NYTeims ed, “Rethinking Criminal Sentences” (2010 July 27):
Sentencing for white-collar crimes — and for child pornography offenses — “has largely lost its moorings,” according to the Justice Department, which makes a strong case that the matter should be re-examined by the United States Sentencing Commission.
This probably makes more sense when you’re wearing a magic green jacket.
Google shopping on USPS “forever stamps.”
Mike Williams, chief electronics technician aboard Transocean Deepwater Horizon:
For months, the computer system had been locking up, producing what the crew deemed the “blue screen of death.” “It would just turn blue,” he said. “You’d have no data coming through.” Replacement hardware had been ordered but not yet installed by the time of the disaster, he said.
The shocking truth that even the Washington Post was afraid to state openly — that America’s shadow government is run by homosexuals:
I wouldn’t want to be on the WaPo‘s design team right now.
McClatchy (Blumenthal, “FDA nears approval of genetically engineered salmon,” 2010-07-11):
And the modified fish, all females, would be sterile so that they couldn’t breed with wild fish if any escaped, the company said.
You gotta be some sort of crazy liberal DFH to think that’s anything but either (a) awesome or (b) absolutely irrelevant. I mean, where else in our stewardship would we see a strong gender bias?
Brad Brace of the 12hr isbn-jpeg project auctions off “2398 hi-res art file suitable for printing,” culled from 5000 Facebook friends.
FB is not amused.
Some financial type (attribution on request — maybe):
Ben, there is real food for thought in the article below. The submarine in the picture below looks pretty crude. Given the global cash flows generated by cocaine, traffickers should be able to afford much better equipment. And I think we, Tim Geithner, and congress should seriously consider helping traffickers to secure higher-grade weaponry. The cocaine industry is just as deserving of our support as banks and investment banks are. Cocaine cartels are far more efficient than banks, more tightly managed, and infinitely better at capital allocation and risk management. Unlike the banks, the cartels excel at adapting to a fast-changing regulatory environment. Cartels are also more meritocratic and more open to promoting entry-level employees. Also, unlike the banks, the cartels are ideologically aligned with us: they genuinely embrace no-holds-barred unregulated Milton-Friedmanesque free-market capitalism. No trafficking organization is too big to fail, and the very real penalties for failure keep them on their toes. Yes, they do occasionally torture people and kill them, but only for sound business reasons. And you have to balance that against the fact that they don’t suck money out of the pockets of innocent taxpayers. For all these reasons, we should consider a tighter working relationship with the cartels. A cocaine dealer arms race could have a major stimulative effect on the American economy. First we could have United Technologies build the dealers a bigger, fancier set of submarines, possibly armed with tactical nuclear weapons. Then we could have the Coast Guard give Raytheon a contract to build new narco-submarine detection and interdiction equipment. Voila — hyper-charged economic stimulus. Some of the technology that gets developed might even have civilian applications. Then we could have the Federal Reserve purchase five thousand tons of the white powder — it will hold its value a lot better than Maiden Lane II, let me tell you — and distribute it to investment banking prop desk traders and programmers, adding that little je ne sais quoi to the capital markets. Meanwhile, cocaine production has a much larger economic multiplier effect than most forms of stimulus: it increases the incomes of campesinos, narcotraficantes, policemen, judges, politicians and prostitutes, restauranteurs, and fine global corporations like LVMH, Ambev, BMW, Sturm Rueger, and Garmin. Moreover, cocaine also increases productivity, causing workers to zip around like foxes with their tails on fire and improving their ability to multitask. This initiative would play to our strengths. If there is one manufacturing industry where America still holds an edge, it is complex high-tech weaponry. Also, the cartels still have an inexplicable affection for the greenback. We should make every effort to encourage this quaint retro commitment to the dollar. We could start by introducing the cartels to the primary dealers and encouraging them to recycle their profits into treasury auctions. As you know, China is no longer pulling its weight in the treasury auctions, and the cartels are the perfect replacement. The cartels could also conceivably repo treasuries from the investment banks. Our shadow banking system may have had its little problems, but no one has ever questioned its complete opacity and imperviousness to regulatory oversight. Moreover, it would be a huge win to get the cartels to take some of that trillion dollars of mortgage-backed securities off our balance sheet. The cartels are better equipped than we are to straighten out the complex legal problems blocking liquidation of those assets. For example, the cartels have a particular expertise in foreclosure, collection of bad debts, and co-opting the judicial apparatus at the local level. My final point, strictly entre nous, is that we can’t all go to work for Goldman Sachs or J.P. Morgan when we leave the Fed (it would just look bad), and embracing the cartels would open up a whole new set of career paths for our people.
Students aspire to do all kinds of things, but ‘creating value’ isn’t one of the first things that most, if asked, would answer. What they end up doing may have that effect, but blithely relying on the creepy rubric to gloss over how they’d describe their own aspirations seems unwise. (Do Jägerbombs ‘create value’? Possibly authoritative sources for answering this question include your local Red Bull sales rep co-branding coordinator, horndogs stoked at the idea of girls gone wild, bar waitrons, etc).
Nicholas Knouf’s official statement:
I am very happy to announce the launching of the Journal of Journal Performance Studies.
Journal of Journal Performance Studies (JJPS) is a series of three interrelated works that engage with academic publishing. The project consists of a Firefox extension, an online radio, and a journal. The JJPS Firefox Extension overlays bibliometric data, graphs of journal ownership, and journal cost onto publisher websites. The extension also replaces advertisements on scholarly sites to provide a glimpse into the future of scholarly distribution. JJPS Radio is designed as a fully-automated internet radio station, presenting recitations of articles in our database of hundreds, translations of texts into sound, and news and views important for the study of journal performance. JJPS Radio suggests not only new methods for the dispersion of academic work, but also re-purposes academic texts as its source material. The Journal is an experiment in the propagation of scholarly work. The hope is that the journal will develop into an ongoing project on the limits of contemporary intellectual representation.
