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We begin with the arrival of the Century of the Fruitbat to England and Wales, with midnight weddings of gay and lesbian couples. Scotland will join later in the year, and Northern Ireland refuses to come along.
The migratory patterns of Homo sapiens over a five-year period.
Russia is in violation of an agreement made with Ukraine. And possibly also committing war crimes, if the un-insigniaed uniformed personnel that attacked and evicted Ukraine military personnel from their bases are in any way connected to the Russian government. Russia also claims Crimea is legitimately annexed to Russia, which resulted in new sanctions against Russian individuals and organizations. The sanctions are causing problems to the Russian economy, but United States conservatives want a shooting solution to the problem.
At taxpayer expense, an internal investigation commissioned by New Jersey governor Chris Christie produced a hagiographic account of the bridge-closing scandal, absolving the governor of any responsibility or knowledge of the event. The "report" also contains a significant amount of "bitches be crazy, amirite?" with regard to the why of the bridge scandal and tapdances around evidence that strongly suggests the governor knew, even if he wasn't directly involved, about the Lianne closures. All while not actually talking to several of the people directly involved in said lane closures. Gotta love politics.
The United States National Security Agency conducted intense surveillance and hacking operations against Chinese networking company Huawei, including the theft of source code, according to Snowden documents. The U.S. is naturally doing the things they claim China is doing to U.S. corporations. And they're probably both right. If software starts to be the main method that defines and controls networking, the NSA could find itself with additional headaches in their hacking attempts.
Zero-intelligence school policies disproportionately affect minority students even as young as preschool, setting up minority kids for bad results in school and prison out of school. More thought and nuance is necessary for things to work.
For example, women in Afghanistan are not all clad in burquas and completely controlled by men. And it is worth thinking about whether to move away from titles that indicate marital status to a more universal system of address. Even better, think about whether gender signifiers are required in titling at all.
Then again, sometimes thought is exercised... with malice, and you get school administrators who bully a student into deleting evidence of bullying from other students by threatening him with a wiretapping charge, and then the officers that arrest the student and the judge that convicted the student on disorderly conduct. The bullies have yet to be punished for their actions. At all.
Or you end up with the worst interview question, ever.
A federal judge temporarily overturned Michigan's constitutional ban on marriage equality, after which the state sought and obtained a stay of the decision. There is a great temptation to title this idea, "Suck it, Michigan!", but there are many obvious reasons not to. While the cases are appealed, Michigan refuses to recognize the married couples as entitled to the benefits of marriage. Attorney General Eric Holder says the Federal government of the United States will recognize and accord all Federal benefits of marriage to the couples in Michigan.
Republicans in the Senate believe that federal agencies should not be allowed to ask whether research presented to them regarding regulation has financial conflicts of interest. Because we know that industry-sponsored research is just as good as independent research, or so we are supposed to believe. It's not like everyone trusts Consumer Reports more than advertisements on TV or anything.
Consider this: Conservatism, as it has become these days, is composed almost solely of persons who have no intention of adapting to the current reality, and then have the stones to claim that the current reality is persecuting them, under whatever house of liberalism they find convenient. Conservatives often pride themselves on not having moved on from The Time That Never Was, but they do so only to their detriment, as they often appear not only clueless, but to be defending things that have long since been proven harmful to the country and possibly to themselves, once their armor of disbelief has been chipped away sufficiently.
The Eighth Circle of Dantean Hell welcomes Fred Phelps, founder of the Westboro Baptist Church, at 84 years of age. Phelps was a galvanizing force for many, and probably helped advance marriage equality and gay rights exponentially by being a focal point for opposition.
The FBI will be batting 151/151 in shootings, with the likelihood that the agents involved in the shooting of a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing and possible suspect in a triple homicide will be cleared of wrongdoing. This comes on the heels of the knowledge that the person accused of the Boston Marathon bombings should have been detained at the airport, but that the name on the notice and on the ID were one letter different.
The payment processor for the online renewal component of the California Department of Motor Vehicles was breached and numbers and confirmation codes stolen. This is the fear or our digital age - only one weak link in the chain could cause the compromise of all the important data in the stream. Additionally, the breach of data on the Sallys Beauty Supply website was much greater than previously thought - all locations may have been affected. Which makes you want to throw your hands up in exasperation and declare that the thieves can have your credit and you'll just continually be on the phone with your card issuers to get new numbers so they can be taken, too. Furthermore, the auditing firms supposedly checking for compliance have not been doing all that great at finding vulnerabilities. So, all suspicious charges, including small ones, should be reported immediately, since some scams basically prey on people not caring about small amounts to make big amounts of money. And accept no bullshit spin from any company that sold data to someone who was using it to help others commit identity theft and fraud.
The ACLU offers a completely indexed and searchable archive of the documents they have obtained through Edward Snowden. Hopefully, this means lots of new stories about the NSA's overreach.
