US Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot through the head twelve days ago during a Tucson, Arizona rampage that left six dead and thirteen wounded, is now able to stand with assistance… and is using an iPad.
I automatically love any story about a robber who tries to stick up a restaurant, only to have to deal with the armada of cooks in the kitchen arming themselves with cleavers and knives and preparing to go to war. I was once in a restaurant in Malden, Massachusetts that avoided being robbed in just the same manner.
That said, it’s rare that I get a chance to write about these amazing incidents of robbers vs. line cooks on Cult of Mac, but here we have an exception, when 20-year old Jerome Taylor made the mistake of falling afoul of a blade-wielding kitchen crew when he tried to rob a New London, Connecticut restaurant using only his iPhone.
Needless to say, the robber — 20-year old Jerome Taylor — failed. Although he brandished his iPhone like a gun, the cooks quickly flooded out of the kitchen, ready to slice and dice. Terrified by the charge, Taylor suddenly “became apologetic and told the cooks he was only kidding and that he needed money for his child.”
He seems to have convinced the staff, because they begged the police not to file charges. It didn’t work, though: Taylor was still charged with attempted robbery and interfering with an officer.
Next time you need money for Christmas for your child, Jerome, maybe try selling that iPhone on eBay instead of robbing a restaurant. Don’t you know they shove all the disreputable, violent lots back in the steamer of the kitchen? Those guys would cut you sooner than look at you.
What if you could propel your band to the top of the iTunes sales charts while simultaneously laundering cash from stolen credit card numbers straight to your bank account?
Why, you’d go to jail, as UK teen Lamar Johnson just found out.
According to both federal prosecutors and Cupertino itself, former Apple manager Paul Shin Devine was crooked, accepting almost $1 million in kickbacks from accessory makers in exchange for insider knowledge gleaned from his position as Senior Operations Manager of the iPod division.
On his part, Devine says he’s not guilty, but that claim certainly seems disingenuous: not only is he facing 23 counts of money laundering and wire fraud, but when investigators raided his home they discovered over $150,000 in cash squirreled away in shoeboxes.
Now prosecutors are saying that Devine has more, and they want him to open his safety deposit boxes to see if he’s withholding even more money from them.
The case has already had a devastating effect on Devine and his family: although he is currently out on bail, but he was only able to secure the money necessary for release by allowing his mother to put her house up on lien. I really hope he ends up being innocent of the charges: it’s one thing to rip off Apple, but another thing entirely to let your mother risk homelessness to protect you from justice.
It sounds like the setup to a heist movie: a speeding truck smashing through a wall, screeching to a halt and almost instantly disgorging itself of a gang of robbers, perhaps all wearing disguising Dead President masks. Take away the masks, though, and you have the real-life caper of a bunch of Apple-coveting thieves who just hit up a reseller in Oregon.
In January of 2009, I spent almost $2,500 on a top of the line, 15-inch unibody MacBook Pro, glutted with as much RAM and hard drive space as its belly could handle. Less than four months later, it was stolen.
Oh, it was my own fault. The whole tale involves a midnight rendezvous with a bartender I had my eye on at the time. She had the face of Natalie Portman, the eyebrows of Roger Moore and the constitution of Oliver Reed; in her presence, one drink became two, and two became twelve, and when we stumbled back to my apartment, I somehow forgot my laptop bag back at the bar… but only for five minutes! Alas, five minutes was too late, and by the time I’d rushed back, it was gone.
Since then, I’ve spent a good amount of time upbraiding myself about the loss. What has always bugged me most about the theft was that I always knew that there were countless programs available (such as Undercover) that would help you track down your Mac if it was stolen. I knew about these programs. I wrote about them, even. But I never once installed one. I just couldn’t imagine the scenario where I would have my laptop stolen. Dumb.
The news feeds bring me further fodder for my self-incrimination this morning. Over at TUAW, they are reporting that one of their readers. Jim, managed to safely recover his stolen Macbook using the MobileMe’s service, Back to My Mac, to take pictures of the perps and gather information about them gleaned from watching them surf the web.
It took Jim many months to get his laptop back: it had changed hands at least five times since it was stolen, at least once as payment in a drug deal. But when he got it back, it was in surprisingly good nick… with most of his files still intact on the disk.
That’s great news for Jim, but as another object lesson in my own amazing stupidity, it’s like a punch to the gut. Guess who also didn’t have a MobileMe account when his MacBook Pro was stolen? Yup. What a maroon.
Hell is other people’s karaoke, or maybe it just seems that way if you’ve had too much to drink.
An inebriated man in Seattle got himself kicked out of a sing-a-long bar for heckling — so fast he left his Mac behind.
Here’s how the sorry tale is recounted on the Seattle Hill Blog police blotter:
“A man contacted the police complaining that a tan American Eagle bag which contained “a Mac laptop and several novels” had been stolen from inside the Crescent Lounge. The man was extremely inebriated and had been thrown out of the bar after cursing at patrons performing karaoke. Police and staff could not find the bag.”
Via Seattle Hill Blog:
