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There is a surprising story out of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania that seems the perfect storm of religious tensions. You begin with Ernie Perce, an atheist who marched as a zombie Mohammad in the Mechanicsburg Halloween parade. Then you add Talaag Elbayomy, a Muslim who stepped off a curb and reportedly attacked Perce for insulting the Prophet. Then you have a judge (Judge Mark Martin) who threw out the criminal charges against Elbayomy and ridiculed the victim, Perce. The Judge identifies himself as a Muslim and says that Perce conduct is not what the First Amendment is supposed to protect. [UPDATE: The judge says he is not a Muslim despite what is heard by most listeners on the tape. That being the case, the criticism of the comments remains.] [UPDATE2: Perce has responded to our blog and denied many of the factual representations made by Judge Martin].
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I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave | Mother Jones
"Don't take anything that happens to you there personally," the woman at the local chamber of commerce says when I tell her that tomorrow I start working at Amalgamated Product Giant Shipping Worldwide Inc. She winks at me. I stare at her for a second.
"What?" I ask. "Why, is somebody going to be mean to me or something?"
She smiles. "Oh, yeah." This town somewhere west of the Mississippi is not big; everyone knows someone or is someone who's worked for Amalgamated. "But look at it from their perspective. They need you to work as fast as possible to push out as much as they can as fast as they can. So they're gonna give you goals, and then you know what? If you make those goals, they're gonna increase the goals. But they'll be yelling at you all the time. It's like the military. They have to break you down so they can turn you into what they want you to be. So they're going to tell you, 'You're not good enough, you're not good enough, you're not good enough,' to make you work harder. Don't say, 'This is the best I can do.' Say, 'I'll try,' even if you know you can't do it. Because if you say, 'This is the best I can do,' they'll let you go. They hire and fire constantly, every day. You'll see people dropping all around you. But don't take it personally and break down or start crying when they yell at you." -
Google offers $1 million reward to hackers who exploit Chrome
Google has pledged cash prizes totaling $1 million to people who successfully hack its Chrome browser at next week's CanSecWest security conference.
Google will reward winning contestants with prizes of $60,000, $40,000, and $20,000 depending on the severity of the exploits they demonstrate on Windows 7 machines running the browser. Members of the company's security team announced the Pwnium contest on their blog on Monday. There is no splitting of winnings, and prizes will be awarded on a first-come-first-served basis until the $1 million threshold is reached. -
IBM Paves The Way Towards Scalable Quantum Computing - Forbes
IBM has announced today that it’s achieved a breakthrough in its work to develop scalable quantum computing by developing a superconducting qubit made from microfabricated silicon that maintains coherence long enough for practical computation.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
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Sunday, February 26, 2012
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Is a gluten-free diet the right way to go? - latimes.com
Given the growing amount of gluten-free foods available at the grocery store, it seems a number of people have trouble digesting the stuff. But are they truly gluten-intolerant, and is there a clear diagnosis for that?
Gluten sensitivity is the topic of a paper published recently in the Annals of Internal Medicine in which researchers acknowledged the seriousness of celiac disease, but also said part of the population could have nonceliac gluten sensitivity. That’s characterized by having distinct symptoms such as diarrhea, abdominal pain, gas, bloating or headaches after eating foods containing gluten. -
Why Being Sleepy and Drunk Are Great for Creativity | Wired Science | Wired.com
Here’s a brain teaser: Your task is to move a single line so that the false arithmetic statement below becomes true.
IV = III + III
Did you get it? In this case, the solution is rather obvious – you should move the first “I” to the right side of the “V,” so that the statement now reads: VI = III + III. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of people (92 percent) quickly solve this problem, as it requires a standard problem-solving approach in which only the answer is altered. What’s perhaps a bit more surprising is that nearly 90 percent of patients with brain damage to the prefrontal lobes — this leaves them with severe attentional deficits, unable to control their mental spotlight — are also able to find the answer.
Saturday, February 25, 2012
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Genetics-inspired research prevents cyber attacks
ScienceDaily (Feb. 14, 2012) — Cyber security is an ever changing and growing concern. Nearly twice as much cyber security funding proposed in the 2013 budget underscores the need for improved computer network defenses. Inadequate security configurations are blamed for 80 percent of the United States Air Force network vulnerabilities.
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Oh no. Dear god, no. Save yourselves. (V8 for PHP) : programming
It's a new PHP library that allows you to access a very fast JavaScript interpreter (called V8) from within PHP. Some people aren't too happy about using JavaScript inside of PHP, their reasoning probebly being something like this:
PHP is objectively a somewhat poor language. Some of the reasons for this include an inconsistent, redundant standard library that doesn't match current best practice, features that don't work together optimally, redundancy, new language features that are later once again removed, lack of various popular features that many people feel are important for high productivity.
It is felt by some that PHP by virtue of being a poor but popular language has attracted a large body of sub-par programmers.
JavaScript is not as universally loathed as PHP, but even it's admirers admit that JavaScript has seem peculiarities that make it uncomfortably easy for bad programmers to write very bad code.
