From TNR's symposium on Afghanistan.

Asia - Business and Economy - Government - United States - Bank of England

Dezeen Magazine has the drop on this superb clock that shows the time in every time zone, using just one hand.

The clock is called Bent Hands and is designed by Giha Woo and Shingoeun.

Via Neatorama

Read the comments on this post...(author unknown)

This is generously borrowed from the PostgreSQL Docs, and updated to something that represents a modern approach to PostgreSQL backups. This documentation has always bothered me because it should have been re-written years ago. Yes I plan on submitting a more comprehensive version as a patch but I don't have time to push it into DocBook right now. If someone else wants to grab it, please do. Yes, I really do believe the use of plain text backups is a mistake. Yes I realize PostgreSQL has the limitation of not being able to backup the cluster in anyway but plain text. The standard for portable backups with PostgreSQL is pg_dump and pg_dumpall. When used properly pg_dump will create a portable and highly customizable backup file that can be used to restore all or part of a single database. The pg_dump application acts as a standard PostgreSQL client. This means that you can perform this backup procedure from any remote host that has access to the database. You do not need to be a super user to use pg_dump but you must have read (and EXECUTE for functions) access to every object within the database. Backups created by pg_dump are internally consistent, meaning, the dump represents a snapshot of the database at the time pg_dump began running. The backup will not block other operations on the database while it is working. (Exceptions are those operations that need to operate with an exclusive lock, such as most forms of ALTER TABLE.) The minimum useful syntax for pg_dump is: pg_dump dbname > outfile However, the backup created from this method has limited usefulness. It can be used to restore a single database in full. A more useful and proper form of PostgreSQL backup syntax looks like this: pg_dump -U $username --format=c --file=$mydatabase.sqlc $dbname The options in detail are: -U, --username=NAME connect as specified database user -F, --format=c|t|p output file format (custom, tar, plain text) -f, --file=FILENAME output file name The most important of which is --format. By default pg_dump uses the plain text format. The plain text format is useful for very small databases with a minimal number of objects but other than that, it should be avoided. The custom format allows for a wealth of customizability. Using the custom format you are able to restore single objects from a backup. For example to restore only a specified index from a backup file: pg_restore -U $username --dbname=$dbname --index=$indexname If you wanted to restore only a single function: pg_restore -U $username --dbname=$dbname --function=$functionname(args) If you wanted to restore only a single table: pg_restore -U $username --dbname=$dbname --table=$tablename For more information on all the pg_dump options, please see the reference page. Restoring the dump The command used to restore a backup file is pg_restore. It has similar options to pg_dump. A simple restore: pg_restore -U$username --dbname=$databasename $filename Where filename is the name of the backup file. Do not confuse --file with $filename. The --file option is used to turn a custom format backup into a plain text backup. The value of --file will be used as the output file for that transformation. If you make the mistake of creating a plain text backup, pg_restore can not be used as a restoration mechanism. You can use psql to restore it: psql $dbname $backupfile Backing up every database The "postgresql" way of backing up every database is to use the command pg_dumpall. Unfortunately pg_dumpall can only create plain text backups and should be considered deprecated. However it is the only way to backup the globals in your cluster. A reasonable backup strategy to backup your globals and produce a flexible backup of every database in the cluster would look like this: pg_dumpall -g -U$username --file=$globals.sql; psql -AtU postgres -c "SELECT datname FROM pg_database \ WHERE NOT datistemplate"| \ while read f; do pg_dump -Upostgres --format=c --file=$f.sqlc $f; done; If someone knows of some Windows code that produces a similar result, it would be great if you would share. Remember, pg_dumpall creates a plain text backup. This means you will need to use psql to restore the globals backup file. After restoring a backup, make sure you run ANALYZE to update the statistics. I know this isn't as comprehensive as it could be, but hey, its just a blog.(author unknown)1015390613620224411608725652041167378087

Well this is one lucky Tiffany here, but she's not alone. Wired UK was first to report that Samsung's been quietly dishing out free Galaxy S handsets (the European flavor) to a few lucky British Twitter users. How so? Oh, four of them just made a fuss about their iPhone 4s, and the fifth guy needed help to choose between the Desire, iPhone 4 and Galaxy S. Before you all start tweeting your way to a free Android phone, though, it looks like the Korean giant's only picking certain influencers for some cheap publicity -- turns out our Tiffany here works in Digital Marketing for Condé Nast, which is coincidentally Wired's parent company. Tut tut tut. The other tweeples all appear to be similarly involved in marketing or publishing, with the exception of one student.

