No, you’re not entitled to your opinion

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10 October 2012
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In Rights, Science
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Every year, I try to do at least two things with my students at least once. First, I make a point of addressing them as philosophers — a bit cheesy, but hopefully it encourages active learning.

Secondly, I say something like this: I’m sure you’ve heard the expression ‘everyone is entitled to their opinion’. Perhaps you’ve even said it yourself, maybe to head off an argument or bring one to a close. Well, as soon as you walk into this room, it’s no longer true. You are not entitled to your opinion. You are only entitled to what you can argue for.

A bit harsh? Perhaps, but philosophy teachers owe it to our students to teach them how to construct and defend an argument — and to recognize when a belief has become indefensible.

The problem with I’m entitled to my opinion is that, all too often, it’s used to shelter beliefs that should have been abandoned. It becomes shorthand for I can say or think whatever I like — and by extension, continuing to argue is somehow disrespectful. And this attitude feeds, I suggest, into the false equivalence between experts and non-experts that is an increasingly pernicious feature of our public discourse — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Governments Seek Control Of Internet

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10 October 2012
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In Politics, Rights, Technology
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It is the most important meeting you’ve never heard of — a behind-closed-doors battle for control of the internet that one of the web’s founders fears may put government handcuffs on the net.

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a United Nations organisation representing 193 countries, is reviewing international agreements governing telecommunications with a view to expanding its regulatory authority over the internet.

The ITU will hold a summit in Dubai in December where member countries will negotiate a treaty (last updated 24 years ago in Melbourne) that sets out regulations on how international voice, data and video traffic is handled — via redwolf.newsvine.com

How The Hard Drive Crisis Led To One Company Buying Up 5.5PB Of Costco Storage

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10 October 2012
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In Business, Technology
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Flooding in Thailand made getting a hard drive a lot more expensive late last year. It wasn’t a huge deal to most of us, but for a small cloud storage company, it was almost death. Staying alive took creativity. And Costco.

About a year ago, the 3TB internal drives that Blackblaze — which sells unlimited cloud storage for $US5 a month — had been using shot up from about $US130 to $US360. And while the human cost of the floods was enormous, the company also needed to do something to keep itself afloat.

It turned to cheaper external drives. Basically, the answer was to buy the drives, rip them open and stick their guts into the 135TB pods that the company uses — like shucking an oyster. Costco had the best deals, and employees went there to buy 50 or so 3TB external drives at a time. Then things really started to get complicated:

The Two Drive Limit signs started appearing in retail stores in mid-November. At first we didn’t believe them, but we quickly learned otherwise. Sometimes, we talked our way into more, but we heard 2 is the limit a lot. We started doing drive math: 2 drives a day per store, times 3 stores per day, times 5 farmers, times 7 days a week is 210 drives. That would be sufficient, but in reality it didn’t work out that way. Stores were stocking out of drives on a regular basis and we really couldn’t farm everyday, but we kept at it. One Wednesday afternoon, after working all day at Backblaze, Yev circled the San Francisco Bay hitting local Costco and Best Buy stores — 10 stores, 46 drives, 212 miles on his Nissan

— via redwolf.newsvine.com

British Library tracks rise and fall of file formats

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10 October 2012
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In History, Technology
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File formats and the software capable of reading them are living longer than previously thought, according to a British Library and UK Web Archive study.

Formats over Time: Exploring UK Web History (PDF, slides as PDF) considers 2.5 billion files author Andrew N Jackson retrieved with the help of the Internet Archive and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). All the files come from the UK web domain and come from the period between 1996 and 2010.

Jackson used Apache Tika and PRONOM’s DROID tool to inspect the files and determine the format they use. Central to the research was Jeff Rothenberg’s 1997 prediction that Digital Information Lasts Forever — Or Five Years, Whichever Comes First. Jackson is also keen on a rebuttal from David Rosenthal, who he quotes as saying “when challenged, proponents of [format migration strategies] have failed to identify even one format in wide use when Rothenberg [made that assertion] that has gone obsolete in the intervening decade and a half.”

