282: An Apple Under My Butt

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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. Wow. We have a metric ton of feedback, so we should probably just get going. This is going to start to turn into a feedback, what day does it come out? Thursday show? Yeah, feedback Thursdays. Yeah, yeah. It just rhymes. It rolls off the tongue that way. Yeah, it just flows. It just flows. So, anyways, moving on, we have a bit of follow-up.

We talked last week about the iTunes headache problems that people were having that went kind of viral. Somebody who had three movies disappear from his iTunes library and got two rentals in return because of licensing issues. Turns out it's a bit more complicated than it just being pulled.

He was moving from Australia to Canada, and there's licensing in different countries. Oh, man, that sucks. That does not necessarily negate the fact that any movie or book or music can disappear at any time anyways because of licensing being pulled. That just hasn't happened yet.

So, licensing in different countries makes sense. But still, you need to remember, you do not own these things. It's time to go to Sweden. Yes, time to go to Sweden. So, Apple said that you can switch back to your old region to regain access to that content. So, that was an example for him.

But from what I remember, back in the day when, you know, music you actually had to buy, and then music was released in different places at different times or different remixes, I used to try to switch over to England in iTunes to be able to buy, like, you know, things that weren't available in the U.S. store.

Special remixes, early releases of albums. The only way you could do that is to have a credit card and billing address in that country, and that remains true. So, he found Apple gave him a solution that did not work. Way to go, Apple. Well done, Apple. So, yeah, in theory, you could switch back and forth between countries, but you have to have a valid credit card and billing address in that country to be able to access content bought in those countries' stores.

Wow. Yeah. What a shitty solution. It's a non-solution, basically. Apple gave him a non-solution. Well, we'll see how that keeps going. The solution is to switch everything to Sweden. That's pretty much it, you know. Once you get them in, I don't know how.

I've never tried to actually rip a copy-protected movie from iTunes. I wonder if there's an easy way to do that. I know that there are some apps for the PC that you can do it with audible content, so you can just, you know, start to play it and it'll just rip it over. I can tell you that there are apps that do such things.

Oh, okay. And off-air, I will tell you which one. Okay. And then maybe I will just, so we white-room this, I might put that in the show notes if we can do that. That would be great. So, I got a little chair follow-up, that gaming chair that I bought, because I didn't want to spend the extra couple hundred bucks and get the Herman Miller Mira 2.

Mira, yes. Yes. That I'm sitting in right now. Rolls off the tongue. Yeah. So, I spent like 200 bucks on that gaming chair, and it turns out to be the biggest steaming pile of shit I've ever bought. Hold on a second. So, a $200 chair is not quality? Here's the thing. I've spent like $100 on a chair from Office Depot that has been better and lasted longer.

Right. This thing is just, A, it squeaks like an 1800s, you know, wooden battleship. It's just like squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak. But now, now, the piston has failed. I just sit in it, and it just goes, chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk.

Kind of like that crappy chair that was in our hotel room in Canada. Oh, yeah, where you just kept like slowly lowering down as you were editing the show? Yeah, that's pretty much it. So, by the time I've done, my knees are like up by my, you know, armpits, and I'm sitting on the floor like looking over my keyboard so I can actually see anything.

And I'm like, I don't know if it's worth it to actually do, you know, a piston replacement on it. Look, I don't know. I know, you know, patreon.com slash GOG, Jason needs some money. You know, I've had two Herman Miller chairs I had the original air on. That is still at my parents' house.

It still works perfectly. That thing is 15, 20 years old now. I've had this Mira for 10. It's an investment that's worth it. These chairs last forever. I know. I just, I have to save up for it. That's the only problem. It's going to take me a couple weeks to get there because I spent all my money on Canada.

So that was, that's the issue. But I really do miss that Mira because I had to sell it when I moved because I just couldn't take it with me. And I lost like 300 bucks on it. And it still pains me to this day. I'm waiting for the owner to drop dead so I can sneak in her house and take it back. Remember, you should be checking Craigslist here.

You are near Silicon Beach and companies go out of business every couple weeks here. So there are fire sales on these chairs. That's a really good idea. I think I'm going to do that first and just maybe go the used route because they do last forever. They last forever. They're amazing. Yeah, but that chair that I got, man, that's a piece of crap.

I'm going to see if, I'm going to see if I still have some kind of warranty with it. I don't know for a chair that cheap, but it's like, I can't sit in it. It's just, it's just chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk. Generally, a good indication that they may not be a great company is again, when you first mentioned them and I tried to find them on Twitter to put them in the show notes and they had been banned by Twitter for some reason.

You know, yeah, yeah. Maybe I should have done a little bit more research on that. There is a plug-in that we have for Chrome and Opera that will tell you how many reviews are fake on an Amazon review, and I forgot to run it for that damn chair. I bet it's 99%.

Probably. I wish there was a plug-in that told you how many reviews were from George Takei. Oh, my. Oh, my. A friend of the show, Mike, likes to send me bird news because I think he is secretly even more upset about bird than I am. He sends me a lot of photos. This one is quite funny.

Now that bird has been regulated here in Santa Monica, it's actually been a lot better. I'm not going to lie. It's not as annoying anymore. Oh, that's good. I still need, you know, I want them to be docked. I want them to be locations. But there are so many less of them. It's fantastic. But West LA and West LA Hollywood in particular does not have any kind of restrictions in place yet, so people are going all over.

But TMZ got this great pick of a 25-year-old guy trying to ride past a field sobriety test on the sidewalk drunk on a bird. Oh, my God. First off, says explicitly, you need to be riding on the street. Secondly, he was drunk. Nice. So he got, like, what, a $10 ticket?

No, I think it was quite expensive, actually. It's got it. Well, driving under the influence on a motorized vehicle. That is a DUI, my friend. Oh, that is a full-board DUI, isn't it? That is a full-board DUI. That's not a $10 fine. That's a $10,000 fine. And lose your license.

Like, after you pay for it. Yeah, you pay for that. It costs about $10,000 to deal with a DUI in California. Yep. I've never gotten one. I've known people that had them, though. And it costs them $10,000 in, like, two years of hell. Yep. So good on you. All right. Way to go, Kappas. Finally, the chips do something right.

Oh, man. Elon Musk. We got a little follow-up. Remember, we were talking about him in Canada, about his crazy, crazy antics. Well, that tweet, it has apparently got him in a lot of trouble. Well, I suppose it could be considered trying to game the financial markets, right?

Yeah. That's the whole point. Oh, God. Fucking autoplay video. Stop it. Thanks, Bloomberg. Yeah. Thank you, Bloomberg. Oh, and it's got follow-on video, too. How nice. Yes, I try and scroll past it. It just follows me like a fucking zombie. Yeah, Tesla.

Well, it's Tesla is under investigation by the Justice Department because of Elon's tweet. Because it could be seen as trying to, you know, change the market. I can't believe I'm going to use this phrase, but it's a nothing burger. There's going to be nothing in Tesla's records about it. What they'd have to look for is some intent for this to actually be happening.

This just came out of the stoned mind of Musk. Yeah. Yeah. It's a nothing burger. So if you believe in Elon Musk, this is a good time to buy. Okay. Yeah. Oh, my. Yeah. Down to three. Down 3.4%. Oh. Exactly. Ooh. Except I'm saving up for a damn share. Maybe I should sell my Tesla stock and get a chair.

