Tag Archives: text

American Airlines Promises Even LESS Legroom

Posted by on June 13, 2013 No comments

This is not a joke: the VP of flight service said they expect to add seats on almost 70% of its planes. More seats + same amount of space = less space per seat. In the past 20 years, airline seats shrunk from an average 34″ of leg room to 31″; on some low-cost carriers, they’re even down to 28″.

no leg room

 

The only thing making American think twice about this is that the FAA requires a steward(ess) for every 50 seats, and American already averages almost 150 seats a plane, so adding any more seats means adding another flight attendant, which means adding enough seats to make that worthwhile. They’re also looking into using smaller seats, so they can cram more of them in.

So, any way you look at it, the message is “Don’t fly American”.

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From Airline Biz Blog, via NPR

NSA Whistleblower Might Be A Genius, Might Be An Idiot

Posted by on June 10, 2013 No comments

Ok, “genius” is probably a stretch, but the guy does appear to be smart:

  • He rose through the ranks of the government from enlisted soldier to security guard, to IT guy, to really well-paid IT contractor guy in Hawaii in less than 10 years
  • He’s definitely well-spoken and looks pretty smart in the video
  • He had the foresight to nobly out himself, get the protection of the public, get a pat on the back from the Pentagon Papers whistleblower, and go down in the history books, rather than wait until the CIA renditioned him to Poland
  • He gave up a super-well paying job in paradise to protect our democracy

Then again, he may not be the sharpest tool in the shed:

  • He gave up a super-well paying job in paradise to protect our democracy
  • He fled to Hong Kong, which is apparently the second worst place to flee to, if you’re running from the US government
  • He apparently used his real name when checking in to his hotel in Hong Kong, pretended the journalists got the wrong guy when they called, and then checked out
  • He doesn’t even have his high school degree, and even failed to get his GED
Edward Snowden

Edward Snowden

 

So at this point, Edward Snowden (whose name, it has to be said, kinda sounds like a Game of Thrones character or two) is to us much like Schrödinger’s cat, at both times smart and dumb. As for the NSA, if he’s smart, then he might’ve bested the them. If he’s dumb, how dumb is the NSA to have hired him?

One final note as we find out more about him: while all of the above is hard to dispute because much of it came from Snowden himself, one must also keep in mind, that when the Pentagon Papers whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg, came out, the Nixon administration tried to discredit him in all kinds of ways, going as far as breaking in to his psychiatrist’s office, and hashing a plan to drug with him LSD. Of course, that action caused Ellsberg’s mistrial and is the reason he’s a free man today. The Obama administration will likely not make such an error, meaning that unless he escapes extradition, Snowden’s best chance is jury nullification.

In the meantime, we should all at least thank him for revealing the actual Facebook privacy settings:

Facebook privacy settings, with NSA

 

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Via The Wall Street Journal, Slate, NPR and Gawker and FAIL Blog

Obama Makes Distinction Between Light And Hardcore Surveillance

Posted by on June 7, 2013 1 comment

“Nobody is listening to your telephone calls.” The government collects “phone numbers … and duration of calls… they are not looking at people’s names and they are not looking at content.” – President Obama, today in San Jose, CA

That roughly translates into “we’re just kinda keeping an eye on you, not really… you know… super-monitoring your calls hardcore.” As if light surveillance is somehow okay in a free society and we should just get used to things being like this now. In a few more years, when persistent drones fly in our skies high above the clouds, and news breaks out that the feds are monitoring everyone’s movements on the ground, the response will be:

“Nobody is bugging your house. We’re just looking at where you go and for how long… we’re not looking at people’s names and we’re not watching you inside your own house.” – President Obama in the Panopticon of the future

Because that would be crossing some kind of line, whereas just keeping tabs on everyone is perfectly normal for a democratic government, composed by the people and for the people, to do.

 

Update, June 9th: The very next day, Obama added:

“You’ve got private companies that have a lot more data and and a lot more details about emails and phone calls than the federal government does,” he said.

“So we’re going to take that data from those private companies by force, because we realize that no one would sign up for a government-run Facebook.”

