firehose

The Scottish parliament on Tuesday voted to pass the Marriage and Civil Partnership (Scotland) Bill by a margin of 105-18, with the first unions set to be conducted in the autumn.

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Netflix is sticking with House of Cards. A few weeks ahead of the Emmy winning drama's sophomore debut on the streaming service, it has been given the official greenlight for a third season.

new, original rushjet1

“I like my dog real hot. I like my dog between my bun.”

An official music video has been released for the song “$2 Dollar Hot Dog $1 Dollar Water” performed by Bishop Frederick Barr, Dr. Erica Barr, and Kyhil Smith. The catchy song, which is surprisingly enough all about selling hot dogs and water, is available to purchase online from iTunes and Amazon.

via Viral Viral Videos

Redman - MTV Cribs Revisits | Watch Hip Hop Music Videos & New Rap Videos | HipHop DX:

See how Redman turned his “De La Casa” into “De La Castle”

This map charts out all the schools receiving public funding that teach creationism — whether they're public schools or private and charter schools that receive public funding.

Read more...

Time Inc. confirmed this morning that long-expected layoffs, which widespread reports place at as high as 500 employees, will begin immediately as parent company Time Warner prepares to spin off its low-performing publishing division. Time Inc., which publishes more than 20 magazines, employees about 7,800 people worldwide. DC Entertainment, a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Entertainment, [...]

People shouldn't laugh about Russian bathrooms. Because here's something on Soviet bathrooms.

There will be jokes. Oh, there will be jokes. Lots of poop jokes.

People have asked me what surprised me the most here in Sochi. It's this. Without question ... it's ... THIS. pic.twitter.com/1jj05FNdCP

— Greg Wyshynski (@wyshynski) February 4, 2014

The bathroom is a place for solace, for contemplation. It's where free-market enthusiasts meditate with the help of a Restoration Hardware catalog. All of which is hard to do with a bucket of poop paper in the corner.

But allow me to defuse some jokes. That picture might represent some of the plumbing mores in present day Sochi, Russia, and it is most certainly not what we're used to. It's not what the reporters covering the Winter Olympics are used to.

I, however, have experience pooping in the Soviet Union.

When I was 13, I went with a youth group to the U.S.S.R.. It was just a month before the coup, and even a teenager could figure out that things were opening up. The packs of kids looking to trade military watches for INXS cassettes and weren't as subtle as we were told they would be. Most of the business was done in the open, which was something of a surprise. We were told to bring cartons of cigarettes for trade. The ones who did came home with full military uniforms, medals and all.

We were also told to bring toilet paper. I did not listen.

When you google "standing in line for toilet paper" now, you get a histrionic quote from Glenn Beck as the first result. But in the '80s, that was a thing. Americans loved to recoil in horror/point in Cold War superiority at the reports of Soviets standing in line for bread and toilet paper. I waited in a surprisingly efficient mile-long line to get a Big Mac, but I never did see lines for bread. Maybe the stories were apocryphal, or maybe they kept the American school kids off that beat.

I'm not sure if I ever saw a roll of toilet paper in a public restroom during those three weeks, though. The Moscow hotels had some in the rooms, I think, but nothing in the lobby. Same with Yaroslavl and Vladimir. They would take care of the guests, but if they put a roll down for the masses, the masses would redistribute it.

At 13, I had not mastered the dos and don'ts of pooping in public restrooms. There was no advance planning, no thought of worst-case scenarios. You went about your day, and when you had to go, you found somewhere appropriate. Seems simple. For the first few days, this didn't come up.

Then it came up. There's nothing quite like the frantic realization there's no toilet paper in your stall. Your first instinct is to reach under the next stall and paw for help, shooting a hand up like something from the Evil Dead poster. Run with that instinct. But in the Soviet Union, that was not a strategy that was likely to work.

Then the door opened to the bathroom, and someone took the next stall. I was convinced it was a local, so I didn't bother with the whimpers for help. I was going to have to wait for the search party to find me. Except, five minutes into the next stall's adventure, it was English that (also) came out.

"No. No, no, no."

It was someone from the trip. We made awkward chatter before getting down to brown tacks. Turns out that my new soulmate remembered he had travel-sized Kleenex in his fanny pack. Also, he had a fanny pack. In a solemn ceremony, tiny Kleenex was passed under the stall. I was saved.

