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Tensions mount with arrest of Occupy D.C. protester and approach of deadline - The Washington Post
Tensions between Occupy D.C. protesters and law enforcement increased Sunday afternoon with the arrest of a demonstrator and the approach of Monday’s noon deadline to enforce a ban on overnight camping.
Tempers flared about midday after police subdued a protester in McPherson Square with an electric shock. Several protesters accused the police of using excessive force, saying the demonstrator had been handcuffed by two police officers before a third used an electronic device to stun him. -
Officials Say the Darndest Things | 30 Must-See Tumblr Blogs | NewsFeed | TIME.com
It's barely five years old, but the micro-blogging platform Tumblr already rakes in 15 billion pageviews every month. With all that buzz, we thought we'd showcase the best accounts out there (with some help from TIME's Tumblr followers, who nominated their own favorites)
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Police: Afghan Woman Killed for Having Girl - TIME
(KABUL, Afghanistan) — An Afghan woman has been strangled death, apparently by her husband, who was upset that she gave birth to a second daughter rather than the son he had hoped for, police said Monday.
It was the latest in a series of grisly examples of subjugation of women that have made headlines in Afghanistan in the past few months — including a 15-year-old tortured and forced into prostitution by in-laws and a female rape victim who was imprisoned for adultery.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
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Monday, January 30, 2012
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Sketchy Skechers.com - The Daily WTF
Imagine yourself as an eager, young developer. After many long months of self-study, you’ve carefully honed your craft and have skillfully mastered virtually all development technologies from enterprisey to hipster. Your twelve-page résumé could land you a job anywhere, and as it would happen, the job you decided to take was at a highfalutin consultancy filled with like-minded developers who were almost as skilled as you.
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10 Questions with Facebook Research Engineer – Andrei Alexandrescu | Server-Side Magazine
Today we caught up with Andrei Alexandrescu for a “10 Question” interview. He is a Romanian born research engineer at Facebook living in the US, you can contact him on his website erdani.com or @incomputable.
We will talk about some of the juicy stuff that going on at Facebook, so let’s get started. -
Along with SOPA and PIPA, our government is contemplating another acronym with deplorable consequences for the free dissemination of information: RWA, the Research Works Act. This is a bill to, it says, "ensure the continued publication and integrity of peer-reviewed research works by the private sector", where the important phrase is "private sector" — it's purpose is to guarantee that for-profit corporations retain control over the publication of scientific information. Here are the restrictions it would impose:
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Nomads hunting with Golden Eagles in Western Mongolia. (i.imgur.com)
submitted 9 hours ago by Dead_Motherfucker to pics
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Dutch ISPs Refuse To Block The Pirate Bay | TorrentFreak
Two large ISPs in the Netherlands have said they will not be blocking subscriber access to The Pirate Bay, as demanded by the Hollywood supported anti-piracy outfit BREIN. T-Mobile and KPN argue that blocking websites is a threat to the open Internet, and suggest that the entertainment industry focuses on new business models instead. BREIN is now expected to take the ISPs to court.
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Tabs vs Spaces vs Both (emacswiki.org)
submitted 15 hours ago by hongminhee
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Sunday, January 29, 2012
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Clamor grows to rein in California pension benefits - latimes.com
Reporting from Sacramento— Gilbert Robles retired as a state parole agent at age 53, able to collect a $101,195 annual pension — 94% of his final salary. Last year, six months after he retired, the Arcadia resident accepted a political appointment with the same agency that pays an additional six figures.
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Was the Costa Concordia’s Captain a coward? - Magazine - The Boston Globe
Did the Costa Concordia’s Francesco Schettino act like a coward? Maybe. But that wouldn’t be his worst mistake.
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online train sim
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Why History Needs Software Piracy
How copy protection and app stores could deny future generations their cultural legacy.
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Elmore Leonard's 10 rules
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Suit claims Silicon Valley anti-poaching scheme
In Silicon Valley's white-hot competition for tech talent, programmers can face a daily barrage of calls from recruiters seeking to woo them to rival companies with offers of better pay and perks.
But workers for some of the biggest names in the business claim their phones fell silent because of a conspiracy among their employers. And they claim the world's biggest tech icon was at the center. -
Peter Yarrow - Puff, the Magic Dragon LIVE! - YouTube
January 27
First recorded 50 years ago, Peter Paul and Mary's Puff the Magic Dragon has a rather sad ending: Puff 'sadly slips into his cave' while little Jackie Paper grows up and puts his childhood behind him. But in 2007, Peter Yarrow published a book, Puff, the Magic Dragon, in which the classic song remains the same, but whose illustrations give us a new glimpse into Puff's future. Here is Mr. Yarrow, performing the song with his daughter Bethany at Woodstock's Bearsville Theatre, in '07 . [more inside]
posted by zarq at 11:51 PM - 11 comments (11 new) +
Saturday, January 28, 2012
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'Alex & Me': The Parrot Who Said 'I Love You' : NPR
Although his brain was no bigger than a walnut, Alex the African gray parrot could do more than speak and understand — he could also count, identify colors and, according to his owner Irene Pepperberg, develop an emotional relationship. When Alex died in September 2007, his last words to Pepperberg were "You be good. I love you."