One nation, under surveillance

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Via NPR

That Japanese Nuclear Plant Incident Resulted In Zero Deaths

Posted by on June 7, 2013 No comments

Yes, you read that correctly: the 2011 meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear reactor, due to a tsunami created by the most powerful earthquake to ever hit Japan, has not killed and likely will not kill even one person. That’s in stark contrast to the news of the time, when we heard that death was inevitable for at least some of the workers trying to fix the radiation leak, and that it was a Chernobyl-level disaster. There were also worries about the environment being desolated, food being irradiated and generally what you’d expect from a post-apocalyptic landscape following nuclear war.

March 14, 2011: A Red Cross rescue worker, in red, is scanned for signs of radiation upon returning from Fukushima to his hospital in Nagahama, Shiga Prefecture. (AP/Fox News)

March 14, 2011: A Red Cross rescue worker, in red, is scanned for signs of radiation upon returning from Fukushima to his hospital in Nagahama, Shiga Prefecture. (AP/Fox News)

 

At the time, xkcd published an infographic showing that it would take about 4 weeks of someone staying in the plant before they would get the amount of radiation that’s clearly linked to cancer. (A flight from NY to LA gives you the same amount radiation as 11 days at the plant, during the incident.) Now, two years later, the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation has some findings:

  • Most Japanese got less radiation exposure from the incident than they would from normal background radiation
  • The six people that had the highest exposure, absorbed about 678 milliSieverts (mSv) of radiation, which is well below the 1000 mSv that causes radiation sickness or increases the chance of cancer
  • Most of the area’s background radiation is back to normal, and all of it will be by 2017
  • “The exposures on both marine and terrestrial non-human biota were too low for observable acute effects.”
  • The worst effect is a very negligible increase (6% of the normal rate) of female breast cancer and male leukemia.

Now, the quake and tsunami itself did kill about 16,000 people; but radiation killed zero. The worst nuclear disaster ever, Chernobyl, which was due to gross human error, killed 46 people. Contrast this to supposedly safe coal power, which claims an average of 35 lives and 4,000 injuries per year. Then consider that about 41% of the world’s electricity comes from coal, but only about 13% comes from nuclear plants.

World Electricity Power Sources

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From UN Information Service, via The Age and Slashdot

Relax, The NSA Snooping On You Is Perfectly Legal

Posted by on June 7, 2013 1 comment

Many of the people that found themselves living in Soviet America today believe that the administration overstepped its bounds when it gave the NSA permission to monitor all calls in the country made on Verizon (and likely, all other carriers) and to search anyone’s data on Google, Facebook, Skype, Yahoo, etc. But what’s more shocking than the fact that the NSA is doing it is the fact that it’s all on the up-and-up.

Can you hear me now? Then the wiretap is functioning properly.

The wiretapping is allowed by section 215 of the Patriot Act, which was the legislative overreaction to 9/11. (The feds already had all the information they needed to stop the attacks — they just hadn’t put all the pieces together yet.)  Originally, then-Senator Obama was against the KGB-like powers the bill gave to the government agencies, and in 2005, he even sponsored a bill that would’ve put an end to it all. But, in early 2006 the powers that be got to him, and he actually voted to extend the Patriot Act. In this video from his 2008 campaign, he explains why, starting at 3:15:

 

Long story short, he didn’t think the Patriot Act was all that bad anymore, he tried to make it better and promised to remove the illegal wiretapping via executive order, when he got to office. And so he did: now, the wiretapping still goes on, but it’s all legal. The feds secretly ask a secret court to issue a subpoena for vague “national security” reasons, and it happens. There’s Congressional-ish oversight, in that the 7% of Congressmen — those who sit on the Intelligence Committees – get biannual reports on the NSA’s actions. But, if they don’t like something, all they can do is make vague warnings because all the information they get in those reports is classified. With 93% of Congress in the dark, the rest under a gag order, and the secret court handing out blank checks, the system ensures that abuses of power can never see the light of day.