For the above reasons, people fear that once the PHP coders get a chance to start using both PHP and JavaScript together, the result will be the most spectacular clusterfuck of all time. -
FAQ: What Google's 'Do Not Track' move means - Computerworld
Google will add support for anti-tracking tech to Chrome browser before year's end
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Paulien Lombard Was a Spyentologist - Page 1 - News - Orange County - OC Weekly
A former spy for Scientology came clean on abuses. Now, she says, the church is chasing her
Friday, February 24, 2012
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Vaccine makes the body resistant to the pleasure effect of the drug and is now being prepared for tests on humans
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How I Found the Human Being Behind Horse_ebooks, The Internet's Favorite Spambot
How I Found the Human Being Behind Horse_ebooks, The Internet’s Favorite Spambot
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10 Alzheimer's warning signs - latimes.com
The Alzheimer's Assn. has compiled a list of 10 warning signs of Alzheimer's and how they differ from mental glitches that shouldn't faze you. They include:
Memory loss that disrupts daily life.
Challenges in planning or solving problems.
Difficulty completing familiar tasks at home, at work or at leisure.
Confusion with time or place.
... -
WorldWideWeb wide-area hypertext app available - comp.sys.next.announce | Google Groups
Tim Berners-Lee
View profile
More options Aug 20 1991, 2:01 am
The WorldWideWeb application is now available as an alpha release in source
and binary form from info.cern.ch.
WorldWideWeb is a hypertext browser/editor which allows one to read information
from local files and remote servers. It allows hypertext links to be made and
traversed, and also remote indexes to be interrogated for lists of useful
documents. Local files may be edited, and links made from areas of text to
other files, remote files, remote indexes, remote index searches, internet news
groups and articles. All these sources of information are presented in a
consistent way to the reader. For example, an index search returns a hypertext
document with pointers to documents matching the query. Internet news articles
are displayed with hypertext links to other referenced articles and groups. -
Fork bomb - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In computing, the fork bomb is a form of denial-of-service attack against a computer system which makes use of the fork operation (or equivalent functionality) whereby a running process can create another running process.[1] Fork bombs typically do not spread as worms or viruses; to incapacitate a system, they rely on the (generally valid) assumption that the number of programs and processes which may execute simultaneously on a computer has a limit.[2] This type of self-replicating program is sometimes called a wabbit.
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'Cash Mobs' profit locally owned stores | PRI.ORG
A new phenomenon, called “Cash Mobs,” is spreading across the country, changing the way people view local businesses. Similar to flash mobs, Cash Mobs organize customers to spend money at struggling locally owned businesses to support their community.
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Heads Up for Smart Phone Glasses: Scientific American Podcast
Could the ultimate smart gadget for accessing the Web, messaging and making phone calls be…a pair of eyeglasses? We may know by the end of the year. That's when Google is expected to debut a heads-up display worn over the ears like a pair of specs.
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Google's New Privacy Policy: How to Stay Off the Grid | PCWorld
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is recommending that privacy conscious users delete their Google Web history before the search giant's new unified privacy policy kicks in. Google Web history is Google's online log of all your search activity, and some browsing history.
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Adobe - Flash Player : Settings Manager - Website Storage Settings panel
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
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Brainstorming Doesn’t Really Work : The New Yorker
In the late nineteen-forties, Alex Osborn, a partner in the advertising agency B.B.D.O., decided to write a book in which he shared his creative secrets. At the time, B.B.D.O. was widely regarded as the most innovative firm on Madison Avenue. Born in 1888, Osborn had spent much of his career in Buffalo, where he started out working in newspapers, and his life at B.B.D.O. began when he teamed up with another young adman he’d met volunteering for the United War Work Campaign. By the forties, he was one of the industry’s grand old men, ready to pass on the lessons he’d learned. His book “Your Creative Power” was published in 1948. An amalgam of pop science and business anecdote, it became a surprise best-seller. Osborn promised that, by following his advice, the typical reader could double his creative output. Such a mental boost would spur career success—“To get your foot in the door, your imagination can be an open-sesame”—and also make the reader a much happier person. “The more you rub your creative lamp, the more alive you feel,” he wrote
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lehrer#ixzz1n6SwINhk -
Serving Life for Providing Car to Killers - NYTimes.com
CRAWFORDVILLE, Fla. — Early in the morning of March 10, 2003, after a raucous party that lasted into the small hours, a groggy and hungover 20-year-old named Ryan Holle lent his Chevrolet Metro to a friend. That decision, prosecutors later said, was tantamount to murder.
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Help us Open Source NASA.gov - open.NASA
The use of open source software, cloud computing technologies, and an integrated approach to search, video, and social media seems almost common-place in industry these days. Yet government websites aren’t quite there with the exception of a few noteable exceptions (not an exhaustive list by any means). This is why I’m so excited about that NASA has recently released an RFI (Request for Information) for information on how to build a better public website nasa.gov and intranet insdie.nasa.gov. This is a really big step for NASA, but,we truly need your help.
