October 2011
46 posts
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Lead Bullets | TechCrunch →
Ben Horowitz:
Early in my tenure as product manager for the web servers at Netscape, we faced a terrible crisis. We just got our hands on Microsoft’s new web server, Internet Information Server (IIS), and benchmarked against our product. Microsoft’s IIS had every feature that we had, was five times faster and we knew that they were going to give it away for free. This might not sound so bad,...
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FBI — The Case of the Stolen Moon Rocks →
So who were these brazen young criminals? “Orb Robinson” was really Thad Roberts, former NASA college intern and ringleader of the plan. His partners in crime were former interns Tiffany Fowler and Shae Saur. A fourth associate from Utah who had set up the web site and sent e-mails was also arrested and charged in the conspiracy.
How did they pull off the heist? Using their NASA IDs, they...
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“In the United States, the political system is a very marginal affair. There are...”
– Noam Chomsky
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Andrew Golden: Old Man Watkins v. Leroy... →
Plaintiff, Old Man Watkins, appeals a lower court decision in favor of Defendant, Leroy “Encyclopedia” Brown, in his individual capacity as the genius son of Chief of Police Brown of the city of Idaville. Mr. Watkins alleges various common law torts against Brown, including trespass, false imprisonment, and intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress. Mr. Watkins additionally...
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Lion Tweaks: Get rid of the stupid leather and... →
If you are:
A Mac user who has
Upgraded to Lion and
Hates the new iCal skeumorphic crummy faux-Corinthian-leather and bit of torn paper decorations,
then have I got the program for you! Lion Tweaks by Fredrik W lets you make iCal grey again. (Some of the text is still brown. It’s still better than the alternative.) Lion Tweaks makes it easy to fix other minor Lion annoyances, like the...
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Yeah, I know that song!
From Arrested Development s2e17: Spring Breakout, in which Michael is asked by the elderly Cal Cullen if he remembers Sugarfoot:
From The Hudsucker Proxy, in which Amy Archer demonstrates to Norville Barnes that she is also from Muncie:
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Fake Science: What's The Difference Between The...
Fake Science:
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Jacob Pacey: You Look at Me Like You’ve Never Seen... →
Hey guys, long time no see, toss me a PBR—actually, better make it a Coors Light. I know, I look different, but before you all start saying how I look like some midtown suit, let me explain. I haven’t gone pleb on you, I’m actually a neo-hipster now. It’s basically where you’re a hipster, but since hipsterism has gone so mainstream you dress and act like a regular person, ironically.
It’s...
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Huffduffer →
Huffduffer is one of my favorite Internet tools. I listen to podcasts basically any time that I’m not reading, talking to humans, or sleeping. However, it’s a pain to get audio that isn’t in a podcast I’m subscribed to onto my iPod so that I can listen at my convenience. Huffduffer makes it easy to save lots of bits of audio, podcast episodes, talks, interviews. I click the...
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Squrl →
Squrl is one of my favorite internet tools. During my daily blog reading, I come across several videos, but I rarely want to watch them right away; I like to watch videos when I have spare time or spare cognitive capacity. Squrl makes it easy to save lots of videos on the Internet in one place; I can bookmark videos with a bookmarklet, or email them to an @squrl.it address. This works with YouTube...
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Greece Offers to Repay Loans with Giant Horse «... →
BRUSSELS (The Borowitz Report) – In what many are hailing as a breakthrough solution to Greece’s crippling debt crisis, Greece today offered to repay loans from the European Union nations by giving them a gigantic horse.
Finance ministers from sixteen EU nations awoke in Brussels this morning to find that a huge wooden horse had been wheeled into the city center overnight.
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BBC News - Struggling Wikileaks stops publishing... →
Wikileaks said that it would focus instead on raising funds to ensure its future survival.
The announcement came after what the group called a blockade by US-based finance companies.
This followed its disclosure on the internet of hundreds of thousands of secret US government files and diplomatic cables.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said that since last December an...
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Hyperbole and a Half: Wolves →
Benny came to the birthday party because his mom had volunteered him to help supervise the children. He must have felt out of place being the lone teenage boy amidst a flock of over-excited six-year-old girls, but we welcomed his presence. We saw him as a sort of prop that we could manipulate in our imaginary games - a living, breathing human that would submit to pretending to be whatever we...
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Mark Shields gets in a monster burn on David... →
DAVID BROOKS: …As for what’s happened across the Middle East over the last several years, one of the things that’s happened—and to me this is the big thing that’s happened—look at the change. Look in the change in leadership across that region. Gadhafi’s gone. Saddam is gone. In Afghanistan, the Taliban is gone. The sclerotic regime in Egypt is gone. Assad is...
