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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) +
Sunday, January 29, 2012
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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.
Enlarge This Image
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.
Enlarge This Image
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).
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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.