Category: rePosts

13. Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge
Like Neuromancer, this novel is largely about humans but contains an AI character who winds up being one of the most intriguing in the novel. Rabbit is an AI who seems to have either built himself or come to life emergence-style out of existing programs. In Vinge’s world, humans wear augmented reality glasses and wearable computers that allow them to exist in a virtual landscape, an overlay of data on the real world. So Rabbit can seem to move around in the real world, even though he’s actually a disembodied AI with many of the characteristics of Neuromancer. He doesn’t reanimate dead humans, but he does have mysterious purposes of his own that humans can’t understand – and he saves many human lives in a riddly, trickster-like fashion. By the end of the novel, which is one of the best you’ll read about the internet of the near future, the character you most want to know more about is the mysterious, powerful Rabbit.
via 15 Books That Will Change the Way You Look at Robots.

MORE MILLIONAIRES, BIGGER GAP
The city-state has seen a huge rise in wealth over the past decade as it positioned itself as a luxury low-tax base for ultra-wealthy people from across the world.
Per-capita GDP of S$65,048 exceeds that of the United States and Germany. And surveys highlight how Singapore, with a population of 5.4 million people, has more millionaires per capita than any other country. The Economist Intelligence Unit ranks it as the world’s sixth most expensive city.
But data published by the CPF shows the proportion of Singaporeans earning less than half the median income – an international yardstick for measuring the proportion of poor people — rose to 26 percent in 2011 from 16 percent in 2002.
“As one of the world’s richest nations, we can afford to do better,” Caritas Singapore, the Catholic Church’s social outreach arm, said at the launch of an advertising and social media campaign to highlight the plight of the poor.
About 12 percent of the 2 million Singaporeans at work earn less than S$1,000 a month. Whereas, Hui Weng Tat, an associate professor in economics at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, reckons a typical worker needs a minimum S$1,400-S$1,500 a month to cope with living costs.
The city-state’s Gini co-efficient, a measure of income inequality, hit 0.478 in 2012, according to government figures, higher than every other advanced economy aside from Hong Kong.
Unlike Hong Kong, Singapore has not set an official poverty line, and the government has rejected calls to introduce a minimum wage.
What PAP has done is to make it harder for firms to recruit low-cost foreigners, tighten requirements to boost wages at the low-end, and amend labour laws to give more job security.
There are also plans to expand social protection and increase spending on healthcare. And while Singapore isn’t going to raise income tax anytime soon, it has raised taxes on bigger cars and luxury homes.
“There’s more to be done,” Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam said during a recent dialogue with diplomats and university students. “I’m not satisfied with the situation in the way it is.”
via As Singapore gets richer, more people left behind | ABS-CBN News.

t times, one does some hand-wringing about the movies. Are the nerds ruining everything? Where are the nonwhite people? Where’s Emma Stone? Where’s Sharon Stone? Would Roger Ebert have liked this movie? Is Steven Soderbergh truly serious about hanging it all up?
Ah, yes, that. Back in February, Soderbergh released a diabolical block of ice called Side Effects with three sharp but sadly forgotten performances by Rooney Mara, Jude Law, and Catherine Zeta-Jones. In April, Soderbergh delivered a keynote speech at the San Francisco International Film Festival about the death of art in the movies.
He focused on ignorant film executives and the proliferation of releases based on comic books. His remarks were refreshingly candid and tinged with a kind of entitled dismay. He was biting a hand that used to feed him. Whether or not his point was self-serving, he had one, and it was resonant: The movies are doomed.
That, of course, didn’t feel at all true this year. But the impacts of global warming don’t hit you all at once, either. For now, it still snows in winter. Soderbergh is looking grimly at the long game, and in doing so, it’s probably obvious whom he’s reminiscent of. Harold Camping would have had an exact date. But Soderbergh’s no dummy; he’s just preparing us to expect less snow.
via The Year in Movies – Grantland.

Nearly the entire history of the NBA suggests that a team wishing to win the title must have one of the 10 or 15 best players alive — and preferably one of the half-dozen best. There have been exceptions, including the famous 2004 Pistons. But they are rare.
The most common means of obtaining said franchise player is via the draft when he is first eligible to enter the NBA. You can certainly land those guys after the top few picks; the Mavs did so with Dirk Nowitzki (no. 9), the Celtics with Paul Pierce (no. 10), the Lakers with Kobe Bryant (no. 13, in a draft-day trade Kobe’s team strong-armed in concert with Jerry West), and now the Pacers with Paul George (no. 10). And the Rockets have recently reminded us that shrewd cap management and a pile of gain-an-inch trades can provide the flexibility required to either sign a star-level free agent or trade for one seeking a new environment. That’s how the Celtics got Kevin Garnett, and Boston (along with Phoenix and a handful of other teams) may be in the early stages of a similar process now.
But the best odds of snagging such a player lay in being very bad, getting some lottery luck, and drafting in one of the first two or three slots. That path is NOT a fail-safe, of course. The Bobcats tanked the 2011-12 lockout season and ended up with Michael Kidd-Gilchrist instead of Anthony Davis. The Bucks, Raptors, and Blazers won the lotteries in years when most of the league found itself infatuated with big-man prospects who turned out to be the wrong choices at the very top.
via The NBA’s Possible Solution for Tanking: Good-bye to the Lottery, Hello to the Wheel – The Triangle Blog – Grantland.