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World's most popular Web Server powers nearly 400 million Websites across the globe
Forest Hill, MD – 21 February 2012 – The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced version 2.4 of the award-winning Apache HTTP Server. Celebrating its 17th anniversary with an all-time record of nearly 400 million Websites powered worldwide[1], the Apache HTTP Server has been the most popular Web server on the Internet since April 1996. -
How Bots Seized Control of My Pricing Strategy
Before I talk about my own troubles, let me tell you about another book, “Computer Game Bot Turing Test”. It's one of over 100,000 “books” “written” by a Markov chain running over random Wikipedia articles, bundled up and sold online for a ridiculous price. The publisher, Betascript, is notorious for this kind of thing.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
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Norwegian Wouldn't | World Policy Institute
WPI Senior Fellow Jeff Madrick describes the history of how greed has bred America’s economic ills over the last forty years, and of the men most responsible for them. He recounts the single-minded pursuit of huge personal wealth that has been on the rise in the United States since the 1970s, led by a few individuals who have argued that self-interest guides society more effectively than community concerns.
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Google Bypassing User Privacy Settings - IEBlog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs
When the IE team heard that Google had bypassed user privacy settings on Safari, we asked ourselves a simple question: is Google circumventing the privacy preferences of Internet Explorer users too? We’ve discovered the answer is yes: Google is employing similar methods to get around the default privacy protections in IE and track IE users with cookies. Below we spell out in more detail what we’ve discovered, as well as recommendations to IE users on how to protect their privacy from Google with the use of IE9's Tracking Protection feature. We’ve also contacted Google and asked them to commit to honoring P3P privacy settings for users of all browsers.
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Using CSS without HTML · Mathias Bynens
A few days ago, Chris tweeted:
If we could stack pseudo elements (e.g. :after:after) we could build a whole website with no HTML other than . Probably good we can’t.
(Technically, we can, although no browser has implemented this yet.)
In response to this, I created this quick demo (view in Firefox or Opera), illustrating that technically you don’t need any HTML at all to use CSS. -
Clojure Programming/Getting Started - Wikibooks, open books for an open world
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Basic Clojure Setup – Part 1: Installing Clojure | Telman Yusupov's Blog
Monday, February 20, 2012
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The Book of Jobs
Forget monetary policy. Re-examining the cause of the Great Depression—the revolution in agriculture that threw millions out of work—the author argues that the U.S. is now facing and must manage a similar shift in the “real” economy, from industry to service, or risk a tragic replay of 80 years ago. -
Santorum challenges policy on prenatal testing - CNN.com
Washington (CNN) -- The government shouldn't make health care providers fully cover prenatal tests like amniocentesis, which can determine the possibility of Down syndrome or other fetal problems, Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum said Sunday.
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The Sins of the Fathers [Also in Polish] - Richard Dawkins - RichardDawkins.net - RichardDawkins.net
Yesterday evening I was telephoned by a reporter who announced himself as Adam Lusher from the Sunday Telegraph. At the end of a week of successfully rattling cages, I was ready for yet another smear or diversionary tactic of some kind, but in my wildest dreams I couldn’t have imagined the surreal form this one was to take. I obviously can’t repeat what was said word-for-word (my poor recall of long strings of words has this week been highly advertised), and I may get the order of the points wrong, but this is approximately how the conversation went.
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Walmart's Low Prices Bear a High Cost for America - Blogcritics Politics
For untold millions, Walmart is not simply a place to shop, but the place. Considering that the quintessential big-box retailer claims to, and often does, offer just about every conventional item necessary for the family at an affordable price, this should be none too surprising. However, at what cost does this convenience come, and in the grander scheme of things, is what Walmart has to offer really convenience at all? The company’s ownership would most definitely say so, as would throngs of eager consumers. Many economists, social scientists, and former employees, though, have a strikingly different opinion. While one can choose to believe whichever side of the argument he or she likes best, where do the facts lie?
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Unsigned Integer Arithmetic API now in JDK 8 (Joseph D. Darcy's Oracle Weblog)
At long last, after due discussion and review, I've just pushed initial API support for unsigned integer arithmetic into JDK 8! The support is implemented via static methods, primarily on java.lang.Integer and java.lang.Long, that:
Provide bidirectional conversion between strings and unsigned integers
Compare values as unsigned
Compute unsigned divide and remainder -
Bruce Springsteen: 'What was done to my country was un-American' | Music | guardian.co.uk
The Boss explains why there is a critical, questioning and angry patriotism at the heart of his new album Wrecking Ball
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Data collection arms race feeds privacy fears | Canada | Reuters
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - This week's revelations that Google Inc, Twitter and other popular Internet companies have been taking liberties with customer data have prompted criticism from privacy advocates and lawmakers, along with apologies from the companies.
They are the latest in a long line of missteps by large Internet companies that have faced little punishment for pushing privacy boundaries, which are already more expansive than most consumers understand.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
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eye of the tiger outtake
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In short, because we are greedy.
We are power Matlab users. Some of us are Lisp hackers. Some are Pythonistas, others Rubyists, still others Perl hackers. There are those of us who used Mathematica before we could grow facial hair. There are those who still can’t grow facial hair. We’ve generated more R plots than any sane person should. C is our desert island programming language.
