34: Sexbots, money, and honey

All right! Clumpy Old Geeks. Two old farts, a microphone, and the internet. What could go wrong? So, we're going to do something a little different this week. We're starting with At the Library.

At the Library. I picked up a new book called The Circle by Dave Eggers, which is kind of a dystopian future of social networking run amok. Yes, it is. It is, hands down, my favorite near-future fiction since Demon by Daniel Suarez, which we covered before.

I fucking love this book. I really do. It points out everything that can and probably will at some point happen with social networking. Yeah, I mean, full disclosure, I'm only about 25% of the way into the book.

You told me about it on Wednesday. Sorry. Whoops. Apparently, 25% is the magic number. Yes, it is. You double dinged. Yeah, so I'm about 25% in. You told me about it on Wednesday. My initial reaction was one of shock and horror because I'm not a Dave Eggers fan.

You know, he wrote Heartbreaking Work, a Staggering Genius, which came out, I think, when I was in college. And, of course, everybody read it and fell in love with it. But I haven't liked his book since then. He's a little too kind of literary up his own ass for me. But, hey, whatever. But I got to say, I like it.

And, you know, I can't have a negative opinion about an author because I firmly believe in separating the work from the author. Otherwise, I would go around recommending Ender's Game. Yeah, exactly. Ender's Game, which is one of my favorite books of all time. But he's just a horrendous dickhead person. So I bought it.

I'm having much the same reaction, even 25% in. I'm really enjoying it. It's frightening. And it is probably our future. It's absolutely terrifying. And it's so fucking believable. That's the problem. It is really believable.

And the company, The Circle, which is kind of an amalgamation of Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Yeah. That's kind of the three. I don't see any Apple in there or anything else. But it's, you know, they want you to eventually run everything in your life through this.

And it even gets into, oh, and Fitbit. They take over Fitbit as well. Well, I mean, that is the concept. The concept being that, you know, I mean, it's what Facebook and Google and all of them are shooting for, which is complete ubiquity, where they do everything for you and basically become one of the only places in the world that you can work anymore either.

Yeah. And it was really creepy because as I was typing on Facebook that I'm going to cover this book for the next one, I've just got, I've just, I mean, I got clammy. I'm like, oh, my God, this is what they talk about in the book. It's like, you must share everything. Everything must be open and transparent. And all this data must be in the cloud for everyone to see.

And it's never deleted. And I'm just like, oh, God. It made me kind of sick to my stomach to actually tweet or use Facebook, which it kind of generally does. But this book really kind of brought it to the fore, I think. And when you look at it from that point of view, like everything that we do with sharing and using all these sites and it comes back to Larnier's book with the siren servers and all that.

It's just like we are paying the bills for all of these companies and with just our attention and our participation. And it drives me mad. But unfortunately, I can't pull everybody out of Facebook and say, just stop it.

I wish I could. I wish I want – this book should be required reading for anybody that decides to ever use social media. I lay down – this should be the Tom Sawyer of our – well, not our generation, future generations because our generation is pretty much done.

But, you know, it's a very accurate portrayal of what, you know, we could be doing in basically like two to three years. It's a very near future fiction. I've really enjoyed it so far, 25 percent in. It's funny. I'm drawing a lot of parallels as I'm reading it, too.

It's almost as if 1984 updated for the current age but making them sound like you're actually working within the corporation. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a reverse 1984 where the main character, May, is part of the whole thing.

And you just follow her trajectory as she, you know, goes farther down the rabbit hole. And I'm really surprised because it's almost Cory Doctorow-ish with how he's really good at near future fiction. Yeah. It really kind of is in that vein.

And I got to say, I just – I love it. I can't recommend it enough. Just go buy it. Read it. The Audible version is pretty good. You're reading the print version because you're like a psycho fast reader. But the – it's like 405 pages. So on Audible, it was a longer book.

It clocked in at close to 14 hours. And at X2, that's only seven. So you can do it in a day if you're, you know, proactive. It's only $6.50 for the Kindle. And, yeah, that's the version I'm reading through my lovely Kindle app. And I'm burning through it.

It's good. I wish I would have had this for my flight. When I was on the way back, I would have torn through the whole thing on the flight. But, yeah, really enjoying it so far. I mean, I have a feeling that I haven't gotten to the part where it starts to get really, really dark and the twist comes in yet. So I have a feeling we'll be talking about this again next week.

Yeah, there's not so much a twist as a steady curve of predictability. And it's got a great ending. So I'm not going to spoil the ending for you, but it's got a great ending. Well, I'm looking forward to it. So, yeah, it's really great. So next up, I want to talk about my buddy Tim Ferriss has a new book club, which is not so much a book club.

Well, I guess it's kind of a book club. It's an audio book club. He's been, like, sneakily on the back end going around buying up audio book rights for some of his favorite books. And his first book is Vagabonding by, I think, it's Rolf Fotz that does this book. I don't have it on the notes, but I've read this book about five times.

And the first time I read it, I'm like, well, shit, I could have written this book because it's very much my lifestyle. As I am camped out in a friend's kitchen right now using a dinner tray table for my mic stand and, you know, I kind of live on the road and set up wherever I have to do my stuff.

This is one of the best books I've ever read, and I'm really happy that Tim has, you know, gone out and got the rights and is revitalizing the audio book market for some of these more obscure books. It's definitely a great read. I highly recommend it.

Cool. So he's basically starting his own kind of, like, Audible. Well, yeah. Well, he's selling the books on Audible, but he has the rights now. Okay, gotcha. There's the difference. He's making the money off of it. Right. Well, and the authors. I mean, I didn't look at the numbers on the splits he's doing with the authors, but I know that he's buddies with Rolf, so he's probably – it's probably a very amicable split that they wouldn't get if they went to just the general publisher.

So I'm looking forward to his further book club selections because it ain't fucking Oprah, that's for sure. Cool. I'm going to definitely have to check it out, but I've got to finish the circle first, and then I've got to get back to my Morrissey book, which I still haven't finished.

What? Jeez. I was too busy having fun in London to read. Come on. Well, and Morrissey does not equate to fun, so there you go. Exactly. Okay, boys. Reel it back in. We've got a bit of breaking news that started basically as soon as we started to record the podcast.

I noticed that there was an update for my iPhone for iOS. That would be the 7.0.4 update. 7.0.4 update, and as I was starting to – as we were starting to record and we were recording the library segment, my instant message window popped up, and I was getting reports of phones crashing.

And then we just got a link. iPhone 5S users report blue screen of death crashes on the latest update, and it actually is a blue screen of death. So apparently Microsoft has infected Apple. That was my first thing because when you sent me the link and I'm like, is it really blue? And I'm like, holy shit, it's blue.

It's actually blue. It's the blue screen of death. I have updated my 5S and my iPad mini to 7.0.4 and have not experienced the BSOD at this point. So it is a subset of users.

Hopefully you wouldn't be one of them. You've got a five. Yeah, I've got a five, so I'll probably be okay. But I'm going to hold off to do my update until after the podcast so as not to suck up our Skype family. Oh, yes, thank you very much. I was like, what? Oh, yes, we're on Skype. So, yeah, give it a shot. It's good. I didn't notice anything different, but I'm sure it's just bug fixes and all that crap.

It's a point release. Yeah. But every time there's a release, I have to. I know, I know. You're always in right away. So I just thought we'd actually do some breaking news, even though it's Friday. Breaking. All right.

So now on to our regular news segment. Apple Maps. How Google lost when everyone thought it had won. Now, this is a – yeah, it's a new article from The Guardian that talks about the app distribution because we talked about it a bit.

I'm a Google Maps guy, and you tried out the Apple Maps when you were in London, and it seemed to be much better for you. And since then, I've been using Apple Maps exclusively just to give it a shot because it's in my war against extra apps.

And I've got to say, it's been fantastic. It is fantastic. It's actually a lot easier on the phone or the iPad. I mean, I still use Google Maps on my desktop, but I'm probably not going to go back to Google Maps on my phone. I love Apple Maps. It's great. They fix their problems. It's just well integrated.

It's built in, and it works a lot better and quicker. I mean, I still haven't figured out an easy way to share from the Maps app on Mavericks to the phone because there should just be a send them my damn phone link. You know, it'll get there because – but Apple kind of just sucks at software integration.

I don't know. They really do. But this is – I mean, it's just a thing where people that have maps on the phone and who aren't power users, which is 90% of the people that have an iPhone, they see, oh, maps. All they care about is maps.

They don't care who provides it. They don't get that deep into it. It's just like, I need a map. I'm going to use the one that says maps that came with whatever that's – the icon that's on the page. Because most people probably don't even know how to change their damn icons on their screen. But, yeah, I've been a fan, and this just basically shows the giant drop in users from Google Maps.

Yeah. Well, I mean, we knew that was going to happen just because, again, people are lazy and people don't know how to use their phones. So once, you know, Apple just basically put it – baked it in, and you actually had to take steps to use Google Maps again, well, it was bound to happen. Yeah, and they kind of mentioned Waze at the end of this article.

And I've known a few people that – I get in the car, and they start up Waze, and they're like – that's W-A-Z-E. That's a traffic app. Yeah. I think I talked about it before. It's just a huge battery drain made my iPhone basically turn into a brick of fire because I had it plugged into the USB port in my car.

I've got an old Ford, which has the first-gen sync. So I've got sync in my Ford, but the power drain is so great that I started off at like 73 percent power, and I sat on the 405 in L.A. traffic with Waze running.

My phone got super hot, and when I got to my place, it was at 72 percent. So the power input could not keep up with the drain that Waze uses. Yeah. So I highly – I was just like, whoa, whoa, dude. There are people that use it. A lot of people I know really love it and swear by it.

I've actually got a couple issues with it. First, yeah, whenever I have it installed, my battery drains like 100 times faster than when I don't have it installed on my phone. Secondly, I thought that texting and driving was supposed to be illegal, and the entire concept of Waze is about people literally social driving and putting in traffic and how slow they're going and what's happening around them while they're driving.

So it's basically illegal. And third, Waze is basically from the circle. It's driving for the circle. Yeah, and I mean, yeah, Google bought them now, so it's going to be the whole – it is what it is. It's got points, but it's got points, and it's got badges, and it's got levels.

It's gamified driving. Yeah. So there are people that – anytime that something tells me that I can earn a badge, that is a giant red flag for me anymore. As soon as they say you can earn badges, I'm out. I'm done. I know that they are trying to use psychology to get me to use their piece of shit that I don't need to use.

You know? That's it. So I'm out. I'm done. I've been done with Waze for ages, but it's just funny to see – like I'm in the Midwest now, and there are people that use this constantly. Yeah. And I'm just like, dude, really? Why the hell do you need a badge for your commute? You've got to do it anyway.

It's not like they give you like a movie ticket so you can go and enjoy yourself or like Netflix credit or new tires, whatever, or an oil change. You know what? If I get the Road Warrior badge on Waze, I want a free fucking oil change because I've given you enough data where you can monetize me and my data to your other users.

