company:it matters

  • The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News | The New Yorker
    https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/the-urgent-quest-for-slower-better-news

    In 2008, the Columbia Journalism Review published an article with the headline “Overload!,” which examined news fatigue in “an age of too much information.” When “Overload!” was published, Blackberrys still dominated the smartphone market, push notifications hadn’t yet to come to the iPhone, retweets weren’t built into Twitter, and BuzzFeed News did not exist. Looking back, the idea of suffering from information overload in 2008 seems almost quaint. Now, more than a decade later, a fresh reckoning seems to be upon us. Last year, Tim Cook, the chief executive officer of Apple, unveiled a new iPhone feature, Screen Time, which allows users to track their phone activity. During an interview at a Fortune conference, Cook said that he was monitoring his own usage and had “slashed” the number of notifications he receives. “I think it has become clear to all of us that some of us are spending too much time on our devices,” Cook said.

    It is worth considering how news organizations have contributed to the problems Newport and Cook describe. Media outlets have been reduced to fighting over a shrinking share of our attention online; as Facebook, Google, and other tech platforms have come to monopolize our digital lives, news organizations have had to assume a subsidiary role, relying on those sites for traffic. That dependence exerts a powerful influence on which stories that are pursued, how they’re presented, and the speed and volume at which they’re turned out. In “World Without Mind: the Existential Threat of Big Tech,” published in 2017, Franklin Foer, the former editor-in-chief of The New Republic, writes about “a mad, shameless chase to gain clicks through Facebook” and “a relentless effort to game Google’s algorithms.” Newspapers and magazines have long sought to command large readerships, but these efforts used to be primarily the province of circulation departments; newsrooms were insulated from these pressures, with little sense of what readers actually read. Nowadays, at both legacy news organizations and those that were born online, audience metrics are everywhere. At the Times, everyone in the newsroom has access to an internal, custom-built analytics tool that shows how many people are reading each story, where those people are coming from, what devices they are using, how the stories are being promoted, and so on. Additional, commercially built audience tools, such as Chartbeat and Google Analytics, are also widely available. As the editor of newyorker.com, I keep a browser tab open to Parse.ly, an application that shows me, in real time, various readership numbers for the stories on our Web site.

    Even at news organizations committed to insuring that editorial values—and not commercial interests—determine coverage, it can be difficult for editors to decide how much attention should be paid to these metrics. In “Breaking News: the Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters,” Alan Rusbridger, the former editor-in-chief of the Guardian, recounts the gradual introduction of metrics into his newspaper’s decision-making processes. The goal, he writes, is to have “a data-informed newsroom, not a data-led one.” But it’s hard to know when the former crosses over into being the latter.

    For digital-media organizations sustained by advertising, the temptations are almost irresistible. Each time a reader comes to a news site from a social-media or search platform, the visit, no matter how brief, brings in some amount of revenue. Foer calls this phenomenon “drive-by traffic.” As Facebook and Google have grown, they have pushed down advertising prices, and revenue-per-click from drive-by traffic has shrunk; even so, it continues to provide an incentive for any number of depressing modern media trends, including clickbait headlines, the proliferation of hastily written “hot takes,” and increasingly homogeneous coverage as everyone chases the same trending news stories, so as not to miss out on the traffic they will bring. Any content that is cheap to produce and has the potential to generate clicks on Facebook or Google is now a revenue-generating “audience opportunity.”

    Among Boczkowski’s areas of research is how young people interact with the news today. Most do not go online seeking the news; instead, they encounter it incidentally, on social media. They might get on their phones or computers to check for updates or messages from their friends, and, along the way, encounter a post from a news site. Few people sit down in the morning to read the print newspaper or make a point of watching the T.V. news in the evening. Instead, they are constantly “being touched, rubbed by the news,” Bockzkowski said. “It’s part of the environment.”

    A central purpose of journalism is the creation of an informed citizenry. And yet––especially in an environment of free-floating, ambient news––it’s not entirely clear what it means to be informed. In his book “The Good Citizen,” from 1998, Michael Schudson, a sociologist who now teaches at Columbia’s journalism school, argues that the ideal of the “informed citizen”––a person with the time, discipline, and expertise needed to steep him- or herself in politics and become fully engaged in our civic life––has always been an unrealistic one. The founders, he writes, expected citizens to possess relatively little political knowledge; the ideal of the informed citizen didn’t take hold until more than a century later, when Progressive-era reformers sought to rein in the party machines and empower individual voters to make thoughtful decisions. (It was also during this period that the independent press began to emerge as a commercial phenomenon, and the press corps became increasingly professionalized.)