We got out, laughing, and started washing our hands. Another kid from the trip came in and closed the stall. Buckle hit the floor, and we figured out a warning was in order.

"There's no toilet paper in there."

"Oh."

"We're out of Kleenex. We'll run up to the room and get you some."

"Don't worry about it."

"No, seriously. It's okay, we'll run up and grab some."

"Nah, I'm cool."

About three minutes later, the guy emerges from the bathroom and rejoins us in the lobby, where we were meeting to get on a bus to Ivanavo. It's about a five-hour trip. I sat next to no-paper for the entire trip. He smelled. He also brought a cassingle of "Everything I Do, I Do It For You" that he would convince the driver to play over the bus's PA every couple hours.

That part is absolutely not made up. Neither is the part about him smelling bad.

So people in Sochi have to throw the toilet paper in a receptacle? Suck it the hell up. You have toilet paper. When it runs out, someone will get more. They will hang it overhand like an animal, but there will be more. Pooping in Sochi might be an experience, but pooping in the Soviet Union was a trauma.

Also, I'm about one more call to the plumber away from keeping a poop-paper receptacle in my own bathroom, so I don't want to antagonize the bathroom gods. Leave Sochi alone.

More on the Winter Olympics:

• Get to know the Sochi venues'

• Longform: Four years after the "Miracle on Ice", the 1984 US hockey team never had a chance

• Sochi’s hotels are having some problems

• Snowboard slopestyle course to be modified after injury

Hockey: Men’s schedule | All 12 men’s rosters | Henrik Lundqvist on Sweden's chances, tournament fatigue

That was the helpful advice offered to one victim of prison rape when he went to the authorities. Christopher Glazek is horrified that "before this year, the federal government had never bothered to estimate the actual number of rapes that occur in prisons":

In January, prodded in part by outrage over a series of articles in the New York Review of Books, the Justice Department finally released an estimate of the prevalence of sexual abuse in penitentiaries. The reliance on filed complaints appeared to understate the problem. For 2008, for example, the government had previously tallied 935 confirmed instances of sexual abuse. After asking around, and performing some calculations, the Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That’s 216,000 victims, not instances. These victims are often assaulted multiple times over the course of the year. The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women.

Adam Gopnik confronted prison rape earlier this week.

Original Source

(By Robert Freeman)

Protesters calling for higher wages for fast-food workers stand outside a McDonald’s restaurant in Oakland, California December 5, 2013 (Photo: Reuters)The Tom Perkins “billionaires-as-victims” charade couldn’t be more surreal. It goes without saying that his comparing the 1% to victims of Hitler’s genocide is tasteless. That it is oblivious is obvious. And that Perkins himself suffers from paranoid delusions must be suspected.

But there are deeper reasons for plumbing the pathology of Perkins’ rant. As background, let’s recall some basic facts.

Over the past 30-odd years, since Reagan, a vast share of the nation’s income and wealth has been transferred from the poor, working, and middle classes to the very wealthy. Twenty five years ago, the top 1% of income earners pulled in 12% of the nation’s income, today they get twice that, 25%. And the rate of transfer is accelerating.

In the ten years between 1996 and 2006 67% of all the growth in the entire U.S. economy went to the top 1% of income earners. Between 2009 and 2012, 95% of all the new income produced in the economy went to the top 1%. What about everybody else?

Since the late 1970s, labor productivity in the U.S. has risen 259%. If the fruits of that productivity had been distributed according to the capitalist ideal that a person gets what he produces, the average person’s income would be more than double what it is today. The reality?

Median male compensation, adjusted for inflation, is lower today than it was in 1975, a full generation ago. A staggering 40% of all Americans now make less than the 1968 minimum wage. It’s the exact opposite of the cultural myth of shared prosperity and opportunity for all.
The rich are getting richer, and everyone else is getting poorer. That is not an ideological statement. It is an empirical one. Perkins believes that simply discussing such facts cannot be allowed. The rich may only be addressed in terms that signal deification.

But underlying Perkins’ tirade is a conviction that the super-rich have earned everything they’ve gotten and so are beyond reproach. Have they?

