Technology And The Ruling Party

"Power tends to corrupt," said Lord Acton, "and absolute power corrupts absolutely." The sexism needs updating but the sentiment remains true. That's been all too obvious this week, during which the powers that be did their damnedest to protect their once-secret surveillance programs...while the NSA responded to Freedom Of Information Act requests with the claim "There's no central method to search [internal NSA emails] at this time."

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/7FescdlZ7Dk/

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Drone gender gap: More women worldwide opposed to strikes than men?

drones

Suzanne Choney NBC News

July 26, 2013 at 3:25 PM ET

Pew Research Institute

There's a significant global gender gap when it comes to the United States' use of drones for military strikes, with more women around the world opposing the use of unmanned aerial vehicles than men.

While women in general are "far less likely than men to say that force is sometimes necessary in the pursuit of justice," the "gender difference over drone strikes is unusually large," says the Pew Research Institute in a new report.

In the U.S., of 61 percent of Americans who approve of drone strikes in military situations, 70 percent are men and 53 percent are women, Pew found.

But the gender gap is even greater in other countries "about this signature Obama administration anti-terrorist tool," wrote Bruce Stokes, Pew's director of global economic attitudes, in the report:

In Japan, for example, 41 percent of men approve of drone attacks, compared with just 10 percent of women. Double digit gender gaps are also found in six of the eight EU nations polled, as well as Australia, Canada, the U.S., South Korea and Uganda.

The Obama administration says it uses military drones to target al Qaeda leaders and senior Taliban officials who are plotting attacks against the U.S. and U.S. troops. But a recent NBC News investigation found that in Pakistan, the CIA didn't always know who it was targeting in using the drones.

Last spring, Pew surveyed people in 39 nations about the U.S. use of drone missile strikes in countries like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. The only three countries where "majorities" support the drone use are Israel, Kenya and the U.S. itself, Pew found.

In France, Germany and Spain, "there are also sharp ideological divisions on this issue, with those on the political right far more supportive than those on the left."

Check out Technology and TODAY Tech on Facebook, and on Twitter, follow Suzanne Choney.

Source: http://feeds.nbcnews.com/c/35002/f/663301/s/2f350842/sc/20/l/0L0Snbcnews0N0Ctechnology0Cdrone0Egender0Egap0Emore0Ewomen0Eworldwide0Eopposed0Estrikes0Emen0E6C10A760A647/story01.htm

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OS X Mavericks preview: Compressed Memory gives your Mac room to run

Another example of how Apple is trying to make Mavericks more efficient is "Compressed Memory." This technique helps free up memory from dormant apps that don't need it. The net result: your Mac runs and wakes from sleep faster.

If you open a lot of applications, or if some of your apps need a lot of memory, your Mac will slow down. Way down. That's because your Mac runs out of physical RAM to allocate. OS X isn't in the habit of saying no, though, so what it does is create a swap file that gets written to your Mac's hard disk. That swap file contains the contents of inactive memory. Reading from that swap file and writing to it takes time, and that slows the Mac down.

Apple has ameliorated some of the effects of swap memory in machines like the MacBook Air, which uses flash storage instead of a conventional hard drive. The MacBook Air has pretty limited amounts of RAM compared to other Macs but can still run a number of applications simultaneously quicker than Macs with conventional hard drives, thanks to the speed of flash storage. And newer MacBook Airs can go even faster, with speedy PCIe-based storage.

Not all Macs have flash storage, however. And even solid state drives have their limits. The speed of SATA and PCIe interfaces are less than the direct path between the CPU and the installed RAM, creating a bottleneck.

Improving memory efficiency

Apple set out to do things a bit differently in OS X Mavericks, and they've come up with a memory compression scheme that does the trick. Here's how it works:

At any given time, dozens of different processes - applications, background tasks and more - may be running on your Mac. A lot of them you may have absolutely no awareness of, unless you open the Activity Monitor app in your Utilities folder - they're not items that appear in your Dock, and there's no way to interact with them directly.

These processes and the apps you're running may be sitting in memory but not actively using memory. But they're there, and they're grabbing a little piece of your Mac's available RAM. Cumulatively, they take up space and create the potential for slowdowns.

