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Operation Clambake: Scientology Super Power Building, Clearwater
The purpose of the Super Power Building has been stated as providing a dedicated center for delivering the Super Power Rundown, a high-level Scientology training course that has not yet been released. posted by Trurl at 7:47 PM - 37 comments
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Pay Your Programmers $200/hour
If you are hiring programmers, you should pay them $200/hr. This breaks through otherwise impenetrable psychological barriers, helps solve the agency problem, and ensures you are only hiring programmers when you really need them.
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Cloud storage sites by Amazon, Google, Apple, Carbonite compared - latimes.com
If you've ever had your laptop stolen, watched your toddler baptize your PC with Pepsi, or had your MacBook come to a cold, dead stop, you know that the digital memories we store on our home computers are anything but indelible.
But now there's a special place coalescing where data never dies: It's called the cloud. -
Young, Black and Frisked by the N.Y.P.D. - NYTimes.com
WHEN I was 14, my mother told me not to panic if a police officer stopped me. And she cautioned me to carry ID and never run away from the police or I could be shot. In the nine years since my mother gave me this advice, I have had numerous occasions to consider her wisdom.
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Earlier this year, I asked a question on Stack Overflow about a data structure for loaded dice. Specifically, I was interested in answering this question:
"You are given an n-sided die where side i has probability pi of being rolled. What is the most efficient data structure for simulating rolls of the die?"
This data structure could be used for many purposees. For starters, you could use it to simulate rolls of a fair, six-sided die by assigning probability 16 to each of the sides of the die, or a to simulate a fair coin by simulating a two-sided die where each side has probability 12 of coming up. You could also use this data structure to directly simulate the total of two fair six-sided dice being thrown by having an 11-sided die (whose faces were 2, 3, 4, ..., 12), where each side was appropriately weighted with the probability that this total would show if you used two fair dice. However, you could also use this data structure to simulate loaded dice. For example, if you were playing craps with dice that you knew weren't perfectly fair, you might use the data structure to simulate many rolls of the dice to see what the optimal strategy would be. You could also consider simulating an imperfect roulette wheel in the same way.
Saturday, December 31, 2011
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Friday, December 30, 2011
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I'll tell you why movie revenue is dropping... :: rogerebert.com :: News & comment
Box office revenue at movie theaters "lagged far behind 2010," an article by the AP's David Germain reports. Partly that was because the year lacked an "Avatar." Partly because a solid summer slate fell off in the autumn. Germain talks to several Hollywood insiders who tried to account for the general decline of ticket sales; 2011 had "smallest movie audience since 1995." I have some theories of my own, fueled by what people tell me.
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Microsoft: Five things to look for in 2012 | Microsoft - CNET News
Next year is one of those years that can't come soon enough for Microsoft.
It's not that 2011 was a particularly difficult year. The company posted record revenue for the fiscal year that ended June 30. And its 2-year-old PC operating system, Windows 7, hit 500 million copies sold, further embedding it as the most widely used operating system in the world. But 2011 had few big product launches at the company, Office 365 and Internet Explorer 9 notwithstanding.
Next year will be altogether different. Microsoft is prepping the big kahuna of its product arsenal, Windows 8. The company hasn't set a date, though most analysts expect the flagship operating system to debut before the end of the year, and perhaps in time for back-to-school shopping. From that product, much else from Redmond flows.
So here are five things to look for from Microsoft in 2012: -
Tests Cast Doubt on F.A.A. Restrictions on Kindle and iPad - NYTimes.com
The Federal Aviation Administration has its reasons for preventing passengers from reading from their Kindles and iPads during takeoff and landing. But they just don’t add up.
Since I wrote a column last month asking why these rules exist, I’ve spoken with the F.A.A., American Airlines, Boeing and several others trying to find answers. Each has given me a radically different rationale that contradicts the others. The F.A.A. admits that its reasons have nothing to do with the undivided attention of passengers or the fear of Kindles flying out of passengers’ hands in case there is turbulence. That leaves us with the danger of electrical emissions. -
Occupy protester 'banned' from flight home for Christmas - News & Advice - Travel - The Independent
A member of the Occupy London protests was stopped from boarding his flight home for Christmas after he was found carrying anarchist literature, it has been claimed.
The demonstrator, who is part of the group occupying the empty UBS building dubbed the "Bank of Ideas", said he was told he would not be allowed on the Ryanair flight to Malaga because the pilot feared he might distribute leaflets and "upset other passengers".
Thursday, December 29, 2011
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Wi-Fi Protected Setup is Busted | ZDNet
I’ve never trusted Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) on my Wi-Fi access points (AP) and routers. I’ve always thought that anything that was that easy to set up had to be easy to hack. It turns out my gut was right. The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) has confirmed that security researcher Stefan Viehböck has found a security hole big enough to drive a network through WPS.
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
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The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect
Lawrence had ordained that Prime Intellect could not, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. But he had not realized how much harm his super-intelligent creation could perceive, or what kind of action might be necessary to prevent it.
Caroline has been pulled from her deathbed into a brave new immortal Paradise where she can have anything she wants, except the sense that her life has meaning.
Now these two souls are headed for a confrontation which will force them to weigh matters of life and death before a machine that can remake -- or destroy -- the entire Universe. -
The year in big data and data science - O'Reilly Radar
Big data and data science have both been with us for a while. According to McKinsey & Company's May 2011 report on big data, back in 2009 "nearly all sectors in the U.S. economy had at least an average of 200 terabytes of stored data ... per company with more than 1,000 employees." And on the data-science front, Amazon's John Rauser used his presentation at Strata New York (below) to trace the profession of data scientist all the way back to 18th-century German astronomer Tobias Mayer.