And again, it’s 100% legal: this is how terrorist wiretapping is supposed to work, under the Patriot Act. As for getting a backdoor to search all the data Google and Facebook have to offer, that’s also legal because it’s all voluntary-ish: the feds offer those companies legal immunity from lawsuits, and in return they get to snoop on everyone conversations. Let’s just hope they don’t accidentally leak more of Petraeus’ emails.

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From NPR

The Red Wedding Was Based On A Real, Historical Event

Posted by on June 6, 2013 No comments

Warning: third season Game of Thrones spoilers

In the third season of Game of Thrones (and the book it’s based on A Storm of Swords), the Starks become too powerful and threaten the crown, held by the boy king Joffrey and his family, the Lannisters. So, the Lannisters conspired with a Stark ally, Lord Roose Bolton, and with Lord Walder Frey who Robb Stark insulted by breaking an oath to marry one of his daughters. The Freys agreed to forget the insult if a Stark cousin marries another Frey daughter. During the wedding, Frey and Bolton men massacred the 16 year-old head of House Stark, Robb, and his entire contingent.

The real life inspiration for this is apparently an event called the Black Dinner, and it took place in Scotland — which itself is likely the inspiration for The North — in 1440. In that time, Clan Douglas had become quite powerful and was a threat to the crown, held by the boy king James II of Scotland and his advisers, William Chrichton and Alexander Livingston.  So, the advisers conspired with a great-uncle of the Douglases and invited the 16 year-old Earl of Douglas, William, and his younger brother David to a conciliatory dinner at Castle Edinburgh. During the meal, Chrichton and Livingston arrested and beheaded them in the presence of the king.

It’s called the Black Dinner because the clan was also known as the Black Douglases (more on why below) and because, supposedly, the signal to arrest the boys was someone bringing the head of a black bull into the feast hall.

Roose Bolton killing Robb Stark at the Red Wedding

Roose Bolton killing Robb Stark at the Red Wedding

 

Besides the similarity between the boy kings (13 year-old Joffrey and 10 year-old James II), the boy head of the rival clan (16 year-old Robb Stark and 16 year-old William Douglas), and the deadly ruse of a conciliatory feast, there are others. Both Joffrey’s father in the books, King Robert, and James II’s father in reality, King James I, were assassinated. And Robb Stark’s father Eddard was named regent of the boy king, as was William Douglas’ father, Archibald, 5th Earl of Douglas. (Ned Stark never actually got to be regent because he was executed pretty quickly, but Archibald was regent for about two years until he died of a fever.)

And, in another parallel, in the early 1300s, James Douglas was the best friend of King Robert The Bruce, much like Ned Stark was the best friend of King Robert Baratheon. There were also two branches of Clan Douglas: the main Black Douglases and the offshoot Red Douglases, which came from the illegitimate George Douglas, who by the way, was seen a product of incest because his mother was also his father’s sister-in-law. In the Song of Ice and Fire series, besides the Starks, there are the Karstarks, which came from a second-born Stark, Karlon.

After the Black Dinner, since the murdered William was 16 and had no children, the head of Clan Douglas passed to William’s great-uncle James, who became the 7th Earl. (Historians believe James was complicit in the Black Dinner, since he stood to gain greatly from it.) He died about three years later, and his son, another William, succeeded him as the 8th Earl. Almost another decade later — 12 years after the events of the Black Dinner — King James II invited this second William to a negotiation, and not having learned from the fate of his same-named cousin, he went. During the meeting, they got into an argument and the King stabbed William and threw him out of a window. Court officials then pummeled his body some more after.

William’s younger brother James then became the 9th Earl of Douglas, and took up arms against King James II to avenge William, but he lost in battle to the King and the Red Douglases, and the title of Earl of Douglas died with him — the Red Douglases were Earls of Angus. So, if history is any indication, it’s not looking good for the Starks.

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Via Wired

TSA Backtracks On The New Relaxed Rules, Thanks To Flight Attendants

Posted by on June 5, 2013 2 comments

Back in March, the TSA decided to go further with their historical lack-of-thinking-rules-through and not-trying-to-have-them-make-logical-sense by allowing certain knives and “sports sticks” on planes again, because — no kidding — Europe was doing it. Well, when the stewardesses heard about this, they got all up in arms because now that they don’t have to deal with drunken passengers wielding Swiss Army knives anymore, they don’t wanna start again.