I want an oil change, period. You do that, I will install your app, period. Well, you know, that's everything. That's the internet now. That's apps. That's Kickstarter. We give you all of our information and our money, and we get nothing in return. So what are you going to do?

We get badges. We get badges. That's right. We don't need no stinking badges. That's right. We get badges that we can then post onto our social networks so they get more data about the other apps that we use. Oh, man. It's a vicious cycle. It is. Okay. So speaking of Google – Yeah, let's get into the Google G plus YouTube kerfuffle that went down this week.

Yes. It's gotten interesting. I mean, obviously, as we all know, the internet is full of trolls. YouTube was spectacularly bad for ages. They made their attempt to try to clean things up by forcing everybody to use Google plus. But they also switched all the algorithms in terms of how comments show up, how they're ranked, et cetera, et cetera.

And at least one user – we got the link in our show notes – has posted about it and said that it's actually made the problem worse because trolling and horrible comments that are done in people's, air quote, real names, and air quote from Google plus are actually getting promoted to the top.

And useful comments and useful comments and good things are going down. So obviously, their algorithms are not working as planned. Well, and here's the other thing that I noticed. Every YouTube video I go to now has an ASCII art, either tank or helicopter or some kind of military device that says, we're against Google plus comments in YouTube.

If you are with us, then copy and paste this piece of artillery to show your solidarity, which is just – I mean, it's fucking stupid. But every video I've gone to in the past week has had at least two or three of those at the top.

So it's getting promoted by Google plus users who are doing it. It's like, hey, if you don't want to leave a comment, if you don't like what they're doing, don't leave a comment. And you know what? YouTube will be much better if you don't leave a comment because your comments are not that good.

Yeah. The correct way to protest against this stuff, boys and girls, is to opt out, not to make a bunch of comments saying how stupid it is. Well, I mean, it's YouTube. These are the dregs of the fucking planet who are commenting on YouTube videos. This is pretty true. Well, negatively commenting on YouTube videos.

I don't leave a comment on YouTube unless it's positive, period. Because – Well, look at you being all nice. It's my Buddhist nature coming out in me now. Oh, God. Excuse me. Oh, God. I'm not even drinking during this one and I feel like I need one after that.

All right. Hey, look. There's just – I've stopped. I've forgiven pretty much everybody that's wronged me in the world at this point. And I see no reason to leave. I see no reason to be a troll. I don't. Period. I agree. I have turned over a new leaf.

But when it comes to videos, if it's a crappy video, I just turn it off. I don't thumbs down it. If it's a great video, I thumbs up it and I leave a great comment. That's it. That's all you need to do. Yeah. You know what? That's when it comes back to don't feed the trolls. Don't – but it's also just don't put negativity out there that you don't need to for no reason.

It's like, okay, you don't like it? Whatever. Don't leave a positive comment. Your numbers will average out in the end that there are less positive comments than views and the algorithm will self-correct. The matrix will self-correct, yes.

But we'll get to that later. We have another study about – let's talk about another big giant. Let's talk about Facebook again. That seems like basically once a month, so every fourth episode that we do, there's a new study about how Facebook isn't cool and the kids hate Facebook. The twist on this particular article is Facebook isn't cool, it will never be cool, and it doesn't have to be cool because we're all there anyways.

So this is basically an article written in reaction to all the articles that are written about how kids don't use Facebook anymore except for the fact that, as everybody points out in those articles, the kids are actually on Facebook. They're just also using other social networks in addition to. So Facebook doesn't really need to worry.

No, they don't need to worry. They're the juggernaut at this point. There was a time when MySpace didn't need to worry. So I don't know. I really – like I said, I don't care about this stuff anymore. It's – this goes up and down. It's fodder for the news cycle.

People are going to use this when they need to use it. I have to use it because I – oh, look, it even says siren servers in it. I know. I saw that too. I was like, hey, that's cool. No, he did make one good point, and I totally agree with this. Facebook has become so ubiquitous now, and all of our families are on it, and his point is – and this is a direct quote from the article – college kids still need ways to stalk and flirt with each other, high school kids even more so.

Ideally, they'd prefer to do that on a platform, i.e. Snapchat, that involves their genitals, that doesn't double as a convenient way of simultaneously broadcasting things to every member of your family. That is why cool kids aren't using Facebook as much as they used to. It's simply gotten too big. That's exactly true. Everybody's on Facebook now.

It's not a little club anymore. So kids have switched off to little other social networks where they can basically control their own little thing and do the stuff that they don't want mom and dad to see. Tinder? Tinder, too. Yep. They can use Tinder. Yes. I actually have that. I just noticed that I have it installed on my phone for some reason.

I've never used it, but somebody told me about it, and I installed it, but I don't think I'll be opening that one. I should probably delete it right now. I haven't installed that one. I have Snapchat on my system, but – Well, you're married. But I don't know anybody else that's on it. I went in and did the sign-up thing, and friends of yours that have Snapchat, no one, because I'm in my 40s.

So, yeah, I did the same thing. I installed it. I'm like, okay, what now? That's the whole point of a network is you have to have people to use the network with. But anyway, yeah. We're part of the group of people that are all happily just okay with Facebook, and that's about all we're going to use.

Maybe Instagram, but that's about it. Vinicor keeps telling me that I'm a 12-year-old girl because I use Instagram every day. It's like, only 12-year-old girls use that. What are you doing? He's got a point. Shut up.

Anyways. Okay. So we get back to the wonderness that is Obamacare and the website of death that won't work. You sent a link that said 106,185 people killed the website. That seems, yeah.

I mean, apparently that was the number at the point that this article was written of people that actually signed up for Obamacare via the multi-state websites, which includes all of them, including the states that built their own and didn't rely on the government back end that was provided.

So that makes me wonder if the site was so horribly built that it was crashing all the time and people weren't able to get on and it was so slow. Only for 106,000 people? That's it? I mean, that's ridiculous.

Yeah. I mean, granted, that's the people that actually went through the entire process and signed up. Obviously, five to six times that many people were going to the website and as soon as it hit the news, every fucking newsroom was full of, you know, every goddamn reporter trying to hit the site at once. So I'm sure they had massive traffic spikes and things like that.

But still, this doesn't seem, you know, almost every single artist's website I do gets that much traffic every day. And I'm running them on, you know, a couple of cloud servers and I'm okay. Oh, geez. Yeah, no, 106,000 users is nothing. I mean, before we even had to shard our database for Technorotic, we were like at 2 million, you know?

I mean, I could run a website on my air that could handle more traffic than that. Yeah. So, you know, when I finally read this article, at first I thought it was absolutely ridiculous. That the president of our country is apologizing for a website in press, you know, press junkets and things like that.

But then when I read this, I was like, yeah, maybe he should. This is obviously just a really shitty, shitty job. Yeah. And, you know, this comes, I mean, I can get all conspiracy theory here and say, oh, maybe the Republicans had some coders hired to kind of sabotage it from the inside, which would not be hard.

That's one of those things where, remember when I told you before, it's like we were talking about hackers. Like, and how exploits, exploits sell on the black market for millions of dollars. Yeah. So if I, if I was a virus writer, I, or just even a black hat hacker, I would be working at Apple right now, putting in as many back doors as I possibly could to go out and like quit the job and then go out and sell them for a couple million bucks.

Yeah. So, you know, who knows, maybe, maybe the, the repub's got some crappy ass coders in there and just, uh, you know, kicked his knees out. I don't know. I'm just, I'm, I'm blue sky in here, but yeah, it's, you know, all they have to do is put a little malware in there and, uh, you know, some DOS attacks. I mean, we don't know what's actually happened.

So, well, no, there was, there was one, one, uh, article I saw where the cookie data, the cookie data alone was so substantial. Like they were trying to store everything in the cookie where a cookie is supposed to be just an identifier for a DV record that then has all the data in it, but they were trying to store everything in the cookie, which is, you know, no, no, no, it's ridiculous.

Either way, there was a bunch of incompetent, you know, poopy heads that, uh, built this website. It was terrible. The stupid poopy heads. I agree. Poopy heads. Speaking of poopy. Oh, what a segue. Ah, gotcha. Motherfucker. So, uh, Vice, uh, investigates Soylent, finds rats in mold.

Yeah. There's a rat poop in Soylent. There goes, uh, there goes my dream of actually trying this stuff out, which I was actually considering doing, but, uh, now no way. Yeah. Uh, Vice is, it's one of those things where I hear good things and bad things about. They did, they sponsored Rodman's trip to North Korea.

Yes. Uh, to do a documentary on it. So now they've got a 20 minute documentary, which I haven't seen yet on, uh, on Soylent. Um, but the, the whole point is that there's, the food safety issues around this thing are just craptacular. So, um, I'm, I'm staying the hell away from it, and I recommend everybody stay the hell away from it.

Yeah. Well, I mean, uh, as you read this article, I went through it a lot, um, because I was really interested in it. Because, again, this kind of goes to my whole hatred for Kickstarter, uh, it's, it's, it's a case of, you know, when, when people start these companies that have no experience running a company, uh, you don't really know what you're doing.

You know, he got, he got a cheap warehouse space in Oakland and figured that would be fine. Uh, didn't think about the fact that there would be, you know, they would have problems with vermin. Vermin! And other things like that, which, you, you know, you know that if you've done this sort of thing before, but, uh, these people haven't. So they got a big pile of money.

They didn't want to spend a lot. They got a cheap warehouse. And, uh, you know, a super big lesson to learn, never invite people to come and film things when you're just starting out. Oh, definitely. Um, and it says, since the filming of the documentary, they've moved to a more official factory in Modesto. Yeah.

Uh, which, which doesn't allow press. Hmm. Oh, interesting. Hmm. Rubs the chin. Yeah. Let's see if I can get some sound off of that. Yeah. Uh, but despite the rat and mold mishaps, he's hoping for success for the company. Um, I don't know. I, I'm still staying the hell away from it.

This is, this is a, this guy just doesn't know what the hell he's doing. You know, this guy, this comes back to the, um, what is the water filtration thing that we had David Teeter on about. So, yeah. And, uh, he, I mean, he's, he's been a crusader against those guys and has done great work.

And they have backtracked, you know, partially because of his due diligence. And so we need more people like doing the same thing with the soil and stuff, like actual food scientists coming in and say, or even just health experts coming in and saying, look, this has to be like clean.

At least, I mean, Jesus Christ, you can't have rats and mold. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, again, they've, they've skirted going around the FDA because it's not considered a food stuff. It's considered a supplement. So, well, no, they've also gotten around it by saying that all, all of the component parts are FDA approved, but not the combination is FDA approved.

So we'll see what they do. Yeah. Well, you know, there you go. So should we talk about the, uh, the, what I would call the $3 billion elephant in the, uh, in the web this week? Yeah. I, I, I mean, my, my, I think my title for this link pretty much sums it up.