We love all of these languages; they are wonderful and powerful. For the work we do — scientific computing, machine learning, data mining, large-scale linear algebra, distributed and parallel computing — each one is perfect for some aspects of the work and terrible for others. Each one is a trade-off.
We are greedy: we want more. -
ME/WE - A North Korean mass game in Kirkenes, Norway - YouTube
Now the North Koreans show the Norwegians how to do it.
posted by marvin at 9:14 PM - 22 comments (5 new) + -
Deus Ex Unreal Revolution mod - Mod DB
Deus Ex Unreal Revolution is a mod for the original Deus Ex that acts as a parody of Deus Ex: Human Revolution while providing commentary on the video game industry and modern gameplay mechanics. Assume the role of a wrist blade equipped JC Denton and perform cinematic takedowns on your mission to rescue Tracer Tong.
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Billionaire Romney donor uses threats to silence critics - Salon.com
Frank VanderSloot is an Idaho billionaire and the CEO of Melaleuca, Inc., a controversial billion-dollar-a-year company which peddles dietary supplements and cleaning products; back in 2004, Forbes, echoing complaints to government agencies, described the company as “a pyramid selling organization, built along the lines of Herbalife and Amway.” VanderSloot has long used his wealth to advance numerous right-wing political causes. Currently, he is the national finance co-chair of the Mitt Romney presidential campaign, and his company has become one of the largest donors ($1 million) to the ostensibly “independent” pro-Romney SuperPAC, Restore Our Future. Melaleuca’s get-rich pitches have in the past caused Michigan regulators to take action, resulting in the company’s entering into a voluntary agreement to “not engage in the marketing and promotion of an illegal pyramid”‘; it entered into a separate voluntary agreement with the Idaho attorney general’s office, which found that “certain independent marketing executives of Melaleuca” had violated Idaho law; and the Food and Drug Administration previously accused Melaleuca of deceiving consumers about some of its supplements.
Saturday, February 18, 2012
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What have you tried? - Matt Gemmell
If you’re a developer and you’re about to ask another developer a technical question (on a forum, via email, on a chat channel, or in person), you’d better be ready to answer the question “What have you tried?”
This of course isn’t specific to software developers, but that’s my field and it’s thus the area in which I’m most familiar with the issue which motivated me to write this. I’m (sadly) quite sure that it applies to your own industry too, whatever that might be. -
Don't Fall in Love With Your Technology
In the 1990s I followed the Usenet group comp.lang.forth. Forth has great personal appeal. It's minimalist to the point of being subversive, and Forth literature once crackled with rightness.
Slowly, not in a grand epiphany, I realized that there was something missing from the discussions in that group. There was talk of tiny Forths, of redesigning control structures, of ways of getting by with fewer features, and of course endless philosophical debates, but no one was actually doing anything with the language, at least nothing that was in line with all the excitement about the language itself. There were no revolutions waiting to happen. -
How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did - Forbes
Every time you go shopping, you share intimate details about your consumption patterns with retailers. And many of those retailers are studying those details to figure out what you like, what you need, and which coupons are most likely to make you happy. Target, for example, has figured out how to data-mine its way into your womb, to figure out whether you have a baby on the way long before you need to start buying diapers.
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Pirate Bay: The RIAA Is Delusional and Must Be Stopped | TorrentFreak
The Pirate Bay is not happy with a recent article published by the RIAA, where the torrent site is portrayed as the prime example of why tougher anti-piracy laws are necessary. In a rebuttal, The Pirate Bay argues that the RIAA is delusional, behaving like a spoiled kid that has lost touch with reality.
Friday, February 17, 2012
Thursday, February 16, 2012
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Jeremy Lin scores only 10 points but still pumps up Knicks and crowd - latimes.com
Point guard who has several impressive performances lately to become the darling of New York fans still contributes with 13 assists in the team's 100-85 victory over Sacramento.
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Michigan's Hostile Takeover | Mother Jones
When the city of Pontiac, Michigan, shut down its fire department last Christmas Eve, city councilman Kermit Williams learned about it in the morning paper. "Nobody reports to me anymore," Williams says. "It just gets reported in the press." This was just the latest in a series of radical changes in the city, where elected officials such as Williams have been replaced by a single person with unprecedented control over the city's operation and budget.
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Susan G. Komen for the Cure's limited impact - latimes.com
Over the last two weeks, as Susan G. Komen for the Curerevoked funding for Planned Parenthood, then reversed itself, I watched through the scrim of something that, while less newsworthy, was, to me, no less significant: the death of Rachel Cheetham Morro, the 42-year-old writer of the blog Cancer Culture Chronicles.
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Retired Philadelphia police officer wears uniform at Occupy Philly event - Philly.com
Retired Philadelphia Police Capt. Ray Lewis, who gained national attention with his defiant, in-uniform protest and subsequent arrest at Occupy Wall Street, made his first appearance with Occupy Philly on Monday afternoon.