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I got an incredible email today from a Penny Arcade reader. Dave shared with me an email chain between him and Ocean Marketing (the folks behind the Avenger controller) Trust me when I tell you that this is one wild ride. I’m serious, Mr. Toad would look at this ride and just give a slow clap while shaking his head. I have tried to arrange this as best I can in chronological order. I’ve also removed email addresses and other private information. So let’s just jump right in, here is Dave’s first mail to Ocean Marketing:
From: Dave
To: Ocean Marketing
Dec 16, 2011, at 1:34 PM
I ordered 2 of the upcoming PS3 controllers (invoice xxxxxxxxx—Nov 3, 2011). Any chance of getting an update of when these items will ship? I’m not really happy about being forced to pay upfront then have the advertised date of “Early December” be completely missed without any sort of update on availability. I really need one of them for a X-mas present as well. Anyways, looking forward to finally using one of these bad boys. Thanks and happy holidays. -
A re-introduction to JavaScript - MDN
Why a re-introduction? Because JavaScript has a reasonable claim to being the world's most misunderstood programming language. While often derided as a toy, beneath its deceptive simplicity lie some powerful language features. 2005 has seen the launch of a number of high-profile JavaScript applications, showing that deeper knowledge of this technology is an important skill for any web developer.
It's useful to start with an idea of the language's history. JavaScript was created in 1995 by Brendan Eich, an engineer at Netscape, and first released with Netscape 2 early in 1996. It was originally going to be called LiveScript, but was renamed in an ill-fated marketing decision to try to capitalize on the popularity of Sun Microsystem's Java language — despite the two having very little in common. This has been a source of confusion ever since. -
Microsoft's Dumbest And Smartest Moves Of 2011 - Windows - Microsoft news - Informationweek
Microsoft's struggle to adapt to a computing market in which the PC is taking a back seat to tablets and smartphones is well known, and much of the company's troubles of late have arisen directly from that market shift. But don't count Redmond out just yet--it had some solid wins in 2011. There were also a number of clunkers. Here's a look at 7 of Microsoft's dumbest and smartest moves of the past year.
1. Skype buy (Smart). -
Studies of deadly H5N1 bird flu mutations test scientific ethics - latimes.com
In a top-security lab in the Netherlands, scientists guard specimens of a super-killer influenza that slays half of those it infects and spreads easily from victim to victim.
It is a beast long feared by influenza experts, but it didn't come from nature. The scientists made it themselves.
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
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Business & Technology | A look back at Microsoft's busy year, A to Z | Seattle Times Newspaper
The year 2011 has been eventful for Microsoft, from its partnership with Nokia to the purchase of Skype and the first peek at Windows 8. Here's Microsoft's year, from A to Z.
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American Class System - We Are Not All Created Equal, by Stephen Marche - Esquire
There are some truths so hard to face, so ugly and so at odds with how we imagine the world should be, that nobody can accept them. Here's one: It is obvious that a class system has arrived in America — a recent study of the thirty-four countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that only Italy and Great Britain have less social mobility. But nobody wants to admit: If your daddy was rich, you're gonna stay rich, and if your daddy was poor, you're gonna stay poor. Every instinct in the American gut, every institution, every national symbol, runs on the idea that anybody can make it; the only limits are your own limits. Which is an amazing idea, a gift to the world — just no longer true. Culturally, and in their daily lives, Americans continue to glide through a ghostly land of opportunity they can't bear to tell themselves isn't real. It's the most dangerous lie the country tells itself.
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Scooping the Loop Snooper — Geoffrey K. Pullum
No general procedure for bug checks succeeds.
Now, I won’t just assert that, I’ll show where it leads:
I will prove that although you might work till you drop,
you cannot tell if computation will stop.
Monday, December 26, 2011
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Roth IRA: Time to retire Roth IRAs - Los Angeles Times
The day after Congress passed the new healthcare law, an opponent called it "a fiscal Frankenstein." In fact, those are fitting words for Roth individual retirement accounts, or IRAs. Roths drive up the federal deficit and cause other pain. They're great for holders but grim for America. It's time to retire them.
Retirement accounts were designed by Congress to spur saving by Americans for their golden years. Let's compare a Roth IRA to other accounts, such as traditional IRAs, 401(k)s or 403(b)s. -
For Libraries and Publishers, an E-Book Tug of War - NYTimes.com
LAST year, Christmas was the biggest single day for e-book sales by HarperCollins. And indications are that this year’s Christmas Day total will be even higher, given the extremely strong sales of e-readers like the Kindle and the Nook. Amazon announced on Dec. 15 that it had sold one million of its Kindles in each of the three previous weeks.
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E-books and audio books on the Web site of the New York Public Library. Publishers are waiting for an industrywide approach to e-lending to gel.
But we can also guess that the number of visitors to the e-book sections of public libraries’ Web sites is about to set a record, too. -
Verizon’s Worrisome Cable Deals - NYTimes.com
AT&T’s decision to drop its bid for T-Mobile is a victory for the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission, which steadfastly opposed a deal that would have locked the wireless market into a duopoly and been bad for consumers. But the battle to defend competition in telecommunications is hardly over.
Related News
AT&T Ends $39 Billion Bid for T-Mobile (December 19, 2011)
As regulators moved to block the AT&T deal, Verizon Wireless was buying big chunks of spectrum from the nation’s largest cable carriers and signing agreements with them to sell each other’s services to consumers around the country.
