Amazon determined to continue its assault on Apple or something – MacDailyNews – Welcome Home:

MacDailyNews Take: Elevating Amazon to the level of an equal with Apple is a joke. Apple could buy Amazon outright, with cash, and still have $15 billion left over. Apple’s market value is rapidly approaching 5 times that of Amazon’s. Five times. Amazon’s net income for calendar Q311 (they don’t report Q4 until tomorrow) was $63 million. Apple’s calendar Q311 net income was $6.62 billion. Apple made 105 times more than Amazon did last calendar Q3. Calendar Q4 will likely be a worse comparison for Amazon as Apple generated an astonishing net profit of $13.06 billion.

Hollywood Still Hates You:

Hollywood continues to completely ignore that lesson. It continues to punish the people who play by the rules with an insufferable customer experience. This is the sole reason piracy is up and profits are down: because doing it right totally sucks. And that’s apparently how the studios want it.

Source: Apple Outsider

Tweets still must flow:

Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why.

We haven’t yet used this ability, but if and when we are required to withhold a Tweet in a specific country, we will attempt to let the user know, and we will clearly mark when the content has been withheld. As part of that transparency, we’ve expanded our partnership with Chilling Effects to share this new page, http://chillingeffects.org/twitter, which makes it easier to find notices related to Twitter.

Source: Twitter Blog

There’s an app on my mac called Notational Velocity. It’s a simple note taking app, that has two critical features. It’s searchable in a “that’s how you use it” kinda way. the second is that it stores your notes on Simplenote. So what’s the big deal?

I started using Simplenote because I wanted a dead simple way to share a food shopping list with my wife. And it was good. Then I got an iPhone and there was an app, so now I could add something on the fly and vice versa. And then I looked for a Mac app because it seemed like that would be an easy to capture thoughts as well. Other “To do” lists worked well in the past, but this felt different and better. Somehow less pressured and achievement oriented. There are some things that require rumination not action, and “to do” by nature is an action.

And so like that the circle was complete. Web access, device access, desktop access to all my notes. And that is the promise of iCloud. No, Simplenote doesn’t rely on iCloud. But iCloud is a system(s) service and it will become more and more common to live in the cloud in all things. Apple hit the basics for now. Music, mail, photos, calendars, contacts… these are things we desire to have on all our devices minus the bother of syncing. And it feels right. Just as right as it does for my notes.

Franklin Veaux’s Journal – Some thoughts on SOPA and Copyright:

People who hold these ideas can not, I think, be persuaded otherwise. A person who feels entitled to something will construct rationalizations about why his entitlement is justified, whether it’s by imagining creativity as some inborn thing like race or sex, or inventing a moral system whereby anyone who does something that could make another person’s life better like create a painting or, I don’t know, haul away garbage is ethically obligated to do so for free. Such people will often spout platitudes like “True artists do it for the love of art, not for money,” setting up a false dichotomy that ignores the fact that creative people also have to eat. This argument also creates a system whereby an artist’s merits are judged not on her technical proficiency or her ability to illuminate the human condition, but rather on how much stuff she gives the speaker for free.