As if it hasn't already rubbed enough salt into Apple's wound, Samsung UK's also running new Galaxy S ads that take an indirect shot at the iPhone 4's antenna controversy with a clever bit of typography -- you can see the dirty work after the break. Very nice, Sammy, but you better be careful playing with fire here, as we've found it pretty easy to death grip Galaxy S phones like the Captivate into losing a fair bit of signal.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Continue reading Samsung dispatching free Galaxy S handsets to iPhone 4 whiners on Twitter?

Samsung dispatching free Galaxy S handsets to iPhone 4 whiners on Twitter? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Wired UK  |  @samsungukmobile (Twitter) (1), (2), (3), (4)  | Email this | CommentsRichard Lai105249404977945091000834820375990833294414885494554096291064125759210128781128591514345738170101710909141663845289345650068070694277040512780931203387195823324903035223867491405321069253511853509052710908074962235259139316039527976128033686115268798723313141531245705290336912894915090121549622458617063735377836324241541290526720403350809414309340780453675536122835356678563999261252485851479871774516523526798902831884175432918589603965080484133547632613385715532883671000433681070716964656486590201351567395441826792202482163204506775199019248682053888001201776529036380414299704226994284551721356060087219960022046600997384091232843110002308827960459694717036989149821171732991823700049861278796517662039786915747868177158066219027867211431668473210543379202510298501820695431119439337271437837290207846034727679878400762398053736439035012033827848677250990980975256470805690314754904777283236952021587469067920763130523254169471655877410714456525799019741145758269454051671820923802563002446111101283567726076153494056184554188932777931021945666561711659614177662329411081428116327512184004634681524262457460530409314219907492392040299017958723817456958451675350010897507634708067905058702299807015133574468215776820604437123649582887313994099104502943631131654451358841423930353325837909739022403111779159494569156019089351791616656391211557267604774878606322551553253102976180951777516477520071199393446011828279201286600368596648475102898968201516854780350574145462047176207068743179246131876085833847176751322110074530071208333337818120468709065437730001124223986634897730756782868284503979903453924166205374639126438028013698052181001049816558467867609582910181759246482

"The light that burns twice as bright burns for half as long - and you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy. Look at you: you're the Prodigal Son; you're quite a prize!" -Tyrell, from Blade Runner Look up at the night sky. On a clear, dark night with normal vision, you can literally see thousands of stars.

Some of them are barely visible, others shine so brightly that they come out when the sky's still blue! Why do some appear brighter than others? Two reasons. Some stars are simply closer to us, but others, intrinsically, shine spectacularly bright. Let's take a look at a small section of the Southern sky.

Alpha Centauri (in yellow, above) is one of the brightest stars in the night sky, coming in at #4 on the list. It's similar to our Sun, only a little bit bigger and brighter, and has roughly the same color. The reason it's so bright, though, is that it's so incredibly close to us: only 4.4 light years distant.

But take a look at the second brightest star above (the blue one). Known as Beta Centauri, it's the 10th brightest star in the night sky, appearing about 70% as bright as its yellow neighbor. Except Beta Centauri isn't really Alpha Centauri's neighbor. While that yellow star is 4.4 light years away, Beta Centauri, the blue one, is 530 light years away, or over 100 times as far away!

Why then, does Beta Centauri appear almost as bright as Alpha Centauri?

Well, because it's a different type of star! If we go by color, yellow Alpha Centauri is a "G-type" star, much like our Sun. But Beta Centauri is one of the bluest stars out there, making it a "B-type" star. In fact, if it were just a little bluer, it'd be an "O-type" star, the bluest of them all.

Surprisingly, we can learn a lot from a star's color. For the whole time a star burns Hydrogen into Helium -- just like our Sun has been doing since its birth billions of years ago -- its color is indicative of another property. Take a look at the picture below.

The bluer ones are bigger, too. In fact, the bluer a star is, the larger, brighter, and hotter it is as well! And Tyrell from Blade Runner got it right: the brighter, hotter, bluer stars burn through their fuel faster!

A "G-star" like our Sun will live about 10 billion years. A star only 10% as massive, an "M-star", will live many trillions of years! But what if you start looking at stars more massive than our Sun? Well, you need to know where to look, because the very massive ones are rare. We find most of them inside star clusters, like 30 Doradus, below.

A "B-type" star, like Beta Centauri, can be up to about 12 times as massive as our Sun, and instead of 10 billion years, only lasts about 10-20 million years before it burns out all of its fuel. Despite being over 100 times farther away and having much more fuel to burn, a B-type star can appear incredibly bright and short-lived, because it burns its fuel over 10,000 times faster than the Sun does!