Jackson’s take is that file formats seem to last rather longer than five years even if they don’t survive forever — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Pakistani Activist, 14, Is Shot by Taliban

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10 October 2012
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In Rights, World
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A spokesman for the Taliban in Pakistan’s Swat Valley took responsibility for the shooting on Tuesday of a 14-year-old activist who is an outspoken advocate of education for girls. The attack on Malala Yousafzai, who was shot in the head on her way home from school in Mingora, the region’s main city, outraged many Pakistanis, but a Taliban spokesman told a newspaper that the group would target the girl again if she survived.

Ehsanullah Ehsan, a spokesman for Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, commonly known as the Pakistani Taliban, told Reuters in a telephone interview that Malala was pro-West, she was speaking against the Taliban and she was calling President Obama her idol. He acknowledged that she was young but said that she was promoting Western culture in Pashtun areas, referring to the ethnic group in northwest Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan whose conservative values the Taliban claims to defend.

Another girl, one of two others wounded in the attack, said in a television interview with Pakistan’s Express News that a man had stopped the school bus and asked which girl was Malala before opening fire — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Cephalopod Studs / UntamedMenagerie

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10 October 2012
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In Craft, Wildlife
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Brushed stainless steel earring measure 25mm at widest point and 0.3mm thick. Octopuses are attached to surgical steel posts with a strong adhesive. Titanium butterfly backs are included. Please handle the intricate tentacles with care — via Etsy

House in Buzen / Suppose Design Office

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9 October 2012
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In Design
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The way in which children always seem to find the most fun in any living space was the inspiration behind this house in Buzen, Japan. It incorporates an interior courtyard and a collection of disconnected structures to bring to life the feeling of a child at play.

Created by Suppose Design Office, the house in Buzen brings the excitement of exterior streets and alleys into the home itself — but without the danger, dirt and strangers — via Dornob

Twitter outage caused by human error, domain briefly yanked

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9 October 2012
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In Technology
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An outage that broke hyperlinks on Twitter yesterday evening originated with a simple human error at a Melbourne, Australia-based hosting firm that was responding to an abuse complaint, CNET has learned.

Twitter last year began to abbreviate all hyperlinks using its t.co domain name — which had the side effect of introducing a central point of failure where none existed before. That failure happened last night around 11.30pm PT when t.co went offline, meaning millions of Twitter users received non-existent domain errors when trying to follow links.

A spokesman for Melbourne IT, a domain name registrar which Twitter uses for t.co, told CNET this afternoon that: Yesterday in the process of actioning a phishing complaint, our policy team inadvertently placed the t.co domain on hold. The error was realised and rectified in approximately 40 minutes and t.co links again began working — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Rusty-Spotted Cats / Berlin Zoo

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9 October 2012
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The Berlin Zoo is celebrating the first birth of Rusty-Spotted Cats in its 168-year history. Rusty-Spotted Cats are the world’s smallest wild cats, weighing only 0.9 to 1.6kg as adults.

The two kittens were born on 5 August and have only recently begun to leave their den to explore their exhibit. Playful, clumsy, and a little awkward, the two female youngsters are a delight to zoo guests. At birth, kittens typically weigh just 60-77g.

— via ZooBorns

Bing is the most heavily poisoned search engine, study says

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9 October 2012
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In Technology
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Bing search results are more affected by poisoning than those of other search engines, according to a study by SophosLabs.

Search engine poisoning attacks are designed to skew results so that dodgy sites — anything from malware infected websites to payday loan sites — appear prominently in the index of sites related to popular search terms. In many cases the tactic is so successful that malware sites appear in the first page of results for popular search terms, in sometimes much higher than legitimate websites. More recently, miscreants have began trying to manipulate image search results — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Lunch lady slammed for food that is too good

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8 October 2012
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In Food, Politics
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A talented head cook at a school in central Sweden has been told to stop baking fresh bread and to cut back on her wide-ranging veggie buffets because it was unfair that students at other schools didn’t have access to the unusually tasty offerings.