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The WHY of WAT | Platformability
Recently a talk given by Gary Bernhardt at CodeMash has been doing the rounds. In it, he pokes fun at some apparently crazy behaviours in Ruby and Javascript.
While I might not be able to persuade you that all of the things he complains about make sense, I hope I’ll be able to show you some of the reasons that javascript behaves as it does. -
Twitter's targeted blocking tool spurs uproar
Twitter Inc. has played a central communications role in protests from Egypt to Wall Street, but the microblogging service became the target of an uprising this week after announcing a new way to censor individual tweets in specific countries.
Friday, January 27, 2012
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Blue Marble 2012: NASA Releases High Definition Image Of Earth (PHOTO)
NASA on Wednesday released "Blue Marble 2012," a view of the home planet that the agency calls the "most amazing high definition image of Earth."
Unlike the original Blue Marble -- the iconic 1972 photograph taken by the Apollo 17 crew while they were on their way to the moon -- this composite image is made from data collected by the Suomi NPP satellite. -
Three Types of People to Fire Immediately - Businessweek
Want a more innovative company? Get rid of these folks. Today
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Cisco Linksys RE1000 Wireless-N Extender Reviewed - SmallNetBuilder
People with crappy wireless coverage are suckers for products that promise to fix what ails them. "High power" routers are one cure and wireless repeaters, like the Cisco Linksys RE1000 that I'm looking at today are another. Repeaters can help get some sort of wireless signal into dead spots. But due to the way they work, you shouldn't expect high throughput (more on that shortly).
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Acquisition Investigations Drag On, Losses Mount at Motorola | PCWorld Business Center
Losses grew at Motorola in the fourth quarter as regulatory investigations into its proposed acquisition by Google drag on, legal battles pile up and competition grows.
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BBC News - FBI plans social network map alert mash-up application
The FBI is seeking to develop an early-warning system based on material "scraped" from social networks.
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BBC News - Five dead in Rio de Janeiro building collapse
The bodies of five people have been recovered by rescue workers searching through rubble after the collapse of three multi-storey buildings in Rio de Janeiro.
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At the heart of so much of Japanese cooking is the fragrant broth called dashi. And at the heart of dashi are the delicate pink petals of katsuobushi, shaved flakes of dried bonito fish.
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Egypt Blocks Departure of US NGO Workers | News | English
Egyptian authorities are preventing several U.S. citizens from leaving the country because of ongoing investigations into the work of civil society groups supporting the country's legislative elections.
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Diabetes patients improve quickly with monthly care - latimes.com
Diabetics who receive regularly scheduled monthly care to learn how to improve their health have a more rapid recovery compared with similar patients who receive only sporadic healthcare visits, according to new research.
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Did Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer disrespect President Obama? (+video) - CSMonitor.com
Republican Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer and President Obama got into a little tiff at the airport in Phoenix yesterday, if you haven’t heard. Governor Brewer was waiting at the bottom of the steps when Obama alighted from Air Force One. She handed him a letter, they started talking, and things quickly got, well , out of hand. According to photos from the scene, at one point Brewer appears to be waving her finger in Obama’s face.
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How Google keeps your secrets private - Jan. 26, 2012
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- How does a company that collects so much information from its users keep all that data private?
Meet Alma Whitten, Google's director of privacy.
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At the end of a miserable 2010 filled with privacy blunders including the disastrous Google Buzz fiasco, Google appointed Whitten to the position of privacy director. Since then, Whitten has instituted what she calls a "culture of privacy" at the company. So far it has been paying off.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
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The Long Goodbye - Features - Atlanta Magazine
We thought Daddy was going to die in 2001. He was staggering around the house in his underwear, gasping in pain, his eyes hollow, his face slashed from shaving with an old-fashioned safety razor. He was eighty-two years old. We took him to a doctor, who said his spine was deteriorating, gave him pills, and suggested he pray. A few days later, Daddy fell at the mailbox, bounced his head on the pavement, and crawled up the driveway, scraping the skin off his knees before collapsing on the front steps. Mama sat in her recliner in front of the TV, worried and clueless, until a neighbor called an ambulance. The EMTs got Daddy propped up in his recliner. He refused to go with them. When I arrived, Daddy was gulping down whiskey. I called the ambulance back, and they took him to DeKalb Medical. Doctors found prostate cancer and operated. My sister and I cried, sure Daddy was in his last days.
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Feline takeoff keeps plane on tarmac | MetaFilter
The day dawned bright and merry on the shore beside the bay
As I took care to well prepare to set forth on my way
I checked my ticket once and twice and donned my jaunty hat
And then 'twas time to turn my mind to readying my cat -
Nostalgia embedded on a web page | MetaFilter
A complete playable Nintendo Gameboy Color system, emulated in JavaScript and HTML5, with Super Mario Land, Zelda, Megaman, Final Fantasy, Tetris and more.