Sunday, December 25, 2011
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Baked Macaroni and Cheese Recipe : Alton Brown : Food Network
no butter; yogurt instead of milk, chicken broth, corn meal instead of bread crumbs, but pretty much the same ;-)
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Static Code Analysis « #AltDevBlogADay
The most important thing I have done as a programmer in recent years is to aggressively pursue static code analysis. Even more valuable than the hundreds of serious bugs I have prevented with it is the change in mindset about the way I view software reliability and code quality.
It is important to say right up front that quality isn’t everything, and acknowledging it isn’t some sort of moral failing. Value is what you are trying to produce, and quality is only one aspect of it, intermixed with cost, features, and other factors. There have been plenty of hugely successful and highly regarded titles that were filled with bugs and crashed a lot; pursuing a Space Shuttle style code development process for game development would be idiotic. Still, quality does matter.
Saturday, December 24, 2011
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365 days: Nature's 10 : Nature News & Comment
Ten people who mattered this year.
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Does Airport Security Really Make Us Safer? | Culture | Vanity Fair
As you stand in endless lines this holiday season, here’s a comforting thought: all those security measures accomplish nothing, at enormous cost. That’s the conclusion of Charles C. Mann, who put the T.S.A. to the test with the help of one of America’s top security experts.
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dotEPUB — download any webpage as an e-book
dotEPUB is software in the cloud that allows you to convert any webpage into an e-book.
For content consumers (readers), we have developed a bookmarklet (or favlet) for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari or Opera. And, if you are a Google Chrome user, you can install the dotEPUB extension in your browser. -
My son's first puppy. (imgur.com)submitted 4 hours ago by vandalklown to aww115 commentssharesavehidereport
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"Another World" source code review
I spent two weeks reading and reverse engineering further the source code of Another World ("Out Of This World" in North America). I based my work on Gregory Montoir's "binary to C++" initial reverse engineering from the DOS executable.
I was amazed to discover an elegant system based on a virtual machine interpreting bytecode in realtime and generating fullscreen vectorial cinematic in order to produce one of the best game of all time.
All this shipping on a 1.44MB floppy disk and running within 600KB of RAM: Not bad for 1991 ! As usual I cleaned up my notes, it may save a few hours to someone. -
sc-tech: What atheists are really concerned about
What atheists are really cĐľncerned about (science-sc.com)submitted 4 hours ago by GinZonian to atheism235 commentssharesavehidereport
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10 New Google Analytics Features You Need to Start Using
Over the past eight months, Google has steadily released one revolutionary new feature after another. On March 17, the company announced a new version of Google Analytics. Up until this point, users could decide whether they preferred to stick with the old interface or switch to the new one. However, Google recently announced that the old version of GA will be turned off in January 2012.
Friday, December 23, 2011
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Video Chat Reshapes Domestic Rituals - NYTimes.com
AFTER nightfall on Tuesday, the Darvick family of Birmingham, Mich., began their Hanukkah rituals, just as they had done for years.
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Robert Wright for The New York Times
Tamra Sanford, who lives in Manhattan, has a weekly FaceTime date with her 11-month-old nephew, Maximino Stafford Johnson, of Houston.
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Debra and Martin Darvick set out a tin menorah given to them by long-gone relatives. Their son, Elliot, 27, struck a match and lighted the first candle. And his sister, Emma, 24, joined in a prayer. -
Retired, Computerless Woman Fined For Pirating ‘Hooligan’ Movie | TorrentFreak
Despite not owning a computer or even a router, a retired woman has been ordered by a court to pay compensation to a movie company. The woman had been pursued by a rightsholder who claimed she had illegally shared a violent movie about hooligans on the Internet, but the fact that she didn’t even have an email address proved of little interest to the court. Guilty until proven innocent is the formula in Germany.
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Evidence Mounts Linking Acetaminophen and Asthma - NYTimes.com
THE INVESTIGATOR
Dr. John T. McBride, Akron
Children’s Hospital.
The sharp worldwide increase in childhood asthma over the past 30 years has long perplexed researchers, who have considered explanations as varied as improved hygiene and immunizations. Over the last decade, however, a new idea has emerged.
Thursday, December 22, 2011
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CBC.ca | The Sunday Edition | Iceland Recovery - Rothko Play - Is Europe Over?
n the 2008 economic meltdown, Iceland nearly collapsed. Its three banks failed, it's currency lost 50 per cent of its value and in an unprecedented display of anger, usually peaceful Icelanders took to the streets to protest.
But Iceland defied the orthodox economic wisdom of the time---bailouts and slashing government services---and now is on the road to a recovery that the rest of Europe envies.
The hero of the hour and the man almost solely responsible for this remarkable turnaround is the country's president Olafur Grimmson.
By refusing to go along with conventional thinking and by asking the people themselves what they wanted, he set a course for Iceland's remarkable economic recovery.
In this hour the president of Iceland, on democracy and the fearsome power of the marketplace. -
The Real Story Behind Apple's 'Think Different' Campaign - Forbes
Apple’s remarkable rise, coupled with Steve Jobs’ recent death, has prompted quite a few people to reflect on the historical impact of the “Think Different” ad campaign and the “To the crazy ones” commercial that launched it. There have been a lot of different accounts of how the work was created, who conceived it, and how it was presented to Jobs, so I thought now was a good time to share my own perspective and give you an inside look.
