Built by historian and classicist Walter Scheidel and Stanford Libraries’ digital humanities specialist Elijah Meeks, with the assistance of geographer and Web developer Karl Grossner and GIS analyst Noemi Alvarez, the interactive online atlas is based on a host of data. This includes historical tide information and weather; size, grade, and surface of roads; main cities and ports; land, sea, and river routes; vehicle speed (including ships, ox carts, horse, and walking); and the cost of transport.

The time period the system centers on is about 200 CE, when Roman power was at its highest and the empire’s extent was greatest. The atlas is built from 751 sites, most of which are cities and towns, and covers about four million square miles. Two hundred sixty-eight of the sites are ports. The road network mapped on ORBIS includes 52,587 miles of road, including desert tracks and 17,567 miles of rivers and canals.

Give it a try. It’s quite informative.

Exactly how bad the body scanners are is not being divulged publicly, but the Inspector General report made eight separate recommendations on how to improve screening.

It was not immediately known when the TSA published its unclassified summary, TSA Penetration Testing of Advanced Imaging Technology. It comes with a “November 2011″ date and can be found on the DHS Office of Inspector General website under the heading “OIG Reports: Fiscal Year 2012.”

It’s not the first time the body scanners, produced by Rapiscan and L-3 Communications, have come under attack. In a three-part series last year, Wired reported that, indeed, there were suspected security flaws with them. Even the Government Accountability Office — Congress’ investigative arm — said the devices might be ineffective. And the Journal of Transportation Security suggested terrorists might fool the Rapiscan machines by taping explosive devices to their stomachs.

Many other organizations and websites have concurred since the beginning that the full body scanners are faulty, untested, and unreliable. During its entire run, the full body scanners have failed to catch a single terrorist. Nearly everything it has found (weapons and drugs) has been through the x-ray conveyor belt or via the metal detectors. Early on, Germany decided not to use full body scanners, displaying on TV just how useless they are.

Meanwhile, an unclassified version of the Inspector General report, unearthed Friday by the Electronic Information Privacy Center, may give credence to a recent YouTube video allegedly showing a 27-year-old Florida man sneaking a metallic object through two different Transportation Security Administration body scanners at American airports.

The unclassified summary said the government has spent $87 million on the scanners, which includes $10 million for “installation and maintenance.” To quiet privacy concerns, the authorities are also spending $7 million to “remove the human factor from the image review process” and replace the passenger’s image with an avatar.

No matter how much the government changes the human body on the machines to look less human, it will never allay the privacy concerns related to the full body scanners, nor will it make them more effective. Passengers who refuse to go through the machines will still be sexually assaulted by TSA pat downs.

The money spent on these useless machines will continue to go to former DHS Chief Michael Chertoff, his consulting firm, and other Washington insiders. The government defends the use of the scanners while it continues to put its citizens’ privacy and health at risk. The TSA’s representative, Blogger Bob, and TSA Chief, John Pistole, continue to defend its employees’ actions despite the fact that the TSA employees have proven time and again that they are untrustworthy, incompetent, and criminal.

The sooner DHS secretary Janet Napolitano, Pistole, and the entire TSA is scrapped, the sooner more reasonable and respectable airport security can be implemented. A first step is admitting the scanners don’t work. The next step is to remove the scanners and return to pre-9/11 security. Then, the government can start to seriously look at what actually works at the nation’s airports. Until Napolitano and Pistole are fired, however, nothing will ever change and passengers will continue to suffer at the hands of one of the most inept agencies ever created in the United States.

Image by Ed Murray, Star Ledger.

This article originally appeared at The Daily Censored.

I have played three of the four games this moron broke. Even when I believed in God and people convinced me that Led Zeppelin were doing the work of the devil, I simply sold my music and video games. I did not destroy them. Maybe it’s because I was raised to value things even if I did not ideologically agree with them.

Maybe it’s because I’ve seen and read history and understand nothing good comes from destroying things you don’t agree with. Maybe, I’m just not an ignorant asshole.

I suppose if you just want to break the stuff you buy that’s okay. The problem is that this sort of behavior then leads to protests, bannings, and burnings.

Source.

Constitutional amendment bans same-sex marriage, civil unions, and any marriage-like contract between unmarried persons
Constitutional amendment bans same-sex marriage and civil unions
Constitutional amendment bans same-sex marriage
Constitutional amendment grants legislature authority to ban same-sex marriage
No constitutional amendments

It appears that this wasn’t a big issue until around 2004 when crazy Bush and his overtly religiosity started massively taking over politics.  Click the photo for the animation to work.