    Schudson proposes a model for citizenship that he believes to be more true to life: the “monitorial citizen”—a person who is watchful of what’s going on in politics but isn’t always fully engaged. “The monitorial citizen engages in environmental surveillance more than information-gathering,” he writes. “Picture parents watching small children at the community pool. They are not gathering information; they are keeping an eye on the scene. They look inactive, but they are poised for action if action is required.” Schudson contends that monitorial citizens might even be “better informed than citizens of the past in that, somewhere in their heads, they have more bits of information.” When the time is right, they will deploy this information––to vote a corrupt lawmaker out of office, say, or to approve an important ballot measure.

    #Journalisme #Médias #Economie_attention

  • The Big Picture — and Aligning Priorities
    https://hackernoon.com/the-big-picture-and-aligning-priorities-d9bfc97bfb89?source=rss----3a814

    The Big Picture — and Aligning PrioritiesI know this is straight from The Department of Belaboring The Obvious, but yes, the Big Picture matters. It matters regardless of where you are in the organization, it matters regardless of what your job is, and it matters regardless of what your responsibility is./via https://www.monkeyuser.com/2018/priorities/Think of this from the perspective of Aligning Priorities. The thing is, we’ve all got our own priorities. In an ideal world, all our priorities align harmoniously, and exist seamlessly within the global priorities of the company, but, well, this is not that world. The reality is that, everybody is one step away from fizzing off in some random direction like some kind of bottle-rocket gone horribly wrong. And that is at the best of (...)

    #software-engineering #life-lessons-101 #management-lessons #aligning-priorities #context-matters

  • FYI France: Tom Paine!

    Une lecture critique du livre «Révolution Paine» (C&F éditions) par Jack Kessler depuis San Francisco.

    A new book which can remind us all, again, of what France and the US have in-common... at a good time for remembering all this, on both similarly-beleaguered sides of The Pond right now...

    Révolution Paine: Thomas Paine penseur et défenseur des droits humains, by Thomas Paine, Peter Linebaugh (pref.), Nicolas Taffin (dir.),

    (C&F éditions, 35 C rue des Rosiers, 14000 Caen, t. 02.31.23.39.48, fx. 01.40.09.72.67, cfedtions@cfeditions.com; août 2018) ISBN: 978-2-915825-85-5

    Tom Paine was British, it must be remembered — but then so were we all, back then, in revolutionary “America”, citizens of an empire which spanned the globe until very recently, our “shots heard round the world” the first of many which ultimately would bring that empire and others to heel and create new ways of thinking about government for the modern world.

    In all that mælstrom we very much needed ideas, and cheerleaders, for encouraging and inspiring ourselves and our fellow citizens, and Tom Paine was that. Whatever his opponents and most severe critics — and there were many — thought of him, and even friends and fans worried about him, but he was encouraging and inspiring, and for careful and conservative American “colonists” like the wealthy plantation-owner George Washington and the gentleman-printer Benjamin Franklin and the Boston lawyer John Adams, Paine’s encouragement and inspiration were enough, and at times they were very badly needed in fact.

    And the French were there for us, very different but close in spirit to the Americans, and always needed, for their spirit & their money & their guns & for many other resources and reasons — at the very least they were enemies of our enemies and so our friends, on whom we could rely for insight, breadth of vision, even occasionally at their own ruinous expense...

    France entertained Paine the rebellious Brit after the excitements of the British colonies had hosted him for a long while — in both places his own exciting language and the clarity of his vision helped citizens greatly, in the great troubles of their times — so now a glimpse of Tom Paine may help again, both to see our current troubles more clearly too, and to remember what we and the French share in-common in all this. When things change, for the US and France, neither of us is ever alone.

    https://cfeditions.com/paine

    The book is a “reader” — not a compendium, but a comfortable and thoughtful armchair-piece to browse-through and then keep handy, as headline-events of current troubled-times pour in, descending upon us daily.

