The Verge:

The company is stepping in to tell everyone to calm down and that those 1984 references are way off base. In a blog post plainly titled “Samsung Smart TVs Do Not Monitor Living Room Conversations,” the company does acknowledge that its clumsy, broad-strokes privacy policy could’ve used some clearer language.

The problem for Sony is that, even if their TVs don’t work the way they are accused of working, many of us have no problem believing they’d be sleazy enough to do that.

Quartz:

Unlike the transistor, the lithium-ion battery has not won a Nobel Prize. But many people think it should. The lithium-ion battery gave the transistor reach. Without it, we would not have smartphones, tablets or laptops, including the device you are reading at this very moment. There would be no Apple. No Samsung. No Tesla.

In 1980, Goodenough, a whip-smart physicist then aged 57, invented lithium-ion’s nervous system.

He says, “I’m only 92. I still have time to go.” What a great attitude.

Monday Note:

I have no trouble with the Law of Large Numbers, it only underlines Apple’s truly stupendous growth and, in the end, it always wins. No business can grow by 20%, or even 10% for ever.

But, for the other three, Market Share, Commoditization, and Modularity, how can we ignore the sea of contradicting facts?

Part of the reason why it seems Wall St doesn’t understand Apple is because the company’s operations don’t conform to so many commonly held beliefs about economics and business.

USA Today:

Starting next week, passengers on select JetBlue Airways flights can use Apple Pay on their iPhone 6 and 6 Plus handsets to buy food, drinks and certain onboard amenities when the plane reaches cruising altitude. You’ll be able to upgrade to available premium seats, too.

JetBlue is the first airline to accept Apple Pay at 35,000 feet. It almost certainly won’t be the last.

One more Apple Pay domino falling.

Huffington Post:

Canadians have a reputation for being some of the world’s kindest people. This video proves that to be true.

In order to test how Canadians would react, a blindfolded Muslim man stood at Dundas Square in downtown Toronto, with signs that read “I am a Muslim. I am labelled as a terrorist,” and “I trust you. Do you trust me? Give me a hug.”

To be fair, it doesn’t prove that – Canadians can be as racist as anyone else – but the video does make me very proud of my fellow country men and women.

The Hill:

Apple CEO Tim Cook will speak at the White House cybersecurity summit Friday at Stanford University, according to an event invitation.

The White House is expected to reveal its next executive action on cybersecurity at the summit, which will bring together tech executives, leading academics and government officials to discuss ways in which the government can better collaborate with the private sector on cybersecurity initiatives.

Cook’s remarks will come amid a debate between tech companies and law enforcement officials over encryption.

Encryption and security is becoming more and more important to everyone on the internet – business, consumers, and governments. It will be interesting to see if anything concrete comes out of this summit.

The Consumerist:

The floral wire services, FTD and Teleflora, were very relevant in 1910 and 1934 when they began, respectively. These companies, along with 1980s upstart 1-800-Flowers, now dominate the industry by advertising their national brand and squeezing local florists. While these companies, and mail-order services like Proflowers, blanket the airwaves and Web pages with ads showing off their great deals before major flower-giving holidays, they are not the best choice to get the best bloom for your buck.

We have long recommended that flower-givers follow this basic process

Definitely buy your significant other, male or female, a flower arrangement. But do your best to support your local flower merchant.

New York Times:

Apple’s record-breaking holiday quarter, which brought in $18 billion in earnings, allowed the company to capture 93 percent of the profit in the handset industry, according to a new report from Canaccord Genuity, an investment firm.

Samsung took the rest, but its share is shrinking, the report said.

Apple is doomed.

Alphonse Swinehart:

In our terrestrial view of things, the speed of light seems incredibly fast. But as soon as you view it against the vast distances of the universe, it’s unfortunately very slow. This animation illustrates, in realtime, the journey of a photon of light emitted from the surface of the sun and traveling across a portion of the solar system, from a human perspective.

This visualization of the speed of light and the realization that, on a galactic scale, it’s actually really slow, is all kinds of mind boggling.

Petapixel:

Unlike other affordable photo-editing apps out there, which are usually dumbed down offerings with only a subset of Photoshop’s usefulness, Affinity Photo is trying to set itself apart by offering the power of Photoshop in a program that’s blazing fast and ridiculously affordable.