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul (39 comments total) [add to favorites] 43 users marked this as a favorite [!] -
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blog.reddit -- what's new on reddit: January 2012 - State of the Servers
Posted by Jason Harvey [alienth] at 15:25 |
Labels: Cassandra, cloud computing, ebs, only you can stop server fires, postgres, problem servers, server problems, servers, sleeping guy during important event, take a shot for every time we say servers
My fellow redditors: the state of our servers is strong. -
Tanzania's Hadza group sheds light on ancient social networks - latimes.com
Long before Facebook made it possible to share photos of your breakfast with hundreds of friends and let them know just how you feel about your latest parking ticket, humans were forming social networks with essentially the same structure people use today.
A team of researchers has mapped out the relationships among a remote group of 205 hunter-gatherers in Tanzania who live as humans did about 10,000 years ago and found that their social networks are very much like ours, even in the absence of the complicating factors of megacities, cellphones and the Internet. -
Apple’s iPad and the Human Costs for Workers in China - NYTimes.com
The explosion ripped through Building A5 on a Friday evening last May, an eruption of fire and noise that twisted metal pipes as if they were discarded straws.
Enlarge This Image
Color China Photo, via Associated Press
An explosion last May at a Foxconn factory in Chengdu, China, killed four people and injured 18. It built iPads.
The iEconomy
A Punishing System
Articles in this series are examining challenges posed by increasingly globalized high-tech industries.
Read the previous article >>
Multimedia
Made in China
Graphic
Compliance by the Numbers
Related
The Lede Blog: Chinese Readers on the 'iEconomy' (January 25, 2012)
Poll Finds Consumer Confusion on Where Apple Devices Are Made (January 26, 2012)
Economix Blog: Facebook Chat About the 'iEconomy' Series (January 25, 2012)
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Ym Yik/European Pressphoto Agency
SAFETY PRECAUTIONS After a rash of apparent suicide attempts, a dormitory for Foxconn workers in Shenzhen, China, had safety netting installed last May. Foxconn said it acted quickly and comprehensively to address employee suicides.
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Ryan Pyle for The New York Times
A SHRINE FOR A SON Lai Xiaodong was killed in a Foxconn factory explosion. His parents have built a memorial in their village.
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Ryan Pyle for The New York Times
A JOB TURNS DEADLY Aluminum dust from polishing iPads caused the blast at Foxconn's plant in Chengdu, left. Lai Xiaodong was among those killed. He had moved to Chengdu, bringing with him his college diploma, six months earlier.
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When workers in the cafeteria ran outside, they saw black smoke pouring from shattered windows. It came from the area where employees polished thousands of iPad cases a day.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
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Transcript: President Obama delivers State of the Union speech - CNN.com
Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, members of Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow Americans, last month I went to Andrews Air Force Base and welcomed home some of our last troops to serve in Iraq. Together, we offered a final, proud salute to the colors under which more than a million of our fellow citizens fought, and several thousand gave their lives.
We gather tonight knowing that this generation of heroes has made the United States safer and more respected around the world. -
Google tracks consumers across products, users can’t opt out - The Washington Post
Google announces privacy changes across products; users can’t opt out
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Five things to watch for in Obama's State of the Union - CSMonitor.com
Former White House speech writers offer pointers to watching President Obama's State of the Union Tuesday night.
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The Air I Breathe - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Air I Breathe is the 2008 directorial film debut of Korean-American filmmaker Jieho Lee, who co-wrote the script with Bob DeRosa. It stars Kevin Bacon, Julie Delpy, Brendan Fraser, Andy Garcia, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Emile Hirsch, and Forest Whitaker. The film was financed by NALA Investments through its production company NALA Films, and was released on January 25, 2008 in the United States.
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What existed before the big bang? What is the nature of time? Is our universe one of many? On the big questions science cannot (yet?) answer, a new crop of philosophers are trying to provide answers.
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One Div Zero: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages
1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry. Redditers of the time are not impressed due to the lack of tail call recursion, concurrency, or proper capitalization.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
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In Defense of Captain Schettino & The Lives He Did Save | gCaptain - Maritime & Offshore
The only fact that is certain in the Costa Concordia disaster is the universal truth of all maritime disasters… human mistakes were made by multiple individuals.
As discussed in the first part of this article “Costa Concordia – The 3 Most Fatal Mistakes,” Captain Schettino has received a lot of criticism in the mainstream press and possibly, even more from industry insiders including gCaptain for abandoning ship before the last passenger was safe. Still, an important question is not being asked… what did he do right? -
Costa Concordia – The 3 Most Fatal Mistakes | gCaptain - Maritime & Offshore
What Really Killed Costa Concordia’s Passengers?
Captain Schettino has received a lot of criticism in the mainstream press and, possibly, even more from industry insiders including gCaptain for abandoning ship before the last passenger was safe. An important question is not being asked however… would his presence on the bridge have saved lives? -
An intro to modern OpenGL. Chapter 1: The Graphics Pipeline
OpenGL has been around a long time, and from reading all the accumulated layers of documentation out there on the Internet, it's not always clear what parts are historic and what parts are still useful and supported on modern graphics hardware. It's about time for a new OpenGL introduction that walks through the parts that are still relevant today.
