Good to know.
SpaceX’s is Dragon about to dock with ISS. Watch here.
"It was clearly something that he was familiar with and I wasn’t. I didn’t know. I didn’t know that this went on."
— Journalist Jeremy Paxman • Testifying before the Leveson inquiry, about an event he attended during 2002, during which then Daily Mail editor Piers Morgan taught him about phone hacking. Paxman told British officials that Morgan’s openness was “quite shocking”, particularly when it came to gaining and maintaining access to phones. “[Morgan explained] that the way to get access to people’s messages was was go to the factory default setting and press either 0000 or 1234,” testified Paxman, adding, “if you didn’t put on your own code… his words: “You’re a fool.” Unsurprisingly, Piers Morgan was less than pleased with Paxman’s testimony. source (via • follow)
Is this t-shirt too offensive to wear on a plane? American Airlines thought so, and told a woman wearing it that she had to change her clothes. What say you, Tumblr?
From the article:
American Airlines media relations representative Tim Smith told Mother Jones via email that it was the language on the shirt, not the message, that prompted the response.
I’m thinking about wearing this shirt the next time I fly. Thoughts?
Douglas Coupland-created ‘V-Pole’ may take high tech to the streets in Vancouver
To clear its streets of cellphone towers, parking meters, Wi-Fi terminals, streetlights and even community message boards, the city of Vancouver is pushing forward with a scheme to compress all the technologies together into specialized “Vancouver poles” planted throughout the city.
“Meet your inevitable future,” wrote novelist Douglas Coupland, the technology’s creator, in an introductory Tweet.
The device, no larger than a telephone pole, would manage cell signals for multiple carriers, as well as wireless Internet for the surrounding neighbourhood. In-ground pads plugged into the pole would provide inductive charging for parked electric cars. An integrated touch screen would display maps, ads or payment interfaces, and an LED street light would be perched at the top of the pole. (Photo: Martin Tessler/Mathew Bulford; Illustration: Andrew Barr)
Neat.
The bloodletting continues:Facebook’s down by another 6 percent this morning.
And the blame game has begun.
One year ago today, Jesus returned to Earth with in a ‘spiritual coming’ to usher in an invisible judgment day, five months before the end of the world.
Religion Dispatches’ Tom Bartlett tracked down the remnants of Harold Camping’s movement:
For a while, their message was everywhere. They paid for billboards, took out full-page ads in newspapers, distributed thousands of tracts. They drove across the county in RVs emblazoned with verses from the books of Revelation and Daniel. They marched around Manhattan holding signs. They broadcasted day and night on their network of radio stations. They warned the world.
That warning turned out to be a false alarm. No giant earthquake rippled across the surface of the earth, nor were any believers caught up in the clouds. Harold Camping, the octogenarian whose nightly Bible call-in show fomented doomsday mania, suffered a stroke soon afterward and mostly disappeared from sight. The press coverage, which had been intense in the weeks leading up to May 21, 2011, dwindled to nothing. The story, as far as most people were concerned, was over.
But I wanted to know what happens next. If you’re absolutely sure the world is going to end on a specific day, and it doesn’t, what do you do? How do you explain it to yourself? What happens to your faith in God? Can you just scrape the bumper stickers off your car, throw away the t-shirts, and move on?
NPR:
Sophomoric? Members Of Congress Talk Like 10th Graders, Analysis Shows
Members of Congress are often criticized for what they do — or rather, what they don’t do.
But what about what they say and, more specifically, how they say it? It turns out that the sophistication of congressional speech-making is on the decline, according to the open government group the Sunlight Foundation. Since 2005, the average grade-level at which members of Congress speak has fallen by almost a full grade.
Every word members of Congress say on the floor of the House or Senate is documented in the Congressional Record. The Sunlight Foundation took the entire Congressional Record dating back to the 1990s and plugged it into a searchable database.
Lee Drutman, a political scientist at Sunlight, took all those speeches and ran them through an algorithm to determine the grade level of congressional discourse.
“We just kind of did it for fun, and I was kind of shocked when I plotted that data and I saw that, oh my God, there’s been a real drop-off in the last several years,” he says.
In 2005, Congress spoke at an 11.5 grade level on the Flesch-Kincaid scale. Now, it’s 10.6. In other words, Congress dropped from talking like juniors to talking like sophomores.
Flesch-Kinkaid equates higher grade levels with longer sentences and words with more syllables.
For example, just one sentence from the member of Congress with the highest grade ranking, Rep. Dan Lungren, a Republican from California, goes on for 62 words. (That sentence: “This Justice Department, in my judgment, based on the experience I’ve had here in this Congress, 18 years, my years as the chief legal officer of the state of California and 35 or 40 years as a practicing attorney tells me that this administration has fundamentally failed in its obligation to attempt to faithfully carry out the laws of the United States.”)
Lungren’s grade level during this session of Congress: 20. Overall since 1996: 16.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Georgia Republican Rep. Rob Woodall registers the second-lowest grade level: 8.01.
An example of Woodall’s speech: “What do they say about socialism, Mr. Speaker? It’s a great plan until you run out of other people’s money. Guess what? We’ve run out of other people’s money. I just want to show you a chart.”
That’s five sentences, an average of about 7.5 words per sentence.
“My mother will probably be embarrassed to hear this news,” Woodall says, “but I’m glad to know I’m not obfuscating our challenges with words that are too complicated.”
I feel like this says more about the American public than it does about our representatives.
Marion Barry is looking for a new Director of Communications. Could this be the hardest job in Washington? (Yes.)
Photo by James A. Parcell for the Washington Post.
To borrow a phrase from my friend Mario, this is why we can’t have nice things.
QED.
Michele Bachmann’s mentor is even nuttier than Michele Bachmann. And he’s running for Congress.
Clearly.
Insider tells why Anonymous ‘might well be the most powerful organization on Earth’
Christopher Doyon, a.k.a. Commander X, sits atop a hillside in an undisclosed location in Canada, watching a reporter and photographer make their way along a narrow path to join him, away from the prying eyes of law enforcement.
It’s been a few weeks of encrypted emails back and forth, working out the security protocol to follow for interviewing Doyon, one of the brains behind Anonymous, now a fugitive from the FBI.
Q: As strictly an online army of hackers, how powerful is Anonymous?
A: Anonymous is kind of like the big buff kid in school who had really bad self-esteem then all of a sudden one day he punched someone in the face and went, “Holy s— I’m really strong!” Scientology (one of Anonymous’s first targets) was the punch in the face where Anonymous began to realize how incredibly powerful they are. There’s a really good argument at this point that we might well be the most powerful organization on Earth. The entire world right now is run by information. Our entire world is being controlled and operated by tiny invisible 1s and 0s that are flashing through the air and flashing through the wires around us. So if that’s what controls our world, ask yourself who controls the 1s and the 0s? It’s the geeks and computer hackers of the world.
Full Q&A
Whenever Anonymous is brought up, this is what I think about:
