Holder says he was lying?! Eric Holder? The attorney general whose office is responsible for Too Big To Jail? Who will not prosecute bankers. Who oversaw the Fast and Furious debacle? Who hounded Aaron Swartz to his death?

Now I know Snowden was telling the truth.

This is what happens when you put professional spinmeisters in charge of professional workers: Dysfunction.

Imagine putting a PR team in charge of the Doctors dealing with an epidemic. A doctor would like to announce quarantine measure, or tell people the full risks, or advise those who are sick, etc. If you had a PR man in charge, the whole epidemic would be treated as a mild flu, no-one would be informed, contagion would spread rapidly and thousands would die. "No matter", says the PR man, "We can spin that too.". But this misses the point.

If you allow spin and the press office to dictate the running of an organisation, then the organisation effectively will not run at all. No professional can work properly with an unrelated lay person getting in his way 24/7.

It's time to call PR men what they really are: Political Officers.

Or maybe it has more to do with this: http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/55749

I think that this was all started by the Town hall protests, more specifically by the administration's reaction to it.

Shortly after the town hall meetings, and I think the birther campaigns, the Obama administration basically went on the offensive. They openly stated that they were going to call out and not stand idly by when similar things happened. The link, if it is true, sounds like an extension of that using the new Prussian apparatus set up over the last decade.

Granted the government's self-interest is to spin this story in their favour, but unless they are lying, given the fact that there are more urgent public sector needs that need to be met (eg. hospitals, food kitchens etc) the reasons they gave seem fairly reasonable in the circumstances.

There's nothing reasonable about pulling the plug on a national broadcaster, without notice, in the middle of the night, and turfing every employee out unilaterally onto the street. This is industrial relations amateur hour.

The guys in charge of Greece have no idea what they are doing. None whatsoever. The same could be said for most western government. The only things these guys know how to do right is overpay themselves.

(Disclaimer: I'm going to use the term 'bandwidth' universally instead of the more correct 'latency' or 'throughput' so normal people can hopefully understand this post) The biggest problem I have with every alternative I have tried is that they are built with the most annoying design flaws. They are so painful to me that I am certain these flaws will be look back upon as the geocities of our modern day web development.

When I fire up an alternative, the responsiveness that was in Google Reader just isn't there. And it always seems like the alternatives require you to hit "refresh" on their interface and then what happens? It apparently makes a call out to every single RSS feed to get updates. On the surface this may seem like standard HTTP way of thinking about things. But it makes for a shit user experience. I have thousands of RSS feeds. Thousands. And if I hit refresh in this paradigm, my browser makes 1,000+ HTTP GET requests. It's not a lot of data but if even one of those requests is slow, it's usually blocking on ceding control back to me.

So let's iterate improvements on here that will get us back to Google Reader style responsiveness, shall we? Well, one of the simplest improvements I can see is to do these requests asynchronously with nonblocking web workers. You can attach each of them to the div or construct that each feed is displayed in and only have them work when that feed is visible (for instance if I am collapsing/expanding folders of feeds). You can grey out the feed until the request comes back but if another request returns first, it is parsed and inserted and activated to my vision. That way if cnn.com comes back faster than NASA's Photograph of the Day, I can read while waiting for my images.

But the core problem is that I'm on my home computer on a residential cable modem and, let's face it, Cox sucks. So what I think Google was doing was sacrificing their bandwidth to actually "reverse" the request from client to server. And, in doing so, they could package up all your updates and ship them out in one request (probably compressed). So, this is how I would approach that. Instead of doing a heart beat HTTP GET to check for RSS updates, I'd build a WebSocket and instead of requesting information, the client (browser) would be listening for information. The event/listener paradigm here would save both the user and the RSS host a lot of bandwidth but it would cost the host of the feed reader service some of that bandwidth (although much less). So basically the client JavaScript would load the page just like normal but instead of continually sending HTTP GET requests, a WebSocket would merely inform the server which feeds are active and listen for updates coming in from the server.

On the downside, this greatly complicates the server side. You need to have one be-all end-all "cache" or storage of all incoming feeds that any user is subscribed to. And for each of these feeds, you need to have a list of the users subscribed to it. And now your server will need to maintain the HTTP GET requests to cnn.com and NASA in order to get updates. When it gets an update, there's two ways you could handle it (user queues are complicated so I won't suggest that) but the most basic way is to send it right out to everyone on that subscription list who has an active WebSocket session established with their account. If a new WebSocket session is established, they simply get the last N stories from their subscriptions (Google included pagination backwards binned by time). To alleviate even more bandwidth from you, you could store it on the client side with HTML5 Web Storage and then the first thing the Web Socket does is find the last date on the last stored element and send that across to the server to establish the session. The server responds with any updates past that time. And from there your WebSocket is merely listening and inserting elements into the page when they arrive.