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Tim Bray on Dennis Ritchie →
Tim Bray offers a concise remembrance of Dennis Ritchie, in terms of his simple but revolutionary ideas in computing.
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Announcing: Alex's podcast →
This is my new podcast. You will not hear me talking. When I find interesting audio on the Internet, typically podcasts, I will post links here. You can subscribe, and new episodes will be downloaded automatically for you.
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Slavoj Žižek speaks at Occupy Wall Street:... →
Slavoj Žižek at Occupy Wall Street:
They are saying we are all losers, but the true losers are down there on Wall Street. They were bailed out by billions of our money. We are called socialists, but here there is always socialism for the rich. They say we don’t respect private property, but in the 2008 financial crash-down more hard-earned private property was destroyed than if all of us here...
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PHD Comics: Dress Codes →
The Academic Dress Code: never wear a business suit, and some clothes are only acceptable if you win the Nobel Prize.
True story: In my first semester of grad school, I had to give a presentation to a Very Important Person. (I’m still surprised that I was given 10 minutes to talk in front of this person.) I asked my advisor what to wear, a little worried because I only wore T-shirts and...
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Pat Robertson: God Let Zoo Animals Escape to Bite... →
From The Borowitz Report (check it out):
ZANESVILLE, OH (The Borowitz Report) – As dozens of escaped exotic animals terrorized the town of Zanesville, Ohio, the Rev. Pat Robertson raised eyebrows today by saying that “God allowed those wild animals to escape because he wanted them to find gay people and bite them.”
Rev. Robertson, who made his remark during a regular broadcast of his 700...
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Books by a Robot!? An Investigation Into an... →
Can a robot write a book? Well, okay, maybe not write, but at least cull and compile sources from the Internet?
That is the question mused over by author Pagan Kennedy in last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, provoked by her discovery of a certain Lawrence M. Surhone, an “author” on Amazon with more than 100,000 books to his credit. These “books” are not...
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CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are... →
Henry Blodget at Business Insider provides a concise explanation of the math behind Occupy Wall Street. The best points made here:
Unemployment is high, 9%, officially, and much higher counting people who are under-employed. (Minorities are disproportionately unemployed.)
Corporate profits are at an all time high. This is facilitated by oodles of tax loopholes, allowing profitable companies to...
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WatchSaturday Night Live Fox and Friends sketch: “Whole Foods does not provide free abortions.”
The Fox & Friends fact checkers are always hard at work finding all sorts of errors that need to be corrected over the course of the show.
This sketch ends with corrections given by the Fox and Friends fact checkers. They come down in a blur. You can find the full list of corrections...
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Free Speech Zones | American Civil Liberties Union →
Anyone remember Free Speech Zones?
According to ACLU legal papers, local police, acting at the direction of the Secret Service, violated the rights of protesters in two ways: people expressing views critical of the government were moved further away from public officials while those with pro-government views were allowed to remain closer; or everyone expressing a view was herded into what is...
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Thirteen Observations made by Lemony Snicket while... →
Lemony Snicket, on Occupy Wall Street,
8. Don’t ask yourself if something is fair. Ask someone else—a stranger in the street, for example.
9. People gathering in the streets feeling wronged tend to be loud, as it is difficult to make oneself heard on the other side of an impressive edifice.
Of all the things I’ve seen and read about Occupy Wall Street, I think this is thing most...
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Announcing Bake 0.2.0: defaults, configuration,... →
Bake 0.2.0 is out now. Bake is a tool that’s handy for people doing parameter studies in scientific computing, because it lets you do that grid of three shear rates and four elasticities with and without using a new hack you made last night, at four levels of mesh refinement, with the amount of effort you spend on starting just one job. 342*4, as easy as 1.
Even if you’re not...
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The Declaration of the Occupation of New York City...
As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.
As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power, and that it is...
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9/11 children's colouring book angers US Muslims |... →
A colouring book about the events of 9/11, complete with pictures of the burning twin towers and the execution of a cowering Osama bin Laden for children to fill in, has provoked outrage among American Muslims.
We Shall Never Forget 9/11: The Kids’ Book of Freedom has just been released by the Missouri-based publisher Really Big Coloring Books, which says it is “designed to be...