Lewis, 60, had been chastised in letters fro
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
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Youtube Related Videos Visualization - YASIV
Visualizing YouTube with my home-made JavaScript graph drawing library (yasiv.com)
submitted 7 hours ago by pablopr
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What is Scientology? - New York News - Runnin' Scared
Although we've written hundreds of articles about Scientology over the years, and other news organizations have contributed hundreds more -- not to mention the numerous books, television programs, and countless websites dedicated to the subject -- without fail we regularly run into people who ask us, "Yeah, but what is Scientology?"
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Australia's 'child labour camp' - Today Tonight
In the middle of suburban Australia is a secret compound that's labelled 'degrading' and 'inhumane', with allegations of keeping children prisoner.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
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How To Build a Naive Bayes Classifier
Some use-cases for building a classifier:
Spam detection, for example you could build your own Askimet API;
Automatic assignment of categories to a set of items;
Automatic detection of the primary language (e.g. Google Translate);
Sentiment analysis, which in simple terms refers to discovering if an opinion is about love or hate about a certain topic; -
Lately, I’ve been making an app called Taxonomy (that desperately needs your votes …sorry). It’s designed to make your taxi experience better- a traveling companion, if you will. Going by the logic that a lot of people (in New York, at least) only really travel in taxis when out at night, I decided that it ought to have a dark colour scheme.
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WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS WITH KATHY ACKER – A Filmed Interview | THE END OF BEING
Legendary transgressive novelists Kathy Acker and William S. Burroughs sit down and chat at the October Gallery, London. Burroughs’ shotgun paintings, the cut-up method, and novels are all subject for conversation, as well as dispelling a few rumors. This was Burroughs’ first exhibition in the UK. This ICA Guardian Conversation video is split into 3 portions, totaling at 33 minutes.
Kathy Acker interviews William S. Burroughs 1 of 3:
Kathy Acker interviews William S. Burroughs 2 of 3:
Kathy Acker interviews William S. Burroughs 3 of 3:
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JC Gonzo tagged this post with: Brion Gysin, Cut-up, Kathy Acker, The October Gallery, William S. Burroughs Read 27 articles by JC Gonzo
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Judge Napolitano.How to get fired from Fox Business in under 5 mins - YouTube
How to get fired from Fox Business in under 5 mins (youtube.com)
submitted 12 hours ago by iupetre to politics
1191 commentssharesavehidereport -
The Misunderstood Power of Michael Jackson's Music - Joseph Vogel - Entertainment - The Atlantic
More than two and a half years after his untimely death, Michael Jackson continues to entertain. Cirque du Soleil's crowd-pleasing Michael Jackson Immortal World Tour is currently crisscrossing North America, while a recent Jackson-themed episode of Glee earned the show a 16 percent jump in ratings and its highest music sales of the season. Even Madonna's halftime Super Bowl spectacle harkened back to a trend first initiated by Jackson.
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The Big Mud Puddle: Why Concatenative Programming Matters
There doesn’t seem to be a good tutorial out there for concatenative programming, so I figured I’d write one, inspired by the classic “Why Functional Programming Matters” by John Hughes. With any luck it will get more people interested in the topic, and give me a URL to hand people when they ask what the heck I’m so excited about.
Monday, February 13, 2012
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Economists, investment advisors and political strategists are closely watching the unemployment rate. But few commentators acknowledge just how faulty the employment statistics are. One key problem is that a crucial group of people can’t be tracked and measured. These are the so-called discouraged workers, who have given up looking for employment. They are the economic equivalent of astrophysicists’ dark matter – the particles scattered throughout the universe that can’t be seen but have enough mass to alter the course of everything we can see.
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How 'Shadow Inventory' Is Killing the U.S. Housing Market | Business | TIME.com
Recently, there have been lots of positive signs coming out of the real estate market. Foreclosure rates are down, housing starts are up, and homes have appreciated in value in some markets for the first time since 2006. Even so, two reports surfaced last week indicating that, for the nation as a whole, home prices dropped by 3.5% to 5% in 2011. And one factor hurting the prices of homes that are for sale is the enormous number of homes that aren’t for sale — but that should be.
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Europe’s Debt Crisis: Back from the Brink? | Business | TIME.com
So it looks like Greece will dodge a default, at least for now. The Greek parliament passed a new $4.4 billion austerity package on Sunday, which includes a painful 22% cut in the minimum wage and 150,000 public sector job losses. Greece’s euro zone partners were demanding the country approve these painful measures in return for a second, $170 billion bailout. The vote clears the way to finalizing that bailout – first approved way back in July – along with an arrangement between Athens and its private-sector bondholders to restructure some $265 billion of the nation’s sovereign debt.
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China economy shows strain as policy shift eyed | Reuters
China betrayed signs of spluttering domestic demand on Friday as imports crumbling to their lowest in more than two years and weaker-than-forecast bank lending signaled to investors that policymakers would soon make a fresh bid to bolster growth.