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$335 Million Settlement on Countrywide Lending Bias - NYTimes.com
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department on Wednesday announced the largest residential fair-lending settlement in history, saying that Bank of America had agreed to pay $335 million to settle allegations that its Countrywide Financial unit discriminated against black and Hispanic borrowers during the housing boom.
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A department investigation concluded that Countrywide loan officers and brokers charged higher fees and rates to more than 200,000 minority borrowers across the country than to white borrowers who posed the same credit risk. Countrywide also steered more than 10,000 minority borrowers into costly subprime mortgages when white borrowers with similar credit profiles received regular loans, it found. -
RIAA: Someone Else Is Pirating Through Our IP-Addresses | TorrentFreak
A few days ago we reported that no less than 6 IP-addresses registered to the RIAA had been busted for downloading copyrighted material. Quite a shocker to everyone – including the music industry group apparently – as they are now using a defense previously attempted by many alleged file-sharers. It wasn’t members of RIAA staff who downloaded these files, the RIAA insists, it was a mysterious third party vendor who unknowingly smeared the group’s good name.
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Verizon's 4G network: Can you hear me now? | Signal Strength - CNET News
Verizon Wireless's claims of having the most reliable wireless network are being tested, with the company experiencing two outages on its new 4G LTE network this month.
The latest outage began in the wee hours of the morning Wednesday and affected 4G customers across the nation. From New York City to Denver to Washington state, customers complained that they could not access the 4G data network. Some customers said that they weren't even able to access the 3G wireless service, despite Verizon's claims that this network was not affected. -
Bottom Line - Jobs where people work the most for the least
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- Median hours worked/year: 2,128
- Median annual salary: $36,972
- Employment: 1,172,070
3. First-line supervisors/managers of retail sales workers
First-line supervisors or managers of retail sales workers directly supervise the work of retail salespeople. They must work longer hours than regular salespeople, as they supervise multiple shifts throughout the workday. Most stores also remain open on the weekend, as well as on many holidays. At the same time, they still work in the retail industry, which is usually low-paying.
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Wednesday, December 21, 2011
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My dad put this up after a fight we had when I was a kid. I find that at the years pass by it gets truer and truer. (imgur.com)submitted 8 hours ago by Vantagonist to pics957 commentssharesavehidereport
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MythBuster Adam Savage: SOPA Could Destroy the Internet as We Know It - Popular Mechanics
Soon the U.S. Congress will reconvene to consider the Protect IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Mythbuster and PM contributing editor Adam Savage says that if these sweeping pieces of legislation pass, the U.S. will join the likes of China and Iran in censoring the Internet, and destroy the openness that made the Web perhaps the most important technological advance of his lifetime.
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Bugs and Battleships : Inside 233
Do you remember your first computer program? When you had finished writing it, what was the first thing you did? You did the simplest possible test: you ran it.
As programs increase in size, so do the amount of possible tests. It’s worth considering which tests we actually end up running: imagine the children’s game Battleship, where the ocean is the space of all possible program executions, the battleships are the bugs that you are looking for, and each individual missile you fire is a test you run (white if the test passes, red if the test fails.) You don’t have infinite missiles, so you have to decide where you are going to send them. -
A Weekly Roundup of Small-Business News - NYTimes.com
The Big Story: End-of-the-Year Lists
Here’s a list of 10 things that have shaped our lives over the last 10 years. Joshua M. Brown offers the 10 biggest moments for the markets, a slide show displays the most innovative products, and Anthony Weiner leads the 10 worst media disasters of the year. Andrew O’Hehir lists his 10 top movies, Gizmodo lists the most expensive computer bugs, and let’s not forget the top 10 pranks of 2011. More? O.K. Google issues its 10 most searched terms. And here are the most overused buzzwords on LinkedIn this year. Wendy’s wins top tweet of 2011. Lifehacker shares its most popular Windows downloads and posts, and of course there are the 50 most viral videos of the year. Can you guess the 20 most played Christmas songs on the radio?
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
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106 of the most beloved Street Art Photos – Year 2011
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IBM's Five Predictions for the Next Five Years - Businessweek
[editor's note: who believes anything IBM says? (Hence, this is classified news more than anything else)--even after their resurgence?]
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SOPA Will Mean The End of Reddit, Says General Manager | TorrentFreak
Last week the House Judiciary Committee discussed the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA). After an abrupt end of the markup session on Friday, a new hearing date was set for this week. Meanwhile, opposition to the controversial bill is increasing and yesterday the General Manager of the largest online community Reddit said that the bill would “almost certainly mean the end” of the popular site.
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The rise and rise of JavaScript « DanNorth.net
I’ve been using JavaScript for a while now, but only really programming in anger with it during the last year. I’ve found it in turns frustrating and enlightening, ridiculous and brilliant. I have never felt so empowered by a language and its ecosystem, so I thought I’d take some time to write about why that is. I’m starting with a ramble through the history of JavaScript, or rather my undoubtedly inaccurate understanding of it, to provide some context for where and how I’ve been using it.
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INFLATION PREDICTIONS AND BROKEN MODELS | PRAGMATIC CAPITALISM
Paul Krugman has really been laying into the hyperinflationists in recent days. And rightfully so. The hyperinflationists have been astronomically wrong and they’ve ended up hurting a lot of people in recent years. And these predictions, as Dr. Krugman notes, were based on a model that is completely wrong. He says:
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"Can you check the back?" (if you work in retail, you know how this feels) - Imgur
Monday, December 19, 2011
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Young, Black and Frisked by the N.Y.P.D. - NYTimes.com
WHEN I was 14, my mother told me not to panic if a police officer stopped me. And she cautioned me to carry ID and never run away from the police or I could be shot. In the nine years since my mother gave me this advice, I have had numerous occasions to consider her wisdom.
