Things are always going to look up. That's right. And Brian wrote in and said, I'm a loyal listener, but Jason and Brian is tripping.

Listening to this episode about the Uber accident, software did kill that lady. Her recklessness actually ended in tragic accident. That logic is Trump-like. The perfect series of event happened. Now, I didn't quite parse this and I saw that you wrote them back. You want to fill me in on this? Well, software did kill that lady.

Her recklessness actually ended in tragic accident. So was it the software or her recklessness? That was why I was confused. Right. Because you say one thing and say another and they kind of conflict. So I, yeah, yeah, the software killed her, of course.

But, you know, the lack of human oversight with the software is what I was saying is that the programmers are going to have a hard time sleeping at night, especially the ones that disabled the emergency brake and the person that was in the car that should have pressed the brake. Yeah. Well, the key for me was the fact that they had disabled, they had stopped the car's auto driving system from being able to engage the brake and they had switched off the notification that was supposed to be sent to the human to go ahead and then be able to do it.

To me, that's all that matters. Nothing else matters about this entire situation. That is a double set of influences that cause death, that made it impossible for the car's brake to be engaged. End of story. Well, I mean, he could have stepped on the brake if he was looking at the window.

If he was actually looking, that's true. Yes. Yeah. That's the third piece of the triangle there. Right. So, all in all, it was a grand failure. But, you know, a thousand monkeys in a room, you're going to get to death by auto at some point, I guess. That's true. All right. Over on GOG.show, Mad Mike writes in, So, Opera, you say rather tragically, as it turned out, is owned by a Chinese government shell company.

That is good information and excellent return on my monthly investment in you guys. Thanks. Two days into Firefox and I like it. Not as much as I liked opera, but the absence of Chinese government makes up for it. Dude, I don't know, man. I'm still on the fence about that. He says he received an email from Firefox today that made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

The scotch helped a little, though. It included the following bit. Because you are not a product, you're an explorer on the open web. You deserve something different, something better. Proving yet again what Simon Sinek has been spouting for a decade now. People don't buy what you sell, they buy why you sell it.

Still my favorite of Harbinger's new shows, by the way, Jason. Thanks again, guys. Thank you. Yep. Thank you very much. Glad you're listening to the other show. GP writes in, Love the show, minus the politics, but it's not going to stop me from listening. Hey, look, it's a real adult. Thank you. Thank you. First off, the birds are taking over Denver.

At least your podcast has prepared me for the invasion. On the web browser front, I've wondered if you've looked into Brave. It is browser built to give the user greater control over their security. Now, a long time ago I looked into Brave, and then when I got this, I went and looked at it again. Now, after hitting the homepage today and seeing the headline and link underneath, I probably never will.

Brave and Town Square partnered to monetize ad blocking with utility tokens and test blockchain-based publisher advertising. Bye. That does not sound like it's built for security. Here's the thing. I don't want anything that has blockchain in it anywhere near my browsing history.

Yep. That's it. That's it. Telling you right now. End of story. I don't care what to do. Especially not doing this show. Yeah, seriously. You should see the weird things that we look up sometimes. Oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah. Corncob dildo was my favorite this week. Yeah. Thanks for getting that in my history as well.

Awesome. Brian writes in, No! Birds have invaded Atlanta. FYI, we have the worst traffic in the country and the worst drivers. No, you don't. I've seen much worse drivers in Atlanta. Yet someone thought this would be a good idea. How many birds will be roadkill on the street?

And how many pedestrians will be roadkill by the bird riders? It's also a popular hobby to go carjacking over the weekends. So I'm sure it's only a matter of time before people start birdjacking riders at gunpoint, only to hoard the scooters for a month to raise the bounty. This is going to be fun.

Love the show and keep up the good work. Brian in Atlanta. Well, you're painting a lovely picture of Atlanta, Brian. Yeah, seriously. Yeah. Good luck with that scooter stuff. I love hearing about all this, though. I've got my war map going here and I'm pinning in Atlanta. There we go. All right.