It just says, fuck the world. I, I feel the exact same way. I can't. First off, I mean, we were bitching just a few weeks ago about how Snapchat could possibly be worth or be valued at $3 billion. And then they actually got offered it and then they turned it down.

He said, no, they said no to $3 billion. If that is not the, the greed run amok with these idiots, I'm like, you're not worth $3 million, let alone $3 billion, $3 billion.

You could buy Uruguay for $3 billion. These guys just made the dumbest decision of their entire lives. You know why they made that decision is because the Chinese are offering them $4 billion. Yeah, I figured. I mean, that's, it's either going to be Google or somebody else who's going to come in and offer just a little bit more money.

Um, the problem is that's going to ruin their cred because right now, I, I'm actually shocked and surprised by the number of people that I know that actually are cheering them on for this. I think this is a great thing that they said, no, what, you know, it's, it's like a, it's kind of a Robin hoodie sort of thing.

I guess they're just thrilled that Facebook is getting denied something, but well, no, they're not, they're not, they're not doing it because they don't want to sell. They're doing it because they're holding out for more money. Yeah. This is not Robin hood. This is, you know, uh, robber baron ask. They just want more.

Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I, I, I hate them. I can't stand them. Um, let's see. There was another article, uh, there's, I mean, there's a million articles out there right now about this, but it's just, it's so, uh, again, as we were saying all along, it's like it, it, they don't make any money.

They don't have any way to make any money. I mean, they can put in ads on what photos that blow up in 10 seconds. Uh, there was a really great article on slate that, that gave us a, someone to even tell me a halfway plausible way. Snapchat can make any money at all, uh, in app, funny hat purchases.

So you can put a hat on your Johnson. Yes. Okay. Cupid style quizzes before each snap sponsored sex, meth puppies, start a private preschool. So that's about it. I mean, there's, there's no way for whatever. I, I don't understand the world anymore.

And this story actually almost made me lose my fucking mind this week. Um, and in keeping with that theme, I did find also another cool little link. Uh, this is from happier.co.uk and it did not make me feel any happier. Um, how much money do the top technology companies make every second?

This is actually an older link. I've seen this before. I figured it had to be a little bit older cause they still have BlackBerry in there, which I'm sure is no longer making $205 per second. Uh, yeah. And, and I thought it was very, very happy that, uh, Facebook only makes $230 a second.

Yeah. This definitely needs to be updated. So, uh, but it's just, it is fascinating to look at these numbers. It's extremely depressing. And the, uh, the follow or the article that introduced it kind of went with a, uh, with the typical London wage, um, which kind of worked out to like 0.0005 cents per second is what normal human beings make.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So Samsung is at the top of the pile making $6,486 a second. Since I have looked at this, they have made 200 and about $30,000, which is about 36 seconds. I opened up this link quite a while ago cause they've made $35 million. Well, you know, I, I, I can't begrudge a corporation for making lots of money.

I can't, I mean, it's, it's taken them years and years of hard work and they, they, they employ a lot of people. I don't, that doesn't bother a lot of people that doesn't bother me at all either. It's a, it's when you're, have your Snapchats and stuff like that. Yeah. It's the companies that don't make, you know, how much Snapchat has made since I've been looking at that $0, you know, how much Instagram has made $0.

And how many people do those people, those companies employ compared to say your apples or Samsungs or anybody else on this list? Yeah. A thousand. Yeah. I mean like those, those, those hardcore companies make, they employ thousands, tens of thousands of people. But these are just like, yeah, what is Instagram? 13 people.

And they made a billion bucks. You know what? Go die in a fire. And one last bit of Snapchat news since, uh, since this has also helped me just be incredibly angry and depressed all the time. Uh, they were based just down the street from me here in Venice beach, but, uh, thank God they are moving.

Apparently they can no longer afford the rent because they passed up on $3 billion. They moved because they couldn't afford the rent. No, they're, uh, who knows why they're moving. They're probably, I'm sure they're getting an even bigger place that costs even more money, uh, with the no money that they make.

I don't understand the world, Jason. Bumps me out. So I want to talk about, I want to talk about one thing real quick. I want to talk about, um, this guy, this comes back to some of the stuff we talked about, but it's linking and attribution. You talked about upworthy.

Yes. And upworthy is a content aggregator. Yes. So if I see a post on Facebook that links to an upworthy page, I click on it and it's a, it's a YouTube video. Now the proper way, if you like that video, I'm going to, I'm, this is some knowledge I'm dropping kids.

So pay attention. Science. It is. Not really. Uh, no, don't hit share the, don't hit, don't share. They're the upward of the page because upward of the is just promoting somebody else's content. If it's a YouTube video or any other, any other content source that is embedded in that page, find the original piece link to that.

Do not link to, it takes, it takes two extra clicks. That provides, yeah, it requires effort. Yeah. Um, it drives me nuts. I, I cannot stand this shit when I see somebody in it. Tumblr is one of the worst ones. They're like, everybody's posting their Tumblr logs and it's just.

Tumblr is a purely intellectual copyright, copyright destroying machine. That's all it is. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. Uh, right up there with Pinterest. Um, so whenever I see a video that somebody shares that I like, I will, here's the deal. When you roll over any YouTube video in the bottom, right, there's a little thing that says YouTube.

And if you hover over it, it says, watch this video on YouTube. Yeah. Click there. Click there. It will open in a new window and there will be a, uh, a question mark and a hashtag at the end of that, which has a timestamp from when you started watching it. Take that out, like delete that from the URL, then copy and paste the URL, then put that wherever you're going to share it.

That will point people to the source of the goodness. Do not give traffic to other people who do not deserve the traffic period. I agree with that a hundred percent. Unless of course the link is on grumpy old geeks.com. Oh no, I'd still, which case you linked our page.

No, no, no, no. I, I, you look, if they, if they saw it on our page, we got the hit. That's great. Whatever. It's, it's about people getting their, their what's due. You know, if, if I post a video to YouTube and people are sharing it, I mean, I got in a huge fight with boing boing actually one time because they, somebody took a set of pictures that I did, posted it to a site, then boing boing linked to the site.

They got, you know, a hundred thousand hits to my photos. And then by the time I, like I was talking to, uh, the whole staff and, uh, I think it was, uh, Fraunfelder. I was talking to Mark Fraunfelder, but he was at Ted. It might've been Peskovitz. Um, he was at Ted and didn't have a cell phone cause they turn them off when they go into the Ted talk because it's an $8,000 conference.

And you don't want to be bothered by people bitching about content that you stole. Uh, when he got out, he finally fixed it. But at that point, like the content was, you know, I, I got none of the attribution for my foot, my photography. Right. So from, from that day, I mean, even before that I've been pissy about this stuff, but now I'm just like, I'm just like, guys, just do your due diligence.

If you're going to share something, share the proper person that needs to get the credit. Well, it's just a moral thing. It's, it has nothing to do with money because most people don't make any money on this. It was like some, somebody did the work. They should get the credit. I agree with you a hundred percent. It's just, uh, it's just, you know, that little bit of extra effort seems to be too difficult for people.

If only we had the circle. I know. Yes. So they, yes. And, uh, speaking of the circle back to Facebook pokes are back. What the hell? I got to, I saw that you poked me, which is just one of the strangest, most kind of weird homoerotic experiences I've had with you recently.

Well, I, I, I was, I was poking a married woman for about 20 minutes last night. It was not nearly as fun as you'd think it would be. Um, no poke never went away. Uh, they, they buried it, but it's never, it's never been gone. Oh, okay. So it's just, they just started, uh, uh, was it surface, surface again?

Yeah. They just did another revamp on their UI and it's popped back up. Uh, it was, it was never gone. It was just buried under some sub menus. Okay. Whatever. Yeah. I, I, I mean, before she was married, I'd have poked it till the sun came up, but, uh, now it just makes me feel slightly dirty.

Yeah. I've never really understood what the poke was for. I mean, it was cute and interesting when it first came up, but then I got the feeling that it just kind of became a flirty device and, uh, then they buried it for a long time and now they're unburied it apparently. And yeah, I was out having a beer or two and I got a little notice on my phone that Jason has poked me and I was like, I ain't that drunk, man.

Well, that was uncomfortable. Yeah. Oh, so, and, uh, lastly, I just want to talk about, we talked about this, you know, in the early episodes about clients and payments. This comes back to like what we do for a living.

Yes. Not, um, we haven't, we, we really haven't talked about this very much like the business side of being a freelancer and a, uh, content owner or not content owner, a, uh, just a shop owner, you know, client services. Yeah. So I mentioned about two weeks ago that I've got like some awesome new clients and they all pay up front and I'm, I'm ready to go.

Uh, I was, I was mistaken. They said that they were going to pay up front and the check, the check was in the mail. Yeah. Checks in the mail. It's always in the mail. It's been 10 days since I executed the contract. Now here's the point, kids execute the contract.

The, they originally sent me an iPhone photo of them signing the lat, like with a signature on the signature page. They sent me an iPhone photo and said, we signed it. And I like, I'm like, seriously, are you, are you fucking kidding me?

That's not going to cut it. So if you do any kind of contracts, if you, if you're not signing in person, I use a service called right signature, which has an audit trail with emails and, uh, inline PDFs that you can sign it with your mouse.

Even, um, it is, it's free for a couple of documents. I think you can have like up to five documents for free, but it gives you legal protection that that person has in fact seen and signed the contract. Right. I cannot recommend this enough because right now I'm shopping for lawyers.

Um, really sucks. It really, really sucks because this was, this was going to be my client that got me through like the next six months. And now I'm back to broke and looking for lawyers, which is like, I mean, this is the worst part of our client services.

It's like, I don't care how nice you think your client is. Um, why, uh, they, you check is never in the mail. Uh, they may be super nice people. They'll blame it on their, their, you know, their financial department. They'll blame it on their accountants, whatever. You will not get paid on time.

I've never been paid on time. I've spent months trying to chase down money. Um, if at all possible, I always recommend, well, what, what we try to do as a company is always, we try to get half upfront. Um, and then we allow ourselves the ability to bill more for the second half if the project goes over budget, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

But I tend to, I try to never deliver product until second half of payment and payment in full is received. Now you don't always get to do that because clients will freak out and deadlines and things like that. That's when it gets murky. Um, I've spent literally a year trying to get money out of a record label.

Uh, it takes perseverance. I try to avoid suing because generally that just means you break even. Um, you know, so far I've been really lucky and I've only had one client completely stiff me in 10 years. So, yeah, this is, I mean, I've, I've been putting blood, sweat, and tears into this thing for over two weeks and I'm just like, I'm just, I'm despondent at this point because that was like, you know, that's, that's Christmas money.

That's yeah. Yeah. Well, an American express is going to be very upset with me. So, um, it just, it, it's, it's a downer. It really is a downer. And I just don't want to have to fight for this kind of stuff because I was doing right by them. Well, why can't they do right by me? You know?