Of course, after you valiantly save your RSS providers from death by a thousand cuts, you yourself face that same fate. And now you know why Google scheduled a turn off of Reader ...

It's time for people to stop with this pretending to write computer games nonsense.

C/C++ is not a suitable development environment. VI is not a suitable development environment. Emacs is not a suitable development environment. C++14 is vaporware. C++ is designed to focus on OBJECTS, not GAMES.

Please re-read those sentences until you get it through your head. If you want to write a computer game, start with a real instruction set:

1. ARM (ARMv7 not ARMv8)
2. x86-64

I recommend ARM so you don't get distracted by all the horse**** bloat around CISC.

If you need a punch card reader, fine. Get one. Then code the game on a real ENIAC (not a fiddly PC) in the vacuum tubes. It will be hard, but the results will be worth it. If you can't bring yourself to do this, then you have no business programming or writing computer games.

P.S. I'm not interested in C++ OOP or whatever "Stroustrup's latest fly-by-night language" is, and I've been programming computers for 1,337 years, so I'm not interested in your tech credentials either. Either code the game or don't code the game, but knock it off with this artificial C/C++ development nonsense.

That is all.

It's not fear of nuclear power that makes it uneconomical. It's cheap fossil fuels. Back in the 70s it was the Saudis opening the oil spigot; today it's fracking natural gas and of course coal.

Which is not to say irrational fear hasn't created nuclear problems -- particularly when it comes to developing long term storage facilities for high level radioactive waste. We also give fossil fuels a break on externalized costs because we're familiar with the and therefore fear them less than we probably ought. But still, it's hard to supplant a mature, entrenched, *cheap* technology.

Well, it depends. You have to look at each situation individually to see what is at stake. If you know that Anne Frank's family is hiding in the office annex, you obviously keep your mouth shut.

In a case like this, it's important to remember that civil disobedience is most effective when it forces the government to mete out a wildly unpopular punishment. What the government has done is bound to be extremely unpopular because it has come perilously close to passing a secret law.

People think they have fourth amendment protections for most of this data, but long established precedent (Smith v. Maryland) is that there is no Constitutional expectation of privacy for metadata on phone calls. When Congress weakened *statutory* protections against collecting call metadata, American citizens *believed* their calling data was still protected by the Constitution. Nobody has bothered to disabuse them of this idea; not Congress (who despite their current posturing passed the law and authorized the program) nor the Obama administration (their posturing on "transparency" and "accountability" notwithstanding). They knew that the majority of Americans had no idea the changes in the law technically allowed the government to run a program like PRISM.

The exposure of this bit of flim-flammery makes Snowden standing up and outing himself incredibly powerful. His doing that means that this issue will *not* die down anytime soon. Look at how long the Bradley Manning case has dragged on, and *this* one, rightly or wrongly, may prove to be far more powerful in the public imagination. I think Snowden might have been morally justified in laying low if he thought he could get away with it, but his outing of himself will keep this issue alive through the next election cycle at least. That could deal a far more serious blow to the PRISM program than quietly leaking it's existence. The cost of that greater impact is that Snowden definitely loses his job, and he faces prosecution and legal punishments.

No. The change in America following the Sep 11th attacks was only loosely related to previous Cold War policies. America was in many ways demilitarising and advancing throughout the pst Soviet Union 1990s.

Then Sep 11th came, and the USA went into a supercharged spiral of descent, economically, legally, politically and probably culturally. Like a traumatised patient inflicting self harm, the US continues to tear at the fabric of its own national identity in response to the attacks. I don't think it will stop until the patient is dead, or practically so. Madness does not follow reason.

"Now that we know who the enemy is, It is time for America to Act."

OK, now you are in a position where the burden of proof is on you.

It's legitimate to look at somebody's evidence and say, "it doesn't convince me." It's sometimes *also* legitimate to say "I've seen enough evidence to convince myself beyond a reasonable doubt, so I won't bother thinking about your evidence; otherwise you'd have to take the time to examine the workings of every proposed perpetual motion machine.

What you can't do is say, "I'll dismiss your evidence because there's a possibility you have a conflict of interest." Everyone *always* has a vested interest in any position they've taken in the past. If you go there, if you call a man a liar because he has stated a professional opinion you disagree with, it's *your* responsibility to show evidence that lying has taken place. If you can't, STFU.

I'm pretty sure The Onion hit the nail on the head (as well as their actual review of it).

But this is coming from someone who's probably going to see Frances Ha tonight and is still trying to get his hands on a copy of Incendies so if you want to laugh and don't want to have to think ... watch it make millions.