ExamForce

"So, how many hostages does he have?" I asked cheerfully. "At least a dozen. Maybe more," the police captain told me grimly as he handed over the megaphone. "You say he asked to speak to me?" I asked. "Well, first he asked to speak to the new Pope. Then he asked to speak to the President. Then Boris Karloff, Isaac Newton, Betty Rubble, Optimus Prime, and then you. You were actually in the phone book, and available." "I see. Well, I'll talk to him." "Appreciate it." The captain turned, and went back to conferring with the SWAT team. I held the megaphone up to my mouth and pressed the trigger. "Hey! Vector! You there, buddy?" I said...

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Turducken (Mar 17 - April 30) A profound realization will come to you this week, but by then you will be incapable of calling for an ambulance. Stripper Pole (May 1 - May 5) Your Moon is in retrograde, and Mars is calling you from inside the house. You didn’t know that not only is your life a horror movie, you are the “Final Girl”. El Guapo (May 6 - Aug 19) You will bravely test the theory that solid matter is made up of mostly empty space, and wow, there’s yet another sexual harassment lawsuit to deal with. Spotted Leper (Aug 20) Some things never get old, like the rotating circle of abducted children you keep in the room under t...

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With the release of Windows 8, which features a touch-centric Start screen built over a traditional Windows desktop, manufacturers have been throwing a ton of different form factors and configurations at the wall to see what will stick with consumers and the enterprise. In this mad rush for new SKUs, there are a couple of dominant trends which have emerged:

1. Laptops that occasionally pretend to be tablets.
2. Tablets that occasionally pretend to be laptops.

In the first category, you’ll find fairly-standard ultrabook spec laptops that use an engineering trick to enable some form of tablet use. The Lenovo Yoga 13 uses...

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"So, my father once told me, 'Stop crying, or I'll give you something to cry about!' When you're a kid, you can't parse a statement like that," I said. "You have to wait until you're an adult, when you can afford therapy." "Hm hmm," my therapist remarked. "The thing is," I said between taking bites of a pancake I'd brought along for the purpose of taking bites of pancake between saying things, "that statement is really messed up. When you unfold it further, what you end up with is, 'I can hear you crying, but it is my opinion that you have not yet been given just cause to cry. This contradiction disturbs me in some core, fundamental way that requ...

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Hello world! Things are starting to get busy here in the Binary Nation, so I thought I should sit down with a bottle of gin and some pretzels and type out this year's Christmas letter. And by "gin" I mean "morphine". And by "pretzels" I mean "nude pictures of Scarlett Johansson". Man, what a year in entertainment. There were great comic book movies, great gadgets, great games, and the TV show "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" was cancelled by ABC. I don't have a problem with building free houses for people who need them. I have a big problem with building free houses for brain-dead jerk-offs who adopt 17 children (every one of them suffering from...

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Later, we would both wonder at how light the security was. My guess is that they couldn't move the experiment once they had taken over the civilian facility it was based in, and they couldn't add a ton of guards and devices without the other tenants of the skyscraper noticing. So, when the two of us walked through the entrance door that evening, dressed in loose robes with cloaks, cowls pulled up over our heads, there was only one bored, heavy-set security guard manning the front desk. He got up and came around the desk, and we stopped about three feet in front of him. "Can I see your passes, fellas?" he asked. Vector waved one hand in front of t...

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The Apple-Samsung patent battle has escalated into the greatest and loudest legal knife fight of the 21st Century. Billions of dollars are at stake, and for Apple, this is the biggest legal fight of its life since the "look-and-feel" lawsuit it waged against Microsoft in the late 1980s. Apple was largely rebuffed in that suit, and the sting of that loss has never fully diminished in Cupertino. Apple does not intend to lose this battle against Samsung, a skirmish that essentially hinges on Apple's iPhone and iPad designs and to what extent (if any) Samsung copied them to create its current lineup of smartphones and tablets. The stakes are high. Apple is looking for over $2 billion in damages. If granted, those damages, and the financial hit Samsung would take to pull its products from store shelves and produce entirely new versions, would devastate the Korean electronics giant. But, for Apple, this battle is about more than Samsung. At its heart, this battle is about Apple claiming foul against the multitude of Android-powered devices from practically every manufacturer currently flooding the market with iPhone and iPad-like phones and tablets. The patent lawsuit against Samsung is just one of dozens Apple has launched against so-called copycats throughout the industry. But this particular case against Samsung, which is finally coming to a head in a San Jose courtroom this month, is very likely going to serve as the precedent from which all of Apple's other patent battles will triumph or fail.

"I'd highly prefer to settle versus battle… I've always hated litigation. We need people to invent their own stuff."

- Tim Cook, Apple earnings call, April 2012

On August 24th, Tim Cook will have been Apple's CEO for one year. For Cook, much of the last twelve months has been about stepping out of the shadow of one of America's most lauded business leaders, and establishing himself at the helm of the most valuable consumer electronics company in the world. Cook's first year of command has been (predictably) a tentative march of baby steps, noteworthy mostly for a number of incremental improvements to already well-established consumer products. When Cook was named Apple's CEO in August 2011, the company was already engaged...

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Vector and I were taking high tea at the Empress Hotel, discussing what an Atari-created version of the videogame "The Human Centipede" would be like, and if it would play better with a trackball or a joystick, when the headwaiter brought over an unopened telegram. "What the hell is a telegram?" Vector asked. "It's like a fax, but with more manual labor," I replied: "What the hell is a fax?" Vector asked. Read More »

These days, you aren’t anybody in the technology/Internet world unless you are suing somebody. Apple is suing Samsung, Samsung is suing Apple, Microsoft is suing Barnes and Noble, Oracle is suing Google, Apple is suing Motorola, Microsoft is suing Motorola, Yahoo! is suing Facebook, and TMZ is suing Nick Nolte for not providing a crazed mug shot in over twelve months. Read More »

The first month of 2012 has been bleak. The Internet has come under attack from the American government, the slack-jawed cabal of mainstream entertainment companies, and the scat-eating vermin known as the MPAA. The so-called "economic recovery" is more stagnant than pond water, even while it's being made to look rosier than it is by Capitol Hill press agents Read More »