Oh God, I so agree with that attitude, but you just can't have it. I, if, if that's such a strong part of your personality, then I would hire, I would recommend hiring, uh, not so much an account. You can just hire a bookkeeper who can do billing services for you and they can take care of, of chasing down and sending the angry emails.

And yeah, or one of the other things that I did for a while, particularly with, with some of my worst clients that I had way back in the day is I made up a person. I just made up a fake email account. That wasn't me. It was, you know, Phil at slender fungus.com. And I started to write the angry, where the hell's our money emails from, uh, from the Phil persona.

That's a pretty good idea. Yeah. Kind of, cause it separates you. You can kind of do good cop, bad cop with your clients and you can continue kind of the, the fake niceties like, Oh, I'm glad everything's going well. So, uh, yeah, you said your accountant was going to send it out tomorrow, right? Cause she was sick for the past few days, which is why she couldn't sign it.

And then you have Phil send the angry email saying, I don't care if your accountants have been out for a few days, you're six days overdue and we're going to start to charge you interest. Oh, you know what's even better? I just thought up, we need to come up with a fake collections agency, uh, URL. We'll get a domain for a fake collections agency that we can, we can send them from.

Yeah. Uh, your account has been turned over to us by blah, blah, blah. Um, we will be pursuing legal action if you do not pay in full within X amount of time. That's a good one too. So yeah, I mean, it's just, uh, it's part of the deal. It's part of running your own thing. Um, you know, if you're a Pollyanna that believes everybody's nice and means well, don't run your own company because what I've learned over the years is in general, people are fuckers.

Yeah. I should, I should not run my own company then because I believe in the human spirit. I really, I mean, I mean, this is, I mean, this isn't even the, the Buddhist crap talk. And this is just before that. I always, I meet nice people. I presume they're nice. I expect them to continue to be nice. And when they fuck me, then I find out they're not that nice.

Um, people, I don't necessarily disagree. I do think that people are generally are, are nice people, um, until money is involved. Yeah. And it's one of those things where like, don't sign the contract that says payment is due upon signature. If you know, you can't pay it.

Uh, cause that just, that blows the trust at that point. And the thing is when you're working with, with small organizations, myself, uh, you as an independent contractor, uh, you, you're larger companies that are, that are hiring us. You have to understand that when you're hiring us, you have wiggle room.

We will be, you know, we're happy to work with you. If you can't pay us for three weeks, just tell us. Yeah. We can get started anyways and establish that level of trust and sign the paperwork. And then you said three weeks in three weeks, send that check. Yeah. Transparency. You know, if you've got something going on and you've got, you know, if you've got outstanding billing and you know, the money is coming in, then let us know and just be upfront about it.

But here's the one thing that I did, did correctly on this job was a, well, there's two things I did correctly. Hey, I got the signatures on a, on a service that gives me legal protection that I can say I sent it to the owner of the company. The owner of the company came in and signed it.

I have a PDF of the signatures with both parties, but also I did not deliver a single line of code to the client before, uh, the check showed up. I'm like, that's what, that was my, my fallback. I'm like, look, as soon as I get this first check, then I can start putting stuff up on the server.

But until then I can't do it. You're a first time client, first time clients, 50% upfront, no matter what check shows up, you start to get code. Exactly. Yeah. And I always, well, always, I, you know, everything is open to negotiation, particularly when you're like us.

Uh, but in general, I always try to set up development, serve development sites on our own servers, never on theirs. So code and everything is always controlled by me. They have no direct access. They can look at things, they can view it, but they can't take it. Yeah. This, in this case, the development server is on their server.

So that's why everything is, everything is done locally and it, it runs great. But I, and here's a trick. If you're running, um, MAMP, which is, you know, the, um, the virtualization stuff, I cloned their URL for the client side. So I can build locally and when I'm done, I just upload it, especially with WordPress because there's problems with domains and all that kind of thing.

I build it locally on their domain, but it never leaves my computer, which is a really, it's a great hack. And once I, once I'm done with it, then I just clone the database, put it up there. Everything works gangbusters. And you can do that with continued development. Even if you're running out of something like a beanstalk or GitHub, just, just, uh, update the database, clone your files.

You're good to go. Yep. Agreed. So try not to get screwed and they will try to screw you. Just be aware of it. Comment of the week. So we'd like to thank, uh, Symboliek Oleg. I believe that's how you pronounce it. If I, if I butchered it, sorry about that, uh, for his donation this week to the, uh, the coffers to keep the ship afloat.

We appreciate it very much. And if you'd like to donate, go to grumpy old geeks.com and click the donate button on the side. Uh, yes. Thank you very much. And please do donate because Jason is becoming quite the gear head. I don't know if you've been seeing his photos, but he keeps buying stuff. We need money. I think I, I think I'm done.

I think I'm done. I've only, I've only spent a thousand dollars on our, on our equipment so far. Um, but now, uh, now I'm coming from my road podcaster, Mike with, uh, uh, you know, requisite gear with it, with the shock mount and the arm. I tell you what, the boom arm for this thing is amazing.

Cause I bought a Heil, I bought a Heil PR 40, I believe is what it was. The, the boom arm with the springs on it, which every time I touched, it sounded like a, like a Chinese gong. But this thing is amazing. And it's the same price. If you got to get a boom arm for a mic, screw Heil, go road.

This thing is amazing. Yeah. I got to get one of those pretty soon. That's a, I got to change my setup a little bit. I think you're, uh, you're, you've got it all down pretty well over there. So, well, I think I think here's what we need to do. I need to ship you the old mic and you need to ship me that one. Okay. We can do that. Cause I, I, yeah, that thing sounds great and way better than the blue.

So some folks out there give us like a $40 donation so we can cover the FedEx on that. Thank you. And we got a couple of five stars this week. So thank you very much to the anonymous people who gave us the five star ratings on iTunes. Yes. Thank you. Please keep rating us. We, we very much, uh, enjoy it and love it.

And thank you very much. Appreciate it. As the kids say today, preesh.

In the news. Do we live in the matrix? The red pill or the blue pill? I've heard this going around for a while. It's like, uh, physicists seem to think that we might actually be, actually be living in a computer simulation. Yeah. But, uh, I mean, that's been around for quite a long time.

But the theory behind this article is that there's supposedly a test to prove it. They've been trying to figure out that test for a while. I don't know if they're going to be able to do it. And it says in the headline, you know, but the real question is, do we want to? Do we want to know? Yeah. I'd like to know personally. Wouldn't you?

I really couldn't care less. It would make absolutely no difference whatsoever as to our normal life. But I would love to know. It'd be interesting. But I think the theory is basically they're looking for glitches. Glitches in the system, right? Ghosts in the machine. Yeah. Deja vus.

Glitches when they reset the matrix. Exactly. That chick with the red dress keeps walking by. I'm down with that, brother. As long as we don't have to deal with the matrix two and three. Exactly. I'm good. If my life doesn't turn into that shit show. Yeah, I really couldn't care.

I mean, life is what it is. You wake up, you shit shower and shave and go about your day. Well, what I'm starting to come to the conclusion with is physics is the new statistics. Basically, you can try to prove or say just about anything you want and say there's some sort of quantum physics reason that proves it.

Hence, the other article that I found. Quantum physics proves that there is an afterlife claim scientist. Yeah, I was just reading through this before we started. Man, talk about a stretch. Yeah. Because they're saying that, you know, our brains can create the universe around us.

And I'm like, no, if that was the case, there would never be a Jersey Shore and there would never be a Kardashian. And the fact that I can talk to you. Yeah, that I can talk to you and you know the same things that there is a Jersey Shore and a Kardashian. It makes no sense.

From a logical perspective, it's total hogwash. This is a physicist that has read, what's that stupid book, a few too many times. Not The Gift. What the hell is it called? The one where you create your own reality, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The secret. You're talking about the secret. Yes. This is a quantum physicist that has read The Secret.

It's a complete and utter load of shit. Let's create our dream board or whatever the hell they call it. Exactly. Yeah. So I didn't know Tony Robbins was into quantum physics. I mean, I used to be really into physics and I was reading all that stuff and when I last left off, it was on multiple fold theory and stuff like that.

But it just seems like people are just – it just seems like physicists are just like fucking around with us at this point. See, here's the deal. My brother is a physicist and you know what he does? He kills cancer. So that kind of physics I can get behind. They've got a – not a Tevatron, whatever the hell the thing is that shoots the beams.

They shoot it up the butt of the patient and it kills the colon cancer or the brain cancer. I mean it's an amazing thing that they've done and he works in medical physics. That's the type of physics we need, not this bullshit, seriously. But when you're talking about alternate realities, tomorrow – actually, that would be today.

Yes. In San Francisco, which will be – Two days ago. Two days ago when you listen to this or whoever the hell – two days ago when we post it. I can't wait to see how this – it should be almost – no, a couple hours it will be over. So there's a kid with the Starbright Foundation who wants to be Batman in San Francisco and they have literally – they're literally driving him around.

In a Batmobile, stopping bank robberies. And there's a ten – there was a flash mob and 10,000 people RSVP'd to the flash mob. There are people flying in from other parts of the country to like make this kid's dream come true. It is the coolest thing.

I mean I – seriously, it's the coolest thing. I have to say because one of my first – one of the first websites I worked on besides Epson, when I was doing the Epson site for my first company that hired me, my second site that I was doing in parallel was for the Starbright Foundation. So I built the first Starbright Foundation website too and it was really fun like just reading these kids' stories and seeing how they got to kind of fulfill their dreams.

It's not the Starlight Foundation which is terminally ill kids. This is the Starbright Foundation which is – it's a level down. I mean they're screwed up for life kind of kids. Right. But either way, it's like – it's a really cool thing that they're doing and the fact that San Francisco is getting behind it, like the mayor's meeting with them and giving them a plaque and all that stuff, that's just cool.

Yeah. That's a cool thing. Yeah. The only downside is that for the kids that are just a little less sick, we'll just have to sit in their hospital and watch it on TV. You know, you can't do it for everybody. Exactly. But I hope it goes well. I can't wait to see the reports and yeah, it was just a fun thing.

So now we're on to one of the – another hot topic on the internet, the McRib. The McRib is back. If we really created our own reality, this thing wouldn't exist either. Have you had one? I have had one. They're disgusting. I love them.

I love them. See, I think you can firmly split all of society down on two halves, those who like the McRib and those who can't stand it. I, you know, I've seen all the reports of how terrible it is for you and how they make it and how disgusting it is.

I really couldn't care less. I have one every five years. I'm a sneetch with no McRib. Sorry. No, I've had one every five years and that's fine. It's gelatinous goo formed in the shape of somewhat related to a rib pattern on a piece of crappy bread with admittedly delicious pickles.

It's gelatinous pig goo. So therein lies the rub. It's – I don't know. I mean they're disgusting as can be but they taste so good. I can't get around. I'm happy that you get to indulge. Don't they do it like every year or is it every couple of years?

