You want to cut the cable cord, but you aren't clear on how to go about it. You aren't much of a gadget geek, you don't regularly follow tech news, and -- while you might have a Netflix account -- you might not know much about the other alternatives and how they compare: Hulu, Blockbuster, Amazon Prime, iTunes, etc.

And you are even less familiar with the hardware that ports Internet video to your TV: Apple TV, Roku, Boxee, and various game consoles and smart TVs. You could do your research online and it wouldn't be very hard, but if you want to get all the most basic information in one place, another option is pay $2.99 to download the e-book "Your Guide to Cutting the Cord to Cable TV" by Mark Glaser of PBS Mediashift.

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Over the last few months, San Francisco car-hire start-ups have been giddily plowing into new markets and introducing a raft of new services. Facing stiffer competition from SideCar and Lyft, Uber unveiled its own ride-share service, UberX in April.

"We're seeing a ... policy of non-enforcement in a number of cities," founder Travis Kalanick announced in a telephone press conference. He said that Uber conveniently equated "non-enforcement" with "tacit approval."

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This probably isn't news, but there's some pretty stark income discrepancies between certain neighborhoods of our fair city. What is news is that while most of us are aware that the rich people live in the Marina and the poor(er) people live in the Tenderloin, the income gaps can vary widely from one short BART stop to the next.

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A vicious assault nine days ago left Eli Reyes with a broken femur and a number of deep cuts and bruises. She'd been riding her bike through downtown Oakland in the wee hours of the morning when an angry motorist pulled up at a red light, grabbed her through the open window of his truck, and dragged her across the intersection of 14th Street and Broadway.

Reyes fell off her bike, and the truck ran right over her legs. She had surgery at Highland Hospital, where doctors put a metal rod in her femur.

According to the couple, the driver sped off, leaving an injured Reyes behind. SF Weekly contacted Oakland Police Department to get more details on the alleged crime, however, we have not heard back yet.

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The horrific heaps of misinformation that spewed from Twitter and other social media services during the Boston Marathon bombing saga haven't slowed down the Twitter fetishists. If anything, they've doubled down.

For some reason, these people believe that Twitter represents some kind of earth-shattering revolution for the news business, when it's really just a platform for delivering short messages in real time.

To be sure, on that basis, Twitter is a big deal. The existence of a stream of constantly updated real-time news and information, coming from all points on the globe all at once, does represent a major development for the news ecosphere. But some observers, for whatever reason, tend to get ridiculously carried away with their enthusiasm.

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Whether it's posting pictures of breakfast cereal or "liking" a Change.org petition on immigration reform, Facebook has become one of the primary vessels through which we express sentiments and emotions. In some ways, that's deeply problematic -- and even Facebook knows that.

Which may explain why executives at the Menlo Park company hired a team of UC Berkeley psychology researchers to expand the network's "emotional palette."

About 15 months ago, Facebook's engineering director Arturo Bejar recruited staff from UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center to serve as paid consultants for the Silicon Valley tech giant, lending their expertise in "compassion," "empathy," and "gratitude" to the company's product channels.

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Will probably call in sick today

If it's not breast-feeding mommies, then it's pipeline-hating enviros going after Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook.

Today, Bay Area activists who are "mystified and angered" by recent TV ads in favor of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline will descend on Facebook's global headquarters to launch their rage at Zuckerberg.

Why Facebook, you ask? Well, it appears Zuckerberg's FWD.us group is running those national TV ads, which feature pipeline supporter Sen. Lindsey Graham, regurgitating the following:

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Many of us applauded when Andrew Auernheimer was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison for hacking into AT&T's systems, stealing the private email addresses of thousands of iPad users, and sending them to Gawker.

Auernheimer is a horrible person -- a repellent, nasty Internet troll whose exploits got him into the New York Times Magazine in 2008, where he was identified only by his Internet handle, "Weev." His real identity became widely known only later. He will hereafter be identified as Weev because it fits him better -- he's the personification of every negative stereotype of an Internet troll/hacker (not to be confused with the many hackers who are fit for civil society): he's a pallid, unkempt, emotionally maldeveloped, malevolent weenie.

Here's how the NYT mag's writer, Mattathias Schwartz, introduced Weev in the NYT mag:

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Does Facebook want to enable personal interaction, or provide an escape from it? Judging by the TV spots for its poorly conceived Facebook Home product, it's the latter. But that doesn't make any sense, does it? Facebook is, after all, a social media service.

One commercial, which Evan Selinger, writing for Wired, dubbed the "most egregious" of the campaign, depicts a dinner apparently attended by an extended family. As an older woman drones on about her trip to the supermarket, a young woman plunges into a better world: the world of Facebook Home, where her friends -- so much more interesting than her old aunt or the rest of her family -- are posting about the actually interesting things going on in their lives. Those things apparently include playing drums in a rock band, dancing in a ballet, and engaging in a snowball fight.

The message being: your family is dull, but you can easily ignore them, even when you're stuck in the same room with them, and pay attention to your much more exciting friends -- who are right there on Facebook Home, posting pictures of their much more exciting lives.

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UC Berkeley

Coye Cheshire doesn't mean to be impolitic, but he can't help mentioning the FBI's fruitless search for a Boston Marathon bomber -- and how it could be abetted by technology.

"The whole push is to find someone who had pictures, and who could provide high resolution information about public events," says Cheshire, an associate professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information.

He's pretty certain he has a solution to this problem, and you're probably not going to like it: Drones. The small, unmanned, all-seeing aircrafts, are mostly considered in a military context, and thus used for nefarious reasons, Cheshire says. But set aside your paranoia -- at least long enough to read this article, and inform yourself about how drones can actually be used for social good.

See Also: Meet Your Neighborhood Drones

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