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cubancigar11 writes:

While the article at NYMag talks about the result as something one might have guessed, it sure came as surprise to me. Apparently, Narcissists watch more internet porn than non-narcissists, as per scientists from University of Houston-Clear Lake, Texas:

This study examined the relationship between Internet pornography use and Narcissism. Participants (N = 257) completed an online survey that included questions on Internet pornography use and three narcissism measures (i.e., Narcissistic Personality Inventory, Pathological Narcissistic Inventory, and the Index of Sexual Narcissism). The hours spent viewing Internet pornography use was positively correlated to participant's narcissism level. Additionally, those who have ever used Internet pornography endorsed higher levels of all three measures of narcissism than those who have never used Internet pornography.

c0lo writes:

Jim Nelson of Yorba foundation has a hair raising blog post on the reasons IRS denied a 501(c)(3) statute to Yorba:

501(c) is the section of the United States' tax code dealing with tax-exempt organizations. The third type (i.e. 501(c)(3)) are for organizations that are "organized and operated exclusively for one or more of the following purposes: religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, educational, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, or the prevention of cruelty to children or animals".

The Yorba Foundation applied for 501(c)(3) in December 2009. We applied as a charitable, scientific, and educational organization. Remember that we only needed to meet the criteria for one of those to receive 501(c)(3) status.

What follows are the most hair-raising statements in their denial letter and my interpretation and response (IRS' statements are in italics):

You have a substantial nonexempt purpose because you develop software published under open source compatible licenses that authorize use by any person for any purpose, including nonexempt purposes such as commercial, recreational, or personal purposes, including campaign intervention and lobbying.

dublet and cafebabe write:

The BBC reports that ISPs from the US, UK, Netherlands and South Korea have joined forced with campaigners Privacy International to take the agency to task over alleged attacks on network infrastructure. It is the first time that GCHQ, the British intelligence unit, has faced such action. The move follows allegations about government snooping made by US whistleblower Edward Snowden. The ISPs claim that alleged network attacks, outlined in a series of articles in Der Spiegel and the Intercept, were illegal and "undermine the goodwill the organisations rely on". The allegations that the legal actions are based on include:

• Claims that employees of Belgian telecommunications company Belgacom were targeted by GCHQ and infected with malware to gain access to network infrastructure
• GCHQ and the US National Security Agency, where Mr Snowden worked, had a range of network exploitation and intrusion capabilities, including a "man-on-the-side" technique that covertly injects data into existing data streams to create connections that will enable the targeted infection of users
• The intelligence agencies used an automated system, codenamed Turbine, that allowed them to scale up network implants
• German internet exchange points were targeted, allowing agencies to spy on all internet traffic coming through those nodes

An update, provided by cafebabe, states that the ISPs taking a stand are:

• GreenNet (UK)
• GreenHost (Netherlands)
• The Chaos Computer Club (Germany)
• Riseup (USA)
• May First/People Link (USA)
• Jinbonet (South Korea)
• Mango (Zimbabwe)

lhsi writes:

A study has found that there is a correlation between someone making poor long term heath decisions and them making poor long term financial decisions.

Are poor physical and financial health driven by the same underlying psychological factors? We found that the decision to contribute to a 401(k) retirement plan predicted whether an individual acted to correct poor physical-health indicators revealed during an employer-sponsored health examination. Using this examination as a quasi-exogenous shock to employees' personal-health knowledge, we examined which employees were more likely to improve their health, controlling for differences in initial health, demographics, job type, and income. We found that existing retirement-contribution patterns and future health improvements were highly correlated. Employees who saved for the future by contributing to a 401(k) showed improvements in their abnormal blood-test results and health behaviors approximately 27% more often than noncontributors did. These findings are consistent with an underlying individual time-discounting trait that is both difficult to change and domain interdependent, and that predicts long-term individual behaviors in multiple dimensions.

AnonTechie writes:

The mainland's billion-yuan supercomputer might be the most powerful in the world, but some researchers say its benefit to them is limited by its high operating cost and a lack of software. Tianhe-2 last week held onto its first-place ranking in the Top 500 charts, which measures the capacity of the world's supercomputers. It performed at a sustained 33.86 petaflops, or quadrillions of calculations per second. But all that muscle is not translating into practical use, some potential clients say.

One problem is cost. The electricity bill for the machine at the Sun Yat-sen University campus in Guangzhou runs between 400,000 yuan (US$ 64,516) and 600,000 yuan (US$ 96,774) a day, which ultimately falls to the user. Another obstacle remains a lack of software, they say. Tianhe-2 has been used for railway design, earthquake simulation, astrophysics and genetic studies. But so far investment has focused on hardware, forcing clients to write the programmes to allow them to use it.

AnonTechie writes:

On the morning of 30th June, ProtonMail received an email and telephone call from PayPal notifying us that our account has been restricted pending further review.

At this time, it is not possible for ProtonMail to receive or send funds through PayPal. No attempt was made by PayPal to contact us before freezing our account, and no notice was given. When we pressed the PayPal representative on the phone for further details, he questioned whether ProtonMail is legal and if we have government approval to encrypt emails. We are not sure which government PayPal is referring to, but even the 4th Amendment of the US constitution guarantees: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizure ..." It seems PayPal is trying to come up with ANY excuse they can to prevent us from receiving funds.

Like many others, we have all heard the PayPal horror stories, but didn't actually think it would happen to us on our campaign since PayPal promised, very recently, to improve their policies. Unfortunately, it seems those were hollow promises as ProtonMail is now the latest in a long string of crowdfunding campaigns to be hit with account freezes. (For examples, just look here, here, and here.)