I think that might work. Hold on to the Tesla. I'd sell some Apple. Okay. Apple. It's interesting. Why do you say Apple? Because it's really high right now. You can get that chair pretty quick. That's true. That's true. All right. I'm going to put an Apple under my butt. In the news.

Facebook is going to use AI to start fact-checking photos and videos. Whee! Now, I like this. We shouldn't just be fact-checking the text. We should be fact-checking the photos and videos because we know nobody reads anymore. And the vast amount of the misinformation and fake news and all that was in the form of stupid memes and videos.

So good. Now, my question about this is the AI aspect. Yeah. Because it says here, it's a fact-checking program to include photos and videos. All 23 of its third-party fact-checking partners across 17 countries are on board. We know that most of those 23 companies are mechanical Turks in the Philippines.

That's true. They're not AI. AI is people again. It's people all the way down. It's people. It's not AI. It's people. And they talk about the whole system. There's a machine learning model that will aggregate Facebook from users doing exactly what I said you do. Things get flagged.

If they get enough flags, it goes into a queue. The machine learning model will take that queue. It'll do a couple things with it and basically look and see if it's crazy in and of itself. After that, it kicks it into a queue where a human has to look at it. Nice. So I don't quite understand the AI there.

The one thing I think they need to do is they need to have, quote, recognition software in these news stories. Because one of the things that I used to do that drove my mom crazy is she would send me one of these batshit insane, you know, right wing email newsletters that she's on.

I would get it and I would actually go read the book for the quote. The one that I remember the most is the Lee Iacocca book because she was sending around some Obama quote about Lee Iacocca hated Obama. And I read the entire fucking book. And the quote was like in the last 20 pages, which was really annoying because I could have stopped it earlier.

But if they can take these quotes and actually, you know, compare them to the original source material, like in the book, if they have the right to search the books and then they can say, oh, misquote, misquote, misquote. That might actually help because that's a lot of the stuff that I see is people are they take a quote, they change a few words and just turn it around.

Yeah, it's like that's true. Well, the thing that drove me absolutely batshit crazy about this entire article is buried a little bit further down. Once identified as false, the flag content will show up less frequently on Facebook's news feed.

Isn't the fucking point to then pull it completely? Yeah. If it's fake, why is it showing up less frequently? What's the point of this program? Yeah. Yeah. Now, for all my anger about that, there are studies that are saying that Facebook's crackdown on misinformation might actually be working.

The keyword there being might a new study from researchers at Stanford, New York University and Microsoft research suggests that it could be working to some extent. It was released as a working paper last Friday and basically says that it does seem to be coming down a little bit.

The engagement on stories from sites that are known to be purveyors of fake news are lower. My argument would be purveyors of any content on Facebook is lower because Facebook is screwing you and making you pay for it. Yeah. So, yeah, but they say this study is far from definitive.

But apparently, maybe, slightly, this is working a little bit. Maybe, slightly, kind of, sort of, maybe. Yeah. Perhaps in no discernible way that we can prove to you in any way, shape, or form. Sometimes I wonder why we do this show, Jason, because basically our show could be put down to everything that they tell you is wrong and analytics are bullshit.

Yeah, that's kind of it. We've said it before. We'll say it again. But, yeah. Here's a study that actually doesn't mean anything. Yeah. That's pretty much every study. Oh, oh, remember when eggs were bad for you? Oh, eggs are great for you. Oh, we don't know what the fuck we're talking about. Yeah, we don't know. So, we have some good news from Twitter for once.

Twitter is giving its users what they actually want. It's a final, real, reverse, chronological timeline only broken up by ads and suggested tweets half the time. Half the time. Okay. I got an email from Twitter this morning that says, Jason DeFillippo, get back to the basics with an introduction to Twitter.

And, of course, it is a video of a cat. So, they're sending me cat videos now. Why aren't they doing birds? They're so off-brand. It should be a bird thing. I know. It should be. What's wrong with these people? Yeah. So, this is like a how to retweet. Oh, God.

And I'm like, okay, I've been a member since, well, even my current account, I think I've been a member since 2010. So, that's like eight years. I kind of know how Twitter works. So, what kind of weird desperation shit is this? And, of course, Twitter could have just said, hey, we're giving you back your chronological timeline.

But, instead, it had to be run through the PR machine. I just love this sentence structure so much I have to read it in its entirety. We learned that when showing the best tweets first, people find Twitter more relevant and useful. However, we've heard feedback from people who are at times preferred to see the most recent tweets, the company said in a statement posted to its support account.

Our goal with the timeline is to balance showing you the most recent tweets, ads, with the best tweets, more ads, you're likely to care about, but we don't always get this balance right. No shit. Just make a chronological YouTube, Facebook. That's all anybody wants. That's what everybody wants.

No, that's how they make money. We don't pay. Yeah. We talked about Apple iOS 12 last week. It came out. I have installed it on everything. It does seem to be kind of nice. It's great. It's fantastic. The problem is I did the public beta on my phone, and I cannot upgrade to the new watchOS.

Have you been able to upgrade to the watchOS yet? No, I didn't try that yet, because I seem to always have issues with watchOS upgrades. Yeah. I was going to wait until other people had confirmed it had worked. Yeah. Yeah. No, Justin Vandenberg over on Twitter is really trying to help me out, and he's sending me all these screencaps of stuff on how to get it done and all this stuff.

And it just doesn't not work. That's the problem. Yeah, it is a massive pain in the butt. I want to get it upgraded, because it'd be really cool if we had the walkie-talkie feature, you know? I've got a bunch of friends that have watches now. Like, almost everybody I know has an Apple Watch.

It'd be really fun to use this walkie-talkie feature, but I just can't get the goddamn thing to load. I hope I can turn that off. I'm sure you can. Brian, hey, did you check that new article I sent? It was so good. Jason, I'm putting my kid to bed. Oh, how's she doing?

Yeah, that's basically why I need to turn it off. Exactly. But yeah, iOS 12 is great. It's one of those maintenance releases that I think they actually did a good job on so far. Yeah, it looks pretty. My phone does seem to be running a bit faster. I'm impressed. Even my old iPad mini is running a lot faster.

Yeah, no, it's good. They did it? Oh, my God. And they seem to have more battery life. It doesn't die nearly as fast. Nice. I just want my fucking watch to upgrade. Well, you let me know when that works. I will. There was, let's see, Shopify CEO Toby Lutke did an interview with Recode, and he talks about Amazon has launched Storefront, which we haven't talked about yet.

It's a retail hub for small businesses, basically a way to use Amazon to set up your own small store, right? Just like Shopify. So he did an interview, and he says, it feels like a trap to me. Yeah. A couple of years. It's a trap. It's a trap. If merchants decided that giving away all their business data to Amazon, then starting to compete on buy buttons with every factory in the world didn't work out as that good of an idea, then I would not be surprised, he said, speaking at a code commerce in New York.

First off, yeah, no shit. Secondly, you're also his direct competitor, so take it with a grain of salt. Yeah, exactly. It's like, oh. So of course he's going to say that using their system is not good. Yeah. No doubt. So I haven't looked too much into storefront. I don't know what the deal is in terms of sharing data.