    First comes a preface — avant-propos — by Nicolas Taffin, outlining why and how the idea for the book occurred to him: 2018 saw the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, he says, and still we face troubles that first were defined for us by events of 1789 — after such a long time the birthday-celebration required a renewal of the effort, he thought, and who better than Tom Paine who first inspired it, in both the US and France, and the “Human Rights” and “Commons” forms in which the ideas were first presented.

    Then comes an elegant introduction to Paine and his works by historian Peter Linebaugh, translated from l’américain...

    It is a useful thing, to know Paine’s history, as he landed somewhat un-announced upon the Americans with his outrageous views and funny accent (?) and stunning phrasings. That he had a tradition, and a context, back home in also-turbulent England, only makes sense — and that early-on England experimented with many of the ideas the colonists were confronting later in their own contests with the Crown, deserves recalling, many of the same conflicts were heard before in early Industrial Revolution England, as workers and owners confronted one another, and governments moved to tax and otherwise control the new techniques.

    Paine and his East Anglia neighbors had rehearsed many of the confrontations he was to witness and comment upon in his sojourns in the American colonies — the issues were similar, new techniques & how to cope with change & the sharing of burdens and benefits & working conditions & and of course taxes... not exactly “taxation without representation”, there at-home in England, but taxation all-the-same...

    Whether Paine was a Che Guevara, as Linebaugh I-hope-playfully suggests, whether the Introduction successfully demonstrates that Americans of that time, “ambitiously risked class warfare on a global scale”, well, other readers will have to read and judge... Linebaugh, described by Wikipedia as a “Marxist historian”, does weave through initial attributions of Paine’s ideas to his having been, “conscious of classes, sensible to differences in power and wealth” — he describes Paine’s concerns for “Agrarian Justice” as involving “class injustice”.

    It matters that Paine’s life in mid-18th c. England greatly preceded the writings of Marx a century later; but also of course there may have been historical connections, workers’ lives a century earlier were very much what the historicist Marx was interested in and wrote about. Linebaugh carefully outlines that Paine, “lived at the time of an industrial revolution, of commercial expansion & urbanization & population increase” — he grants that Paine’s views did not fall cleanly into any contest between “communism and capitalism”, terms which, apparently per Edmund Burke, were, “still cartilaginous, not yet well defined or formed”.

    But Paine had a good sense for “the commons”, he insists, “and of its long presence in English history”, a matter which he says has not been well considered in previous studies of Paine. “A long anti-capitalist tradition in England”, Linebaugh believes he’s found, through Tom Paine, “one which contributes to our understanding about current notions of ‘revolution’ and ‘constitution’ in modern Britain” — for this suggestion alone, Linebaugh’s Introduction makes for some very interesting reading.

    Beyond this Introduction there are excerpts, then, from Paine’s own “Rights of Man” — fascinating, the differences, between one culture’s “emotive” language and another’s — French easily is the equal of English in this regard...

    And finally a fascinating Post-Script by editor Nicolas Taffin: he takes “Tom Paine of Thetford” several significant steps further than the little local American Revolution — several steps further, even, than the nascent Class Warfare of the Levellers and workers’-revolts of East Anglia which maybe-led to the Marxian revolutions of the 19th century — Taffin going-further finds, in Paine, the freeing of the human imagination, from the illusory securities and comforts and oppressions of the previous era’s religion-controlled philosophies, the emergence of the Enlightenment’s idealisms into a modern world of “real” rights and responsibilities and true-freedom, governed by reason alone...

    Paine may have had a glimmer. The American Founders who fought our little revolution here certainly had some glimpse as well... Certainly the young Virginia lawyer who boldly wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident” and then chafed as the elders to whom he submitted that draft picked it apart... Jefferson had read much of what the young Paine had read as well — in 1776, when arguably they both were at their most-inspired, Jefferson was age 33, Tom Paine was age 37 — as Wordsworth observed of youth in a slightly-later revolution, “Bliss was it in that Dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven”.

    But the true significance of what they all were doing did not emerge until much, much later... as late as the 1820s the two then very elderly American patriots Jefferson and Adams, both preparing for death and fondly reminiscing in their dotage-correspondance, could recall what they had done for the little United States, and for Britain, but only the more daring Jefferson seriously considered what they may have done ‘way back then to, “free the human spirit in general”...