TSA's small knives guide

This WAS going to become the new rule, but not anymore…

 

Because, screw the fact that it’s only happened once in history  – they were sober and wielding box cutters on 9/11, but still — it could happen again. Astronomical odds always trump passengers’ convenience, and at 2,000 pocket knives being confiscated every day by the TSA, that’s quite the trumping. Long story short, the TSA finally gave in to its wife, the International Flight Attendants Association, and had to go back and tell us kids that we’re too young to keep those Swiss Army knives after all. “As mommy pointed out, just because the European neighbors are doing it, that doesn’t mean it’s right for us.”

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Via NPR

The Bald-Faced Lie Everyone Tells: ‘I Agree To The Terms And Conditions’

Posted by on April 25, 2013 Comments Off

The Register has an interesting article about the sheer absurdity of having to click “I Agree” to some legal document every time you install a piece of software, or sign up for a website. No one actually reads the document, and even if they did, they wouldn’t understand half of it — not unless they were lawyers, anyhow. Furthermore, it’s a giant drain on society: looking at the Adobe Flash license alone, and assuming it takes someone ten minutes to read it, the world has wasted over 50,000 working lifetimes of man-hours in just the past year. Clearly, this does not happen.

Adobe Flash license agreement checkbox

And yet, the farce continues. It’s reminiscent of other legal documents that most people just blindly initial in a few places and sign at the bottom: apartment leases, car rental agreements and credit card applications. The rationale being that some legal documents are boiler-plate: we know what a standard lease says and by signing it without reading it, all we’re saying is “we’ll play by the standard rules”. But while most leases are standard and the expectations widely known, the same doesn’t hold true for software. There’s no standard End-User License Agreement, or Terms and Conditions, and they could say anything.

For example, the Flash license doesn’t allow maintaining a copy of it, even in backups; since most backups are automatic, you’re violating the license without even knowing it. “That’s ok, Adobe isn’t gonna come after me for accidentally backing Flash up.” And that’s true — at least not until they have a reason to. But when they do, watch out: the whole point of the license agreement is to give the software maker leverage. If they for some reason do want to sue you, they can dig up so many infractions of their 3500-word license that you’ll have no choice but to capitulate. Because given enough rules, everyone will be guilty of breaking some of them, just due to sheer statistics.

From The Register

Gay Marriage May Pave The Way For The Legalization Of Polygamy

Posted by on April 19, 2013 Comments Off

In the US, marriage licenses were introduced the late 1800s in most states as a way to stop interracial marriages. By the early 1900s, the legal age of sexual consent was raised from 12 (roughly the age when puberty starts) to 16 — though some states still allow marriage as early as 14 years old. The marriage license was then also used to prohibit marriages with people that were too young. Also in the late 19th century, polygamy became illegal throughout the country in response to the rise of the Mormons, and marriage licenses were used to stop it as well. Finally, as homosexuality came out of the shadows in the 1970s, the licenses were used to prevent gay marriage.

marriage license

Since marriage is usually a religious rite, in a country with nearly unlimited religious freedom the government’s interest in marriage should only pertain to secondary issues of taxation and arbitration (inheritance, custody, distribution of assets, etc). Given that, the various prohibitions on marriage by government have never made any sense from the standpoint of civil rights. The issue first came to a head in the 1960s, when the Supreme Court invalidated miscegenation laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Almost fifty years later, the Court is now poised to invalidate the prohibition of gay marriage. If it does, marriage licenses will only have the power to prohibit polygamy and violations of age of consent.