No amendment
Amendment grants legislature authority to ban same-sex marriage
Amendment bans same-sex marriage
Amendment bans same-sex marriage and civil unions
Bans gay marriage, civil unions, and any marriage-like contract between unmarried persons

The ignorant fools in this country, however, will probably just call Obama an uneducated nigger. Yes, I have heard this many times from people. Oh, and while we’re on the subject of the uneducated, the most educated counties in North Carolina voted against Amendment 1.

As usual, people in the cities and more in touch with the outside world voted against Amendment 1. Those in rural areas fear homosexuals and anything else their pastors and ministers tell them to. This is an example of the type of people who are afraid of homosexuals.

My greatest hope is that our country, which realized discrimination against blacks and women was wrong, will come to understand that gays are no different from the rest of us. Sadly, I think people are returning to their 19^th century ways of thinking when they banned interracial marriage. We are taking huge steps backwards in this country.

Here’s another perspective.

I am sickened by the fact that so many of my fellow countrymen believe that this type of behavior is acceptable. It makes me ashamed and embarrassed to be an American. I lived in North Carolina for a year and I thought some of the people were a bit too simple-minded, but otherwise harmless. They aren’t. Their voluntary ignorance is helping to destroy the country and their fellow citizens’ lives with it.

TL;DR : Fuck you North Carolina and people everywhere who are threatened by something so simple and loving as gay marriage.

American Literature from Mark Twain

British Literature from Charles Dickens

It’s interesting that people don’t know or understand where their words come from anymore. When I was in school, we learned many Latin roots, making it far easier to understand medical terms. It also helped immensely when trying to figure out the meaning of a new word. If we knew roots of words, new words were easy to decipher. It’s a shame they don’t teach this anymore as it’s a valuable tool to understand the nuances of the English language.

So my friend recently has been telling grand tales of trading on Grand Fantasia, and I decided I should try the game since it seems he might actually be settling on an MMO for once. After running through the installer, I noted that the installer had quietly added (it did NOT ask to install it, or even mention that it would be installed) a little piece of adware called “Aeria Ignite”. And when I went to start the updater, this chunk of crapware started with it. Bonus: It had set itself up to start with Windows via registry key. Didn’t ask me or anything, just dropped the key in there. Allright, uninstalled that crap… and now my game won’t start.

I reinstalled the thing and did some digging. I found that the game shortcut pointed to aeria_launcher.exe, a 100K stub that checks if Ignite is installed, and if it isn’t, prompts you to install it; then it checks if Ignite is running, and if it isn’t, starts it; then it launches the REAL launcher, _Launcher.exe. No integration hooks or anything actually useful; just a malicious pseudo-launcher that forces you to run their crap.

Yes, that’s right. You can uninstall Ignite, delete aeria_launcher.exe, change the shortcut to point to _Launcher.exe, and play the game without their “required” crapware, no problem. So the app does, literally, NOTHING. Just yet another chunk of useless code to potentially cause problems.

Aeria, I’m sure you’re feeling the heat from the new competition in the F2P market, but forcing useless crapware on users is a great way to scare off more technically-minded customers. There are better F2P networks with better games that don’t make me clutter my system.

You think that’s bad. I didn’t know about the following.

Welcome to the world of F2P MMO’s, Korean ones in particular. Most stealth-install ones are there to monitor your input for abnormal behaviour or programs to prevent botting/automated keyboarding etc, but such programs walk a fine line between virus and malware.
Some examples that come to mind:

Silk Road comes with a backdoor rootkit which most virus scanners won’t pick up.

Nexon games come with ad programs which happily occupy your (desktop) screen when you exit the game. Can be manually deleted but are annoying. Login process to the game is insecure as it links to a website not using HTTPS.

Webzen and C9 have similar issues, I couldn’t even get the game to work, albeit it’s still in beta.

NCsoft has (temporarily) stopped using Pando Media Booster, which is a P2P streaming client, but some people claim to have issues with it, as well as it taking up unnecessary bandwidth during gameplay.

Several companies use Hackshield which is known to conflict with other programs.

In short, prepare for pain if you like F2P games.

The more I read the comments on reddit, the more I’m glad I don’t care for F2P games.