An enormous amount of the gains by the super-rich have flowed to those in the finance industry. But much of that has been the result of naked fraud and outright criminality, for example in the mortgage, mortgage securities, and derivatives markets. The simple fact of banks being “too big to fail” (an immunity to failure underwritten by the government) is worth tens of billions of dollars a year. And do we even need mention the trillions of dollars of bailouts lavished on the banks, even as millions of mortgage holders were losing their homes?

The banks have learned how to pillage the public and plunder the public purse by paying a periodic “licensing fee” in the form of a nominal fine with no admission of guilt, even as tens of millions of global victims are denuded of income and wealth.

This is hardly the John Galt/Atlas Shrugged model of rugged economic individualism that Perkins fantasizes. It is a cancerous corruption of markets, achieved by equally cancerous capture of political and regulatory systems. It is so brazen and uncontested it’s become normal. Perkins literally believes it is admirable.

Markets in fossil fuels are equally corrupted, if not more so. Coal and oil companies reap enormous, breathtaking profits, partly by offloading their waste products into the global commons called the atmosphere. As with the banks, it is a massive, trillion-dollar case of privatizing profits while socializing costs.

This is the essential nature of almost all major markets today: the government acts as guarantor of staggering private profits, underwritten at public cost. This is the basis of much of the income and wealth transfers of the past thirty years.

We have WalMart and McDonalds, for example, paying their people so little they are forced onto food stamps. It is a covert subsidy of their costs, borne by the public, and worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year. All hidden in plain view.

Or, remember G.W. Bush’s billion giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry with his Medicare Part D gift. It prohibited the government from negotiating for lower drug prices or from allowing foreign-made competition into the U.S. market. Its value? $600 billion.

The government effectively quit enforcing anti-trust thirty years ago, with the consequence that almost all major markets have become consolidated into just a handful of mega-corporations who agree not to compete on price. Think, for example, of the banking, airline, telecommunications, insurance, weapons, and media industries. They are massive oligopolies, extracting all value from their captive customers.

It is through such structuring of industries, stripping of regulations, provision of subsidies and guarantees, favorable tax treatments, and a thousand other insider artifices that the U.S. economy has become a mechanism for sluicing the nation’s income and wealth to those who are already the most wealthy, like Tom Perkins.

The consequence is that the U.S. has become the most unequal economy in the developed world, and with less upward mobility than any other industrialized country. Another consequence is the devastation of democracy, as pharaoic wealth is channeled into buying politicians, judges, regulators and all other gatekeepers of the public trust. Inequality and plutocracy then become an irreversible problem.

Perkins’ delusions of persecution might be tolerable were they rooted in some reality about the source of the 1%’s income and wealth. They are not. We must guard against letting his narcissistic delusions become anyone else’s cognitive map for how to deal with the problem.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Robert Freeman

Robert Freeman is the author of The Best One-Hour History series which includes World War I and The Vietnam War. He is the founder of the national non-profit One Dollar For Life which helps American students build schools in the developing world from their contributions of one dollar.

Mirrored from Commondreams.org

—–

Related video:

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks: “Rich Asshole Tries To Apologize And Makes Things Much Worse”

David Simon, journalist, writer, creator of The Wire and Treme, talks with Bill Moyers.

”The horror show is we are going to be slaves to profit. Some of us are going to be higher on the pyramid and we’ll count ourselves lucky and many many more will be marginalized and destroyed,” Simon tells Moyers.

Dark Horse Wins With Tomb Raider, Buffy, and Serenity « fangirlblog.com:

tkeiralea:

Dark Horse Comics’ Year of the Horse started out with a bang with their record number of wins in the Diamond Gem Awards. From their news feed:

Last week, Diamond Comic Distributors announced the 2013 Gem Awards, boasting a record number of accolades for Dark Horse!

While DC Entertainment topped the list with six awards, Dark Horse dominated among the independent publishers, with Dark Horse Presents winning Anthology of the Year for the second year in a row!

This year’s Dark Horse wins are as follows:

•    Licensed Comic Book of the Year: The Star Wars #1 (SEP138217)

•    Anthology of the Year: Dark Horse Presents #26 (MAY130015)

•    Trade Book of the Year: The Legend of Zelda: Hyrule Historia (SEP120055)

•    Original GN of the Year: Hellboy: The Midnight Circus (JUN130031)

•    Manga TP of the Year: Lone Wolf & Cub Omnibus Vol. 1 (JAN130124)

Over at Newsarama, Brian J.L. Glass talks about FURIOUS, out now from Dark Horse. It’s a fabulous discussion of female characters, superheroes as a means to explore the human condition, tropes, and darker storytelling.

