Private probation companies add huge fees for probation.
Gina Ray, 31 and unemployed was fined $179 for speeding three years ago. She failed to show up at court (she says the ticket bore the wrong date), so her license was revoked.
Ratio Of PCs to Macs sold has fallen to levels not seen since the 1990s
Horace Dediu’s chart
An excellent chart has from analyst Horace Dediu of Asymco shows the ratio of PCs sold to Macs sold each year since the early 1980s (via Philip Elmer-Dewitt, who notes that the peak year for Microsoft dominance was 2004).
Continue reading… “Ratio Of PCs to Macs sold has fallen to levels not seen since the 1990s”
A QR code for your headstone
Death may be permanent, but headstones are always changing.
Gravestones are the very mark of solidity; their stone says longevity, durability, time immemorial. But there is at least one headstone company in Seattle that brings headstones into the 21st century by pasting a QR code sticker onto them.
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Turmoil Ahead for the Automotive Industry
Futurist Thomas Frey: In 1954, Brook Stevens, a well-known industrial designer gave a keynote speech at an advertising conference titled “Planned Obsolescence.”
By his definition, planned obsolescence was “instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than necessary.”
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The future of content: Louis CK and Amanda Palmer
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TveAzAs6NAY&hd=1[/youtube]
Earlier this year comedian Louis CK raised some eyebrows when he sold downloads of a live show through his website and pulled in more than $1 million in about a week, despite the fact that fans could easily download the content for free. Now, he has done it again: instead of a traditional tour, he decided to sell tickets through his website, and sold $4.5-million worth in under 48 hours. Content creators of all kinds — authors, musicians and others — would do well to learn from his example, and that of others like Amanda Palmer, who recently financed a new album and tour through Kickstarter. The main lesson? Building a community is more important than ever.
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What your e-reader knows about you
Is your e-book reading you?
On the Kobo e-reader the average reader will take just seven hours to read the last book in Suzanne Collins’s “Hunger Games” trilogy, that’s about 57 pages an hour. Nearly 18,000 Kindle readers have highlighted the same line from the second book in the series: “Because sometimes things happen to people and they’re not equipped to deal with them.” And on Barnes & Noble’s Nook, the first thing that most readers do upon finishing the first “Hunger Games” book is to download the next one.
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The serial entrepreneur myth
A serial entrepreneur is an entrepreneur who starts a number of new businesses.
When it comes to learning about startups, that landscape is largely made up of the books you would find in the average library, They are books about “how to deal with your company finances”, “10 steps to marketing success” and other dispiriting works, along with more inspiring but largely useless biographies of successful businessmen.
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New twist on trash pickup in Portland, Ore.
Portland’s new policy encourages composting.
Forty years ago, Portland, the largest city in Oregon, pioneered five-cent deposits on beverage container. Now they are advocating a new approach to garbage collection that has some U.S. communities taking notice.
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Apple rules the mobile market
Apple overshadows other mobile phone companies where it counts the most: profits.
The Apple iPad rules the tablet market and the iPhone is a popular among smartphone users, even though a panoply of devices running Google’s Android owns the majority of the smartphone market. We also know Research in Motion is in serious decline, and Nokia is struggling to reverse its slide through Windows Phones — a strategy set back at least temporarily as customers wait for Windows Phone 8, given that current Nokia smartphones won’t run Microsoft’s first serious version of Windows Phone.
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Apple’s retail employees are long on loyalty but short on pay
Apple employees
During Jordan Golson’s best three-month stretch last year, he sold bout $750,000 worth of computers and gadgets at the Apple Store in Salem, N.H. It was a performance that might have called for a bottle of Champagne — if that were a luxury Mr. Golson could have afforded.
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What happens to all the data we upload with the technologies of tomorrow
Facebook has acquired the facial-recognition software company Face.com
A problem with uploading your life into the cloud: you’re sending it Internetward with an understanding of today’s technologies — and tomorrow always comes.
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‘Local’ will be biggest of Social-Mobile-Local
“Social-Mobile-Local” is an overused buzz phrase and most of the attention has been placed on the “social” and “mobile” parts of the phrase. In social, the spectacular rise of Facebook and Twitter is clearly a disruptive and critical trend. In mobile, the adoption of the smartphone (led by Apple’s iPhone and now catapulted forward by Android) is also a fundamentally important platform transition. Much less attention has been paid to the third concept, “local,” which is ironic since it may be a much larger real business opportunity than either social media or Smartphone application revenue. Over the next five years, this massive opportunity will come into focus as local businesses embrace the Internet and adopt new interactive technologies that increasingly automate the connections between their customers and themselves.