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Google+ updates policy to address identity crisis | Digital Media - CNET News
The company wanted to create a service without pseudonyms or impersonation. But the service, which now claims 90 million users, had plenty of people sign up who are better known by some other identity than their real name. Google has suspended many of those accounts, much to their users' chagrin.
Google is changing the policy to "broaden support" for some pseudonyms, Bradley Horowitz, a co-leader of Google+, wrote this afternoon in a Google+ post. Now Google+ will allow users to be known by "established" pseudonyms, such as Madonna. Google will be the final arbiter of what is established. -
Google+ Rolling Out Support for Pseudonyms, Nicknames | News & Opinion | PCMag.com
Google on Monday started rolling out a way for Google+ members to use pseudonyms or nicknames instead of their real names.
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We are putting up a black interstitial about SOPA/PIPA for the next 24hrs or so. If you click away from it, you'll get a cookie stored so you won't see it again in the same browser, but what follows is my reasons for doing it.
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The Heroes of the Concordia : Discovery News
Stories of courage and heroism aboard the striken luxury cruiser Costa Concordia are beginning to emerge in stark contrast with the behavior of the captain Francesco Schettino.
Branded "Captain Coward" by the international press, Schettino is currently under house arrest on charges that include manslaughter, shipwreck and abandoning ship.
While Schettino watched the rescue operations from the reef, where he had disembarked after having "fallen into a lifeboat" (as he claimed during his first court hearing), another captain, Roberto Bosio, coordinated the ship's evacuation with other crew members. -
Supreme Court Court Rejects Willy-nilly GPS Tracking | Threat Level | Wired.com
The Supreme Court said Monday that law enforcement authorities might need a probable-cause warrant from a judge to affix a GPS device to a vehicle and monitor its every move — but the justices did not say that a warrant was needed in all cases.
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Let's make TCP faster - The official Google Code blog
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), the workhorse of the Internet, is designed to deliver all the Web’s content and operate over a huge range of network types. To deliver content effectively, Web browsers typically open several dozen parallel TCP connections ahead of making actual requests. This strategy overcomes inherent TCP limitations but results in high latency in many situations and is not scalable.
Our research shows that the key to reducing latency is saving round trips. We’re experimenting with several improvements to TCP. Here’s a summary of some of our recommendations to make TCP faster: -
Senator Paul refuses airport patdown after | Reuters
(Reuters) - Republican Senator Rand Paul was stopped at an airport on Monday for setting off an alarm and refusing a patdown, prompting his father, U.S. presidential candidate Ron Paul, to accuse security officials of being part of an "out of control" police state.
Monday, January 23, 2012
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Lion and dragon dance opens up Chinese New Year celebration in Yangon - Xinhua | English.news.cn
YANGON, Jan. 22 (Xinhua) -- A grand lion and dragon dance performed by Chinese-Myanmar dancing groups opened up the Chinese New Year celebration in Myanmar's commercial city of Yangon Sunday, the eve of the Chinese Year of the Dragon.
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Amnesty International | Working to Protect Human Rights
*Iran*
The authorities maintained severe restrictions on freedom of expression, association and assembly. Sweeping controls on domestic and international media aimed at reducing Iranians’ contact with the outside world were imposed. Individuals and groups risked arrest, torture and imprisonment if perceived as co-operating with human rights and foreign-based Persian-language media organizations. Political dissidents, women’s and minority rights activists and other human rights defenders, lawyers, journalists and students were rounded up in mass and other arrests and hundreds were imprisoned. Torture and other ill-treatment of detainees were routine and committed with impunity. Women continued to face discrimination under the law and in practice. The authorities acknowledged 252 executions, but there were credible reports of more than 300 other executions. The true total could be even higher. At least one juvenile offender was executed. Sentences of death by stoning continued to be passed, but no stonings were known to have been carried out. Floggings and an increased number of amputations were carried out. -
9/11 - The promise - 10th Anniversary - Tribute 2011 - Zapatou - YouTube
Zapatou is a video editor who likes to make audio-visual mashups, such as World Covers of Adele's Rolling in the Deep, a a 10th anniversary 9/11 memorial in pictures, quad-screen HD eye-candy of the Fast and the Furious, and Mellencamp's Hurt So Good, lip-synched by the Ice Age 3 crew.
posted by iamkimiam at 10:50 PM - 0 comments -
Duran Duran - New Moon On Monday Movie Version - 17 Minutes 1 - YouTube
Light your torch and wave it for the lunar event tomorrow with the full 17-minute-long video for Duran Duran's New Moon On Monday (Part 1, Part 2).
posted by hippybear at 8:26 AM - 12 comments -
How Kodak squandered every single digital opportunity it had | smh.com.au
This post was originally published on
Kodak has finally formalised what had been expected for years — it’s gone bankrupt. In the past 15 years, digital technology changed photography dramatically, and Kodak, a former heavyweight in the analog film business, got left behind.