But they're not even the most extreme stars in the Universe. If you can get more than around 12-15 times the mass of the Sun together in one star, you're going to get the brightest, hottest star type in the whole Universe, an "O-type" star, like Alnitak (below).

But why muck around with a star only 28 times as massive as our Sun? Even though Alnitak has a total lifetime of just one or two million years or so, we can find even brighter, heavier, shorter-lived ones. If we look near the center of the galaxy, we can find star WR 102ka, located in the Peony Nebula below.

WR 102ka is located where the bright white spot near the center of the image is, and it weighs in at a whopping 175 times the mass of the Sun! At around 25,000 light years away, WR 102ka has an incredibly interesting property: it's already dead! A star that massive will live less than 25,000 years, and since the light we're seeing now left that star 25,000 years ago, it's already burned up all of its fuel, and has likely died in a tremendous supernova explosion!

But WR 102ka, you need to move your skinny butt over. There's a new star in town that's got you beat.

(And click to enlarge this image above.)

Deep inside the Large Magellanic Cloud, 160,000 light years away, the star R136a1 has just shattered all of the records.

It weighs in at 265 times the mass of the Sun. It's so massive that it's probably already blown off something like 60 times the mass of the Sun, meaning it was over 300 times as massive as the Sun when it was born. A star like this is unheard of, and many were dubious that a star like this could have even existed! With a lifetime under 10,000 years, we're lucky to have caught a glimpse of it at all!

And since it is the biggest star we've ever found, would you like to see an illustration of just how big it is?

In terms of size, this star is to the Sun like Jupiter is to the Earth: huge!

In terms of energy output, this one star, R136a1, radiates more than 10 million times faster than our Sun. Imagine that, for a minute. If you replaced the Sun with this star, you'd be able to place Earth nearly an entire light-year away from the Sun, and life would still survive. For comparison, in our solar system, it takes sunlight less than nine minutes to reach us.

So be aware that behemoths like this are out there, burning through Hydrogen with the fury of millions of Suns, and be very, very happy about the fact that they're as far away from us as they are!

Read the comments on this post...(author unknown)05848138683244235982034563661326153522240899042345064573963911999956919771845077015844160192601754421224421087639673460015568066990702432803058909597649850224471577646548724547354008171045344855446125057512498974388844980758192949914186679605650439971478030852

Hat tip: Buzzfeed.

BuzzFeed - Web Design and Development - Hosting - Free - Children

This is excellent.

And it's been cracked already.

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"If you only look at a person through one lens, or only believe what you're told, you can often miss the truth that is staring you in the face." -Kevin Spacey One of the most powerful ideas from Einstein's theory of Gravity -- General Relativity -- is that any massive object in the Universe not only causes a gravitational force on other masses, but also bends light!

This was confirmed in 1919 by observing the positions of stars during a total solar eclipse; the stars closest to the Sun had their apparent position shift due to the gravitational bending of the light rays!

How does this happen? The mass acts just like a lens does, bending the light rays! Only, instead of being a glass, plastic or acrylic lens, it's a gravitational lens.

In 1936, Fritz Zwicky, the same guy who theorized the existence of dark matter, realized that distant galaxies could act as gravitational lenses also! After all, they have mass, and if there are other objects emitting light behind them, that light could get bent towards us!

Although it wasn't discovered observationally until 1979, this phenomenon, known as strong gravitational lensing, has given us some of the most remarkable images in the Universe.

Those weird arcs in the above image -- of cluster Abell 370 -- are due to gravitational lensing. Gravitational lensing is great for distorting the light from background objects, and therefore for distorting the shapes of lensed galaxies.

Any other neat effects of gravitational lenses?

Multiple images! Do you see what looks like five bright blue stars (with crosshair-style rays) in the image above? Those are actually five multiple images of the same quasar! In many of the images, you can actually see the host galaxy that the quasar resides in!

In fact, just two years ago, we discovered an incredible alignment of three objects nearly all in a perfect row from our vantage point. What does that give us?

Two almost perfect, concentric rings!

It turns out that there's only one thing that determines how much (and what type of) bending we get, given your galaxies in a certain place. All that matters is the mass of the thing acting as a gravitational lens! So if I put down a distant galaxy in the background and then a lens in the foreground, by observing what the background light does, I can easily figure out how much mass is in the lens. In fact, there are software packages out there that will even do it for you.

This is true whether it's a galaxy, a cluster of galaxies, or an individual star doing the lensing. But that's usually not such a big deal. After all, by observing a galaxy, a cluster of galaxies, or an individual star, we can usually learn a lot about its mass from other means.

But you know what would be a huge advance?

