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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.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
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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.
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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
Thursday, January 12, 2012
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#122 Cover Letters from Unemployed Overachievers « Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like
Dear Hiring Manager for [insert International Humanitarian Organization],
I would like to apply for the position of [insert vague sounding job title that has no meaning outside of the given organization]. I believe that my educational background and skills make me uniquely suited to this position. So far in life I have proven myself capable of taking on the challenges required for this position, which I understand pays under $20,000 a year for working in one of the most dangerous countries in the world and undertaking tasks that no one else wants to do. -
blog.reddit -- what's new on reddit: Stopped they must be; on this all depends.
The freedom, innovation, and economic opportunity that the Internet enables is in jeopardy. Congress is considering legislation that will dramatically change your Internet experience and put an end to reddit and many other sites you use everyday. Internet experts, organizations, companies, entrepreneurs, legal experts, journalists, and individuals have repeatedly expressed how dangerous this bill is. If we do nothing, Congress will likely pass the Protect IP Act (in the Senate) or the Stop Online Piracy Act (in the House), and then the President will probably sign it into law. There are powerful forces trying to censor the Internet, and a few months ago many people thought this legislation would surely pass. However, there’s a new hope that we can defeat this dangerous legislation.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
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Controversy Swirls Around Harsh Anti-Obesity Ads : NPR
Stark billboards and television commercials that feature overweight kids are part of a controversial anti-obesity campaign in Atlanta. The goal of the "Stop Sugarcoating It, Georgia" ads is to shock families into recognizing that obesity is a problem.
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The C++ Lands
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The US schools with their own police | World news | The Guardian
The charge on the police docket was "disrupting class". But that's not how 12-year-old Sarah Bustamantes saw her arrest for spraying two bursts of perfume on her neck in class because other children were bullying her with taunts of "you smell".
"I'm weird. Other kids don't like me," said Sarah, who has been diagnosed with attention-deficit and bipolar disorders and who is conscious of being overweight. "They were saying a lot of rude things to me. Just picking on me. So I sprayed myself with perfume. Then they said: 'Put that away, that's the most terrible smell I've ever smelled.' Then the teacher called the police." -
Understanding JavaScript OOP — Sorella's Basement
JavaScript is an object oriented (OO) language, with its roots in the Self programming language, although it's (sadly) designed to look like Java. This makes the language's really powerful and sweet features stay covered by some pretty ugly and counter-intuitive work-arounds.
One such affected feature is the implementation of prototypical inheritance. The concepts are simple yet flexible and powerful. It makes inheritance and behaviourism first-class citizens, just like functions are first-class in functional-ish languages (JavaScript included). -
Cut the Rope | Behind the Scenes
Cut the Rope is an immediate favorite for anyone who plays it. It’s as fun as it is adorable. So we had an idea: let’s make this great game available to an even bigger audience by offering it on the web using the power of HTML5.
To do this, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team partnered with ZeptoLab (the creators of the game) and the specialists at Pixel Lab to bring Cut the Rope to life in a browser. The end result is an authentic translation of the game for the web, showcasing some of the best that HTML5 has to offer: canvas-rendered graphics, browser-based audio and video, CSS3 styling and the personality of WOFF fonts. -
Guantanamo still in use for US war on terror, 10 years after - CSMonitor.com
Suleiman al-Nahdi waits with dozens of other prisoners in a seemingly permanent state of limbo five years after he was cleared for release from Guantanamo Bay.
Related stories
In Pictures: Life at Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp
Peace progress? Qatar gives Taliban an office address
Does defense bill's anti-terror provision deprive Americans of key rights?
Guantánamo for US citizens? Senate bill raises questions
From Guantánamo to Pakistan: One man shares his story
Topics
Military Detention and Detainees Human Rights Social Issues War and Conflict Domestic Policy Political Policy Domestic Security Policy
"I wonder if the U.S. government wants to keep us here forever," the 37-year-old al-Nahdi wrote in a recent letter to his lawyers.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
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My Guantánamo Nightmare - NYTimes.com
ON Wednesday, America’s detention camp at Guantánamo Bay will have been open for 10 years. For seven of them, I was held there without explanation or charge. During that time my daughters grew up without me. They were toddlers when I was imprisoned, and were never allowed to visit or speak to me by phone. Most of their letters were returned as “undeliverable,” and the few that I received were so thoroughly and thoughtlessly censored that their messages of love and support were lost.
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There’s more than one way to stick it to The Man. There’s civil disobedience, subversive propaganda, political art, outright violent revolt--each possessing its own degree of difficulty and consequence. In a decidedly 21st-century twist, team of German hackers bent on fighting the powers that be has chosen a rather ambitious means of taking the power back: building a hacker-owned and -operated space program, complete with a constellation of communications satellites beaming uncensored Internet to users on the ground.
Monday, January 9, 2012
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U.S. Courts-Martial in Occupation Japan: Rape, Race, and Censorship :: JapanFocus
“We too are an army of rapists,” anonymous soldier, letter to the editor, Time Magazine, November 12, 1945.
What explains the lack of records regarding the number of rapes in occupation Japan by American servicemen? I briefly review the situation of rape during World War II in the European theater for which there is reasonable documentationto better understand why the names and numbers are concealed or lost. I then examine the situation postwar, focusing particularly on conditions in Japan at the beginning of the American occupation. I conclude by analyzing what little documentation I discovered about an execution for rape while writing Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, my memoir about my uncle who committed suicide after leaving me tapes about his experiences as an MP in Tokyo’s 8th Army stockade. -
Local News | Hundreds of 'sensitive' military items stolen at JBLM | Seattle Times Newspaper
About 100 soldiers at Joint Base Lewis-McChord remained restricted to the base Sunday after hundreds of sensitive items, including night-vision goggles and rifle scopes, were reported stolen from a supply area.
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Why Men Can’t Stand to Be Alone After a Breakup or a Divorce — First Person - NYTimes.com
ONE cold, misty autumn morning, I slipped and fell. I was on my way out to do errands, the mossy wooden deck on the north side of my house was slick with dew, I was in a hurry, I skidded, and both feet flew out from under me.
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The Myth of Japan’s Failure - NYTimes.com
DESPITE some small signs of optimism about the United States economy, unemployment is still high, and the country seems stalled.
Time and again, Americans are told to look to Japan as a warning of what the country might become if the right path is not followed, although there is intense disagreement about what that path might be. Here, for instance, is how the CNN analyst David Gergen has described Japan: “It’s now a very demoralized country and it has really been set back.”