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This is only the latest in a long string of attacks – like that time Trump compared the intelligence community to “Nazis” – that Schindler says is aggravating the intelligence community – with potentially devastating consequences:
US intelligence is not the problem here. The President's collusion with Russian intelligence is. Many details, but the essence is simple. — John Schindler (@20committee) February 15, 2017
Progress? The President was calling US "intelligence" Nazis only a few weeks ago — now they're merely un-American.https://t.co/5y1T8EHCJy — John Schindler (@20committee) February 15, 2017
Now we go nuclear. IC war going to new levels. Just got an EM fm senior IC friend, it began: "He will die in jail."https://t.co/e6FxCclVqT — John Schindler (@20committee) February 15, 2017
Putin never viewed Trump as anything more than a useful lunatic. Moscow wants political chaos in America — and oh boy are they getting it. — John Schindler (@20committee) February 15, 2017
In this tweet, IC is shorthand for “intelligence community” and EM for “email.”
If we take these tweets at face value, Trump’s continued insistence on berating the intelligence community for their work and siding with the Russians over our own national security apparatus is going to come back to haunt him.
The only thing “illegal” about this entire scandal are the secret communications that the Trump campaign was conducting with agents of the Russian Federation during and after the election – and every move the Trump administration makes only deepens the suspicion that the Russian government is blackmailing our so-called President – and that is an unacceptable state of affairs.
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The Apple Watch is set sell millions in its first year on shelves. Already the new, quite possibly redundant, gadget has moved over 2 million in preorders alone, and analysts are betting on anywhere from 9 to 30 million sold in the first year.
That's out of myriad different models ranging from just a few hundred dollars for the iPeasant version, to as much as $17,000 for the Apple Watch Edition, with the high-end settling on the customized, diamond-studded Lux Watch Omni which costs a measly $114,995.
If you see someone wearing an Apple Watch that cost over $100,000...well, just know that somewhere there's a Swiss watch-maker rolling over in their grave.
The first Apple Watches are shipping out this week, but the entire roll-out of the wearable is of the "soft launch" variety, rolling out to stores later in the summer. Customers will need appointments at Apple Stores to demo and purchase the watch, because suddenly Apple doesn't like lines outside its stores.
This is one silver lining, no pun intended. The Apple device lines are among the most irritating phenomena of our age.
Indeed, the entire Apple hype machine ranks among the most irritating phenomena of our age. While the company has done marvelous work in the realm of marketing and product design---and I don't begrudge them one ounce of success---the willingness of the masses to simply hop aboard that train irks me to no end. I am a reverse-snob in this regard, I admit it.
In one sense, it's quite remarkable that Apple Watch sales are projected to be so high, while Android smart watches have made very little of a dent in the fledgling tech genre. There's little reason to believe the Apple Watch will be such a huge step up over the competition, and Pebble still seems like the smart way to go if you want actual functionality and not just hipster-tech social signaling.
Then again, as Forbes contributor Paul Lamkin notes "With the Pebble considered a smartwatch success story after around 1 million sales, and Android Wear causing only a minor blip with its estimated 1 – 1.5 million device sales across its multi-branded range in the platform’s first year of existence, the Apple Watch could be the benchmark-raising saviour of a slow-burning new tech genre."
A rising tide lifts all boats or some such. It's the Starbucks effect, where the rise of the massive coffee chain actually boosted mom-and-pop cafes all across the country rather than put them out of business. The iPhone in many ways paved the way for other smartphones; the iPad opened the floodgates for Android tablets and even Windows 8 tablets. So it will go with the Apple Watch---while it's late to the party, it's nonetheless the wearables' vanguard, come to ready the teeming masses.
But I can't help myself: Smartwatches already strike me as superfluous.
True, there's something kind of neat about being able to check your texts and step totals and Twitter at the flick of a wrist---but my phone is already right there in my pocket, or on the table, and its screen is way, way bigger. The added expense of an Apple Watch to an iPhone setup doesn't strike me as a particularly good value proposition.
It's much more for show, for style, for fashion, for signaling than for functionality, of course, and as a rather more utilitarian techie, I guess that just rubs me the wrong way. It must be my inner-Luddite, or just the budding curmudgeon in me, but I think we're already overly connected. My smartphone is enough of a distraction from the world. But at least we smartphone owners keep ours in our pockets rather than sporting them around on our wrists for all the world to see in all their gaudy splendor.
