Leon Atkinson's Blog, page 25

Government kills Intrade to save movie exec jobs

Stossel shares some entertaining outrage, but the WSJ coverage leads with a reference to Hollywood that’s closer to the mark. Intrade must have been terribly threatening to the practice of picking hit movies. Even a stinker makes some cash, but not if a market warns everyone beforehand.

Government Crushes Innovative Online Prediction Market

Today, Americans were told that they must close their Intrade.com accounts. That happened because the federal government agency known as the “Commodity Futures Trading Commission” (CFTC) today sued the prediction market, where people from all over the world bet about things like who will win elections.

Intrade decided all its U.S. customers must now close their accounts and withdraw their money from the site.

Related articles

How Dare You Make American Customers Happy?
Anti-Business US Government Puts a Stop to Intrade Making US Customers Happy

Government kill Intrade to save movie exec jobs

Stossel shares some entertaining outrage, but the WSJ coverage leads with a reference to Hollywood that’s closer to the mark. Intrade must have been terribly threatening to the practice of picking hit movies. Even a stinker makes some cash, but not if a market warns everyone beforehand.

Government Crushes Innovative Online Prediction Market

Today, Americans were told that they must close their Intrade.com accounts. That happened because the federal government agency known as the “Commodity Futures Trading Commission” (CFTC) today sued the prediction market, where people from all over the world bet about things like who will win elections.

Intrade decided all its U.S. customers must now close their accounts and withdraw their money from the site.

Related articles

How Dare You Make American Customers Happy?
Anti-Business US Government Puts a Stop to Intrade Making US Customers Happy

Freakonomics On Consulting

The Freakonomics podcast is great–I listen to it in bed with my Logitech Squeezebox Radio before falling asleep.  The most recent episode has Stephen Dubner talking to Robin Hason, one of the authors of the Overcoming Bias blog.

It’s about consulting: I Consult, Therefore I Am. There’s some useful (if cynical) advice, such as fifty percent of the job is nodding your head at whatever’s being said, thirty percent of it is just sort of looking good, and the other twenty percent is raising an objection but then if you meet resistance, then dropping it.

Overcoming Bias : Freakonomics On Consulting

Me in January on Too Much Consulting?:

…

The CEO often understands what needs to be done, but does not have the resources to fight this blocking coalition. But if a prestigious outside consulting firm weighs in, that can turn the status tide.

Freakonomics Radio interviewed me about it a bit later, and they’ve just put up a podcast they say was “inspired in part” by my post. In addition to me, they talk to Keith Yost, a former consultant:

Fellow consultants and associates … [said] fifty percent of the job is nodding your head at whatever’s being said, thirty percent of it is just sort of looking good, and the other twenty percent is raising an objection but then if you meet resistance, then dropping it.

FCC trolls Dish Network

It sure looks like the FCC played a dirty trick on Dish by giving approval to provide wireless service on the ground but stipulating conditions that make it impractical. I bet somebody got some nice stuff from a lobbyist.

Dish Network LTE plan: FCC chairman gives support | BGR

Good news for everyone who wants to see more competition in the United States wireless industry: Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski is throwing his weight behind Dish Network’s (DISH) proposal to use a 40MHz chunk of satellite spectrum on the 2GHz band for terrestrial LTE-Advanced services.

Related articles

FCC’s LTE plan will delay its mobile network plans, Dish says
Dish will get its 4G network, but there’s a catch

Minecraft on a Raspberry Pi

Mojang will release a version of Minecraft Pocket Edition for the Raspberry Pi, a tiny cheap computer sold by a charity that encourages young people to get interested in hacking computer hardware. My two sons are completely addicted to Minecraft and play on Windows and Ubuntu. Minecraft PE is not exactly as featureful as the ordinary version, so they probably wouldn’t care about getting a Pi and playing there.

I’ve noticed lots of innovation in tiny PCs coming out of China that run either Android or Ubuntu. In addition to tablets and laptops, there are the gamepad and HDMI stick form factors. For not much more than the Pi, you could get an HDMI stick like this: Mini MK802 Android 4.0 Google TV Box HD IPTV Player PC Allwinner A10 1G DDR3. I’m sure there’s some fun to be had putting the Pi into a box and hacking it, but it seems like one of these HDMI sticks would actually be more fun on the software side.