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Trial Opens 2 Years After Feds Break Up Militia : NPR
DETROIT (AP) — Seven members of a Midwest militia accused of plotting to overthrow the government are set to stand trial, where jurors will decide whether federal authorities prevented an attack by homegrown extremists or simply made too much of the boasts by weekend warriors who had pledged to "take our nation back."
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Pakistani prime minister to stand trial for contempt - The Washington Post
Islamabad, Pakistan — The Supreme Court formally charged embattled Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani with contempt Monday.
Gilani, who pleaded not guilty, has steadfastly defied court orders to reopen old corruption cases against Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari. If convicted, Gilani faces six months in jail and possible removal from office. -
Interpol supports death penalty for tweets | MetaFilter
Saudi journalist Hamza Kashgari was arrested in Kuala Lumpur and deported to Saudi Arabia for at the behest of Interpol. Mr. Kashgari faces the death penalty in Saudi Arabia for a series of tweets insulting the prophet Muhammad, including 'I have loved things about you and I have hated things about you and there is a lot I don't understand about you I will not pray for you.' (BBC, Al Jazeera)
Fair Trials International's Jago Russell said "Interpol should be playing no part in Saudi Arabia's pursuit of Hamza Kashgari, however unwise his comments on Twitter. .. If an Interpol red notice is the reason for his arrest and detention it would be a serious abuse of this powerful international body that is supposed to respect basic human rights, including to peaceful free speech, and to be barred from any involvement in religious or political cases."
Fair Trials International has a campaign against the blanket enforcement of Interpol red notices because the international police agency has a poor record of respecting freedom of speech cases (pdf).
posted by jeffburdges (54 comments total) [add to favorites] 8 users marked this as a favorite [!] -
The DOJ’s escalating criminalization of speech - Salon.com
Over the past several years, the Justice Department has increasingly attempted to criminalize what is clearly protected political speech by prosecuting numerous individuals (Muslims, needless to say) for disseminating political views the government dislikes or considers threatening. The latest episode emerged on Friday, when the FBI announced the arrest and indictment of Jubair Ahmad, a 24-year-old Pakistani legal resident living in Virginia, charged with “providing material support” to a designated Terrorist organization (Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT)).
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Gamasutra - Features - Principles of an Indie Game Bottom Feeder
Ever since I founded Spiderweb Software and released my first game in January of 1995, I have been a proud indie game bottom feeder. I have fed and grown fat upon the scraps left behind by the mighty predators above. I have learned well the secret power that writers of indie games can use to actually make a living: We can find a small niche long-abandoned by the big companies, settle into it, and thrive.
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Racist stereotype (i.imgur.com)
submitted 6 hours ago by periodicflip to funny
367 commentssharesavehidereport -
Goodbye, state funding for California libraries | KALW
The bad news is that state funding for California libraries has been completely eliminated. There’s not really any good news about that except that it was expected. This past July, state library funding was sliced in half, and there was a trigger amendment attached to the budget that would eliminate state funding for public libraries at midyear if the state's revenue projections were not met. Needless to say, they weren’t.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
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Dodgy Coder: Coding tricks of game developers
If you've got any real world programming experience then no doubt at some point you've had to resort to some quick and dirty fix to get a problem solved or a feature implemented while a deadline loomed large. Game developers often experience a horrific "crunch" (also known as a "death march"), which happens in the last few months of a project leading up to the game's release date. Failing to meet the deadline can often mean the project gets cancelled or even worse, you lose your job. So what sort of tricks do they use while they're under the pump, doing 12+ hour per day for weeks on end?
Below are some classic anecdotes and tips - many thanks to Brandon Sheffield who originally put together this article on Gamasutra. I have reposted a few of his stories and also added some more from newer sources. I have also linked on each story to the author's home page or blog wherever possible. -
My favourite interview question
My favourite interview question
Some years back, I was interviewed by an interesting start-up in Palo Alto. I was really tempted to take their offer, mostly because:
One of the interviewers was an avid Ultimate player;
Stanford. In walking distance. (And the regular Stanford Friz-ball variant game);
They asked me a question which has become my favourite interview question to ask and to answer.
The question they asked was:
How might you design a program that lets people play Monopoly with each other over the internet? -
Raise the Crime Rate | MetaFilter
Raise the crime rate: an argument for the abolition of prison.
posted by latkes (59 comments total) [add to favorites] 23 users marked this as a favorite [!] -
SpandyAndy - Tight Bright & Fearless - Documentary - YouTube
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Is it true that living in America has become riskier? In 2006, the political scientist Jacob Hacker published The Great Risk Shift, a progressive tract that appropriated the vocabulary of wealth management to show how thirty years of privatization and deregulation had abraded the security of the American family. Risks once borne by corporations and the government, Hacker noted, like unplanned health costs, are now the responsibility of Mom and Pop. Transferring risk from the collective to the individual, though, ends badly for everyone. Family affliction, like banker “contagion,” is tricky to sequester: if Larry and Terry get bankrupted by bad luck, their misfortune cascades, dragging down creditors, neighbors, and especially their children. The reason liberals like insurance is that it helps diffuse risk throughout society. Pooling risk, one might say, is the essence of the progressive social contract.