Next up, Theo. Brian, I think I have the solution for your partial stock investing issue. Check out Motif Investing. The premise is batch-themed investing. So one motif is typically about 30 stocks that are centered around them, such as a high dividends, monopolies, et cetera. The cool thing is you can create your own motifs and the batching allows you to save money.

You can also add money to stocks within the motif once you've purchased it. You can see how your motif performs versus the stock market over its lifetime. Hope this helps. Thanks so much for that. I've gotten a number of suggestions from people. It looks like there is no real partial stock investing the way that there used to be. In fact, front of the show, Mike, who turned me on to ShareBuilder, which is what I was using and he was using in the first place, just informed me that they're actually going to shut that down.

So I guess it's not making money for people to do it anymore. So I'm still on the hunt for a straight up one, but this looks pretty interesting. I'll check it out. Thank you. I want to figure out how I got a partial trade in E-Trade because I own like 22.46018 shares of Apple.

Right. And I don't know how that happened. I don't know how that would have happened either. Was it a long time ago? Yeah. It was a couple of years ago. All right. They may have been offering weird stuff like that then. It could be. It's back when I bought it at 118. Yay me. I hope I don't have to go get it soon.

Phil Doe writes in, I upped my Patreon to $10 a month in the hopes that Jason can use the extra scratch to buy his babies a new toy. To be honest, $250 a week is a tenth of what your work is worth, but that's why my budget allows for now. Much love. Well, thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. And Jake wrote, sorry, I forgot to attach the link to the cybersecurity training.

Here's a couple. The first is shorter, but has no sound. The second is the full experience, but no sound. It's U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency Test and Cyber Awareness Challenge. Also, you guys should check out Craig Allenson's series, Expeditionary Force. I'd highly recommend starting with the audiobook version. There you go, Jason.

The narrator does an amazing job and nearly got an Audi award for his performance. The first two chapters of the first book are a little slow, and it's definitely not Shakespeare, but it's one of my favorite guilty pleasures. All right. And on the first, the first video does have sound. I watched it, some of it this morning. Yeah. It's actually kind of cool.

Very cool. Yeah. I kind of crapped on it before. I'm like, who's going to do that kind of training? But going through it, it's actually pretty engaging. It does remind me of the CD-ROMs from the 80s, but I can see how it can actually be effective. So I'm going to pedal back on that one and think, hey, that might be a good idea.

Okay. And I also bought the first in the series, Expeditionary Force. So I will check it out this week because I could use some more sci-fi in my life. I need to disengage. Right. Me too. And over at the Clash Royale clan, Beta Bucket writes in, why do you support Googlers forcing the dropout from the Maven program?

I'm a bit confused. They won't stop targeting drone strikes, but they would make them more accurate and presumably limit collateral damage. What do they want to do? He says, I'm not trolling. I just don't understand. What do you think, Brian? I support any company for the company's employees did not want to get involved with the military industrial complex.

And so that's good, right? If they don't want to do it and Google decides to pull out, it's like if you were working for any company and that company wanted to get involved with something that you didn't feel comfortable with and the company decided not to because of you, that's a good thing, right? Yeah, somebody else will take care of this.

Yeah, there's always somebody else out there. But yeah, if this guy, you know, or if these people sign up, it's like, hey, I want to write new AI to help, you know, cure diseases and find, you know, find things that are going to be better for humanity. And you give me a job of targeting people who I don't think should be targeted or, you know, maybe stop doing drone strikes and we wouldn't need so many.

I'm just saying these people have a right to say no. And some of them have left, but at least Google did the right thing and backpedaled and they're not going to be part of it. Now, if they want to open up a new branch, you know, if there's the letter M in alphabet left for military and they want to open that up and people want to go work for it, fine, go do that.

But the people who were already there and got this thrust upon them, I can see why they would complain. I would. Yeah. I mean, look, Google take don't be evil out of their out of their handbooks and everything. But a lot of people, you and I both know people that work at Google and a lot of people are very, they very much bought into the do no evil bit and they see Google as a force for good and they're there to try to do good.