That’s the story of Kodak in the broadest of strokes, though it doesn’t capture the full (if you’ll forgive me) picture. In fact, Kodak missed the boat on digital not once, but at least three times. Besides never capitalising on the digital-camera tech it helped create, Kodak also gravely misunderstood the new ways consumers wanted to interact with their photos, the technologies involved, and the market forces surrounding them. -
Imperva: Anonymous Used LOIC to Attack DoJ, MPAA
Imperva reports that Anonymous is using a Low Orbit Ion Canon application to attack the MPAA, RIAA, FBI and other websites in its SOPA/PIPA/Megaupload-inspired wrath.
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Gong Xi Fa Cai vs. Gong Hey Fat Choy
Gong Hey Fat Choy
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How my boyfriend planned our double date with his friend... - Imgur
How my boyfriend planned our double date with his friend... (imgur.com)
submitted 5 hours ago by sunnydisposition88 to geek
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Yemen's Saleh leaves for U.S. | Reuters
(Reuters) - Outgoing president Ali Abdullah Saleh apologized for "any shortcoming" in his 33-year rule before leaving Yemen for the United States on Sunday, paving the way for a transfer of power after a year of unrest.
Sunday, January 22, 2012
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The Supreme Court, big data and 1984 — Cloud Computing News
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court of the United States heard oral arguments in a case that could decide how connected the concept of big data is to constitutional expectations of privacy. The case, United States v. Jones, is specifically about whether police needed a search warrant to place a GPS device on a suspect’s car and monitor his movements for 28 days, but the Court’s holding could have a much broader effect. Several justices seized upon a very important question: How much data is too much before allowable surveillance crosses the line into an invasion of privacy?
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I ran across an interesting Web page today: Agile @ 10: Ten Authors of The Agile Manifesto Celebrate its Tenth Anniversary. The editors at The Pragmatic Bookshelf contacted the 17 signers of the original Agile Manifesto and asked them to contribute their thoughts about developments in the Agile world over the succeeding 10 years. Ten of the 17 signers contributed publishable responses, which are collected in the article. The contributors – Andy Hunt, Kent Beck, Ron Jeffries, Jon Kern, Ken Schwaber, James Grenning, Arie van Bennekum, Stephen J. Mellor, Ward Cunningham, and Dave Thomas – shared reflections on the extent to which their bold statement changed the development world.
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Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class - NYTimes.com
When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.
The iEconomy
An Empire Built Abroad
Articles in this series are examining challenges posed by increasingly globalized high-tech industries.
Multimedia
Interactive Feature
The iPhone Economy
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Times Topic: Apple Incorporated
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A production line in Foxconn City in Shenzhen, China. The iPhone is assembled in this vast facility, which has 230,000 employees, many at the plant up to 12 hours a day, six days a week.
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Thomas Lee for The New York Times
In China, Lina Lin is a project manager at PCH International, which contracts with Apple. “There are lots of jobs,” she said. “Especially in Shenzhen.”
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But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States? -
Fried Calamari Recipe : Giada De Laurentiis : Food Network
Pour enough oil into a heavy large saucepan to reach the depth of 3 inches. Heat over medium heat to 350 degrees F. Mix the flour, parsley, salt, and pepper in a large bowl. Working in small batches, toss the squid into the flour mixture to coat. Carefully add the squid to the oil and fry until crisp and very pale golden, about 1 minute per batch. Using tongs or a slotted spoon, transfer the fried calamari to a paper-towel lined plate to drain.
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The Secret Document That Transformed China : Planet Money : NPR
In 1978, the farmers in a small Chinese village called Xiaogang gathered in a mud hut to sign a secret contract. They thought it might get them executed. Instead, it wound up transforming China's economy in ways that are still reverberating today.
The contract was so risky — and such a big deal — because it was created at the height of communism in China. Everyone worked on the village's collective farm; there was no personal property. -
Bird Flu Scientists Agree to Pause H5N1 Research - NYTimes.com
The scientists who altered a deadly flu virus to make it more contagious have agreed to suspend their research for 60 days to give other international experts time to discuss the work and determine how it can proceed without putting the world at risk of a potentially catastrophic pandemic.
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Ron Fouchier
The small black bodies are H5N1 viruses produced by an infected human cell, at left. H5N1 is a contagious strain of bird flu.
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Ron Fouchier, of the Netherlands research team.
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Suspensions of biomedical research are almost unheard of; the only other one in the United States was a moratorium from 1974 to 1976 on some types of recombinant DNA research, because of safety concerns.
Saturday, January 21, 2012
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Waffle House Terrorists - Waffle House Terrorist Plot - Esquire
On November 1, 2011, four codgers who gathered at this Waffle House in Toccoa, Georgia, as well as at the Shoney's and in the home of Fred Thomas, were arrested by the FBI for plotting acts of mass murder.
