With the appearance of software that can detect plagiarism, those who are too lazy to compose their own prose have been forced to take steps to try and avoid detection. Thus the word ‘rogeting’ has entered the lexicon, coined by a lecturer in business information systems who found strange phrases in his students’ essays.
[Read more…]
Since the Edward Snowden revelations a year ago, I have been writing quite a lot about encryption although I don’t know much about it. I came across this introduction to the PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) system, a common form of what is known as public key cryptography, that was fairly clear about how it worked in converting the plain text message into the encrypted form called the ciphertext.
[Read more…]
There are a lot of people on the internet whose main goal seems to be to say silly and outrageous things just so that the public will pay attention to them. Ann Coulter in one such media hustler. Sarah Palin is another. The logical thing to do is to ignore them and deny them the visibility they so clearly crave and usually I do just that. But sometimes the things they say are so funnily mockable that I bend the rules.
[Read more…]
When Apple unveiled Siri, its intelligent digital assistant, people were wowed by what it could do. You could ask ‘her’ to set the alarm or call someone or tell you where to go and was able to deflect metaphysical questions with humor.
[Read more…]
A federal judge ruled on August 7, 2014 that a privately-funded Ten Commandments monument that on July 4, 2011 was placed on the lawn in front of the city hall of the town of Bloomfield in New Mexico must be removed by September 10, 2014 as a result of suit filed by the ACLU on behalf of two people, one of whom Jane Felix is a Wiccan, a high priestess with the Order of the Cauldron of the Sage.
[Read more…]
Last week a federal judge struck another blow against the bogus amateurism shield that the NCAA uses to prevent having to share its enormous revenues with the students who make all that money for them.
[Read more…]
Ryan Devereaux reports that five people have now sued the government for infringing on their civil liberties by placing them on no-fly lists and otherwise harassing them using its massive database to put them on watch lists and used it to pressure them.
[Read more…]
The world of mathematics was agog last week with the announcement of the first woman to win the Fields medal, the most prestigious prize in that field, awarded every four years to two to four people. What was additionally noteworthy is that Maryam Mirzakhani, a professor from Stanford University is originally from Iran.
[Read more…]
The latest gambit by American corporations to lower their taxes even more is to take advantage of what is known as ‘corporate inversion’. The way it works is for a big US company to buy a small company in a country that has favorable tax laws, Ireland being the current favored nation. They then ‘invert’ the relationship, claiming that the foreign company is the parent one while the US one is the subsidiary, even though nothing else has changed. This enables them to pay the lower taxes of the other nation while enjoying all the benefits of being in the US.
[Read more…]
Alex Kane writes that mounting evidence is making it increasingly hard to deny that war crimes were committed by Israel in its most recent assault on Gaza. The United Nations Human Rights Commission has sent in a three member team to investigate human rights violations in the most recent conflict.
[Read more…]