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Texas Man Seeks Inquiry After Exoneration in Murder - NYTimes.com
AUSTIN, Tex. — A Texas man wrongfully convicted in 1987 of murdering his wife is scheduled to be officially exonerated on Monday.
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Callie Richmond for The Texas Tribune
Michael Morton on the day of his release in October. He served nearly 25 years for the murder of his wife before being cleared.
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Times Topic: DNA Evidence
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That is no longer so unusual in Texas, where 45 inmates have been exonerated in the last decade based on DNA evidence. What is unprecedented is the move planned by lawyers for the man, Michael Morton: they are expected to file a request for a special hearing to determine whether the prosecutor broke state laws or ethics rules by withholding evidence that could have led to Mr. Morton’s acquittal 25 years ago. -
Delays for Paramedics Draw Criticism in Oakland - NYTimes.com
Gunshots cracked the air on a sunny morning as two men led a group of high school teachers on a tour of a violent area of West Oakland. As the teachers fled to safety, the local guides hurried to the chaotic scene on the nearby corner of 13th and Peralta Streets.
A nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization providing local coverage of the San Francisco Bay Area for The New York Times. To join the conversation about this article, go to baycitizen.org.
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Follow @NYTNational for breaking news and headlines.
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Thor Swift for The Bay Citizen
A group of neighborhood residents held a vigil at the intersection.
A young man named Darius Jenkins lay on the ground bleeding as friends and neighbors panicked. Sam McNeal, an attendance counselor for McClymonds High School, crouched at his side and urged him to keep breathing while Ron Muhammad, a widely known community organizer, ran to the fire station about a block away. There he discovered a truck full of firefighters, waiting in the driveway. -
Last Convoy of American Troops Leaves Iraq - NYTimes.com
BAGHDAD — The last convoy of American troops drove into Kuwait on Sunday morning, punctuating the end of the nearly nine-year war in Iraq.
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BT Files Patent Suit Against Google | PCWorld Business Center
British Telecommunications has filed a civil suit in a Delaware court alleging that some Google products and services including Android, and its search, music, map, and location-based advertising infringe on one or more of six of its patents.
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Bradley Manning hearing told of security failings at Iraq base | World news | guardian.co.uk
The person in charge of ensuring the security of the computer network that Bradley Manning worked on in Iraq was officially admonished earlier this year for failing to accredit and certify the system.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
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OS.js (JavaScript Operating System) « Anders Evenrud Weblog
OS.js started out as a tool to use on my home server so i could run GUI applications to configure services without installing X and a window manager (including VNC or similar remote management) and connect from anywhere in the world just using a web-browser. But lately I’ve also found some other uses for it, mainly HTML5 application development.
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Warming Arctic Permafrost Fuels Climate Change Worries - NYTimes.com
FAIRBANKS, Alaska — A bubble rose through a hole in the surface of a frozen lake. It popped, followed by another, and another, as if a pot were somehow boiling in the icy depths.
Temperature Rising
Trouble in the Arctic
Articles in this series are focusing on the central arguments in the climate debate and examining the evidence for global warming and its consequences.
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Slide Show
Hunting for Clues to Global Warming
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Frozen Carbon
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A blog about energy and the environment.
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In an Alaskan lake, bubbles of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, collect beneath the ice. More Photos »
Every bursting bubble sent up a puff of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas generated beneath the lake from the decay of plant debris. These plants last saw the light of day 30,000 years ago and have been locked in a deep freeze — until now.
Saturday, December 17, 2011
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10 Brand Names Gone, But Not Forgotten - TheStreet
Pan Am
Think back to when the "friendly skies" were really friendly. When you could board an airplane without a strip search, carry on more than 3.4 ounces of water and took your shoes off only if you wanted to.
There was a time when men wore suits and women wore their Sunday best when they boarded an airplane -- sweatpants or jeans were just simply uncouth. Smoking? Sure thing. In fact, a lovely young stewardess would light your Chesterfield as she handed you another scotch and soda.
[in memory of Mary Young (Goon), with affection, pjm] -
10 Brand Names Gone, But Not Forgotten - TheStreet
Amiga was *way* cool, and they did it first. It all mostly worked (but, then, Flash, *mostly* works), and they didn't make you give up your left ball (/uterus) to get features. It all just functioned. Sure, you can do the same thing now on Youtube or Vimeo, but it's not the same--it's as easy, but no where near the thrill. ;-)
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UMG claims "right to block or remove" YouTube videos it doesn't own
Universal Music Group has responded to Megaupload's request for a temporary restraining order barring the music giant from further interference with the distribution of its "Mega Song." UMG insists that it had a right to take down the video—not under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, as Megaupload had assumed, but under a private contractual arrangement between UMG and YouTube.
Friday, December 16, 2011
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A geek with a hat » Why programmers work at night
A popular saying goes that Programmers are machines that turn caffeine into code.
And sure enough, ask a random programmer when they do their best work and there’s a high chance they will admit to a lot of late nights. Some earlier, some later. A popular trend is to get up at 4am and get some work done before the day’s craziness begins. Others like going to bed at 4am. -
Guantánamo for US citizens? Senate bill raises questions - CSMonitor.com
Legislation passed by the Senate this week and headed for the House – and a possible presidential veto – could allow the US military to detain American citizens indefinitely.
