March 30, 2014 – Brown Pundits

Erdogan cant bowl (can he throw?)

The man behind the screen usually comes off as pitiful when the spotlight lights up the (dark) spots.

In the ICC T20 World Cup ongoing in Bangladesh here is an excerpt from the Guardian live commentary during the India-Australia match which just got over:

Geoff Lemon (commentator for the Guardian) writes: So may I enquire who’s out there, following along in the graveyard hours
of Australia, the sunset hours of India, or the high-street hours of
the United Kingdom? Or in other nooks and corners around the world where
cricketing enthusiasts go to hide? Drop me a line via geoff.lemon.casual@theguardian.com, on any subject that stirs your gravy.

An interesting response below: Zachary Taylor is as confused as Shaun Pollock with a Duckworth-Lewis
table.

“Following from Istanbul, where no one is quite sure what time of
day it
is.

You see, daylight savings was supposed to begin last night, but
there’s an election on for today, and the government
announced out of nowhere that the spring forward would be put off until
tomorrow (presumably to increase confusion).

The problem is, everyone’s
cellphones and computers went ahead with the time change regardless. It
appears no one in the government thought to inform the telecom
companies. So there it is. Maybe it’s 4:30 pm right now, or maybe it’s
in fact 3:30.”

regards

Ink more expensive than perfume

It is the font, stupid!!! Just change to Garamond and watch Uncle Sam pocket a cool $400 million/year.

Bam!!! just like that, all budgetary donut-holes mysteriously disappear, and the lions (republicans) and the lambs (minorities surviving only on food stamps) can relax together in peace (under influence of legal pot of course).

If it seems too good to be true….it may be true after all.

….
A 14-year-old Indian-origin boy has come up with an unique plan that
could help the US save nearly USD 400 million a year by merely changing
the font used on official documents.

Suvir Mirchandani, a student in a Pittsburgh-area middle school, claimed
that if the federal government used the Garamond font exclusively it
could save about USD 136 million per year, nearly 30 per cent less than
the estimated USD 467 dollars it spends annually on ink.
An additional USD 234 million could be saved annually if state governments also implemented the change.

Mirchandani said the idea came to him when he was trying to think of
ways to cut waste and save money as part of a science fair project at
his school, CNN reported. The youngster noticed that he was getting a lot more handouts than he
did in elementary school and decided to figure out if he could minimise
use of paper and ink. While recycling paper was one way to save money and conserve resources,
Mirchandani said little attention had been paid to the ink used on the
papers.

“Ink is two times more expensive than French perfume by volume,” he
said, adding that he then decided to focus his project on finding ways
to cut down the cost of ink.

As part of his experiment, he collected random samples of teachers’
handouts and focused on the most commonly used characters such as e, t,
a, o and r. He noted how often each character was used in different fonts like
Garamond, Times New Roman, Century Gothic and Comic Sans and then
measured how much ink was used for each letter, using an ink coverage
software.

From his analysis, Mirchandani figured out that by using the Garamond
font with its thinner strokes, his school district could reduce its ink
consumption by 24 per cent and in turn save as much as USD 21,000
annually.

He repeated his tests on five sample pages from documents on the
Government Printing Office website and got similar results that changing
the font would save money.

Mirchandani’s findings have been published in the Journal for Emerging
Investigators (JEI), a publication founded by a group of Harvard
students in 2011 that provides a platform for the work of middle school
and high school students.

One of the journal’s founders Sarah Fankhauser said that of the nearly
200 submissions they have received since 2011, Mirchandani’s project
stood out. “We were so impressed. We really could really see the real-world application in Suvir’s paper,” Fankhauser was quoted as saying.

JEI challenged the teenager to apply his project to a larger scale,
preferably the federal government, to determine how much real savings
his idea could generate.

The government has an annual printing expenditure of USD 1.8 billion and
implementing Mirchandani’s idea on such a massive scale was more
challenging than a school science project, the CNN report said.

Media and public relations manager at the Government Printing Office
Gary Somerset described Mirchandani’s idea as “remarkable” but said it
was concentrating on saving money by publishing documents online instead
of hard copies.

“They can’t convert everything to a digital format,” Mirchandani said. “Not everyone is able to access information online. Some things still
have to be printed. I recognise it’s difficult to change someone’s
behavior,” he said. But “I definitely would love to see some actual changes and I’d be happy
to go as far as possible to make that change possible,” he said.
…

regards

Lying liars are “playing with fire”

Trust us. Really, we never snoop, or share your personal data, except this one time when we slipped up. Please believe in our mea culpas and re-invest your faith in us.

In today’s closely knit relationship between security states (USA is proud to be #1, even ahead of China) and strongman companies, it is reasonable to assume that whenever you stroke a key on the inter-webs, some automaton somewhere is paying close attention.
What we are seeing is a trailer of how the future will be shaped- the word privacy will be absent from all languages and dictionaries.

Also, it is not just the muslims anymore.

What would be a worth-while exercise is to have an authentic member of the upper management at Microsoft (and all the other selfish giants) write out these lines a hundred times on the chalk-board.

“Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls:
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
’twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.”

…..

Several
days after Microsoft acknowledged that it read the personal emails of a
French blogger in 2012 to catch an insider who had leaked code related
to Windows, the company said that it would change email policies and
would no longer read emails hosted on its servers without a warrant.

According to a few court documents related to a case that involves
former Microsoft employee Alex Kibkalo, who reportedly leaked code
related to Windows, Microsoft went through the Hotmail inbox of the
blogger who was in touch with Kibkalo to identify the leaker.

In the wake of uproar and privacy concerns, Microsoft said that its
“terms and conditions” for Hotmail accounts allowed it to look into the
content of private emails in order to protect its intellectual property.

On Friday, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith said the
company has decided to change its email policies. “Effective
immediately, if we receive information indicating that someone is using
our services to traffic in stolen intellectual or physical property from
Microsoft, we will not inspect a customer’s private content ourselves.
Instead, we will refer the matter to law enforcement if further action
is required,” Smith wrote on the company’s office blog.

“While
our own search was clearly within our legal rights, it seems apparent
that we should rely on formal legal processes for our own investigations
involving people who we suspect are stealing from us,” he added.

Incidentally, the case of snooping on the French blogger came at a time
when Microsoft was running its “scroogled” campaign against Google,
arguing that Google read emails of its users so that it could serve them
advertisements.

After the details of the Kibkalo case came out
in public, Microsoft was criticised by Electronic Frontier Foundation
(EFF), a well-known non-profit organization that argues in favour strong
privacy on the web. “The search in the Kibkalo case may have revealed
criminal activity, but it was also conducted in Microsoft’s
self-interest, which is an exceedingly dangerous precedent. Combined
with the kangaroo court potential of the company’s new internal Warrants
for Windows policy, Microsoft is playing with fire,” said EFF.

On Friday, Microsoft revealed it is also starting a project that will
“identify, flesh out and discuss important issues (related to privacy on
the web)”. The company said that for discussions on the issue of
privacy, the Center for Democracy and Technology has agreed to convene
stakeholders and the EFF will be a key participant.

The
interesting bit here is that Google, which runs Gmail, and several other
technology companies have policies similar to that of Microsoft when it
comes to their own intellectual property. A few days ago Michael
Arrington, founder of Techcrunch, wrote that he suspected Google snooped
on his Gmail inbox to identify his sources within the company.

Though Google denied the allegations, it is yet to follow Microsoft in
changing the email policies that gives it right to go through the
private emails of a user if it is probing theft of its intellectual
property…
regards