Venezuela bans violent video games: a first-person guest essay - Boing Boing
Topic: Miscellaneous
9:22 am EST, Nov 6, 2009
Last Thursday in Venezuela, a new law criminalizing "violent" video games and toys was approved by the National Assembly...
Last year, on a trip to the US, I was able to buy a Nintendo DS for my brother, and a puzzle game that deals with using weapons to defend the fish stock of penguins in Antarctica, Defendin' de Penguin. Early next year, when the law kicks in, bring such a game could land me in jail for 3 to 5 years..
The law is... a pitiful attempt to blame video games and toys for the widespread lethal violence in our country, instead of a defective judicial structure, systemic corruption and governmental (purposeful?) ineptitude to deal with the problem.
When American politicians use social wedge issues as a foil to draw attention away from their inability to address real problems people here are easily fooled because the solutions to our problems seem intractable to us, and so the foil does not seem so unreasonable.
When the same actions are seen through the prism of a foreign culture their true nature becomes more apparent. Obviously, Venezuela is more violent than most western countries and has less video games, so the idea that video games are at the heart of Venezuela's problems is silly. But they are going after video games, with prejudice.
Perhaps someone will take the position that violent video games are too heady for a culture that already places a low value on human life, that they exacerbate a problem that already exists and eliminating them is justified.
"I'll just re-derive everything...it's easier than walking over to the other board" - Dr. John Elton, DiffEq. Professor.....only at tech
Today I read a post about the guy sang the "Link finding an item" song when he bought a bag of peanuts and my girlfriend admitted to doing the same thing when she found a lost item before. Only at Tech.
Maryland Voters Test New Cryptographic Voting System | Threat Level | Wired.com
Topic: Miscellaneous
7:43 am EST, Nov 5, 2009
On Tuesday voters in Takoma Park, Maryland, got to try out a new, transparent voting system that lets voters go online to verify that their ballots got counted in the final tally. The system also lets anyone independently audit election results to verify the votes went to the correct candidates.
Why not publish all the votes on the Internet? When I vote, I get a random number. I can go on the website later and verify that my random number got tabulated correctly. I can count all the votes on the website using my own software and decide for myself who won the election.
(Not saying I had any influence on this, I didn't. Just saying, this has been a good idea long coming.)
Texas Instruments (TI) ultimately failed to stand behind their misguided claim that calculator hobbyists violated copyright law by having public, online discussions about techniques to get more functionality from TI calculators. Yet the company continues to dig itself into new holes by issuing more improper take-down letters...
In fact, TI has sent an identical take-down demand to Mr. Smith's university complaining about the same OS keys having been posted on our client's student webpage, and demanding that the school take the materials down from that URL. Today, Mr. Smith filed a DMCA Section 512 counternotice to continue the fight.
NSFW: Halloween in San Francisco and the gathering clouds of a location-based privacy storm
Topic: Miscellaneous
12:47 pm EST, Nov 1, 2009
n the past month or so, I’ve had conversations with two friends who have organised private parties at their homes for small groups of friends. In both cases the hosts created online invitations but sensibly ensured that any date and location information was only visible to invited guests. Yet within minutes of the first guests arriving, they were alarmed to discover that all of their privacy efforts were for nought. Their guests – their friends – had used Foursquare to check in at the party, thus instantly adding their address to the service’s growing database of highly specific locations.
From that point on, a simple search on the Foursquare site for the hosts’ name provides their full home address, along with a handy map for anyone who feels like breaking in and murdering them in their sleep. To make matters even worse, as more partygoesrs checked in – all caught up in the game element of this thing, and hoping to become mayor of someone else’s living room – the information was repeatedly pushed out via Twitter. If Foursquare had a ‘Breathtakingly Irresponsible’ badge, there would have been a whole lot of recipients at those parties.
Zoompf: Or, Why Billy Hoffman Left Security To Work On Web Performance
Topic: Miscellaneous
6:26 pm EDT, Oct 30, 2009
Today I'm launching Zoompf, a new kind of web performance company. We don't deploy sensors, simulate user load, or monitor your application from data centers around the global. We don't try to answer the question "How fast are my web apps?" We answer the next logical and frankly more important question: "How do I make my web applications go faster?"
