Monday, 6 June 2011

@exiledsurfer interviews Adrian Lamo

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Martin Rushent RIP

Music producer Martin Rushent, who worked with bands including the Human League and the Stranglers has died, aged 63.

His son, James, confirmed on his Facebook and Twitter pages that his father had died on Saturday.
Rushent started as an engineer in the 1970s, working on records by T-Rex and Fleetwood Mac among others.
He produced the Human League's hit album Dare, which contained the classic "Don't You Want Me?".
The Stranglers paid tribute to him on their official website, saying: "We have just received the sad news that another early band collaborator, Martin Rushent, passed away yesterday aged 63."
Rushent produced the band's first three albums, Rattus Norvegicus, No More Heroes and Black and White.
@'BBC'
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Senators Target Website That Sells Narcotics

Two U.S. senators said Sunday they will ask federal authorities to crack down on a secretive narcotics market operated on the Internet with anonymous sales and untraceable currency.
Heroin, cocaine and methamphetamines are among the drugs being sold in the well-protected website apparently operating for just a few months.
Sens. Charles Schumer of New York and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, both Democrats, said they asked the Justice Department and Drug Enforcement Administration to shut down and investigate the website, often referred to as the Silk Road after an ancient Asian trade route.
"This audacious website should be shut down immediately," Manchin said.
"Never before has a website so brazenly peddled illegal drugs online," Schumer said. "By cracking down on the website immediately, we can help stop these drugs from flooding our streets."
The senators planned to release their letters to the agencies on Sunday.
A key to the illicit trade is use of a network by buyers and sellers that conceals their identity. Websites including Gawker have reported on the site.
Schumer said the website began operating in February and uses "layers" of secrecy to thwart authorities. Sellers are told to make shipments in vacuum-sealed bags to avoid drug-detecting dogs.
@'npr'

Niall Ferguson and the brain-dead American right

Sunday, 5 June 2011

New Al Qaeda Video: American Muslims Should Buy Guns, Start Shooting People

...and so it goes!

Three Pakistani Christian evangelists are facing 'blasphemy' charges

Three elderly Indians hacked to death for ‘witchcraft’

How I Failed, Failed, and Finally Succeeded at Learning How to Code

When Colin Hughes was about eleven years old his parents brought home a rather strange toy. It wasn't colorful or cartoonish; it didn't seem to have any lasers or wheels or flashing lights; the box it came in was decorated, not with the bust of a supervillain or gleaming protagonist, but bulleted text and a picture of a QWERTY keyboard. It called itself the "ORIC-1 Micro Computer." The package included two cassette tapes, a few cords and a 130-page programming manual.
On the whole it looked like a pretty crappy gift for a young boy. But his parents insisted he take it for a spin, not least because they had just bought the thing for more than Â£129. And so he did. And so, he says, "I was sucked into a hole from which I would never escape."
It's not hard to see why. Although this was 1983, and the ORIC-1 had about the same raw computing power as a modern alarm clock, there was something oddly compelling about it. When you turned it on all you saw was the word "Ready," and beneath that, a blinking cursor. It was an open invitation: type something, see what happens.
In less than an hour, the ORIC-1 manual took you from printing the word "hello" to writing short programs in BASIC -- the Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code -- that played digital music and drew wildly interesting pictures on the screen. Just when you got the urge to try something more complicated, the manual showed you how.
In a way, the ORIC-1 was so mesmerizing because it stripped computing down to its most basic form: you typed some instructions; it did something cool. This was the computer's essential magic laid bare. Somehow ten or twenty lines of code became shapes and sounds; somehow the machine breathed life into a block of text.
No wonder Colin got hooked. The ORIC-1 wasn't really a toy, but a toy maker. All it asked for was a special kind of blueprint.
Once he learned the language, it wasn't long before he was writing his own simple computer games, and, soon after, teaching himself trigonometry, calculus and Newtonian mechanics to make them better. He learned how to model gravity, friction and viscosity. He learned how to make intelligent enemies.
More than all that, though, he learned how to teach. Without quite knowing it, Colin had absorbed from his early days with the ORIC-1 and other such microcomputers a sense for how the right mix of accessibility and complexity, of constraints and open-endedness, could take a student from total ignorance to near mastery quicker than anyone -- including his own teachers -- thought possible.
It was a sense that would come in handy, years later, when he gave birth to Project Euler, a peculiar website that has trained tens of thousands of new programmers, and that is in its own modest way the emblem of a nascent revolution in education...

Continue reading

James Somers @'the Atlantic'

FOIA Request Unveils Secret CIA-Produced Documentary About CIA Agents Captured & Held In China For Decades

This is fascinating. Apparently, a US plane with CIA agents on board flew into China in 1952, trying to recover a spy in that country. However, the plane went down, and the Chinese captured the two CIA agents who survived the crash... and then kept them until 1971 and 1973. That, in itself, is an interesting story. But making it even more interesting is that the CIA had a professional documentary made about the story (including reenactments), intended for internal audiences within the CIA. Yet, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Associated Press, the CIA is now planning to release the entire (short) movie on YouTube. Of course, as a work created by the government, it should be in the public domain, though I'm curious to see if that's officially acknowledged anywhere.
Mike Masnick @'techdirt'

The Simpsons Live Action Titles

(Thanx Luke!)

Two sides to every story...

avimayer Avi Mayer

NRG: Half-hour ceasefire at #Syria-#Israel border subject to protesters refraining from causing damage to security infrastructure

ibnezra Joseph Dana

The army response has been rubber, live bullets, skunk, tear gas canisters as bullets and pepper spray

The army coated M Khatib of Bilin in pepper spray. This is his arm
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Doctor Who anime - FINAL. ドクター・フーのファン・アニメ

All 13 minutes of the completed fake Doctor Who 80s-style anime. Drawn, animated and partially voiced by myself. Some bits are good, some bits are poor, but on the whole it turned out okay, I think. Enjoy! This is old school Who, so fans of the new reboot show may be confused by the fact that the Doctor is doing martial arts and Cybermen say "excellent." Watch the classics and you'll understand. You'll also become almost instantly more handsome by watching classic Who.
PS - for those complaining about total lack of story or narrative in this clip, I did always state from the start that it was only going to be an extended trailer with no plot. Think of it as highlights from a 24 epsiode series if there was one.
この私が完成した無認可のドクター・フーの1980年代スタイルファン・アニメ。１３分の長さです。
このフィルムには良い面も悪い面もあると思うが、全体として見たらOKと思う。
１９７０-１９８０年代の原作のドクター・フーを基にしているから、今風の２００５のシリーズのファンは登場人物の言行が奇妙な印象はぬぐえないだろう。往年のドクター・
フーに没頭せよ！笑
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