Here’s the full version of that panel you saw earlier. I’m really happy with the layout…obviously there’s a constant motion to the right, which is a good general approach, but it also establishes the distance she’s going. The figures move progressively toward the right at each row, and she overlaps the panel lines at those spots to emphasize the direction. The first panel forces the reader to realize it’s a double-page spread—this is always important when you’re designing a spread. You never want your reader to think they are singular pages and read it wrong!
An private contractor to student debt-holders has a special legal department that goes to bankruptcy court to argue that student loans shouldn't be discharged in bankruptcy, ever. The Educational Credit Management Corporation contracts to the Department of Education, on whose behalf it argues (for example) that debtors who go bankrupt fighting pancreatic cancer should still have to pay back their student loans in full, because "Survival rates for younger patients tend to be higher."
Student debt is the most pernicious kind of debt. It's debt that you take on when you're a teenager, and it's the only debt that can be taken out of your Social Security check. But as bad as the student debt racket is (and it's bad -- no, I mean really bad), I hadn't quite clocked how depraved its bagmen and enforcers could be.
They've been censured by courts for their strongarm tactics, bills have been introduced to make them behave, but they seem unstoppable. Why not? The precarious job-market has convinced Americans to go into $1 trillion worth of student debt, and when that collapses, it'll make subprime look like small change. So, realistically, who's ever going to stop thug bill-collectors from torturing people with terrible illness, or caring for severely disabled loved ones, or facing other unimaginable hardship, in order to bleed whatever they can for the debt-holders who're depending on that trillion bucks being repaid?
A panel of bankruptcy appeal judges in 2012 denounced what it called Educational Credit’s “waste of judicial resources,” and said that the agency’s collection activities “constituted an abuse of the bankruptcy process and defiance of the court’s authority.”
Representative Steve Cohen, a Tennessee Democrat who has introduced a bill to limit predatory tactics, said, “The government should hold its agents to the highest standards, and I don’t know that we’ve been doing that.”
He added that the government has a special responsibility to use “a standard that’s reasonable.”
The case that caused the bankruptcy judges to accuse the agency of abuse concerned Barbara Hann, who took a particularly drawn-out beating from Educational Credit. In 2004, when Ms. Hann filed for bankruptcy, Educational Credit claimed that she owed over $50,000 in outstanding debt. In a hearing that Educational Credit did not attend, Ms. Hann provided ample evidence that she had, in fact, already repaid her student loans in full.
But when her bankruptcy case ended in 2010, Educational Credit began hounding Ms. Hann anew, and, on behalf of the government, garnished her Social Security — all to repay a loan that she had long since paid off.
Happy winter, everyone! Have you also given up on doing anything at all? Wonderful. Here's what I'm up to: while wrapped in my winter cocoon, I have recently delved into the wonderful world of "Let's Play" videos—that is, watching someone play a videogame so you don't have to. I had thought this was a boring and lame idea, but on the other hand, I am broke, I don't own a new console, and some of these people have amazing accents.
So here is my gift to you: Scott Manley. He speaks in a delightful Scottish accent, he knows tons about astronomy, and he makes videos of himself playing videogames and talking about space! So if you (like me) don't have the patience for amazing and complicated games like space-travel simulator Kerbal Space Program, watching him talk about things is a wonderful way to pass the time. Happy accenting, everyone.
Peter Cohen’s argument is compelling: while written reviews provide important value to shoppers, the far more numerous 1- to 5-star ratings are to blame for most problems with App Store customer reviews:
I say this as someone who’s reviewed software for nigh on 20 years now — reviews of any type are entirely subjective, and whittling them down to a facile up- or down-vote or numerical rating system ultimately demeans the efforts of the developers that create these apps. If I didn’t like an app’s design, should I remove one star or just half a star? What if it crashes? Is that an instant one-star rating? How many stars do I take off for grammar or punctuation errors?
5-star rating systems have always been ineffective and dysfunctional because people have such different and inconsistent standards on what deserves each rating.
Eliminating the star ratings but leaving the written reviews would eliminate a lot of developer headaches and much of the motivation behind the annoying “Rate This App” epidemic that’s interrupting and annoying iOS customers and infecting, embarrassing, and devaluing almost all modern iOS apps.
I hope Apple’s listening. Their culture values quality, but many conditions, abuses, and dysfunctions in the App Store just keep getting worse — and that’s only going to lead to worse apps, more abandoned apps, and more customers who struggle to see a difference between the iOS and Android app ecosystems.
Is there a Facebook update that compares to building a thing? No, but I’d argue that 82 Facebook updates, 312 tweets, and all those delicious Instagram updates are giving you the same chemical impression that you’ve accomplished something of value. Whether it’s all the consumption or the sense of feeling busy, these micro-highs will never equal the high when you’ve actually built.
Look at that nice font on his site, too.
Spending time on social media and fluffy web browsing feels a lot like eating junk food to me. It feels great in short bursts, but too much of it just leaves me tired with a stomachache.
Spike Jonze hat in einem Interview verraten, dass er mit den Beasties nach dem Dreh ihres legendären Sabotage-Videos an einem Film und einem Drehbuch im selben Stil gearbeitet haben, leider kam das Projekt nie zustande.
“The four of us wrote a script together,” Jonze says. “It was called We Can Do This because it had … it was so surreal and out there and [Adam "MCA" Yauch’s filmmaker alter-ego] Nathanial Hornblower was a character as the director. One of the characters from “Sabotage,” Sir Stuart Wallace, was a character. Both played by Yauch and it just would’ve been ridiculous and fun … There were no 1970s cops in it, but it was definitely in the same spirit.” […]
“It was about Hornblower. Mike played a Country star — those songs we wrote for the movie, actually. Adam Horovitz played this kid, Nino Vincenzi, who lived on Roosevelt Island with his dad who was a mechanic, and [he] was a little bit a John Travolta [in] Saturday Night Fever … He had all these dreams and aspirations, but he was awkward and couldn’t dance. So he didn’t even have that going for him. But yeah, I forget all the different characters but … it would have been funny.”