So this was jarring to a lot of these people. So, you know, Google is welcome to do whatever they want. They can keep doing it if they want to. And these people can choose to leave the company. But I personally like the fact that Google listened to its employees. I do, too. I think that's a fantastic move and it gets a little bit more goodwill.

OK, we got some iTunes reviews this week. Woohoo. Thanks, guys. We missed you last week. Kev NG9 from Canada writes in perfect start to the week. This podcast has made Mondays when it comes out on Mondays infinitely better. Excellent news and love the banter. Thanks for making me look like a madman when I laugh out loud on the subway commute to work.

You're welcome. Yes. Another one from Canada from Brevia LC. Just like family to me. These guys are just like family, i.e. they don't stop complaining. Thankfully, I can't argue back so the police don't have to be called. All the same, I keep coming back each week for some reason. Nice.

And over in Germany, Warrior writes in great show. Thanks, guys. Enjoying the show. Again, the Germans who write in, they're very terse and just get to the point. That's true. We've never had like any long review from Germany. Just great show. Yep. Thank you.

We'll take it. And finally, I did something this last week that I've always told my clients to never do. I Googled us. Oh, dear. Okay. And I discovered that not only did we have one, we had two different articles that we appeared in.

The first is over at Salon with no commentary, but we were one of a list of humanity-focused tech podcasts that they had chose. And I would like to say we were number two on the list, beating Reply All. Suck it, bitches. Yes, there was that. And then I discovered way back in February that we got a write-up in The Guardian.

Wow. Of all places. Miranda Sawyer wrote a couple of different podcast reviews. Most of them were negative. Of all the podcast reviews, we were one of only two shows that got a positive review. Oh. So isn't that nice for us? So she says, Jason DeFillippo and Brian Schulmeister aren't that grumpy, to be fair.

They're just middle-aged men having a chat about the internet, music, TV shows, both where they're experienced slightly heavy. And then she puts in quotes, 40 years of online experience. Well, more than that, but we'll take it. More than that. But anyways. But as hosts, they're easy to listen to. And if you're an older techie type, this may be the show for you.

Actually, they remind me of the Simpsons comic book guy. They have the same slightly superior, over-informed, nitpicky geek attitude, but that's not a completely bad thing. Love it. There we go. So that's very nice. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to gog.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air.

And if you're so inclined, please head over to gog.show slash iTunes and toss us a five-star and snarky review. And make sure to tell your friends. In fact, just take their damn phone and subscribe to our show on it. Closing shout-outs! I got a quick shout-out to the guys over on the Clash Royale clan, which is gog.show, but nobody's going to remember that I just said that.

And they're going to ask me anyway on Twitter seven times. Because we do have spots open if you want to join. But Magnus, Alpine, Jay the Destroyer, Waylon, and Beta Bucket, those guys have been helping out run the show over there when I'm not available to. So I appreciate it, guys. And everybody else in the clan, it's fun.

So get on that stupid war thing that we have to do every week. I miss the clan chest. That's all I'm saying. I don't even know what you're talking about anymore. It's in secret code. I guess so. All right. Well, I think we somehow got ourselves in slightly better moods.

So until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash gog. Toss us a buck a month and we'll love you forever. If you'd like to give a one-time or recurring donation, go to gog.show and click the PayPal button in the sidebar.

Show notes for this episode are at gog.show slash 263. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy, and we'll see you next week. We're now one of my favorite places in Los Angeles, In-N-Out Burger. You know, the thing about a burger is there are many forces at play with a properly made burger.

You've got to have a decent bun, right, to start with. Bun selection, very important. You know, good quality meat. Also, you know, that would be nice. Non-limp, reasonably fresh greens and garnishes, also good. Cheese, you don't want fancy cheese.

You don't want, you know, no. Whatever that is, this cheese-like substance is just perfect. But notice it's two thin patties together, okay? Maximum surface area, therefore exposing the maximum areas of meat surface to the popples of the tongue.

It's brilliant. This is like a ballistic missile. Perfectly designed delivery system, protein delivery system. And I like mine animal style. And I'd tell you what that is, but I'd have to kill you. Oh, yeah.

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