While Apple and its app-developers may need to find ways to not annoy Apple Watch wearers, the wearers themselves may be a source of annoyance for the rest of us (though I don't recommend shaming them the way non-smokers have attempted to shame smokers. Fighting rudeness with more of the same strikes me as fairly awful.)
In any case, I'm hardly alone in thinking this.
“These smartwatches can be as annoying as our smartphones and more visible since you wear them,” says Pamela Eyring, the president of The Protocol School of Washington according to MarketWatch. “But smartphones can be hidden easier when you’re with people since you can tuck them into a handbag or jacket pocket.”
Others suggest that perhaps social norms surrounding acceptable watch-checking behavior will shift, though not any time soon.
“Yes, norms shift," manners-expert and author Henry Hitchings writes to New York Magazine. "We feel different about someone taking a phone call in our presence from how our grandparents might have felt about it. But modern communications technology, of which the Apple Watch is of course just one example, has created uncertainty rather than a new set of social certainties. And while some people may applaud the social fluidity that results from that, there are obvious problems to do with our confusion about privacy, ownership, the distinction between the real and the virtual, and so on.”
This uncertainty is emphasized by the fact that the Apple Watch is part of our attire, Hitchings also notes, which brings up deeper questions of how we set social norms and boundaries.
Call me a traditionalist hold-out but I believe that a watch's core mission is simply to keep the time. It shouldn't have to be charged every day. I shouldn't have to wake it up in order to check the time. And it shouldn't be designed with planned obsolescence in mind.
The truth of the matter is this: Your Apple Watch will be out-of-date in a year or two. Even your $17,000 model will seem slow and clunky compared to whatever Apple makes in 2017. Watches are supposed to be the closest thing we have to engineered immortality. Watches and firearms. Smartwatches do not fit that bill.
You might argue that phones were once meant to merely take calls, and now do so much more, and you'd have a point. But phones were never instruments designed to last. They were even more utilitarian than watches. And modern smartphones actually expand on the functionality of a phone in truly useful ways, and might as well be called smart-cameras at this point regardless. Regardless, even smartphones have raised issues of manners and what counts as acceptable behavior.
I recall one day, years ago at my daughter's preschool, parents were invited to see what their kids had been working on, talk to the teachers, play in the playground. There were snacks. It was a time carved out for kids and their parents.
Yet glancing around I counted probably half the dads glued to their phones for much of the brief morning visit. I have my own moments when I'm sucked away from life, into the bowels of Twitter or some other dark dungeon of social media. An Apple Watch, I suspect, would only hasten my descent.
"I can’t seem to get past the worry that Apple’s Next Best And Brightest Thing is designed for a future that I don’t particularly want to inhabit," writes Buzzfeed's Charlie Warzel. "A pingy, buzzy, always visible, always on future that I’ll have to enter begrudgingly."
But hey, at least there won't be Apple zealots lining the street. That's something to be cheery about.
This view of a full moon was photographed by an Expedition 14 crewmember onboard the International Space Station. Earth's horizon and airglow is visible at left.
As the full moon rises this Wednesday evening, June 18, many people will be fooled into thinking it's unusually large.
The moon illusion, as it's known, is a trick in our minds that makes the moon seem bigger when it's near the horizon. The effect is most pronounced at full moon. Many people swear it's real, suggesting that perhaps Earth's atmosphere magnifies the moon.
But it really is all in our minds. The moon is not bigger at the horizon than when overhead.
The illusion will be particularly noticeable at this "solstice moon," coming just two days before summer starts in the Northern Hemisphere. The reason, according to NASA, lies in lunar mechanics: The sun and full moon are like kids on a see-saw; when one is high, the other is low. This week's high solstice sun gives us a low, horizon-hugging moon and a strong, long-lasting version of the illusion.
If it's any consolation, space station astronauts report the same effect.
Here's how it works: Your mind believes things on the horizon are farther away than things overhead, because you are used to seeing clouds just a few miles above, but the clouds on the horizon can indeed be hundreds of miles away. So if we think something (such as the moon) is farther away, and it's not, then it seems larger.
If you remain doubtful, test the idea yourself. Go out at moonrise with a small object, perhaps a pencil eraser. Hold it at arm's length as the moon rises and compare the sizes of the moon and the eraser, then repeat the experiment an hour or two later when the moon is high in the sky. A rolled up tube of paper works well, too.