A five year-old child discovered a security vulnerability in Microsoft&apos:s XBox Live service which allowed him to access his father&apos:s account without the correct password. The flaw has been patched and it's discoverer officially credited and rewarded. And yes, now we can joke that XBox Live failed the five year-old test.
a vulnerability in OpenSSL allowed for the reading of memory from a server's dynamic memory, which could contain credential information or encryption keys. The more laconic explanation comes from xkcd, which shows how a server trusts an improper request and provides information.
An earthquake off the coast of Chile triggered a tsunami, forcing evacuations off the entire coastal area of the country. Then comes rebuilding and the discovery of who didn't make it.
To get around a council prohibition on street music before 10 am and after 9 pm, a group of street musicians formed the Church of the Holy Kazoo, claiming street music is their form of preaching. We think they'll get along with the Pastafarians, the Church of the Invisible Pink Unicorn, and the Discordians just fine.
After receiving the ability to create their own heraldry, Canada has gone on to incorporate significant amount of new animals, designs, and crests, creating visually appealing heraldry that is definitively Canadian.
Emotions, especially those without rhyme or reason to their forming, can be very scary to outside observers, whether they have empathy or not. Perhaps they are even scarier to those without a large amount of empathy because they appear to be random changes of behavior for no discernable reason.
Managers will hire men more often than women, even if the women have better skills, often because what kind of employee a manager is looking for has been shaped by the idea of the man who exudes overconfidence as the ideal. Those who are socially told to downplay themselves don't end up getting hired, and if they do play up their skills, they're often perceived as being uppity and don't get hired. Our conservative overlords will tell us that it's not gender bias at all, but [REDACTED] and [FALSEHOOD], so there's no reason to think that there's a problem.
A Mr. Smith would have you believe that students asking professors to include trigger warnings on their course materials is the result of helicopter parents raising children who are afraid of everything and need to be coddled, despite having given the correct reasoning (so that those who have suffered traumatic events will be forewarned about things that may invoke memories of those traumas) earlier in the episode. It's apparently a threat to academic freedom, because people demanding trigger warnings are the same as censors who want those materials expunged entirely.
Chronic pain screws with everything and reaches much farther than anticipated. Many of those things also affect the caregivers of those in chronic pain the same way.
Last for tonight, An essay about essays, which warns us against believing and accepting that the five-paragraph essay peddled to us by standardized tests is the correct and sole form of essay writing.
And a good way of making DRM-free chores of your books for your own use and archiving.
The migratory patterns of Homo sapiens over a five-year period.
Russia is in violation of an agreement made with Ukraine. And possibly also committing war crimes, if the un-insigniaed uniformed personnel that attacked and evicted Ukraine military personnel from their bases are in any way connected to the Russian government. Russia also claims Crimea is legitimately annexed to Russia, which resulted in new sanctions against Russian individuals and organizations. The sanctions are causing problems to the Russian economy, but United States conservatives want a shooting solution to the problem.
At taxpayer expense, an internal investigation commissioned by New Jersey governor Chris Christie produced a hagiographic account of the bridge-closing scandal, absolving the governor of any responsibility or knowledge of the event. The "report" also contains a significant amount of "bitches be crazy, amirite?" with regard to the why of the bridge scandal and tapdances around evidence that strongly suggests the governor knew, even if he wasn't directly involved, about the Lianne closures. All while not actually talking to several of the people directly involved in said lane closures. Gotta love politics.
The United States National Security Agency conducted intense surveillance and hacking operations against Chinese networking company Huawei, including the theft of source code, according to Snowden documents. The U.S. is naturally doing the things they claim China is doing to U.S. corporations. And they're probably both right. If software starts to be the main method that defines and controls networking, the NSA could find itself with additional headaches in their hacking attempts.
Zero-intelligence school policies disproportionately affect minority students even as young as preschool, setting up minority kids for bad results in school and prison out of school. More thought and nuance is necessary for things to work.
For example, women in Afghanistan are not all clad in burquas and completely controlled by men. And it is worth thinking about whether to move away from titles that indicate marital status to a more universal system of address. Even better, think about whether gender signifiers are required in titling at all.
Then again, sometimes thought is exercised... with malice, and you get school administrators who bully a student into deleting evidence of bullying from other students by threatening him with a wiretapping charge, and then the officers that arrest the student and the judge that convicted the student on disorderly conduct. The bullies have yet to be punished for their actions. At all.
Or you end up with the worst interview question, ever.
A federal judge temporarily overturned Michigan's constitutional ban on marriage equality, after which the state sought and obtained a stay of the decision. There is a great temptation to title this idea, "Suck it, Michigan!", but there are many obvious reasons not to. While the cases are appealed, Michigan refuses to recognize the married couples as entitled to the benefits of marriage. Attorney General Eric Holder says the Federal government of the United States will recognize and accord all Federal benefits of marriage to the couples in Michigan.
