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The most realistic keep calm poster ever!

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PA - The Easton Area School District's former technology director has entered a first-time offenders program after being accused of illegally recording a private meeting.

That's according to the Morning Call, which says Thomas Drago's record will be expunged following a year on probation and a psychiatric evaluation.

Drago, 54, of Bushkill Township, resigned from his post in late 2012, just before the district began investigating whether he had been spying on his colleagues.

Police say investigators eventually learned Drago had used his iPhone to audio tape an "Act 93" meeting in March 2012. He was charged in August of last year with one count of felony wiretapping. (more)

In the early 1990s, at the end of the Cold War, before the onset of the Internet Age, 

Courtesy, SpyArtStudios

you could tune across the shortwave bands and hear the monotonous drone of an automated woman’s voice calling out long strings of numbers in Spanish. “Siete — Quatro — Cinqo — Cinqo — Cinqo,” the voice would say, pause, and then switch to a new set of numbers. The Spanish-language female voice station became known as “Attenćion,” due to its repeated use of that phrase at the beginning of each transmission.

These transmissions, which had started at the end of the Second World War, weren’t always in Spanish, nor were they always female. Other languages were used to broadcast entire strings of numbers, which many believed made up a coded message that could be heard by anyone with a shortwave radio. The consensus view at the time was they were meant for secret agents operating in foreign countries...

Today, with the Internet Age fully mature and the Cold War buried under 20 years of modern history, the numbers are still being transmitted. (more)

 

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Com a introdução de sistemas de multimídia e entretenimento conectados à internet ou em redes fechadas, as montadoras já começam a planejar a inserção de publicidade a bordo dos automóveis. A GM já demonstra interesse na tecnologia, mas a BMW já está se adiantando nesse aspecto, planejando oferecer anúncios através do BMW ConnectedDrive.

Para a BMW, trata-se do “mercado virtual do futuro”. No entanto, para que o projeto não tenha impacto negativo junto ao cliente, este poderá filtrar as propagandas indesejadas no sistema de entretenimento. A empresa encomendou em 2012 um software que permite fazer exatamente isso.

Além disso, o dispositivo da BMW vai permitir que o condutor tenha acesso à informações dos pontos de referência ao longo do trajeto. Um exemplo é buscar um shopping. Quando o carro se aproxima do destino ou ponto de interesse, o sistema informa antecipadamente o número de vagas disponíveis e a tarifa do estacionamento.

Futuramente, o objetivo é integrar essa tecnologia aos navegadores, que além de pontos de interesse e rota mais rápida ao destino programado, também oferecerão avisos de promoções e descontos em variados serviços e produtos ao longo da rota, tais como cafés, restaurantes ou preços de combustíveis, por exemplo.

A noticia Fabricantes querem explorar publicidade dentro dos automóveis foi publicada no site Notícias Automotivas - Carros.

Lista inclui apenas modelos feitos em série, de qualquer categoria

It has been a while since we had a Laughs post. Not enough material, simply. This piece came out last weekend, but of course the release of the behind the scenes video took the limelight off it. The spin on the S4 trailer (which has over 16 million YouTube views at the moment, btw) is not my favourite, but with the onset of the new season we are bound to get more Thrones humour to pick from as well.

And as a bonus, internet memes cast in Thrones, by C-Section Comics:

The sample is pretty limited, but here is what they find:

The killers typically murder their targets on a street close to the victim’s home, although a significant proportion get cold feet or bungle the job, according to criminologists who examined 27 cases of contract killing between 1974 and 2013 committed by 36 men (including accomplices) and one woman.

…The reality of contract killing in Britain tended to be striking only in its mundanity, according to David Wilson, the university’s professor of criminology. He said: “Far from the media portrayal of hits being conducted inside smoky rooms, frequented by members of an organised crime gang, British hits were more usually carried out in the open, on pavements, sometimes as the target was out walking their dog, or going shopping, with passersby watching on in horror.”

Researchers found that the average cost of a hit was £15,180, with £100,000 being the highest and £200 the lowest amount paid. The average age of a hitman was 38 with the youngest aged 15 and the oldest 63.

The youngest, Santre Sanchez Gayle from north London, shot dead a young woman at point-blank range with a sawn-off shotgun in 2010 after she answered her front door. The oldest was David Harrison who, also in 2010, shot the owner of a skip-hire business in his Staffordshire home.

