CircleCount helps you better understand Google+

2013-05-20 00:43:54 (10 comments, 1 reshares, 11 +1s)

It has been deemed that anything not good for you is bad. Hence, illegal.

"Utopians always, always end up being the most tyrannical of zealots about imposing an entirely dystopian dictatorship on others."

+Peter Strempel's comment illustrates the dichotomy between intention and outcome; the scene from Demolition Man, perfectly packages the message for the medium.

2013-05-17 14:27:59 (6 comments, 0 reshares, 7 +1s)

Life In Plastic Is Not Fantastic

Yesterday it was. Remember Angelina Jolie who finally eradicated sickness and defeated death for all of us? I don't think that her newly bought boobs are made of bio-degradable material.

Either way, there were protests — OUTRAGE! FEMEN! OCCUPY BARBIE! — at the opening of the Berlin Barbie Dream House because —

"The Junge Linke argue that Barbie's "pinkified" personality cultivates a desire in girls to focus on looks instead of careers and spend their cash on expensive beauty products."

While keeping in mind yesterday's plastic hero Angelina, I wonder if the protesters could have been appeased by — or would they have applauded and celebrated? — a lesbian Barbie as the honorary patron of the opening festivities.

On the other hand, shouldn't the LGBT lobby rejoiceat the fa... more »

2013-05-16 00:06:32 (14 comments, 0 reshares, 11 +1s)

Summary of the #IO13 Keynote

Amazing, fantastic, incredible, auto-awesome, ... times 1000.

Translation: More pseudo-HDR candy, mandatorily smoother skin, and the best weather for all, because there's nothing worse than gray, ugly, unaltered reality.

2013-05-14 20:13:45 (48 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Tendentious Photo "Journalism"

Browsing through the winners in the various categories of the World Press Photo Awards,[1] it is hard to miss the quality of the imagery and the perfection of captured events and emotions, to the point where the terms "staged" and "(re-)enacted" come to mind. Perfect moments on demand, it seems, but inconsistent with "press" photography's rules.[2]

With press photos, the most spectacular, most gruesome, or most snappy one wins the game, the hearts, and the hate. There would hardly be any hunger charity or exile lobbying for not-yet-states without the proper manipulative or inciting imagery of starving children or crying wives.

A very curious photo work of art is the famous "Gaza Burial" — a questionable celebration of death for a political cause, an abuse of the media byi... more »

2013-05-14 12:12:11 (8 comments, 1 reshares, 7 +1s)

Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie has undergone a double mastectomy

She said her doctors estimated she had an 87% risk of breast cancer and a 50% risk of ovarian cancer. "I decided to be proactive and to minimise the risk as much I could," she wrote.

So I thought long and hard, and came to the conclusion that with a statistically significant prevalence of high intelligence in my family, and given the problems and issues that high intelligence yields in 50% of the cases, the best I can do for a risk-free future is getting a full lobotomy as soon as possible. 

For the greater good.

2013-05-13 18:23:31 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Commander Hadfield to Ground Control

Recorded aboard the ISS.

2013-05-13 01:33:56 (8 comments, 3 reshares, 6 +1s)

Weak Android = Strong Samsung

It remains to be seen whether this analysis is correct; it's interesting nonetheless —

Here is a dirty secret: it is in Samsung’s interest to damage Android.

Each successive generation of Samsung’s Android phones has been more laden down with TouchWiz customisations and non-removable Samsung apps than the last. In the Galaxy S4, for example, 7GB of its internal memory is taken up its custom apps and highly tweaked version of Android. This is 1GB more than the Galaxy S3 and more than twice the size of a clean Android install partition. Samsung has been building an operating system on top of an operating system.

It is a classic Trojan Horse tactic. Android had unstoppable momentum, Samsung fought hard to become the chief beneficiary of it and now it wants an Apple-like control of its destiny. When Samsung adds softwareto it... more »

2013-05-12 11:25:09 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

A brief list of misused English terminology in EU publications is a fascinating look at the emerging dialect of English that is emerging out of the EU bureaucracy, in which odd bureaucratic language has to be translated from and to many languages. It's a good window into concepts that are common in one nation's bureaucratic tradition, but not others

2013-05-06 21:36:58 (42 comments, 0 reshares, 9 +1s)

The World's First Fully 3D-Printed Gun

I covered 3D printing and its implications in my book +Serendicritique and now the weapon is ready and we finally may witness the clash between the postion of everything-wants-to-be-free on one side and everything-but-guns on the other side. I'm interested in where the two will eventually meet.