Republicans in the Senate believe that federal agencies should not be allowed to ask whether research presented to them regarding regulation has financial conflicts of interest. Because we know that industry-sponsored research is just as good as independent research, or so we are supposed to believe. It's not like everyone trusts Consumer Reports more than advertisements on TV or anything.
Consider this: Conservatism, as it has become these days, is composed almost solely of persons who have no intention of adapting to the current reality, and then have the stones to claim that the current reality is persecuting them, under whatever house of liberalism they find convenient. Conservatives often pride themselves on not having moved on from The Time That Never Was, but they do so only to their detriment, as they often appear not only clueless, but to be defending things that have long since been proven harmful to the country and possibly to themselves, once their armor of disbelief has been chipped away sufficiently.
The Eighth Circle of Dantean Hell welcomes Fred Phelps, founder of the Westboro Baptist Church, at 84 years of age. Phelps was a galvanizing force for many, and probably helped advance marriage equality and gay rights exponentially by being a focal point for opposition.
The FBI will be batting 151/151 in shootings, with the likelihood that the agents involved in the shooting of a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing and possible suspect in a triple homicide will be cleared of wrongdoing. This comes on the heels of the knowledge that the person accused of the Boston Marathon bombings should have been detained at the airport, but that the name on the notice and on the ID were one letter different.
The payment processor for the online renewal component of the California Department of Motor Vehicles was breached and numbers and confirmation codes stolen. This is the fear or our digital age - only one weak link in the chain could cause the compromise of all the important data in the stream. Additionally, the breach of data on the Sallys Beauty Supply website was much greater than previously thought - all locations may have been affected. Which makes you want to throw your hands up in exasperation and declare that the thieves can have your credit and you'll just continually be on the phone with your card issuers to get new numbers so they can be taken, too. Furthermore, the auditing firms supposedly checking for compliance have not been doing all that great at finding vulnerabilities. So, all suspicious charges, including small ones, should be reported immediately, since some scams basically prey on people not caring about small amounts to make big amounts of money. And accept no bullshit spin from any company that sold data to someone who was using it to help others commit identity theft and fraud.
The ACLU offers a completely indexed and searchable archive of the documents they have obtained through Edward Snowden. Hopefully, this means lots of new stories about the NSA's overreach.
A five year-old child discovered a security vulnerability in Microsoft&apos:s XBox Live service which allowed him to access his father&apos:s account without the correct password. The flaw has been patched and it's discoverer officially credited and rewarded. And yes, now we can joke that XBox Live failed the five year-old test.
a vulnerability in OpenSSL allowed for the reading of memory from a server's dynamic memory, which could contain credential information or encryption keys. The more laconic explanation comes from xkcd, which shows how a server trusts an improper request and provides information.
An earthquake off the coast of Chile triggered a tsunami, forcing evacuations off the entire coastal area of the country. Then comes rebuilding and the discovery of who didn't make it.
To get around a council prohibition on street music before 10 am and after 9 pm, a group of street musicians formed the Church of the Holy Kazoo, claiming street music is their form of preaching. We think they'll get along with the Pastafarians, the Church of the Invisible Pink Unicorn, and the Discordians just fine.
After receiving the ability to create their own heraldry, Canada has gone on to incorporate significant amount of new animals, designs, and crests, creating visually appealing heraldry that is definitively Canadian.
Emotions, especially those without rhyme or reason to their forming, can be very scary to outside observers, whether they have empathy or not. Perhaps they are even scarier to those without a large amount of empathy because they appear to be random changes of behavior for no discernable reason.
Managers will hire men more often than women, even if the women have better skills, often because what kind of employee a manager is looking for has been shaped by the idea of the man who exudes overconfidence as the ideal. Those who are socially told to downplay themselves don't end up getting hired, and if they do play up their skills, they're often perceived as being uppity and don't get hired. Our conservative overlords will tell us that it's not gender bias at all, but [REDACTED] and [FALSEHOOD], so there's no reason to think that there's a problem.
A Mr. Smith would have you believe that students asking professors to include trigger warnings on their course materials is the result of helicopter parents raising children who are afraid of everything and need to be coddled, despite having given the correct reasoning (so that those who have suffered traumatic events will be forewarned about things that may invoke memories of those traumas) earlier in the episode. It's apparently a threat to academic freedom, because people demanding trigger warnings are the same as censors who want those materials expunged entirely.
Chronic pain screws with everything and reaches much farther than anticipated. Many of those things also affect the caregivers of those in chronic pain the same way.
Last for tonight, An essay about essays, which warns us against believing and accepting that the five-paragraph essay peddled to us by standardized tests is the correct and sole form of essay writing.
And a good way of making DRM-free chores of your books for your own use and archiving.