Zoompf's technology crawls and identifies over 150 specific problems with your web application that impacts web performance. You can learn more by downloading our Optimizing Web Performance presentation. Bu this post is not about what Zoompf does. It's about why I'm doing Zoompf.
Why on earth would I leave an amazing career in a successful industry and resign from an awesome job in a down economy? A lot of close friends have asked whether I'm crazy or not in the last month. But after I've explained the incredible opportunity behind what I'm doing their outlook completely changes and they become very supportive, offering time, funding, and recommendations.
The business case for performance is obvious. Faster apps increase revenue. Using resources more efficiently reduces operational costs. This is why the performance testing market is huge. But there is a gap in this market when it comes to performance testing of modern web applications. Talk to anyone about web performance and they start talking about the usual suspects:
-Refactoring, optimizing, JITing, caching application code and data -Database tuning, queries, store procedures, indexes, denormalizing tables -Reverse proxies, memcached, Varnish, load balancers, SSL accelerators, etc.
But recentresearch has found generating dynamic content accounts for typically less than 10% of page load times. The vast majority of page load time is spent downloading, parsing, and rendering all the components that make up a modern application. It is on the front end, and not on the back end, where optimizations can be made that drop seconds off load times. JavaScript code, CSS, the inner workings of browsers, HTTP voodoo. I am a thought leader in exactly this space.
The majority of widely known web performance optimization practices today focus on the application tier or the database tier. Traditional performance testings tools do no front end optimization testing. And yet the front end has the biggest impact on web application performance in modern applications. Do you see the disconnect yet?
Viking metal is a subgenre of heavy metal music characterised by its galloping pace, keyboard-rich anthemic sound, bleakness and dramatic emphasis on Norse mythology, Norse paganism, and the Viking Age.
There is something undeniably cool about the idea of metal about Viking mythology incorporating elements of traditional Scandinavian folk music. At least the abstract idea of it is cool - as an artform - the history of metal in Norway is way more messed up then I thought... some of these guys got into folk religion because Satanism isn't anti-Christian enough, and we're not just talking about philosophy here. There was a epidemic of church arsons associated with the scene in the early 1990's.
The first song is instrumental:
The second is Finnish:
There are some interesting threads that have fallen off from this, such as this Swiss "ambient metal" band whose music is supposed to characterize the emptiness of outer space:
100 Year Dow Jones Industrials Chart | The Big Picture
Topic: Miscellaneous
12:24 pm EDT, Oct 28, 2009
People have been asking me when I think the economy is going to get better. The answer is 2020 on the outside, and 2015 if we're lucky. Please see the attached chart, from 2005.
Things are basically going to suck for a decade. A map of the future stock market is here. We're now entering the "trading range" section of that chart. Kind of a good time to make money in the market, actually, as you know its going to fluctuate. You will really be able to buy low and sell high and then buy low again and sell high again over the next ten years. Right now valuations are high. They'll be low again by March I think, but that is from the hip. These fluctuations are totally irrational so predicting the exact tops and bottoms will be really hard to do.
Most people will not be making money playing the market - they'll be struggling to make ends meet and adjust personal expectations in an environment where there just isn't enough money to go around.
We're about half way through a cyclical bear that would have been worse than the great depression if it wasn't for the housing bubble, which is why I think all the recent hand wringing about causes of the housing bubble is a bit strange.
It was obvious for years that there was a bubble, so articles wondering why economists didn't know or didn't do something, etc are silly. Economists did know. The bubble was created intentionally. If it wasn't for the bubble, it would have felt like a depression. Because it was a depression. It is a depression. And its going to be a depression for another decade.
In the past century, every Bull Market has been followed by a significant refractory period. From the looks of the time-lengths of red, it appears almost generational in nature. The damage is repaired when a new crop of investors — without crash scars – finally appears.
Maybe our soft landing will make us less cautious, which is probably a good thing for our prospects, but basically, get used to the current environment because by the time it gets better you won't care anymore.
