Gongol.com Archives: October 2011
Brian Gongol


October 14, 2011

The United States of America Maps of the pipelines of the United States


Iowa State tells "Occupy Iowa" protesters that they've maxed out their allowable protest time
Groups have a right to assemble, but there has to be a distinction between a protest assembly and a group of people just sitting around occupying public property -- property to which the rest of the public also has a right of access. If they're just assembling in the hope of getting arrested, then that's no longer really "peaceable" assembly, now is it? On a related note, even though the "Occupy ____" movement is rallying around a generally anti-capitalist banner, it turns out that they still understand property rights...at least when it comes to their own property.

Computers and the Internet Apple releases the iPhone 4S
A concurrent update to Apple's iOS has been blamed for wiping out lots of customer data.

Computers and the Internet Unix co-creator Dr. Dennis Ritchie has died
Unix is behind the Android and Mac OS operating systems, among others. One developer said, "Ritchie's influence rivals Jobs's; it's just less visible." He's quite right.

Computers and the Internet Amazon drops price of basic Kindle to $79
The price is valid as long as the customer is willing to accept promotional ads on the screensaver, which seems like a decent trade-off for the $30 price cut

Computers and the Internet BlackBerry outages spread all over the planet
Though CNN goofed when it noted on its news ticker that "almost every planet" was being affected by the outages. Nobody's using a BlackBerry on Venus. The outage is really, really bad news (and timing) for BlackBerry, which is seeing its market share slip to rivals using Android and the iOS.

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