I don't really – Like I said, I only do one every five years because it takes that long for my colon to like recover from it. Right. I don't know. Here in – I'm in Oakbrook. I'm like right next to Oakbrook, Illinois where McDonald's is headquartered and that's why we got it tested here first.

Right. We ate it like cows at the trough as it were. It's good stuff. I don't know. I don't care. I don't care when they come out, when they come out. But all of the anti-press is making me want it more. So I'm thinking that they got a pretty good – well, it's McDonald's.

They got a great PR department. All the vegans going batshit crazy about this thing make me want to eat like 10 of them and just post pictures of it. I want to rub them on me shirtless. Now that wouldn't be good for anybody. No.

No, it would not. And it's also something I don't want scanned by Google, a photo of that happening to you. That was a horrible segue. You've got to stop that, man. I know, I know. You're really not good at the segues. I don't know. I've had some winners. That just wasn't one of them. I didn't even know this legal fight was still going on, but apparently they just finished winning it.

Google has now won its legal fight and is allowed to basically scan every book known to man, and that is fair use. They don't really specify how much of a book can be scanned. I just see this as yet another nail in the coffin of intellectual property rights. I don't.

I actually don't. I think it's good to have it scanned because we're dealing with decades-old paper books that will eventually decay. I think it's good to have it in digital form somewhere. I think the greatest part about this article – this is a boing-boing article that we're linking to – is the Gene Wilder, Charlie at the Chocolate Factory animated GIF where he just keeps saying you get nothing over and over again.

It is mesmerizing. It is. I've got to turn it off. I can't look at it anymore. I will be posting that on our Facebook and Twitter shortly. It's a great GIF. It is. I watched it when he first posted this. I watched it. Like literally for five minutes, I'm just like, nothing, nothing, nothing.

You get nothing, which is basically like my slogan for the internet in general right now. You get nothing. It's like – well, especially when I'm dealing with clients, I get nothing. God damn it. Thanks for ruining my day. Well, let's talk about something that makes us happy.

No, no. Wait, wait, wait. No. I don't have a problem with this as long as they're using – as long as they're not releasing the entire book. If like you search for something, it's in the book and they show you a relative snippet of what you search for that's in that book and gives you an option to go buy that book.

Yeah. Fucking great. I think that's fantastic. I see nothing wrong with that. Yeah. Like I said, I mean I said in the notes that I was kind of on the fence about it. I'm not entirely sure how I feel. I just – I don't trust Google. I don't trust that they're going to keep it to little bits here and there. So we'll see.

Okay. That kind of ties into a story that we're not going to cover this week, which is the – never mind. Never mind. Let's move on to the fun stuff. Okay. You found an article that you posted and I think I one-upped it in terms of the headline.

Yeah. So my headline is sex makes people happiest. No shit. File under no shit. And your headline was sex and alcohol make you happier than kids in religion, study finds. So you know what? MSNBC wins the day for headline writing.

They won the internet with that headline. In fact, it's funny because I saw that you had posted this article. But, I mean, the one that I found, the headline I found is all over my Facebook, usually posted by married people, which is kind of funny. Oh, fucking readers. Yeah. So, yeah.

People with kids were posting this all over the place. And, I mean, obviously, sex and alcohol make you happier than kids in religion. Kids in religion – well, religion is just stupid. But that stuff kind of requires effort. Sex and alcohol doesn't really. It's just fun. Well, yeah, I mean – that's what it is.

So let me open it here and let's run through the – this is the – you know, it's a great study. And it's weird how they did it. They did it with cell phones and texting. So the top-ranked activities according to the survey, sex, drinking alcohol, volunteering, meditating – Volunteering to drink alcohol and have sex?

Well, count me in. Meditating-slash-religion and caring for children and listening to music. Now, see, that's way higher for me. And socializing hobbies. And here – this is what got me. The worst-ranked activities, recovering from sickness, Facebook, housework, studying, and texting.

Okay, that Facebook ranks second among the worst-ranked things that people want to do. Why did their stock not tank on that? I don't know. Yeah. Okay, well, screwing and getting screwed up is apparently the greatest things in the world.

I can't – I cannot – That's hard to argue with. Yeah. Even though I only get to do one of them nowadays, I will do that one in excess. Yeah, what are you going to do? Now, if you're fucking and you take pictures – Okay, no, wait, wait.

Yeah, let's see how Brian does the segue on this one. Continue, my brother. If you're drunk and fucking and you're taking photos and you break up with the person later, you can't post them in Wisconsin anymore. Or California. Or California. Or several states. And I'm totally down with this law.

I mean, entire websites have been built on fucking, you know, 20-year-old meatheads putting up pictures of their 19-year-old girlfriends that broke up with them. Yeah, so to clarify, we're talking about the revenge porn bills. Yes. Where it says that, yes, if somebody sends you a picture in coitus or selfies – Snapchats.

While you're dating, you cannot take those and post them on the internet. Yeah, which, of course not. I'm happy that they passed this law. It's going to be really hard for them to enforce. I mean, all you can really do is shut down the sites to post them. No, you can send them to jail for – you can give them a $10,000 fine and put them into jail for up to nine months where they can go get some new sex selfies, apparently.

Yes, they can have photos of themselves being violated, posted. And, you know, as somebody who used to have relationships with the opposite sex, I appreciate this bill because there are probably some very inappropriate photos of myself out there and of the ladies I used to date.

So, you know what? This is – when I look at this as – Hopefully those photos don't involve McRibs as well. No comment. Hopefully – I mean, this is like a mutually – it's – up until this point, it's always been mutual. Mutually assured destruction, you know? Because if you're in a relationship with somebody, they send you pictures, you send them pictures, you both have them, and it's just like, yeah, let's not go there, you know?

Let's not – but apparently in the modern age, some people tend to overshare, go figure. I imagine that. Yeah, and they – the other person has more explicit photos than the other. But that was always the contract.

It was always mutually assured embarrassment. Oh, that's a show title. I'm going with that. Coming on Fox. So apparently Netflix has caused a dramatic drop in file sharing. Okay.

Because everybody can just stream whatever they were trying to download illegally before? Yeah, exactly. You know, give people an avenue to get the things that they want legally. Yep. And they will generally go for the legal option even if it costs a few bucks.

I agree with that. I mean, we haven't really seen that in the music industry. But in general, that does seem to work for most things. Yeah. I mean, I'm down with it. This is not really a shocker to me. Is it to you? No. No, not at all.

Well, especially for movies because they take a – they're a bit – they're bigger. They take a longer time. You know, even when I am BitTorrenting illegally Downton Abbey because PBS refuses to air it in the same season as it's aired in the UK. You know, I have to find the right BitTorrent, one that isn't a pirated one, and then it still takes a good 20 minutes or so for it to download.

And it's a bit of pain in the ass. And if I could just hop onto Netflix and they're all right there right away, boom, done, great. Yeah, I'll pay for that. Yeah, this comes into – like Sherlock's coming out soon. And they're still waffling between if it's going to air on the BBC first versus here.

And it comes down to spoilers at this point, you know, because we're in an interconnected world and spoilers are a problem. Yeah. You know? Staggering things makes no sense. Make it easy. Make it global. Make it instantaneous. And people will pay for that.

Pay for the convenience. And honestly, abolish the movie theaters. Get rid of the movie theaters. I'm done with movie theaters. I want shit the day it comes out. I will pay $30 to see a first-run movie the day it comes out.

Seriously. Well, I mean I still think the movie theaters have their place for the grand spectacles and whatnot. Your big action movies, your sci-fis. I want them in a theater. I want – well, I want a respectful crowd. Good luck finding those these days. But, you know, I think that that's still an experience that's worth having.

I'm sorry. Popcorn smells like feet and I can't stand it. So I'm never going to the theater again. So give me – every place I'm at – I mean granted, I don't own a television. But I have a lot of friends with really nice big TVs and surround sound systems. And I can go to their house and I will buy the movie for them to let me watch their TV.

It's quid pro quo as it were. So I'm done with that. But anyway, yeah, the file sharing thing, that makes perfect sense. Now here's a really weird one is – and I didn't know this. The L.A. school district has been handing out millions and millions of dollars worth of iPads to students.

Yes, living here in L.A., I'm aware of this. It's been in the news a lot. I also – I find it infuriating to begin with because we can't fix a goddamn fucking pothole. I can't even tell you how much I pay in city tax. And they're just passing out iPads to students.

You don't need an iPad. I'm sorry. Well, you know, if you have to buy books, well, you know what? Get rid of the books. Give me an iPad with my books on it and I'll pay the same amount of money because books were ridiculously expensive. I paid more in high school for my books than I would ever pay for an iPad.

And this was in 1989 – 88. I was in high school from what? 87 to 89. I agree. And I was paying hundreds of dollars in books. You know what else is really expensive? What? The iPad, especially since you can get Android tablets for like $40 to $50.

So why didn't the school district just go with an Android tablet, have somebody that could actually lock these things down? Because the big problem is kids have figured out how to get around – they tried to shut things down so they wouldn't be able to get on Facebook with these things. And they were just going to be able to use it for school. And they found out, you know, it just takes one smart kid who figured out how to break the locks on it.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. So you're saying that you should give them an Android tablet because it's more secure? No, because it's – Are you fucking kidding me? No, I said because it's cheaper. Cheaper and less secure. Yeah, but it's a computer. There is no security. The kids know better than the L.A. school district does.

The kids are going to be able to hack this. It doesn't matter what you give them. The kids are going to figure out a way around it. So can we at least minimize my tax burden? That's all I'm saying. Well, here's the minimize the tax burden. Make the parents pay for the iPad instead of buying books. Oh, but that was – That's it. Yeah. I agree.

No. No argument. But it didn't happen. In any ways, it's a completely screwed up program and they've completely screwed the pooch on this whole thing. Well, and after that bullshit in – was it Wisconsin or Minnesota or wherever where the people that ran the school were turning on the webcams at night and watching kids have a couple spree and thinking they were popping pills or watching them naked as they get out of the shower.

It's like I would not want my school district to give my kid anything. No. I don't trust them at all. Agreed 100%. That's crazy shit. So my last one is – we're going back to the tips and tricks. Okay.

I found this – I think Tim Ferriss posted this going back to Tim. Does bedtime honey improve sleep? Nine reasons to think so. This is on the blog of Seth Roberts and he puts together a pretty good case and so I did the experiment. I've been doing it for about six days now.

Yeah. A thousand percent. Really? It's really helped. One thousand percent. I sleep through the night. The whole premise is that since your brain needs sugar to perform, right? And that's why it's always better to have carbohydrates later in the day than earlier in the day because you burn them out and then if you just have protein at dinner, then there's no sugars to have your brain do all the housekeeping functions while you're sleeping.

Right. So honey is like a – it's a hybrid of – is it fructose and glucose? It's a 50-50 split between the types of sugars. Right. But the initial sugars break down instantly and power your brain. But by the time your brain has run through those sugars, the other sugars have metabolized and kick in.

