Interesting Links for 23-01-2016

• I signed the petition to scrap the £35k threshold for non-EU citizens settling in the UK. And you should too.
  • petition work UK immigration
• Open Carry laws backfire in Texas
  • texas guns USA
• 12 years in 15 seconds: Aligning and condensing a self-portrait time-lapse
  • timelapse video portrait
• The future of “hardcore” games on mobile
  • phones games
• 5 alarm clocks that are either genius or borderline sadistic
  • alarm clock technology evil
• Why was most of the Earth’s coal made all at once?
  • coal prehistory
• Gillian Anderson Initially Offered Half of David Duchovny’s Pay for The X-Files Revival
  • OhForFucksSake women money tv x-files
• Steven Moffat quits Doctor Who to be replaced by Chris Chibnall in 2018
  • drwho StevenMoffat
• Undercover Boss: Starkiller Base Behind The Scenes
  • starwars video funny
• The Racial Inequality of Sleep
  • sleep race
• Privilege and inequality in Silicon Valley - Why few successful startup founders grew up desperately poor
  • inequality startups privilege
• Sleeping With A Weighted Blanket Improves Your Mental Health
  • sleep
• Wherein an ogre discovers what it's like to be Good.
  • dnd short_story viaMonique
• Doctor Who fans ‘not over-reacting’ by burning BBC to ground
  • drwho bbc satire funny

Stupid business methods #2 - software licenses still cheaper when they come wrapped in plastic

Eighteen months ago I wrote about it being a third cheaper to buy a license for Diablo in the most wasteful manner possible.

Today I come to re-subscribe to Norton Antivirus*, and the Norton site offers me a year's resubscription for £40 (for up to three PCs). So, of course, I go to see how much they're charging if I bought it from scratch, and wasn't a semi-captive market. And I can get Norton Security (which seems to be the replacement for Norton Antivirus) for a 30% discount off the £50 price (down to £35) for up to 5 PCs. So, £5 cheaper, and two more PCs. That's rather better.

And then I go on Amazon. Where I can also get the online code for £35. Or...I can get a license card for £24. Which is another 1/3 off, if I'm willing to wait a day for it to be delivered, and waste plastic, paper, and someone carrying it to my door. Which, of course, I am.

To summarise:
Re-subscribe: £40
Order new (digitally) from manufacturer: £35
Wastefully buy a piece of paper and have it shipped to me: £24

And yes, I'm sure that there are good reasons for this (see previous post for discussion), but still - there is something irretrievably fucked about the kind of system that produces results like this.

*Before someone leaps in here, Norton _used_ to be a massive memory and CPU hog, and impossible to remove from your system. And then they rewrote it from the ground up, and since then it's been remarkably well behaved for me. If there's a good reason to dislike the current version, then I'd like to know, of course. I've checked the reviews and it does rather well in comparison to most.

Learning to attack unhelpful thoughts

(Via various people on FB. Mostly because it might be useful in the future.)