Moonrise times vary by location. On Wednesday, it will come up at these local times at these locations, according to NASA: New York City, 8:58 p.m.; Miami, 8:35 p.m.; Seattle, 9:51 p.m.
The moon rises about 50 minutes earlier Tuesday night, when the effect will also be noticeable because the moon will be nearly full. Oh, and that raises another fallacy: There's no such thing as a full moon.
Additional moonrise times for your location are available from the U.S. Naval Observatory Web site.
Most of us can't fully succumb to our techno-lust until we've seen a finished gadget in use. Here's the dirty secret, though – none of your perverted fantasies about multiple-touchscreen smartphones can be realized until someone makes a dual-core chip that would know what to do with them. Samsung's new Orion 1-GHz dual-core ARM microprocessor could make those kinky dreams come true.
Samsung announced the new chip in a press release earlier this week; it will be pushed out to "select customers in the fourth quarter of 2010" and go into "mass production in the first half of 2011."
So what's the big deal? We've had dual-core processors in our laptops for years! Ah, but those processors are way too big and power-hungry for mobile standards. You don't want to strap your laptop's battery to your phone, do you? By necessity, mobile chips are all about small size and low power-consumptions. That's why IBM's working on mobile chips with super-sleep modes and Intel just went ahead and bought smartphone chipmaker Infineon just to get in the game, as Gadget Lab reported last week.
But wait – haven't Qualcomm and Texas Instruments already announced their dual-core processors for mobile devices? And didn't LG even announce that they're going to start packing graphics champ NVidia's Tegra 2 dual-core processor into smartphones? This can't just be about mobile multicore processors.
How right you are. This is where we have to unpack those other big numbers attached to the Orion's specs. The real gem of the Orion is its video processing. Part of this is just the multicore processing; lightweight single-core mobile chips can't really handle true high-definition (1080p) video. Like the Tegra, the Orion can. What's more, it's got an "onboard native triple display controller architecture that compliments multitasking operations in a multiple display environment." Translation: three-way. Smartphones with multiple screens that can display different video on each screen, plus output an entirely different video to a third. These chips are polymorphously perverse.
So that's the truth about these chips. A smartphone or tablet's hardware body and capacitative touchscreen are just pretty clothes and suggestive sunglasses. Once you strip those away away, all of the hot, sinewy action is happening underneath.
Photo: "Big Sister" by Schodts at Flickr. Used gratefully under a Creative Commons license.
See Also:
The Securities and Exchange Commission launched an informal investigation on Thursday into the details of the Los Angeles Unified School District's (LAUSD) notorious $1.3 billion iPad project, which was supposed to give every child in the nation's second-largest school system an iPad loaded with Pearson curriculum. The Los Angeles Times said that a source inside LAUSD confirmed that the commission was asking questions about how the bond money that was set aside to fund the program was used.
The iPad program met many roadblocks since its inception in 2013, and recent allegations of improprieties during the bidding process for the bond money derailed the program permanently. Back in December, the FBI raided the school district's offices , taking with them 20 boxes of information pertaining to the program. At the time, the LAUSD superintendent resigned, although he has denied wrongdoing.
Just yesterday, LAUSD's attorney wrote to Apple demanding refunds for Pearson curriculum that the school system deemed unsatisfactory. It also said it would not accept any more shipments from Apple or Pearson in the future. Pearson was a subcontractor for Apple in the deal between the tech giant and LAUSD.
On Thursday, District officials told the LA Times that “they were optimistic that they had addressed the SEC concerns.” The LA Times also reported that LAUSD had prepared a presentation in March that “outlined measures it took to inform the public and potential investors about how bond funds [for the iPad program] would be spent.”
The school district reportedly told the SEC that the bonds used to fund the iPad program were general obligation bonds that were not meant to generate revenue for investors. It also maintained that it was transparent in its dealings and that “all necessary disclosures were made to the public, underwriters, rating agencies, and investors.”
Twilight sparkleboyfriend Robert Pattinson is starring in a new movie, premiering Friday, about a young couple falling in love in New York. It's all romantic and silly, until the film's exploitative gotcha! ending. Want to know what it is?
