Links to cool places or things.
There are 1,530 posts filed in Check It Out (this is page 79 of 153).
Chris nails it, once again.
I can’t imagine a more dreadful existence than just being useful. Robots are useful. Tools are useful. People are passionate. Life is not a dress rehearsal. We get one shot on this earth. Find your passion. Follow it to wherever it leads you. And have fun doing it.
Orange County District Attorney Jim Woodall has charged former UNC professor Julius Nyang’oro with obtaining property by false pretense for accepting money for a class he didn’t teach.
Julius Nyang’oro, the former chairman of the Department of African and Afro-American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was indicted Monday by an Orange County grand jury on a charge related to an academic scandal at the school.
Nyang’oro could face up to 30 months in prison if he is convicted of obtaining property by false pretense, which is a felony. Investigators said he accepted $12,000 for teaching a class that never happened.
The university reclaimed the money through garnishment of his final paycheck.
While I am mad as anyone that UNC condoned cheating, I think the false-pretense charge is ridiculous. You would have a harder time convincing me that UNC didn’t know this was going on, that UNC wasn’t fully aware of what Nyang’oro was doing, than convincing me that Nyang’oro somehow hoodwinked the university. These things don’t happen in a vacuum. The professor has done this work many times before with no compensation. It was the university’s idea to pay him this particular time and by then it should have been “caveat emptor.”
Again, I can’t stand cheaters and I think the book should be thrown at UNC for their misdeeds. However, this charge won’t result in justice. It will result in quite an interesting trial, though, as Nyang’oro and his attorney summon some very uncomfortable witnesses to testify at his defense.
via Former UNC-Chapel Hill professor indicted in academic scandal :: WRAL.com.
One of the notable events of 2013 that has largely escaped notice is the official death of the HTML blink tag. As of August’s release of Firefox 23, Mozilla has officially dropped support for the tag, arguably the most annoying web element ever invented.
When Mozilla released Firefox 23 on Tuesday, the updated browser put an unofficial end to one of the annoyances of the early Web—the “blink” tag.
According to the release notes for the new browser, Firefox 23 completely drops support for the “blink” element, preventing browsers from rendering text that, well, blinks.
via The blink tag is finally dead, killed off by Firefox 23 | PCWorld.
Last week, I noticed an attack against my webserver very similar to this one. It doesn’t appear to have been successful, which is good.
Like any fellow server maintainers out there, I know that I will occasionally be the target of an anonymous persons ire. This week it was my turn. I run an Apache server with PHP for my personal projects, nothing important. I also run a number of apps to help me manage my server, like BASE to monitor my snort logs overkill for a personal server, yes I know, and phpMyAdmin to manage the database portion.
I made the mistake of thinking that one of my apps was secure, and the further mistake of not updating it to the most recent version of an app. I blame my busy schedule with school and work for not keeping it more up to date. Today, phpMyAdmin was the culprit.
via Blog Crossed Buns: Deconstruction of a Hack.
Update: Here’s code similar to that which someone attempted to post to my site. And here’s another site which got hit in a similar way.
When you’ve got a big story, making extraordinary claims, you’d better make sure you’ve got your facts straight. That CBS News failed to do this is troubling and absolutely inexplicable.
CAIRO — When “60 Minutes” apologized for featuring in its report on Benghazi a security contractor whose story turned out to be a lie, it said it had been “misled.” But a close examination of the controversial piece by McClatchy shows that there are other problems with the report, whose broadcast renewed debate about one of the most contentious events in recent U.S. diplomatic history.
In an email Wednesday, CBS declined to respond to questions about the accuracy and origin of some of the other aspects of the report. But it said that it was undertaking “a journalistic review that is ongoing” – the network’s first acknowledgement that concerns about the report may go deeper than just the discredited interview with security supervisor Dylan Davies.
A recently released Georgetown study may help explain why veterans with Gulf War Illness have such a wide variety of physical complaints – researchers have determined that there may be two forms of the illness.
A research team at Georgetown University Medical Center GUMC published their findings online today in PLOS ONE. The study suggests the illness varies depending on which brain regions show atrophy.
via Georgetown Researchers Discover Two Forms of Gulf War Illness – Georgetown University.
Here’s a story about the growth the Person Street business district has seen in the past few years.
RALEIGH — Craig Heffley first visited the North Person Street business district about a decade ago, around the time he was opening Wine Authorities in Durham. He spotted a series of vacant storefronts amid two thriving historic neighborhoods, and he made a mental note.
“This would be a great space if I ever opened in Raleigh,” he recalled thinking. “It’s got spunk to it. It’s a good mix of neighborhood people and people who are driving through on their way to downtown.”
I found a big goof in this story, though:
And more neighbors are on the way to fill prescriptions with James, sip wines in Heffley’s store lounge and dine at Piebird. Peace Street Townes, an 18-unit townhouse development, is under construction near Krispy Kreme. Even Oakwood is expanding with a new subdivision called Oakwood North.
Oakwood North is in no way related to the Historic Oakwood neighborhood. It just has Oakwood in its name.
via RALEIGH: North Person Street business district fills up fast | Raleigh | MidtownRaleighNews.com.
Looks like Iranian hardliners are organizing protests against the United States again. I found this quote particularly telling:
“Fighting the global arrogance and hostile policies of America is the symbol of our national solidarity,” said Saeed Jalili, who lost to Rouhani in June’s election and later was replaced as the country’s top nuclear negotiator.
See that? Iran is driven by its hatred of America (or at least that’s what its hardliners would have us believe). America, on the other hand, couldn’t give a shit about Iran. The last protests we had against Iran were 30 years ago before the Iranian hostages were freed. We’ve moved on. Iran apparently hasn’t.
Kinda sad, isn’t it?
Chew on this for a moment. Our galaxy, just one of hundreds of billions, harbors at least 10 billion Earth-like, habitable planets. This isn’t just an estimate, this is a calculation from NASA.
Ten billion Earth-like planets in our corner of the universe. Still believe there’s no other life in the universe?
One out of every five sun-like stars in the Milky Way galaxy has a planet about the size of Earth that is properly positioned for water, a key ingredient for life, a study released on Monday showed.The analysis, based on three years of data collected by NASA’s now-idled Kepler space telescope, indicates the galaxy is home to 10 billion potentially habitable worlds.
via One in five Milky Way stars hosts potentially life-friendly Earths: study – Yahoo News.
My brother worked for Google for a time, when his company got bought by a company that got bought by them. I thought he would be thrilled. Much to my surprise, though, he was largely unimpressed with the culture of Google. I suppose making all of that money is making the company lazy. Seems like Google is in the same position Microsoft was in many years ago and, like Microsoft, might also find itself largely irrelevant.
A job at Google. It’s career heaven, right? How could a gig at the biggest, most ambitious tech company on the planet possibly be bad?Well, take a look at this Quora thread, which is being used by current and former Google employees to dish the dirt on working for Big G.We’ve edited some of the standout comments into this excerpt.
Here’s the original Quora thread where this discussion got started.
via Google Employees Confess The Worst Things About Google – Business Insider.