    Taffin gives Paine the greater credit. Well, history has benefit of hindsight... Whether Paine himself, or truly his contemporaries, really understood what he was accomplishing with his amazing writings, back then, seems questionable. There are crackpots writing this sort of thing about The Future today — just as there were in East Anglia long before Paine’s birth there, which later he read, a few of them, in the Old School at Thetford — so qua-dreamer Paine’s contribution may well have been fortuitous, simply a matter of good timing... The poet appears to have felt this about his own contribution to the French Revolution, and others have suggested Paine contributed little there too...

    But ideas have lives of their own, and History has control of this. Taffin doubtless is correct that if we are “free” today — universally — then some part of that is due to the writings of Tom Paine, almost regardless of how exactly that happened and what agencies promoted it and why, Marxist or Liberal or French, English, American, or other... Mao Tse Tung and Ho Chi Minh both are said to have read Tom Paine, I expect Steve Bannon has as well, and Marion (Le Pen) Maréchal (age 29) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (age 29) are reading Paine now...

    So the mystery of origins and influences continues, but so do the ideas. Read Taffin’s fascinating rendition here of Tom Paine’s context and continuing influence, and see what you yourself think... it is what many of us are worrying about in both the US and France, now, & that particular “common-concern” coincidence has made vast historical waves before...

    —oOo—

    And now a Note:

    Tom Paine in epigrams, 1737-1809: & now I understand better why Ben Franklin must have enjoyed his company so much... —

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Paine

    “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.”

    “I love the man that can smile in trouble, gathers strength from distress, and grows brave by reflection.”

    “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.”

    “To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.”

    “The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.”

    “Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.”

    “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.”

    “’Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.”

    “Reputation is what men and women think of us; character is what God and angels know of us.”

    “Reason obeys itself, and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.”

    “Moderation in temper is a virtue, but moderation in principle is a vice.”

    “Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man.”

    “The most formidable weapon against errors is reason.”

    — and the following three Tom Paine épigrammes seem of particular relevance to our present Franco & américain mutual Times-of-Troubles —

    “Character is much easier kept than recovered.”

    “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.”

    “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

    Jack Kessler
    kessler@well.com
    fyifrance.com

    #Révolution_Paine #C&F_éditions #Peter_Linebaugh #Droits_humains

  • Net Neutrality: What It is, Why It Matters and How It Affects the U.S.
    https://hackernoon.com/net-neutrality-what-it-is-why-it-matters-and-how-it-affects-the-u-s-97ad

    Over the past year, much of the news has been filled with articles about net neutrality. With the Federal Communications Commission’s recent repeal of net neutrality, many Americans have been scratching their heads trying to understand what net neutrality really is, why it matters and how it affects them.Well we’ve got you covered. Though net neutrality rules are not currently in effect the United States, there is still continued debate over its impact on society, the regulatory future and more. The following guide will help you navigate those persistent conversations with ease.What is Net Neutrality?The term was first coined in Tim Wu’s 2003 paper titled, “Network Neutrality, #broadband Discrimination.” It was his argument that a level playing field among #internet applications was needed to (...)

    #net-neutrality #whats-net-neutrality #fcc

  • Bitcoin and Ethereum have a hidden power structure, and it’s just been revealed - MIT Technology Review
    https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610018/bitcoin-and-ethereum-have-a-hidden-power-structure-and-its-just-be

    Perhaps the most striking finding is that the process of verifying transactions and securing a blockchain ledger against attack, called mining, is not actually that decentralized in either system. Bitcoin and Ethereum are open blockchain systems, meaning that in principle anyone can be a miner (see “What Bitcoin Is, and Why It Matters”). But organizations have formed to pool mining resources. The researchers found that the top four Bitcoin-mining operations had more than 53 percent of the system’s average mining capacity, measured on a weekly basis. Mining for Ethereum was even more consolidated: three miners accounted for 61 percent of the system’s average weekly capacity.

    They also found that 56 percent of Bitcoin’s “nodes,” the computers around the world running its software (not all of them engage in mining), are located in data centers, versus 28 percent for Ethereum. That might indicate that Bitcoin is more corporatized, Gün Sirer says. Overall, the group concluded that neither network “has strictly better properties than the other.”

    Discussions of decentralization may seem esoteric, but anyone interested in the future of cryptocurrency should try to follow along. Part of the vision sold by the technology’s biggest promoters is that it can help solve problems of financial inequality created in part by traditional, centralized institutions. If digital currency allows wealth and power to pool in the hands of a few, that’s not so revolutionary.