Right. So you have enough sugar to power your brain through all the housekeeping cycles with like memory retention and muscle rebuilding and all the other functions that it needs. So like starving yourself before you go to bed tends to kind of screw things up.

I've been doing this for six days now and I have – I can quantifiably tell you that in the morning I am sharper. I get more work done. I am better rested and I feel a thousand percent better. So I'm going with the formula in the article which is – well, in the beginning I went with the formula that was a cup of hot water mixed in with two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar and one tablespoon of honey.

It's tasty. It's really tasty. You wouldn't think vinegar and honey would be great but it almost tastes like an apple cider. It really does. It doesn't sound very appetizing to me but I'll trust you that it wasn't bad. Yeah. I found it delicious. And plus the hot liquid before you went to bed just knocked me out immediately.

I fell asleep right away. You'd think having a bunch of sugar right before you went to bed would just keep you up but that's the weird thing about honey. It does not give you that spike that really kind of wakes you up like you would – like if you had a Snickers. No, this knocked me out.

And the interesting thing was because it talks about it allows you to sleep through the night because I've always had problems with waking up like five or six times in the middle of the night. Right. I have slept through the night ever since I started this. I wake up in the morning ready to go.

So from my studies, I think this is one of the best sleep tips I've ever found and I'm sticking with it. The last couple nights, I didn't really have the time because I was just – I was getting kind of tired and I'm just like, you know what? I popped the lid on the honey and poured it down my throat.

I'm like, oh, that feels like a tablespoon or three, whatever. Same effect. I mean they found the minimum effect of doses is one tablespoon. Any more than that, it doesn't really give you any more benefit. Right. So – but it doesn't also cause any problems.

So I have a bunch of honey right before I go to bed and, man, it has really improved how I sleep. And it's not even that. It's how I greet the day. Because I greet the day like really just ready to go because I'm a horrible morning person.

I hate mornings. OK. So I mean if you have problems sleeping, definitely give this a try. Even if you don't have problems sleeping, I think it will improve how your body solidifies memory and does, like I said, muscle rebuilding.

Because they talk about like strength improvement and it's true. It's ridiculously true because your body is – that's when your muscles heal because every time you exercise during the day, you do micro tears in your muscle fibers. Yeah. And while you sleep, that's when they heal. And, man, it's just – it's crazy.

It's a crazy good tip. So hats off to Tim for passing that one along. And I highly recommend it. All right. I mean I don't have sleep issues. I'm pretty lucky with that. So – but I think I'll give this a shot anyways and see if I get any of the other benefits. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Even if you don't have sleep problems, it will still help your brain in the – like hard code memories and – because I found that my memory has really improved, especially with this project that I'm working on or was working on until they stiffed me.

Like before I'd wake up and I'd have – it would take me an hour to get back to where I was just plotting through. I'm like, oh, this is the CSS I was working on. OK, this is what this does and all that. But I can – I come back down in the morning and I'm just like back exactly where I was at ready to rock. Awesome. Good to know, man.

I will definitely try it out.

Kickstarter in the Balls. This week on Kickstarter in the Balls, we're talking about actually an Indiegogo project called Anti-Rapeware. Yes. It is called ARWare. Confidence and protection that can be worn.

So I got a couple problems with this. A, they're kind of hot. Yeah. Which is really a problem because it's like don't rape me with my hot pants on. Well, granted – well, hey, you're not – OK, look.

I know – we're joking here. Take this with a grain of salt. I know a lot of girls, unfortunately, that have been victims of rape and it's ruined them for life and it is not a joking topic. But the way that they treat this product is kind of silly.

The ads are pretty damn sexy and the clothes are pretty damn sexy. I mean some of these outfits are more extreme than what I normally see girls walking up and down Venice Beach in. Wow. There's some – I mean the great-looking clothes and some great-looking models. But that's – seriously, that's just – I don't know if their marketing department just sucks.

Well, they've hit their goal. They've hit their goal. Their first goal was a $50,000 goal on Indiegogo. They've raised $52,649 and they've got seven days left. So if you don't want to get raped, go buy them I guess. But I don't know what the – this is a conflicting – this is a conflicting thing for me.

Because it's an interesting concept. You know, I don't know. I mean this is – what is this? A modern-day chastity belt to stop people from entering your vagina. I don't really get it. They seem to have a conflicting approach to why they're doing it. I mean certainly in their preface on this thing, they're attempting to – they're hoping that this clothing line will raise awareness and bring education, which is what everybody says when they do something stupid.

Okay. Go on. Go on. I mean, you know, it's just – read the first paragraph in the preface. It's hilarious. Rape is about as wrong as it gets. The only one responsible for rape is the rapist. And ARWare will not solve the fundamental problem that rape exists in our world. Okay. Thanks. This is – whatever. I don't know.

This is silly. Okay. Well, they obviously need a copywriter. They need a copywriter. Yes. Okay. I'm sorry. Rape is about as wrong as it gets. That sentence alone would make me want to hate rape you. Yeah.

Okay. Maybe that's good. Okay. That might be good. But that's just – oh, rape is about as long as it gets. The garments must be very difficult for someone else to remove either by force or stealth. So they need to be resistant to pulling, tearing, and cutting while being comfortable to wear during normal activities. And as in the case of underwear, fit smoothly under form-fitting outer clothing.

So this is clothes that can't be easily ripped, can't be torn, look pretty hot. Apparently, you can't cut them with the scissors as they go out of their way to keep – so it's basically like – Or a knife. Or a knife. They can't cut them with a knife. It's Lara Croft wear.

It is. It's definitely Tomb Raider wear, especially – If you're raiding a tomb, wear this or not get raped. That should be your tagline. No, if you're raiding a tomb and don't want your tomb to get raided. Oh, damn it. I missed that. I can't believe I missed that. So they show this woman like trying to rip the hot pants off of like a size one model.

And I'm just like, get them off. Get them off. But no, this is not right. I understand. This is why this is a conflicting problem because why are you putting all these hotties up here? It's just wrong. It's wrong. I just think that it's sad that something like this would exist and people feel the need for it.

I get that that's our world. I just – I hate Kickstarter. I hate Indiegogo. I hate people funding this stuff. I can't believe it. All right. Moving on. No, no, no, no, no. The one thing – here's the – so they've got like a little clockwork hinge on the front.

So you have to be like – where they say you have to be like – your hands have to be up top to open it. And it's a clockwork type of system. So you have to know where the hands go to open the latch. Right. Which – that was cool. I figured that one out. That was decent. I mean it took me like five years to figure out how to undo a bra.

Let's be honest here. Well, that's kind of sad. But they only protect the front crotchal area. So if you're worried about booty rape, these are probably not the – so no men should probably get these.

They talk about how the front crotchal area is protected with the anti-cut and rip stuff. But they don't talk about the booty because we know there are many orifices on the human body. And they're not protecting against that. So, okay. So here's the deal.

You have the anti-rape pants. But they can cut the part in the back where you can get ass raped. Sorry. That is a design flaw. That is a major design flaw. Well, maybe you can offer some consultancy services. Just make sure you get paid half up front.

Oh, we're going to have to cut this all fucking second. I know it. No, this is staying in. I mean we've kept in every single time. I've been horrible. It's your turn. You're such a dick. All right. That's Kickstarter in the crotchal region. Welcome to this week in shit we put on our computers.

So I found a new app called Coffitivity. Which it doesn't – it's kind of an app that gives you background noise like you're in a coffee shop. That's it. That's all it does. You can put your music tracks over it unless you use iTunes Match because it doesn't work with iTunes Match.

Okay. But it's free. It's out for Android and Mac and PC and it's above the – it's on all the platforms. Great stuff. I actually quite enjoy it because I'm alone all day when I'm working and it's great to have that noise in the background because background noise actually makes me concentrate harder on the tasks that I'm doing.

So I totally recommend it. That's all I got this week. It's been a really busy week. I'll actually have to give it a shot. I mean I still prefer my Star Trek The Next Generation bridge background noise but I'm a dork. Oh shit. I should really try that.

You should try that one out. I think it's a lot more interesting than coffee sounds, coffee shop sounds. Well, there's a couple of them. There's one where you can kind of hear people talking which sucks. Right. That would drive me insane, yeah. Yeah. There's one that's just kind of just mumbling and background noises and it's the university one I think it is.

It's nice. It's nice background noise. I actually get more done when that's going than compared to pure silence. I suppose – I mean I guess that's why I listen to podcasts which is people talking and I kind of tune in and out but it's almost as if you just have an annoying person in the cubicle next to you.

So there you go. I'll give it a shot. I mean definitely I work from home too so it's worth a try. It's free. Why not? Rock on. Rock on. So I can't believe the second thing that you found. The second thing that you've got in here.

Wait. I got a second thing? I got to cut that. Never mind. That was in You Gotta Be Shitting Me. No, no, no. We're good. We're good. Keep rolling, brother. Keep rolling. Well, I'll drop in the You Gotta Be Shitting Me. I can't believe that you stumbled across this. No, seriously?

Are you shitting me? Broga. Broga. Yoga for bros. These people need to be shot instantly. Just for the name alone. It's like brogramming. Oh, man. Yeah. Anything that has bro in it should be avoided at all costs by anybody that has testicles.

And I mean we've already offended all of our – well, you've already offended all of our female listeners. So now I'll just hop on the bandwagon here. The only point in going to a yoga class with people instead of just doing it at home alone is to watch the chicks. I do not want to go to a guy-only yoga class. Seriously, down-facing dog with dude?

No. Yes. They should have just called it swinging sack.com instead. This is the worst idea ever unless you're gay, in which case it's probably pretty awesome. Yeah. Then it's just like Grindr. Yeah. There you go. Grindr and Broga together at last.

Okay. Grindr? I don't know. Oh, God. We're so – well, you're married, but I'm never getting laid again. Thank you. And we're not even drinking on this show. Oh, Jesus. I don't think I took a long enough break after that last thing.

All right. You got the giggles again. Yeah, I got the giggles. I got to calm down for security. All right. Let's – Later. I got to go Broga.

So, security time. We haven't done this in a while besides going, oh, Jesus Christ, we give up. Yeah. Sorry about that. I found a video that came out yesterday, which is called They're Watching Us? So what? It goes to the point of everybody that says, oh, I've got nothing to hide, so I don't care if they're watching or listening.

Yeah. It is a roundtable with James Bamford, Ariel Dorfman, Glenn Greenwald, and Bruce Schneier, which is the mind trust of all of the greatest minds who are covering all of the Snowden stuff and the NSA stuff. I think James Bamford was one of the first NSA leakers.

I think he was before – I mean I'm pretty sure that's the guy. It's amazing. It is unbelievably amazing. So if you think that you've got nothing to hide, just watch this. It's two hours – or it's about an hour 40. The video that we're going to link to, it's one of those YouTube live things, and as I found doing the Kia stuff, when you start rolling, it keeps it in the feed.