Most hits involved a gun, with three victims stabbed, five beaten to death and two strangled. The most conspicuous weapon was used in the killing of David King, a widely feared underworld figure known as “Rolex Dave”, who in 2003 was shot five times as he emerged from a Hertfordshire gym by hitman Roger Vincent and his accomplice David Smith, both 33. The killing was the first time an AK-47 assault rifle – apparently belonging to the Hungarian prison service – had been used on a British street.

For the pointer I thank Mike Brown.  By the way, those records are focused on Birmingham, England, which perhaps is not like Lodi, New Jersey in this regard.

The original work is cited as appearing in the Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, but I do not seem to find the article at that link.

One empirical regularity is that many minimum wage boosts come during recessions or downturns, as many of you pointed out here.  Yet I take this repeated pattern to be an argument for having a low, zero, or quite “fettered” minimum wage.

Let’s think through the economics.  One of the main pro-minimum wage arguments — arguably the #1 argument — cites labor market monopsony.  Let’s say you have a monopsonistic employer who holds back on bidding for more labor, out of fear that hiring more labor raises the price paid on all labor units of a certain quality (by assumption, there is no perfect price discrimination here).  The minimum wage can get you out of this trap.  By forcing the higher wage on all workers in any case, the employer now doesn’t hesitate to hire more of them because the “fear of bidding up the price of labor” effect is gone or diminished.  And that is how, in some situations, a higher minimum wage can boost employment.

Now let’s say the economy is in a demand-driven downturn, which creates a surplus in the labor market.  Now, to get more workers, the monopsonist firm does not have to raise the wage and it can get more workers at the prevailing wage.  But employers just don’t want more workers, because of demand-side constraints.  So employers could in fact hire more workers without pushing up wage rates at all, once again that is for all units of labor of a particular quality.  Yes there is still monopsony, but the potential wage effects of hiring more labor are muted by the labor surplus.  And that means boosting the minimum wage won’t create the beneficial hiring effects which operate in the more traditional monopsony scenario, explained in the paragraph directly above.

In other words, if you think we are now seeing a slow labor market for demand-side reasons, you should be skeptical of the monopsony argument for minimum wage hikes, at least for the time being.

By the way, demand-side problems often wreck the notion that the EITC and minimum wage are complements.

The bottom line is that a lot of the arguments for a higher minimum wage are inconsistent with or in tension with a demand-driven labor market slowdown.  And I don’t exactly see the world rushing to point this out.

Here is my earlier argument that slow labor markets are the worst times to boost minimum wages.  Here is my earlier post drawing a parallel between minimum wages (government-enforced sticky wages) and privately-enforced sticky wages.  Here is an excerpt from that post:

I know many economists who will argue: “let’s raise the state-imposed minimum wage.  Employers will respond by creating higher-productivity jobs, or by paying more, and few jobs will be lost.”  I do not know many Keynesians who will argue: “In light of the worker-imposed minimum wage, employers will respond by creating higher-productivity jobs, or by paying more, and few jobs will be lost.”

Addendum: By the way, here are some graphs and regressions about the minimum wage and recessions, from  Kevin Erdmann.  I think he is attempting the impossible, but you still might find it instructive to look at some of the pictures.

1. More Pentagon chatter about robots.  And man-machine co-authored sonnet.  Video about robots who attend weddings.

2. Should we allow state-based visas?  I wrote back to Adam Ozimek: “thanks, I will link to this, suppose I don’t yet have an original comment as to whether the more immigrants vs. potential balkanization trade-off is worth it…”

3. What characterizes the 2013-2014 job market stars in economics?

4. Economic development and the dangers of stories.

5. The business model behind Vox.  And are the best things in life W.E.I.R.D.?

Midnight movies. Guilty pleasures. Cult classics. We have lots of terms for films that are so bad, they're good. But why do we really love terrible films, sometimes more than good movies? And why aren't all bad movies wonderfully bad?

Read more...

In honor of the Mac's 30th anniversary today, iFixit has partnered with Cult of Mac and The Vintage Mac Museum to tear down an original Macintosh 128K. Analysis of the well-known vintage hardware obviously reveals no surprises, but does highlight just how far technology has come in the past 30 years.

Thirty years of progress yields some impressive changes to input peripherals. Keyboards and mice are now wireless, thinner, and comprised mainly of sturdy, non-yellow metal.

And we now have arrow keys! In typical Apple fashion, they ditched the arrows on the original Mac to force people to use the mouse, a strange new accessory at the time.