His less official announcement is a bit more obviously witty:
An aside of rare bluntness from Reuters about one legacy of US military adventurism:
The resort town has been known for its vibrant nightlife and sex trade since the days of the Vietnam War, partly due to its proximity to an American air force base at the time.
The US pulled out of Vietnam in April 1975, so that’s be about thirty-five years of sex trade in a neighboring country.
Some enterprise users built internal line-of-business applications around IE6 — and are now stuck with it. Others are planning to run Windows XP into the ground — or at least until 2014, when Microsoft officially ends support for it. And because IE6 is what’s built into XP, that’s what these companies are going to allow their users to run. Still, other firms have opted to use IE6 as a kind of blocking tool. They’re counting on the Microsoft legacy browser to fail to work with some popular sites, such as Facebook, Google Docs and Google Reader, and serve as a passive-aggressive way to prevent their users from accessing these sites on their work machines and on the company’s dime.
(df)
Following up on “Home naming is killing the, oh, nevermind…“ (2009 Dec 09), the Wikipedia entry on Ted Klaudt (“accessed,” as they say, 6 July 2010) reports:
“Copyrighting” his name
In December 2009, Ted Klaudt sent a “Common Law Copyright Notice” to the Associated Press and various state media outlets warning that use of his name, Ted Klaudt, without permission is a violation of a common-law copyright of a trade name or trademark and could result in a judgment against the offender of up to US$500,000.[5] Laura Malone, associated general counsel for intellectual property at The Associated Press, noted that the names of individuals, including Ted Klaudt, cannot be protected under copyright law.[1] The resulting publicity made his case more famous than ever, a syndrome sometimes termed the “Streisand effect”.
The AP story today:
The dependent NYT article today:
The Rapid City Journal seems to have been less impressed.
The NYTeims reports on the United States of Bananas (Stour, “Coveted but Elusive Summer Internship,” 2010 July 2):
As a result, the big-name internship has become coveted capital — a reality that was showcased in the extreme when the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights recently auctioned media internships to help raise money for its cause. The opportunity to work — unpaid — went for some pretty big amounts: $2,900 at Vanity Fair, $9,000 at the Huffington Post — and an eye-popping $42,500 at Vogue.
Why pay someone to work when you can donate entrée to an unpaid job so a nonprofit can auction it off to the highest bidder?
For too long, normal white people have had to sit by and watch the efflorescence of new forms of subjectivity and identity. True, some of them joined the fun — but many, in re/discovering themselves, found that they weren’t LGBT, weren’t involved in a multicultural relationship, didn’t have a blended family, and just weren’t marginal, transgressive, or anything else. They were just normal, boring white people, the fat part of the bell curve. The end of the American Century and creeping precarity were bad enough, but this, this cultural obsolescence…it was too much.
The Tea Party: Stonewall for boring white people.
Apple, on discovering that “bars” are not just ephemeral but illusory:
“We are also making bars 1, 2 and 3 a bit taller so they will be easier to see.”
Bars of a prison, bars of a dissolute life, bars of gold — an awful metaphor given not just new life but, as they like to say these days, a new domain.
Don’t be accidentally on purpose evil.
Nine days ago the data protection authority (DPA) in Hamburg, Germany asked to audit the WiFi data that our Street View cars collect for use in location-based products like Google Maps for mobile, which enables people to find local restaurants or get directions. His request prompted us to re-examine everything we have been collecting, and during our review we discovered that a statement made in a blog post on April 27 was incorrect.
In that blog post, and in a technical note sent to data protection authorities the same day, we said that while Google did collect publicly broadcast SSID information (the WiFi network name) and MAC addresses (the unique number given to a device like a WiFi router) using Street View cars, we did not collect payload data (information sent over the network). But it’s now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) WiFi networks, even though we never used that data in any Google products.
Not “accidentally” or “inadvertently”: mistakenly.
NYTeims (Wilford, “Mapping Ancient Civilization, in a Matter of Days,” 2010-05-11):
“Now we have a totality of data and see the entire landscape,” Dr. Arlen Chase said of the laser findings. “We know the size of the site, its boundaries, and this confirms our population estimates, and we see all this terracing and begin to know how the people fed themselves.”
See also: “From the ontological-hysterical archives.”
Hackers behind the rootkit responsible for crippling Windows machines after users installed a Microsoft security patch have updated their malware so that it no longer crashes systems, researchers confirmed today.
See also: “FIRE, Detroit, GOP, Microsoft.”
Searching the Wii’s “Virtual Console” for “mari” — as in Mario — turns up one possible autocompletion that might explain why the Wii is so popular:
5th Pillar‘s zero-rupee note (in Tamil, front and back:), intended as a means of protest for those too poor to pay a bribes: they’re supposed to hand this over rather than actual currency.
This seems ill-conceived all around: a private protest likely to transform impersonal corruption into personal persecution (where shouting, say, at least can attract attention); an expensive surrogate for one of the few things the poor have (speech); a general approach to a problem that is everywhere specific; and so on. And, of course, who are these people too poor to pay a bribe but not too poor to print a jpeg from the web? Third parties might intervene by printing and distributing them to the poor — central banks for anticorruption. But who knows?
Also available in Hindi, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayam.
( World Bank | Felix Salmon )
A great improvement over an inexplicably beloved brand franchise:
