A month after ace programmer Sergey Aleynikov left Goldman Sachs, he was arrested. Exactly what he’d done neither the F.B.I., which interrogated him, nor the jury, which convicted him a year later, seemed to understand. But Goldman had accused him of stealing computer code, and the 41-year-old father of three was sentenced to eight years in federal prison. Investigating Aleynikov’s case, Michael Lewis holds a second trial.
Ever since the discovery of printing and glass lenses, each generation (in the West) acquired new prosthetics to expand human vision, memory and reach. Waves of innovation — from print journalism and libraries to radio, television and the Internet — promised liberation or oppression. Citizens and societies were disrupted, cajoled and misled — and adapted.
When former National Security Agency contractor Ed Snowden exposed the inner workings of the country's biggest intelligence organization, he said he did so to roll back a spying apparatus that put the United States on the path to "turnkey tyranny." But his revelations could end up having the opposite effect. Instead of declawing a single surveillance state, Snowden's leaks could ironically wind up enhancing government spying around the globe.
‘So much darkness, so much desperation’: Talking with the directors of ‘Detropia’, Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing about Detroit's decline and what, if anything, could save it.
To better understand how the manner in which the government’s surveillance program is described affects public evaluations, the Pew Research Center conducted a question wording experiment in a national telephone survey fielded between July 11 and 21, 2013 among 2,002 adults.
George Gilman’s early A&P stores are the spiritual ancestors of the Whole Foods experience. [...] Before Gilman, pre-industrial consumption was largely the unscripted consequence of localised, small-scale patterns of production.
From a population of 1,422 in 1820, Detroit grows to 285,704 by 1900 and then powered by the automobile industry Detroit peaks in 1950 at 1,849,568. It then goes into decline and now sits at about 700,000 people – about where it was during the First World War. Michigan as a whole has continued to grow in population but its major urban center is now a shadow of its former self. [...] Detroit is bankrupt.
When a heat wave spread across the Midwest in the summer of 2012, the Powerton coal plant in central Illinois had to temporarily shut down a generator when its water supply became too warm to effectively cool the plant.
Although 2012 was a year of severe drought in the U.S., the problems seen at various coal, nuclear, and hydropower facilities last summer are only likely to increase in coming years unless the power sector quickly changes its way of doing business, according to a new study from the
For decades, a so-called anti-propaganda law prevented the U.S. government's mammoth broadcasting arm from delivering programming to American audiences. But on July 2, that came silently to an end with the implementation of a new reform passed in January. The result: an unleashing of thousands of hours per week of government-funded radio and TV programs for domestic U.S. consumption in a reform initially criticized as a green light for U.S. domestic propaganda efforts. So what just happened?
Today, electric utilities and the insurance industry are grappling with a scary possibility. A solar storm on the scale of [the Carrington Event] in 1859 would wreak havoc on power grids, pipelines and satellites.
There's a new big macher in town. On Tuesday, July 9, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu officially named Ron Dermer to be his next ambassador to Washington, formally bringing current ambassador Michael Oren's four-year tenure to an end in the fall. In replacing Oren with Dermer (full disclosure: Oren was my professor in graduate school at Harvard University, and we have maintained a good relationship), Netanyahu is replacing one American-turned-Israeli with another, but that is where the similarities end.
The question is what might be done. A single national solution is unlikely to work. Dr Murray and his colleagues report that the gap between life expectancies in the highest and lowest ranked counties has widened since 1985 (see chart below). In the top counties—Marin County, California for women and Fairfax County, Virginia for men—the life expectancies rival those of Switzerland and Japan. At the same time, at least one of every nine counties has a life expectancy lower than Nicaragua's. Parts of West Virginia and Mississippi fare worse than Bangladesh and Algeria.
In the interest of preserving your freedoms and bolstering our fair nation, here is the full articulation of the deeply paranoid and complex life you must live in order to assure that the government leaves you alone.
... when we believe in anything to the exclusion of our own intellectual and moral rigor, we are simply less worthy and viable as human beings. That is Hannah Arendt’s great insight, and it stands.
What do you believe in? Is it always true? Does it always work? Is it always right, in every circumstance? If so, look again. You have diminished yourself in some way.
At the dawn of the Cold War, America’s intelligence agencies began constructing a vast surveillance machine. It was a machine with many parts, and a codename for each program it ran.
It was a machine made of copper wire twisted around switchboard terminals, and microphones installed covertly in homes and offices. It was made from COINTELPRO‘s human informants, and from manila envelopes marked JUNE MAIL bound for J. Edgar Hoover’s “Personal & Confidential” file.
Alex Gianturco ... has had to devote a lot of thought to the following problem: How do you destroy an organization made up of the undying? Though losses in [MMOG] Eve are painful, as long as players keep paying their subscription fees, their characters can never die. And yet, alliances fail.
“Back in the day I was focused entirely on destroying alliances via espionage or military means (since Goonswarm was too weak to win in a traditional engagement) and became somewhat obsessed with the process,” says Gianturco. The answer, he discovered, was fucking with people’s sense of identity.
Brooks is saying that the goal should be to rig the system against them and to do almost anything that is required to rig it that way. What makes this even more foolish is that Morsi and his allies were already failing. It would have been only a matter of time until they would have been defeated at the next election, and then there would have been no question that they had been rejected on the grounds that their tenure had indeed been a disaster. The coup allow Morsi and his supporters to claim that they have been robbed, and it is unlikely that they are going to take that lying down. That is a recipe for continued strife and instability, which are exactly what Egypt can least afford.
I laughed when I saw the headline but was much more somber after reading the article....
From a purely political point of view, then, this was a bad news story but not a big news story. / To the hundreds of millions of people around the world for whom Israel news is religious news as well as political news, it was something else. The Jewish Temple is not just another historical building, and any discussion about rebuilding it isn’t just another political story.
Listening in on BlackBerry communications by world leaders at a Group of 20 summit meeting, as the British didin April 2009, does not seem like a great way to build international trust and economic cooperation. Writing up the operation in PowerPoint and bragging about it in writing – such documents always leak — was pure Monty Python.
