image: Rotten (cc) -Muppet

I appreciate that businesses can sell what they want to whomever they wish, but it doesn't mean that the company isn't a jerk. Apple is a jerk.

A number of iPod owners have discovered that their recently purchased iPods won't work with Apple's new iTunes video rentals, even though the iPods have video playback capabilities.

As of Tuesday, the issue had been raised multiple times in Apple's support forums. So far the company's only response has been to confirm that movie rentals work only with the iPhone, iPod touch, iPod classic and the third-generation iPod nano. Earlier iPods, including fifth-generation iPods sold before the September 2007 release of the sixth-generation iPod classic, are incompatible with rented videos.

The whole forced obsolescence scheme Apple has been using may be great for business, but it's quite the snub for their customers.



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At the end of August, the California senate blocked mandatory employee RFID chipping in the state, which is technical way of saying that companies in California are no longer allowed to require employees to be implanted with radio-frequency identification chips to remain employed.

Until reading that article, I had no idea that mandatory chipping even existed in the United States. Apparently, the privacy-eliminating technology has been spreading, and companies like CityWatcher.com are already requiring certain employees to be chipped.

CityWatcher.com, a Cincinnati video surveillance company, has required employees who work in its secure data center to have a microchip implanted in an arm.

I hate thinking of the end-of-the-world scenarios that come from requiring employees to be tagged so they can be tracked anywhere they go, but... the speed at which chipping technology is growing (chip your pets if they get lost!), the notion of totalitarian government/corporate control is hardly the stuff of fantasy. It's apparently just around the corner.

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Stupid Chinese companies and their use of lead paint on the toys I buy for my kids.

Seen below are Dora the Explorer and her cousin Diego, both of which have been recalled. Fantastic.



Since I paid very little for them (I picked them up at a garage sale), I've decided that instead of returning them to the manufacturer, I'm going to bring them to work and add them to my cubicle decorations.

And of course, this topic leads to all sorts of conversations regarding capitalism, outsourcing, minimum wage regulation, social responsibility, and all sorts of other buzzword issues.

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Those are the numbers of the week.

... or if you prefer binary:
1001 11111001 10001 10 10011101 1110100 11100011 1011011 11011000 1000001 1010110 11000101 1100011 1010110 10001000 11000000

It's amusing how much rage is going across digg.com right now over this.

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Use Firefox.

Over the course of 2006, Internet Explorer (used by roughly 80% of the online community) was left with at least one GAPING SECURITY HOLE for 284 of the 365 available days of the year - nearly 78% of the time. For people involved in online banking, online purchases, or the posting of any personal data online, this has to be as horrifying as it is unacceptable.

For a total 284 days in 2006 (or more than nine months out of the year), exploit code for known, unpatched critical flaws in pre-IE7 versions of the browser was publicly available on the Internet. Likewise, there were at least 98 days last year in which no software fixes from Microsoft were available to fix IE flaws that criminals were actively using to steal personal and financial data from users.

And the record for Mozilla's Firefox browser?

In contrast, Internet Explorer's closest competitor in terms of market share -- Mozilla's Firefox browser -- experienced a single period lasting just nine days last year in which exploit code for a serious security hole was posted online before Mozilla shipped a patch to remedy the problem.

So... why haven't you switched yet?

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