If we could find something of unknown mass acting as a gravitational lens!

Well, there's a new paper out (with some great new images) by two joint teams from Caltech and Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, respectively, led by George Djorgovski and Georges Meylan. And they found exactly that, for the first time.

Instead of a star, galaxy, or cluster of galaxies, the object acting as a lens is a quasar (shown below), where the galaxy its found in is completely obscured by the blazing core!

Under normal circumstances, we'd never be able to know the mass of the galaxy housing this quasar. But because of the gravitational lens, we can figure it out!

Want to know something that makes this even more amazing? This image was taken from the ground, with all of the Earth's atmosphere to contend with! It is amazing how good adaptive optics have gotten!

And thanks to these observations, this is the first time we've ever seen a quasar act as a strong gravitational lens!

And what they found is that there's a mass of 22 billion Suns within the innermost kiloparsec (about 3,000 light years) of this quasar and its host galaxy!

This is the very first time this technique has been used to measure the mass of a quasar's host galaxy, and the very first time we've seen a quasar act as a gravitational lens! You can bet it won't be the last. So, welcome to the birth of a new way to do astronomy, and enjoy the images and analysis from this first discovery!

Read the comments on this post...(author unknown)0618607929272186267801584416019260175442122442108763967346000446825613442215716705650439971478030852

Image purportedly shows a Humble Oil "melting glacier" advertisement from 1962.snopes@snopes.com

How Britain has changed since 1997.

(Hat tip: Yau)

Hosting - Web Design and Development - Free - United States - Espionage

Mercifully, they do seem as if they are finally taking sexual abuse as seriously as they should. But in the same document, according to insiders, they also elevate another act to that of  "most grave crimes." The act in question? Attempting to ordain a woman as a priest.

Abusing children and ordaining women? The same level of obloquy from Benedict. That tells you a lot, I think.

Sexual abuse - Child abuse - Priest - Support Groups - Vatican

The sheepdog block driver for qemu has been merged into mainline qemu providing access to sheepdog’s distributed storage system. Sheepdog is the first driver for a distributed file system to be included into upstream qemu ( I don’t consider nbd to be a distributed file system ). The sheepdog team has been been submitting patches since last year for inclusion into qemu.

Since then, there have been a few revisions and just a few days ago it was merged into upstream qemu. You now have native access to the client block drivers in qemu. What is also noteworthy is that qemu is currently the only client for the sheepdog distributed file system. With the inclusion into upstream qemu, you can expect to see these drivers merged into qemu-kvm very soon.

Using the sheepdog distributed file system requires the following:

• Three or more x86-64 machines
• Corosync cluster engine

A typical session using qemu with sheepdog will look like the following example taken from the sheepdog website. On the cluster nodes:

Install corosync on the nodes

yum install corosync <--------- install corosync service corosync start <--------- start the daemon

Once qemu with sheepdog drivers are released in future you simply need to install qemu or qemu-kvm.

yum install qemu-kvm <-------- install qemu/kvm

Until the sheepdog drivers have been merged into qemu-kvm, you’ll have to use the instructions at the following page.

http://www.osrg.net/sheepdog/usage.html

Run the following commands to start your qemu session using the sheepdog distributed filesystem.

sheep /store <---- launch on each cluster node collie cluster format --copies=3 <----- specify data redundancy qemu-img create sheepdog:Alice 256G <----- create the disk image on sheepdog qemu-system-x86_64 sheepdog:Alice <----- start qemu/kvm

The sheepdog website has been updated and provides some good documentation on getting started with sheepdog including how to convert images to sheepdog format and using snapshots with sheepdog. See the following page on getting started with sheepdog with the qemu client.

http://www.osrg.net/sheepdog/usage.html
 

Haydn Solomon1217184184994959208510314834615052755310064194081303234746731223099976807336284106947507505228527571065997379075172303300485507684618532686501993857499677576189167780801250458570870636307925967771028212993981182342687684062094459950777765291746805956552427076612077786968492113672050550963270710909210952570714720263677113253302024960493265021936646494402955021715752003466750156317235334906474059075138686548020273977901075235485146515299306043141133165588466042959276877734527751756065049488269808302072535751339202631090721697540990300290517490738260174185013813399869481268455092888820650117833910634533956943045044204744476210212481943

The sheepdog block driver for qemu has been merged into mainline qemu providing access to sheepdog’s distributed storage system. Sheepdog is the first driver for a distributed file system to be included into upstream qemu ( I don’t consider nbd to be a distributed file system ). The sheepdog team has been been submitting patches since last year for inclusion into qemu.

