MindMover
MindMover's JournalThe 'culture of shut up' is sometimes just rude people who disagree
Last week, I made a shocking discovery: some leftwing activists have developed a sinister new superpower that enables them to control other people’s actions by brainwaves alone. Their first victim was Brendan Eich, appointed then un-appointed as head of Mozilla, after his financial support for the campaign against gay marriage (and in support of Pat Buchanan) came to light. To outsiders like me, it seemed as if a high-profile firm had made a decision about its leadership; that its employees and users had engaged in vigorous debate about that decision; and that the company had decided to reverse it.
But it turned out that opponents of Eich’s new role hadn’t just been voicing their opinions. Somehow, by means I’ve yet to understand, they’d forced him to resign. That was the phrase used again and again, including in a piece entitled The Culture of Shut Up, by the former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett, with which the internet declared itself richly pleased. “We need to stop telling each other to shut up. We need to get comfortable with the reality that no one is going to shut up,” Lovett wrote, correctly. But he didn’t mean that Eich’s raucous critics should be tolerated. He meant that the Culture of Shut Up had silenced Eich, by forcing him to resign. And not just Eich. Lovett listed many more victims, including celebrity chef-and-alleged-racist Paula Deen and Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty, who, I’m told, is a man on a television show who is cross about gays.
And all that happened before Brandeis University bunglingly offered then withdrew an honorary degree for Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Oh, man.
http://www.theguardian.com/news/oliver-burkeman-s-blog/2014/apr/14/culture-shut-up-twitter-controversy-mozilla-brandeis?CMP=twt_gu
If the answer is not obvious then we are all in big trouble ...
http://action.sumofus.org/a/bayer-bees-lawsuit/"
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MH370: Is it time to stop searching for pings?
Source: CNN
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (CNN) -- Is it time for underwater search vehicles to start scanning the ocean floor in the hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370?
Some analysts say it is, because it's been days since anyone has picked up a possible signal from the missing aircraft's data recorders.
And the batteries powering the locator beacons inside the so-called black boxes are probably dead, a top official from the company that manufactures the beacons told CNN on Sunday. That means searchers may not be able to detect any more pings to help lead them to those pieces of the missing plane.
Meanwhile, the search area for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 grew over the weekend. And authorities say no one onboard the plane has been ruled out in connection with its disappearance.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/13/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-plane/index.html
Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/13/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-plane/index.html
Official says sub will be used in search for jet
PERTH, Australia — Search crews will for the first time send a sub deep into the Indian Ocean to try and determine whether signals detected by sound-locating equipment are from the missing Malaysian plane’s black boxes.
Angus Houston, the head of a joint agency coordinating the search off Australia’s west coast, said Monday that the crew on board the Ocean Shield will launch the underwater vehicle as soon as possible. The Bluefin 21 autonomous sub can create a sonar map of the area to chart any debris on the seafloor.
The move comes after crews picked up a series of underwater sounds over the past two weeks that were consistent with an aircraft’s black boxes.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/missing-planes-black-box-batteries-may-have-died/2014/04/13/2782a4dc-c372-11e3-9ee7-02c1e10a03f0_story.html?Post+generic=%3Ftid%3Dsm_twitter_washingtonpost
Submersible to search for MH370
Teams searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane are to deploy a submersible for the first time.
Search chief Angus Houston said work using the towed pinger locator would stop, with the Bluefin 21 submersible drone sent down as soon as possible.
He said no new acoustic signals thought to be from the missing plane had been detected since 8 April.
Air Chief Marshall Houston warned that the submersible search would be a long process that could yield no results.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-27017928?OCID=twitterasia
OFFICIAL SAYS SUB WILL BE USED IN SEARCH FOR JET
PERTH, Australia (AP) — Search crews will send a sub deep into the Indian Ocean on Monday for the first time to try to determine whether signals detected by sound-locating equipment are from the missing Malaysian plane's black boxes, the Australian head of the search said.