So skip to 17 minutes, and then it starts. Glenn Greenwald is Skyping in from Rio de Janeiro. Oh, poor baby. But they've got James Bamford, Bruce Schneier, and Ariel Dorfman in the room, and it's at the – The Penn American Center, which I don't know exactly what that is, but it's in conjunction with the ACLU, and it is – it's amazing.

If you want it to be – if you want all this stuff to be explained by people who are way smarter than we are, which obviously isn't that hard, go with this video, and it will chill you to the bone. It really will. There's another guy that's missing here.

There's a guy from Columbia who talks about the surveillance state in Columbia, which is just amazing. Seriously, just take some time out. Watch it. It's a great video. Okay. So on to the next bit, which is our dear friends at Adobe.

You lion sacks of shit. First they said, oh, yeah, maybe a few hundred thousand people's accounts got hacked and maybe a few million. Now it turns out pretty much everybody, 150 million accounts were hacked, and that their password hashing algorithms were completely subpar, and they've all been cracked.

So if you had an Adobe account, an Adobe Live account, any kind of Adobe account, absolutely. If you work in the business, you had it because I had it for Lightroom for sure because I pay for that, my only Adobe software that I pay for. Right.

Because obviously that's the only Adobe software I use. So yeah, so my password was cracked, and that was – that password was unfortunately one of the ones that I used back in the day before I got a password manager and has been used on several dozen websites.

So I've been scrambling to change everything. And by the way, if you have one password, you can do an audit. And if you type in a password, it will show you all of the accounts that use the same password. Right. And then you can go and change all of those accounts.

Highly recommended. Go buy one password. Seriously. Yeah, it's a great program. And now we have the government agency compromised by fake Facebook hottie. What we call the social engineering hack. Yeah, yeah. This is – it's just kind of silly.

Fake hottie from Hooters and – I don't know. We're going to put it in the show notes. Go check it out. It's one of those things. It's amusing. It's written by my – I guess I could call her ex-friend, Violet Blue. She's pretty good with the security stuff, and she has a really good take on it.

She's a great writer, and just check it out. It's on ZDNet. Now, the next one is a little bit more scary. This is UK spies continue quantum insert attack via LinkedIn and Slashdot pages, and they were targeting engineers from the Global Roaming Exchange and OPEC.

Right. Now, here's the deal with this attack. Because the NSA can get into these data centers, like at key points on the internet, when they see a request coming through from somebody that they have flagged, they can respond with a page that looks like the page that they were looking for.

This is not good, yeah. Yeah, before the actual server can respond with it, which is – I mean, we're talking like milliseconds here. We're talking like hundreds of a second to do this kind of thing.

And that's why it's called a quantum insert because it's tiny and small. The fact that they're doing this is – the fact that they – no, not that they're doing it. The fact that they can do this is reason alone to just – I don't know.

I'm sorry. I'm just – I'm angry about this one, that they have this much access to the internet that they can do these kind of attacks. And so they put up a fake page that looks like the page that they were going to get, and then they install malware on the person's server or computer to then follow them and do all the standard spy shit that they do.

It's creepy and we – Jesus. I'm sorry. I'm just – I'm flabbergasted. Between the NSA and the GCHQ, we need to shut these guys down. You know, and I loved MI5, the TV show from England.

I thought it was great. You know, I loved the spy stuff they did. But, you know, in the real world, this much power and being able to insert themselves into our lines of communication should not be fucking tolerated. It should not be tolerated. Yeah.

I mean, this is going back to my, you know, we're just completely screwed. So now we're back to the Silk Road. Yes. Which is supposedly back, sort of. Well, here's how – how do you trust that the Silk Road is – the new Silk Road is the Silk Road or is it a honeypot?

Exactly. Because for those not in the know, the honeypot is a juicy target that is easily accessible and exploitable, but is collecting data on anybody that tries to hack it.

Yeah. So, basically, is this a trap? Yeah. Like Admiral Ackbar would say. It's a trap. It's a trap. Yeah. Nobody knows and there's no way to know. Seriously.

It's – Yeah. It's an interesting thing. I mean, I guess we'll find out soon enough, won't we? People will sign up and there will be a big bust or this will just go on for some time. It kind of comes back to the whole point of the honeypot. It's like any of these sites could have been honeypots. Yeah. I could do that for, oh, say, child pornographers, which we'll get to in a second.

But, yeah, it's – nobody knows. So, if you're looking to buy drugs, go to your usual street corner and find the guy from Starsky and Hutch that looks like a pimp and buy your shit off of him. Seriously. Safer off. So, San Diego has now started to roll out facial recognition software.

Yeah. Here's the problem I have with facial recognition software, and they cover this in the article. Oh, by the way, Naked Security is a great blog. It's run by the guys that do Sophos. Yeah. I check that out pretty regularly. It's where you look every now and then.

I recommend following if you're on the Facebook. On the Book of the Face, yes. The Book of the Face. Follow them because you get all the new stuff every day. And this one, there's a – hang on. Let me find it here. It's a 20 percenter.

Oh, here it is. Meanwhile, as officers rave about the precision of facial recognition, the Electronic Privacy Information Center – epic. Not really. Has obtained documents that show that the Federal Bureau of Investigation Facial Recognition Program failed to identify the right person one out of five times.

That is a 20 percent failure rate, people. Yes, which is extremely, unbelievably unacceptable. Yeah. No. If you're – look. I mean, that's just off the chart bad. Yeah. So. Do what you're going to do.

Stay out of San Diego. That's all I want to say. Pretty much, yeah. To wrap it up today on security, we now have Cisco claiming that the NSA has screwed their ROI. Really? They are down – they saw a 21 percent drop in revenue in its top five markets, including Brazil, India, Mexico, China, and Russia.

Uh-huh. Yeah. Basically, everybody who – Everybody who is scared about the NSA getting into their business. Yeah. Thinking that the NSA has backdoors into Cisco routers. Yes. So that's not too surprising. So this is – I mean, this is going to continue.

I mean, Amazon hasn't released any numbers on this, but they have to be quaking. They have to be – I mean, because the AWS conference was this week, the reInvent conference. And they put out, I think, 10 new products that were amazing products.

But it's all cloud-based. And I think Amazon is trying to buy all of the computers in the world and just have you rent time on them. Seems to be, yes. I mean, I love AWS. I love Amazon. I use them every day, and they're great.

But now that we know that they are a spoff, as it's called, a single point of failure for the NSA. Yeah. I don't really care that much about them. Same with Rackspace. Anybody that provides cloud computing, I'm kind of – I'm almost back to going to find me an e-machine at Fry's and finding a local ISP and put my box there.

I'm seriously, like, on that level now. Right. But at least Google is trying to fight back. But, you know, it's like watching a building trying to move. It doesn't work.

No, it's going to be a very slow process, the fight back. I mean, and that's assuming it even works. We'll see what happens. I don't know. Again, my opinion with every security segment is the latter part of the title. Yeah. Well, I mean, it got to a point where I was just so despondent about all the shit.

But now I'm just like, you know what? We can fight back. We can fight back. And there are people fighting back. Kind of like the guy that nailed his scrotum to the floor in Red Square in Russia. You know? He's like, I don't want to be surveyed or surveilled.

So I'm just going to, I'm going to, for some reason, nail my sack to the ground. I don't know what exactly that signify, but. Yeah, I don't quite get the protest or how it related to anything. But good on him, I suppose. Going to take some surgery.

God. In Russia, sack nails you. The whip's not dead. So. You've got me with the giggles, you bastard. Sorry. We have, we have a couple of websites today that prove that the web is still the purveyor of useless entertainment.

And the first one is called the useless web.com. It literally is the useless web.com. And you go to the site, it's a very pretty site. It's very web 2.0, where it says, take me to a useless website, please.

And every, every time you click, please, it opens a new, a new site in a new tab that is utterly useless. I'm going to open one right now. Oh, I can't because it's going to have sound. I got a cold side. There. I tell you what, I spent an hour on this thing when I found it and I giggled every time.

I had seriously giggled every time. So check that out. Now, the next one, uh, we, it's, uh, we, we are Bulgarians. Yes, we are. Uh, so we say the F bomb, the F bomb as the, as, as the church goers say a lot.

Um, now this is F bomb.co. This is a, this is geo location for anybody on Twitter that says, fuck, that's it. So, and I'm looking at it and I'm thinking, well, that has to be a very English centric phrase because that's, it's an English word.

Yes. But I just, I just found one in Russia. It goes up to Nigeria. Oh, I saw that one. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, Oh, I ran. Okay. So the Russia was fucking, fucking, fucking algebra. I hate her. So, uh, that's a fun little site.

Yeah. It's honestly, fuck you. And I'm serious in, in Iran. Actually, no, that's not Iran. That's, uh, the United Arab Emirates. I think that they might be coming for that person. Now this is, this is a tool of, uh, Oh, Puerto Rico feel horrible as fuck.

Okay. Uh, Greece fucking feelings. Yeah. It's, it's just fun to see how despondent some people are. I think that might be a, uh, yeah, just go check it out. Seriously. You'll spend some time here just saying that you're not alone with your, vulgarity.

Good stuff. Now I found another series of, uh, YouTube videos, um, which were great. This is about the only thing that I can stand on the internet anymore, which is, uh, all these people that are creating these incredibly hilarious, educational, but hilarious videos out there. Would that be, would that be edutainment?

Edutainment. Yes, it would be. Uh, it's a open university, which is of course, uh, from merry old England because they are the best at this sort of thing. Uh, Oh, you learn on YouTube. You, that's their channel. Uh, they've done a ton of them. All of them are really, really funny.

My particular favorite at the moment is the history of English. Uh, it's, uh, 11 minutes of hilarity. Uh, very funny. Uh, good time. Uh, definitely check it out and check out all the rest of their videos. Uh, you will lose yourself for a few hours and you will come away, uh, laughing and educated.

Absolutely. I checked it out and I loved that video. Yeah, it's hilarious. I loved it. Yeah. It's, it's just the history of English. Did you ever hear the, the song by, uh, it's called the Anglo-Saxons? Yes. That's a great song. I, I, I definitely just, if you're an RDO or whatever that crappy UI version of RDO is, uh, go, go search for the song, the Anglo-Saxons.

Yes. Talks about language. It's great. It's very funny. And this is a, this is a great video. Um, they've done a great job. All of them are very well-produced, uh, very hilarious. And you also, you really do learn. So good stuff.

Ooh, fantasy. There's this great new invention called the ball camera for panoramics. Uh, you, you throw it in the air. It's got like 20 some odd cameras on it and it takes a picture when it hits its apogee. It knows when it starts to fall and it takes pictures and then it, it does all the math on the photos and then you can do these crazy, uh, panoramics on it.

It's super cool. It's a little expensive. It, and it's an Indiegogo project, of course, cause nobody could. Um, so their goal is 900, 900, $900,000. Wow. They've hit 217.

