So the question is what kind of justice mokery they came up with ?
I suppose that the Wikileaks cable leaks were so pervasive that some of the files contained classified information -- maybe even information not only classified by the United States government but also many other governments of the world.
Has it occurred to you that perhaps the US prosecutors have researched the laws that he was supposed to be abiding by when he obtained the files? They're probably not as serious as the US laws but nowhere does it say whether these are charges under US law, Australian laws, US-Ally law or some other foreign law. Here's some reading on said laws from the nation of his citizenship. Perhaps the purpose of this indictment is to try to get him tried under those laws in an Australian court with information provided by US prosecutors?
The 2009 attempt to raise funds by devaluing its already pathetic currency revealed not only the country's fiscal desperation, but also the abuse Dear Leader was willing to inflict on his people. The won was devalued by 100 percent, which meant 1,000 won suddenly had the purchasing power of 10 won.
It appears they got the 100 to 1 ratio correct but I don't see how this is a "devaluation by 100 percent." Such ambiguous language would normally lead me to believe that a devaluation by 100 percent means everything is completely worthless (with zero percent value left). Wouldn't the correct devaluation percentage be 99 percent? I guess I would have preferred the fraction or ratio comparison instead if that is indeed how listing devaluation by percentage works in economics. Perhaps they could use better phrasing like "reduced purchasing power of all your money to one hundredth of its original worth overnight." Furthermore, how would you not riot over your government doing something like that to you?
Nahh, he just switched from brothke to benrothke. He's been reviewing as far back as 2008 with a review of The Tangled Web not even a month ago. Maybe he forgot his password?
Haters gonna hate on book reviews (including me) but keep 'em coming, brothski!
Either Gleick revised his post or Bad Astronomer got this one wrong. Gleick says he received the Climate Strategy anonymously:
At the beginning of 2012, I received an anonymous document in the mail describing what appeared to be details of the Heartland Institute's climate program strategy. It contained information about their funders and the Institute's apparent efforts to muddy public understanding about climate science and policy. I do not know the source of that original document but assumed it was sent to me because of my past exchanges with Heartland and because I was named in it.
It appears the rest are documents that he knows are official that he acquired deceptively in order to verify the anonymous document. My own personal hunch, as I first noted when this broke, is that '2012 Climate Strategy' is a cheap fake thrown in with real documents. There is probably no way to verify this one way or the other but I don't think this summary or Phil Plait's blog posting adequately explain what Gleick did exactly. Here is one thing that is going for the validity of '2012 Climate Strategy' and that is if Gleick did not alter it then some of the sums and investments roughly match up with the budget document -- which caused Gleick to believe it is completely authentic. However, fiscal knowledge of the Heartland Institute might be more public than people think...
Well, I'm dumbfounded. What is this man's capacity over at Adobe? One the one hand hats off to him for having the balls to come out with such a post and to end it with:
You can e-mail the CEO of Adobe at snarayen@adobe.com (to tell him to keep me or fire me).
But on the other hand, I wonder if he was aware of the network problems some of his proposed solutions represent. Surely, he must realize that "Run my gestures against an image in the cloud" amounts to increased network traffic. Don't even get me started on the privacy of those "gestures." Let's say you open up Photoshop to edit some 12 megapixel family pictures immediately. Are they transferred to the cloud in the process? And transferred back? Who has the network to do that faster than just loading to main memory with CPU cache? This increases what Adobe must now host as far as server farms and will, probably, raise the price of Photoshop in doing so. And, you know, it's already too expensive for me. Furthermore his post rails against "bloatware" but it's not like hosting this out on the cloud is going to make the application any less bloated. On the contrary, it can only make software more intricate, bloated, buggy, susceptible to attack, expensive, etc. Furthermore are there any users out there that are stationed on top of an internet backbone on Google's campus that could even take advantage of this additional functionality? Perhaps decades into the future this will be reality but until the infrastructure catches up to your consumers, this is a logistical headache.
As a developer, this all sounds very much like a two year old prattling off "and then I want a hover board, and then I want a flying car, and then..." ad infinitum while we're still concentrating on minimizing highway deaths. He's probably sitting there with the latest iPhone asking why everything doesn't run like this but I have coworkers that are complaining about the latest iOS 5 updates to their older iPhones and all the problems associated with it. Good luck with pushing that "instant on" standard to all hardware out there man, I really will be amazed if you pull it off.
The problem is in part a scientific one, Mualchin said. The Italian scientists based their analysis on the frequency of earthquakes in the area. This is known as the probabilistic seismic-hazard analysis (PSHA), a method that is state of the art in many countries, but that, in Mualchin’s view, systematically underestimates seismic hazard because it does not consider extreme and rare events.
"Frequency is not important, what really matters is the largest earthquake we can expect, the strongest one that has happened in the past. Risk prevention should be based on that," he said. This is the philosophy behind deterministic seismic-hazard analysis, a method that Mualchin says has been mostly abandoned by the scientific community, to the point that younger seismologists do not even learn about it.
So they were using what is commonly considered a "state of the art" model? I'm guessing the prosecutors happened to find a guy in the United States that apparently even admits to adhering to models that are less commonly accepted than the model that the scientists used. I wonder if he's got an ax to grind now that his preferred model is no longer taught? I don't know anything about these two models but this sounds like infighting and I'm sure it's really easy for Mualchin to step in after the fact and show that his "abandoned" model would have worked better in this particular case. Any seismologists here that can speak to the current research in earthquake prediction and the actual effectiveness of these two models?
I sure am glad I'm not a seismologist, this would angry up my blood.
... meanwhile their competitors are fighting over who gets Tradehill's customers.
Not sure where that came from, didn't find it in the Ars article. At the end they mention Mt. Gox being the only other exchange... so there's one competitor. They didn't mention anything about fighting over customers.
Furthermore the third sentence in the Ars article was suspiciously absent from the summary:
He has pledged to open a new site once these issues have been resolved.