Spotify also takes data, so let's not forget that. It's not like Spotify has their hands clean of this sort of stuff. Right. I mean, yeah, direct competitor. Yeah, exactly. Just much smaller. But I got to say, Spotify is, if you do need to set up a store, Shopify, or Shopify. Not Spotify.

Shopify. Hey, dyslexic. What do you want, man? Every now and again, I see different letters. Shopify is a great little store to set up. Oh, it's fantastic. It's so much better than so many of the competitors out there. So it is very good. I would recommend them as well. Oh, man. I often do to people. Yeah.

And you remember the days when we had to set up like shopping plugins on WordPress? Oh, yes. Oh, my God. And how many shopping carts have you written personally? I know I've done at least 20 or 30, like from scratch. A long time ago. Yeah, I did a bunch. I hated it. It was the worst thing ever. Credit card integration was terrible. I know.

Okay. I'm starting to get depressed now. I'm getting PTSD, but let's move on, please. Here's a great article I ran across on Mental Floss. How expensive is your drunk shopping habit? And I'm looking at you, Jason. Oh, God. So I love this. I could retire. I could retire.

Drunk Americans may be spending as much as $30 billion annually while shopping online, the Daily Dot reports. A separate survey conducted in February of 2018 by the website Finder suggests as many as 46% of people have made a purchase while under the influence. The drunk purchases add up.

According to Finder's research, Americans spend an average of $447.57 per year shopping while drunk. Oh, my God. That's one session. That's for you. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. This is definitely. I am on the far end of the middle term. I can see you later tonight. I'm going to get the goddamn mirror.

Where's my credit card? That's. Well, that is how I got the first mirror, by the way. So I'm not going to front. Yeah. Now, what I really love about this study, Jason, is the breakdowns. It didn't end there. Gin is apparently the most dangerous alcohol for your wallet, according to the Archstone Recovery Center.

Gin drinkers spent the most on Amazon shopping sprees, an average of $82.40. And they were also likely to spurge on more expensive items, on average $235.10. Whiskey drinkers, on the other hand, spend the least amount of money when they're drunk. But they're right behind gin dinkers in terms of splurging for higher priced items.

So you might want to go to the whiskey. I can't. I can't do the whiskey. I'm too old. My brain doesn't work. I'm just a wine drinker. Now, you know, don't get all hashtag me too on me out there, audience. But shockingly, women spend more than men when drunk, as they tend to spend more than women.

Well, just look at the home shopping network at four in the morning. We know that for a fact. Yes. But men will buy higher priced items than women do. So there's some evening out there. Like a mirror too. Yes. Yes. Almost 67% of people in the survey regretted purchasing cell phones and phone accessories.

And 34% regretted purchasing books. Never regret purchasing books, people. On the other hand, nobody regretted buying musical instruments. What? Their neighbors may have. Yeah. But they didn't mind. I wanted this drum kit since I was 12, and now I've got one.

Woo-hoo! And where I figure you fall fully into this survey is a full 93% said that they enjoyed the purchases of pet supplies. I have never drunk bought pet supplies. I can hands down say that. You are 7% in the one that I thought you fit into.

Your Venn diagrams do not overlap. No, no. Electronics are my downfall. And we've got some new electronics that we'll talk about on the next episode that I bought when I might have had a glass or two more of wine than I should have. So. And finally, I just want to quickly mention that the Music Modernization Act has passed in the Senate with unanimous support.

That doesn't mean shit yet because it has to go back to the House and has to be passed by Trump. So I'm not even going to get into the specifics yet because it could all change. But it is good news for the music industry, which has needed some good news for nay on 15 years now. Yeah, seriously. What's this do, though? Well, in theory, it's going to help get a lot more money into the musicians' hands as opposed to going into black boxes that go to labels and tech industries and things like that.

It's going to modernize kind of how different things are collected from different copyright agencies. So it's good for musicians. Oh, that's good. If it gets through the way it's supposed to be. So we'll talk about it more when it actually gets passed. All right, cool.

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I have them with me all the time.

Media candy. My wife likes to watch award shows. I used to enjoy watching them as well, and I used to maybe imbibe a little bit, and kind of back when Facebook actually had a chronological timeline, I would live Facebook them to many of my friends' enjoyment.

However, we don't have a timeline anymore, so it doesn't make sense. And also, I started to realize I no longer knew anybody on the Grammys or the Emmys or anything anymore, because I'm old and don't care. So I stopped doing that, but my wife still enjoys watching it, so sadly on Monday night I had my iPad open to watch the Dodger game, and the Emmys were on.

So I watched it. Congrats to the Americans, The Marvelous Miss Maisel, and Game of Thrones, all of which won a lot of awards, and all of which I loved. I'm a little leery on Game of Thrones winning, since they haven't aired an episode in over a year and a half, so I don't quite see how they win Emmys this year. Yeah, yeah. Whatever.

Look, I'm happy about the Americans. I just didn't think they won enough awards for their final season. No, no. It was their final season, and they totally should have won Best Drama, not Game of Thrones. That's my entire point. Yeah, Game of Thrones for next, whenever the next one is in three years. You know, maybe they should win, but I thought, yeah, I thought the Americans got snubbed for that, and I thought Best Actress should have been, was it Sandra Oh?

Yeah, definitely for Killing Eve. Yeah. Yes. Have you got a chance to watch that yet? One episode, because my wife really loves Sandra Oh, and it was very good, so we'll get into it. Oh, it's so good. So good. Amazon seems to have bought every single ad, which was funny.

It's weird until you realize that basically the entire ceremony, which was on NBC, was an ad for NBC. Anything that wasn't an award was plugging NBC shows and was about NBC, and Lorne Michaels was running the show, so it was basically all SNL. I can't believe Lorne Michaels didn't kill the recurring Maya Rudolph and Fred Armisen bit, which was painfully unfunny.

Every single time they went to it, all the scripted joke bits from the presenters were horrible. Just stop it. Award shows, just stop it. They're so bad. They are pretty bad, yeah. It was pretty boring, but as the Slate article, the Emmys were an island of boring in a sea of chaos pointed out, that's a good thing.

We have enough excitement. Thank God it was boring. No, I like the Foreign Press Awards. Those are the best. You know, especially when Ricky Gervais is up there, because that is just like, that's just gold. Everybody's uncomfortable, and it's fantastic.

Yeah. So we're getting another Coen Brothers Western. I'm a huge fan of the Coen Brothers. Not so much their Westerns. I mean, they've all been good, but they're not my favorites. This is going to be called The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. What was the last Western they did? They have done, let's see, this will be the Coen's first movie for Netflix, the third in the genre, which include No Country for Old Men, and True Grit.

So I like both of those, just not as much as I like their other stuff. So this will be available for streaming on Netflix and in limited theatrical release on November 16th. It will be an anthology format following six different stories starring James Franco, Brandon Gleeson, Zoe Caron, Liam Neeson, Tim Blake Nelson, and Tom Waits, which is kind of cool.

Now, the James Franco thing kind of bumps me. Now, I watched Baby Driver on the plane when we flew to Canada, and I told you immediately how weird it was, and I may have enjoyed it more if Kevin Spacey wasn't in it. Yeah. Obviously, I'd watched it post Kevin Spacey having his issues.