    #Bitcoin #Etherum #Crypto_monnaies #Pouvoir #Monnaie_numérique

  • C++ Object Model with Nicole Mazzuca
    http://cppcast.libsyn.com/c-object-model-with-nicole-mazzuca

    Rob and Jason are joined by Nicole Mazzuca to talk about the C++ Object Model, and some of the differences between Rust and C++. Nicole is someone who’s thought a bit too much about object models and error handling. She started in C, moved to Rust, and then fell into C++ a year ago. She also loves coffee, and latte art. News Meson 0.44.0 is out C++Now 2018 Call for submissions MSVC code optimizer improvements in Visual Studio 2017 version 15.5 and 15.3 Broken warnings theory Nicole Mazzuca @ubsanitizer Nicole Mazzuca’s GitHub Links CppCon 2017: Nicole Mazzuca “Values, Objects, and References, oh my: The C++ Object Model, and Why it Matters to You” Sponsors Undo Audible Hosts @robwirving @lefticus 

    http://traffic.libsyn.com/cppcast/cppcast-131.mp3?dest-id=282890

  • Blockchains Use Massive Amounts of Energy—But There’s a Plan to Fix That - MIT Technology Review
    https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609480/bitcoin-uses-massive-amounts-of-energybut-theres-a-plan-to-fix-it

    Bitcoin guzzles about as much electricity annually as all of Nigeria. Ethereum gulps electrons too, as do most other cryptocurrencies.

    Blockchains get a lot of love, but they are only shared sets of data. What brings cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum to life is the way all the computers in their networks agree, over and over, that what a blockchain says is true. To do this, they use an algorithm called a consensus mechanism. You’ve probably heard it called “mining.” (See: “What Bitcoin Is, and Why It Matters”)

    Cryptocurrency miners do much more than unlock new coins. In the process, they check the blockchain to make sure people aren’t spending coins fraudulently, and they add new lists of transactions—the blocks—to the chain. It’s the second step, meant to secure the blockchain from attacks, that guzzles electricity.

    Ultimately, the miners must transform each list of most recent transactions into a digital signature that can serve as proof that the information is true. All miners can do this, using a cryptographic tool that takes any input and spits out a string of seemingly random characters. But Bitcoin’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, made this part particularly difficult.

    This expends an immense amount of energy, signaling to the rest of the network that a miner’s accounting can be trusted.

    But while this particular method of reaching agreement—known as “proof of work”—is the most established, it isn’t the only one. A growing number of technologists are exploring different avenues, and some smaller cryptocurrencies already employ alternative means.

    The one in the best position to supplant proof of work is called “proof of stake.”

    #Monnaie_numérique #Bitcoin #Energie

  • Open data is a right | Simon Roger

    https://simonrogers.net/2017/03/27/open-data-is-a-right

    Simon Roger est l’ancien datajournaliste du Guardian et travaille maintenant chez Google.

    Open data is a right
    Posted by Simon Rogers ⋅ March 27, 2017 ⋅ Leave a comment
    Filed Under data journalism, government, open data

    It’s not that long ago that open data was set to change the world. Governments across the globe opened their vast vaults of data. By mid-2010, it looked like the river of data was unstoppable.

    #open_data #data #données
    First the US launch of data.gov, then data.gov.uk — and then a “tsunami” of open data around the globe, from Bahrain to Ghana. Choose a country, it probably has an open data portal that anyone can access. It matters because that open data promises a golden age of transparency that allows us, the people who after all pay for that data to be collected, to access to the raw information of government.

    Here’s something I wrote at the time:

    • Dans les grandes lignes, je n’en peux plus du discours « we after all pay for »... C’est la logique foireuse du soi disant gratuit. L’opendata ouvre des perspectives positives, entre autres pour la transparence démocratique mais si on laisse les GAFA s’en servir sans contrepartie, ils vont encore réussir a nous en faire de la merde économiquement rentable.

    • Since Ie Carre’s writings and public pronouncements (whether because of ignorance, discretion, or censorship) don’t appear to pose any threat to SIGINT sources and methods, does it matter to US what he writes? It matters because it adds to a public mystique about HUMINT that has a real (although intangible) impact on the way the Intelligence Community is perceived both by the public and by the rest of the government.

      [...]