As well as the explanation of why all this happened (lack of proper money transmission licensing). I've asked this many times before but how do you track illegal purchases on BitCoin when, by definition, it claims to be an anonymous payment solution?
Quite simply put, no BitCoin exchange -- neither Tradehill nor Mt. Gox -- is going to be able to comply with the Bank Secrecy Act.
Just to point out that the real incriminating evidence comes from the "2012 Climate Strategy" document that could be falsified. The other documents, like the budget, look pretty legit but the document you are citing is a page and a half. Wouldn't take much for me, someone who is ultra opposed to the Heartland Institute, to dream that up in a short afternoon with a six pack. I'm poking through the rest of them and am not finding the same sort of evidence. So it's possible that someone could have gotten their hands on a few legit documents (like the budget) and created this one and added it to the group. The metadata on the meeting agendas and such read "jbast" while the metadata on the climate strategy document reads "Joseph Bast." Entirely possible they were created two different ways but then why does the climate strategy document appear photoscanned? Is he photoscanning his own internal documents? Why? Or did someone want this to look legit, photoscan it and then write "Joseph Bast" as the author to make it look authentic?
I'm just pleading for people to exercise caution. I think that the best approach for this is to put forth questions towards Dr. Wojick about his funding and move forward with caution. This is the internet. This is an area where I require a lot of verification before I believe something. The climate strategy document is awful convenient and as someone who's use to corporate bullshit, I can tell you my manager could easily produce a 15 page document on our team's "vision" and "mission statements" or "strategy." Mostly to prove he's worth something but also because that just seems to be how they roll. Two pages can be made up and I would imagine the real thing would have a lot more fluff and a lot more boring in it. I'm not saying this document is a fake, I'm just urging everyone to exercise caution before you look like a rube.
Jaffee is wrong. Some of the bet games in the past two year have been emotionally engaging narrative-driven. If you ignore the arc of characters and plot, and only focus on gameplay, then you end up in the same box as angry birds. And that box is worth $.99.
Disclaimer: I submitted the story and I am 100% in disagreement with Jaffe and I hope I did his argument some justice in my summarizing. However, nor do I entirely agree with your assertion. Angry birds has turned out much more money (probably) than one of my favorite long running RPG series "Tales of (Symphonia|Vesperia|Xilia|etc)" So by that measure, he's giving sound advice. Angry Birds didn't need cinematic or great voice acting (which he cites to be high budget features of games) so it didn't need to cost more than 99 cents.
And I can easily cite counter examples to your rule. Every so often a really novel gameplay mechanic comes out. I remember the advent (or at least the advent to me) of real time strategy games like Age of Empires and Warcraft I & II. These were amazing and the plots were pretty much phoned in (hell, one was just history). And if you implement an old gameplay mechanic really well or come out with a novel new gameplay mechanic, you sort of get a free pass on story and cosmetics. Hell, look at Minecraft. Where's the story there? Or even amazing graphics? I beat a dragon at the end and was like... huh, it really could have done without "the story."
I sympathize with Jaffe but I don't think we should just have gameplay mechanics. In the end, there's probably a healthy balance and as a former Tetris addict turned RPG enthusiast, I see the benefits of both sides. When a game blends these two things together, that's when you get magic. Currently I'm obsessed with Star Wars: The Old Republic but I can see how that's just not for everybody. I think Jaffe was just pushing back after seeing a focus on gameplay taking a back seat to Hollywood for too long. But either extreme is bad for gaming.
I haven't written any games but if I had, I would be completely fine with being condemned to "the same box as angry birds."
"Muslim brotherhood" . this is the organization behind all those 'revolutions' within n. africa and arabia. no exceptions : in libya they got the upper hand and immediately moved to sharia. in egypt, they were the main driving force, but was not the majority, hence they only were able to 'call' for a sharia government. in syria, they are the ones perpetrating the revolution. all of the 'revolutions' involve usage of social media and internet as you can remember - they were prepared for this. they are known to be working in libya for a decade now.
According to authors writing in the Council on Foreign Relations magazine Foreign Affairs: "At various times in its history, the group has used or supported violence and has been repeatedly banned in Egypt for attempting to overthrow Cairo's secular government. Since the 1970s, however, the Egyptian Brotherhood has disavowed violence and sought to participate in Egyptian politics." Jeremy Bowen, BBC Middle East editor, calls it "conservative and non-violent". The Brotherhood has condemned terrorism and the 9/11 attacks.
The Brotherhood itself denounces the "catchy and effective terms and phrases" like "fundamentalist" and "political Islam" which it claims are used by "Western Media" to pigeonhole the group, and points to its "15 Principles" for an Egyptian National Charter, including "freedom of personal conviction... opinion... forming political parties... public gatherings... free and fair elections..."
Yeah you used that scary word "sharia" and then oh god no they're Muslim. They must be evil. Well, you know, I know some of the other countries in the world see our Republican party as conservative and threatening to enact similar scary laws against gay marriage and even are seen as violent war mongers.
But as long as Democracy is in place and the elections are rigged and voters aren't threatened or coerced then we have the ability to change that. At one point in our own nation's history, people were voting in politicians who were okay with slavery! Imagine that!
Some people in these country want sharia law and if that's what their politicians are running on and win on then that's how democracy is supposed to work. Just so long as the voters can always change it.
I know it's hard for Americans to grasp this but "Democracy" doesn't mean that whoever you think is best should win the vote in foreign countries.
I'm against such censorship in principle -- I think that even the right to publish and access pornography counts as a fundamental human right.
I don't understand this escalation from liberty to "fundamental human right." It's a liberty we enjoy... I don't think tax payers should be paying for prisoners to have access to pornography nor do I think such taxes should be used to hand out pornography like we do with food stamps or welfare. Food, shelter, water. Those are basic fundamental rights... not access to pornography. I think you meant to say "a liberty" and that you don't think it has any moral repercussions. I might just be nitpicking but what do you mean when you escalate it to "fundamental human right"?