Looks very interesting and for free, there’s no harm in giving it a try.

Rolling Stone:

After three and a half hours of the Grammy telecast, you may feel like you saw everything that could possible be imagined – even Kanye West hilariously rushing the stage in defense of Beyoncé, yet again. But although the show was tailored for the home audience, those actually in attendance at Los Angeles’ Staples Center were privy to a few jokes, celebrations and candid moments that didn’t make the CBS broadcast. These were our favorites.

There were some great moments on TV but, as always, the best often happen away from the cameras.

VanCityBuzz:

This time every year, the Sapporo Snow Festival draws millions of people to Sapporo to see hundreds of intricately detailed snow sculptures and to participate in snow-themed cultural festivities.

The festival features an International Snow Sculpting Contest with teams from 12 countries around the world. 6,500 tons of snow is transported to the three festival sites throughout the month of January from locations in and around Sapporo.

The Star Wars sculpture is epic.

So cool.

New York Times:

Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College released a study on Thursday that mapped DNA found in New York’s subway system — a crowded, largely subterranean behemoth that carries 5.5 million riders on an average weekday, and is filled with hundreds of species of bacteria (mostly harmless), the occasional spot of bubonic plague, and a universe of enigmas. Almost half of the DNA found on the system’s surfaces did not match any known organism and just 0.2 percent matched the human genome.

I’m never taking the New York City subway ever again.

LA Times:

Measles has been a scourge for centuries, afflicting millions of people. It has been blamed, in part, for decimating native populations of the Americas as Europeans explored the New World. In modern times, before a vaccine was developed, nearly every American contracted the virus, with its telltale skin blotches and fever. Measles was declared eradicated in the U.S. in 2000, but has staged a comeback as the inoculation rate has dropped. Here’s a history.

Many people think of measles as an innocuous childhood disease but it’s actually incredibly dangerous and sometimes deadly.

Vice:

Between 1974 and 1979, the Canadian government tested the idea of a basic income guarantee (BIG) across an entire town, giving people enough money to survive in a way that no other place in North America has before or since.

For those four years—until the project was cancelled and its findings packed away—the town’s poorest residents were given monthly checks that supplemented what modest earnings they had and rewarded them for working more. And for that time, it seemed that the effects of poverty began to melt away. Doctor and hospital visits declined, mental health appeared to improve, and more teenagers completed high school.

Damn Canadian socialists.

Macworld:

Providing many of the features found in its mobile sibling, the Yosemite-only Photos for OS X offers an interface less cluttered than iPhoto, improved navigation, simpler yet more powerful editing tools, the ability to sync all your images to iCloud (though it doesn’t require you to), and new options for creating books, cards, slideshows, calendars, and prints. I’ve had the opportunity to take an early look at Photos, and this is what I’ve found.

This is the developer preview but, in my experience, it’s pretty stable with few true glitches or bugs. Keep in mind, this is not (yet at least) a professional Aperture or Lightroom level app. But, that being said, it’s still pretty good.

FiftyThree:

Beginning today, the Draw, Sketch, Outline, Write, Color, and Mixer tools in Paper are available for free for everyone.

I can’t draw a straight line with a ruler but Paper is my favourite app for doodling and showing off the iPad’s drawing capabilities to others. Go grab these apps now.

Matt Gemmell:

There’s a lot of misunderstanding out there about mental health. Some people are up, some people are OK, and some people are down. Everyone gets down from time to time. Pull your socks up, and get on with it. Hold it together.

It’s reasonable advice – as long as you’re just feeling down.

For some people, though, down doesn’t cover it. They can’t just get on, because their feet can’t find the bottom.

There’s a predator down there. That’s the truth. Black as pitch, and silent in motion. It can see perfectly even where no light penetrates – in fact, especially there. It’s surprisingly warm to the touch, but it can drain all the heat out of a room in moments.

As one who suffers from depression, Matt’s piece really hit home for me.

Vice:

On his way to games, while his teammates on the bus would be mentally preparing to take the ice, James had to prepare for something else: the hatred that would inevitably be thrown at him due solely to the color of his skin.

I love hockey but it has a very recent and very ugly history of racism.

Jim and Shawn talk about Super Bowl ads, TUAW, music creation and good bourbon!