Related stories
Gallery: American Jihadis
No. 1 priority for US security: domestic terrorism, threat report says
Bomb plot: New York 'lone wolf' was one hour away from finishing his bomb
Topics
Terrorism War and Conflict Military and Defense Policy Political Policy Libertarian Politics Armed Forces Human Rights
The National Defense Authorization Act covering $662 billion in defense spending for the next fiscal year includes a provision requiring military custody of a terror suspect believed to be a member of Al Qaeda or its affiliates and involved in attacks on the United States.
Thursday, December 15, 2011
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Mohammed el Gorani and JĂ©rĂ´me Tubiana · Diary: Guantánamo · LRB 15 December 2011
Mohammed el Gorani, the youngest prisoner held at Guantánamo, has written a memoir of his time there, the lead up to his imprisonment, and subsequent release years later. posted by gman at 2:02 PM - 52 comments
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My Heart Will Go On - Recorder By Candle Light by Matt Mulholland - YouTube
Matt Mulholland performing "My Heart Will Go On" on the recorder. That is all. (SLYT) posted by Rory Marinich at 10:43 PM - 10 comments
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WEBlog -- Wouter's Eclectic Blog
A commentor on my previous post asked why I think MySQL is a toy.
I've actually blogged about that a number of times, but when wanting to point that out, I found that most of those posts point out just one thing, rather than having one post that enumerates them all. So let's remedy that, shall we?
There are many things wrong with MySQL, including, but not limited to: -
Having to think about the unthinkable - latimes.com
"I could show you case after case," said Dr. Neil S. Wenger. "I could bet you million-to-1 odds these patients would not want to be in this situation."
He was talking about patients in critical condition who are "attached to machines, being kept alive" in hospitals, many of them suffering.
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A common reason for that, said Wenger, director of UCLA's Health System Ethics Center, is that fewer than one-third of us make our healthcare wishes known in advance of critical illness or injury. So if we end up comatose after an accident, or with severe memory loss in old age, we're kept alive, regardless of the cost and regardless of what our wishes might be or how grim the prognosis. -
Autism services go to the families who fight hardest - latimes.com
From the day her son was diagnosed with autism nine years ago, Stacie Funk has made it her full-time job to find him the best possible help. Hiring lawyers and experts to press her case, she established herself as a mother whose demands could not easily be dismissed.
DISCOVERING AUTISM
The series at a glance:
Sunday: An epidemic of disease or of discovery?
Today: Services go to those who fight hardest
Thursday: Families chase the dream of recovery
Friday: Finding traces of autism in earlier eras
About the series | Discuss
The result has been a bounty of assistance for Jonah: A behavioral therapist who works with him at home and comes along on family outings, a personal aide at school and specialists to design his curriculum, improve his speech and refine his motor skills.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
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As Facebook Aims at Millions of Users, Some Are Content to Sit Out - NYTimes.com
Tyson Balcomb quit Facebook after a chance encounter on an elevator. He found himself standing next to a woman he had never met — yet through Facebook he knew what her older brother looked like, that she was from a tiny island off the coast of Washington and that she had recently visited the Space Needle in Seattle.
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Erika Gable refuses to use Facebook. She does use social media applications such as Twitter and Spotify.
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“I knew all these things about her, but I’d never even talked to her,” said Mr. Balcomb, a pre-med student in Oregon who had some real-life friends in common with the woman. “At that point I thought, maybe this is a little unhealthy.” -
From Finland, an Intriguing School-Reform Model - NYTimes.com
asi Sahlberg, a Finnish educator and author, had a simple question for the high school seniors he was speaking to one morning last week in Manhattan: “Who here wants to be a teacher?”
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Pasi Sahlberg, a Finnish educator and author, with students at the Dwight School in Manhattan.
News, data and conversation about education in New York.
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Out of a class of 15, two hands went up — one a little reluctantly.
“In my country, that would be 25 percent of people,” Dr. Sahlberg said. “And,” he added, thrusting his hand in the air with enthusiasm, “it would be more like this.” -
Amazon’s Jungle Logic - NYTimes.com
I FIRST heard of Amazon’s new “promotion” from my bookseller daughter, Emily, in an e-mail with the subject line “Can You Hear Me Screaming in Brooklyn?” According to a link Emily supplied, Amazon was encouraging customers to go into brick-and-mortar bookstores on Saturday, and use its price-check app (which allows shoppers in physical stores to see, by scanning a bar code, if they can get a better price online) to earn a 5 percent credit on Amazon purchases (up to $5 per item, and up to three items).
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Body Possibly Shannan Gilbert’s Is Found on Long Island - NYTimes.com
They had planned to gather on Tuesday, on the barren shore along Ocean Parkway on Long Island, to remember the victims of a suspected serial killer, the remains found scattered among the area’s shrouded thickets over the past year.
Related
Missing Prostitute’s Clothes Found on Long Island (December 8, 2011)
Times Topic: Long Island Serial Killer
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Instead, they paid special respects to the woman whose disappearance unfurled this grim string of mysteries in the first place. -
They Call It the Reverse Gender Gap - NYTimes.com
NEW YORK — As the year ends, much of the talk around women — at least in the United States — has moved from empowerment and global gender gaps to the trend of young single women out-earning men and the rise of female breadwinners.
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There are so many views and theories out there, some of them driven by independent research and others by personal experience and still others by a chatty blend of both, that we are getting a sometimes confounding, always provocative and occasionally contradictory picture.
