interesting things
In his three decades as baseball’s most prominent agent, Scott Boras has faced no shortage of competition. He’s now facing a threat from Jay Z, the 43-year-old rapper turned entrepreneur and nascent sports agent.
via WSJ.com: Lifestyle http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323423804579022660231403136.html?mod=WSJ_GoogleNews
Reformed Protestantism was born in Zurich in 1522, when a few brave believers defied a church ban on eating meat during Lent. Barton Swaim reviews D.G. Hart’s “Calvinism: A History.”
via WSJ.com: Lifestyle http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324747104579023233063952314.html?mod=WSJ_GoogleNews
The living pay homage to the dead by burning paper versions of money and other items. But the value of fake bucks is escalating, creating ‘inflation’ in the ghostly underworld.
via WSJ.com: Lifestyle http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323455104579016203011548912.html?mod=WSJ_GoogleNews
The New Jersey governor will sign a bill barring therapists from trying to make gay minors straight.
via POLITICO – TOP Stories http://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/chris-christie-gay-conversion-therapy-new-jersey-95666.html
So, Google suffered a power outage on Friday evening. Old news, you may say. But that small act, where all of its services––that’s YouTube, Gmail, Google Search, Google Drive––were unreachable for a few minutes, cut Internet traffic by 40%. That is an amazing figure.
The LEDs went out in Googleland, so to speak, at around 4:37 p.m. PST, and the blackout lasted for anything between one and five minutes, according to Google’s Apps Dashboard––you can see a screenshot of its red–light status below.
According to analytics firm GoSquared, the five minutes of downtime caused a drop in traffic of 40%, before spiking “as users managed to get to their destination.”
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via Fast Company http://www.fastcompany.com/3015942/most-innovative-companies-2013/a-brief-google-outage-made-total-internet-traffic-drop-by-40?partner=rss
Genteel towns in the Litchfield Hills of Connecticut are shocked by charges against Jasper Johns’s assistant.
via NYT > Most Recent Headlines http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/19/arts/design/community-shock-at-accusations-against-jasper-johnss-aide.html
On Thursday, after reading that the NSA violated its surveillance rules 865 times in the first quarter of 2013, I wondered how big a percentage that was. On Friday, they provided an answer:
The official, John DeLong, the N.S.A. director of compliance, said that the number of mistakes by the agency was extremely low compared with its overall activities. The report showed about 100 errors by analysts in making queries of databases of already-collected communications data; by comparison, he said, the agency performs about 20 million such queries each month.
Holy crap. They perform 20 million surveillance queries per month? On the bright side, if you assume that their internal auditing really does catch every “incident,” it means they have a violation rate of about 0.001 percent. On the less bright side, they perform 20 million surveillance queries per month.
That’s genuinely hard to fathom. Is some of that automated? Or is that truly 600,000-plus human queries each and every day? The mind boggles.
via Kevin Drum Feed | Mother Jones http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/08/nsa-surveillance-database-queries
Teary ‘Blade Gunner’ charged with murdering girlfriend…
via DrudgeSiren.com – All Stories http://www.drudgesiren.com/allhl.php?id=176332#h176332
On the back of ongoing cinema building in China, Wang’s Dalian Wanda Group bought North America’s AMC Entertainment last year for $2.6 billion, making it the largest exhibitor in the world.
via Hollywood Reporter http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/chinas-richest-person-named-wang-608897
CHRISTIE TO SIGN BAN ON GAY CONVERSION THERAPY…
via DrudgeSiren.com – All Stories http://www.drudgesiren.com/allhl.php?id=176348#h176348