Since your laptop can be confiscated legally at the border.
I'm not saying it's right for them to be able to do that but they do catch individuals engaged with corporate and even economic espionage that way. The key difference here is that it's intended to be an open action against you by US Customs whereas in China the intent is for you to never know anything happened and the key logger or stolen information being covertly used without your knowledge of who did it or even what's going on. I think one is much worse than the other but I guess that's just my opinion.
As details about new features in Windows 8 started to be discussed in the Building 8 blog and bandied about in Linux/Windows forums, Linux users were quick to chime in with a hearty 'Linux had that first' — even for things that were just a natural evolution, like native support for USB 3.0.
Perhaps they're not jeering Windows for "copying" Linux so much as they are happy to show that the flexibility and community involvement in open source is starting to surpass those closed source equivalents? Isn't that what Windows used to gain so much marketshare? Supporting everything before everyone else?
The Microsoft twist: No Linux distro does ISO mounting as easily as Windows 8, as it requires some command line trickery (or, again, third-party tools).
Here's your "command line trickery" (once you've gotten superuser):
mkdir -p/mnt/iso mount -o loop image.iso/mnt/iso
Did you see that trickery? Someone call the pope, I'm well on my way to sainthood after that "miracle." Hahah that's funny though, this guy should see some of the command line paragraphs I've typed out for stuff like ffmpeg back in the day. I think the author doesn't understand that there are many linux machines that are servers or headless and many distros that love to leave you the option of not having to run a window manager. As a result, it's almost always up to you if you want to run a heavy GUI to execute two whole commands.
Somewhere betwixt Faust and Robert Johnson's legend lies the RIAA where they find aspiring musicians they can capitalize on and offer them (seemingly) unlimited resources as they are first starting out and thirstiest for it most.
You're eventually carried off into eternal damnation in hell or eternal litigation in court -- I can't really say which is worse.
Pink Floyd Engineer Alan Parsons Rips Audiophiles, YouTube and Jonas Brothers
Oooh, now this should be good. Let's see what we got here.
Everybody strives to get perfect sound and we work hard to get the best sound we can. A certain artist or song or style of music will sound a certain way. It would be ridiculous for me to make a Jonas Brothers record using the techniques and procedures I normally use. The techniques used to make many modern pop records involve a lot of compression and that's what those consumers want, according to the labels. A lot of the processing that audiophiles criticize is a style thing and part of the music itself.
Oh, my god, the Jonas Brothers are so burned! He did not just say that they are trying to get their sound to be a certain way that their audience prefers. Oh no he did not! I can't believe it, I haven't seen a meltdown like this since Christian Bale flipped out on a stage hand. Somebody, call Disney and have them put the Jonas boys on suicide watch tonight in their cells -- not even paper underwear, they know how to hang themselves with that. When they hear this news they'll probably never perform again.
I think what perhaps critics don’t appreciate is that there is a lot of luck in getting a good sound. It's not all about the equipment, spectral response and compressing. It's all about the quality of the musicianship, the songwriting and the sound reaching the microphone... that's crucial. It's often been said, "garbage in means garbage out," so if that's the case you won’t get a good sound.
Wow, I am so glad I'm not an audiophile right now. I would be fuming! Never have I heard such a direct and searing attack on audiophiles. The era of hipster sound snobs may be over as we know it.
There's another damaging situation: You can complain about iTunes and subscription sites being damaging to copyright owners and having inferior audio quality, but one of the worst culprits is YouTube. You can look for any record ever made and it's on YouTube for free - usually with crappy audio - and let's not even mention the video content that's out there to go with it. I sense there will be a huge copyright court case over the content on YouTube someday.
Oh, now he's stepping on a big dog's toes. You cannot print that, that is slander and that is libel. YouTube promises to provide only the highest quality sound and video... Certainly Google's legions of lawyers will see Alan Parsons in court.
Seriously? That's considered "ripping"? Everything I read was fact and on top of that, he's still predicating his sentences with "I think."
"Well gee golly, Fred Rodgers, how will we put up with all these harsh words flying out of Alan Parson's mouth?" I think you need to take a trip to the Abuse Department to hear some real
The guy that spends a week finding a five year old memory bug, that no one has every been able to find is now ineffective, whereas a dweeb performing trivial refactoring is classed as a genius?
The examples are endless so I'll provide another that I 1) witness monthly and 2) have been on either side of. You have the programmer that, when presented with implementing a solution to a complex problem, sits down and draws out class diagrams on paper and erases and redraws while that is cheap and writes the code once many days later and makes small changes to it as it is tested/refined. You also have the programmer that dives right in, may well discover that this was a really expensive solution though easy to code and has it constantly sent back to him after testing only to have to rewrite major portions of it and/or realize then that he/she is reinventing the wheel leading to major changes to try to use another library and, well, this run-on sentence like their work could go on forever while your first programmer was done weeks ago. And who gets the major commit and repository score?
After all Slashdot didn't write any of that opinion, it was shoutingloudly so you should have known that it was just an opinion or editorial in response to the editorial. Wait, you mean you didn't read it as such? That's odd, I guess that was just confusion. Sort of like, you know when one of the 'old media' news channels has one of those bullshit talk shows like Glenn Beck that they play on their "news network" where he has free reign to act like a newscaster. And then when he says something completely false, they throw up their hands and go "It's just his opinion that happens to closely align with what we want people to believe. This show is entertainment, not news we just happen to have the Fox News Channel logo at the bottom of the screen at all times."
"As it happens, the television networks that actively supported SOPA and PIPA didn’t take advantage of their broadcast credibility to press their case. That’s partly because 'old media' draws a line between 'news' and 'editorial.' Apparently, Wikipedia and Google don’t recognize the ethical boundary between the neutral reporting of information and the presentation of editorial opinion as fact."
And when does Cary Sherman recognize the ethical boundary of paying off the people who vote on this bill -- a bill which clearly serves his interests?