His kerfuffle. Joe is a bit of a douchebag, and I've got to say, I'm not ready for him to have a comeback and don't want him to, and I think it's going to drive me out of this movie. What has he done? I don't even remember. I just don't like him as an actor, but what has he done lately? Did I miss something?

Because he had to go away because he got in trouble banging some assistants on movies or something like that. Oh, okay. I missed that story. Remember, he kind of disappeared right away after that movie that they did about the room. Oh, was that the one that got the 0% on Rotten Tomatoes?

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I mean, the last movie I saw with him was the one where he cut his arm off when he was stuck in a cave. He was decent in that. We can recycle our old joke. He's become a magician since then and made himself disappear. Okay. Yeah.

Don't really care. Now, I stumbled across an op-ed by Gary Newman, of all things. Really? Savage Rhetoric. Mars, the promise of the America I chose to move to, and it's very interesting. It doesn't get specifically political. It just says what we're doing to each other in this country is horrible, and I came here for a reason, and you guys are screwing it all up, so let's fix this.

It's a really good op-ed, but the interesting thing for me is it's in the Kansas City Star. That's what I was looking at. I'm like, what? Is that where he lives? No, he lives here. So I don't quite get it, but I went down basically an old-school goth industrial wormhole this week and ran into that.

I also ran into the fact that Nine Inch Nails is currently touring, and this might be the first Nine Inch Nails tour in, like, 15 years that I'd want to go to because it's the good old days. At the first of two concerts in Phoenix Comerica Theater, he performed all eight tracks from the Broken EP, the second album ever released, including Happiness and Slavery, which hadn't been performed live in 23 years, and the song Last, which was last performed in 2009 and Help Me and I'm in Hell in 2013.

I also heard he just played a show in Vegas where he played The Perfect Drug for the first time ever. So they're, like, busting out the oldies. Man, The Perfect Drug. I love that song. One of my favorites. That's a great song. Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty cool. I saw them at Riot Fest last year, and, you know, it was the first time I've ever seen them, and I thought they were fantastic, but we left in the middle of it because we wanted to be traffic.

Yeah. As one does. That's how I feel about Dodgers games. Yeah. It kind of tells you how into it we were, you know? It's like, this is really good. And then he brought out the, you know, the tambourine of doom. I got that really good picture of it. But, oh, and by the way, everybody should go check out punkvinyl.com because a friend of the show, MXV, has all his pictures up from this year's Riot Fest, and he's killing it.

Including Gary Neumann. Yeah. There's great stuff up there. So go check out punkvinyl.com to see all of the amazing shots and his review of Riot Fest. All right. I also stumbled across a new band, sort of. It's what they're building as a gothic rock supergroup called Beauty and Chaos, and they premiered their new video for a song called Storm.

It is a collective of iconic artists, such as Wayne Hussey from The Mission. Okay. Goth. Simon Gallop from The Cure. Goth. Robin Zander, Cheap Trick. Not goth, but very well respected by an awful lot of musicians, so I get why he's in there. Al Jorgensen from Ministry. Fair enough.

Pete Prada from The Offspring. Doug Pinnock from Kinzex. Fair. Ice-T from Body Count. Fair enough. He did the Lollapalooza tours. Michael Astin from Gene Loves Jezebel. Fine. Here we go. Here's the problem that I have with this. Michael Anthony from Van Halen. What? In what universe is Van Halen alternative rock at all, in any way, shape, or form, much less God?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Anyways, he doesn't sing, so it doesn't matter. It's actually pretty good. I'm definitely going to check out the album when it drops. I like the single. It's very, you know, 1989 poppy goth. It was enjoyable. Okay. Cool. Now, Van Halen over.

Yeah, I know. It was just that pumped out to me. Like, what's he doing in there? I'm sure he's a nice guy. Yeah. Can't wait to see him in eyeliner. Yeah. Anyways, moving over to TV. The wife and I finally finished season three of Better Call Saul. That is a great goddamn show.

We just watched the latest episode last night. Well, I would like to have caught up on season four. Since I'm paying for cable and I'm paying for AMC, why the fuck is season four episodes one through three not available on demand anymore? It picks up with four through seven. Uh-oh.

What the fuck? Hello, Sweden. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, so there you go. So I'm going to have to go to Sweden to get episodes one through three, and I've got to do it quickly before they drop four, and then to hell with it. I'll just get it all. Just get the whole damn thing. It's easy. This is the problem, industry.

You should be listening to us. You make it easy, we get it. I'm paying for it. Why can't I get it? Now I'm going to Sweden. Yeah, that's it. I actually got one of those notifications in the mail a long time ago from my cable provider because I went to Sweden and I got, I think it was Band of Brothers way back when.

And they sent me a thing that said, you downloaded Band of Brothers. And so then I sent them back my cable bill with HBO Circled and said, fuck you, I pay for HBO. I can download whatever I want. Never heard from them again, by the way.

Nice. So I did miss the Emmys because I have been getting caught up on Empire because season five is going to launch in about two weeks here. And we love this show so much. We love this show. But it has moved into, at the end of season three, it moved into daytime soap opera land.

There was, there was, you know, they're, they're really kind of stretching on trying to take the plot line somewhere. And it, it got to the point where we were just cracking up because it was, it's awesome. It's still awesome. I love this show, but it got to the point where it was really funny. And Leslie Uggams plays like, you know, the psychotic mom in this.

And oh my God, she's amazing. But the point of the whole thing is it's, we're just like dive bombing through these things. We've got like 15 episodes to go in a week and a half. So if you don't hear from me, that's where I'm at. I've fallen down the empire hole. And at night though, right before I go to bed, you said you were going to watch an episode of Iron Fist season two.

So I didn't have to. I did. And I intended to. Then my son who has started school brought home a stomach bug that he got. And two days later I woke up and rolled over and vomited and continued to vomit for two days. So I've lost two days of my life and didn't get a chance to.

Yeah, I just said, fuck it and tried it. And I went to season one because somebody on Twitter actually said, hey, check it out. It's not that bad. And then I said, uh, okay, let me just roll it while I'm falling asleep. And I'm on episode four now because it's actually pretty good.

Like Iron Fist himself is not that annoying. I think he learned how to act in between season one and season two. I think he listens to the show and figured out that how annoying he was, was bugging everybody. So he went out and he actually learned how to act. And it's, it's, it's good.

I actually like it, but I hate, you know, I hate when I'm wrong for the most part. I usually love it when you're wrong, but I really hate it when I'm wrong. And I think that I'm, I might be wrong for Iron Fist. I it's actually not bad. I, here's the thing last night I went to bed and I sat there and I'm like, okay, maybe I should watch some more Iron Fist.

And the one thing I didn't think of was, oh, maybe I should watch some more Luke Cage. Nope. Iron Fist it was. So yeah, that's, that's, that's tells you that it, this came across my Twitter feed this morning and it's a website I've never heard of called learning for a small world.com.

And it's a course it's called Star Trek, inspiring culture and technology. When you enroll in this course, you will examine how Star Trek's live action television show and motion pictures affected audiences around the world. And it goes through a whole thing about just, you know, the effect that Star Trek had on popular culture and us as humans as we went.

