McGruber writes "The U.S. government fined Infosys $35 million after an investigation by the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department found that the Indian company used inexpensive, easy-to-obtain B-1 visas meant to cover short business visits — instead of harder-to-get H-1B work visas — to bring an unknown number of its employees for long-term stays. The alleged practice enabled Infosys to undercut competitors in bids for programming, accounting and other work performed for clients, according to people close to the investigation. Infosys clients have included Goldman Sachs Group, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc. Infosys said in an email that it is talking with the U.S. Attorney's office, 'regarding a civil resolution of the government's investigation into the company's compliance' with employment-record 'I-9 form' requirements and past use of the B-1 visa. A company spokesman, who confirmed a resolution will be announced Wednesday, said Infosys had set aside $35 million to settle the case and cover legal costs. He said the sum was 'a good indication' of the amount involved."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One does not simply walk into Mordor — one takes the J.R.R. line. Alas, Post-Isengard replanting of the Fangorn forest has caused some delays on the subway. Check out these adorable signs that were posted all over the NYC's subway system.

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When you're a Triceratops, you have to teach your babies how to take a bath — especially on a hot day. Maybe your feathers will get a little dirty, but it's a small price to pay when you need to cool down on a hot, late Cretaceous afternoon.

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You are here.

if this is the end i just wanna say it was a pleasure and an honor to blog with you

trickortribble:

okay so everyone uses this gif for halloween:

BUT THERE ARE OTHERS AND THEY ARE SO MUCH BETTER:

dreaminpng:

kako-pumpkin:

lonely-ler:

thiscartoonlife:

Witty banter

I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS GIF SET FOR THE LONGEST TIME!

OH GOD THIS MOVIE THIS IS THE BEST MOVIE

One day I will cosplay as Megamind. One day…… (and my fiance will do Metroman or Minion)

Researchers in game companies tweak games to get players to stay on longer, or to encourage them to spend money on digital goods. They study gamers' reactions. It's become a science.

It’s not just that standing desks are uncomfortable; they sublimate wellbeing to workaholism, as though it were a perfectly normal thing to do. And it turned out that, as a sitter, I had not adopted the most radically anti-standing position. Once you knew about the supine option, sitting became merely the mushy middle ground.

When Uber announced that it would be delivering kittens door-to-door today in honor of National Cat Day, the Internet went crazy with excitement. Unfortunately, the demand really is as high — and the kittens are as scarce — as Uber warned in its press release.

submitted by i_amnotacanadian [link] [27 comments]

Facebook of the Dead

When, if ever, will Facebook contain more profiles of dead people than of living ones?

Emily Dunham

Either the 2060s or the 2130s.

There are not a lot of dead people on Facebook. The main reasons for this is that Facebook—and its users—are young. The average Facebook user has gotten older over the last few years, but the site is still used at a much higher rate by the young than by the old.[1]There are a zillion surveys confirming this, such as this one from eMarketer.

The Past:

Based on the site's growth rate, and the age breakdown of their users over time,[2]You can get user counts for each age group from Facebook's create-an-ad tool, although you may want to try to account for the fact that Facebook's age limits cause some people to lie about their ages. there are probably 10 to 20 million people who created Facebook profiles who have since died.

These people are, at the moment, spread out pretty evenly across the age spectrum. Young people have a much lower death rate than people in their sixties or seventies, but they make up a substantial share of the dead on Facebook simply because there have been so many of them using it.

The Future:

About 290,000 US Facebook users will die (or have died) in 2013. The worldwide total for 2013 is likely several million.[3]Note: In some of these projections, I used US age/usage data extrapolated to the Facebook userbase as a whole, because it's easier to find US census and actuarial numbers than to assemble the country-by-country for the whole Facebook-using world. The US isn't a perfect model of the world, but the basic dynamics—young people's Facebook adoption determines the site's success or failure while population growth continues for a while and then levels off—will probably hold approximately true. If we assume a rapid Facebook saturation in the developing world, which currently has a faster-growing and younger population, it shifts many of the landmarks by a handful of years, but doesn't change the overall picture as much as you might expect. In just seven years, this death rate will double, and in seven more years it will double again.

Even if Facebook closes registration tomorrow, the number of deaths per year will continue to grow for many decades, as the generation who was in college between 2000 and 2020 grows old.

The deciding factor in when the dead will outnumber the living is whether Facebook adds new living users—ideally, young ones—fast enough to outrun this tide of death for a while.

Facebook 2100:

This brings us to the question of Facebook's future.

We don't have enough experience with social networks to say with any kind of certainty how long Facebook will last. Most websites have flared up and then gradually declined in popularity, so it's reasonable to assume Facebook will follow that pattern.[4]I'm assuming, in these cases, that no data is ever deleted. So far, that's been a reasonable assumption; if you've made a Facebook profile, that data probably still exists, and most people who stop using a service don't bother to delete their profile. If that behavior changes, or if Facebook performs a mass purging of their archives, the balance could change rapidly and unpredictably.