Since then, there have been a few revisions and just a few days ago it was merged into upstream qemu. You now have native access to the client block drivers in qemu. What is also noteworthy is that qemu is currently the only client for the sheepdog distributed file system. With the inclusion into upstream qemu, you can expect to see these drivers merged into qemu-kvm very soon.

Using the sheepdog distributed file system requires the following:

• Three or more x86-64 machines
• Corosync cluster engine

A typical session using qemu with sheepdog will look like the following example taken from the sheepdog website. On the cluster nodes:

Install corosync on the nodes

yum install corosync <--------- install corosync service corosync start <--------- start the daemon

Once qemu with sheepdog drivers are released in future you simply need to install qemu or qemu-kvm.

yum install qemu-kvm <-------- install qemu/kvm

Until the sheepdog drivers have been merged into qemu-kvm, you’ll have to use the instructions at the following page.

http://www.osrg.net/sheepdog/usage.html

Run the following commands to start your qemu session using the sheepdog distributed filesystem.

sheep /store <---- launch on each cluster node collie cluster format --copies=3 <----- specify data redundancy qemu-img create sheepdog:Alice 256G <----- create the disk image on sheepdog qemu-system-x86_64 sheepdog:Alice <----- start qemu/kvm

The sheepdog website has been updated and provides some good documentation on getting started with sheepdog including how to convert images to sheepdog format and using snapshots with sheepdog. See the following page on getting started with sheepdog with the qemu client.

http://www.osrg.net/sheepdog/usage.html
 

Haydn Solomon1217184184994959208510314834615052755310064194081303234746731223099976807336284106947507505228527571065997379075172303300485507684618532686501993857499677576189167780801250458570870636307925967771028212993981182342687684062094459950777765291746805956552427076612077786968492113672050550963270710909210952570714720263677113253302024960493265021936646494402955021715752003466750156317235334906474059075138686548020273977901075235485146515299306043141133165588466042959276877734527751756065049488269808302072535751339202631090721697540990300290517490738260174185013813399869481268455092888820650117833910634533956943045044204744476210212481943

Bradley M. Kuhn has a thought-provoking post with the title "Proprietary Software Licensing Produces No New Value In Society". Here's a key section:

I've often been paid for programming, but I've been paid directly for the hours I spent programming. I never even considered it reasonable to be paid again for programming I did in the past. How is that fair, just, or quite frankly, even necessary? If I get a job building a house, I can't get paid every day someone uses that house. Indeed, even if I built the house, I shouldn't get a royalty paid every time the house is resold to a new owner. Why should software work any differently? Indeed, there's even an argument that software, since it's so much more trivial to copy than a house, should be available gratis to everyone once it's written the first time.
He then goes on to point out:

Thus, this line of reasoning gives me yet another reason to oppose proprietary software: proprietary licensing is simply a valueless transaction. It creates a burden on society and gives no benefit, other than a financial one to those granted the monopoly over that particular software program. Unfortunately, there nevertheless remain many who want that level of control, because one fact cannot be denied: the profits are larger.

For example, Mårten Mikos recently argued in favor of these sorts of large profits. He claims that to "benefit massively from Open Source" (i.e., to get really rich), business models like “Open Core” are necessary. Mårten's argument, and indeed most pro-Open-Core arguments, rely on this following fundamental assumption: for FLOSS to be legitimate, it must allow for the same level of profits as proprietary software. This assumption, in my view, is faulty. It's always true that you can make bigger profits by ignoring morality. Factories can easily make more money by completely ignoring environmental issues; strip mining is always very profitable, after all. However, as a society, we've decided that the environment is worth protecting, so we have rules that do limit profit maximization because a more important goal is served.
This analysis is cognate with my recent post about the absence of billion-dollar turnover open source companies: the fact is, as a pure-play free software outfit, you just can't make so much money as you can with proprietary software, because you generally have to sell scarce things like people's time, and that doesn't scale.

But the implications of this point are much wider, I think.

As Kuhn emphasies:

I'll just never be fully comfortable with the idea that workers should get money for work they already did. Work is only valuable if it produces something new that didn't exist in the world before the work started, or solves a problem that had yet to be solved. Proprietary licensing and financial bets on market derivatives have something troubling in common: they can make a profit for someone without requiring that someone to do any new work. Any time a business moves away from actually producing something new of value for a real human being, I'll always question whether the business remains legitimate.
This idea of getting money for work already done is precisely how copyright is regarded these days. It's not enough for a creator to be paid once for his or her work: they want to be paid every time it is performed or copies made of performances.

So ingrained is this idea that anyone suggesting the contrary - like that doughty young Eleanor - is regarded as some kind of alien from another planet, and is mocked by those whose livelihoods depend upon this kind of entitlement economics.