New York Magazine ran the spoiler a couple of weeks ago, and now the Village Voice, the third "Top Critic" review on RottenTomatoes, just spilled the beans. Variety and The Hollywood Reporter kept slightly more mum about the ending, alluding only to some grim foreshadowing of Lower Manhattan skylines...
The end?
Everything is hunkydory for most of the film. Two young sexys — Bobby Patentleather, crazy Claire from Lost — meet cute during college in the gray whirlwind of New York. They battle past sadnesses, mean daddies, and cigarette addictions on their course to true love. They get married and the Vampyr heads off to his first day of grownup man work. He goes up and up in an elevator and everyone in the audience is saying "My, that's an awfully tall building, where does he work exactly?" And then, can you guess it?
9/11.
Edward Pattinson dies of 9/11 at the very end of Remember Me and all the film's happiness goes with him. This is their shocker! It's like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close if Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close had featured just a few more vampire sexpots. And if Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close had used a national tragedy as an opportunistic, zam-bang! instant-meaning hook at the end, rather than throughout the whole book.
So well done, filmmakers! Doesn't this oddly make you want to see it? And it makes us curious whether more critics will get so upset/annoyed/tickled by the hokum ending of a twinklevampire movie that they too will let the 9/11 cat out of the 9/11 bag.
S. 3100: Stop Dangerous Sanctuary Cities Act passes committee (and what you can do)
GovTrack.us Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jul 5, 2016
A “sanctuary city” is a city that protects illegal immigrants from federal or state prosecution, either by expressly prohibiting or never requiring legal inquiries about immigration status. There are more than 300 sanctuary cities in the United States.
There have been many Republican attempts to prevent sanctuary cities. The latest is S. 3100, the Stop Dangerous Sanctuary Cities Act, which would withhold certain federal grants from sanctuary cities. The bill was introduced last week on June 27 and made it past committee the next day. While it may receive a Senate vote, the White House has threatened to veto similar previous bills.
What supporters say
Many sanctuary cities have another, more controversial, practice to protect illegal immigrants convicted of crimes from being deported. An immigrant arrested for an unrelated crime, and then later determined to be in the country illegally, will often only be punished for the crime. They may serve jail time or pay a fine but they will not be not deported.
Many critics of sanctuary cities see this practice as dangerous, citing increasing violent crime rates in San Francisco since 2011. Bill sponsor Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) described a San Francisco murder committed by an illegal immigrant. The shooter had been in police custody three months earlier but was not deported due to sanctuary practices. Many feel that the murder represents a clear example of a death that would have been avoidable if not for the sanctuary city. (Proponents of sanctuary cities argue that the cities are just as safe, if not safer, than other cities.)
What opponents say
A 2015 Washington Post article presents a different picture on the effects of sanctuary cities. It argues that sanctuary cities were the solution to criticisms about inhumane treatment of immigrants and racial profiling. “Immigrant advocates said all of this deeply damaged already-limited police trust in immigrant communities, making people afraid to call police or provide information. That, these advocates argued, was the real threat to public safety.”
How to get involved
Support an advocacy group you agree with:
Stop sanctuary cities by supporting the Federation for American Immigration Reform
Protect sanctuary cities by supporting the American Immigration Council
Call Congress: Whether you want to support S. 3100 or oppose it, it is worth letting your senators know. You can do this by clicking on the yellow “Call Congress” button at the top of the bill page. You can also let others know how you feel about the bill by reacting with an emoji.
Author: Beach Combing \| in : Contemporary
Nauru is a small island (about eight square miles) half way between Hawaii and New Zealand made largely of bird droppings. If that does not sound particularly promising consider two further points. First, that its European discoverer named it Pleasant Island in 1798: it was once extraordinarily beautiful. And second that the bird droppings can be mined as phosphates, which are worth a lot of money. The following morality tale has, in fact, a lot to do with money…
Money… Everyone wanted a piece of Nauru. It is enough to list the island’s owners over the last two hundred years. For most of the nineteenth century the Nauruans ruled themselves and spent a lot of that time fighting each other with firearms brought by European traders. In 1888 Germany intervened to end the war and in an amnesty – and encouraged by the threat that tribal leaders would be executed – over seven hundred guns and rifles were handed over to the new authorities; enough to attempt an invasion of Belgium.