      In the final analysis, we’re obviously better off that a writer as widely read as Ie Carré doesn’t write accurately about SIGINT.
      But it is galling to know that his books and public comments make marginally more difficult the task of ensuring that resources are allocated within the Intelligence Community on the basis of real contributions instead of on the basis of myth and mystique. It is also ironic that the CIA would benefit from all this in even a small way, since Ie Carré has made his distaste for that organisation so obvious.

  • Spark of Science: Sean B. Carroll - Issue 34: Adaptation
    http://nautil.us/issue/34/adaptation/spark-of-science-sean-b-carroll

    In his latest book, The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why It Matters, Sean B. Carroll tells us the remarkable story of Robert Paine, who revolutionized ecology by throwing starfish out of tide pools. Paine’s bold experiments revealed predators have an ineluctable impact on every animal and plant in an ecosystem. If a writer turned the lens on Carroll, a professor of molecular biology and genetics at the University of Wisconsin, and vice president for science education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, he would have an equally adventurous subject who’s made fantastic contributions to science. Only in Carroll’s case the inspirational animal would not be starfish but snakes. As a kid, Carroll loved everything about snakes, especially the colors and patterns (...)

    • Our oldest ally, the French, said the regime, quote, “committed this vile action, and it is an outrage to use weapons that the community has banned for the last 90 years in all international conventions.”

      It matters because if we choose to live in the world where a thug and a murderer like Bashar al-Assad can gas thousands of his own people with impunity, even after the United States and our allies said no, and then the world does nothing about it, there will be no end to the test of our resolve and the dangers that will flow from those others who believe that they can do as they will.

      This matters also beyond the limits of Syria’s borders. It is about whether Iran, which itself has been a victim of chemical weapons’ attacks, will now feel emboldened in the absence of action to obtain nuclear weapons.

      It is about Hezbollah and North Korea and every other terrorist group or dictator that might ever again contemplate the use of weapons of mass destruction. Will they remember that the Assad regime was stopped from those weapons’ current or future use? Or will they remember that the world stood aside and created impunity?

    • U.S. Releases Detailed Intelligence on Syrian Chemical Attack - NYTimes.com/2013/08/31/world/middleeast/syria.html

      Du french fries bientôt au congrès étasunien.

      A military strike against government targets would have a “dissuasion value” and push President Assad toward a negotiated “political solution” to the conflict, said Mr. Hollande, referring to France’s explicitly stated goal.

    • Les services de renseignement ont repéré des activités que nous estimons liées à la préparation d’une attaque chimique

      Si ça c’est pas une preuve détaillée , ah mais !

      U.S. Releases Detailed Intelligence on Syrian Chemical Attack - NYTimes.com
      http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/31/world/middleeast/syria.html

      The intelligence found “activities that we assess were associated with preparations for a chemical weapons attack” in the three days before the weapons were unleashed, the summary said.

    • Cette phrase est absolument admirable :

      This matters also beyond the limits of Syria’s borders. It is about whether Iran, which itself has been a victim of chemical weapons’ attacks, will now feel emboldened in the absence of action to obtain nuclear weapons.

      C’est vraiment invraisemblable, un tel charabia. Rien n’a de sens là-dedans :
      – l’Iran a été victime d’armes chimiques, donc si on ne fait rien l’Iran sera encouragée à développer des armes nucléaire
      – (subliminal : ce sont les États-Unis qui ont aidé l’Irak à gazer l’Iran, donc ce sont les États-Unis qui doivent bombarder la Syrie pour faire la leçon à l’Iran)
      – les armes chimiques sont le mal absolu, donc on va parler des armes nucléaires (suggérant que c’est le même genre de topo), donc ce sont les pays qui possèdent des armes nucléaires (États-Unis, France, Israël) qui sont légitimes à interdire à l’Iran d’en posséder.

  • John’s Tumblr • A few folks have asked me what I think of the news...
    http://lilly.tumblr.com/post/43088488614/a-few-folks-have-asked-me-what-i-think-of-the-news

    From a broader web perspective, I don’t think it matters a lot that #Opera is moving. It matters on the margins for sure — they’ve always had smart, dedicated people, and have been a distinctive and differentiated voice that’s made the overall web stronger as it’s evolved. But the consumer market has never really much cared about Opera overall despite their technical excellence.

    I don’t know. Opera has pushed the boundaries for so many years, with print CSS, zoom, etc. One innovator down.

    #web #browser #webkit #monoculture