First, if I can address your observation about FURIOUS as a character—the point you made about her resisting a trope forced upon her is one of the ways this story does resonate directly with the issues the female audience is currently expressing displeasure about. This woman is unique, with her superpowers truly setting her apart from every other human being on Earth (at least for now), yet a media system labels her. She wants to be “The Beacon” yet a male reporter saddles her with what could be considered a negative title: she’s “FURIOUS.” It’s an observation, but more so an indictment. And deep down, FURIOUS struggles with the truth that this label is a far more accurate descriptor than her desire. She can rail against the label and the system that boxed her, yet only reinforce the label by how she does so. How she ultimately struggles against that system, as well as her own inner darkness, is part of her heroic journey. And that brings me back to your actual question regarding that lost sense in the joy and wonder of superheroes…

Also out now, Serenity: Leaves on the Wind #1 picks up the story approximately 39 weeks after the events in the movie Serenity.

Spotted over at The Mary Sue, Dark Horse has hired former Buffy the Vampire Slayer actor Nicholas Brendon to write a Buffy comic.

The Star Wars: Legacy: Volume 3 hardcover debuts February 5th. We’re big fans here of John Ostrander and Jan Duursema.

Finally, Kotaku previewed Tomb Raider #1, written by Gail Simone, which will premiere February 26th. Simone is one of my favorite storytellers, not just for what she puts on the page but for her ability to articulate her understanding of tropes, characters, and how stories affect the audience. She has been a champion for women in storytelling, in universes and out of universe. Tomb Raider will definitely be going on my pull list.

I’m particularly a fan of her Twitter prediction for women in comics this year.

---

Just a reminder: My book Wynde is out now and here are all the things you can do to support it.

For updates on all things FANgirl follow @FANgirlcantina on Twitter or like FANgirl Zone on Facebook. At times she tries the Tumblr.

OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy

Inevitably left behind in this discussion are girls like Lily, who are never asked whether they prefer Catholicism, Thanksgiving, and Irish step dance to Buddhism, the Chinese New Year, and gymnastics (did I mention Russell also becomes Buddhist?)

#yitb

By Guest Contributor Sara Erdmann

Despite the fact that international adoption has become commonplace — most recent studies show that over 70,000 Chinese girls were adopted into the United States between 1991 and 2010 — Beth Nonte Russell’s path to motherhood was a nontraditional one. In her 2007 memoir, Forever Lily: an Unexpected Mother’s Journey to Adoption, Russell describes accompanying a friend who intends to adopt on a trip to China.

This book, while almost 7 years old, is continuously recommended across the web for adoptive mothers — it’s pinned on Pinterest and a regular on the book club circuit. In an era obsessed with memoir, it seems only natural that Russell would choose to chronicle her journey as such, particularly considering the major surprise (read: book sales) that characterizes her trip: Russell’s friend changes her mind. Quickly becoming the heroine of her own story, Russell looks down at the little girl she has only just met and begins conceiving a history in which the two of them were meant to be together. Eager to substantiate her sudden role as Lily’s mother, Russell proclaims that “there was a past life connection between [her] and Lily,” and that her “longing brought [Lily] into being.” To suggest that this child living in an orphanage in China exists because Russell willed her into being is problematic to say the least, but Russell goes one step further in her desire to feel permanently and unalterably connected despite her and Lily’s cultural and racial differences.

White adoptive families are regularly challenged by the idea of incorporating their child’s birth culture into their family. Researchers have long questioned whether an adopted child’s birth culture should be ignored, as in cases when families essentially raise their child of color as white, or whether it should be embraced, even to the point of trying to mimic a Chinese upbringing in the United States (think Chinese New Year parties and Mandarin lessons). In Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant observe that “there is a continuous temptation to think of race as an essence, as something fixed, concrete, and objective. And there is also an opposite temptation: to imagine race as a mere illusion, a purely ideological construct which some ideal non-racist social order would eliminate.” Because Russell sees Lily’s race as an essence, something unalterable, and she needs to feel she was meant to be Lily’s mother, she relies on personal epiphanies and memories that confirm that, in some way, she is also Chinese.