Apple has engineered Mavericks to be aware when your Mac is reaching its physical RAM limit. And when it does, Mavericks leaps into action and figures out which processes are active and which are inactive. It then compresses the memory that the inactive applications have allocated, which frees up more RAM. That keeps your Mac from having to write content out to and read from swap files.

According to Apple, compressing and decompressing memory happens "almost instantly," so there's no slowdown and therefore no downside for the user. Apple says that with memory compression on Mavericks, they're seeing 1.4x speed increases in system reponsiveness under load, when opening documents or reactivating inactive applications, even on machines equipped with fast SSDs.

Your Mac has to write out swap files when it goes to sleep and it needs to read the when it wakes up. There's also a big improvement in the time it takes a Mac to wake from standby - 1.5x faster, compared to Mountain Lion.

It's yet another way that Mavericks promises to improve efficiency compared to Mountain Lion and what's come before, which means a faster and better user experience for you.

Have you seen your Mac slow way down as it manages big swap files? Do you think Mavericks will make a big difference for you? How much RAM does your Mac have? I want to hear from you, so please let me know in the comments.

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/L53nxjBpJTc/story01.htm

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Korea Returning Chinese Character

The world of hangul studies and childhood education have collided in an unusually sharp argument over the future of hanja in schools.

The spark for this latest conflagration was the decision by the Seoul Department of Education to expand hanja education in its elementary and middle schools starting in the 2013 fall semester

On July 3rd, civic groups devoted to hangul and parents of schoolchildren gathered in front of the Department of Education?s office building in Jongro and held a press conference detailing their opposition to teaching hanja in elementary schools.

The Coalition for Hangul Culture, the Association for Hangul Studies, and other hangul organizations, New Right parent associations which typically voice their concerns about the Department of Education?s policies, conservative education groups and progressive education groups all stood side by side in presenting their position during the meeting.

South Korean elementary schools had been using hangul-only textbooks for the past forty years, however the hanja expansion policy introduced by Moon Yong-rin, Chairman of the Seoul Department of Education, would have marked a change back toward hanja-based education. This fundamental change lead to the unusually unified opposition showing on July 3rd.

Starting in the fall, the Seoul Department of Education will implement a policy that encourages city elementary and middle schools to use textbooks that prioritize learning hanja terminology. The department is currently looking at the demands of teaching hanja and parents? concerns in regards to hanja education.

Hangul advocates and a number of education civic groups have branded the policy ?a return to the past.?

According to critics, ?Chairman Moon is advocating for the cause of teaching hanja in school because he believes that it is difficult to understand the words in the textbooks, but he is doing so based solely on his personal feelings rather than any objective evidence.?

The opposition claims that the students have a hard time understanding the hanja-based terms in their textbooks, but that it also takes too long to teach them the characters. They say that if such is the case, it would be better to replace the difficult words with more native Korean words rather than trying to teach the hanja.

Opposition groups also suggested that the hanja education policy will place an additional burden on students, thereby pushing them to rely more on private education and tutors.

The Seoul Department of Education has responded by saying that the opposition is overreacting, since the hanja classes will be optional and taught after school hours. The classes are also intended only to improve knowledge of Korean words.

During an internal meeting last month, Chairman Moon stated that ?the hanja expansion policy is intended to increase understanding of Korean, not to undermine the hangul-only education approach?make sure that there are no misunderstandings.?

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The above was machine translated from Yonhap news.

Source: http://www.defence.pk/forums/china-far-east/266645-korea-returning-chinese-character.html

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Pink Heals tour brings cancer awareness to Oshkosh

OSHKOSH, Wis. (WFRV) - A group of pink police cars and fire trucks stopped in the City of Oshkosh to help in the fight against cancer.

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It was all part of a national cancer awareness program called Pink Heals.

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Today, the caravan traveled to stops throughout the city? where people could share their stories and sign the trucks.

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It's part of a larger group of pink emergency vehicles that travel the country spreading awareness and raising funds for cancer treatment programs.

"I think a lot of times, the healthcare system is broke, and focus is too much in service to one's self, instead of everyone you're supposed to be inspiring to help," tour founder Dave Graybill says. "We're creating immediate care by raising money without raising taxes and 100% of it directed to the people in need."

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T-shirts commemorating the stop are on sale at all Oshkosh Hardees locations.

