Archive for October, 2011
Facebook Is Building Shadow Profiles of Non-Users
October 20th, 2011Via: Slashdot: “As noted previously, Max Schrems of Europe Versus Facebook has filed numerous complaints about Facebook’s data collection practices. One complaint that has failed to draw much scrutiny regards Facebook’s creation of Shadow Profiles. ‘This is done by different functions that encourage users to hand personal data of other users and non-users to Facebook… […]
‘Rise of the Machines: America’s Jobs Challenge’
October 20th, 2011Via: Reuters: For decades, American workers and their machines advanced in tandem. As companies invested in technology, more workers were needed to operate machines. That relationship is now looking unsteady. Since 1999, business investment in equipment and software has surged 33 percent while the total number of people employed by private firms has changed little. […]
MTV Real World Casting Call for Occupy Wall Street Protestors
October 20th, 2011An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will. —Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind So, Obombya, the Goldman Sachs’ shill, and MTV are now behind this Occupy Wall Street situation. [Update: Mikhail Gorbachev: Protests leading to […]
A Long, Steep Drop for Americans’ Standard of Living
October 20th, 2011Via: Christian Science Monitor: Think life is not as good as it used to be, at least in terms of your wallet? You’d be right about that. The standard of living for Americans has fallen longer and more steeply over the past three years than at any time since the US government began recording it […]
Egypt’s Top ‘Facebook Revolutionary’ Now Advising Occupy Wall Street
October 19th, 2011Via: Wired: One of the key activists behind Egypt’s “Facebook Revolution” is now giving advice to a new group of protesters: the Occupy Wall Street movement. The protesters in New York’s Zuccotti Park — and their offshoots around the country — often cite the mass demonstrations earlier this year in Cairo’s Tahrir Square as their […]
State Department Shakes Down Employee of 23 Years Over Book Describing Absurd “Reconstruction” Antics in Iraq
October 19th, 2011We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People by Peter Van Buren Via: Tom’s Dispatch: On the same day that more than 250,000 unredacted State Department cables hemorrhaged out onto the Internet, I was interrogated for the first time in my 23-year State Department career […]
Federal Reserve Now Backstopping $75 Trillion Of Bank Of America’s Derivatives Trades
October 19th, 2011Via: Daily Bail: This story from Bloomberg just hit the wires this morning. Bank of America is shifting derivatives in its Merrill investment banking unit to its depository arm, which has access to the Fed discount window and is protected by the FDIC. This means that the investment bank’s European derivatives exposure is now backstopped […]
China: People Ignore Dying Child Who Was Run Over by Two Different Vehicles
October 18th, 2011Via: New Zealand Herald: Footage of a two-year-old girl being run over by a van and lying bleeding on the road as more than a dozen people pass her by has sparked outrage and soul searching in China. The video surveillance footage posted widely on Chinese social media sites starts with the young girl being […]
‘The Pentagon hopes to sniff out who has fallen prey to dangerous ideas’
October 18th, 2011Via: Wired: Mark Twain once tried to distinguish between the storyteller’s art and tales that a machine could generate. He observed that stringing “incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities,” was the province of the American storyteller. A machine might imitate simple formulas […]
U.S. Troops Will Soon Get Tiny Kamikaze Drone
October 18th, 2011Via: Wired: AeroVironment calls its teeny-tiny killer drone the Switchblade. Essentially a guided missile small enough to fit in a backback and fire at a single foe…