Upon her return to the United States with Lily, Russell talks with her sister who recalls that, during a family trip to San Francisco’s Chinatown years ago, Russell awoke in the middle of the night, waving her arms around and saying something about a baby. Russell’s sister said she was quite scared and that “she was sure [Russell] was speaking Chinese.” From this story, Russell’s sister concludes that she “always knew [Russell] was Chinese.” Russell is immediately validated:

A chill of recognition rippled over me as she spoke those words, and I thought, Yes, I am Chinese. [...] I forget at times that when [the Chinese] look at me, they see someone different, someone separate; and when I remember that, it feels like a betrayal.

Because Russell had a dream after a family trip to Chinatown, and later fell in love with a Chinese baby girl, she is now Chinese. Yet, Lily, who was born in China, is Chinese as well. Lily, who will be raised in the United States and likely know no more of China than any other tourist, will remain Chinese no matter what. It is never considered that Lily will be entirely American, because the idea that someone crosses national borders and loses their “ethnic heritage” is no longer accepted. Yet, what Russell fails to acknowledge is the fact that, if Lily is unalterably Chinese, Russell is unalterably white. To allow herself a flexible ethnicity implies that Lily’s racial essence conflicts with Russell’s racial illusion: in other words, one can add Asianness to whiteness, but not the other way around.

Much as maleness is considered the blank slate of sex, whiteness is essentially a racial blank slate to most Americans. In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison articulates the problematic tendency to portray whiteness as “‘universal’ or race-free.” Morrison describes a character from a Hemingway novel who we know is white “because nobody says so.” In other words, whiteness is what we assume when given no other information, and anything else is a shift to non-white, or raced. This mentality of white people as “race-free” is pervasive among white Americans and is a large part of the adoptive community’s tendency to see little girls born in China as unalterably Chinese while their adoptive parents’ identities are more flexible. (Of course, this mutable identity is not allowed to Chinese women, who, when they choose to go by American names for professional reasons, sadden Russell. She projects that these women “cannot be who they really are with us; they must alter their identities in an attempt to bridge the cultural gap [...]. It must be a strain to do so.”)

In the recent past, it was acceptable to pretend adopted Chinese daughters were no different from white biological children: colorblindness was the politically correct stance. Only twenty years ago Morrison wrote that “the habit of ignoring race is understood by most to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture.” In other words, to ignore someone’s race was considered an act of benevolence. Today, with a trend toward multiculturalism and a fascination with the exotic, the idea that these young girls cross the border and immediately become “American” is both outdated and unfashionable.

No longer do parents pick up their adopted children at the airport, give them American names, and imagine they have lived here all along; as Toby Alice Volkman observes in Cultures of Transnational Adoption, no longer is “racial assimilation the goal.” When Russell is going through the final stages of bringing her daughter home from China, she describes her discomfort with the name her friend had originally chosen:

It is a quintessentially American name, and would have given no hint or nod to [the baby's] Asian roots. It is a label, an American label that would have been slapped over the MADE IN CHINA label that was Baby herself, in an attempt to obscure the truth.

In Russell’s mind, Lily is Chinese regardless of what her future brings, so much so that Russell imagines a physical label on Lily’s body. Indeed, Russell ends up choosing the name Lily, which apparently hints at her “Asian roots” (despite its Latin origin and immense popularity in English-speaking countries). Anthropologist Barbara Yngvesson acknowledges in Cultures of Transnational Adoption that, while children aren’t free-standing, nor are they necessarily rooted. She counters the pervasive myth that an adopted child “naturally” belongs somewhere, and yet she is simultaneously adamant that there is no such thing as a motherless child. Like Omi and Winant, she sees two extremes that adoptive parents cling to, unable to find the balance that exists in between.

Russell, like many mothers, adopts both extremes: her daughter’s race is permanent, hers is not, and thus they can be joined by her own transition to a Chinese identity. Vincent Cheng’s Inauthentic: The Anxiety over Culture and Identity notes how this fascination with (or fetishization of) Asian culture leads many adoptive parents to dress their daughters “in clothes they had bought in China and decorate her room with artwork from her homeland.” It leads to families who are “not only learning to cook Chinese at home but are learning Mandarin in order to speak Chinese to a little girl who was probably never able to speak it to begin with.”