Published in the February 2012 "Things We Can All Agree On" issue, on sale soon
The guys were coming over. That's what Fred and Charlotte Thomas both called them — "the guys," as though they were Fred's poker buddies. Fred and Charlotte were both in their early seventies. They were retired. They were living in a place that was still new to them, and in some ways still foreign. They weren't in the best health — Charlotte had pain in her legs, and Fred, just a month before, had endured having half a lung removed by doctors who had misdiagnosed him. They thought he had cancer, when in fact the growth was a fungus. Fred had lost half a lung by mistake, and now both Fred and Charlotte had trouble climbing the stairs in their tall, narrow house. It had been a tough year, and when Fred told her that the guys were coming over, she was just happy he had friends. -
An overzealous bill that claims to be about stopping child pornography turns every Web user into a person to monitor
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Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory | This American Life
Mike Daisey was a self-described "worshipper in the cult of Mac." Then he saw some photos from a new iPhone, taken by workers at the factory where it was made. Mike wondered: Who makes all my crap? He traveled to China to find out.
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Europe can exhale following good week | Detroit Free Press | freep.com
FRANKFURT, Germany -- Europe has taken a step back from the brink.
Three weeks into the year, borrowing rates for debt-saddled countries have fallen to more manageable levels.
Auctions of government debt have gone better, a sign of increased investor confidence. -
Obama, crooner in chief, sings some Al Green at N.Y. fundraiser - latimes.com
It cost $200 a ticket to hear President Obama speak at a fundraiser Thursday in New York. Obama singing? That was just a bonus.
The president thrilled the crowd of about 1,400 at the landmark Apollo Theater when he briefly launched into song, crooning a few lines of Al Green's "Let's Stay Together" to the surprise of, well, just about everyone. -
BBC News - Syrian activists call for release of detainees
Anti-government protesters have taken to the streets of Syria in support of thousands of people detained by the government in the 10-month uprising.
The UN said last month that more than 14,000 people were in detention, but human rights activists believe as many as 40,000 people are being held.
Friday, January 20, 2012
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http://guru.bafta.org/sites/learning/files/guru_sws_ck_transcript_final.pdf
Charlie Kaufman: Thank you very much. I’m actually
really happy to be here; at least that’s what I’m
telling myself. I’ve never delivered a speech before,
which is why I decided to do this tonight. I wanted
to do something that I don’t know how to do, and
offer you the experience of watching someone
fumble, because I think maybe that’s what art
should offer. An opportunity to recognise our
common humanity and vulnerability.
So rather than being up here pretending I’m an
expert in anything, or presenting myself in a way
that will reinforce the odd, ritualised lecturerlecturee model, I’m just telling you off the bat that I
don’t know anything. And if there’s one thing that
characterises my writing it’s that I always start from
that realisation and I do what I can to keep
reminding myself of that during the process. I think
we try to be experts because we’re scared; we
don’t want to feel foolish or worthless; we want
power because power is a great disguise. -
Facebook's New Actions Go Beyond 'Like' - The BrainYard - InformationWeek
As Facebook broadens its Open Graph API by adding 60 new frictionless sharing apps, look for new action verbs in your feed. Here's what it all means.
"Like" will be a lot less lonely on Facebook, with the addition of new Open Graph application verbs such as cook, eat, travel, run, or review movies. -
Megaupload.com Charged With Piracy Violations, Shut Down By Feds
McLEAN, Virginia (AP) — One of the world's largest file-sharing sites was shut down Thursday, and its founder and several company executives were charged with violating piracy laws, federal prosecutors said.
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The rise and fall of personal computing | MetaFilter
The rise and fall of personal computing
January 18, 2012 9:45 AM Subscribe -
If someone asks me what I do all day at work, I show them this helpful infographic. (i.imgur.com)
submitted 6 hours ago by _chendo_ to funny
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I put the original text here below since its blocked in most countries (and also since it's under (K)-License...).
Original
INTERNETS, 18th of January 2012. PRESS RELEASE, FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.
Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would "do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear". He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person to own the copyright to a motion picture. -
Because that's exactly what we need to wake up from this slumbering, do-nothing, "occupy everything," stagnant, non-action slump we Americans are in.
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Opinion - Hallelujah! Canadians agree it's time to legalize marijuana
A new poll suggests Canada may have reached the tipping point and a 66-per-cent majority favours legalizing marijuana.
Hallelujah! Finally we might get a sensible public policy discussion in this country about what to do about a relatively benign substance that has been demonized and outlawed for a century yet is as readily available in schoolyards as cigarettes. -
Pot meets kettle - none more black. | MetaFilter
Chris Dodd responds to the SOPA/PIPA protest and blackout on the official MPAA blog calling it an "abuse of power".
posted by loquacious (161 comments total) 15 users marked this as a favorite -
100 Best Companies to Work For 2012: Full list - from FORTUNE
1 Google 33% 18,500
2 Boston Consulting Group 10% 1,958
3 SAS Institute 8% 6,046
4 Wegmans Food Markets 5% 41,717
Thursday, January 19, 2012
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PIPA support collapses, with 13 new Senators opposed
Members of the Senate are rushing for the exits in the wake of the Internet's unprecedented protest of the Protect IP Act (PIPA). At least 13 members of the upper chamber announced their opposition on Wednesday. In a particularly severe blow for Hollywood, at least five of the newly-opposed Senators were previously co-sponsors of the Protect IP Act. (Update: since we ran this story, the tally is up to 18 Senators, of which seven are former co-sponsors. See below.)
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No one would mistake the average shell script for principled software.
