It begins with a quote from Steve Jobs.

““When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money.

That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is – everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will, you know if you push in, something will pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it. That’s maybe the most important thing. It’s to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.

I think that’s very important and however you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better, cause it’s kind of messed up, in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.””

Read why Baji thinks Apple has lost the plot here.

As the voice of tomorrow’s tech leaders it’s notable that they are overwhelmingly in support of  Ed Snowden, the NSA whistlerblower.  See the list of stories they’re reading here.

As a Canadian I totally agree with Henry Blodget.

One thing that is interesting–and, to many people, offensive–about the way the U.S. government is defending the PRISM program, however, is by reassuring people that the program can only be used to spy on “foreigners.”

The U.S. government appears to assume that, once people realize that PRISM is focused on “foreigners,” they won’t care what the government does.

And maybe, unfortunately, the government is right about that–at least in America.

But most people in the world–and most of the billions of users of Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and other major Internet services–won’t likely be so sanguine. That’s because these people do not happen to be Americans. They happen to be “foreigners.” And that means that they are included in the group of ~7 billion non-Americans that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act apparently gives the U.S. government considerable freedom to spy on.

If all ~7 billion “foreigners” in the world were likely to be potential terrorists, and the 300 million Americans were not potential terrorists, this logic might make sense.

But as recent events in Boston have shown, Americans can also be potential terrorists. And most of the ~7 billion “foreigners” targeted by PRISM, meanwhile, are law-abiding folks who would never dream of blowing up planes or killing innocent people.

These “foreigners,” moreover, also constitute the vast majority of the users and customers of Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and other American tech companies.

via Why Is It Okay For Government To Spy On “Foreigners” – Business Insider.

The existence of this massive spying network that is spying on Canadians (and all other non Americans) is yet another reason why we need to build our own social networks.

A great piece in Techcrunch on recent NSA news.

In short, we didn’t trade privacy for security. We traded privacy for convenience. And the government, seeing a hole, took advantage of this.

Read the full piece here:  We Asked For This | TechCrunch.

“Any other questions?”

It was what Toronto Mayor Rob Ford asked reporters at City Hall after he finished a prepared speech touting the city’s $248-million budget surplus, along with his record on low taxes and infrastructure improvements.

via ‘Any other questions?’ Rob Ford holds press conference amid new crack scandal reports – Need to know – Macleans.ca.

Vancouver Police are evacuating buildings and closing streets in the 900 and 1000 blocks of Granville, Howe and Hornby, as well as the 700 and 800 blocks of Nelson, due to a gas leak.

An underground gas line has been hit in a construction site in the 700 block Nelson. The Law Courts have also been evacuated.

People are being advised to avoid the area.

Cops discovered an underground marijuana growing operation in as many months, this time at a property in the 27000-block of 56^th Avenue in Langley over the weekend.

A search of the property revealed five shipping containers buried underground where they housed a sophisticated bunker system, similar to what was seen at the underground bunker in Mission that was disguised as a fake horse paddock. In this case, however, the property above the bunker was constructed to resemble a small hobby farm, complete with three sheep and one pig. In addition to the farm animals, a combination of about a dozen pit bull-type dogs and Chihuahuas were found. The dogs were taken by a family member of one of the people arrested.

Each of the steel shipping containers had a doorway cut through it to make a continuous pathway that connected all of the containers as well as raised walkways so workers could easily walk through the bunker from container to container.

The grow-op, which is believed to have been operating for at least a couple years, was powered by an industrial-sized natural gas generator, similar to what was found in Mission, worth an estimated $100,000. To fuel the underground generator and further conceal the operation from the public and police, it was discovered, to the shock of the officers, that a nearby natural gas pipeline had been cut into and a bypass installed to redirect the gas to the generator.

As was the case in Mission, the perpetrators went to great lengths to conceal what they were doing.  At the Langley property, the generator’s muffler was disguised from view with an old manure spreader placed over top of the muffler.

In addition to the four people arrested, officers discovered a loaded firearm in one of the bedrooms of the house on the property and seized about 1.5 pounds of dried marijuana.

Gezi Park the action Dehşet Lecturer Medals Photos – onedio.com.