Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which horrible neologisms are proposed, things are both funny and also sad, and there is ooh gosh loads of news:
- [00:04:10] The BBC’s coverage of the life and death of Prince Philip breaks the UK TV complaints record, and the National Rail make their website greyscale, breaking it for visually impaired users
- [00:10:30] Sharding is called sharding because of the shards of the Gem of Immortality in Ultima Online
- [00:13:00] Researchers asked 100 people whether “a reasonable person” would unlock their phone and allow someone to look through it, and most of them said: no, definitely not. Then the researchers tried it, and 100 out of 103 people absolutely allowed it
- [00:18:00] Microsoft buy speech recognition firm Nuance for $16 billion
- [00:26:50] Oracle vs Google: an end at last as the US Supreme Court rules that Google’s use of Java APIs is fair use (but gives no ruling on whether APIs are copyrightable)
- [00:36:20] Jono thinks it is important that you learn that the world’s biggest rabbit has been stolen. We think: mess with the hoppo, bomb gonna droppo
- [00:38:50] In the last couple of years, the last couple of puzzles from Perplex City, an ARG from 2005, have finally been solved, the last in December 2020
- [00:44:44] China Creates Its Own Digital Currency, which seems like an alarmingly big deal for the future
- [00:49:10] Apple changes ‘subscribe’ to ‘follow’ on Podcasts because people think subscribing means paying. We’re not sure we agree, but then we’re not sure we don’t agree either. Maybe we need a new word
Come chat with us and the community in our Slack channel via https://badvoltage-slack.herokuapp.com/!
https://community.badvoltage.org/t/3×27-bargle-floop-the-podcast/12420
News music: Long Live Blind Joe by Robbero, used with attribution.
Thank you to Marius Quabeck and NerdZoom Media for being our audio producers!
