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Monday, January 7, 2013
Walmart's For-Pay Blu-ray Ripping Is Now Slightly Less Annoying, Still Way Overpriced
Sunday, January 6, 2013
Thread: Hi everyone - Writing Forum
Welcome to Writing Forums, Jamilla!
I hope you find what you're looking for here, whatever your interests in writing.
This forum aims to provide the best workshopping resources on the internet, and to that end we have a few rules which you should familiarise yourself with before you get stuck in. The main section of the site is the Writing Workshop, where members can post their writing in order to receive critique of their work.
However, before we allow members to post their work, they must have met some basic requirements. Firstly, you must have been a member for fourteen days, and have made twenty posts on the forum overall (please note, posts in Word Games do not count towards this). This is so that members, when they post their work, have familiarised themselves with the forums and contributed to them (as well as hopefully learned something for themselves). Secondly, members must provide two constructive reviews of other people's work for each piece of their own that they wish to post. This is because we believe that the focus of workshopping should be equally upon giving reviews as receiving them, as they allow a writer to practice and improve their editing skills, which they can then apply to their own writing.
Beyond the Writing Workshop, you will find that we have extensive forums for discussion of aspects of writing, as well as a community area for general discussion. We also run periodic short story and poetry contests, which are good for challenging yourself and expanding your skills.
If you have any questions or problems, then the moderators (myself, Cogito, Lemex and Dante Dases) should be your first port of call. Any technical problems with the site itself should be directed to Daniel, the site administrator and owner. I would recommend you have a look over the rules so that you know what to expect, and what is expected. But aside from that, I hope you enjoy your time here.
Banzai
Source: http://www.writingforums.org/showthread.php?t=58880
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Egypt fires finance, interior ministers before IMF visit
CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt's Islamist President Mohamed Mursi fired his finance and interior ministers, cabinet sources said on Saturday, in a government reshuffle he had promised to assuage public anger at an economic crisis.
General Mohamed Ibrahim will replace Ahmed Gamal El-Din as interior minister and Al-Mursi Al-Sayed Hegazy takes the finance ministry job from Mumtaz al-Saaed.
Egypt's pound, 10 percent down since the 2011 uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak, lost more than 3 percent against the dollar in the week ending on Thursday, hitting a record low as fears grew over its rapidly shrinking foreign currency reserves.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) said it is sending its Middle East and Central Asia director, Masood Ahmed, to discuss a postponed $4.8 billion loan agreement and "possible IMF support for Egypt" with officials on Monday.
Loan talks were delayed last month at Cairo's behest because of unrest in which 11 people died and hundreds were injured in anti-Mursi protests.
State-run Egyptian newspaper Akhbar Al-Youm said earlier on Saturday that Ahmed would meet Mursi, Prime Minister Hashim Kandil and other top officials.
BROTHERHOOD MINISTERS
State news agency MENA said 10 new ministers would be sworn in on Sunday for portfolios including electricity, environment, communications and transport.
According to cabinet sources, at least three of the new ministers are from Mursi's Freedom and Justice Party, the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood group.
"The Brotherhood new ministers are the ones handling the portfolios of transport, local development and supplies," one cabinet source said.
A Brotherhood official, who asked not to be named, declined to say how many of the new ministers are from the Brotherhood but said that the finance minister is "considered close to us due to his field of experience in Islamic finance".
A spokesman for the main opposition bloc, The National Salvation Front, said the group was still studying the new appointments and would give its reaction to the moves later.
Egypt's opposition youth group, April Six, said in a statement that the changes were not enough and "will not solve (Egypt's problems)".
Most opposition groups had asked for the whole cabinet to be sacked and replaced by one that would include more technocrats and represent all political parties.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/egypt-fires-finance-interior-ministers-imf-visit-081558502--business.html
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Depardieu, now Russian citizen, welcomed warmly
Gerard?Depardieu, the French actor who sought Russian citizenship to avoid a millionaires tax in France, arrived in Saransk, Russia, Sunday. Depardieu has been welcomed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, as well as Russian citizens.
French film star Gerard Depardieu shows his passport after arriving at the airport in the town of Saransk, southeast of Moscow, Jan. 6. Depardieu received a hug from Russia's President Vladimir Putin and a new Russian passport on Sunday after abandoning his homeland to avoid a new tax rate for millionaires.
Yulia Chestnova/Reuters
EnlargeThe day after receiving his new Russian passport from President Vladimir Putin, French actor Gerard?Depardieu?flew Sunday to the provincial town of Saransk, where he was greeted as a local hero and offered an apartment for free.
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Depardieu?had sought Russian citizenship as part of his battle against a proposed super tax on millionaires in France.
Putin granted his request last week and then welcomed the actor late Saturday to his residence in Sochi, the host city of the 2014 Winter Olympics. Russian television showed the two men embracing and then chatting over supper, discussing a soon-to-be-released film in which Depardieu?plays Russian monk Grigory Rasputin.