This enthusiastic adoption of Chinese culture excites many white mothers and provides them with the connection they desire: Volkman cites “one white adoptive mother [who] laughed as she described how a highly educated Chinese American friend sought her advice on books about things Chinese for his young children.” It seems as though this woman considers herself more authentically “Chinese” than her Chinese-American friend. Like Russell, many adoptive parents are determined to provide Chinese culture for their children, even if it means learning to make mooncakes, a Chinese food that most Chinese people never cook themselves (how many Americans make their own bagels?), or replacing family trips to the aquarium with Chinese culture excursions.

While the desire for connection is understandable, this identification leaves Chinese adoptees that much more isolated, simply because their mothers actually appear white and thus benefit from white privilege adoptees can’t access. Whether being teased for what Cultures of Transnational Adoption calls “small noses, flat faces, yellow skin, or short eyelashes,” Chinese children are tempted to seek solace from their parents. Yet, in response to this, one adoptive mother asks, “What can I say to her? I speak with long eyelashes.” This one acknowledgment, it seems, is what Russell never accepts, and what many white adoptive parents so desperately need to hear in their quest for information about parenting children of color.

The desire of an adoptive mother to see herself as her child’s ethnicity in order to better relate to the child is not unique to Russell, nor do I intend to use her as the scapegoat for all white adoptive mothers struggling with the realities of race. Indeed, many more memoirs have been written about adoption, and Russell’s is not the only one to make dubious claims about race, nor the only suspect text that swims around in the adoptive parent circuit.

For Russell to see herself as Chinese, she may be creating what she believes is a closer connection to her daughter, but what it comes down to is that no amount of imagination will rid Russell of her privilege as a white woman. Inevitably left behind in this discussion are girls like Lily, who are never asked whether they prefer Catholicism, Thanksgiving, and Irish step dance to Buddhism, the Chinese New Year, and gymnastics (did I mention Russell also becomes Buddhist?). They are not allowed to grow up as they are, a product of two cultures. As she grows older, Lily may be unaware of the debate surrounding cultural assimilation, but she has the unique perspective of an adopted child whose mother’s identity as a white woman seems to have been replaced by hers.

So book groups beware: insofar as transracial adoptive parents can find answers to what is best for their children, it is not Russell’s voice but the voices of those who are adopted, those who are the subject of this continuous debate, that deserve our undivided attention.

Original Source

submitted by OPBGuy
[link] [4 comments]

tldr:

Simplified and community-driven man pages

Run tldr to get a brief description of a command and a short list of usage examples.

cURL an image!, like so:

 curl ihmage.com/Prince

Not terribly useful, admittedly.

At least 87 people were set free for crimes they did not commit last year, the highest number since researchers began keeping track more than 20 years ago. Some of those people spent decades in prison before release.

Diode Milliampere is an artist who does things the hard way.

Let's journey down the Nerd Hole™.

I've longed for SFTP access to my Dropbox files. It always seemed like the easiest way to work on text files when at a locked down Windows computer or inside a remote script. But it was never important enough to dedicate much time. Fast forward to my recent migration to plain text task management. Now I really just want access to a handfull of text files from Sublime Text, Pythonista and variety of scripts. Rather than attempting to mess with the Dropbox API from every script, I can use more simple SFTP access to download, edit and upload files. So I needed to solve the problem I had long put off.¹

Turns Out™ that it was much more simple than I had assumed. Using the very concise instructions provided by Professor Jones I installed the Dropbbox CLI on my Webfaction host. But rather than use my primary Dropbox account that is bursting with 75GB of data, I created a new free 2GB account. I then shared a folder from my primary Dropbox account to this new account that contained my assortment of plain text task files. Problem solved.

I use the fantastic SFTP package for direct access from Sublime Text when I'm not at my Mac.

I can also access the files from Pythonista on iOS. But it's still a Dropbox folder so I can also access the files from apps like Editorial and Listacular. Or I can just use the excellent TaskPaper app on my Mac.