The European Parliament has approved the controversial data transfer agreement, the bilateral PNR (passenger name register), with the US which requires European airlines to pass on passenger information, including name, contact details, payment data, itinerary, email and phone numbers to the Department of Homeland Security.

According to the ruling, the following PNR data [pdf] will be sent:

PNR Data Types

1. PNR record locator code
2. Date of reservation/issue of ticket
3. Date(s) of intended travel
4. Name(s)
5. Available frequent flier and benefit information (i.e., free tickets, upgrades, etc.)
6. Other names on PNR, including number of travelers on PNR
7. All available contact information (including originator information)
8. All available payment/billing information (not including other transaction details linked to a credit card or account and not connected to the travel transaction)
9. Travel itinerary for specific PNR
10. Travel agency/travel agent
11. Code share information
12. Split/divided information
13. Travel status of passenger (including confirmations and check-in status)
14. Ticketing information, including ticket number, one way tickets and Automated Ticket Fare Quote
15. All baggage information
16. Seat information, including seat number
17. General remarks including OSI, SSI and SSR information
18. Any collected APIS information
19. All historical changes to the PNR listed under points 1 to 18

If a person is not on a terror watch list, no-fly list, or any other list that labels them a danger to the airline industry, then there is no need to keep any of this information. This is all erroneous information with no justifiable reason to keep innocent travelers’ information.

Under the new agreement, PNR data will be “depersonalised” after six months and would be moved into a “dormant database” after five years. However the information would still be held for a further 15 years before being fully “anonymised”.

All the information taken from passengers will be readily available and accessible for six months. PNR data is the personal details of a person. If you remove the information that identifies the person, how is any of that information useful in combating terrorism?

If this information is depersonalized, how is it useful beyond the six months? If the information is not completely anonymized until after 15 years, how do they intend to identify a person if it was already depersonalized? It should also be noted that, after 15 years, the information will still be held. It might be anonymized, but it will still be held somewhere in a database.

Unfortunately, the most depressing aspect of this story is that the European Parliament caved to US pressure in voting to send airline passenger data to the US.

Some EU politicians alleged that their colleagues had been “held to ransom”by the US authorities, who threatened to suspend visa-free travel to the US if the deal was rejected.

At this point in time, the United States is in no position to be making travel to the US more difficult than it already is. If Europe no longer has visa-free travel to America, they are more likely to travel elsewhere that does not require long waits for expensive visas. The European Parliament should have called the United States’ bluff as it cannot afford to have millions of European tourists go elsewhere for their holidays.

The United States is continuing to bully every country it can into doing their bidding. They are attempting to control worldwide copyright with TPP. They have attempted to control free speech and the internet with ACTA. They have already forced anyone flying over US airspace to hand over airline passenger data. They recently forced Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean to turn over airline passenger data even if they don’t enter US airspace.

Other countries need to stop rolling over and merely accepting whatever policy the United States creates. As long as other countries are willing to give up their sovereignty to placate the United States, citizens across the world will suffer. Intrusive, big brother surveillance is not what the world needs.

Sophie in ‘t Veld of The Netherlands has urged the EU to reject the rule. This video is from her speech in the EU Parliament in February 2012.

This article originally appeared at The Daily Censored.

Why the hell do we need to go through this sort of shit in 2012? It’s because there are still too many assholes who use religion as a tool to keep people in line.   Do what we tell you or we’ll get rid of you.  If you don’t think like we do, we’ll eliminate you.  It’s days like these that I really wish I lived in a more tolerant country.

Like Amery, I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day. Actually, the experience in the Lager with its frightful iniquity confirmed me in my non-belief. It prevented, and still prevents me from conceiving of any form of providence or transcendent justice: Why were the moribund packed in cattle cars? Why were the children sent to the gas?

I must nevertheless admit that I experienced (and again only once) the temptation to yield, to seek refuge in prayer. This happened in October 1944, in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death: when, naked and compressed among my naked companions with my personal index card in hand, I was waiting to file past the “commission” that with one glance would decide whether I should go to the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working.

For one instant I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then, despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed: one does not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, not when you are losing. A prayer under these conditions would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? and from whom?) but blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety of which a nonbeliever is capable. I rejected that temptation: I knew that otherwise, were I to survive, I would have been ashamed of it.

(The Drowned and the Saved, p. 146) – Primo Levi

If you ever get a chance to read Primo Levi, please do. His writings on his experiences in WWII and Auschwitz are extremely powerful and well worth the time.