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The money raised will go to Aurora Medical Center and Mercy Medical Center.

Source: http://wearegreenbay.com/fulltext?nxd_id=211612

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Obama?s Speech Longer Than All but One of His State of the Union Addresses

AP

BY: Washington Free Beacon Staff
July 24, 2013 3:46 pm

President Obama?s speech on jobs and the economy Wednesday in Illinois took 1 hour, 6 minutes, making it longer than every State of the Union address of his presidency except the one in?January of 2010?when he spoke for 1 hour 9 minutes.

And yet many pundits were left wondering what the point was to Obama?s lengthy remarks at Knox College today.

The Weekly Standard?s Fred Barnes called it a ?predictable bust? with ?tired ideas? that proved Obama, whose approval ratings are at their lowest point since 2011,?may be older but is anything but wiser:

And remember the ?sequester??? It was his idea to force spending cuts of $100 billion or so for 10 years.? Now, though the sequester?s impact has been chiefly to reduce our military strength, he blames Republicans for ?leaving in place a meat cleaver? that?s done everything from costing jobs to gutting education and scientific research.

As usual for an Obama speech, there?s plenty of pie in the sky.? He?ll ?rebuild run-down neighborhoods.?? He?s for making preschool available for 4-year-olds?no mention of the cost?and providing ?a vital support system for working parents.?? Translated, that means taxpayer paid babysitting.

Forbes?contributor Doug Schoen, a Democrat, derided the ?much-hyped? address as little more than a campaign-style speech that doubled down on his 2012 approach: division, polarization and moving to the left.

Washington Post?s political blog ?The Fix? said Obama?s address would change very little despite being billed by aides as a major moment for his second term:

And yet, during that same OFA fundraiser, Obama acknowledged that no matter how lofty his goals or his rhetoric, the fundamental realities of the politics of the economy were almost certain to remain unchanged.??I?m excited about the speech, not because I think the speech is going to change any minds,? he said.

Truer words were never spoken.

?The Fix? editor Chris Cillizza added afterwards, ?You could be forgiven if you thought you had heard?President Obama?s speech on the economy today before. Because you have.?

Before the speech, liberal?Washington Post columnist and?frequent MSNBC contributor Dana Milbank pondered whether yet another attempt to ?pivot? to the economy showed the chief executive was ?fresh out of ideas?:

If he?s to break through the resistance, Obama will need some bold new proposals. That?s why his speech returning to the oldies would seem to confirm that the White House has given up on big achievements.

To build interest in the new series of speeches, the White House scheduled an invitation-only briefing (RSVP required) for Monday, then set cloak-and-dagger ground rules requiring that the briefers not be quoted, even anonymously. Reporters protested, but they needn?t have worried: The official who gave the briefing made clear that there would be no new policies announced, at least not major ones and not initially.

Even the royal baby stole Obama?s thunder. News that the young prince had been named George Alexander Louis of Cambridge came during his prepared remarks.

Source: http://freebeacon.com/obamas-speech-longer-than-all-but-one-of-his-state-of-the-union-addresses/

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At least one Mursi supporter killed in Cairo protest march

CAIRO (Reuters) - At least one supporter of Egypt's deposed President Mohamed Mursi was killed on Wednesday in Cairo during a protest march, a security source and the Muslim Brotherhood said.

The Muslim Brotherhood said on its website that police in civilian clothes had opened fire using live ammunition early on Wednesday on marching Mursi supporters, killing two and injuring others.

A security source confirmed one Mursi supporter was killed.

The Muslim Brotherhood has accused the Ministry of Interior of using thugs in plain clothes to attack protesters, but security officials have denied this accusation.

In a separate incident, a bomb exploded at a police station in a province north of Cairo early on Wednesday, killing one person and wounding 17 others, Health Ministry and security sources told Reuters.

Unknown assailants threw the bomb from a passing car in Mansoura, the capital of Dakhalia province, two security sources said.

Nine people were killed in Cairo on Tuesday in clashes between opponents and Islamist supporters of Mursi who was toppled by the army earlier this month.

(Reporting By Shadia Nasralla; Editing by Philip Barbara)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/least-one-mursi-supporter-killed-cairo-protest-march-040625085.html

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