Annika Eriksson, a lunch lady at school in Falun, was told that her cooking is just too good.

Pupils at the school have become accustomed to feasting on newly baked bread and an assortment of 15 vegetables at lunchtime, but now the good times are over.

The municipality has ordered Eriksson to bring it down a notch since other schools do not receive the same calibre of food — and that is unfair.

Moreover, the food on offer at the school doesn’t comply with the directives of a local healthy diet scheme which was initiated in 2011, according to the municipality — via redwolf.newsvine.com

eBay frets as right to resell comes under scrutiny

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8 October 2012
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In Rights, Technology
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eBay has launched a grass roots campaign to defend America’s first sale doctrine, as a Supreme Court hearing approaches that could subject second-hand and resale trades to the approval of rights-holders.

The online auctioneer is lobbying in defense of the first sale doctrine, and has launched eBay Main Street to mobilise its merchants.

The first sale doctrine — in essence, your right to sell your property — will be put under the spotlight in a case sparked by a student reselling textbooks bought outside the USA.

At issue is a decision by a lower court that as far as books are concerned, the doctrine only applies to copies made in America — a decision that forbids what Australians would recognise as parallel imports.

Rather than being confined to books, however, the Appeals Court ruling in the case of Kirtsaeng v John Wiley & Sons soon to be examined by the Supreme Court covers all copyright works — via redwolf.newsvine.com

With The Oatmeal’s help, nonprofit buys property to build a Tesla Museum

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8 October 2012
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In Science
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On Friday, a group known as the Tesla Science Centre at Wardenclyffe, formerly known as Friends of Science East, purchased 16 acres on eastern Long Island to create a Tesla museum and science centre. Matt Inman, creator of the Web cartoon The Oatmeal, encouraged his readers to contribute to the non-profit’s purchase, calling its goal, a simple feat… only expensive. Inman set out to raise $850,000, but ended up raising close to $1.4 million for the establishment of what will be America’s first museum dedicated to scientist Nikola Tesla.

The New York Times reports that Inman’s fundraiser saw donations from residents of over 100 different countries. Inman donated the proceeds of the fundraiser to the nonprofit, which purchased the Long Island property from the Agfa Corporation. The corporation used the land from 1969 to 1992, but decided to put it up for sale in 2009 — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Oriental Small-clawed Otters / Edinburgh Zoo

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8 October 2012
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In Wildlife
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Edinburgh Zoo‘s Oriental Small-clawed Otters welcomed five newborns to the raft in July this year — and now the 10 week old pups have started venturing out and about in their enclosure. The quintuplets were born to mum Elena and dad Ray — their third litter since arriving at the Zoo, making them experts when it comes to rearing pups. The youngsters have only recently started to explore their new surroundings under the watchful eyes of their older sisters, Eliza and Aisha, and of course their protective parents. Keepers have sexed the 10 week olds as three females and two males, who have yet to be named — via ZooBorns

1969 Norton Commando / Damian Bombardiere

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7 October 2012
41 second read
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In Design
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Damian Bombardiere bought his 1969 Norton Commando on the cheap from eBay three years ago. The seller mentioned a bottom-end noise, but I found it was simply a loose tappet. With non-matching numbers and a bizarre stepped backbone frame—perhaps to suit a short rider — Damian rode the Norton for a year while debating what to do with it — via Custom Norton Commando

Republican congressman Paul Broun dismisses evolution and other theories

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7 October 2012
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In Politics, Science
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A Republican congressman who sits on the science committee of the House of Representatives has dismissed evolution, the Big Bang theory and embryology as lies straight from the pit of hell.

Paul Broun, who is running for re-election as Georgia representative this November unopposed by Democrats, made the comments during a speech at a baptist church last month. A videoclip of the event was posted on YouTube on Friday — via redwolf.newsvine.com

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