But just as open source has cut down the fat profits of proprietary software companies, so eventually will the exorbitant profits of the media industry be cut back to reasonable levels based on how much work people do - because, as Kuhn notes, there really is no justification for anything more.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.noreply@blogger.com (glyn moody)09672041804595895303

(updated below - Update II)

From an Associated Press article today on the conviction in China of an American citizen accused of spying and collecting "state secrets":

BEIJING – An American geologist held and tortured by China's state security agents was sentenced to eight years in prison Monday for gathering data on the Chinese oil industry in a case that highlights the government's use of vague secrets laws to restrict business information.

In pronouncing Xue Feng guilty of spying and collecting state secrets, the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People's Court said his actions "endangered our country's national security." . . . Agents from China's internal security agency detained Xue in November 2007 and tortured him, stubbing lit cigarettes into his arms in the early days of his detention.

A few cigarette stubs into a forearm for a handful of days?  That's it?  That's "torture"?  Not according to the official definition of that term adopted by the U.S. Government, as explained by John Yoo:

Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death. For purely mental pain or suffering to amount to torture (under U.S. law), it must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years.

Placing a lit cigarette on someone's arm is unquestionably painful, but clearly does not rise to the level of pain "accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."  Moreover, any psychological harm would likely be fleeting, not of "significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years" -- that's at least as true as the psychological harm from being repeatedly strapped onto a board and drowned close to the point of death.  Making AP's use of the term "torture" even more journalistically inexcusable is that the Chinese Government has repeatedly and categorically denied that it uses "torture":

During the U.N. review of China’s human rights record on Monday (Feb. 9), Chinese delegate Song Hansong of the Supreme People's Procuratorate said that use of torture to obtain evidence was a criminal offense and that China had "established a comprehensive safeguard measure against torture in all our prisons and detention facilities."

"China is firmly against torture and would never allow torture to be used on ethnic groups, religious believers or other groups," Song said.  

Given the standards of Good Journalism prevailing in the U.S. media, as taught to us just this weekend by high-level executives at the NYT and The Washington Post (and previously at NPR):  what right does AP have to "take sides" in this dispute by substituting its own judgment about "torture" for the Chinese Government's?  Beyond that, given that the U.S. Government has officially adopted a definition of "torture" that plainly does not include a few cigarette stubs on an arm, shouldn't that preclude any Good Journalist from using the term in this subjective and biased way?  I hope AP will be apologizing to the Chinese shortly for its act of journalistic irresponsibility.  It's not the role of journalists to take sides this way.

* * * * * 

As I noted yesterday, Time's Alex Perry appeared in the comment section at FAIR's website after that media watchdog group had criticized an article Perry wrote on the Congo.  FAIR pointed out, accurately, that Perry concealed from his readers the vital role played by the U.S. in foisting the tyrant Mobutu Sese Seko on Congo (while heaping all the blame on that country).  Among other petulant complaints, Perry bitterly mocked the idea that an upstanding, important news magazine such as Time would ever, ever shape its news coverage at the direction of the U.S. Government ("grow up," he bellowed).  Read Jonathan Schwarz's documented response to that, as compelling a response as I've read on the Internet to something like Perry's denialism.  Perry complained that FAIR did not contact him to obtain his comment before writing its critique, so to accommodate Perry's complaint, I've emailed him to ask for his response to Schwarz's post, as well as to other issues raised by his complaints.  I've not yet heard from him, but will post his response if and when I receive one.

 

UPDATE:  As lysias notes in comments, the North Vietnamese have emphatically denied that the techniques they used on John McCain constituted "torture":

The Republican US presidential candidate John McCain was not tortured during his captivity in North Vietnam, the chief prison guard of the jail in which he was held has claimed.

In an interview with the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, Nguyen Tien Tran acknowledged that conditions in the prison were "tough, though not inhuman". But, he added: "We never tortured McCain.  On the contrary, we saved his life, curing him with extremely valuable medicines that at times were not available to our own wounded."

Despite that, The New York Times states as though there is no dispute about it that McCain "was tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam."  How can Bill Keller possibly justify taking sides this way concerning the meaning of "torture," something which, he told us this weekend, is not what Good Journalists do?  That's a particularly pressing question given that even the techniques to which McCain claims he was subjected are not "torture" under the U.S. definition to which the NYT is so deferential.  As I noted the other day, quoting Orwell, we don't need a state-run media because so many of our most influential outlets volunteer for the task.