Angus Houston said the crew on board the Ocean Shield will launch the underwater vehicle sometime Monday evening. The Bluefin 21 autonomous sub can create a sonar map of the area to chart any debris on the seafloor.
The move comes after crews picked up a series of underwater sounds over the past two weeks that were consistent with an aircraft's black boxes.
"We haven't had a single detection in six days, and I guess it's time to go under water," said Houston, the head of a joint agency coordinating the search off Australia's west coast.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/missing-planes-black-box-batteries-may-have-died
Searchers Will Deploy Sub in Search for Malaysia Jet Wreckage
Investigators scouring for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet will send a submarine deep into the Indian Ocean for the first time to try and figure out whether signals picked up by sound-locating equipment are from Flight 370's black boxes, taking the hunt underwater after six weeks of searching.
The crew aboard the Australian Navy vessel Ocean Shield will launch the Bluefin 21 autonomous underwater vehicle as soon as possible, said Angus Houston, the head of a joint agency coordinating the painstaking search off Australia's west coast, at a news conference just after 12 p.m. local time (12 a.m. ET).
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/missing-jet/searchers-will-deploy-sub-search-malaysia-jet-wreckage-n79521
MH370 search to shift focus to underwater scan
Australian authorities will deploy an underwater vehicle on Monday evening to continue the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane, as it is now believed unlikely there will be any further sonar detections of the black boxes.
The search for the missing plane, which is believed to have crashed in the Indian Ocean, claiming the lives of all 239 passengers on board, will enter a new phase now on the 38th day since the plane went missing, involving an underwater search vessel known as “Blue Fin 21” that will be deployed from the Australian defence vessel Ocean Shield.
The vehicle is sent out on 24-hour search cycles, and will spend four hours on the Ocean Shield after each search, having its batteries charged and allowing the data to be downloaded and analysed. Private contractors for the US navy from Phoenix International will analyse the data onboard the Ocean Shield.
The head of Australia’s joint co-ordination centre, Angus Houston, said on Monday: “We haven’t had a single detection in six days so it’s time to go underwater … The deployment of the underwater autonomous vehicle allows us to take a step forward.”
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/14/mh370-search-to-shift-focus-to-underwater-scan?CMP=twt_fd
Nevada ranching family claims victory as government releases cattle
Source: Reuters
(Reuters) - U.S. officials ended a stand-off with hundreds of armed protesters in the Nevada desert on Saturday, calling off the government's roundup of cattle it said were illegally grazing on federal land and giving about 300 animals back to the rancher who owned them.
The dispute less than 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas between rancher Cliven Bundy and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management had simmered for days. Bundy had stopped paying fees for grazing his cattle on the government land and officials said he had ignored court orders.
Anti-government groups, right-wing politicians and gun-rights activists camped around Bundy's ranch to support him in a standoff that tapped into long-simmering anger in Nevada and other Western states, where vast tracts of land are owned and governed by federal agencies.
The bureau had called in a team of armed rangers to Nevada to seize the 1,000 head of cattle on Saturday but backed down in the interests of safety.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/14/us-usa-ranchers-nevada-idUSBREA3B03Q20140414?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter&dlvrit=992637
Everything You Need to Know About High-Frequency Trading
The stock market isn't rigged, but it is taxed.
It always has been. As Justin Fox points out, for as long as people have been trading stocks, there have been middlemen taking a cut of the action. Now, that cut has gotten smaller as markets have gotten bigger and more technologically-advanced, but it's still there. It's the implicit fee that intermediaries charge for making sure there's a buyer for every seller, and a seller for every buyer—for "making markets."