In that scenario, where Facebook starts losing market share later this decade and never recovers, Facebook's crossover date—the date when the dead outnumber the living—will come sometime around 2065.

But maybe it won't. Maybe it will take on a role like the TCP protocol, where it becomes a piece of infrastructure on which other things are built, and has the inertia of consensus.

If Facebook is with us for generations, then the crossover date could be as late as the mid-2100s.

That seems unlikely. Nothing lasts forever, and rapid change has been the norm for anything built on computer technology. The ground is littered with the bones of websites and technologies that seemed like permanent institutions ten years ago.

It's possible the reality could be somewhere in between.[5]Of course, if there's a sudden rapid increase in the death rate of Facebook users—possibly one that includes humans in general—the crossover could happen tomorrow. We'll just have to wait and find out.

The fate of our accounts:

Facebook can afford to keep all our pages and data indefinitely. Living users will always generate more data than dead ones, and the accounts for active users are the ones that will need to be easily accessible. Even if accounts for dead (or inactive) people make up a majority of their users, it will probably never add up to a large part of their overall infrastructure budget.

More important will be our decisions. What do we want for those pages? Unless we demand that Facebook deletes them, they will presumably, by default, keep copies of everything forever. Even if they don't, other data-vacuuming organizations will.

Right now, next-of-kin can convert a dead person's Facebook profile into a memorial page. But there are a lot of questions surrounding passwords and access to private data that we haven't yet developed social norms for. Should accounts remain accessible? What should be made private? Should next-of-kin have the right to access email? Should memorial pages have comments? How do we handle trolling and vandalism? Should people be allowed to interact with dead user accounts? What lists of friends should they show up on?

These are issues that we're currently in the process of sorting out by trial and error. Death has always been a big, difficult, and emotionally charged subject, and every society finds different ways to handle it.

The basic pieces that make up a human life don't change. We've always eaten, learned, grown, fallen in love, fought, and died. In every place, culture, and technological landscape, we develop a different set of behaviors around these same activites.

Like every group that came before us, we're learning how to play those same games on our particular playing field. We're developing, through sometimes messy trial and error, a new set of social norms for dating, arguing, learning, and growing on the internet. Sooner or later, we'll figure out how to mourn.

Happy Halloween!

What Ted Cruz Doesn't Want You to Know | Perspectives, What Matters Today | BillMoyers.com:

The senator has put a hold on the confirmation of the new FCC chief until he’s promised the agency won’€™t follow the law and disclose the real funders of dark money group political ads.

Sock puppet son of a bitch.

Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

spark-of-constellation:

There’s no knowing where we’re rowing, or which way the river’s flowing.
Is it raining? Is it snowing? Is a hurricane a-blowing? 

samantha2k13:

_{In the first Harry Potter films, if you watch carefully, in some scenes you can see me mouthing Harry and Ron’s lines, as well as my own! Because that’s just what I was like, I was… I was crazy. - Emma Watson}

I didn’t know this! This is adorable!

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A Nevada assemblyman came under fire Monday after a YouTube video surfaced in which he told a Republican gathering he would vote to allow slavery if that is what his constituents wanted him to do.

"New Leaf," a new Animal Crossing shirt ⊟

What a lovely cross-section of an Animal Crossing life, by Adam Works. Reminds me of Camille Young’s amazing sculpture for Fangamer X Attract Mode.

BUY Animal Crossing: New Leaf, AC:NL guide, upcoming games

The numbers:  LinkedIn swung to a third quarter net loss of $3.4 million, from a profit of $2.3 million last year, as the corporate social network ramped up investment in its platforms. But revenue for the third quarter surged 56% to $393 million. Together with an upbeat forecast for the next quarter, this was enough to drive shares up by 1.7% in after hours trading.

The takeaway: Those pesky emails from LinkedIn asking you to upgrade from free to paid service may drive you mad, but they appear to be working. Revenue from premium subscriptions jumped 61% to $79.8 million. The talent solutions division, which is mainly specialist products for recruiters, still accounts for the bulk of the business, with revenue growing by 62% to $224.7 million. Marketing solutions—mainly advertising—was up 38% to $88.5 million.

What’s interesting: During the quarter, LinkedIn membership climbed through the 259 million mark, an increase of 38% on last year. The gap with Twitter, which has 218 million monthly active users, has widened. But the corporate social network is still way behind Google Plus, with 540 million active monthly users, and Facebook, with a whopping 1.2 billion.

BOSTON—While speaking with his mother over the phone Monday evening, sources confirmed that 27-year-old marketing coordinator Daniel Hewitt lied about every single detail of his life in order to keep his parents from worrying about him. Hewitt repor...

BOSTON—Ahead of Wednesday’s potential World Series–clinching Game 6 matchup between the Red Sox and Cardinals, sources confirmed that Los Angeles Times sports editor Sam Poyet instructed journalist Ross Martinez to quickly throw t...

submitted by pdxborn1960 [link] [38 comments]