Saturday, February 11, 2012
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Transcript
JUDY WOODRUFF: And we turn to some thoughts about the U.S. role in the world as it shares power with new global players.
That's the topic of Jeffrey Brown's conversation with Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser. -
Buying a tablet on a budget: Android or iPad? | Signal Strength - CNET News
Thanks to Google Android, there are more tablet choices on the market than you can shake a stick at. But with a weak supply of apps to choose from and some buggy software, are these iPad knockoffs worth it? Or should consumers just pony up a few extra bucks and buy the iPad?
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sturmovikdragon: PHOTOS: CHICGAO, CTA AND METRA ELECTRIC
Well for those of you who dislike America's great rail freight transportation network I have arrived at the City of Chicago, home of the world famous L. In the two days I was to spend in the Windy Apple I had plans to head down to the Museum of Science and Industry to check out the U-505 (the tour turned out to be a bit of a letdown). Later I had plans to visit the John Hancock Tower and take a trip on Metra out to Western Ave. While that last bit will be covered in the next set, everything else will be shown where where I travel around the downtown area via either the L or Metra Electric (for the MSI).
You can see all these great photos, including the non-rail Chicago scenery here at this link. You can also continue reading and check out the small sample of photos that I deemed to have best illustrated the trip.
We begin at the Randolph-Wabash loop station with the latest monument to Donald Trump rising in the background like some sort of giant dick. I guess buildings and their owners do share things in common ;-) -
Chromium Blog: The Future of JavaScript – take a peek today!
The ECMA committee is working hard on designing the next version of JavaScript, also known as "Harmony". It is due by the end of next year and it is going to be the most comprehensive upgrade in the history of this language.
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It's time for a unified ebook format and the end of DRM - O'Reilly Radar
Imagine buying a car that locks you into one brand of fuel. A new BMW, for example, that only runs on BMW gas. There are plenty of BMW gas stations around, even a few in your neighborhood, so convenience isn't an issue. But if one of those other gas stations offers a discount, a membership program, or some other attractive marketing campaign, you can't participate. You're locked in with the BMW gas stations.
Friday, February 10, 2012
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Latin American leaders assail U.S. drug ‘market’ - The Washington Post
MEXICO CITY — Latin American leaders have joined together to condemn the U.S. government for soaring drug violence in their countries, blaming the United States for the transnational cartels that have grown rich and powerful smuggling dope north and guns south.
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Betrayed by a bitfield [LWN.net]
Developers tend to fear compiler bugs, and for good reason: such bugs can be hard to find and hard to work around. They can leave traps in a compiled program that spring on users at bad times. Things can get even worse if one person's compiler bug is seen by the compiler's developer as a feature - such issues have a tendency to never get fixed. It is possible that just this kind of feature has turned up in GCC, with unknown impact on the kernel.
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This is the Feinwerkbau P11 Piccolo Air Pistol. It costs somewhere around $1,500 and looks like it is mainly designed for people doing competition. The black barrel is what shoots the pellet and the silver barrel is the compressed air.
If you have a gun that runs on compressed air, it would be nice to know how much air you have left wouldn’t it? I’m not sure the design was fully thought through. -
Jeremy mother fuckin' Lin | MetaFilter
"Lin is saving the Knicks with super-human play, but he's dispelling myths about Asian America by being otherwise hyper-normal and I thank him. He doesn't have a duty to embrace Asian America, speak for Asian America, or represent Asian America because right now he IS Asian America." -- Eddie Huang on Yao Ming, Jeremy Lin, and being Asian in America.
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Fresh Off the Boat: Thank You, Jeremy Lin
There are three magazine covers I'll always remember. AI with the blow out and retro sixers jersey on the cover of SLAM (what up @microtony), Obama on the cover of Newsweek December 2006, and Yao on the cover of ESPN in 2000. I still remember the day I got it in the mail... Thoughts rushed through my head. Was ESPN gonna give him props or were they going to reveal he was a genetically engineered government project with fake papers, Pekingese Potstickers, and an affinity for lead based bubble tea?
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
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spent last year in Afghanistan, visiting and talking with U.S. troops and their Afghan partners. My duties with the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force took me into every significant area where our soldiers engage the enemy. Over the course of 12 months, I covered more than 9,000 miles and talked, traveled and patrolled with troops in Kandahar, Kunar, Ghazni, Khost, Paktika, Kunduz, Balkh, Nangarhar and other provinces.
What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official st -
Suffering-oriented programming - thoughts from the red planet - thoughts from the red planet
Someone asked me an interesting question the other day: "How did you justify taking such a huge risk on building Storm while working on a startup?" (Storm is a realtime computation system). I can see how from an outsider's perspective investing in such a massive project seems extremely risky for a startup. From my perspective, though, building Storm wasn't risky at all. It was challenging, but not risky.
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Cricket Wireless has the music industry feeling chirpy - latimes.com
Reporting from San Diego— For the embattled music industry, hope lies inside a small corner store in the City Heights section of San Diego.
