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Bellator MMA app for iPhone and iPad

When the fights are live on SPIKE, this app is your companion, allowing you to participate in the on-air broadcast. The fight is in your hands, as you become The 4th Judge. Score the fight as it happens using comprehensive real-time fighter analytics you can only get in this app. Developed from the ground up to make watching LIVE fights richer, Bellator MMA allows you to compare fighters and historical statistics to make your pre-fight picks, watch exclusive videos, and dig deep into robust bio pages.

That’s very cool.

AT&T’s latest plan to screw consumers

AT&T plans to jettison circuit-switching technology with IP-based hardware that will free it from “common carriage” restrictions imposed by the FCC.

Steve Jobs manga coming to Japan

The official Japanese translation of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography is getting the manga treatment in Japan. Because, well, Japan.

Google sends a cake to Fancy

Matthew Panzarino:

Apple sent one over to Fancy to commemorate its role as a launch partner on Google+ Sign-In. A picture of the cake was posted by Fancy’s Jake Frey and we confirmed that yes, it was indeed sent from Apple.

Love it.

Budweiser sued for making shitty beer

AB InBev routinely adds extra water to its finished products to produce malt beverages with significantly less alcohol content than displayed on its labels, Thomas and Gerald Greenberg said in a complaint filed yesterday in federal court in Philadelphia. The company’s exaggeration of the alcohol content violates Pennsylvania’s consumer protection statutes, according to the complaint.

It’s about time.

Dissatisfaction

Perhaps I’m biased but I believe the only cure for discouragement is dissatisfaction. That it is a key ingredient, perhaps the key ingredient, to success.

Great views from Patrick Rhone. I agree.

CaptureNotes 2 & CaptureAudio [Sponsor]

CaptureNotes 2 for iPad is the full featured notetaking and audio recording application that provides users with the ability to write, type, Flag audio with markers and annotate PDFs during classes or meetings. Launching soon, CaptureAudio delivers more than a simple voice recording app, bringing the unique Flag marking feature of CaptureNotes to the iPhone. Notebooks are easily shared among team members. Likewise, recorded audio sessions can conveniently be shared between the two Apps, supporting both iPhone and iPad users!

CaptureNotes 2 & CaptureAudio are brought to you by G8R Software.

“Comically selfish”

Harry Marks takes on John Siracusa and his recent comments about watching Netflix’s “House of Cards.”

Printer ink: You’re paying more, getting less

The Guardian:

The sky-high price of printer ink – measure for measure more expensive than vintage champagne – has been well documented. Less well-known is the fact that the amount of ink in the average cartridge has shrunk dramatically.

A decade ago, the best-selling HP cartridge had 42ml of ink and sold for about £20. Today, the standard printer cartridges made by HP may contain as little as 5ml of ink but sell for about £13.

Cut open a HP inkjet cartridge and you’ll find what is going on.

This is a European report but there’s no reason to believe it’s not the same for cartridges sold here in North America.

Amazon sweatshop

It appears that Amazon’s warehouses are the global book distribution chain’s equivalent of modern day sweatshops. Earlier this week Amazon fired its German security firm after a documentary film crew from ARD tied it to a far right wing group. The film crew revealed that seasonal workers hired by an Amazon subcontractor in Germany, many of whom were previously unemployed, were driven around Germany in buses, housed in poor conditions and kept under constant surveillance by the aforementioned security guards.

I’m guessing the mainstream media won’t see fit to make a big deal out of this like they did with Apple and Foxconn.

[Via Harry Marks]

The Chromebook Pixel is not for you

The Wirecutter:

Google just announced its first premium Chromebook, the Chromebook Pixel. It’s gorgeous. Unfortunately, it’s so expensive that I can’t think of a single person who should get one.

If you have the money to spend on the Pixel and you need the kind of hardware it’s packing, you have so many other better options.

This may be the future of “cloud based” laptops but in the here and now, this is an extravagant machine.

Illinois town bans kids from only sledding hill

Esquire:

What happened to the America that once was? What happened to the America where kids could spend their snow-days at the local sledding hill, without cell phones in their snow-pants, laughing at their friends’ face-plants, throwing snowballs, and making the same yellow-snow jokes that their grandfathers made when they too were a bunch of rapscallions running through the slush?

That America exists no more in Paxton, Illinois. Because the Paxton Park District’s insurance provider ruled that its sledding hill is too risky. “The insurance would have skyrocketed if someone was hurt,” a parks board member told The Champaign News-Gazette.

One of the commenters said, “The park board ought to be able to erect a sign at the hill that says “Sled at your own risk.” How about NOT suing people because your kid got hurt horsing around, as kids will do? When I was a kid in Canada, I broke my leg playing on a local hill. There was never any discussion of a lawsuit.

BBEdit

I’d like to thank Bare Bones Software for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week with BBEdit.

BBEdit 10.5 from Bare Bones Software — The leading professional HTML and text editor for the Mac just keeps getting better. Now with Retina support and many other improvements — download the demo and see for yourself!

I’ve been using the app since 1994.

Microsoft hacked

The world’s largest software company said the security intrusion was “similar” to recent ones reported by Apple Inc (NSQ:AAPL) and Facebook Inc (FB.O).

The first “Read Later” service

I don’t care anymore whether people know that Instapaper defined the read-later service and was first to most of its core features. I don’t care anymore whether people know how much Read It Later copied from Instapaper in our early years. You can’t force people to know backstories.

But for Pocket to repeatedly state the opposite — that they were the first service like this, and that Instapaper followed their lead — is over the line, and I won’t sit here quietly and let that go unchallenged.