The engineering of the Macintosh 128K reflects the do-it-yourself culture from which this Mac emerged. Unlike the current Mac models, the 128K is relatively easy to repair, earning a repairability score of 7 out of 10. Most main components, with the exception of RAM, are user replaceable and easy to access since adhesive was not used in the assembly process. Deep-set case screws and electrocution hazards from power supplies are the biggest hindrances to a self-repair.


Originally released as the Apple Macintosh, the Macintosh 128K was unveiled thirty years ago by Steve Jobs on January 24, 1984 at the company's annual stockholders meeting. The presentation showcased the computer's then revolutionary graphical UI and speech technology.

Last night, over 100 members of the original Mac team gathered to celebrate the Mac's 30th anniversary in De Anza College's Flint Center, where Steve Jobs first introduced the Macintosh 30 years ago. The event was focused around three separate panels: the conception of the Mac, the building of the Mac and the third-party developers who built software for the Mac.


The evening began with video of both Jobs' introduction of the Macintosh in the Flint Center and a couple minutes of the 90-minute Macintosh presentation at the Boston Computer Society, which was made public for the first time last night. Master of Ceremonies and Apple employee #4 Bill Fernandez then introduced the first panel of the night: the conception of the Mac.

Moderated by New York Times writer John Markoff, the panel included Mac team members Larry Tesler, Daniel Kottke, Rod Holt, Jerry Manock and Marc LeBrun. While introducing themselves, Manock himself recalled that he initially thought he was going to be fired due to a defect on the Apple III's design that was seen as his fault. Manock states that he was called into Jobs' office while trying to fix the design and, instead of being fired, was given a job to design the Macintosh.

Later, when asked what carried over from Jef Raskin's version of the Macintosh project and Steve Jobs' version of the Macintosh product, Holt, who developed the power supply for the Apple II, said the main difference was that the computer became a product the team themselves wanted, echoing Apple's current product philosophy.

From an abstract, it became a reality. But it was the sum of its parts, but the parts were all what people wanted. And that enthusiasm, you see, people put themselves into that computer. It's the same thing that happened with the Apple II. Everyone worked on that Apple II because they wanted that Apple II. This process of invention was very unusual. I think that this world could use a lot more of that.

The second panel, moderated by Wired's Steven Levy, focused on the creation of the Mac and included Mac team members Bill Atkinson, Caroline Rose, Andy Hertzfeld, Bruce Horn, Steve Capps, George Crow and Randy Wigginton. During the introductory part of the panel, which detailed how each employee joined the Mac team, Wigginton, who created MacWrite, said "I feel like I'm listening to a bunch of lies, because according to the Ashton Kutcher documentary..." referencing Ashton Kutcher's Steve Jobs biopic Jobs and drawing a roar of laughter.

The panel then discussed how difficult it was to ship the Mac on time, noting that some of them worked up to 90 hours a week to fix things and get them as good as they could be for shipment. Levy then asked the group about their work with Microsoft, noting Bill Gates' claim that Microsoft had more people working on software for the Mac than Apple did. Wigginton quickly responded, saying "If they had more people than us then it doesn't speak very highly of the quality of the people they had," which drew massive applause and laughter.


Hertzfeld, who was a software designer on Macintosh, then jumped in, noting Microsoft was the first company that got a Mac and ended up helping shaping the Mac, creating three programs to accompany Apple's MacWrite and MacPaint to give its young ecosystem a boost. Further, he also noted one of Microsoft's systems architects kept asking how the internals of the software worked. Hertzfeld said he was curious as to why they kept asking, but eventually assumed why. "I quickly thought 'maybe they were trying to copy the Mac?' And sure enough, in 1983, they announced Windows. We were kind of shocked by that."

Capps, who helped create Finder with Horn and worked at Microsoft from 1996 - 2001, then mentioned that well into 2000 he would be in a product meeting and Gates, when he didn't like any of the ideas that were presented to him, would say "What would Apple do?" He said that Apple's ethos and product environment were burnt into his psyche and inspired Gates. Horn then noted the curiosity around Apple still exists today.

Everybody looks at Apple and says 'what would Apple do?' and everybody is copying Apple. So something that Steve did and all the people who he hired made Apple have a particular way of thinking and particular passion for the user of the product that is here today for years and years so I think that's amazing.

Atkinson then said making the Mac was more about creating art for them as opposed to doing work. This mentality, Atkinson stated, was why Jobs made the team have their signatures on the inside of the Mac, because "artists sign their work" and Jobs wanted them to be proud of what they built.