And cause we always talk about the Star Trek economy on the show and I'm like, oh, this has piqued my interest. It's like a three hour video course. It's 20 bucks. I think I might try this. Nice. I've never heard of the site before, but I thought it was, I thought it was just kind of a cool find and I wanted to throw it in here because I, I loves me some Star Trek.

Well, who doesn't, you know what else I love, Jason? I love me some. Whoa. Whoa. Some Keanu Reeves. Whoa. And I stumbled across the best video in the entire history of the internet and what the internet was created for every Keanu Reeves. Whoa. In chronological order from 1986 to 2016.

You're calling it a whoa. It's a, it's just whoa. Well, he's all over the place with it. They take some liberties with whoa. They, they actually do take it. And, and to be honest, I watched the entire thing this morning and which was very strange. Wasn't it a hoot? It was.

And to be fair, most of the woes. Those come from Bill and Ted's one and two, you know? Well, obvious. That's the only line he had in the movie. Right. That kind of was it. Oh, and so I watched it. I enjoyed it. Stay tuned to the end of the show for a mashup because I found another video at the end.

It said every Matthew McConaughey. All right. In chronological order from 1993 to 2017. So, so I might have to do a little mashup at the end of the show for that because I know how much you love Matthew McConaughey. All right. All right. All right. All right. I read two things this week here on At the Library.

I read Play Bigger, How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets by Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Chris Lockhead, and Kevin Maney. I read this because I went on Chris Lockhead's show, Legends and Losers, which will be coming out soon. And we talk a lot about porn economics in there and how the porn industry ate itself and other random bits of trivia about myself.

It was a fun show. Chris is awesome. I love this guy. I want to hang out with him in person. I was really bummed because we did it over video and on his desk was this giant decanter of whiskey and I'm like, I really want some of that right now. But it was a fun show. We'll put a link in the show notes when it comes out. Great book on business and how to like, you know, like how these big companies actually created their own markets and their niches to dominate.

Basically, it was if you're into business stuff, great book, highly recommended. And then I got to The X-Files Cold Cases. This is this is one of those audio books on Audible that is an Audible original. And I mentioned last show that they're giving those away for free if you're an Audible subscriber.

So I got it for free. I wasn't going to pay for it before because it's only four and a half hours long. And I'm like, that's a I'm not going to spend a credit on that. But the price to pay was too high. But now if you're a subscriber, you can get it for free. So I listened to it. Well, God, oh fucking mighty.

I want my four and a half hours back. The truth is definitely out there. It's definitely out there in a very poorly acted audio drama. It was like I don't think they were in the same room. I don't think any of these people were in the same room because they were not like bouncing off each other or like David Duchovny is not a great actor to begin with.

I don't think I think he's a terrible actor. I love Californication because he just played that dumb shit writer who liked to fuck anything that walked perfectly because I think that's who he is as a person. And I just know some people who know him and have slept with him and said, no, that's him in person.

That's yeah, that's him. So stick with that. Jillian Anderson was fantastic. She actually acted. Smoking man was great. I mean, everybody from the show is in this, but I don't think that they were in the same room because nobody was acting off each other and it was terrible. But if you want the backstory, the answers to the questions, Brian, that you have been looking for, they're in here.

They're all in here. One, two quick questions, Jason. First off, is this just available as a regular book? Could I just read it? Audio only. Damn it. Yep. And secondly, you linked for some reason to the Italian version. Oh, well, I am Italian. So I don't think I'd get much from that.

Oh, yes. Seria Complita. I guess I might want to fix that. Yeah. Why don't you fix that link for our Italian viewers? Yes, for our Italian listeners, our Italian viewers. That was the only one that had the whole, because it's broken down into five different books here.

Right, right. Okay. So I'll figure it out. I'll figure it out and get it to you. But yeah. I'm sure there's some sort of X-Files wiki out there that runs through the basics in this audio series. And I can just figure out what the answers were without subjecting myself to this. Or I could go find that app that I mentioned before that lets you rip an audio book and maybe loan it to you one day when you're out on a bike ride.

It's, yeah, yeah. It was just so poorly acted. I had a really hard time actually giving a shit. But they do talk about, they talk about the kid. They talk about the aliens. They talk about the black goo. All of the stuff is in there. And they just kind of answer basically most of it.

So if you want to, feel free. Moron of the Week. This week's Moron of the Week is what we call a twofer. We have two morons in one story. So the Massachusetts police tweeted a screenshot, sort of.

So the article says they tweeted a screenshot of a computer monitor Thursday to help illustrate the extent of a series of gas explosions and fires that occurred throughout this one area in Massachusetts. One person died. About 20 more were injured. So, you know, they tweet this out as information.

So first, Moron, article of the story. The screenshot of a browser, which has now been deleted, included a map of the affected area. Next sentence. The photo or the image appears to be a photo taken by a smartphone of a computer screen at the police department. Screenshot of a browser. Photo taken of a screen.

Different things. Okay. Okay. That's not a screenshot. If you took a picture of it, is it? I kind of not by the definition. Yeah. Okay. I can. I can. You can fudge that one. I might be splitting hairs. It is a shot of a screen. It doesn't mean that you just did a screen capture, but go ahead. Right.

Well, the problem with this shot is it didn't just include the page of the map itself. It also included all the tabs that were open in the browser. Every single tab included pages of left wing activist Facebook groups in the area. Those aren't tabs that are open, by the way.

That's the bookmark bar. Yeah. Bookmark bar. So they're all bookmarked. So they're actually looking at those on a regular basis. That's. Yes. On the regs. They have them saved. Yeah. So while no activists should be surprised, the police are tracking them. The concentration of left wing activist groups at the top of the browser was rare.

If it was a rare, if inadvertent official acknowledgement of this kind of tabs keeping quite literally. The Facebook groups that were bookmarked include Massachusetts action against police brutality, which organizes to end police brutality and share stories of police killings. It's the coalition to organize and mobilize Boston against Trump combat.

Nice. And a link to the website called resistance calendar, which posts Trump opposition events across the country. There do not appear to be tabs on this particular computer for right wing political groups that organize online. But perhaps they separate them by computer. This is just the left tracking computer. And to the right, you'd find the right.

Yeah. Derp. Derp. That's funny. This is what happens when you don't know how to use technology and you're put in charge. Feedback loop. We got a lot of feedback about one thing in particular that we talked about the other week.

And Joanna, the teacher who asked so much about the cloud storage advice, she wrote us on Twitter. Thanks so much for your advice. Read my cloud storage. I already carry around a USB. I suggested it's fallen off my key ring, though, prompting my cloud choice. But I'm glad I doing everything you guys can think of makes me feel better.

Well, a lot of our listeners have some ideas for you. Some of them want to reach out to you directly. But, you know, we're just a platform and we're not comfortable connecting people directly in case something weird might happen in some place. And then we have to turn over all of our emails to the FBI. And nobody wants that. So I will read all the advice that we got for Joanne.

And you guys can, since she's on Twitter, you can find her quite easily. And, you know, get in touch each other with each other. Get in touch with each other, not get in touch with you. Get in touch each other. That's exactly why. Exactly. We don't want anybody touching each other. Well, unless you're into it, go for it.