Also, a practical question: If banned, how do you enforce and control such a ban?

“[T]he Liberator” [is a] homage to the cheap, one-shot pistols designed to be air-dropped by the Allies over France during its Nazi occupation in World War II.

Unlike the original, steel Liberator, though, Wilson’s weapon is almost entirely plastic: Fifteen of its 16 pieces have been created inside an $8,000 second-hand Stratasys Dimension SST 3D printer, a machine that lays down threads of melted polymer that add up toprecis... more »

2013-05-03 11:35:48 (21 comments, 1 reshares, 12 +1s)

Not A Good Sign When Satire Becomes Indistinguishable From Reality

"Hey, could I get another pepperoni over here?" Bloomberg asked owner Antonio Benito.

"I'm sorry sir," he replied, "we can't do that. You've reached your personal slice limit."

Mayor Bloomberg, not accustomed to being challenged, assumed that the owner was joking.

"OK, that's funny," he remarked, "because of the soda thing ... No come on. I'm not kidding. I haven't eaten all morning, just send over another pepperoni."

"I'm sorry sir. We're serious," Benito insisted. "We've decided that eating more than one piece isn't healthy for you, and so we're forbidding you from doing it."

"Look jackass," Bloomberg retorted, his anger boiling,... more »

2013-04-29 23:56:25 (8 comments, 4 reshares, 16 +1s)

First Sustainable Symbiosis Between A Human And A Ball

2013-04-25 21:03:04 (52 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

The Most Beautiful Woman in the World?

2013-04-19 12:58:51 (20 comments, 0 reshares, 10 +1s)

News of the Day

Prerequisite knowledge to properly follow the manhunt coverage for the Boston bombing suspects –

"Caucasian," while usually used to describe "white-skinned people," is also a term for those coming from the Caucasus, a region East of Turkey and South of Russia.

Chechnya, on the other hand is a Russian republic located in the Northern Caucasus.

2013-04-15 20:30:13 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

If everyone is selling their Gold — I wonder who is the one buying?

2013-04-15 14:42:43 (6 comments, 0 reshares, 6 +1s)

Still desperately looking for culprits...

Did cocaine use by bankers cause the global financial crisis?

Coked-up bankers caused the credit crunch, according to the former drug tsar David Nutt.

2013-04-12 18:54:33 (7 comments, 2 reshares, 17 +1s)

North Korean High Heels of Mass Distraction

I'd like to see them battle Femen...

Photo via NY Post: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/international/north_korea_high_heeled_female_soldiers_LdsC4mYDQr7lYCTxA2022K

2013-04-08 21:04:53 (21 comments, 4 reshares, 9 +1s)

Pussy Riot in Germany

Merkel looks scared, Putin looks amused, and the hysterical attention whores just look silly.

2013-04-01 12:36:53 (6 comments, 1 reshares, 8 +1s)

What Can You Do Without a Brain?

2013-03-26 00:19:45 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

The Cyprus Joke

The two banks at the centre of the crisis - Cyprus Popular Bank, also known as Laiki, and Bank of Cyprus - have units in London which remained open throughout the week and placed no limits on withdrawals. Bank of Cyprus also owns 80 percent of Russia's Uniastrum Bank, which put no restrictions on withdrawals in Russia.

2013-03-25 18:17:16 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 18 +1s)

#philosoraptor

h/t +Reddit 

2013-03-25 00:38:10 (11 comments, 3 reshares, 14 +1s)

Remember Max Headroom?

"Have you any idea how successful censorship is on TV? Don't know the answer? Hmm. Successful, isn't it?"

