An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
I probably should've just lied, said my name was Thomas or Pierre like I did whenever I ordered take-away or made restaurant reservations. Not being able to pronounce a name spells a death sentence for relationships. That's because the ability to pronounce someone's name is directly related to how close you feel to that person. Our brains tend to believe that if something is difficult to understand, it must also be high-risk.
The agents found little evidence of a broader attack. What they did find were systematic security failures riddling some of the most important U.S. financial institutions. It turned out that many on the list were vulnerable to the same attack that struck Nasdaq. They were spared only because the hackers hadn't bothered to try.
Multiple entities had unrestricted access to the Nasdaq's networks for up to three months. Four years later, we don't have a clear picture on what they did or why, and we have more proof that the places we assume are secure are in fact not very.
We expect these changes to have an impact to our team structure.
—Steven Elop, "Email to Nokia employees"
Corporate-speak translation: We're laying off 12,500 of you from multiple countries over the next several months.
Millennial politics is simple, really. Young people support big government, unless it costs any more money. They're for smaller government, unless budget cuts scratch a program they've heard of. They'd like Washington to fix everything, just so long as it doesn't run anything.
[...] "Totally incoherent," as Dylan Matthews puts it.
The movie doesn't make a very big deal of this basically insane moment, and since this is a film about robots from space who can transform into trucks and helicopters but whose true forms all seem to track crude ethnic stereotypes, there's no reason for the audience to think about it for very — DID YOU SEE THAT THING EXPLODE? But the moment means more to Chinese audiences: the elevator rider is Zou Shiming, China's first Olympic gold medalist boxer. Go, China!
— Transformers 4 Is a Master Class in Economics
This helps explain why Transformers 4 is the most successful movie in Chinese box office history.
Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.
Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents.
Document by document, the revelations keep coming, proving the NSA's previous lies false, one by one, most recently this one:
For close to a year, NSA and other government officials have appeared to deny, in congressional testimony and public statements, that Snowden had any access to the material.
As recently as May, shortly after he retired as NSA director, Gen. Keith Alexander denied that Snowden could have passed FISA content to journalists.
Whether it's couched as research or operations, people don't want to think that they're being manipulated. So when they find out what soylent green is made of, they're outraged. This study isn't really what's at stake. What's at stake is the underlying dynamic of how Facebook runs its business, operates its system, and makes decisions that have nothing to do with how its users want Facebook to operate. It's not about research. It's a question of power.
As usual, great insight from danah boyd.
Very funny video about The Cloud from James Mickens of Microsoft Research. Here be dragons.
Last year, a group of economists working with eBay's internal research lab issued a massive experimental study with a simple, startling conclusion: For a large, well-known brand, search ads are probably worthless.