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Facebook Is Tracking Your Every Move on the Web;... →
For quite some time now, Facebook’s user tracking hasn’t been limited to your time on the site: any third-party web site or service that’s connected to Facebook or that uses a Like button is sending over your information, without your explicit permission. However, Winer noticed something mostly overlooked in last week’s Facebook changes: Facebook’s new Open...
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Switzerland’s Anti-PowerPoint Party |... →
The best up-and-coming political force may be Switzerland’s Anti-PowerPoint Party. The intrepid Party is fighting the use of PowerPoint presentations in business, government, and education, arguing that use of PowerPoint costs their nation approximately 2.5 billion $USD yearly. (There is no methodology behind this number.)
Sample slide:
See also The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint by...
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Serve Time In Jail...Or In Church? | WKRG →
Non-violent offenders in Bay Minette now have a choice some would call simple: do time behind bars or work off the sentence in church.
Operation Restore Our Community or “ROC”…begins next week. The city judge will either let misdemenor offenders work off their sentences in jail and pay a fine or go to church every Sunday for a year.
…
Rowland says the...
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Old pictures of websites | Serge Keller →
Early pictures of websites, including the first website, Yahoo! when it was made by people, not robots, The Facebook, Twittr, and the Dell webpage back when it was useful:
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Texas Tax System Heavily Burdens Poor Residents |... →
Texas, in particular, is “extremely imbalanced” in its reliance on sales and property taxes, the report concludes. Even without having to pay income tax, the poorest fifth of Texans ended up paying about 12 percent of their income in taxes in 2009, ITEP reports. The wealthiest 1 percent of Texans paid only 3 percent of their income in state and local taxes.
Still, Perry appears...
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The ugliness of cheering for capital punishment |... →
It is worth contemplating why it is that conservatives who believe the government is incompetent in most areas of its agency are willing to assent credulously to its unerring competence when it comes to exercising the ultimate power over its citizenry: killing them.
I think it’s because liberals tend to dread the innocent being harmed, while conservatives tend to dread the guilty going...
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Things Apple is Worth More Than →
In the category of “there is a Tumblr about it”, Josh Brown would like you to know that Apple is worth more than:
Ten times the entire National Football League
Twice the entire US clothing store business
All the gold at the New York Fed
The annual GDP of Singapore
All the illegal drugs in the world
and so on.
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Goldilocks Reviews the Sunshine Mary Jane Pump on... →
By Sarah Schmelling:
REVIEWER: Goldlox3 from Big Scary Woods
They fit now, but the only color they had in this size is “dove.” So, here goes: they’re too frumpy. Also: too easily scuffed, too loud, too friendly, too beige-smelling, too Katy-Perry-if-she-was-a-French-blacksmith-in-space, and, I don’t know, too leathery. And now that I’ve walked up and down the stairs a few times I’m...
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Got Cheap Milk? - By Charles Kenny | Foreign... →
With supermarket chains from Whole Foods to Safeway trumpeting their healthy produce from farmers just down the road, buying local and eating non-genetically modified organic food is surely the best thing for you and the planet. And that’s something government should get behind, right?
Actually, no — these First-World food fetishes are positively terrible for the world’s...
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OUR BRIDGE! | King Cobe's Decrees →
Cobe went to New York City to occupy Wall Street. As much as I am continuously aggravated by the government backing corporations and so sympathetic to the cause (see the Occupy Wall Street site), I read Cobe’s story with curiosity both regarding how protests operate and the impact they have, broadly. When the occupiers are marching, the energy runs high:
This is when we were introduced...
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Best Buy Flyer - Sept. 1996 - Imgur →
Featuring:
* A Pentium multimedia computer
* Things by Packard Bell
* The Macarena
* Cordless phones, answering machines, pagers, and a cell phone advertised as weighing 7.9 oz.
* A Sony Trinitron monitor
* Walkman
* An Apple desktop computer with answering machine and speakerphone built in
* CRT TVs
* Camcorders
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New season of Arrested Development? →
For the first time since “Arrested Development” was cancelled in 2005, the entire cast assembled today for a Bluth Family Reunion moderated by New Yorker television critic Nancy Franklin; even Ron Howard joined via telephone. The big news of the afternoon: If all goes according to plan, the series will return to television in a nine- or ten-episode limited-run series, set to film next summer,...
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Sumerians Look On In Confusion As God Creates... →
Members of the earth’s earliest known civilization, the Sumerians, looked on in shock and confusion some 6,000 years ago as God, the Lord Almighty, created Heaven and Earth.
According to recently excavated clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform script, thousands of Sumerians—the first humans to establish systems of writing, agriculture, and government—were working on their...
