http://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A0_cu%E1%BB%91ng#Th.C3.A0nh_ng.E1.BB.AF_Vi.E1.BB.87t_Nam

Google Translate FTW. It’s probably not as bad a translation as you might think.

Belostomatids – Vietnamese Wikipedia.

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Belostomatids death to the buttocks is spicy

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Is there a way to sync Firefox plugins across machines yet?

Pakistani authorities have blocked access to the social media website Twitter because of messages they say are offensive to Islam.

They talked of “blasphemous and inflammatory” material although it is not clear exactly what the tweets said.

Some officials mentioned a 2010 Facebook competition involving pictures of the Prophet Muhammad, considered blasphemous by Muslims.

At that time access to about 1,000 websites was blocked.

The ban in 2010 lasted for around a fortnight until Facebook blocked access to the controversial page in Pakistan.

The new ban on Twitter comes just hours after Pakistan’s Interior Minister, Rehman Malik, said there were no plans to block access to the site.

The Indian news agency PTI reported a tweet sent by Mr Malik: “Dear all, I assure u that Twitter and FB will continue in our country and it will not be blocked. Pl do not believe in rumors,” it said.

But the chairman of the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority, Mohammed Yaseen, told the Associated Press (AP) news agency: “We have been negotiating with them (Twitter) until last night, but they did not agree to remove the stuff, so we had to block it.

[...]

via BBC News – Pakistan blocks Twitter because of ‘offensive material’.

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BBC News – Pakistan blocks Twitter because of ‘offensive material’

GET SPOCK UP HERE! – Very Demotivational – The Demotivational Posters Blog

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GET SPOCK UP HERE! # #pratchett meets #trek

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Vodka Martini: Vodka, Vermouth, Olive; Vodka Gibson: use an Onion; Vodka Muffett: use Pickled Garlic

Botching the Bomb
Why Nuclear Weapons Programs Often Fail on Their Own — and Why Iran’s Might, Too

The chronic problem of nuclear proliferation is once again dominating the news. A fierce debate has developed over how to respond to the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear activities, which most experts believe are aimed at producing a nuclear weapon or at least the capacity to assemble one. In this debate, one side is pushing for a near-term military attack to damage or destroy Iran’s nuclear program, and the other side is hoping that strict sanctions against the Islamic Republic will soften it up for a diplomatic solution. Both sides, however, share the underlying assumption that unless outside powers intervene in a dramatic fashion, it is inevitable that Iran will achieve its supposed nuclear goals very soon.

Yet there is another possibility. The Iranians had to work for 25 years just to start accumulating uranium enriched to 20 percent, which is not even weapons grade. The slow pace of Iranian nuclear progress to date strongly suggests that Iran could still need a very long time to actually build a bomb — or could even ultimately fail to do so. Indeed, global trends in proliferation suggest that either of those outcomes might be more likely than Iranian success in the near future. Despite regular warnings that proliferation is spinning out of control, the fact is that since the 1970s, there has been a persistent slowdown in the pace of technical progress on nuclear weapons projects and an equally dramatic decline in their ultimate success rate.

Botching the Bomb | Foreign Affairs.

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Botching the Bomb | Foreign Affairs

Working backwards:

1. The fundamental requirements for truly personal platforms are not yet with us. Controlling your data unfortunately means being in physical control of it, or at least of the keys which encrypt it. There are no if’s and’s or but’s about this, alas.
2. Too many people think in terms of data being (say) owned by the supermarket they have bought stuff from; you have the fact of your purchases already, so the data is already also yours – it’s just terribly inconvenient to scan data in from your receipts, so yes it would be better to demand your purchase history from Tesco/Walmart but this may or may not yield fruit because they also own that data.
3. VRM as a movement has from the outset been usurped by the “if only people would use our new identity technology then this would all be easy” evangelists. Identity is bogus anyway, but this is particularly egregious solution-in-search-of-a-probleming.
4. VRM as a movement has from the outset been usurped by the “if only people would use my new startup’s technology then this would all be easy” evangelists. Sometimes this is identity-related, but other times this bleeds into Let’s get everyone to give us their search-histories so we can use magic toolbars to offer them value independent of the corporations! But it’s OKAY for us to be middlemen BECAUSE WE ARE THE GOOD GUYS!
5. VRM as a movement has from the outset been usurped by the “if only people would give us all our data to keep it safe for them! They can trust us” evangelists; this is for when you don’t want to foist a technology upon the masses but instead want all the data, you find some way to be “ethical” about it and do a data grab anyway. See “it’s OKAY for us to be middlemen BECAUSE WE ARE THE GOOD GUYS” again.

I still believe that the only person who ever understood VRM fully was Adriana Lukas because she realised (in the face of my arguments to the contrary) that it was not about storing data passively but instead about people using, mashing-up and sharing data in ways that they already understand – and critically that the definition of “controlling” data is not a techie-geeky DRM/DLP-like one, but instead a new relationship-oriented means of control that is so simple that people rarely understand the power of it.

As I put it frequently at the time: if you break up with someone then there’s no way to expunge all the embarassing things that they know about you; instead the point is that they don’t find out any further embarassing things. The whip hand is over the ongoing relationship and the mutual ability to terminate it, rather than access to previously-shared digital data which can be cached.

This understanding is why I got into Mine development in the first place^[1] and why I implemented it twice-over, and why I understand that what has to happen first is the addressing of point (1) – almost all the software technologies exist, none of them require invention, all we need is a good bidirectional communications infrastructure and wide adoption of the ability by some means to selectively and easily unicast data in a direct point-to-point way, to replicate in the truest sense a “relationship” in the digital domain.

