corrisit-blog

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Tip for modern adulterers:

Tip for modern adulterers: If you’re planning to cheat on your wife of 10 years by awkwardly hitting on the model seated next to you on your flight out of Los Angeles, make sure she isn’t live-tweeting the entire miserable experience to her 13,000 followers;

sauce

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THE SHOCKING TRUTH OF THE PENDING EU COLLAPSE! (by 2012sprint)

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Roger Ailes, head of Fox News, made up a story about his victimization by the New York Times. 

Seriously. “Made it up” is not too strong a term. As best we can determine, it never happened. But it’s important to understand that he thinks it happened. Because this expresses so well what Fox News Channel sells: resentment news. 

Here’s the deal. In a speech at Ohio University, Ailes told the following anecdote to former Washington Post ombudsman Andy Alexander.

Roger Ailes: What if you got up on a Thursday morning and the front page of The New York Times said you were going to be indicted on Monday. How would you feel about that? Let’s assume you hadn’t done anything and don’t know anything about it. That happened to me. I got up on a Thursday morning and it said Roger will be indicted on Monday.  … And do you know what they used for their source? They said somebody was overheard in the waiting room of a Barbados airport saying it. That was their source for that story.

Andy Alexander: Did you call them on it?

Roger Ailes: No.

Andy Alexander: Why not?

Roger Ailes: Because they’re a bunch of lying scum and they’re not going to do anything about it. They did it on purpose, they did it deliberately and they didn’t have anything. I’m sure they couldn’t produce the guy in the Barbados airport.

Actually, it’s Ailes that can’t produce this front page story because it is fictional. It was formed in his mind through a fusion of two separate events.

The first event is this story in the New York Times:  Fox News Chief, Roger Ailes, Urged Employee to Lie, Records Show.  It reads: “After the publishing powerhouse Judith Regan was fired by HarperCollins in 2006, she claimed that a senior executive at its parent company, News Corporation, had encouraged her to lie two years earlier to federal investigators who were vetting Bernard B. Kerik for the job of homeland security secretary.” That senior executive, the story says, was Ailes. Fox News did not bother to deny it. 

About any indictment, here is what the Times reported: “Depending on the specifics, the taped conversation could possibly rise to the level of conspiring to lie to federal officials, a federal crime, but prosecutors rarely pursue such cases, said Daniel C. Richman, a Columbia University law professor and a former federal prosecutor.”

No… AILES ABOUT TO BE INDICATED. Instead, “prosecutors rarely pursue such cases.”

So that happened. Then something else happened. A financial blogger, Barry Ritholtz, published this at his blog:

Here’s what I learned recently: Someone I spoke with claimed that Ailes was scheduled to speak at their event in March, but canceled. It appears that Roger’s people, ostensibly using a clause in his contract, said he “cannot appear for legal reasons.”

I asked “What, precisely, does that mean?”

The response: “Roger Ailes will be indicted — probably this week, maybe even Monday.”

You read it here first …

And the rumor spread. But not to the front page of the New York Times. 

See what Ailes did? In his imavictim! mind, he mapped the Ritholtz post onto the Times story about his name surfacing in court documents and created a fiction: that the New York Times falsely indicted him on the front page, relying on some bathroom conversation in Barbados. And for this (imaginary) crime, Ailes called (real) New York Times reporters “a bunch of lying scum.” 

Now for the extra twist. Ailes actually had to apologize for the “lying scum” comment. Well, sort of. Not really. I mean he did it in the most weasely way possible. He got Howard Kurtz of CNN and the Daily Beast to anonymously quote a “senior Fox News executive” claiming that Roger feels bad about the whole thing. See: Ailes Regrets ‘Scum’ Attack on NYT. 

Ailes himself couldn’t apologize, because that’s not the kind of guy he is. But this was before we knew how fictional his front page resentment narrative was. No one can figure out what Kurtz was doing granting anonymity to a Fox person for the purpose of defending the boss (which is not exactly whistle-blowing if you follow me…) but: there it is!

And now, media watchers, we get to see if a shawdowy Fox News executive will ring up Kurtz and request anonymity so he can correct the record about the front page Times story that never happened. 