2013-03-22 02:25:21 (14 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

Google Keep

Since Google knows anything about you anyway, why not just help it a little, basically the opposite of "Takeout" —

Quickly capture what’s on your mind and recall it easily wherever you are. Create a checklist, enter a voice note or snap a photo and annotate it. Everything you add is instantly available on all your devices – desktop and mobile.

With Google Keep you can:
• Keep track of your thoughts via notes, lists and photos
• Have voice notes transcribed automatically
• Use homescreen widgets to capture thoughts quickly
• Color-code your notes to help find them later
• Swipe to archive things you no longer need
• Turn a note into a checklist by adding checkboxes
• Use your notes from anywhere - they are safely stored in the cloud and available on the web at http://drive.google.com/keep

2013-03-21 21:29:53 (8 comments, 2 reshares, 15 +1s)

Why is the global economy in so much trouble?

How can so many people be so absolutely certain that the world financial system is going to crash? Well, the truth is that when you take a look at the cold, hard numbers it is not difficult to see why the global financial pyramid scheme is destined to fail. In the United States today, there is approximately 56 trillion dollars of total debt in our financial system, but there is only about 9 trillion dollars in our bank accounts. So you could take every single penny out of the banks, multiply it by six, and you still would not have enough money to pay off all of our debts. Overall, there is about 190 trillion dollars of total debt on the planet. But global GDP is only about 70 trillion dollars. And the total notional value of all derivatives around the globe is somewhere between 600 trillion and 1500 trillion dollars. So we have a... more »

2013-03-18 14:38:16 (5 comments, 2 reshares, 11 +1s)

First Person Tetris

www.firstpersontetris.com

2013-03-18 13:44:36 (16 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

It it worse than a crime, it is a mistake.

2013-03-15 17:01:14 (3 comments, 2 reshares, 11 +1s)

Astroturfing
A new term for me. Means using sock puppets on large scale to establish a fake identity.

Excerpts:

Operation Earnest voice is built to allow 50 real users to manage 10 fake accounts each. These 500 accounts appear to be from anywhere in the world they user would like, “replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographically consistent.” What it does, effectively, is create a network of online personas that, when working in a coordinated fashion, can control the tone and direction of just about any online conversation.

These accounts could have some very useful applications outside of the stated goal; they could be used to help monitor social networking sites, and they would be quite powerful in influencing social movements through hashtags and what’s hot features on twitterand G... more »

2013-03-15 16:41:08 (8 comments, 0 reshares, 6 +1s)

The WSJ on – Beards

Mostly BS, but let's make a point here; beards separate men from, well, anybody else...

Fed chairman Ben Bernanke—who became a totem of hope, or at least the last bastion against the threat of another Great Depression—was bearded. The villain of the piece, Bernie Madoff, was not; appearing at all times clean-shaven and bespoke-suited. Suddenly looking less like a successful banker and more like a man who was up to a challenge on the mean streets wasn't only preferable, it was practically mandatory. In the space of a few short weeks, beards became symbols of empathy and humility, a rejection of the overt pursuit of the capitalist ideal. This was interesting, not least because, as any beard historian will tell you, during the Great Depression scrupulously good grooming was imperative—other than above one's top lip, where fulsomemustach... more »

2013-03-15 01:25:08 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 11 +1s)

Finally, Proof That Anti-Virus Software Actually Works

On Thursday morning, the protection programs of AVG incorrectly identified the Windows system file wintrust.dll as a trojan of type "Generic32.FJU". Under certain circumstances, the virus hunting software has also labelled programs as malware if they attempted to access the supposed trojan DLL. The solution is a virus signature update.

Only Windows XP systems were affected by the problem. Users who deleted the file from their system could not boot their computers any more. In this case, to help restore the system, boot it with the Rescue CD and take wintrust.dll from a still functioning system and copy that to C:\Windows\System32\. At least, according to AVG, the anti-virus software did not automatically delete or quarantine the wintrust.dll file, though other files will have to be moved back into... more »

2013-03-13 00:54:29 (10 comments, 1 reshares, 4 +1s)

"This is about history"

Just as Al Gore thinks he invented the Internet, David Hasselhoff believes he took down the Berlin Wall. Now, the latter threatens to — this time — save the remains of the wall in a publicity stunt aimed against capitalism —

"I think the best way to do this is to fight capitalism with capitalism," Hasselhoff said. "If you get the whole world behind it, I'd be happy to come over and help and do what I can and do a concert. If you're gonna fight money, you gotta fight money with money."