Switch DNS or whatever directs traffic to point at new site.
That should be a matter of minutes and since I would guess this is largely just a reading and verifying service, there shouldn't even be an interruption for game validation. There are other strategies to employ if that database dump takes a long time but nothing that should require an unknown downtime.
Uh, I do this stuff with two-bit websites that I don't even make a profit on. What the hell is money monger Ubisoft doing?
The movie industry is deeply engaged with labor unions. The Democrats tend to favor labor unions, so the movie industry often pushes for Democrat candidates to keep their status quo union agreements.
That's odd, the article says:
Ever since GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole claimed that Hollywood produced "nightmares of depravity" that coarsened American culture and made "deviancy" mainstream, movie studios and record labels have enjoyed a spectacularly uneasy relationship with the Republican Party.
So it appears that the "think of the children" supporters of Republican candidates made them tough to buy by the MPAA and RIAA which like to sell "indecent" materials if it will turn a profit.
I'm quite confused by your assertion that the companies and corporations support those who support labor unions. Um, I thought that labor unions allowed workers to band together to turn the screws on the companies that employ them -- thus detracting from the company's massive profits and gaining more benefits and pay for the workers? Why would the CEOs and lawyers that feed off those profits pay into politicians that support the labor unions that could have them shrinking those profits? Is there something special about MPAA/RIAA unions that actually shifts the capital up to those companies like Universal Music Group and the big studio executives?
While you may have a point that Apple is not the only company to point the finger at, I am amazed at the volume of iProducts that Apple moves and how quickly they move it. I had to order my Samsung Galaxy Nexus after driving from store to store to find out that they were sold out yet my friend was able to walk into a store after work and pick up the latest iPhone with no problem. How does this happen?
Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.
“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”
This raised many questions in my mind. Like whether or not other Chinese companies would respond with such force to a request? Is it just because Apple is so big that Foxconn takes these extreme measures? Are Foxconn employees experiencing longer shifts because of these pressures from Apple and, ultimately, Apple consumers?
You're also missing a point that I found interesting from the This American Life episode on these plants. One group had gone to a village that did not have a Foxconn plant but was due to get one. They looked at the village and the quality of life of the people. It wasn't pretty. After the plant opened, after people got the jobs and after electricity and running water were forcefully brought for the purpose of the plant, life improved. Sure, pollution got worse but the group couldn't argue with people being better fed, having electricity and (more) potable water. Is this a good argument for Foxconn and Apple? I don't think so but it's an ethics issue and I think you'll find a lot of people are divided on this issue.
Closer to home for me, people from West Virginia have been attacking the EPA for stopping mountaintop mining in their state. They say that the EPA is halting job creation and go on and on about how horrible the EPA is. It's so odd to me because this state is rife with environmental problems left over from just this mining and when there was no EPA and no regulations on the state level, chemical companies ran rampant in West Virginia. I wouldn't drink the groundwater there if my life depended on it now. And what was the reason for this? To give a few generations of jobs and stoke the smokestacks of the industrial USA? Sure... but at what future and permanent and irreversible cost?
In Florida? Are you serious? Does anyone else realize that unless there's a hurricane Florida (especially central Florida) is basically a dead zone for winds. That's not to say a freak wind storm couldn't occur but I've lived in some pretty windy places and never heard of a fire started by buffeting winds. Lightning, yes. I've googled for it, can someone point me to evidence of this phenomena actually happening? Having tried to get a spark or start fire by rubbing two sticks together, I can tell you that it would indeed by a freak occurrence if wind did just that.
To add to your doubt, the wikipedia article for Sealand makes it sounds like a couple guys with a boat and some small arms could over take it... so, uh, you're moving your servers to a defenseless island? Where no other nation recognizes you? Where no one will come to your aid if someone decides to just blow you out of the water? And you're planning on hosting what? Oh, sensitive information about the United States government that they consider to be a threat to national security? Yeah, good luck with that. The US will take out anybody in Pakistan (or a number of other countries) in the middle of the night if they want to, I highly doubt they'd be worried about slapping some thermite to some servers out in the middle of the ocean and calling it a day -- which government would they worry about upsetting if they did so?
Needs one kind of elite to innovate, and another kind of elite to monopolize, shut down, put trivial patents around that innovations or other "innovative" measures to avoid them to succeed.
Heh, I got some laughs out of reading this article as well:
Yet Apple has also repeatedly displayed its openness to new ideas and influences as exemplified by the visit that Mr. Jobs made to the Palo Alto research center of Xerox in 1979. He saw an experimental computer with a point-and-click mouse and graphical on-screen icons, which he adopted at Apple. It later became the standard for the personal computer industry.
Is "adopted" the right word here? It's funny how some people consider that same "influence" to be stealing.
In 2010, Apple bought Siri, a personal assistant application for smartphones. At the time, it was a small start-up in Silicon Valley that originated as a program funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Pentagon. Last year, Siri became the talking question-answering application on iPhones.
So those are you examples for 'repeatedly displayed its openness to new ideas and influences'? They "borrow" and idea and then they buy up and assimilate a start-up? Well, if that's your frame of reference, Microsoft excels at openness too! I know this article is not even trying to be exhaustive but Android isn't even mentioned once. I don't understand how Apple can even be called "open" when compared with Google's offerings to everyone.
Google's current CEO, Larry Page, took Steve Jobs' advice to heart and is cutting the bloat (e.g. Google Wave, Google Labs, etc. have all been cut in the last several months). That means less 20%-time projects from engineers who have no experience with product development and more polished projects from the top management and PMs.
Where do I even start with this? Okay, 20% time still exists. Eliminating projects that resulted from it just means those engineers can move on to new ideas or join other projects. Saying 'less 20%-time projects' doesn't really make any sense. That perk still exists... it's possible his strategy was to disassemble those bigger teams so that they get more engineer hobby projects to pick from. If Page was taking Steve Jobs' advice, the 20 percent perk would be eliminated completely and Page would be walking around instructing people what the consumer wants.