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"The community you build is what makes Flickr truly unique. And Flickr Groups are the pulse of the community on Flickr. So we’re very excited to share three Group announcements with you......" Try it & see what you think 

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Ahhh, the delicious cruelty that is irony! The ineffable loss, the sadness at the sudden realization that this was your own doing — an easily preventable mistake, that harsh painful sensation in the pit of your stomach when you realize that you have no one to blame but yourself . . . Our story so far: Facebook, a wildly overvalued momentary internet phenomena led by an arrogant 28 year old man-child, decided to treat the process of going public with the same respect they do their users’ privacy, which is to say, with none at all. So they went public more or less unlawfully over the past two years, allowing 1000s (or more) outside investors to acquire substantial stakes via secondary markets from their employees and early investors. Note this is within the company’s control, and could have been stopped, but they elected not to do so. When the clamor to dump shares overwhelmed these markets (but not the hype surrounding them), FB decided to do what was described as an IPO, but was in all actuality a secondary. Flattered and cajoled by the bankers and wankers at Morgan Stanley and Nasdaq respectively, the man-child allowed the Facebook secondary to be bungled by these once-great-now-shite financial firms. How?

Read on, by Barry Ritholtz

How Facebook Fucked Up Its Own IPO | The Big Picture

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"In 2005, Peter Mahnke, a resident of the English town of St. Margaret's, Middlesex, set up a community website. For the past seven years, he and a handful of local volunteers have been publishing regular updates about local events, parks, new businesses, weather, and train schedules. All G-rated and uncontroversial.

Yet in early March, for reasons that remain unclear, the St. Margaret's website was blocked throughout Britain on mobile Internet services offered by Orange (a subsidiary of France Telecom) and T-mobile (owned by Deutsche Telecom). The site had fallen victim to a nationwide child-protection system run by the mobile companies themselves. Somehow the system, which activists say is rife with errors, had classified the site as "adult" content, causing it to be blocked on all phones by default.

The accidental censorship of the St. Margaret's community website highlights a larger reality of the Internet age: The digital networks and platforms we depend upon for all aspects of our lives -- including the civic and political -- are for the most part designed, owned, operated, and governed by the private sector. Internet and mobile services empower us to organize and communicate in exciting new ways, and indeed have been politically transformative in democracies and dictatorships alike. But the connectivity they provide has also created tough new problems for parents, law enforcement, and anybody wanting to protect their intellectual property. Democratically elected governments face political pressure from a range of vocal and powerful constituencies to take urgent action to protect children, property, and reputations. Increasingly, however, the job of policing the Internet is falling to private intermediaries -- companies that are under little or no legal obligation to uphold citizens' rights. In effect, they end up acting simultaneously as digital police, judge, jury, and executioner."

read more

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United States Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano has warned the New Zealand Government about the latest terrorist threat known as "body bombers".

NZ warned over 'body bombers' | TRAVEL News

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T. Mills Kelly encourages his students to deceive thousands of people on the Web. This has angered many, but the experiment helps reveal the shifting nature of the truth on the Internet.

How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit - Technology - The Atlantic

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How to Convert an Old PC into a Modern Server

How to Convert an Old PC into a Modern Server | PCWorld

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In what may be the most useful application of the Twitter UI framework, Mislav Marohnić offers RFC, a website that reformats The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) documents into something a bit more reader friendly:

I know which I’d rather read. The source is on GitHub and the live site is running on Heroku.

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The OS X Problem

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The sorry tale of the rise and fall of the original (and possibly greatest) social photo app ever

Thanks Yahoo! - not 

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"Well, it looks like all the fearmongering about hackers shutting down electrical grids and making planes fall from the sky is working. No matter that there's no evidence of any actual risk, or that the only real issue is if anyone is stupid enough to actually connect such critical infrastructure to the internet (the proper response to which is: take it off the internet), fear is spreading. Of course, this is mostly due to the work of a neat combination of ex-politicians/now lobbyistsworking for defense contractors who stand to make a ton of money from the panic -- enabled by politicians who seem to have no shame in telling scary bedtime stories that have no basis in reality."

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Fantastic time lapse map of Europe, 1000 - 2005 A.D.

This time lapse covers more than 1000 years and shows the shifting national borders of Europe.

There’s also a slowed-down version that shows the year and some annotation of events. (via ★interesting)

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......

"It assumes that coding is the goal. Software developers tend to be software addicts who think their job is to write code. But it's not.Their job is to solve problems. Don't celebrate the creation of code, celebrate the creation of solutions. We have way too many coders addicted to doing just one more line of code already."

......

Yep, solutions are the name of the game.

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A cipher by Lewis Carroll, which he invented between Alice and The Hunting of the Snark.

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