Depardieu?flew Sunday to Saransk, a town about 300 miles east of Moscow, where he was met at a snow-covered airport by the governor and a group of women in traditional costume singing folk songs. He flashed his new passport to the crowd before setting out on a tour of the town.
The governor invited?Depardieu?to settle in Saransk and offered him an apartment of his choice, according to reports on state television.
Depardieu?has not said where he would take up residence in Russia, only that he did not want to live in Moscow because it is too big and he prefers a village.
The Frenchman has spent a fair bit of time in Russia in recent years, including for the filming of the French-Russian film "Rasputin," and he expresses an admiration for Putin. But it is Russia's flat 13 percent income tax that appears to be the biggest draw at the moment as he flees high taxes in France.
France's new Socialist government tried to raise the tax on income above ?1 million ($1.3 million) to 75 percent from the current 41 percent. That plan was struck down by the highest court, but Budget Minister Jerome Cahuzac said Sunday that the government is reworking the law so the superrich will still be asked to pay an elevated rate. He said the government is also considering putting the new tax in place for longer than the two years initially imagined.
"I find it a bit pathetic that for tax reasons this man ? whom by the way I admire infinitely as an actor ? has decided to exile himself," Cahuzac said.
Sarah DiLorenzo in Paris contributed to this report.
Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/K9llnUpgLwk/Depardieu-now-Russian-citizen-welcomed-warmly
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Saturday, January 5, 2013
Book Review: Media, Home, and Family by Stewart M. Hoover, Lynn ...
You are on the couch reading. Your daughter, four, is sitting next to you fiddling with your iPad. She's been on your iPad for twenty minutes. You decide she's had enough and ask her to put it down. She refuses, so, like all parents, you bribe her: "Hand over the iPad and I'll let you watch My Little Ponies." She readily agrees and hands over the goods. You start her show and flop back onto the couch. In the end, your daughter will have received fifty minutes of media, unless this is a repeat episode, and then who knows how much media your daughter might have today.
The minds behind Media, Home, and Family assert that the stories we tell ourselves in regards to our media intake contribute to our collective familial identity, which is an ongoing and fluid negotiation. Are you the family that doesn't own a T.V. and proudly condescends to those who do, while secretly streaming Netflix on your iPhone? If so, then why do you tout your T.V.-less house? What does that say about you and your values? Is there import, for your family, in espousing those values even if you don't always adhere to them?
Hoover, Clark, and Alters posit that, yes, even if we don't always embody our standards; we are modeling for our children the importance of having a worldview that informs our decisions. This is an interesting thought, because it is so often, parentally, coupled with guilt. We tell ourselves that our children only watch thirty minutes a day, but, in actuality, we know they watch up to two hours a day. Yet, there is purpose in both our intentions and lessons, and, even in our failure and guilt, we are teaching our children important lessons about worldview and moderation.
Media, Home, and Family is a fascinating book about what it means to be a family in a digital age. It is both scholarly and well researched, but also accessible. It is an essential read for any parent seeking to understand their family's relationship to media and how their family's negotiations around media contribute to their family's collective identity.
In the end, I found that what matters most is not so much what my children are watching (though that, too, is important) but how well we, as a family, dialogue. To take an example from Media, Home, and Family: Should I turn off The Simpsons because Bart is rude, or should I watch The Simpsons with my children and then foster an environment where conversations about Bart's rudeness are commonplace? Though I lean towards the latter, to be honest, I don't do it. And why? Because it's harder. It's easier-much easier-as a modern-working parent, to turn off what I don't like and command it's banishment. But, even if it's not easier, dialogue is the root of good parenting. I guess I should power down my MacBook Air and go.
View the original article on blogcritics.org
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Forbes 2013 Career List Flamed By University Professors
An anonymous reader writes "The Forbes list of 'least stressful jobs' for 2013 is headlined by... university professors. This comes at a time in which the academic community has been featured on controversies about 100-hour week work journeys, doctors live on food stamps, tenured staff is laid off large science institutions, and the National Science Foundation suffers severe budget cuts, besides the well known (and sometimes publicized) politics of publish or perish. The Forbes reporter has received abundant feedback and published a shy, foot-note 'addendum'; however, the cited source, CareerCast (which does not map to any recognizable career journalist, but rather to a Sports writer), does not seem to have had the same luck. The comments of the Forbes reporter on the existence of a Summer break for graduates ('I am curious whether professors work that hard over the summer') are particularly noteworthy." Here is the CareerCast report the article is based on, and a list of the "stress factors" they considered. The author of the Forbes article passed on a very detailed explanation of how tough a university professor's job can be.
Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/Pywcz347ZJk/story01.htm
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Dead on Facebook: Pranksters kill accounts with fake death reports
1 day
While vacationing with his wife in Cancun, Rusty Foster did something many would find inexplicable?? he?didn?t check his Facebook account. Not once.?
But when the couple returned to their home in Peaks Island, Maine earlier this week, Foster?learned much to his surprise that he was dead???at least as far as Facebook was concerned.