But, yeah. It's consensual, yes. Okay. So first off, Pete, love the show and the dumping on tech that deserves it. I have a suggestion for the educator in episode 280 that was looking for a cloud storage solution. I've been using Resilio Sync for quite a while now to keep files in sync across my computers and phone. I admittedly have not dug too deep into this, but the transfer of data is using BitTorrent technology.

In my experience, it has worked flawlessly. Stay grumpy. All right. There's one idea. AJ writes in, I don't know if it's too late for this, but that teacher that wrote in about cloud storage solutions, there's a Woot deal today on a home NAS. Well, yep. It's unfortunately too late now because that's pretty much gone.

But it's kind of the same thing as a Synology, and it works out to be about the same price of the Synology that I got. It was about $160 for the base unit, and then you still have to buy the hard drives for it. Also, there's the hashtag EdTech and EdChat that I'm sure could help her out. Yep. And Tim wrote in very generously and had this offer.

Just heard the episode, that teacher who wrote in about cloud storage. Anyway, you could pass along my info to her. I would like to give her a few hundred dollars to pay for cloud storage for the next five to ten years. You can find her on Twitter. Just look under our replies. Yep. Please do, because we don't want to be responsible.

John writes in, I heard this one too, and as someone in instructional technology, I have resources she can look into. Nothing personally to sell her, but leads I can certainly do. So same with you, John. Please feel free to reach out on the Twitters. Yes, and be nice to her. Yes, be nice.

Give her lots of monies and advice. Just don't be a dick. Yeah. Okay, over on Patreon, we got donations from Dan and Mark. Mark writes in and says, thank you for one of the best general technical podcasts on the web. I work for Red Hat, and I'm a bit of a geek myself, and it helps keep me current.

If there's anything I can do, let me know. If you want to shout out something from me on the show, please just tout yourselves and your sponsors. All right, we will do that. Yes, we will. And Jim writes in, yeah, the damn sticky videos. Didn't we all agree about 15 years ago that autoplaying videos is bad? When did this shit become okay?

When page views became the, you know, the coin of the realm. We also actually had a standard for analytics about 15 years ago that made sense and then kind of went away. We also kind of agreed that, you know, taking people's data and selling it wasn't okay. And how did that go?

Seriously. Yeah. Peter writes in, howdy, geeks. Hope you had a good time at Fireside. I can only imagine how great that spank bank talk must have been. Shame you couldn't get your hands on some booty coin. Yep. Anyways, I wanted to share the video. I just wanted some booty. I don't even care about the coin. Anyways, I wanted to share this video.

I just made my first YouTube video, actually, which is a tutorial on photogrammetry. Grammetry? You know what that is, Jason? No, I don't. I'm going to have to check out the video. We'll have the link in the show notes. There's some really incredible computer science going on down here using difference of Gaussians and fast library for appropriate nearest neighbors, along with really cool ML algorithms that I've been learning about in my coursework.

Oh, but if the ladies ask, it's all AI blockchain, baby. So thanks, Peter. Thank you very much. John writes in. Hey, guys, I just up support to 10 bucks because now with two episodes a week, I felt it to be only right. Love what you do. Also use the extra cash to buy a can of Freon for Jason.

Cold? I live in Massachusetts and could do without the cold. Fucking hell. All right. I don't need Freon because I don't know if you've noticed, but Freon is kind of banned in California. So I need more than a few bucks to get some on the black market. Yep. We do that environmental thing here.

Jared writes in. Do you know how this is obviously about the Apple Watch 4? Do we know how accurate the ECG is coming from an EMT background? It would be awesome if this is truly accurate, though. I do think this will cause the unwashed mashes to call 911 constantly either way. They will call freaking out saying their watch is showing that they are dying when they aren't.

Or we will get people who say, oh, yeah, I'm fine. When in reality, a true ECG is showing that their heart is telling them to shove it and die. Okay. I don't know. Neither of us have a four. Well, no, no, no. I listened to a podcast that talked about this recently and it it's very accurate.

It's like 99 or 97 percent accurate. It's up there. It's very high. And it doesn't just do it on the first run. It has to average it over seven episodes that you're having. Like, you know, any kind of AFib moment or whatever, whatever they call it.

So it is tracking it. But the FDA did approve it as a medical device. So they have done the due diligence on it. So I'm guessing it is fairly accurate. It's not just like, oh, I took my watch off and put it back on. And it's like, oh, your heart stopped. You know, I think. You know what? I'm 100 percent sure I'm accurate about what that I'm 100 percent sure there's something in the TOS and the and all of that about that says that you should not use this as a medical device.

Probably. And you don't own your own heart rate anymore. Yes. If you move to Canada, you can't get your heart rate back. We own it now. Yeah. Barbie writes in. Hello again, GOG. I have a tech question for you all. I have a tech question for y'all.

I'm transferring to headquarters to become an instructor for the search and rescue program within the Texas State Guard. With this new responsibility, I'll be managing training certifications, logs, presentations, et cetera, as well as traveling to the state of Texas to teach all of this to other soldiers.

I wanted to get your recommendations on how I should store all of this and it be portable, whether it be a flash drive, external HD or something else. I'm probably going to get a small laptop that I can use, but want it backed up on something else in case the laptop freezes, gets wet, crushed, et cetera. Probably going to be buying a tough book for my company to help prevent all of that, LOL.

So what do y'all recommend? Okay. My initial recommendation would be buy two tough external hard drives and you can lock them down that way. You can put whatever you want on it to kind of keep them safe and secure. But my immediate question is, does the military have some sort of procedure about this or guidelines?

Yeah, that's the one thing. That would be my big question. So I would check with your higher ups and see if there's already some sort of a system in place and recommendations in place that you have to use. If not, just, you know, do the external hard drives and keep those things backed up. Yeah. There's a couple, there's a couple other options too that I would, would recommend.

SD cards are pretty tough and it's, it's not like you're going to be like, you know, carrying around terabytes of data. So, you know, you can do multiple SD cards to back up to instead of a hard drive. If you need them, they're slower, but they are really tough. You know, you can wash an SD card a couple of times and it still works just fine.

And they've even got the micro SD cards now. So you can keep one in your phone if you need to, which I wouldn't recommend if you're doing government work, uh, because somebody, somebody in the IT department might get pissed off about that. But SD cards are actually a really good option instead of like thumb drives nowadays. I find right.

Uh, just because they're, those things are built to last and the technology has come a long way and you can get like a 64 gig SD card for like 30 bucks, you know, and get a couple of those and just, just keep them backed up. Yep. That's actually a great idea. Well done, Jason. Thank you. Over at PayPal, we got donations from Sarah and Jeff who said, thank you for the content.

Please feel free to use this donation to go towards a bike ride or bird ride. Yeah, it wasn't a bike ride. It was a bird ride. Thanks, Jeff. Thanks, Jeff. I think what we're going to do is we're going to just walk to the pub and drink your donation. So we appreciate that very much. Yes, we do. And we'll, we, we, and when we're done at the bar, we might pee on a bird, but, uh, I don't think we'll go for a ride.