But there's a new kind of middleman today. They don't work at stock exchanges or banks. They work at hedge funds, and trade at whiz-bang speeds. These "high-frequency traders" (HFT) use computer algorithms—a.k.a., algobots—to arbitrage away the most infinitesimal price discrepancies that only exist over the most infinitesimal time horizons. You can see just how small and how fast we're talking about in the chart below from a new paper by Eric Budish and John Shim of the University of Chicago and Peter Cramton of the University of Maryland. It uses 2011 data to show the price difference between futures (blue) and exchange-traded funds (green) that both track the S&P 500. These should be perfectly correlated, and they are—at minute intervals. But this correlation disappears at 250 millisecond intervals, a little more than half the time it takes to blink your eyes. This is the "inefficiency" that HFT makes less so.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/04/everything-you-need-to-know-about-high-frequency-trading/360411/
"Does the Heartbleed Bug Mean You Should Stay Off the Internet?
Update: The NSA knew about the Heartbleed bug for at least two years and actively exploited it in order to gather intelligence, Bloomberg reported on Friday. This means that under the pretense of protecting Americans, the NSA intentionally didn't notify millions of Americans that they were vulnerable to identity theft. Go read that book, now.
On Tuesday, news broke that the safeguard many websites use to protect sensitive information on the internet has had a major security flaw for about two years. These sites use a security system called OpenSSL to encrypt data like content, passwords, and Social Security numbers. But thanks to a small coding error in a popular version of OpenSSL, nicknamed "Heartbleed," hackers can potentially steal sensitive data from vulnerable websites. Richard Bejtlich, chief security strategist at FireEye, a network security company, notes that there's no evidence that malicious hackers have exploited the flaw yet. But the secrecy-minded Tor Project, which enables anonymous internet browsing, nevertheless recommended on Monday that, "If you need strong anonymity or privacy on the internet, you might want to stay away from the internet entirely for the next few days while things settle." Here are seven reasons why you might want to stop looking at cat videos right now:
1. Lots of popular websites have the security problem.
According to the New York Times, up to two-thirds of sites on the internet rely on OpenSSL. A user on Github, an open-source coding site, compiled a list of sites that were allegedly vulnerable after a test was conducted on Tuesday. The Github list included Yahoo, Flickr, OkCupid, and Eventbrite, among dozens of other companies. (Some may have since updated their security.) Facebook and Google both released statements confirming they are not affected by the flaw. If you'd like to test a specific site to see whether it's could be exploited—although this doesn't meant that it has—go here.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/04/heartbleed-bug-internet-security-ssl
Meet the Clinton shoe-thrower
Who throws a shoe? Honestly!
That would be 36-year-old Alison Ernst of Phoenix, Arizona, who was charged Thursday night with disorderly conduct by the Las Vegas Police Department after allegedly throwing a shoe at former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
According to NBC News, who spoke with a Secret Service official, the U.S. Attorney’s office has declined federal prosecution. Ernst was wearing shoes on Thursday night when she attended a speech Clinton was giving in Las Vegas, but apparently brought an extra one specifically to throw at the former secretary of state. The official said the incident appeared to be “premeditated.”
Clinton ducked out of the shoe’s path and avoided being hit. She laughed it off with several clever quips, including “Is that somebody throwing something at me?” and “Is that part of Cirque de Soleil?” and “My goodness, I didn’t know that solid waste management was so controversial.”
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/meet-the-clinton-shoe-thrower
Guess what ...
Men have nipples because everyone is a female until the Y chromosome kicks in.
We are all girl embryos.
UN: 'Massive shift' needed on energy
A UN report on climate change is expected to call for a trebling of the planet's use of renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power.
The report is also expected to argue that the trend of increased carbon emissions can only be reversed if a "massive shift" in energy use is made.
Scientists will also cautiously endorse a shift to natural gas an alternative to carbon intensive sources.
The report will be released on Sunday at a press conference in Berlin.
It will argue that if significant action isn't taken by 2030, global temperatures could rise by more than 2 degrees C.
Such a rise in temperature would be highly dangerous, the report will argue.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-27007486
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Carbon Tax NOW, INVEST in Renewables
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