A federal suit challenging Utah’s polygamy law was brought in 2011 by the cast members of the Sister Wives reality TV series, and a decision should come soon. Regardless of the outcome, an appeal will likely be made to the 10th Circuit, and then the Supreme Court. Which brings us back to the current gay marriage case: Justice Sotomayor, who will likely vote for legalization of gay marriage, asked attorney Ted Olson, who is arguing that gay marriage is a fundamental civil right, if any restrictions on marriage can exist. His answer was a “yes”: polygamy can be banned because it’s a law prohibiting conduct, whereas gay marriage bans are based on discrimination of a class of people based on their status as homosexuals. Given that both arguments can be applied to both gays and polygamists, it’s a very weak one.

The Brown Family, from TLC’s ‘Sister Wives’

 

Prohibition of interracial marriages was based on racism — the view that non-whites were lesser versions of humans, maybe even sub-human, and it would thus be almost as morally wrong for whites to marry them as it would be to marry animals. The prohibition of gay marriage and polygamy is based on religious beliefs. The concept of age of consent is based on a parental desire to prolong the chastity of childhood beyond its natural end at puberty. None of these legal prohibitions have anything to do with the government’s monetary and arbitrative interest in the private, and usually religious, institution of marriage. All four prohibitions are based on the moral fashions of certain periods in our history — fashions which are now changing. In fact, marriage itself is increasingly being seen as an outdated fashion, made pointless by the ease of divorce.

It’s also important to note that legal prohibitions of marriage have little bearing on reality. Whether or not they’re allowed to marry legally, interracial, gay, and polygamous couples/triples/etc still act like they are married for all purposes that matter: they live together, they have sex, they share expenses and have children. The only differences are legal, and therefore artificial: they have to jump through hoops to get certain rights like hospital visitations and power of attorney, and are denied certain benefits, like sharing insurance plans. It’s reminiscent of other toothless prohibitions, like those on alcohol and drugs. If 20th century legislation has taught us anything, it’s that it is almost impossible to legislate morality in a free country: as long as they have the right to privacy, the people will do what they want in their own homes.

Of course, our right to privacy is increasingly being threatened by technology, and it is now easier than ever for a fascist state to impose moral dictates on its population. Which in turn means that it is now more important than ever that our laws not curb the freedoms upon which America was founded.

See also:

via NPR

Multitaskers Are Impulsive Risk-Takers… Who Are Also Bad At Multitasking

Posted by on April 11, 2013 Comments Off

That’s the conclusion of a study at the University of Utah, that measured four of their subjects’ traits: how good at multitasking they thought they were, how good they actually were, how impulsive they were and how much they liked seeking thrills. First finding: the ones that thought they were good at multitasking were actually worse at it. (Scientists tested multitasking ability by asking their guinea pigs to do math while remembering words.) In other words, if you’re proud to be a multitasker, you probably fall in this group.

Scott May daredevil stunt show. Photo by John Wright.

Scott May daredevil stunt show. Photo by John Wright.

 

Secondly, the people who thought they were good at multitasking were impulsive and sought out risks just for the thrills. Why? Because they can’t help “multitasking”: impulsivity and risk-taking also indicate lower self-control, which means that this group is not as much made up of multitaskers as A.D.D-ers. Not the real disorder, but the 21st century word for being scatterbrained: when they see a shiny new toy, they can’t help but play with the new toy too — due to the lack of self control. After that happens a few times, they find themselves spinning seven plates at once and call it multitasking — even though they suck at it.

Now, the study was done on college kids, and since everyone can get better at anything with enough practice, maybe by the time they’re middle-aged, the impulsive people are actually great at multitasking, and probably even less impulsive simply because they’re older. This logic is supported by a previous study that showed bilingual people are a lot better at multitasking while driving, because they have more experience jugging multiple pieces of information, via thinking in two languages.

Speaking of multitasking while driving, it’s worth mentioning that the study had a no-texting-while-driving slant to it. The NPR article covering the matter repeated the fact that texting while driving is more distracting than being drunk while driving. They also mentioned how everyone is texting and driving now, which would make you think there are all kinds of texting-related accidents, since half of us are basically driving around drunk. Unfortunately for the fear-based media, the insurance industry’s own data shows that accident rates have actually dropped since everyone started texting. Which really makes you think about the worth of these studies.

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From Plos One, via NPR