The island remained in the German Empire until 1914 when it was occupied by Australians on behalf of the Allies. In 1919 the British created the British Phosphate Commission that ran the island in the interests of Australia, New Zealand and the wider Empire, though not necesarily the Nauruans. In 1923 Australia took over the running of Nauru. In 1942 Japan occupied and Nauru had its worst years: a leprosy outbreak was dealt with by sailing a boat of the afflicted out into the ocean and sinking it. In 1945 a joint New Zealand, Australian and British trusteeship was set up, then in 1968 the island was finally given independence.
Nauruans, Germans, Australians, BPC, Japanese, Commonwealth Trusteeship and Nauruans again. Nauru became a kind of Pacific Krakow passing constantly between powers. It would be interesting to see if any other spot in the Pacific rivals Nauruans in terms of the multiplicity of owners. Beach is tempted to quote Kissinger: ‘if they had grown carrots there no one would have given a damn.’
From 1968 the Nauruans should have had a happy or at least wealthy existence. After all, they now had the phosophate for themselves. And for a while the government was immensely rich, particularly given how small the population was. It also proved though immensely stupid and the money was wasted. Nauru is a nice example of the Dutch disease. Never give your kids an oil well.
By 2006 the phosphates had run out, as had the money, and the island experienced an environmental catastrophe, much of it having been strip mined to water or rock: note the central moonscape in the image above. The lawyers managed to claw some money back through suing Britain, Australia and New Zealand for overexploitation. But the compensation didn’t last either. And then desperation and creativity set in. In 2003, the island briefly tried to get on the US’s patronage list by helping North Korean defectors escape!
90% of the Nauruans are now unemployed and most of those that have jobs owe them to the authorities: hardly Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Still at least Nauru has survived its colonial masters and the passing of the guano. Here’s to a brighter future for one of the world’s most obscure territories. Let’s hope the birds will return.
Beach is always on the look out for ‘forgotten kingdoms’ even when they are republics: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
A report released by legislative auditors Friday says the State Board of Elections needlessly exposed the full Social Security numbers of almost 600,000 voters to potential hacking, risking theft of those voters' identities.
The determination that election officials did not fully protect voters' personal information was one of several highly critical findings in the report. The audit also faulted state election officials' handling of issues including ballot security, disaster preparedness, contracting and balancing its books.
State lawmakers called for a hearing in response to the Office of Legislative Audits report, which prompted strong reaction from critics of the board and its longtime administrator, Linda H. Lamone.
"This audit is an A-to-Z criticism of the way the board operates," said Michael Greenberger, director of the Center for Health and Homeland Security at the University of Maryland School of Law. He said the "damning" findings call for the establishment of an independent, bipartisan commission of computer experts to examine the board's handling of information technology issues.
Doug Mayer, a spokesman for Gov. Larry Hogan, said the report underscores some of the Republican governor's longtime concerns about a "lack of executive oversight" at the board, where the day-to-day management is outside the administration's control.
"This is a perfect example of why those concerns are valid," Mayer said. "Properly securing Maryland's election data is critically important and needs to be given the utmost priority."
Lamone said she agreed with most of the auditor's findings, but "virtually everything" they identified has already been addressed.
"We were working on a lot of these things even before the auditors came in," she said.
The audit found that the board needlessly retained the full nine-digit Social Security numbers of about 592,000 active and inactive voters in its data base — or almost 15 percent of the state's 4.1 million registered voters — when only the last four digits were needed. The report said the board then shared voters' personal information — including driver's license numbers and the last four digits of Social Security numbers — with a third-party organization without ensuring that the data was safeguarded.
CAPTION Anton Black's family speaks about “Anton’s Law,” named after Anton Black, who died in law enforcement custody on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. (Luke Broadwater, Baltimore Sun video) Anton Black's family speaks about “Anton’s Law,” named after Anton Black, who died in law enforcement custody on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. (Luke Broadwater, Baltimore Sun video) CAPTION Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski Jr. launches a task force to look into sexual assault investigation in the county. (Alison Knezevich, Baltimore Sun video) Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski Jr. launches a task force to look into sexual assault investigation in the county. (Alison Knezevich, Baltimore Sun video)
The organization that received the data is the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a nonprofit that helps state election officials around the country identify ineligible voters. While auditors did not question the board's cooperation with ERIC, they said state officials had not received sufficient assurances that ERIC and its outside contractor were adequately protecting data.

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