The fact that you think that engineers have 'no experience with product development and more polished projects from the top management and PMs' makes me think you are either management or you live in a fantasy world where management has tricked you. I am a software developer, I do agile development. Guess what? The engineers can do all of what you just listed too! Not having that BS middle management means we get paid more although we have more responsibilities but those responsibilities were already foisted upon us when something went wrong anyway! What does 'more polished projects' mean exactly? Who has always done the polishing and development? It wasn't management and I've often found their direction is a coin flip.
Slashdot Mirror
So the question is what kind of justice mokery they came up with ?
I suppose that the Wikileaks cable leaks were so pervasive that some of the files contained classified information -- maybe even information not only classified by the United States government but also many other governments of the world.
Has it occurred to you that perhaps the US prosecutors have researched the laws that he was supposed to be abiding by when he obtained the files? They're probably not as serious as the US laws but nowhere does it say whether these are charges under US law, Australian laws, US-Ally law or some other foreign law. Here's some reading on said laws from the nation of his citizenship. Perhaps the purpose of this indictment is to try to get him tried under those laws in an Australian court with information provided by US prosecutors?
The 2009 attempt to raise funds by devaluing its already pathetic currency revealed not only the country's fiscal desperation, but also the abuse Dear Leader was willing to inflict on his people. The won was devalued by 100 percent, which meant 1,000 won suddenly had the purchasing power of 10 won.
It appears they got the 100 to 1 ratio correct but I don't see how this is a "devaluation by 100 percent." Such ambiguous language would normally lead me to believe that a devaluation by 100 percent means everything is completely worthless (with zero percent value left). Wouldn't the correct devaluation percentage be 99 percent? I guess I would have preferred the fraction or ratio comparison instead if that is indeed how listing devaluation by percentage works in economics. Perhaps they could use better phrasing like "reduced purchasing power of all your money to one hundredth of its original worth overnight." Furthermore, how would you not riot over your government doing something like that to you?
First time accepted submitter benrothke writes
Nahh, he just switched from brothke to benrothke. He's been reviewing as far back as 2008 with a review of The Tangled Web not even a month ago. Maybe he forgot his password?
Haters gonna hate on book reviews (including me) but keep 'em coming, brothski!
At the beginning of 2012, I received an anonymous document in the mail describing what appeared to be details of the Heartland Institute's climate program strategy. It contained information about their funders and the Institute's apparent efforts to muddy public understanding about climate science and policy. I do not know the source of that original document but assumed it was sent to me because of my past exchanges with Heartland and because I was named in it.
It appears the rest are documents that he knows are official that he acquired deceptively in order to verify the anonymous document. My own personal hunch, as I first noted when this broke, is that '2012 Climate Strategy' is a cheap fake thrown in with real documents. There is probably no way to verify this one way or the other but I don't think this summary or Phil Plait's blog posting adequately explain what Gleick did exactly. Here is one thing that is going for the validity of '2012 Climate Strategy' and that is if Gleick did not alter it then some of the sums and investments roughly match up with the budget document -- which caused Gleick to believe it is completely authentic. However, fiscal knowledge of the Heartland Institute might be more public than people think ...
You can e-mail the CEO of Adobe at snarayen@adobe.com (to tell him to keep me or fire me).
But on the other hand, I wonder if he was aware of the network problems some of his proposed solutions represent. Surely, he must realize that "Run my gestures against an image in the cloud" amounts to increased network traffic. Don't even get me started on the privacy of those "gestures." Let's say you open up Photoshop to edit some 12 megapixel family pictures immediately. Are they transferred to the cloud in the process? And transferred back? Who has the network to do that faster than just loading to main memory with CPU cache? This increases what Adobe must now host as far as server farms and will, probably, raise the price of Photoshop in doing so. And, you know, it's already too expensive for me. Furthermore his post rails against "bloatware" but it's not like hosting this out on the cloud is going to make the application any less bloated. On the contrary, it can only make software more intricate, bloated, buggy, susceptible to attack, expensive, etc. Furthermore are there any users out there that are stationed on top of an internet backbone on Google's campus that could even take advantage of this additional functionality? Perhaps decades into the future this will be reality but until the infrastructure catches up to your consumers, this is a logistical headache.
..." ad infinitum while we're still concentrating on minimizing highway deaths. He's probably sitting there with the latest iPhone asking why everything doesn't run like this but I have coworkers that are complaining about the latest iOS 5 updates to their older iPhones and all the problems associated with it. Good luck with pushing that "instant on" standard to all hardware out there man, I really will be amazed if you pull it off.
As a developer, this all sounds very much like a two year old prattling off "and then I want a hover board, and then I want a flying car, and then
The problem is in part a scientific one, Mualchin said. The Italian scientists based their analysis on the frequency of earthquakes in the area. This is known as the probabilistic seismic-hazard analysis (PSHA), a method that is state of the art in many countries, but that, in Mualchin’s view, systematically underestimates seismic hazard because it does not consider extreme and rare events.
"Frequency is not important, what really matters is the largest earthquake we can expect, the strongest one that has happened in the past. Risk prevention should be based on that," he said. This is the philosophy behind deterministic seismic-hazard analysis, a method that Mualchin says has been mostly abandoned by the scientific community, to the point that younger seismologists do not even learn about it.
So they were using what is commonly considered a "state of the art" model? I'm guessing the prosecutors happened to find a guy in the United States that apparently even admits to adhering to models that are less commonly accepted than the model that the scientists used. I wonder if he's got an ax to grind now that his preferred model is no longer taught? I don't know anything about these two models but this sounds like infighting and I'm sure it's really easy for Mualchin to step in after the fact and show that his "abandoned" model would have worked better in this particular case. Any seismologists here that can speak to the current research in earthquake prediction and the actual effectiveness of these two models?
I sure am glad I'm not a seismologist, this would angry up my blood.