Yet, if we look at how scripts are used, patterns emerge.
Unix is a bestiary of ad hoc databases: comma-, colon-, tab- and space-separated tables. Think of /etc/* or /var/log/*, or of columnar commands. -
while true blog » Visual Studio Achievements, now a reality!
A year ago we posted a humorous blog post What if Visual Studio had Achievements?. It received great response which spurred a lot of new discussion about various funny and informative gaming-like achievements.
Guys from Microsoft’s Channel 9 took this idea seriously and developed it into a quite real Visual Studio Extension. They’ve launched the beta today, be sure to check it out. Here’s also an introduction from Microsoft’s Karsten Januszewski. -
UPDATE 3-Kodak files for bankruptcy, secures $950 mln lifeline | Reuters
* Liabilities exceed assets by about $1.65 billion
* Kodak holds 1,100 digital patents
* Obtains $950 mln credit line from Citigroup
* Chairman/CEO says bankruptcy filing a "necessary step"
* Non U.S. subsidiaries not part of filing
Jan 19 (Reuters) - Eastman Kodak Co, which invented the hand-held camera and helped bring the world the first pictures from the moon, has filed for bankruptcy protection, capping a prolonged plunge for one of America's best-known companies. -
U.S. Lawmakers Abandon Anti-Piracy Bills as Google Protests - Businessweek
Jan. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Eight U.S. lawmakers dropped their support for Hollywood-backed anti-piracy legislation as Google Inc., Facebook Inc. and other websites protested the measures.
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Microsoft System Center 2012 Takes Shot at VMware | Sci-Tech Today
Microsoft is swatting at VMware with its latest cloud initiative. The new private cloud solution aims to help businesses move faster, save money and compete better.
Dubbed Microsoft System Center 2012, the solution lets companies build and operate private clouds to deliver business applications across both private and public cloud platforms. The software is available in Release Candidate form. -
Andrew Sullivan: How Obama's Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics - The Daily Beast
The right calls him a socialist, the left says he sucks up to Wall Street, and independents think he's a wimp. Andrew Sullivan on how the president may just end up outsmarting them all.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
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blog.reddit -- what's new on reddit: A technical examination of SOPA and PROTECT IP
- As you have probably heard, there are two pieces of legislation currently pending that we, and others like us, believe seriously threaten the internet. I wanted to take some time to delve into the text of both of these bills, and outline their potential consequences as I am able to understand them. As you can imagine, this is a complex issue, and as a result this is going to be a complex post. I highly encourage you to set some time aside to read this thoroughly. Grab some caffeine, we are going to be here for a while.
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Fundamental Oracle flaw revealed
Over the past two months, InfoWorld has been researching a flaw in Oracle's flagship database software that could have serious repercussions for Oracle database customers, potentially compromising the security and stability of Oracle database systems.
Typically, when a bug results in a database outage, affected systems can simply be recovered from backups. But as InfoWorld has learned, this particular collection of Oracle issues could incur database outages that take considerable time and effort to correct.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
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Inside the Fight Against SOPA | Inc.com
It's a battle made for the big screen: Silicon Valley tech stars versus Hollywood heavyweights.
The fight is over a piece of legislation called the Stop Online Piracy Act, which aims to expand the ability of government agencies to police websites for copyright and intellectual property violations. Introduced in the House of Representatives in late October, Congress plans to resume the debate this month after the winter recess. -
Dog Surprises Officer - YouTube
If you save a dog’s life, you are responsible for it. (youtube.com)
submitted 6 hours ago by shadowwork
297 commentssharesavehidereport -
"Maybe I should finally mention WOOL..." | MetaFilter
Hugh Howey was a self-published novelist of no real success. Until WOOL, that is - a 15,000 word "little throwaway story" he uploaded to Amazon's Kindle Marketplace one day and promptly forget about. The story he didn't blog, didn't tweet, and didn't even sell on his site hit #2 on the Kindle SciFi Bestseller list and "changed the course of e-books."
Monday, January 16, 2012
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prog21: On Being Sufficiently Smart
I'm proud to have created the wiki page for the phrase sufficiently smart compiler back in 2003 or 2004. Not because it's a particularly good page, mind you; it has been endlessly rewritten in standard wiki fashion. It's one of the few cases where I recognized a meme and documented it. I'd been seeing the term over and over in various discussions, and it started to dawn on me that it was more than just a term, but a myth, a fictional entity used to support arguments.
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Robotic Technology to Help Understand and Treat Strokes - NYTimes.com
Consider the 1,001 little movements we take for granted, like reaching a few inches for a salt shaker or trying on new shoes.
Most involve simple reflexes and signaling from the brain to our arms, hands and fingers. But for many people — 750,000 have strokes each year in this country, and an estimated 60 percent of them suffer injuries that could include a partly paralyzed arm — those acts are nearly impossible. -
The end of the world, in 14 days, according to Reddit. [more inside]
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 1:30 AM - 90 comments -
Audioboo / Battlestar Galactica
Battlestar Galactica
posted by Jofus at 12:50 PM on January 4 [157 favorites]
Sunday, January 15, 2012
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China's skyscraper craze 'may herald economic crash' | Business | The Guardian
Tall-building boom may indicate impending disaster in China and India, claims report by Barclays Capital
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Attacks on Social Security, Medicare borrow a strategy from Lenin - latimes.com
About the last thing you'd ever expect is for conservatives to draw procedural lessons from the founder of the Soviet state. So it's fascinating to ponder the persistence of an attack on Social Security that was explicitly billed as a "Leninist" strategy three decades ago by analysts at the Heritage Foundation and is still in use today.