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
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Tribe Legis Memo on SOPA 12-6-11 1
H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act or “SOPA,” violates the First Amendment, for several reasons:• The notice-and-termination procedure of Section 103(a) runs afoul of the “prior restraint” doctrine, because it delegates to a private party the power to suppress speech without prior notice and a judicial hearing. This provision of the bill would give complaining parties the power to stop online advertisers and credit card processors from doing business with a website,merely by filing a unilateral notice accusing the site of being “dedicated to theft of U.S. property” – even if no court has actually found any infringement. The immunity provisions inthe bill create an overwhelming incentive for advertisers and payment processors to comply withsuch a request immediately upon receipt. The Supreme Court has made clear that “only a judicial determination in an adversary proceeding ensures the necessary sensitivity to freedom of
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Beijing air goes from 'hazardous' to off the charts, literally | The Observers
A dense blanket of smog covered most cities in northeast China this past week, reaching record pollution levels and grounding hundreds of flights at Beijing’s international airport. Public outrage over the quality of the air in the Chinese capital is rising high while the government insists that the problem is down to inclement weather and nothing to be overly worried about.
For most of this week the air in Beijing has been rated as “very unhealthy” and “hazardous” by the US Embassy air monitor, reputed as the most reliable indicator of pollution in the city. On Sunday it posted a new record: “beyond index”, as it registered 522 micrograms of particulate pollutants per cubic meter of air.
More and more Chinese citizens - and not just expats - are turning to the US Embassy's BeijingAir Twitter account for precise data on pollution, especially since Chinese authorities continued to describe the situation as “moderate” despite the thick cloud of smog – “fog,” according to them - that envelops the city. In fact, Beijing’s health authorities insist that the air is perfectly safe 80% of the time, even though the US monitor has rated the air as good only 13 days this year.
Monday, December 12, 2011
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Ecstortive - The key value store everyone ignored (Postgresql)
Yes I know you are really happy with your “persistent” Key Value store. But did anybody notice hstore that comes along Postgresql. I find Postgresql to be a really great RDBMS that has been ignored all the time. It even has some great publisher/subscriber system as well (or LISTEN/NOTIFY in terms of Postgresql) that a lot of people may have implement using Redis, RabbitMQ etc. For people who have not lived anything other than MySQL. I would simply ask them to try out Postgres.
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Despite all of its warts, I like working in Linux. I've used it for 15 years and I've never been as productive in another environment. Most people claim that it's the configurability of Linux that keep the users coming. That may have attracted me at first, but what attracts me now is its programmability.
Let me be very clear. I'm not saying that Linux is great because I can patch the source code to grep and recompile it. In all my years of Unix, I've never done anything like that. And I'm not saying that Linux is a great workstation for programmers because it helps you program better. Those are topics for another essay. -
The Return of the Worm That Ate the Pentagon | Danger Room | Wired.com
It’s back. The story of the worm that ate the Pentagon just won’t go away.
The attack of the Agent.btz worm, dubbed “the most serious breach of the U.S. military’s classified computer systems,” is getting another telling, this time in the Washington Post. The story adds new details about the intrusion — and reveals that some in the military wanted to use “offensive tools” to remove the malware on overseas and civilian networks. But the article still doesn’t uncover anything that justifies the hyperbole that the government has used for this breach since it was first uncovered.
Danger Room broke the story in November 2008 that the Army got -
Getting a job in software development: A Reddit discussion round-up : cscareerquestions
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How I feel almost every night. (i.imgur.com)submitted 9 hours ago by brillo90 to funny202 commentssharesavehidereport
Sunday, December 11, 2011
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More shell, less egg - All this
I can’t help but include one more excerpt. It’s the last paragraph of the review:
Knuth has shown us here how to program intelligibly, but not wisely. I buy the discipline. I do not buy the result. He has fashioned a sort of industrial-strength FabergĂ© egg—intricate, wonderfully worked, refined beyond all ordinary desires, a museum piece from the start.
Just remember, he’s saying this about Donald Knuth. -
Illinois Court Reverses Conviction of Man Jailed in Rape-Murder - NYTimes.com
In an opinion that harshly criticizes the tactics of the police and prosecutors, an Illinois appellate court on Friday night reversed the conviction of Juan Rivera, who has spent 19 years in jail for the 1992 rape and murder of an 11-year-old baby sitter in a suburb of Chicago.
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Mr. Rivera, who is 39 and serving a life sentence, has been convicted three times for killing the sitter, Holly Staker, based on the strength of a confession that was obtained after four days of questioning. There was no physical evidence linking him to the crime, which occurred in Waukegan, Ill., and DNA testing in 2005 excluded him as the source of sperm found in Holly’s body. -
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I was looking for a congratulations pregnancy card for a friend and I came across this... (i.imgur.com)submitted 6 hours ago by Mapes to funny278 commentssharesavehidereport
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Creating a NES emulator in C++11 (PART 1/2) - YouTube
Creating a NES emulator in C++11 (PART 1/2) (youtube.com)submitted 10 hours ago by jezeq194 commentssharesavehidereportCreating a NES emulator in C++11 (PART 1/2) (youtube.com)submitted 10 hours ago by jezeq194 commentssharesavehidereport
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Medical Marijuana and the Memory of One High Day - NYTimes.com
WHEN my mother-in-law was in the final, harrowing throes of pancreatic cancer, she had only one good day, and that was the day she smoked pot.