They got 50 days left. $900,000 is fucking ridiculous. Yes, it is. Um, and if you go look at the video, go look at the videos and the photos, there's super cool, terrible color correction on it. Um, you can buy one for, I think it's, yeah, $549 for this camera or, or a series of cameras in a ball.

Um, I kind of hope they don't make it and somebody just steals the tech and runs from it from there. Um, it's, it's really cool. And here's the problem I have with it. I think every cop in the world will have one when they're doing crowd control and they'll be able to pick out people in the crowd, do facial recognition on it and then, and then go arrest people after the fact.

Yep. I seriously see that happening. So I, I think, I think it's a dangerous piece of tech and well, you know, let me go get my tinfoil hat. That's all I got. So another piece of stupid, dangerous tech is called coin.

It's at only coin.com. It's a, it's kind of a memory card for all your credit cards. Right. Uh, you, you, you, no, you have a reader that plug like a, like a square reader that plugs into your phone and you swipe your cards. Then you post them up to this little credit card device that has a button that lets you toggle between your cards.

Um, it's, I, there, there's so many things wrong with this thing. I cannot, uh, even begin to start. It's, it's at only coin.com there. They want pre-orders for $55. They're not taking even shipping addresses at this point because they're taking your money and charging your card to go make the first batch.

Yeah. Yeah. So they're doing, they're doing Kickstarter without the Kickstarter. Exactly. They're, they're basically taking your money and going to go make it. Uh, it only, it's got a built in battery. It lasts two years. Once the battery dies, you will need to replace it, which means you need to buy a new one.

So it's only good for two years and that's on their theoretical, uh, battery life demonstrations that they've done. It uses Bluetooth low energy. Here's the problem I have with that. Okay. Your card, your car and, and it talks to your phone via, uh, BTLE.

So you swipe your card on your phone, your phone then, uh, sends the card information to the, the coin, which means that, okay, right there, right there. It's, you've got a, you've got a broadcast problem. You've got the app that has your cards in it.

So if I can get into the sandbox of your app, I got your cards, uh, there's just so many problems with this thing. And if you're a fat motherfucker and you sit on it, you probably broke it. And, and it's, there's a button that switches cards.

So when you're at a restaurant, you go, okay, I'm going to press the button for the card. That doesn't mean that the dumb shit waiter or the, the wait, the waitron will not, uh, press the button and go, Ooh, I'm going to put this on his, uh, family card or whatever. So if you're, if you're on a, uh, a, uh, rendezvous with somebody who you shouldn't be with and you put it on your card, well, and the waitress does it, then it shows up on your wife's bill and then you've got a marital stripe.

Uh, what are you going to do there? There, there, there are so many problems with this thing. I can't even, uh, just don't just, you know what? Silly product. And yeah, let's, let, let us all issue credit and pay with cash. Pay with cash. Yeah, sure.

That's going to happen. So my last, my last little one is, uh, William Gibson's book, uh, pattern recognition, which is one of my favorite books in the world. It is a very, uh, his, uh, his main character case Pollard has a buzz Rickson with all of the, um, the labels and, uh, branding removed and it's, it's kind of her go-to jacket.

It's her, it's, it's her security blanket. Yeah. Well, uh, they have decided to produce it in the, in the William Gibson collection. The, uh, the jacket costs, I believe, uh, it's coming up now. It is ridiculously $695.

Whoa. It is a fine looking jacket, but here's the problem. Uh, it was worn by a woman in the book. Yes. Which is way hotter than some dude in tight jeans wearing it, which they have in the, and apparently they figured out how to make his pants jeans match the zipper on the coat.

So I, I'm, I'm seriously go look at the webpage. We're going to look at the show notes. Grumpy old geek slash 34. It is, it's disconcerting how his crucial area kind of merges into the zipper. It's not, not right.

Um, it's not a very good photo at all. This is a, this is a, how not to take product photos. Yeah. Um, I'm a, I, like I said, I'm a fan of it. I, I love no branding on stuff, but 700 bucks for, for a bomber that you could get at the, uh, uh, military, you know, discount store for 35 bucks.

Yeah. Not really into it. No, not, not that impressive. It's a great idea. It's a great looking jacket, but, uh, yeah, you can get this for about 30 bucks. Here's the, here's the other thing. Uh, case Paul had hated branding. There's literally a tag inside that says the William Gibson collection. So, uh, if you wanted it to really be the William Gibson collection, there would be no labels whatsoever, whatsoever.

I'm sure there are government regulate regulatory bodies who say we need to have labels for washing and stuff, but still no labels, no, like no, no capes, no capes. All right. Who's this asshole? So this last story, um, is about why we're building jailbait sex bots.

I wasn't aware we were doing so. Uh, well, a company in the Netherlands is, in Amsterdam is what they found kind of actually kind of, it is all you really got to do is then go to the, uh, to the donators houses and arrest them.

I think that we are pretty safe because these things are fucking creepy. Um, so there are apparently 750,000 people who daily log on to webcam sites to have kind kind of virtual sex with underage kids, right?

That's which is frightening. That's a fucking huge number. Yes, it is. So they, they, they figured that they can't figure out how to get to one side of the equation where the, where the guys are. So let's go to the other side of the equation.

Yeah. Comes back, comes back to the honeypot. Yes. They've, they've created a virtual 10 year old honeypot. And that's, that's, that's, that there's no euphemism there. Um, they built a pretty much a, a cybernetic 10 year old, a 10 year old girl.

Yes. Who is, is hooked up to a person in emotion, a mocap suit. Yep. Um, who they then chat with and then find the information on and send the dossiers to Interpol because it is an international crime now to do this.

Yes. Which is, uh, what do they call it? The webcam, uh, WCST, the webcam sex trade. Is that what webcam sex trade is very, um, I am, I mean, I am completely fucking creeped out about this, that there are that many guys out there doing this.

I am, this was the first, my, my first reaction was like, Jesus Christ. I mean, I mean, I don't want to be even believe in Jesus Christ. I'm just like, Oh shit. Um, and this article actually goes to the point where they're, they're smart enough in the article where they talk about, is this pre-crime?

Because they go to the, the, um, minority report side of it saying, look, they're talking to somebody who doesn't exist. Right. So is this actually a crime? Is it, or is it even entrapment? Yeah. There's, there's, there's a whole lot of legal ramifications about this, but these guys have literally, I mean, I mean, I'm looking at the, the pictures of the, the fat, big titty fucks who are jerking off to these little kids and I'm just like, I don't care.

You know, just burn the bastards. Um, it's, it's, it's a, it's a strange, strange twist that we've come into now where we've got these computer models of children who are talking dirty to these guys who are jerking off across the world.

I mean, it's, it's, it's seriously, it's bizarre. I know. It's, I, I, I, I, well, I'm not surprised that this stuff exists. Uh, the numbers that they're throwing around scares the hell out of me. Uh, what the hell's wrong with this world? Well, here's, here's, here's, okay. Here's one thing that pissed me off is they're like, we took two months, we found a thousand people.

Right. And they said, if the, if the governments of the world police this, we could do a hundred thousand a year. I'm like, wow, uh, excuse me. That's math. You could do two months, 1,000, a hundred thousand a year. That doesn't really work.

No. Um, either way the, I want to know why, why these people are out there, why this shit exists, you know, like let's get down to the root of the problem instead of going after these broken people. If there's 750,000 of these people out there who are doing this on a daily basis, basis, ruining these kids' lives, what caused them to get to this point?

You know, then, then you have to get into psychology and neuropsych and all that sort of stuff. And that's, we're just not there yet. We don't know. No. I mean, that's, that's, that, that, that's what I, that's what really disturbs to me about it. It's like, let's not punish these guys for, well, yeah, let's punish them, but, but let's also in future generations, let's figure out what the triggers are that make these people who they are.

Yeah. You know, that, I think that's more important than just putting out a little fake 10 year old. I mean, yeah, for now, let's, let's put these guys behind bars and actually, no, I, even that, it just pisses me off because then we have to pay for it.

If we put these guys in jail, we have to pay for it. Oh yeah. So let's figure, let's figure out a different strategy, you know, to, to, to kind of, to kind of bring these guys into the fold of normal human relationships. What went wrong in their lives that made them do this kind of thing and, and figure out how we can fix that in the future.

Is it bad parenting, which I'm a hundred percent sure it is. Oh yeah. Is it, you know, it, there's, there's so many different factors that go into the shit and it, it just drives me nuts. And I really wish that we wouldn't go after this kind of, well, it's a reactionary response to a complicated problem.

It is, but I mean, the solution that, that you're talking about just doesn't exist. And yeah, we, we need to put more time and effort and money into that. And, but what do you do in the meantime when these people are out there? And I don't know, it's just, it's such a weird way to, to go about it because yeah, there are valid questions about, are they actually committing a crime when they're doing this?

Um, I don't know. This is a weird, creepy story. And the only thing that I can think of to make it even slightly lighter is, are they going to let this, uh, fake 10 year old grow up to become a Japanese pop star? Because they're all fake these days. They're all fake and CGI'd anyways. So, well, that goes back to, uh, William Gibson's Adoru.

Exactly. Yeah. And by the way, if, if, if you are, if you are interested in buying the original blue lines for Adoru, email me at Jason at grumpy old geeks.com because I have them and they are now on sale. I bought, I bought the blue, I bought the blue lines from William Gibson in a, in an auction years ago and I have them.

They're in a light proof envelope and they are for sale. So. All right. I lost you there, didn't I? Oh, you know, I'm letting you do your personal eBay. Shit, man. Somebody's got to make some money off this motherfucker.

Damn right. Don't forget. I, I, I, I, I've never, I haven't recovered from the stupid Kickstarter segment. Sorry. You are still, you are still giddy as a little fucking school girl about that, aren't you? All right. That I ruined my sex life on our show.

God damn it. So, uh, I'm back in the U S and our sound quality may be better, but that doesn't necessarily mean the show was going to be, so thanks for sitting through it. I've never lost the giggles after our Kickstarter segment. Yeah. Thanks for never getting me late again.

I appreciate it. Uh, I did not put that nail in that particular coffin. No pun intended. I'm, I'm, I'm assuming. No, no pun intended. Yeah. Uh, now I'm going to go poke you on Facebook. Well, that's the only poke I'm going to get anytime soon.

So bring it on. All right. Well, thank you for listening everyone to a bit of a, a bit of a crazier podcast. Uh, we'll be back next week. You got anything, Jason? You want to say goodbye to your sex life? Yeah, I do. I would, I would like to wave goodbye to going away in the distance and saying, uh, I'm going to die alone with a Stouffer's lasagna in my lap.

That's all I have left. So, uh, thanks for listening guys. And we'll see you next week. See you next week. Keep up with the grumpy old geeks on the web at grumpyoldgeeks.com, on Facebook at facebook.com slash grumpyoldgeeks, or email them at podcast at grumpyoldgeeks.com.

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