"a steel well casing left behind by an exploratory groundwater project back in 2002"
The mysterious, Thing-like object blocking Seattle tunnel-boring project has finally been revealed after weeks of investigation. Sadly, it wasn't an 18th century shipwreck or a glacial boulder, as many speculated. In the end, the culprit was a steel well casing left behind by an exploratory groundwater project back in 2002. The pipe should have been removed when the project finished or, failing that, removed in preparation for the well-boring project, but miscommunication between the teams meant it wasn't discovered until the project was fully underway. Nevertheless, the well was on the initial maps of the region, as workers were quick to point out. "I don’t want people to say WSDOT didn’t know where its own pipe was," Department of Transportation spokesman Lars Erickson told The Seattle Times, "because it did."
Boston Magazine vs. Alpha Management, of rat city fame
Anwar Faisal has built an empire renting to the city’s college students, but he hasn’t been so good at making sure his apartments are actually habitable.
"can their defense stop the Eagles' running game or the super-hot Nick Foles?"
no
Saints lose 35-31
they lose 42-17 if it's snowing
We know Drew Brees and the Saints offense can score, but can their defense stop the Eagles' running game or the super-hot Nick Foles? And can Aaron Rodgers overcome the weaknesses of the Packers' defense and special teams?
Found at The Raw Story, originally from Agence France-Presse.
One of the journalists is accused of being “a Muslim Brotherhood Member.”
The journalists “broadcast live news harming domestic security,” the interior ministry said, adding they were also found in possession of Muslim Brotherhood “publications”.
Today's item from the NSA's Tailored Access Operations (TAO) group implant catalog is IRONCHEF:
IRONCHEF
(TS//SI//REL) IRONCHEF provides access persistence to target systems by exploiting the motherboard BIOS and utilizing System Management Mode (SMM) to communicate with a hardware implant that provides two-way RF communication.
(TS//SI//REL) This technique supports the HP Proliant 380DL G5 server, onto which a hardware implant has been installed that communicates over the I2C Interface (WAGONBED).
(TS//SI//REL) Through interdiction, IRONCHEF, a software CNE implant and the hardware implant are installed onto the system. If the software CNE implant is removed from the target machine, IRONCHEF is used to access the machine, determine the reason for removal of the software, and then reinstall the software from a listening post to the target system.
Status: Ready for Immediate Delivery
Unit Cost: $0
Page, with graphics, is here. General information about TAO and the catalog is here.
"CNE" stands for Computer Network Exfiltration. "Through interdiction" presumably means that the NSA has to physically intercept the computer while in transit to insert the hardware/software implant.
In the comments, feel free to discuss how the exploit works, how we might detect it, how it has probably been improved since the catalog entry in 2008, and so on.
The plan is to post one of these a day for the next couple of months.
Digital music sales declined for the first time in 2013 since the iTunes Store opened a decade before, according to new data from Nielsen SoundScan. Billboard reports that sales of tracks declined 5.7 percent, to 1.34 billion units, while album sales fell 0.1 percent, to 117.6 million. The chief culprit, according to executives interviewed by Billboard: streaming services like Spotify and Pandora.
At around $10 a month for unlimited listening, the streaming services are proving to be an attractive alternative to albums that cost $10 apiece. The good news for record labels: so far, revenue from streaming services has offset the decline in sales. And digital sales are falling much more slowly than sales of physical media — CD sales fell 14.5 percent last year.
Precipitated carbonate at one of the sites of methane seepage.
GEOMAR
The earth sciences have described a number of processes that are decidedly unpleasant for any living organisms unlucky enough to experience them, from volcanic eruptions to mass extinctions. Climatic “tipping points” are one of those scary processes. You can think of them along the lines of a kid who accidentally crests a steep hill on an old bike with no brakes—he won’t be stopping before the bottom of the hill (or he wipes out, whichever comes first). Crossing a tipping point in the climate system means being locked into some magnitude of climate change with no chance of halting it.
One scary tipping point involves the methane locked in molecular cages of ice called clathrates (or methane hydrates), found within the sediment on the seafloor. Heating up the water enough to melt hydrates and release methane adds an additional punch of greenhouse warming to whatever caused the heating. Such heating has been implicated in some ugly climate swings in Earth’s past.
Climate scientists don’t anticipate crossing this tipping point any time soon (the latest IPCC report judged it “very unlikely” this century), but that doesn’t mean hydrates aren’t the focus of research and concern. There is still much we don’t know about where hydrates are present and how much ocean warming it takes to begin destabilizing them.
We’ve written at length about how sexism and the film and TV industries negatively affects the number of women behind the screen, most noticeably when it comes to directing. Not that this it at all surprising, but the trend continued in 2013: Movies with female leads made bank, but of the 100 top-grossing movies of the year only two of them were directed by women.
Say that it's because women must not want to direct as much as men do and I will spit fire at everything you love.
shared because this is in the Harvard Business Review, so it comes off more as advice on how to fuck over other people without setting off allegations of racism than as an examination of privilege
Whites don’t have to do bad things to minority groups in order to maintain a racial advantage in employment and wealth. They only have to do good things for one another. And they do good things for one another all the time.
speaks in asides:
![[link]](http://i.imgur.com/HQXPIlK.jpg){kind=link}