And over on Facebook, Matthias writes in how to police these EU laws in Germany, at least it's common practice to sue a fellow competitor if they are in breach of regulation. Basically, you say it's no fair competition if they are breaking the rules. Okay, well, just take it to, take it to the court. I think everything works a lot better, faster, and more efficiently in Germany.

If we did that here in the US, the USA, it'd be, uh, eight years of court proceedings before any decision would be made. And thus, uh, you know, kind of nullifying the whole point. Hmm. Yeah. Nothing would ever get done. Nope. Not at all. Yeah. Uh, over on Twitter, Alan writes us, y'all might remember the movie Holiday with Jack Black, Kate Winslet, et cetera.

A chick flick I know. A meet cute is a talking point in that. FYI. Never saw that movie. Never heard of that movie. That's kind of crazy. And, uh, Paul over on Twitter writes in, just what I need on my daily commute. And he sends us a link to the best UK roads for driverless lorries have been identified.

So, oh man. Well, I would look at this, uh, here's a Mr. Bright site on this. You know which roads to avoid. That's true. Yes. If you don't want to die in a horrible tech accident. Yeah. Uh, Tim writes us, cloud ready, black view dash cams illegally broadcast your exact GPS location and live video from inside your car without permission publicly on the internet.

And it gets a little bit deeper into that. And, uh, Bittner was tagged on this. And I do believe we want to hold this for Monday show with Bittner because I think he's chomping at the bit to discuss this. All right. All right. All right. All right. Oh, maybe I watched one video too. All right. Whoa. Alan writes in, what was the security company you mentioned that works on the blockchain?

I got laughed out of a meeting and couldn't find a link in the show notes. Grump on. Now. Oh, it was, it wasn't. I couldn't remember the exact one. And I did a quick Google search and there's a ton of them. One of them is called, uh, there's a, there's, there's a ton apparently.

So I couldn't remember specifically, maybe you'd remember Jason, but, uh, yeah, I put a link into the show notes to us, uh, an article on Forbes about a company called edge, which is cybersecurity on the blockchain. That wasn't it. That wasn't the one. Yeah. Yeah. Begin with an X. We'll have to, we'll, we'll, we'll dig it up and we'll throw it in the show notes if I can find it.

Cause hopefully our search will be fixed soon. Right. Canada got in the way of that. So we're working on it. Moss 6502 wrote us. The thing about the new iPhones and watches is that it's great health stuff for those who can afford it. Just like their privacy policies, privacy and preventative health seem to be more and more for the people that can pay big divide.

Yeah. I mean, but it's always been that way, right? Hasn't it? Like it's all healthy people are, you have more access to it. If you're rich, you have more access to everything when you're rich. But to be fair, from my childhood, I see a hell of a lot more people now that make minimum wage that have big screen TVs, iPhones, and Apple watches.

And I saw people have big ticket items when I was a kid, myself included. So yeah, it's, it's still, it's the way of the world, man. But it seems a lot more, uh, even keel for technology these days than it ever used to be. At least to me. Yeah. People have more credit nowadays and just live in debt.

Yeah. That's not great. No, it's not. Derek writes in, uh, with a wind 10 screen cap tool called snipping tool. Uh, edge also pushes itself on you in default programs. Oh, great. Edge worst drug dealer ever. Uh, yeah. And as soon as I saw that, uh, my memory came back.

That's exactly what I use when I use windows. So snipping tool, Jason, that's what you want to get. Okay. I will put a link in the show notes for that. Friend of the show, Kyle Roderick, send us a link. Major Japanese ramen chains logo confuses Honda's cars, AI. So just like you said, Jason, there are logos out there in Japan that look basically like a stop sign.

Yep. So then the car, or no, it's a do not enter sign. Do not enter. Yeah. For a ramen store. So if you bring the car up around it, it, uh, will not drive past it. And then you have to get out and eat because you're going to be there forever. See, this is how this is going to work in the future. This is how this is going to work.

Everybody's logo is going to be a stop sign. So no car can pass. I love shall not pass. Yeah. Mitch writes in, this is what may happen at your local seven 11 stolen cash registers, one hundred and eighty dollars and some shooting. And it's a video to some, uh, body cams from these, these cops that were at a seven 11.

And, uh, basically when I got shot, so trigger warning, literally warning, literally. Uh, most six, five or two also sent us, or is, oh, most six, five, nine, two. Is that a different one? I think maybe you missed. I think you missed.

I might've mistyped that. Sorry. Yeah. This is about the iron fist thing. Watch the last episode of iron fist too. It might just make you interested enough to go back and see how it got to that ending. The new show runners seem to be big fans of the comics and it shows. I cannot ever watch the last episode of a show and go back. I can't read the last page of a book either.

You are dirty animals that do that. Yeah, no, I used to do that when I was a kid because I just, I don't know, I have a mental issue and I don't do that anymore. So I'm going to wait to get to the end. Like, like, like a human should. Yes. Well, human would stack books this way.

Yeah. Free, free sticker to the first person that gets us on Twitter with the movie that came from. Okay. I was going to, I was going to spoil it, but no, I will, I will wait. Don't spoil it. SJ Cogs writes in this robotic bartender is coming soon to an airport near you.

And this is a mashable link to this robot bartender, which actually looks kind of cool. But here's the problem I have with robot bartenders. If you go to a really good bartender and you tip them really heavy on the first drink, your next drink is usually poured a little bit heavier.

Let me destroy your point for you, Jason. It's only going to be at an airport. Where'd you ever get a special deal from a bartender at an airport? Let's see. San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles. Yeah. Fireside. How dare you point shit my point shit.

I can't, I can't help it, man. Sorry. All right. And finally, Nathan over on Twitter sent us, Amazon is up to some shady stuff to polish their PR. And this is a business insider link that talks about their program that encourages some of its fulfillment center employees to go to Twitter and talk about their experiences working there.

They're called FC ambassadors and they spread their word about working at Amazon as their full-time job and it's great and everything's positive. This is nothing new. Amazon is hardly the only company that does this. Sadly, I've bitched on this show before about friends that have taken new jobs and then all of a sudden just start posting about how great their job is.

Unfortunately, it started to become part of the job as being positive about your company on social media, which is an outrage to me. Yeah, it's just, it, it, no guys, stop, stop that shit over on GOG.show. Andrew writes in, this one is for Brian and his love for bird scooters.

And it's a, uh, a link to scooters in the river, pdx.com. And it's just a bunch of, uh, is how many scooters have been thrown into the river? Wilmette 17 so far with some screenshots and videos. So that's fantastic.

Single service website. I love these. And there's an Instagram. Our next comment is from Torn. Uh, and this is lengthy, but interesting. Hey, grumpies. After hearing your segment on Europe's new policies today, I have a few things to clarify from my European perspective. One, the link tax is not what you described in your show.

Nobody wants to tax the linking itself. The links in your show notes, for example, are not an issue at all. The link tax gives the copyright holders of news articles, i.e. the newspaper outlets, the right to charge Google for using excerpts of the articles on their Google's news page. And Google News is the target for this law. The reasoning, in grabbing the bylines of the articles and displaying that on their site, Google is profiting from the work of these news outlets.