?Everything seemed OK, but?I didn?t try to post anything until Thursday,? Foster told NBC News. Foster says he attempted to log on to his Facebook account, and got the ?pink box? instead???the one that reads:
This account is in a special memorial state. If you have any questions or concerns, please visit the Help Center for further information.
Turns out, while Foster was away, his prankster pal had him declared dead on Facebook, where it?s surprisingly easy to falsely memorialize an account. Since Facebook has no realtime customer service hotline,?getting one?s profile resurrected in this case?required outside intervention ... from BuzzFeed.?When Foster couldn't get Facebook's immediate attention, he wrote a note to the social news site asking for help.
How did BuzzFeed's intrepid reporter?Katie Notopoulos?help out? By turning around and Facebook murdering her colleague John Herrman, of course.
Being dead???at least on the Internet???is ?a little bit anticlimactic,? says Herrman. "I?ve been worrying about it?my whole my life and it turned out to just be a Facebook status update."?
Unbeknownst to him, Notopoulos had reported him dead for the purposes of investigating Foster's claims, not to mention the possibility of an awesomely annoying (and some might say, dark)?prank made possible by Facebook's service for the grieving.
When NBC News turned to Facebook to make sense of this apparently?slipshod policy, a spokesperson emailed the following statement:
We have designed the memorialization process to be effective for grieving families and friends, while still providing precautions to protect against either erroneous or malicious efforts to memorialize the account of someone who is not deceased.?We also provide an appeals process for the rare instances in which accounts are mistakenly reported or inadvertently memorialized.
Prior to 2009, Facebook users who sloughed off this mortal coil had the unfortunate habit of haunting the living???their pictures popping up on the profiles of their former friends, along with the friendly suggestion from Facebook that y?all should ?reconnect.? Four years into the network's existence, and with more than 300 million active users at the time, Facebook realized it had had its fair share of user fatalities, and the pile of creeped-out user?complaints that came with it.?
So the??Memorializing? function came into being, allowing loved ones to alert Facebook to their friends? passing and?preventing the social network from making potentially upsetting, wildly inappropriate suggestions. Any profile that has been?memorialized?is locked down: Only friends previously?approved by the deceased can even?view it, and personal information such as phone numbers are removed.?
Before contacting BuzzFeed, Foster had?attempted to?resuscitate?his profile by following?Facebook?s appeal process? ??filling out the online form titled ?My Personal Account is in a Special Memorialized State.? But he?wasn't?keen on killing time in social-media purgatory, and the automated reply Foster first received?didn't?inspire his confidence.??We are very sorry to hear about your loss,? it read, along with some reassurance that his report would be reviewed in according the site?s policies.
?Since I?couldn't?get on Facebook, I had a lot of time to kill on the Internet,? Foster said. ?So I Googled.? Foster says he?found more than a few search results about similarly pranked users who had difficulty getting the memorial status removed from their accounts, dating back to 2009. Finally, he sent his note to BuzzFeed.
Like Foster?s puckish friend, Notopoulos filled out a?memorialization?form for Herrman, and included ?proof of death? in the form of an online obit. For Rusty Foster, 36, who lives in Maine, his pal sent a link to the obit for a Russell Foster, 80, of Mississippi. Sure, the names more or less match, but the ages and places of residence do not.
For?BuzzFeed?s Herrman of New York, Notopoulous sent in an obit for John Herrmann of Nebraska, who, as Notopoulous noted ?is way older? than her coworker. In addition to the?age and geographic discrepancies, there's a small matter of the last names being spelled differently.
Like Foster, Herrman didn't know he was "dead" until he tried to access his account.?Herrman told NBC News that he attempted to log on, got that pink box telling him he was dead, filled out the form to get things fixed and received the same?perplexing ?sorry for your loss? automated response.
Yet less than an hour after Notopoulous? story ?How Almost Anyone Can Take You Off Facebook (And Lock You Out)? went live on BuzzFeed, Herrman?s account rose from the grave. Herrman also received another response that may very well be from a real human, which read:
It looks like your account was suspended by mistake. I'm so sorry for the inconvenience. You should now be able to log in. If you have any issues getting back into your account, please let me know.
Foster, meanwhile, says he finds it interesting that Hermann, who was Facebook-dead days less than himself, got the Lazarus treatment before Foster. His own profile did get reinstated eventually?on Friday ? but without a cheerfully apologetic note.
The spookiest part of the social media ghost story, at least for Foster, wasn?t getting declared dead. It?s what he says happened after he created a second account in order to troubleshoot his problem.?He friended just one person, and almost immediately Facebook started suggesting he friend people who were linked to his ?dead? account. The thing is, these people are not Facebook friends with the new account's only?acquaintance; Facebook was digging deeper into its data?to reconnect Foster with his people.
?It?s weird how Facebook is so good about knowing things about you, but you find this one little hole where they pretend they don?t know you at all.?
There's no word itself?from Facebook?on precautions regarding pranks, but then again, it?s not like there are a lot of jerks on the Internet.
Helen A.S. Popkin?goes blah blah blah about the Internet. Tell her to get a real job on?Twitter?and/or?Facebook.?Also,?Google+.
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