Minecraft is coming to Raspberry Pi!

Have you ever thought about learning to program? Where would you begin? How much would it cost? What would you need to get things moving?

The Raspberry Pi is a credit card-sized computer that’s a great starting point. It’s cheap, capable, and approachable for newbie programmers. It’s also extremely fun to play around with, no matter your experience with code. Plug it into a TV or monitor, attach a keyboard, and begin.

Soon you’ll be able to play and program with Minecraft on one of the snazzy little devices. Aron and Daniel have dedicated time to porting a version of Minecraft: Pocket Edition that comes with a revised feature set and support for multiple programming languages. We’re calling it Minecraft: Pi Edition, and it will be completely free to download.

Dogs do not naturally distinguish objects by shape

Humans tend to classify objects by shape first and then use other aspects to further specify them and turn them into abstract concepts. Dogs start with size and then rely on texture. You and I see a marble and a basketball as two examples of balls. A dog would consider the marble to be more like a small, smooth coin. It would be hilarious to have a philosophical conversation with a dog with human-level consciousness.

Fetch! First clear evidence that dogs do not naturally distinguish objects by shape

Researchers have provided the first empirical evidence that the way in which dogs relate words to objects is fundamentally different to humans.

Germany outlawing Darknets

Increasingly, people are using darknets to hide their communication from prying eyes. It looks like Germany is moving to try to punish those people. Note that in Germany, someone who unwittingly passes on a copyrighted file can be held responsible. That’s not true in the U.S.

“Anonymous” File-Sharing Darknet Ruled Illegal by German Court | TorrentFreak

A court in Hamburg, Germany, has granted an injunction against a user of the anonymous and encrypted file-sharing network RetroShare . RetroShare users exchange data through encrypted transfers and the network setup ensures that the true sender of the file is always obfuscated. The court, however, has now ruled that RetroShare users who act as an exit node are liable for the encrypted traffic that’s sent by others.

Related articles

Pirate Bay and Mega: Treating the State as Damage and Routing Around It
Tor and the internet’s anonymous community

PHP library for database version control

DBV is a library for PHP that helps manage changes to your database. Various open source projects do this in different ways. You can go the simple route of manually keeping a series of SQL files that must be executed in order. One big downside is needing to remember the conventions and following them. Plus, you must keep track of which patches have been applied.

You can automate updates and tie them to release numbers. This is how Expression Engine does it. You just need to manage your release numbers.

Another way to do it is to write a PHP script that detects the database state and executes ALTER statements as necessary. I made a solution like that from scratch before.

It looks like DBV is more sophisticated than any of these solutions.

dbv.php: Database version control, made easy!

Make sure you and your team always have the same schema structure for tables, views, procedures, etc.

Create changeset scripts and queries, commit them to your source control system, and share them with your team.

New changeset scripts are highlighted, so you know your database is in need of an update.

Something wrong with a changeset script? Fix it directly in the application interface.

Not using MySQL, or any other of the bundled DBMS adapters? Writing your own is as easy as pie!

Chevy Chase gone from Community

The writing has been great on this show, but it’s probably run its course.

Chevy Chase is off Community, effective immediately

While reports say that the decision was mutual, Chevy Chase has made a deal with NBC to leave Community and never come back. Chase had filmed the majority of the fourth season’s episodes, but there is no word yet on how the absence of his character, Pierce Hawthorne, will be addressed. Everyone who enjoyed his voicemails and borderline racist behavior will miss him dearly. (via Deadline)

Big piracy clampdown coming

Sounds like a backdoor version of SOPA. So, can we expect a retaliation from Anonymous?

One week left before US faces clamp down on piracy • The Register

As Americans settle in for the Thanksgiving weekend of food and family, filesharing traffic traditionally shows a modest rise. But those downloading content may look back on this holiday as the last golden weekend of piracy if the major ISPs have anything to do with it.

Next week AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon will be signing up to a monitoring system run by the Center for Copyright Information (CCI). This organization will check for the IP addresses engaged in peer to peer or torrent downloading of copyrighted material and alert ISPs.