Therefore, news outlets should get a share of Google's advertisement revenue. This law is already in effect in Germany. Nothing has changed. After heavy lobbying by the news outlets, the law got enacted. Some of the outlets even tried to charge Google. In response, Google just stopped displaying the news articles in their service. Naturally, that dropped traffic on the news sites until they allowed Google to use their bylines free of charge.

And because this was so successful, the news outlets are trying this again on the European scale, hoping to get enough leverage that Google won't pull that stunt again. What was the definition of insanity again? Well, basically, you're saying this is useless. Yeah. Yeah. It's not going to work. Yeah. And by the way, the definition of insanity, go back and listen to the previous shows.

It is not doing the same thing over and over again, expecting the same result. We debunked that a long time ago. And if we had those filters about quotes, that would come up right now. True. The fines for not pulling extremist posts. The fines are real. No individual cases get fined. Only if this happens all the time because the platforms read Facebook, ignore the timeline regularly.

More important, the law places fines on the platforms if they ignore requests by law enforcement for user information. This is actually a problem over here. We don't have free speech. We have freedom of opinion. And saying or writing some things is actually illegal, denying the Holocaust or insulting other people, for example. These are serious matters over here.

There are people in jail for repeatedly denying the Holocaust. But the investigations often get stopped in their tracks because Facebook simply ignores the request for IP addresses and user information and didn't delete these postings because they didn't violate the Facebook community guidelines, ignoring that they violate our law.

In my opinion, the first law is crap. Google will again pull all the news articles from a service. Until the news outlets cave and allow the use of their bylines free of charge, there's a possibility of bloggers and other users getting fined. That's a real danger. I totally agree with you there. The second law, we'll see if this helps reduce hateful comments on social media or if actually legal posts or comedy get caught in the crossfires.

Greetings from Germany. Torn. Thank you, Torn. That is a very interesting analysis of it. And I like your thoughts. No, that really helps put it in perspective. I dig that. And the fact that Google was using the bylines and some of the content in the search results, like that makes sense because you can generally go through Google News and get like the gist of the article and don't have to read the article because everybody, you know, you lead with the bulk of what it is.

So that makes sense. Peter writes in, and this is another long one. Howdy, geeks. So my love of GOG is bleeding over into my classroom demeanor. The internet is leaking, as they used to say. In one of my last required courses, technical writing, our professor asked the class what the definition of buzzword is in reference to resume building.

Without skipping a beat, I raised my hand to answer journalism in the 21st century and got a chuckle out of her. Moreover, I wanted to follow up on your first request from feedback loop on episode 280. Here we go. Number one, if everyone stopped having kids for 10 years, how many people would there be in 10 years?

Because the question is kind of vague. Let me assume the following. A, everyone currently pregnant would still give birth, but procreation would cease entirely. B, the statistical rate of successful births and deaths by natural causes would stay the same. Ignoring the Donald element, of course.

So, taking the current world population of 7,649,888,013 with a global rate of 360 births per day, meaning that for the next nine months, this number would stay constant until dropping to zero on June 1st, 2019.

In 151,600 deaths per day, we can crunch the numbers on this one. I know. Hey, come on, man. Wake up. Wake up. This is good stuff. I found this fascinating. There are 260 days between today and June 1st, nine months from now, and when the last currently pregnant woman would give birth.

So, at 360,000 births per day, that would mean 93.6 million babies would be born, and 151,000 deaths per day, 39.26 million people would croak. So, it's a lot of people.

It's a lot of dead people. The population that day, when the last baby is born, would be 7,704,000,000. And some change. Then, from June 1st, 2019 to September 14th, 2028, there are 3,393 days in total.

Now, we just need to use the death rate of 151,000 per day, which equates to 512,343 million. Oh, my God. Okay. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to put this in the show notes. Anyone still with us? I'm halfway through this, but he does the math on it. He does the math.

He did do the math, which is pretty amazing. And he actually puts a Google Doc in here with the links, or with, like, he shows his work. Shows his work. Yeah. Yeah. At TLDR, we start with, where was the original? 7,649,000,000.

And we end up with 7,191,000,000. So, not that great of a reduction over the course of 10 years. Right. Yeah. So, he says, love the show is always stay grumpy. Man, I thought I could get through that faster, but, oh, my God. No, that didn't happen.

That was a deep one. Brevity is the soul of wit, but thank you very much. I love it. Appreciate you doing that. Look, man, we asked him to do the work, and he did it. That's true. That's true. We did ask for it. Yeah. Yeah. So, actually, Peter, send me your physical address.

I'll send you some stickers for that, because that was pretty awesome. Okay. Over at iTunes, we got a five-star rating from Ferdinand. Best podcast ever. I've been listening to GOG for going on two years now, and I live for the now two days a week. Parentheses, bang, bang, bang, in parentheses, when shows are published. I, myself, am only very indirectly in the tech world.

My last three serious boyfriends have all been IT nerds, so I at least have heard of some of the $5 words y'all use and have some fodder for conversation topics. My current boo seems to agree with your opinions the most, so he's obviously a keeper. I am also a huge fan of the sense of humor that infuses each episode.

The snarkism is probably the main things that keep me listening. Even the mechanics behind a lot of the actual topics are way over my liberal artsy head, which field is kind of ambiguous. My former dissertation advisor referred to me as a... I can't even pronounce that. Thank you so much for everything you do. Also, I just made a recurring donation on Patreon.

Appreciate it. Appreciate it. Thank you, Ferdinand. Yes, and she's a phenomenological cultural analyst. There you go. Yep. And Tris Hussey from Canada writes in, cheers from a fellow grumpy old geek. I found my tribe. I might have started building websites a couple years after the guys, but the perspective is the same.

Once you've been doing geek stuff for this long, you've earned the right to call bullshit on the stupid and bring a little perspective to tech news. Thank you very much, Tris. Thank you. Next up is Christopher, another five-star rating, legendary podcast. Jason and Brian have a great rapport. Fun take on tech, great topics.

Grumpy old geeks is a must. This next one comes from Germany. Ich bin nächst einverstanden. It says... It means I don't agree. It's a five-star funny. These guys should start the first dockless scooter company using AI running on the blockchain. Keep up the great work and stay grumpy. Well, thank you very much.

Thank you. If you want your question or comment right 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. I don't have a shout-out so much as seen on Twitter that really kind of encapsulated my feeling about the internet recently.

The internet has given me so much, but I'd give it all up to go back to not knowing how terrible people are. You just want to go back to the old days. No. As we said before, you can't put the genie back in the Pandora's box. No, you cannot. To mix metaphor quotes.

Or even the RDO's box. No. Or the Spotify's box. Nope. None of the above. So my shout-out is to Jordan Harbinger and his lovely wife, Jen Harbinger. They came over yesterday and we recorded some stuff. And they bought me a cheeseburger on National Cheeseburger Day, which was pretty awesome.

I had a black and blue burger, which was a cheeseburger with blue cheese, which I highly recommend, but not if you are allergic to blue cheese, like Friend of the Show pub. Is that that same pub we went to the one time I came out there? The HQ, yes. Yeah, that was a delicious burger. Yeah, I'm telling you, man. HQ Gastro Pub in Woodland Hills.

Definitely recommend it. Oh my God, their skinny fries are to die for. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. 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 282. And there you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay crumpy and we'll see you on Monday.

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