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Nintendo, Electronic Arts and Sony Electronics — some of the largest video game companies in the world — have all pulled their support for an online bill that could encourage censorship online, according to an updated list of supporters of the bill.

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Everyone has their bullshit. You can simply decide whose you’re willing to tolerate.

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If you are hiring programmers, you should pay them $200/hr.

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This will be Taylor’s fourth Christmas living on what some Texans call the “Mexican side” of the U.S. border fence. Although she lives in Texas, her home is south of the 18-feet steel-and-concrete border wall erected by the American government. Taylor, who is 84, can see it from her front porch.

The wall was built to satisfy a law, passed in 2006 and 2008, that authorized 700 miles of fence on the southern border, 315 miles of it in Texas. President Bush said the fence would make the border safer and was “an important step toward immigration reform.” Many of the 2012 Republican presidential candidates, with the exception of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, say they want to build a fence that spans the entire U.S. border. The Brownsville area shows just how complicated that project would be.

Because of a decades-old treaty with Mexico prohibiting building in the Rio Grande floodplain, the government built its border fence more than a mile north of the snaky river, trapping tens of thousands of acres of Texas–land in Cameron and Hidalgo counties–on the wrong side of the fence. The border wall is also riddled with miles-long gaps, seemingly placed at random. The U.S. Border Patrol says that illegal crossers are pushed to these gaps, where they are more easily apprehended.

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Bob Lucio, the owner of a 165-acre golf course that lies entirely on the “Mexican” side of the fence, says the thought of Homeland Security using a secured gate to close the one entrance to the course keeps him up at night.

“If that happens, I don’t think we can survive,” he told Yahoo News during an interview in his office.

So, Bob, and who did you vote for in 2000 and 2004?

in 2008, McCain got 55% of the vote with 4,467,748 people, while Obama received 44% and 3,521,164 people – so the odds Bob voted R are only slightly larger than that he voted D

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Kopper: I’m old school, so to speak. Often, when people are berating “the banks,” they’re really talking about completely different things: derivatives, commodities trading, foreign currency.

SPIEGEL: These are all businesses in which banks are involved.

Kopper: But usually just on behalf of pension funds, very large hedge and sovereign funds and wealthy investors. Never in the history of mankind has there been so much money in circulation, and never before was it possible to trade with it so quickly. And never before has this money used the entire planet as a playing field, as is the case today in the era of globalization. That’s the way it is and the way it will remain. There can be no turning back the clock. How shortsighted people must be when they hold bankers responsible for this development!

Yeah! It’s not like they invented derivatives, commodities trading, (foreign) currency! Oh wait…

SPIEGEL: Have you lost illusions when it comes to your image of humanity?

Kopper: Completely. I used to think that the world was shaped by love. I’m sorry, but that’s nonsense. It’s shaped by money. Money, avarice and greed — these are the three main constants.

You have been hanging out with bankers too much.

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Apple’s chief designer Jonathan Ive has been appointed a Knight Commander of the British Empire (KBE) in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours list.

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Undercover police officers routinely adopted a tactic of “promiscuity” with the blessing of senior commanders, according to a former agent who worked in a secretive unit of the Metropolitan police for four years.

The former undercover policeman claims that sexual relationships with activists were sanctioned for both men and women officers infiltrating anarchist, leftwing and environmental groups.

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More than 250 guns were collected today at an event downtown in which owners of firearms received gift cards in exchange for turning in a weapon – no questions asked.

The fourth annual “Gifts for Guns” exchange program, sponsored by the nonprofit United African American Ministerial Action Council (UAAMAC), attracted a long line of cars along Market Street in Lincoln Park. Unloaded guns were collected from vehicles by uniformed officers.

Participants who exchanged their handguns or standard rifles received $100 gift cards, while $200 cards were given to those who turned in assault rifles with detachable magazines. The organizers reportedly ran out of gift cards after taking in 255 guns by 11:30 a.m.

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Finance has always been complex. More precisely it has always been opaque, and complexity is a means of rationalizing opacity in societies that pretend to transparency. Opacity is absolutely essential to modern finance. It is a feature not a bug until we radically change the way we mobilize economic risk-bearing. The core purpose of status quo finance is to coax people into accepting risks that they would not, if fully informed, consent to bear.

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Writer and Oscar-winning documentary maker Errol Morris talks about the nature of truth, art and propaganda in photography. Drawing examples from the photographs of Abu Ghraib and the Crimean war, cited in his book Believing is Seeing, he argues we’ve often underplayed the link between photgraphs and the physical world

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Check out IBM’s 305 RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control) hard disk and those gripes about dragging around that USB thumb drive soon evaporate. This 1956 HDD was composed of 50 24-inch discs, stacked together and taking up 16 sq ft of real estate. The once-cutting-edge monstrosity was capable of commanding an annual fee of $35,000 and stored up to 5MB of data. Sure, by modern standards it’s a pretty modest capacity, but the RAMAC still weighed in at just shy of a ton. Our technological forefathers could have done with that exoskeleton prototype.

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A fight has broken out at the church built on the spot where Jesus is said to have been born.

Palestinian police stormed the basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem after rival groups of Orthodox and Armenian clerics clashed in a row over the boundaries of their respective ancient jurisdictions inside the church.

Armed with brooms, around 100 priests and monks came to blows during the cleaning of the church in preparation for Orthodox Christmas celebrations.

The former Palestinian minister of tourism and head of the Palestinian forces in Bethlehem were slightly injured.

Administration of the church is shared by Catholic, Orthodox, and Armenian Apostolic clerics.

The relationship between these groups has often been difficult, and there have been similar scuffles in previous years over jurisdiction.