What we don’t need is to rely on identity hierarchies, or FOAF, or I-cards, trusted third parties, legal fictions for non-profit do-gooding, or anything else of that sort.

–
[1] Watch the first video, and the second if you are a geek; they are worth it

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What I think is wrong with #VRM – HT @nzn @glynmoody @windley @dsearls @adriana872

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“JESUS also suffered from GOVERNMENT CUTS” # should have gone on strike, then.

it’s huge! context.

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Dinner: poached goose egg on warm baguette, french butter; vodka martini.

• Serdar Argic
• Abian
• Robert E. McElwaine
• Julian Assange (yes, him, at one point)
• Ludwig Plutonium
• Canter & Siegel

…and a bunch of others too numerous to mention. Not all of them were trolls in modern day parlance but a few were positively unhinged, and others were right up there in the hate-mail-generating stakes.

And of course there was Kibo, the antidote to trolling.

It’s not new.

“UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS.”

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Just in case anyone thinks that Internet trolls and timewasters are a new phenomenon…

HOT on the stilettos of British author EL James, whose erotic romance Fifty Shades Of Grey topped the New York Times bestseller list, countless other seemingly ordinary women are seeing sales of their own racy reads soar.

Thanks to the popularity of eReaders such as Amazon’s Kindle, which mean there’s no tell-tale book cover, women can now download and read erotic fiction wherever they are without any fear of embarrassment.

Small wonder that the big publishers are now keen to cash in on the erotic genre. HarperCollins has launched Mischief, focusing on erotic ebooks, while romantic heavyweight Mills & Boon is publishing more risqué novels digitally than in print after a huge surge in online sales.

Here three erotic authors reveal all to SADIE NICHOLAS.

[...]

Janine Ashbless, 45, lives in York with her husband Philip, 45, an IT consultant. They don’t have any children. Her latest novel Red Grow The Roses (Mischief) is available to download on Amazon

Sex and writing are what make me happiest but being an erotic author is far more risqué than my previous jobs. I was a library assistant, a computer programmer and subsequently a museum worker. All the time I was working I wrote in my spare time, initially ghost stories. I had a few published under another pen name.

The turning point was being given a Black Lace novel – one of the first publishers of erotic fiction – by a friend in 1998. Until then I had no idea that the racy stories in my head were the sort of thing anyone was allowed to print.

I sent a book of erotic short stories to Black Lace soon after and it was published in 2000. My ninth book is due out soon. My stories are dramatic and very rude. I assume my readers are smart and won’t accept half-hearted descriptions or dumb heroines.

My husband and I met at university when we were 20 and despite always being very sexual, researching sex for my novels has led to us being even more adventurous in the bedroom.

Philip is very proud of my work but my parents, who are staunch Christians, wish that I would write something tasteful that they could show off to their friends.

I don’t pen my novels in a perfumed boudoir as may be easy to imagine. You’re more likely to find me wearing wellies and walking the dogs than donning make-up and a sexy dress.

I tend not to drop my job into conversation with strangers as I’m aware that some people find what I do shocking. In Britain we tend either to make a joke about sex or simply demonise it. My view is that sex is great and we should take pleasure in it. Erotica is for intelligent women.

via Express.co.uk – Home of the Daily and Sunday Express | Express Yourself :: We’re the new naughty novelists.

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Express.co.uk :: We’re the new naughty novelists # La Express reports on the British #CottageErotica industry

Law banning insulting language ‘is strangling free speech’

A law banning ”insulting” language and behaviour is strangling free speech and should be scrapped, a campaign spearheaded by a senior Tory MP has demanded. [...]

via Law banning insulting language ‘is strangling free speech’ – Telegraph.

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Law banning insulting language ‘is strangling free speech’ – Telegraph

An injunction issued by an Indian court in a copyright infringement case has forced Indian Internet service providers to block access to the video-sharing sites Vimeo and DailyMotion, Bittorrent-tracker The Pirate Bay, text-sharing site Pastebin and a number of other websites. In response, members of Anonymous mounted a denial of service attack on the websites of the Indian Supreme Court and the Indian National Congress political party. As of 2pm GMT, both sites are back up.

The temporary restraining order (PDF) was issued by The High Court of Judicature at Madras in response to a lawsuit by the Chennai, India based company Copyrightlabs (whose site appears to have been taken down for maintenance) over the sharing of the movie “3″ online. It orders ISPs to stop sharing of the film “by copying, recording, reproducing, camcording or communicating, or allowing others to to communicate” the contents of the film in any form.

Meanwhile, the denial of service attack on The Pirate Bay Ars examined on May 17—which lasted for over a day—has ended. ZDNet reports that credit for the attack was claimed by a hacker going by the name Nyre. The hacker, who also claims to be a former supporter of Anonymous, posted his displeasure with the quality of porn on The Pirate Bay just before the DDoS attack started.

via Indian court orders Pirate Bay, Pastebin blocks, Supreme Court gets DDoSed | Ars Technica.

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#India blocks #Pastebin? Great way to kill off the tech boom in #Bangalore, guys #whoohoo #IndiaTechSuicide

I hope that atop all the eco-boosting they’ll get around to mentioning that some of the stuff you get at the WI you also cannot get in any other way (short of making it) – and that other stuff (eg: eggs) is price-per-unit of far higher quality than the supermarkets..

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Small team from Plunkett Foundation (@PlunkettFoundat) filming at Hartley Wintney WI Market this morning

Via Astronomy Picture of the Day

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If you want to fix your Mac’s Desktop Wallpaper, you need today’s APOD

Somehow I find this both ironic and hilarious. Doubtless there are rational explanations involving fake “From:” addresses.

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“Why is this message in Spam? We’ve found that lots of messages from schneier@schneier.com are spam”