Whatever.

For those of you who can't attend the magic in Berlin, or who sensibly took cover, enjoy one of the best videos of all time.

2013-03-12 17:55:24 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 6 +1s)

Production stopped and review ordered for new medals for "cyber and drone ops" - You may recall I've consistently blasted the concept of these medals as currently defined, considering them to be a slap in the face of our military personnel who actually put their lives in harm's way in battle.

2013-03-10 20:48:46 (3 comments, 1 reshares, 6 +1s)

It’s the infinite monkey theorem, applied to products: with time, the algorithms would produce a T-shirt someone wants. [...] The advent of 3D printing will create an explosion in such phantom products.

2013-03-10 17:51:30 (2 comments, 9 reshares, 22 +1s)

Hahaha!

2013-03-08 01:30:21 (15 comments, 2 reshares, 9 +1s)

Don't worry, it's just 6cm long...

"After review and based on an overall risk-based security approach, TSA will be making changes to allow small knives, ..."

Because you can only hijack an airliner with a knife longer than 2.36 inches. By the way, how deep inside the body are the major blood vessels? Exactly.

http://www.tsa.gov/sites/default/files/assets/pdf/tsa_permitted_items_update.pdf

2013-03-05 13:22:11 (2 comments, 1 reshares, 6 +1s)

#DailyWTF – U.S. Urges Ban On Drunk Diplomats At UN Budget Debates

"We make the modest proposal that the negotiating rooms should in future be an inebriation-free zone," Joseph Torsella, deputy U.S. ambassador to the United Nations for management and reform, told the General Assembly's budget committee.

Diplomats who participate sessions have told Reuters that it is not unusual to see delegates showing visible signs of having imbibed heavily.

2013-03-05 02:45:21 (9 comments, 0 reshares, 6 +1s)

What A Dilemma – Who Are The Good Guys Again?

“This is truly an ironic situation. We have been fighting for a free world, and our opponents are mostly huge corporations from the United States of America, a place where freedom and freedom of speech is said to be held high.”

“At the same time, companies from that country are chasing a competitor from other countries, bribing police and lawmakers, threatening political parties and physically hunting people from our crew. And to our help comes a government famous in our part of the world for locking people up for their thoughts and forbidding access to information,” they add.

2013-03-03 23:28:08 (8 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

The Comments Make The Message

When it comes to reading and understanding news stories online the medium can have a surprisingly potent effect on the message. Comments from some readers can significantly distort what other readers think was reported in the first place. But it’s not the content of the comments that matters. It’s the tone.

IN the beginning, the technology gods created the Internet and saw that it was good. Here, at last, was a public sphere with unlimited potential for reasoned debate and the thoughtful exchange of ideas, an enlightening conversational bridge across the many geographic, social, cultural, ideological and economic boundaries that ordinarily separate us in life, a way to pay bills without a stamp.

Then someone invented “reader comments” and paradise was lost.

2013-03-01 14:32:30 (12 comments, 0 reshares, 9 +1s)

The Ethics of a +Project Glass World
I want it as much as you do, but we need to talk. Seriously.

It is unquestionable that the good; in a catering-to-the-gadget-inclined sense, and the addictive; in a feeding-the-delusional sense, as well as the helpful; in a bionic, augmenting, supporting-those-that-are-disabled sense, and the economical; in an obvious sense; is beyond current imagination.

With that out of the way, let’s take a look at the dark side. Take one feature: The ever-recording, potentially streaming, continually filming, über-sensing [1] video camera. 

The question is very simply stated: What happens if everybody, anybody, starts wearing continually recording video cameras, 24/7?

Privacy, not mine and yours, but exceedingly fundamental, the privacy of that one person is a concern, that one person, who just doesn’t wantto be f... more »

2013-02-28 23:03:53 (40 comments, 2 reshares, 11 +1s)

Is Professional Life Being Informed By Personal Life And Vice Versa?