Not sure where that came from, didn't find it in the Ars article. At the end they mention Mt. Gox being the only other exchange ... so there's one competitor. They didn't mention anything about fighting over customers.
Furthermore the third sentence in the Ars article was suspiciously absent from the summary:
He has pledged to open a new site once these issues have been resolved.
As well as the explanation of why all this happened (lack of proper money transmission licensing). I've asked this many times before but how do you track illegal purchases on BitCoin when, by definition, it claims to be an anonymous payment solution?
Quite simply put, no BitCoin exchange -- neither Tradehill nor Mt. Gox -- is going to be able to comply with the Bank Secrecy Act.
Just to point out that the real incriminating evidence comes from the "2012 Climate Strategy" document that could be falsified. The other documents, like the budget, look pretty legit but the document you are citing is a page and a half. Wouldn't take much for me, someone who is ultra opposed to the Heartland Institute, to dream that up in a short afternoon with a six pack. I'm poking through the rest of them and am not finding the same sort of evidence. So it's possible that someone could have gotten their hands on a few legit documents (like the budget) and created this one and added it to the group. The metadata on the meeting agendas and such read "jbast" while the metadata on the climate strategy document reads "Joseph Bast." Entirely possible they were created two different ways but then why does the climate strategy document appear photoscanned? Is he photoscanning his own internal documents? Why? Or did someone want this to look legit, photoscan it and then write "Joseph Bast" as the author to make it look authentic?
I'm just pleading for people to exercise caution. I think that the best approach for this is to put forth questions towards Dr. Wojick about his funding and move forward with caution. This is the internet. This is an area where I require a lot of verification before I believe something. The climate strategy document is awful convenient and as someone who's use to corporate bullshit, I can tell you my manager could easily produce a 15 page document on our team's "vision" and "mission statements" or "strategy." Mostly to prove he's worth something but also because that just seems to be how they roll. Two pages can be made up and I would imagine the real thing would have a lot more fluff and a lot more boring in it. I'm not saying this document is a fake, I'm just urging everyone to exercise caution before you look like a rube.
Jaffee is wrong. Some of the bet games in the past two year have been emotionally engaging narrative-driven. If you ignore the arc of characters and plot, and only focus on gameplay, then you end up in the same box as angry birds. And that box is worth $.99.
Disclaimer: I submitted the story and I am 100% in disagreement with Jaffe and I hope I did his argument some justice in my summarizing. However, nor do I entirely agree with your assertion. Angry birds has turned out much more money (probably) than one of my favorite long running RPG series "Tales of (Symphonia|Vesperia|Xilia|etc)" So by that measure, he's giving sound advice. Angry Birds didn't need cinematic or great voice acting (which he cites to be high budget features of games) so it didn't need to cost more than 99 cents.
... huh, it really could have done without "the story."
And I can easily cite counter examples to your rule. Every so often a really novel gameplay mechanic comes out. I remember the advent (or at least the advent to me) of real time strategy games like Age of Empires and Warcraft I & II. These were amazing and the plots were pretty much phoned in (hell, one was just history). And if you implement an old gameplay mechanic really well or come out with a novel new gameplay mechanic, you sort of get a free pass on story and cosmetics. Hell, look at Minecraft. Where's the story there? Or even amazing graphics? I beat a dragon at the end and was like
I sympathize with Jaffe but I don't think we should just have gameplay mechanics. In the end, there's probably a healthy balance and as a former Tetris addict turned RPG enthusiast, I see the benefits of both sides. When a game blends these two things together, that's when you get magic. Currently I'm obsessed with Star Wars: The Old Republic but I can see how that's just not for everybody. I think Jaffe was just pushing back after seeing a focus on gameplay taking a back seat to Hollywood for too long. But either extreme is bad for gaming.
I haven't written any games but if I had, I would be completely fine with being condemned to "the same box as angry birds."
"Muslim brotherhood" . this is the organization behind all those 'revolutions' within n. africa and arabia. no exceptions : in libya they got the upper hand and immediately moved to sharia. in egypt, they were the main driving force, but was not the majority, hence they only were able to 'call' for a sharia government. in syria, they are the ones perpetrating the revolution. all of the 'revolutions' involve usage of social media and internet as you can remember - they were prepared for this. they are known to be working in libya for a decade now.
Okay, I Googled it, found the Wikipedia page and found their response to your criticism interesting:
According to authors writing in the Council on Foreign Relations magazine Foreign Affairs: "At various times in its history, the group has used or supported violence and has been repeatedly banned in Egypt for attempting to overthrow Cairo's secular government. Since the 1970s, however, the Egyptian Brotherhood has disavowed violence and sought to participate in Egyptian politics." Jeremy Bowen, BBC Middle East editor, calls it "conservative and non-violent". The Brotherhood has condemned terrorism and the 9/11 attacks.
The Brotherhood itself denounces the "catchy and effective terms and phrases" like "fundamentalist" and "political Islam" which it claims are used by "Western Media" to pigeonhole the group, and points to its "15 Principles" for an Egyptian National Charter, including "freedom of personal conviction... opinion... forming political parties... public gatherings... free and fair elections..."
Yeah you used that scary word "sharia" and then oh god no they're Muslim. They must be evil. Well, you know, I know some of the other countries in the world see our Republican party as conservative and threatening to enact similar scary laws against gay marriage and even are seen as violent war mongers.
But as long as Democracy is in place and the elections are rigged and voters aren't threatened or coerced then we have the ability to change that. At one point in our own nation's history, people were voting in politicians who were okay with slavery! Imagine that!
Some people in these country want sharia law and if that's what their politicians are running on and win on then that's how democracy is supposed to work. Just so long as the voters can always change it.
I know it's hard for Americans to grasp this but "Democracy" doesn't mean that whoever you think is best should win the vote in foreign countries.
I'm against such censorship in principle -- I think that even the right to publish and access pornography counts as a fundamental human right.