 

UPDATE II:  Strangely, at some point after I wrote this, the above-linked AP article was re-written so as to edit out the word "torture" in the two places that word appeared to describe what the Chinese did (though the original language can still be seen in this old version of the AP article).  Perhaps, as recommended here, AP took to heart the Bill-Keller/WashPost/ NPR standard -- if a Government denies it did X, then a Good Journalist does not say that it did X -- and edited its article accordingly.

Glenn Greenwald13567648622507188795130954124815629457880663652439164750142614424747511956392722096720418045958953031446681155178789816311954715567535265610111621214962294268570976833335827130590416958550404071364132052452438272478807530947013181711555834311977667530585662757

For those who are trying to run JBoss Tools on Eclipse 3.6 aka Helios then we are working on getting a M1 build out, but for those

eager to use Helios the nightly builds can help you.

 

We recommend you use the update site over any of the separate standalone zip builds, thus either use the updatesite (http://download.jboss.org/jbosstools/updates/nightly/trunk/) or the update site zip from the nightly zip builds.

 

Don't forget to let us know if you find something not working as you expect. You can do so in our jira

or discuss them in the forums

 

Have fun!

Max Andersen05207053305331749519

Andrew wrote last week about the stock market's May 6 "flash crash", and whether it might have been caused by a denial-of-service attack. He points to a detailed analysis by nanex.com that unpacks what happened and postulates a DoS attack as a likely cause. The nanex analysis is interesting and suggestive, but I see the situation as more complicated and even more interesting.

Before diving in, two important caveats: First, I don't have access to raw data about what happened in the market that day, so I will accept the facts as posited by nanex. If nanex's description is wrong or incomplete, my analysis won't be right. Second, I am not a lawyer and am not making any claims about what is lawful or unlawful. With that out of the way ...

Here's a short version of what happened, based on the nanex data:
(1) Some market participants sent a large number of quote requests to the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) computers.
(2) The NYSE normally puts outgoing price quotes into a queue before they are sent out. Because of the high rate of requests, this queue backed up, so that some quotes took a (relatively) long time to be sent out.
(3) A quote lists a price and a time. The NYSE determined the price at the time the quote was put into the queue, and timestamped each quote at the time it left the queue. When the queues backed up, these quotes would be "stale", in the sense that they had an old, no-longer-accurate price --- but their timestamps made them look like up-to-date quotes.
(4) These anomalous quotes confused other market participants, who falsely concluded that a stock's price on the NYSE differed from its price on other exchanges. This misinformation destabilized the market.
(5) The faster a stock's price changed, the more out-of-kilter the NYSE quotes would be. So instability bred more instability, and the market dropped precipitously.

The first thing to notice here is that (assuming nanex has the facts right) there appears to have been a bug in the NYSE's system. If a quote goes out with price P and time T, recipients will assume that the price was P at time T. But the NYSE system apparently generated the price at one time (on entry to the queue) and the timestamp at another time (on exit from the queue). This is wrong: the timestamp should have been generated at the same time as the price.

But notice that this kind of bug won't cause much trouble under normal conditions, when the queue is short so that the timestamp discrepancy is small. The problem might not have be noticed in normal operation, and might not be caught in testing, unless the testing procedure takes pains to create a long queue and to check for the consistency of timestamps with prices. This looks like the kind of bug that developers dread, where the problem only manifests under unusual conditions, when the system is under a certain kind of strain. This kind of bug is an accident waiting to happen.

To see how the accident might develop and be exploited, let's consider the behavior of three imaginary people, Alice, Bob, and Claire.

Alice knows the NYSE has this timestamping bug. She knows that if the bug triggers and the NYSE starts issuing dodgy quotes, she can make a lot of money by exploiting the fact that she is the only market participant who has an accurate view of reality. Exploiting the others' ignorance of real market conditions---and making a ton of money---is just a matter of technique.

Alice acts to exploit her knowledge, deliberately triggering the NYSE bug by flooding the NYSE with quote requests. The nanex analysis implies that this is probably what happened on May 6. Alice's behavior is ethically questionable, if not illegal. But, the nanex analysis notwithstanding, deliberate triggering of the bug is not the only possibility.

Bob also knows about the bug, but he doesn't go as far as Alice. Bob programs his systems to exploit the error condition if it happens, but he does nothing to cause the condition. He just waits. If the error condition happens naturally, he will exploit it, but he'll take care not to cause it himself. This is ethically superior to a deliberate attack (and might be more defensible legally).

(Exercise for readers: Is it ethical for Bob to deliberately refrain from reporting the bug?)