The question came up in a different context and I'm not as much interested in this specific story as I'd like to know whether there is some sort of dilemma, or bias depending on the amount of overlap between the two sides of life.

Here is a rather disturbing case —

Among the evidence that convicted Makarov was his daughter’s drawing of a cat with a tail that Leila Sokolova, a psychologist at the clinic, called phallic. Her testimony played a key role in establishing that a rape took place, argued Tokareva. With many already skeptical of the verdict, bloggers unearthed a series of photos of Sokolova in tight fitting black leather outfits brandishing a whip; her comments on online forums exposed her as a dominatrix, lesbian and “inclined toward sadism.” [1]
The p... more »

2013-02-28 14:52:47 (3 comments, 1 reshares, 7 +1s)

SEVEN KOMMUNITY KILLERS
There is no way to address the questions raised by the ongoing discussions about 'building' and 'managing' community, or the curious quest to simulate social status with mathematical abstractions that can be turned into algorithms,  without regard to personal experiences.  That is to say, I want to do something everyone does even when they pursue the asinine pretense of objectivity.

So, in that spirit, let me borrow a Faktorism, and propose the seven kommunity killers on Google Plus: political correctness; circle-jerk crèches; anodyne vacuity; catholic orthodoxy; infantilism; the princess syndrome; and outright psychosis.

1. Political correctness is most often exhibited by timid souls who don’t understand the difference between discussing and idea and subscribing to it, usually as a result of being bullied into this ficklecowa... more »

2013-02-21 02:24:39 (4 comments, 1 reshares, 11 +1s)

HSBC Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail

For at least half a decade, the storied British colonial banking power helped to wash hundreds of millions of dollars for drug mobs, including Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel, suspected in tens of thousands of murders just in the past 10 years – people so totally evil, jokes former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, that "they make the guys on Wall Street look good." The bank also moved money for organizations linked to Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, and for Russian gangsters; helped countries like Iran, the Sudan and North Korea evade sanctions; and, in between helping murderers and terrorists and rogue states, aided countless common tax cheats in hiding their cash.

"They violated every goddamn law in the book," says Jack Blum, an attorney and former Senate investigator who headed a major bribery investigation againstL... more »

2013-02-19 23:53:07 (35 comments, 2 reshares, 3 +1s)

Quick Question: Where is the "Circles Tab" — is it just me or is it gone?

2013-02-19 02:58:26 (15 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

Horsemeat Scandal Goes Global As World's Largest Food Maker Pulls Tainted Pasta From Spain And Italy

...this fits a little too well into the ongoing anti-meat campaigns all over the globe, also, stay tuned for the next big thing, Soylent Green —

First it was Ireland, then the entire UK, then Germany, and gradually it spread to all of Europe (except for France of course, where it was always a delicacy). But it was only once its finally crossed the Alps and made its way to the Swiss factories of Nestle, the world's largest food maker, did the horsemeat scandal truly go global. The FT reports that "the escalating horsemeat scandal has ensnared two of the biggest names in the food industry, Nestlé, the world’s number-one food maker, and JBS, the largest beef producer by sales."

Good overview:ht... more »

2013-02-17 21:44:21 (9 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

Minimum Wages and Wage Subsidies

Interesting points from The Economist –

Think of check-out clerks. While many retailers have invested substantially in automated check-out, others have not, presumably because the cost difference between human and robot is not yet big enough to justify the change. It seems very probable that higher minimum wages will in some cases tip that balance.

2013-02-15 10:51:43 (37 comments, 2 reshares, 8 +1s)

Meteorite Hits Russia — Let the Hype, Rumors, and Memes Begin...

The Russian Urals region has been stricken by a sudden cosmic attack. Unidentified flying objects exploded over several major cities, including Chelyabinsk, where the blast waves blew out windows and disrupted mobile connections.

More: http://rt.com/news/russia-meteor-meteorite-asteroid-chelyabinsk-291/

See the meteorite at 0:54 in the video.