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Researchers have found that there’s a part of your body that might shrink when you eat too much fast food.

Unfortunately, it’s your brain.

People with diets high in trans fats are more likely to experience the kind of brain shrink-age associated with Alzheimer’s disease than people who consume less of the artery-damaging fats, the new study suggests.

Those with diets high in vitamins C and E, the B vitamins and vitamin D, meanwhile, appear to have larger brains than people with diets low in these nutrients.

And diets high in omega three fatty acids seemed to benefit the small blood vessels of the brain – “and the thinking abilities related to those vessels,” said lead investigator Dr. Gene Bowman.

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The funeral of Kim Jong-il on Wednesday called to mind the best stage-managed Communist state productions: the falling snow, the wailing mourners, the perfectly spaced limousines and rows of chest-beating men.

So perhaps it was because the scene was so nearly impeccable that someone — an overzealous North Korean photo editor? — appears to have taken issue with an errant group of men, barely noticeable in a sweeping photograph of the procession in central Pyongyang, and removed them.

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“David took his men with him and went out and killed two hundred Philistines and brought back their foreskins. They counted out the full number to the king so that David might become the king’s son-in-law. Then Saul gave him his daughter Michal in marriage”

1 Samuel 18:27

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What does a sudden evacuation look like? After everyone is gone, what happens to the places they’ve abandoned? National Geographic Magazine sent Associated Press photographer David Guttenfelder to the nuclear exclusion zone around Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power plant to find out. Evacuated shortly after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami led to a nuclear radiation crisis, the area has been largely untouched, with food rotting on store shelves and children’s backpacks waiting in classrooms. The area may face the same fate as the town of Pripyat, Ukraine after the Chernobyl disaster 25 years ago. This isn’t the first time Guttenfelder has gotten a rare glimpse of a place few see, as The Big Picture featured his photographs of North Korea in an earlier post. Collected here are Guttenfelder’s haunting images just released of a place abandoned, and of people dealing with the loss. — Lane Turner (39 photos total)

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In this June 18, 2011 photo, a hog naps after eating a meal inside an abandoned feed store and wandering the deserted streets of radiation-contaminated Namie, Japan. (AP Photographer David Guttenfelder on assignment for National Geographic Magazine) #

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A few minutes ago, Android chief Andy Rubin sent out his 6th tweet. A milestone. Never mind that they’re all self-serving promotion with Rubin never responding to anything or really giving anything in the way of context. They’re all awesome. Kudos.

But wait. I thought this was his 7th tweet…

That was the response I kept getting after noting Rubin’s milestone. But I counted and counted again. Six.

Not so fast.

Turns out, the people are right. This was actually Rubin’s 7th tweet, but he deleted one of them… 

Interesting. Okay, so which one? One Twitter follower, MentionOnly noticed it and appropriately, Google cache confirms:

the definition of open: “mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make”

Yes, Rubin for some reason has deleted his most famous tweet. His first tweet! One that led to stories by myself and others. 

That tweet no longer exists. His first one listed is now from December 2010, trumpeting, what else: Android activations!!!!

Where did the initial tweet go? Who knows. But it sure looks like he deleted it. Deleted it in an “open” way, I’m sure.

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“Imagine an NFL coach,” writes Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, in his important new book, Fixing the Game, “holding a press conference on Wednesday to announce that he predicts a win by 9 points on Sunday, and that bettors should recognize that the current spread of 6 points is too low. Or picture the team’s quarterback standing up in the postgame press conference and apologizing for having only won by 3 points when the final betting spread was 9 points in his team’s favor. While it’s laughable to imagine coaches or quarterbacks doing so, CEOs are expected to do both of these things.”

Imagine also, to extrapolate Martin’s analogy, that the coach and his top assistants were hugely compensated, not on whether they won games, but rather by whether they covered the point spread. If they beat the point spread, they would receive massive bonuses. But if they missed covering the point spread a couple of times, the salary cap of the team could be cut and key players would have to be released, regardless of whether the team won or lost its games.

Suppose also that in order to manage the expectations implicit in the point spread, the coach had to spend most of his time talking with analysts and sports writers about the prospects of the coming games and “managing” the point spread, instead of actually coaching the team. It would hardly be a surprise that the most esteemed coach in this world would be a coach who met or beat the point spread in forty-six of forty-eight games—a 96 percent hit rate. Looking at these forty-eight games, one would be tempted to conclude: “Surely those scores are being ‘managed’?”

Suppose moreover that the whole league was rife with scandals of coaches “managing the score”, for instance, by deliberately losing games (“tanking”), players deliberately sacrificing points in order not to exceed the point spread (“point shaving”), “buying” key players on the opposing team or gaining access to their game plan. If this were the situation in the NFL, then everyone would realize that the “real game” of football had become utterly corrupted by the “expectations game” of gambling. Everyone would be calling on the NFL Commissioner to intervene and ban the coaches and players from ever being involved directly or indirectly in any form of gambling on the outcome of games, and get back to playing the game.

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The final report into the 2008 Qantas flight QF72, which unexpectedly dived twice during a routine flight, has blamed a combination of software and hardware errors for the incident.

On 7 October 2008, the Australian-owned A330-303 aircraft was cruising at 37,000 feet when the autopilot disengaged and the aircraft rose, before plunging downwards sharply, injuring 110 of the aircraft’s 303 passengers and three-quarters of the cabin crew. Three minutes later the aircraft did it again, and the flight crew was bombarded with warnings from the instrumentation – almost all of them false.

And how often does this happen?

It’s not clear what caused the ADIRU to shift into failure mode, as this is only the third time that it has happened in over 128 million hours of operation – although one of those other incidents was down to the same ADIRU in that aircraft.