Later on, Caroline Rose, who wrote the Macintosh's technical documentation, said the team had tears in their eyes and became depressed when it was announced the price of the Mac was raised from $1,995 to $2,495 to offset the massive marketing costs, because the people they built the computer for wouldn't be able to purchase it.

Apple CEO Mike Markkula then came on stage and thanked the entire Mac team for their accomplishment. Fernandez then symbolically presented Markkula with a plaque that had a trophy on top of it with six arms holding up a Mac, which said: "Apple and Macintosh would never have happened without you. Your participation changed the world."

After bringing out an original Macintosh and re-demoing the original demo Steve Jobs conducted at the product's introduction in 1984, Steve Hayden, the copywriter behind many popular Apple ad campaigns, including the famous "1984" commercial, gave a presentation on the history of Apple's advertising.


Hayden recounted the early development of "1984" to the 20-page inserts he helped create to explain how to use a Mac to the "Computer for the rest of us" tagline to the failure of the "Lemmings" Macintosh Office commercial to the resurgence of Apple advertising with the iMac's "Three Steps" ad.

In the final panel of the evening, CNET's Dan Farber moderated a panel that included third-party developers Mark Canter, Charlie Jackson, Jim Rea, Heidi Rozen, Ty Roberts, David Bunnell, Maryline Delbourg Delphis, Adam Hertz and Steve Jasik, focusing on how developing for the Mac changed their lives, echoing Apple's recent efforts to highlight how developing for the App Store and iPad has changed people's lives today.

Bunnell, who founded Macworld, remembered how he had worked with Steve Jobs and Apple to develop Macworld magazine in secret. Jobs initially didn't want to be on the famous first cover for Macworld, but was talked into it. Jobs later changed his mind, telling Bunnell he didn't want to be on the cover anymore, but Bunnell lied and told him it was too late and the magazine was already printed.

Finally, Jerry Manock, Caroline Rose and Patti Kenyon came on stage to read a letter from the Mac team to the Macintosh, and to the various Apple employees that attended the event:

Dear Mac, today you are celebrating your 30th birthday. Here are some things we wanted you to know as you enter your fourth decade. Your early family really loved you. We had lots of fun being pirates and working very hard together, before you were born. You were a cute, chubby little baby who has grown up to be as slender as a No. 2 pencil with the power of an NFL middle linebacker. You were writing and drawing sketches at a very early age, who would have guessed that you'd now be making movies all by yourself and sharing it with people around the world.

Your list of accomplishments is truly astounding. We are very, very proud of all the tasks you have mastered. Many more than we could have ever imagined! Never forget that your parents wanted you to always be respectful of the individuality of your users. And we hope that you will continue to help them communicate their uniqueness to each other.

You can't let vanity and compliments about your beauty stop you from always remembering your core purpose: fostering innovation and creativity. Finally, don't forget to keep your sense of humor. True artist not only ship, but laugh! Don't forget about the little Mac Man who used to run across the desktop every once in a while. So, have an insanely great happy birthday. We all wish you continued success in your next 30 years, helping pilot the Mothership.

Sincerely yours, members of the 1984 Macintosh Development Team.

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This Avengers Captain America Marvel Comics Mr. Potato Head will let you play with Steve Rogers in a whole new way. Captain America just got a makeover. This Mr. Potato Head Captain America toy stands 6-inches tall and he comes with his mask, red gloves, classic shield, and red boots. You can mix and match […]

This Batman Utility Belt Prop Replica is going to look great in your Bat-shrine. The utility belt is Batman’s whole bag of tricks. He never leaves home without it. And now you can display it in your home. This Batman Utility Belt Prop Replica features a black metal-like finish of the Batman logo as the […]

schneidafunk writes " Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.' was the message sent to thousands of protesters as a new law prohibiting public demonstrations went into effect." From NYTimes: "... Protesters were concerned that the government seemed to be using cutting-edge technology from the advertising industry to pinpoint people for political profiling. Three cellphone companies in Ukraine ... denied that they had provided the location data to the government or had sent the text messages, the newspaper Ukrainskaya Pravda reported. Kyivstar suggested that it was instead the work of a 'pirate' cellphone tower set up in the area."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sexually transmitted canine cancer has acquired almost 2 million mutations and is still going strong.

Nature News doi: 10.1038/nature.2014.14580