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A few hours before the Yahoo acquisition was announced in June 1998 I took a snapshot of Viaweb's site. I thought it might be interesting to look at one day.
The first thing one notices is is how tiny the pages are. Screens were a lot smaller in 1998. If I remember correctly, our frontpage used to just fit in the size window people typically used then.
Browsers then (IE 6 was still 3 years in the future) had few fonts and they weren't antialiased. If you wanted to make pages that looked good, you had to render display text as images. -
Dropbox inventor determined to build the next Apple or Google - latimes.com
Reporting from San Francisco— Four years ago, Drew Houston was just another super-smart hacker with ambitions of starting his own company.
He'd strap on headphones to block out everything but the endorphin rush as he cranked code late into the night on a new service that instantly syncs all of your files on all of your devices. -
The Rise of the New Groupthink - NYTimes.com
SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
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The only winning move is not to play, or to watch these first. | MetaFilter
Game Theory 101 has a selection of video and text lectures covering such topics as How to Fly on an Airplane with an Empty Seat Next to You for Free, Why You Should NOT Maximize Your Score in Words With Friends and How to Catch a Ball at a Baseball Game. It's not all light and fluffy, though. Some other topics include Why You Should Support International Aid, How the United States Debt Crisis Will End and Why the Intervention in Libya Was a Bargain. If you're new to game theory, start with The Prisoner's Dilemma.
posted by desjardins (19 comments total) 23 users marked this as a favorite -
Civilians have whip-hand in showdown with Pakistan military | Reuters
(Reuters) - For decades, Pakistan's generals only had to pick up a phone and order the removal of anyone in the civilian government who had crossed them. It's not so simple anymore, as the army is finding out in its latest battle with President Asif Ali Zardari.
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Tim O’Reilly: Why I’m fighting SOPA — Tech News and Analysis
As the debate about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) rages on from Silicon Valley to Washington DC, a number of the technology industry’s most influential leaders have come out against the proposed legislation, which would give the government and private corporations unprecedented powers to remove websites from the internet for any alleged copyright infringement.
On Thursday, I interviewed Tim O’Reilly about why he believes SOPA is wrong and what the tech industry can do to stop it. His concerns fell into five main categories: -
c++ - Cycles in family tree software - Stack Overflow
I am the developer of some family tree software (written in C++ and Qt). I had no problems until one of my customers mailed me a bug report. The problem is that he has two children with his own daughter, and, as a result, he can't use my software because of errors.
Those errors are the result of my various assertions and invariants about the family graph being processed (for example, after walking a cycle, the program states that X can't be both father and grandfather of Y).
How can I resolve those errors without removing all data assertions?
Friday, January 13, 2012
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2012/01/captain-obvious-on-javascript.md at master from raganwald/homoiconic - GitHub
n JavaScript, anywhere you find yourself writing:
function (x) { return foo(x); }
You can usually substitute just foo. For example, this code:
var floats = someArray.map(function (value) {
return parseFloat(value);
});
Could be written:
var floats = someArray.map(parseFloat);
This understanding is vital. Without it, you can be led astray into thinking that this code: -
An Oral History of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Center | Politics | Vanity Fair
January 11, 2012, marks the 10th anniversary of the arrival of the first detainees at the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay—the first of what would be nearly 800 prisoners to cycle through the camp. One hundred and seventy one are still there. Despite President Obama’s pledge, the facility remains open, a prisoner of fear-mongering and politics—and it continues to be a symbol of mistreatment and missteps in the prosecution of the war on terror. Vanity Fair has interviewed dozens of people associated with Guantánamo—lawyers, soldiers, diplomats, former detainees—in order to tell the story in their own words.*
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Dozens of factory workers at Foxconn's Xbox plant threaten suicide | VentureBeat
According to reports, dozens of workers at a Chinese factory that assembles Xbox 360 consoles threatened to jump off a dormitory roof. The rooftop protest began on Jan 2, following plans to close the Xbox assembly line, with workers saying that Foxconn reneged on a promise to compensate anyone wanting to leave.
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If SOPA passes, we’re as much to blame as Congress and Hollywood | VentureBeat
There’s been a lot of huffing and puffing in the tech community over the past few months about SOPA, the proposed legislation that many believe would cripple the Internet and thwart innovation. People have started online petitions, written countless blog posts, started boycotts against companies that support SOPA and campaigns to change Twitter avatars. (Check out the rest of VentureBeat’s SOPA coverage here.)
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Saw this bumper sticker while driving to work. (i.imgur.com)
submitted 3 hours ago by pwylie to atheism
178 commentssharesavehidereport