Nate the greatest writes "Whether it's EA and SimCity, the Sony rootkit scandal, or Ubisoft, we've all read numerous stories about companies using DRM in stupid ways that harm their customers, and now we can add Adobe to the list. Adobe has just announced a new timeline for adoption of their recently launched 'hardened' DRM, and it's going to take your breath away. In a video posted to Youtube, Adobe reps have stated that Adobe expects all of their ebook partners to start adopting the new DRM in March. This is the same DRM that was launched only a few weeks ago and is already causing problems, but that hasn't stopped Adobe. They also expect all the stores that use Adobe's DRM to sell ebooks (as well as the ebook app and ebook reader developers) to have fully adopted the new ebook DRM by July 2014. That's when Adobe plans to end support for the old DRM (which everyone is using now). Given the dozens and dozens of different ebook readers released over the past few years, including models from companies that have gone under, this is going to present a significant problem for a lot of readers. Few, if any, will be updated in time to meet Adobe's deadline, and that's going to leave many readers unable to buy DRMed ebooks."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sherlock Holmes has taken on some difficult mysteries in his life, but none quite so daunting as the one Benedict Cumberbatch faced this morning on Sesame Street, posed by Cumberbatch's (fairly new) arch-nemesis Murray-arty. The Sherlock actor had no choice but to call in some help...

Read more...

Last week we discovered an outstanding open source project which worked out of the box on the Raspberry Pi.  8086tiny is a free PC XT-compatible virtual machine/emulator written in C.

It was created by Adrian Cable who won IOCCC last year with 4043.  We caught up with Adrian last week and this is what he had to say:

“The personal computer as we know it today began in the early 80s with the release of the IBM PC – an incredibly complex machine for its time, and the result of hundreds of thousands of man-hours of development time, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Thirty years later, I set out to answer the question of how small a highly portable, software PC emulator/virtual machine could be written, complete and accurate enough to simulate not just the Intel 8086 CPU but enough of the peripheral hardware to run software like Windows, AutoCAD, Lotus 1-2-3 and classic PC games. The answer: 4043 bytes of highly condensed C source code, which won the 2013 International Obfuscated C Code Contest.

Following the contest, widespread demand led to the release of 8086tiny, a fully documented and commented distribution of the original code, including full BIOS source code. 8086tiny, when deployed on the $25 Raspberry Pi, produces not only the world’s smallest but also the world’s cheapest PC.

Uniquely we believe for PC emulators, 8086tiny is released under the most free open source license possible, the MIT License, allowing use or redistribution for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, with no restrictions whatsoever. I encourage anyone to use 8086tiny as a starting point for their own emulation projects.”

8086tiny is now part of the Raspbian repository and can be installed using apt-get and it comes with a pre-made mountable DOS hard disk.  Further instructions on installation and use can be found on the forums.  We had a lot of fun with it last week trying to remember the keys for Word Perfect 5.1!

A project like this has the potential to allow the Raspberry Pi to replace legacy DOS systems in industrial settings.  8086tiny is under active development and in the future we hope to see the addition of new features such as a VGA card and serial/parallel port emulation.  Keep up the good work Adrian!

Sort of.

The IT services company, under pressure to meet a high earnings forecast, has turned to the ever-malleable tax code for a boost to its earnings. That has some pretty surprising consequences, as Alex Barinka and Jesse Drucker report for Bloomberg: The company is driving more income through a subsidiary in the Netherlands. In 2008, the subsidiary, IBM International Group BV, reported just three employees, but at the end of 2012, it reported 205,000—almost half of the company’s worldwide staff of 430,000 workers.

Of course, we’d be hearing about a Dutch property bubble if those 205,000 people actually lived in the Netherlands. In fact, just 2% of them do. The rest are scattered around the world. For tax purposes, measures like these saved the company $6.5 billion from 2010 to 2012. In 2013, the company paid a 15.6% overall global tax rate, which it attributed to a “more favorable [than] expected geographic mix” of revenues (auditor jokes are funny). That will have added to the $44 billion of untaxed cash the company had accumulated overseas by the end of 2012, though we don’t yet know by how much.

Public-policy concerns aside, what worries analysts, of course, is a company on a cost-cutting mission running out of costs to cut. When it’s doing so much of that through tax avoidance, it inevitably raises questions about how well the primary business is going.

rainbowbarnacle:

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