In a neighborhood chock-full of Mexican, Vietnamese and Somalian restaurants, Larry Woelfel, a 40-year-old unemployed lab technician, waited with two dozen customers to buy cellphones and service from a San Diego company called Cricket Wireless. -
Hacker posts Symantec source code after ransom demand fails - latimes.com
A hacker has released stolen source code from Symantec Corp., one of the largest computer security firms, after a phony set of ransom negotiations failed, according to the company.
The source code is part of a Symantec product called pcAnywhere, which allows users to log into and control home or work computers from remote locations. Access to the code could in theory give hackers insight into how to seize computers that use the software. -
Erik McClure: "Programmer" is an Overgeneralization
Earlier today, I came across a post during a google-fu session that claimed that no one should use the C++ standard library function make_heap, because almost nobody uses it correctly. I immediately started mentally ranting about how utterly ridiculous this claim is, because anyone whose gone to a basic algorithm class would know how to properly use make_heap. Then I started thinking about all the programmers who don't know what a heap is, and furthermore probably don't even need to know.
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Stack Overflow running short on space « Nick Craver
Stack Overflow handles a lot of traffic. Quantcast ranks us (at the time of this writing) as the 274th largest website in the US, and that’s rising. That means everything that traffic relates to grows as well. With growth, there are 2 areas of concern I like to split problems into: technical and non-technical.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
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Nikon unveils D800 DSLR and yes, its pixel count is enormous
Nikon unveiled its latest DSLR camera on Tuesday, the D800, confirming recent rumors that it would incorporate a huge 36.3MP sensor. Buyers of the device might also want to consider getting several extra-large external hard drives to hold all of their super-sized images. The D800 starts shipping in March.
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Most racist ad played during the Super Bowl goes to Michigan's Hoekstra - YouTube
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SummerTech Day & Sleep-Over Computer and Technology Camp in Westchester, New York - YouTube
I've poured my heart and soul into this company for twelve years and have truly made a difference in kids' lives by setting them on a path to be great programmers. I've yet to make a dime doing it. I'm at a crossroads and can really use some Reddit love to keep it alive. (youtube.com)
submitted 10 hours ago by schroderrr
184 commentssharesavehidereport
Sunday, February 5, 2012
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Nevada economy suffers on all fronts - Feb. 3, 2012
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- The Great Recession has dealt Nevada a losing hand.
The Silver State, which will hold the Republican caucus on Saturday, has the dubious distinction of leading the nation in unemployment, foreclosure filings and share of homes worth less than the mortgages on them. -
A Eulogy for Google Plus - Forbes
It may not be dead, and it’s entirely possible I’m shoveling dirt on something that’s still writhing around, promising me it is in fact the next big thing, but I’m now deaf to its cries. Google Plus is a failure no matter what the numbers may say.
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You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You - Forbes
Now that the SOPA and PIPA fights have died down, and Hollywood prepares their next salvo against internet freedom with ACTA and PCIP, it’s worth pausing to consider how the war on piracy could actually be won.
It can’t, is the short answer, and one these companies do not want to hear as they put their fingers in their ears and start yelling. As technology continues to evolve, the battle between pirates and copyright holders is going to escalate, and pirates are always, always going to be one step ahead -
Mortgage Tornado Warning, Unheeded - NYTimes.com
YEARS before the housing bust — before all those home loans turned sour and millions of Americans faced foreclosure — a wealthy businessman in Florida set out to blow the whistle on the mortgage game.
Multimedia
Document
Report to Fannie Mae Regarding Shareholder Complaints
Add to Portfolio
Federal National Mortgage Association Fannie Mae
Go to your Portfolio »
His name is Nye Lavalle, and he first came to attention not in finance but in sports and advertising. He turned heads in marketing circles by correctly predicting that Nascar and figure skating would draw huge followings in the 1990s. -
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect: Chapter 1
Her name was Caroline Frances Hubert, and she had three claims to fame.
In the first place she was the thirty-seventh oldest living human being. Caroline herself was unimpressed by this fact. To her way of thinking it was the result of an accident, nothing more. In any case she had been the thirty-seventh oldest human being for a long, long time, and it got to seem more of a bore than an accomplishment after a while. -
Object Computing, Inc. - Java News Brief - March 2009
The goal of this article is to provide a fairly comprehensive introduction to the Clojure programming language. A large number of features are covered, each in a fairly brief manner. Feel free to skip around to the sections of most interest. The section names in the table of contents are hyperlinks to make this easier when reading on-line.
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For Facebook 'Hacker Way' is way of life – USATODAY.com
For most people, that word means something malicious — shady criminals who listen in on private voicemails, or anonymous villains who cripple websites and break into e-mail accounts.
For Facebook, though, "hacker" means something different. It's an ideal that permeates the company's culture. It explains the push to try new ideas (even if they fail), and to promote new products quickly (even if they're imperfect). The hacker approach has made Facebook one of the world's most valuable Internet companies. -
DIY science: should you try this at home? | Science | The Guardian
When Richard Handl was arrested for attempting to split the atom on his stove, he joined a growing band of home experimenters cooking up all kinds of trouble behind the kitchen door