2013-02-11 16:21:25 (36 comments, 2 reshares, 9 +1s)

Pope Benedikt XVI. Resigns

The overwhelming sentiment in social media seems to be one of hostility and a general "good riddance" notion as well as well-placed rumors to smear the head of the Catholic Church.

That's quite a lot of hatred from a self-appointed elite of ever-so-free, positivism-preaching, cat-posting, anything-goes, literal liberal minds.

Here is the pope's statement –

"After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry.

"For this reason, and well aware of the seriousness of this act, with full freedom I declare that I renounce the ministry of bishop of Rome, successor of Saint Peter, entrusted to me by the cardinals on 19 April 2005, in such a wayt... more »

2013-02-08 14:27:09 (52 comments, 3 reshares, 15 +1s)

Institutional Trolls In Best Cointelpro Fashion Are Back, This Time With Euro-Propaganda

You may remember Cointelpro, the infamous FBI-operation aimed at surveying, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations. [1] Look no further than your favorite forum for a renaissance of long-proven tactics to counter dissent and (re)gain public sympathies. 

We are dealing with commercial hype and opinion-shaping every day on the Internet, but political manipulation and controlled propaganda by agents provocateurs and intel-bureaucrats is something that still goes against the grain of every best practice and expectation in what still poses as democracies. 

From the Daily Telegraph —

"Parliament's institutional communicators must have the ability to monitor public conversation and sentiment on the ground and in real time, tound... more »

2013-02-06 18:56:26 (13 comments, 2 reshares, 11 +1s)

Wednesday Humor: German Education Minister Stripped Of PhD For Plagiarism

Some thought the irony of a Treasury Secretary who cheated on his taxes was extreme but Germany has gone one better as the nation's Education Minister has just been stripped of her PhD due to plagiarism. As Spiegel Online reports, the University of Düsseldorf has revoked German Education Minister Annette Schavan's degree because "she systematically and deliberately presented intellectual efforts throughout her entire dissertation that were not her own." As such, she was guilty of "intentional deception through plagiarism." Allegations that parts of her dissertation were not consistent with academic standards were first raised last spring and were hardened in October when a blogger released detailed findings of citation shortcomings he had found in the education... more »

2013-02-04 09:30:49 (37 comments, 2 reshares, 11 +1s)

Why there is no coke in Coca Cola anymore

Apart from preventing equal access to coke and its "hypersexual" effects on "negroes," there is this money quote –

The Coca-Cola we know today still contains coca -- but the ecgonine alkaloid is removed from it. Perfecting that extraction took until 1929, so before that there were still trace amounts of coca's psychoactive elements in Coca-Cola. As Dominic Streatfield describes in Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography, the extraction is now done at a New Jersey chemical processing facility by a company called Stepan. In 2003, Stepan imported 175,000 kilograms of coca for Coca-Cola. That's enough to make more than $200 million worth of cocaine. They refer to the coca leaf extract simply as "Merchandise No. 5."

Last question: Where does the good stuff go in the process?

2013-02-03 00:36:20 (64 comments, 2 reshares, 5 +1s)

Don't bring scissors to a gunfight — only if you have to...

Options for Consideration (by US Homeland Security) demonstrates possible actions to take if confronted with a active shooter scenario. The instructive video reviews the choices of evacuating, hiding, or, as an option of last resort, challenging the shooter — 01:50.

2013-02-02 20:31:54 (14 comments, 9 reshares, 24 +1s)

Project Eightball: The First #Ingress Level 8 Farm in Berlin
brought to you by the 8-Ball Team of the Berlin Resistance

The challenge was clearly laid out: Capture the Victory Column and be the first faction to erect a bunch of level-8 portals in the city. The requirements were equally clear: At least 8 level-8 players with the problem being that our rival green frog faction was far ahead of the game with more than 8 players for weeks, but apparently a lack of motivation or organisation. For us blue smurf players, developing an underdog strategy was the only way out of an almost completely green city at the beginning of the year. In the first days of 2013, I made my level 8 and we decided to keep it within a trusted circle and used our resources, open source intelligence, and a couple of ruses and many deceptive moves (a shared map with all the players names and false level numbers,... more »