Claire doesn't know that the NYSE has a bug, but she is a very careful programmer, so she writes code that watches other systems for anomalous behavior and ignores systems that seem to be misbehaving. When the flash crash occurs, Claire's code detects the dodgy NYSE quotes and ignores them. Claire makes a lot of money, because she is one of the few market participants who are not fooled by the bad quotes. Claire is ethically blameless --- her virtuous programming was rewarded. But Claire's trading behavior might look a lot like Alice's and Bob's, so an investigator might suspect Claire of unethical or illegal behavior.

Notice that even if there are no Alices or Bobs, but only virtuous Claires, the market might still have a flash crash and people might make a lot of money from it, even in the absence of a denial-of-service attack or indeed of any unethical behavior. The flood of quote requests that trigged the queue backup might have been caused by another bug somewhere, or by an unforeseen interaction between different systems. Only careful investigation will be able to untangle the causes and figure out who is to blame.

If the nanex analysis is at all correct, it has sobering implications. Financial markets are complex, and when we inject complex, buggy software into them, problems are likely to result. The May flash crash won't be the last time a financial market gyrates due to software problems.

Ed Felten12152726857642268281180075240087884331271785058026896548048717816029897345670628029113977277164073230967204180459589530312076127897859828385167135711413831664341606951535149144618211067853532291698348

Kelly Rand spies an urban design project:

Greenaid takes old gumball machines, rehabs them and turns them into “seedbomb” dispensers. The seedbombs are made from clay, compost and seeds and are perfect for the cracks, crevices and empty spaces found in daily life. They can be temporarily placed in sidewalk cracks, empty planters and in missing concrete pieces from parking lots.

Suck UK commercializes the concept with hand-grenade replicas.

Seed - Urban design - Clay - Compost - Concrete

Move over, Kobo -- following the promise of a Summer launch, Amazon's Kindle app for Android is now live, bringing the usual array of features that existing Kindle users will hold near and dear: access to the Kindle store right from the app, adjustable font sizes, free book samples, and most importantly, wireless bookmark synchronization with your entire stable of Kindle-equipped devices (because we know you've all got an iPad, iPhone, and physical Kindle lying around somewhere). The app requires Android 1.6 to operate, which is going to leave a few people in the lurch -- but it's always good to have a compelling reason to upgrade hardware, is it not?

[Thanks, Neil]

Kindle for Android now available originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Jun 2010 16:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Amazon  | Email this | CommentsChris Ziegler00886715554605655256156509159385232710920796535703353377849908348203759908332944106846148664465618390442799331043351982103534814895346551937081242413498284940341639770871023814493410442931907610054505060067119464015533951628961991746373690417930847330388679789057609521516228813240944877163981940078806925351185350905271065753926599977123150417803722992821664114942259604212874173181368686276791910031362900319343943771602301159028238059929077034648156573331721152687987233131415317966090118686565060045409090019152003270302767748080479054914475085632473727612016499727350088057960441737944351600998108301633117495397810182065056424011579451531797346207306795100836173863089844117100550398259082451190985086586567613106412078296549135493968095560990844213649641290526720403350809400171762175499637426082537043198845229391652352679890283188411905794413143356034094496942997985793521247620694903224947411547635327279469752011948565768193276350707169646564865902011868296443576693248108942514584155094440543173121154950889617010228604115026973144178689354067030760779060749718673922215862502408209522019165309674932692760641394292106526224448605988605746075825440163337461507365237390163882737163607786116352153680574593184023525993990673632191393891661025497414218258071009055852624113831217274008271590670219388759356558901814389136868144613097004486085047371510750577094172872941802308827960459694717125670661620591924311823700049861278796502178698353135411812138844460357279543961470498290239807828906343225525045736396122014438710571587831704365659599946358601765646881743100116141453071816240357180502007337692281021315727482410453409473016295194997875805601721411719234581735705276462645760030267081282218811148183861293522026245956423902510298501820695431008101721009964477471048984552336932626705296382212240923899061337028311076709930127743315805708999806231362127503598845147549047772832369520215874690679207631300562762146107312226164415202844898883460253517833695478021010026091361185786433

The Center for Economic and Policy Research put out a new report on the fiscal burden of the American prison system (pdf):

We calculate that a reduction by one-half in the incarceration rate of non-violent offenders would lower correctional expenditures by $16.9 billion per year and return the U.S. to about the same incarceration rate we had in 1993 (which was already high by historical standards). The large majority of these savings would accrue to financially squeezed state and local governments, amounting to about one-fourth of their annual corrections budgets. As a group, state governments could save $7.6 billion, while local governments could save $7.2 billion.

(Hat tip: Economix)

Prison - United States - Incarceration in the United States - Crime and Justice - Local government