I don't understand this escalation from liberty to "fundamental human right." It's a liberty we enjoy ... I don't think tax payers should be paying for prisoners to have access to pornography nor do I think such taxes should be used to hand out pornography like we do with food stamps or welfare. Food, shelter, water. Those are basic fundamental rights ... not access to pornography. I think you meant to say "a liberty" and that you don't think it has any moral repercussions. I might just be nitpicking but what do you mean when you escalate it to "fundamental human right"?
Since your laptop can be confiscated legally at the border.
I'm not saying it's right for them to be able to do that but they do catch individuals engaged with corporate and even economic espionage that way. The key difference here is that it's intended to be an open action against you by US Customs whereas in China the intent is for you to never know anything happened and the key logger or stolen information being covertly used without your knowledge of who did it or even what's going on. I think one is much worse than the other but I guess that's just my opinion.
As details about new features in Windows 8 started to be discussed in the Building 8 blog and bandied about in Linux/Windows forums, Linux users were quick to chime in with a hearty 'Linux had that first' — even for things that were just a natural evolution, like native support for USB 3.0.
Perhaps they're not jeering Windows for "copying" Linux so much as they are happy to show that the flexibility and community involvement in open source is starting to surpass those closed source equivalents? Isn't that what Windows used to gain so much marketshare? Supporting everything before everyone else?
The Microsoft twist: No Linux distro does ISO mounting as easily as Windows 8, as it requires some command line trickery (or, again, third-party tools).
Here's your "command line trickery" (once you've gotten superuser):
Did you see that trickery? Someone call the pope, I'm well on my way to sainthood after that "miracle." Hahah that's funny though, this guy should see some of the command line paragraphs I've typed out for stuff like ffmpeg back in the day. I think the author doesn't understand that there are many linux machines that are servers or headless and many distros that love to leave you the option of not having to run a window manager. As a result, it's almost always up to you if you want to run a heavy GUI to execute two whole commands.
Somewhere betwixt Faust and Robert Johnson's legend lies the RIAA where they find aspiring musicians they can capitalize on and offer them (seemingly) unlimited resources as they are first starting out and thirstiest for it most.
You're eventually carried off into eternal damnation in hell or eternal litigation in court -- I can't really say which is worse.
Pink Floyd Engineer Alan Parsons Rips Audiophiles, YouTube and Jonas Brothers
Oooh, now this should be good. Let's see what we got here.
Everybody strives to get perfect sound and we work hard to get the best sound we can. A certain artist or song or style of music will sound a certain way. It would be ridiculous for me to make a Jonas Brothers record using the techniques and procedures I normally use. The techniques used to make many modern pop records involve a lot of compression and that's what those consumers want, according to the labels. A lot of the processing that audiophiles criticize is a style thing and part of the music itself.
Oh, my god, the Jonas Brothers are so burned! He did not just say that they are trying to get their sound to be a certain way that their audience prefers. Oh no he did not! I can't believe it, I haven't seen a meltdown like this since Christian Bale flipped out on a stage hand. Somebody, call Disney and have them put the Jonas boys on suicide watch tonight in their cells -- not even paper underwear, they know how to hang themselves with that. When they hear this news they'll probably never perform again.
I think what perhaps critics don’t appreciate is that there is a lot of luck in getting a good sound. It's not all about the equipment, spectral response and compressing. It's all about the quality of the musicianship, the songwriting and the sound reaching the microphone ... that's crucial. It's often been said, "garbage in means garbage out," so if that's the case you won’t get a good sound.
Wow, I am so glad I'm not an audiophile right now. I would be fuming! Never have I heard such a direct and searing attack on audiophiles. The era of hipster sound snobs may be over as we know it.
There's another damaging situation: You can complain about iTunes and subscription sites being damaging to copyright owners and having inferior audio quality, but one of the worst culprits is YouTube. You can look for any record ever made and it's on YouTube for free - usually with crappy audio - and let's not even mention the video content that's out there to go with it. I sense there will be a huge copyright court case over the content on YouTube someday.
Oh, now he's stepping on a big dog's toes. You cannot print that, that is slander and that is libel. YouTube promises to provide only the highest quality sound and video ... Certainly Google's legions of lawyers will see Alan Parsons in court.
Seriously? That's considered "ripping"? Everything I read was fact and on top of that, he's still predicating his sentences with "I think."
"Well gee golly, Fred Rodgers, how will we put up with all these harsh words flying out of Alan Parson's mouth?" I think you need to take a trip to the Abuse Department to hear some real
The guy that spends a week finding a five year old memory bug, that no one has every been able to find is now ineffective, whereas a dweeb performing trivial refactoring is classed as a genius?
The examples are endless so I'll provide another that I 1) witness monthly and 2) have been on either side of. You have the programmer that, when presented with implementing a solution to a complex problem, sits down and draws out class diagrams on paper and erases and redraws while that is cheap and writes the code once many days later and makes small changes to it as it is tested/refined. You also have the programmer that dives right in, may well discover that this was a really expensive solution though easy to code and has it constantly sent back to him after testing only to have to rewrite major portions of it and/or realize then that he/she is reinventing the wheel leading to major changes to try to use another library and, well, this run-on sentence like their work could go on forever while your first programmer was done weeks ago. And who gets the major commit and repository score?
"As it happens, the television networks that actively supported SOPA and PIPA didn’t take advantage of their broadcast credibility to press their case. That’s partly because 'old media' draws a line between 'news' and 'editorial.' Apparently, Wikipedia and Google don’t recognize the ethical boundary between the neutral reporting of information and the presentation of editorial opinion as fact."
And when does Cary Sherman recognize the ethical boundary of paying off the people who vote on this bill -- a bill which clearly serves his interests?
That should be a matter of minutes and since I would guess this is largely just a reading and verifying service, there shouldn't even be an interruption for game validation. There are other strategies to employ if that database dump takes a long time but nothing that should require an unknown downtime.