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So I was heartened when, at the end of last month, the governors of Washington and Rhode Island petitioned the Obama administration to classify marijuana as a drug that could be prescribed and distributed for medical use. While medical marijuana is legal in 16 states, it is still outlawed under federal law. -
One of the interesting things about the increasingly measured world of journalism is that new and surprising statistics are emerging about what kind of writing and writers are the stickiest.
Read It Later, the Web service that allows surfers to hit a button and save an article for future consumption, has been around since 2007, but it has really gained traction with the advent of tablets. Amid the hurly-burly of daytime activity, many readers don’t have time to devote to long stories, but devices like the iPad are ideal for leaning back and taking in something glorious, at one’s leisure. Read It Later offers a one-click way to save articles that might otherwise become lost and never read. Nate Weiner, the founder of Read It Later, wrote a post this year that noted that people were time-shifting content to later in the day, programming their evening hours with long-form material.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
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Universal Censors Megaupload Song, Gets Branded a “Rogue Label” | TorrentFreak
Earlier today, Megaupload released a pop video featuring mainstream artists who endorse the cyberlocker service. News of the controversial Mega Song even trended on Twitter, but has now been removed from YouTube on copyright grounds by Universal Music. Kim Dotcom says that Megaupload owns everything in the video, and that the label has engaged in dirty tricks in an attempt to sabotage their successful viral campaign.
This morning we published an article on a new campaign by cyberlocker service Megaupload. -
We are Virginia Tech (i.imgur.com)submitted 7 hours ago by ShadowRex to pics445 commentssharesavehidereport
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Skyrim Guard - i used to be an adventurer like you until i was offered this
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HP announces that they will open source WebOS! : programming
HP announces that they will open source WebOS! (hp.com)
submitted 13 hours ago by orospakr
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To Fix Health Care, Help the Poor - NYTimes.com
IT’S common knowledge that the United States spends more than any other country on health care but still ranks in the bottom half of industrialized countries in outcomes like life expectancy and infant mortality. Why are these other countries beating us if we spend so much more? The truth is that we may not be spending more — it all depends on what you count.
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Internet Access and the New Divide - NYTimes.com
FOR the second year in a row, the Monday after Thanksgiving — so-called Cyber Monday, when online retailers offer discounts to lure holiday shoppers — was the biggest online sales day of the year, totaling some $1.25 billion and overwhelming the sales figures racked up by brick-and-mortar stores three days before, on Black Friday, the former perennial record-holder.
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Such numbers may seem proof that America is, indeed, online. But they mask an emerging division, one that has worrisome implications for our economy and society. Increasingly, we are a country in which only the urban and suburban well-off have truly high-speed Internet access, while the rest — the poor and the working class — either cannot afford access or use restricted wireless access as their only connection to the Internet. As our jobs, entertainment, politics and even health care move online, millions are at risk of being left behind.
Thursday, December 8, 2011
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Cool Text: Logo and Graphics Generator
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Invisible Among the Uncounted - NYTimes.com
NEW DELHI — Officially, Chandni doesn’t exist, nor is there any space for her in Delhi. Unofficially, the 14-year-old has grown up in the national capital, on its streets, one of the thousands of uncounted homeless women and girls in a city that has little time or empathy for her.
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“This city,” said Chandni, whose parents never registered her birth, “has less room for girls like me than it does for the crows and stray dogs.” -
open source - What should every developer know about legal matters? - Stack Overflow
Software is copyrighted if it is made available to the general public. It is no longer necessary to put a copyright notice on the application or in the source code. The owner of the copyright is the author(s) or company paying the author(s).
The copyright of software can be assigned by the owner of the copyright, or it can be retained by the owner and the software can be licensed to the user or users by the owner.
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
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8-Year Old Boy Leaves Michele Bachmann Speechless on Gay Rights | Reuters
How old do you have to be to stump Michele Bachmann?
Apparently you just have to be eight.
At a South Carolina book signing, an eight-year old boy named Elijah showed up and nervously went up to Bachmann to defend his mother.
He told Bachmann, “My mom’s gay, but she doesn’t need any fixing.”
Bachmann, who initially brought the boy right up to her face because he was speaking too quietly, pulled back and said nothing. -
Medical advances. (i.imgur.com)submitted 9 hours ago by nomdeweb to funny1240 commentssharesavehidereport
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It all started with Responsive Web Design, an article by Ethan Marcotte on A List Apart. Essentially, the article proposed addressing the ever-changing landscape of devices, browsers, screen sizes and orientations by creating flexible, fluid and adaptive Web sites. Instead of responding to today’s needs for a desktop Web version adapted to the most common screen resolution, along with a particular mobile version (often specific to a single mobile device), the idea is to approach the issue the other way around: use flexible and fluid layouts that adapt to almost any screen.
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Paris Review – Document: The Symbolism Survey, Sarah Funke Butler
In 1963, a sixteen-year-old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister sent a four-question mimeographed survey to 150 well-known authors of literary, commercial, and science fiction. Did they consciously plant symbols in their work? he asked. Who noticed symbols appearing from their subconscious, and who saw them arrive in their text, unbidden, created in the minds of their readers? When this happened, did the authors mind?
McAllister had just published his first story, “The Faces Outside,” in both IF magazine and Simon and Schuster’s 1964 roundup of the best science fiction of the year. Confident, if not downright cocky, he thought the surveys could settle a conflict with his English teacher by proving that symbols weren’t lying beneath the texts they read like buried treasure awaiting discovery.