As of 1st July, it appears that the restriction had been lifted by PayPal.

https://protonmail.ch/blog/paypal-freezes-protonmail-campaign-funds/

Harmonious Coward writes:

Virginia is more vulnerable to storm-surge destruction than anywhere else on the US's east coast. Problems are particularly acute in Norfolk, Virginia's second-biggest city and home to the world's largest naval base; sea levels there are now 14.5 inches (37 cm) higher than they were in 1930--so high that parts of Norfolk flood when the moon is full.

"A severe Category 2 or a Category 3 storm--if we were to receive a direct hit, almost all of the city would be underwater", Paul Fraim, Norfolk's mayor, told National Public Radio in 2012.

Worse, scientists expect sea levels in southern Virginia to rise at least a foot (30 cm) and perhaps as much as three feet by 2060. Moreover, that's only accounting for the sea-level rise. Factoring in subsidence--sinking land--Virginia's tides could be eight feet higher by 2100 in some areas, according to a study by Virginia Institute of Marine Science, with about six of those feet from sea-level alone.

present_arms writes:

News from The Register reports that Samsung admits that its suppliers are guilty of safety and legal violations despite saying they will clean things up, from the article in its annual sustainability report, the firm said that this year's audits had found a number of instances of poor working conditions for people at 100 of its suppliers.

The company didn't find any child labourers at its factories, but it did find that minors were working with chemical handling processes at 48 of its suppliers.

Samsung also said that the majority of its suppliers don't comply with China's legally permitted overtime hours and 33 of them used pay cuts or fines as a system of disciplinary action.

So what are your thoughts on this?

gambit writes:

Computational nanoscientist Surendra Jain has written solvers for Sudoku, Killer Sudoku, Samurai Sudoku, Calcudoku, Kakuro and many other logic problems.

All are elegantly coded and very fast: for example, the "World's Hardest Sudoku" is solved in 0.05 seconds (on a 5 year old PC) and his Knight's Tour solver is an order of magnitude faster than this one.

The page (called "Classical Geek") has all source (in Fortran 90, one of the most popular languages in high-performance computing) as well as compilation and running instructions.

Jaruzel writes:

As a result of moving into a new role, I'm about to embark on a complete re-filing of 5+ years worth of work documents. Typically my digital filing system always ends up completely random, even though I always start out with very good intentions.

Has anyone got any good advice on best practice document hierarchies and naming conventions? Are there any useful tools that can help me speed up this re-filing process?

My documents are all a mix of Word/Excel/Powerpoint/Visio/PDFs and are typically either BAU/Run or Project related.

lhsi writes:

The next in line for odd social networking is emoj.li, a social network where the only characters used are emoji. Usernames must be fully in emoji, as are all messages to be sent on the network.

The question is: do we need this in our lives? "I'm fairly sure we don't," says Scott. "But then, we don't really need Yo, Twitter or Facebook either."

Amphistomous Coward writes:

In 2012, a small team of Google Inc engineers and business staffers met with several of the world's largest car makers, to discuss partnerships to build self-driving cars.

In one meeting, both sides were enthusiastic about the futuristic technology, yet it soon became clear that they would not be working together. The Internet search company and the automaker disagreed on almost every point, from car capabilities and time needed to get it to market to extent of collaboration.

As Google expands beyond Web search and seeks a foothold in the automotive market, the company's eagerness has begun to reek of arrogance to some in Detroit, who see danger as well as promise in Silicon Valley.

AnonTechie, RhubarbSin, and others write in to tell us:

Millions of legitimate servers that rely on dynamic domain name services from No-IP.com suffered outages on Monday after Microsoft seized 22 domain names it said were being abused in malware-related crimes against Windows users. Thus proving once again that when you are the proverbial 800lb gorilla, you need to be damn careful where you sit.

Microsoft enforced a federal court order making the company the domain IP resolver for the No-IP domains. Microsoft said the objective of the seizure was to identify and reroute traffic associated with two malware families that abused No-IP services.

lhsi writes:

Research into language development of young children shows that talking to them at a young age gives them an advantage at communicating effectively when they start school (linked article based on article from page 42 of PsyPAG).

Just saying more words to children, however, isn't enough on its own; diversity and complexity of the language is important.

But it's not enough just to bombard children with a barrage of words: the quality of the speech that they hear matters too. Children who hear language that is diverse, complex, and is directed towards them specifically (child-directed speech), often have a larger vocabulary size and a faster rate of vocabulary growth.

The most consistent finding in why some children are exposed to more speech than others is that it is strongly related to parents' socioeconomic status. Researchers have also found correlations between maternal education, family income, and occupational prestige.

LaminatorX writes:

Back in his heyday as a cocaine kingpin, the late Pablo Escobar built a zoo on his palatial hacienda. According to a BBC report, the descendants of the four hippos he imported have not only survived, but are thriving in Colombia's drought-free climate.

From the article:

Here, conditions for hippos are idyllic. The river is slow moving and has plenty of shallows, perfect for larger animals which don't actually swim but push themselves off banks, gliding through the water. Moreover, the region never experiences drought, which tends to act as a natural brake on the size of herds in Africa.

How much the hippos like Colombia can be judged from how much sex they are having. In Africa they usually become sexually active between the ages of seven and nine for males, and nine and 11 for females, but Pablo Escobar's hippos are becoming sexually active as young as three. All the fertile females are reported to be giving birth to a calf every year.