Uh, I do this stuff with two-bit websites that I don't even make a profit on. What the hell is money monger Ubisoft doing?
The movie industry is deeply engaged with labor unions. The Democrats tend to favor labor unions, so the movie industry often pushes for Democrat candidates to keep their status quo union agreements.
That's odd, the article says:
Ever since GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole claimed that Hollywood produced "nightmares of depravity" that coarsened American culture and made "deviancy" mainstream, movie studios and record labels have enjoyed a spectacularly uneasy relationship with the Republican Party.
So it appears that the "think of the children" supporters of Republican candidates made them tough to buy by the MPAA and RIAA which like to sell "indecent" materials if it will turn a profit.
I'm quite confused by your assertion that the companies and corporations support those who support labor unions. Um, I thought that labor unions allowed workers to band together to turn the screws on the companies that employ them -- thus detracting from the company's massive profits and gaining more benefits and pay for the workers? Why would the CEOs and lawyers that feed off those profits pay into politicians that support the labor unions that could have them shrinking those profits? Is there something special about MPAA/RIAA unions that actually shifts the capital up to those companies like Universal Music Group and the big studio executives?
I'm reminded of a recent Slashdot article that had an interesting passage to me:
Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.
“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”
This raised many questions in my mind. Like whether or not other Chinese companies would respond with such force to a request? Is it just because Apple is so big that Foxconn takes these extreme measures? Are Foxconn employees experiencing longer shifts because of these pressures from Apple and, ultimately, Apple consumers?
... but at what future and permanent and irreversible cost?
You're also missing a point that I found interesting from the This American Life episode on these plants. One group had gone to a village that did not have a Foxconn plant but was due to get one. They looked at the village and the quality of life of the people. It wasn't pretty. After the plant opened, after people got the jobs and after electricity and running water were forcefully brought for the purpose of the plant, life improved. Sure, pollution got worse but the group couldn't argue with people being better fed, having electricity and (more) potable water. Is this a good argument for Foxconn and Apple? I don't think so but it's an ethics issue and I think you'll find a lot of people are divided on this issue.
Closer to home for me, people from West Virginia have been attacking the EPA for stopping mountaintop mining in their state. They say that the EPA is halting job creation and go on and on about how horrible the EPA is. It's so odd to me because this state is rife with environmental problems left over from just this mining and when there was no EPA and no regulations on the state level, chemical companies ran rampant in West Virginia. I wouldn't drink the groundwater there if my life depended on it now. And what was the reason for this? To give a few generations of jobs and stoke the smokestacks of the industrial USA? Sure
In Florida? Are you serious? Does anyone else realize that unless there's a hurricane Florida (especially central Florida) is basically a dead zone for winds. That's not to say a freak wind storm couldn't occur but I've lived in some pretty windy places and never heard of a fire started by buffeting winds. Lightning, yes. I've googled for it, can someone point me to evidence of this phenomena actually happening? Having tried to get a spark or start fire by rubbing two sticks together, I can tell you that it would indeed by a freak occurrence if wind did just that.
To add to your doubt, the wikipedia article for Sealand makes it sounds like a couple guys with a boat and some small arms could over take it ... so, uh, you're moving your servers to a defenseless island? Where no other nation recognizes you? Where no one will come to your aid if someone decides to just blow you out of the water? And you're planning on hosting what? Oh, sensitive information about the United States government that they consider to be a threat to national security? Yeah, good luck with that. The US will take out anybody in Pakistan (or a number of other countries) in the middle of the night if they want to, I highly doubt they'd be worried about slapping some thermite to some servers out in the middle of the ocean and calling it a day -- which government would they worry about upsetting if they did so?
Needs one kind of elite to innovate, and another kind of elite to monopolize, shut down, put trivial patents around that innovations or other "innovative" measures to avoid them to succeed.
Heh, I got some laughs out of reading this article as well:
Yet Apple has also repeatedly displayed its openness to new ideas and influences as exemplified by the visit that Mr. Jobs made to the Palo Alto research center of Xerox in 1979. He saw an experimental computer with a point-and-click mouse and graphical on-screen icons, which he adopted at Apple. It later became the standard for the personal computer industry.
Is "adopted" the right word here? It's funny how some people consider that same "influence" to be stealing.
In 2010, Apple bought Siri, a personal assistant application for smartphones. At the time, it was a small start-up in Silicon Valley that originated as a program funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Pentagon. Last year, Siri became the talking question-answering application on iPhones.
So those are you examples for 'repeatedly displayed its openness to new ideas and influences'? They "borrow" and idea and then they buy up and assimilate a start-up? Well, if that's your frame of reference, Microsoft excels at openness too! I know this article is not even trying to be exhaustive but Android isn't even mentioned once. I don't understand how Apple can even be called "open" when compared with Google's offerings to everyone.
Google's current CEO, Larry Page, took Steve Jobs' advice to heart and is cutting the bloat (e.g. Google Wave, Google Labs, etc. have all been cut in the last several months). That means less 20%-time projects from engineers who have no experience with product development and more polished projects from the top management and PMs.
Where do I even start with this? Okay, 20% time still exists. Eliminating projects that resulted from it just means those engineers can move on to new ideas or join other projects. Saying 'less 20%-time projects' doesn't really make any sense. That perk still exists ... it's possible his strategy was to disassemble those bigger teams so that they get more engineer hobby projects to pick from. If Page was taking Steve Jobs' advice, the 20 percent perk would be eliminated completely and Page would be walking around instructing people what the consumer wants.
The fact that you think that engineers have 'no experience with product development and more polished projects from the top management and PMs' makes me think you are either management or you live in a fantasy world where management has tricked you. I am a software developer, I do agile development. Guess what? The engineers can do all of what you just listed too! Not having that BS middle management means we get paid more although we have more responsibilities but those responsibilities were already foisted upon us when something went wrong anyway! What does 'more polished projects' mean exactly? Who has always done the polishing and development? It wasn't management and I've often found their direction is a coin flip.