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Irony is not dead.

Dear Google,

If you had told me five years ago that I’d have the chance to pay $1,500 to beta test and advertise a product for you I would’ve said ‘get the heck out of town’! But here we are.

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What’s that — you’re worried about getting caught? It won’t happen. Think about the complexity of our operation. We are organized in Singapore, I flew from Budapest, the match is in Finland, we’re wagering in the Philippines using masked computer clusters from Bangkok to Jakarta. Our communications are refracted across so many cell networks and satellites that they’re almost impossible to unravel. The money will move electronically, incomprehensibly, through a hundred different nowheres. No legal system was set up to handle this kind of global intricacy. The number of intersecting jurisdictions alone is dizzying. Who’s going to spot the crime? Small-town police in Finland? A regulator in Beijing? Each of them will only see one tiny part of it. How would they ever know to talk to each other? Dan Tan has friends in high places; extradition requests can find themselves bogged down in paperwork. Witnesses can disappear. I promise; you’ll be safe. Who can prove you didn’t see a penalty? We’re fine.

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Documents released Friday shed light on the inner workings of a secretive and now-disgraced Roman Catholic order called the Legion of Christ, including new details on how the organization solicited money from an elderly widow, eventually persuading her to bequeath it $60 million.

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Boy howdy, this one is just mind-boggling. This is what happens when education is considered to be elitist while stupidity and ignorance are glorified. Alabama state Rep. Mary Sue McClurkin (R), who apparently never took biology, is sponsoring the latest TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) bill in the Alabama legislature. It contains all the usual crap we’ve come to expect from those who are trying to outlaw safe abortion through burdensome regulations, including requiring physicians to have admitting rights at local hospitals, baseless building codes. Though this one also adds a prohibition against nurses, nurse practitioners and physician’s assistants from dispensing abortion-inducing medications (punishable as a felony, fergawdsake!). Mississippi’s last clinic is battling to survive in the face of similar legislation in that state.

We’ve heard all of the pro-birth crowd’s weak arguments about these regulations and how they will “make abortions safer” (they are already safe) and, gosh, we are only thinking of the patients. But Rep. McClurkin has come up with the most inane, ignorant thing I think I have ever heard:

“When a physician removes a child from a woman, that is the largest organ in a body. That’s a big thing. That’s a big surgery. You don’t have any other organs in your body that are bigger than that.”

Read that again and marvel at the sheer stupidity on display here. First, a baby is not an organ. Get that woman a dictionary! And a biology textbook, while we’re at it. The largest organ inside the human body is the liver, though the skin is actually the largest we have. Our skin weighs in at an average of 8 pounds… heavier than even most full-term babies.

A Democratic legislator in Alabama (now that must be an exhausting job), Rep. Patricia Todd, D-Birmingham, says that she expects the bill to pass. She points out that the Republicans who are pushing this legislation really have no idea what they are talking about, which is pretty obvious. But it’s not just the science that they have no grasp of, it’s the clinics themselves and the women they serve. These people don’t know what current regulations are, what they do or what a clinic even looks like inside. But that doesn’t stop them from pushing their religious agenda on everyone else.

I’m pretty sure that, even as a zygote, it’s bigger than this woman’s brain.

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“‘The lack of interest, the disdain for history is what makes computing not-quite-a-field,’ Alan Kay once lamented. And so it should come as no surprise that the USPTO granted Google a patent Tuesday for the Automatic Deletion of Temporary Files, perhaps unaware that the search giant’s claimed invention is essentially a somewhat kludgy variation on file expiration processing, a staple of circa-1970 IBM mainframe computing and subsequent disk management software. From Google’s 2013 patent: ‘A path name for a file system directory can be “C:temp\12-1-1999\” to indicate that files contained within the file system directory will expire on Dec. 1, 1999.’ From Judith Rattenbury’s 1971 Introduction to the IBM 360 computer and OS/JCL: ‘EXPDT=70365 With this expiration date specified, the data set will not be scratched or overwritten without special operator action until the 365th day of 1970.’ Hey, things are new if you’ve never seen them before!”

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A US Catholic group has called for an American cardinal accused of covering up sexual abuse by priests not to take part in electing a new pope, saying he would taint the new pontiff with the same scandal that dogged Pope Benedict XVI.

As of Tuesday, the group Catholics United had gathered more than 5,000 signatures against Cardinal Roger Mahony, archbishop of Los Angeles until 2011.

“Please do not bring further scandal to our Church that has already been rocked by the sex abuse crisis by attending the

Papal Conclave. You have been disciplined and you have lost your ability to have a voice within our Church,” said the petition from the Washington-based group.

[..]

In an interview with Al Jazeera, Vatican journalist Alessandro Speciale said it is up to Mahony to examine his “conscience” and decide if he wants to participate in the conclave.

That will be easy for him – he hasn’t got one.

And indeed:

Although his successor, Archbishop Jose Gomez, removed him from all public and administrative duties, Mahony has announced his intention to fly to Rome where he would be among 117 cardinals allowed into the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel to vote for the next leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics.

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Scientists are still sorting out the details of last year’s discovery of the Higgs boson particle, but add up the numbers and it’s not looking good for the future of the universe, scientists said Monday.

“If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it’s bad news,” Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist with the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, told reporters.

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With stolen passwords in hand, attackers attempt to break into accounts across the web and across many different services. We’ve seen a single attacker using stolen passwords to attempt to break into a million different Google accounts every single day, for weeks at a time. A different gang attempted sign-ins at a rate of more than 100 accounts per second. Other services are often more vulnerable to this type of attack, but when someone tries to log into your Google Account, our security system does more than just check that a password is correct.

Every time you sign in to Google, whether via your web browser once a month or an email program that checks for new mail every five minutes, our system performs a complex risk analysis to determine how likely it is that the sign-in really comes from you. In fact, there are more than 120 variables that can factor into how a decision is made.

If a sign-in is deemed suspicious or risky for some reason—maybe it’s coming from a country oceans away from your last sign-in—we ask some simple questions about your account. For example, we may ask for the phone number associated with your account, or for the answer to your security question. These questions are normally hard for a hijacker to solve, but are easy for the real owner. Using security measures like these, we’ve dramatically reduced the number of compromised accounts by 99.7 percent since the peak of these hijacking attempts in 2011.

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Thirty Saudi women have taken seats in Saudi Arabia’s Shura Council, for the first time in the conservative kingdom’s history, as they were sworn in before King Abdullah at his palace in the capital, Riyadh.

The women took their seats in the same room with their 130 male colleagues and were sworn in collectively, state television said on Tuesday.

“Mercy, it’s the Revolution and I’m in my bathrobe.”

They must really be worried what’s going to happen when the old bastard dies U.S. leaves.

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That was in the early ’60s, she said. A recent investigation by an independent council of Buddhist leaders has suggested that Roshi, a leading figure in Zen Buddhism in the United States, may have abused hundreds of others for decades. According to the group’s report, that abuse included allegations of molestation and rape, and some of the incidents had been reported to the Rinzai-ji board, which had taken no effective action.