Sponsored by lynda.com (Start learning something new in 2015 by visiting the link to get a 10-day free trial and access their 2400+ courses) and Squarespace (use code GUITARS for a free trial and 10% off).

The Verge:

Apple appears to be testing a pool of cars near San Francisco that are equipped with powerful camera rigs. A Claycord blog has published photos of a car that CBS affiliate KPIX 5 has confirmed is leased to Apple. The mysterious cars have been spotted a number of times over the past several months in and around San Francisco. A video, published on YouTube in September, also shows a complex camera rig mounted on the roof of a similar Dodge minivan in New York. Both of the cars near San Francisco and New York appear to be equipped with the same LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) camera system.

This is interesting but not hugely surprising. Apple is continuing to make its Map.app and technology behind it better all the time.

Re/code:

Researcher IDC said Amazon showed the steepest annual decline among the five major tablet makers, with worldwide shipments of its Kindle Fire devices falling by as much as 70 percent compared with the holiday 2013 period.

A spokesperson for the retailer criticized IDC’s methodology, saying “our most affordable tablet ever, the Fire HD 6 at $99, which is one of our high volume products, wasn’t included in the report.” She declined to discuss sales.

Well Amazon, you know how to solve the problem. Simply report sales figures.

Mashable:

Phone Expander is designed to make it easy for a user to easily save space on their iOS device by deleting cache files inside apps, easily remove large apps installed on the device, remove pictures or videos (backing them up to the desktop first) and soon, manage music on their devices.

I ran the app on my (backed up) iPhone and it allowed me to recover a little over 2.5 GB. Not a lot but every little bit counts.

Matt Richman:

With Apple Pay, Apple leveraged its business model, cultural influence, and customer base to enter arguably the most heavily-regulated international system on Earth in a way that everyone already in the system had a reason to like. This is an incredible accomplishment, and no other company could have done it.

Matt makes a great point, one often made by many others, that Apple will and can succeed because of its tight control and integration of both hardware and software.

Medium:

Giraffedata—a 51-year-old software engineer named Bryan Henderson—is among the most prolific contributors, ranking in the top 1,000 most active editors. While some Wikipedia editors focus on adding content or vetting its accuracy, and others work to streamline the site’s grammar and style, generally few, if any, adopt Giraffedata’s approach to editing: an unrelenting, multi-year project to fix exactly one grammatical error.

Henderson has now made over 47,000 edits to the site since 2007, virtually all of them addressing this one linguistic pet peeve. Article by article, week by week, Henderson redacts imperfect sentences, tightening them almost imperceptibly. “I’m proud of it,” says Henderson of the project. “It’s just fun for me. I’m not doing it to have any impact on the world.”

You’ve got to admire the dedication if nothing else.

The Atlantic: The story of how avocados went from being an obscure West-Coast cash crop to the juggernaut of the Midwestern produce section is one of extreme feats of marketing and major shifts in ideas about nutrition. It is a … Continued

DIY Photography:

Not many know this but Google Earth had a bigger brother called Google Earth Pro and while the ‘lil sibling was free, getting the pro version was $400/year. No small change.

I guess there were not too many hoppers on that offer and now Google is releasing Google Earth Pro for free.

What can you do with the pro version? For starters, you can export bigger images, the regular version supported only 1000×1000px photos, while the pro version enables you to dump 4800×3200px photos which should be good enough for 4K resolution.

You have to jump through a bunch of hoops to grab the software but for those who can put it to use, it’s pretty cool.

Ars Technica:

“You know how every once in a while you buy the $40 bottle of wine instead of the $8 one, thinking you’re gonna have a special dinner or something?” Senior Reviews Editor Lee Hutchinson wrote over instant message. “And you get home, and you make the salmon or the pasta or whatever and you light the candles? And you pour the wine, swirl it like they do in Sideways so that it looks like you know what you’re doing… you bring it to your lips and after smelling it—it smells like wine—you have a sip? And it’s like… yeah, I guess this tastes good or something, but really it just tastes like wine?

“The Pono Player is kinda like that, but for music.”

I’m not an “audio snob” so I have no need for the Pono Player but is it of interest to any of our sharp-eared Loop readers?

I think this might be the first time an iPhone accessory company has paid the big bucks for a Super Bowl ad. What did you think of it?