13. The classic rock station is now playing your high school playlist.
via 30 Unexpected Things You Learn In Your Thirties.

In a thoughtful essay for The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal recently made the case that after years of prioritizing “nowness,” the Internet is slowly pulling back from what he calls “the stream.” By this he means a move away from the fevered gush of Twitter and the Facebook timeline and toward a version of online life that is a little more removed, a touch more calm. A lake, not a river. One can’t keep up with everything, so why even try? To make his case, he points to the rise of the proudly impermanent Snapchat, evergreen and “snowfalled” longform stories, and, yes, Netflix’s season-dumping strategy. Rather than mourning the loss of the collective, he considers these moves from the opposite perspective: Taking a step back not only allows the breathing room necessary to appreciate and process, it restores a cultural sense of boundaries, of beginnings and endings. In TV’s post-stream future, we might share less but appreciate more. Everybody’s watching. Does it matter if we’re all looking in different directions?
via ‘Breaking Bad,’ ‘Black Mirror,’ and the Year in Television – Grantland.

:26
Danielle Calixto, manager of a children’s boutique in downtown Miami, sat among season-ticket holders in row 26, section 124. She had purchased two tickets on Stubhub for $287 apiece and brought her boss’s eight-year-old daughter, Diandra. “The season-ticket holders were all getting up, shaking hands, telling each other, ‘I’ll see you next season,’ ” Calixto says. “I told them, ‘You’re going to regret this,’ and they said, ‘Yeah, you’re funny.’ Diandra started crying because everybody was leaving, and she didn’t understand why we weren’t leaving too. We were surrounded by empty seats. She wanted to call her mom. I told her, ‘You just have to sit here right now and believe with me.’ ”
via In 29 seconds Ray Allen, Miami Heat swung 2013 NBA Finals – NBA – Lee Jenkins – SI.com.

DB2 JDBC Driver and URL Information
Listed below are connection examples for three common JDBC drivers for IBM DB2:
IBM DB2 Universal Driver Type 4
DRIVER CLASS: com.ibm.db2.jcc.DB2Driver
DRIVER LOCATION: db2jcc.jar and db2jcc_license_cu.jar
(Both of these jars must be included)
JDBC URL FORMAT: jdbc:db2://<host>[:<port>]/<database_name>
JDBC URL Examples:
jdbc:db2://127.0.0.1:50000/SAMPLE
IBM DB2 Universal Driver Type 2
DRIVER CLASS: com.ibm.db2.jcc.DB2Driver
DRIVER LOCATION: db2jcc.jar and db2jcc_license_cu.jar
(Both of these jars must be included)
JDBC URL FORMAT: jdbc:db2:<database_name>
JDBC URL Examples:
jdbc:db2:sample
App JDBC Driver
In order to be able to use the DB2 App driver, certain software must be installed on your machine. This usually entails installing the IBM DB2 Client software. See IBM’s site for more information.
DRIVER CLASS: COM.ibm.db2.jdbc.app.DB2Driver
DRIVER LOCATION: To use the App driver, the DB2 client software should be installed on your machine. The name of the file that contains the DB2 App driver is usually db2java.zip. However, this may change depending on the version of the client software that is installed. Usually, the DB2 client software is installed in the SQLLIB directory. For example, if you are using Windows, the following may be the location of the db2java.zip file: c:\SQLLIB\java12\db2java.zip
JDBC URL FORMAT: jdbc:db2:<database_name>
JDBC URL Examples:
jdbc:db2:test
Net JDBC Driver
DRIVER CLASS: COM.ibm.db2.jdbc.net.DB2Driver
DRIVER LOCATION: The DB2 Net drivers can be obtained by installing the DB2 client software from IBM. Depending on the version of the client software, the net drivers are usually contained in the db2java.zip file. For example, if using Windows, the following may be the location of the db2java.zip file that contains the drivers: c:\SQLLIB\java12\db2java.zip
JDBC URL FORMAT: jdbc:db2://<host>:<port>/<database_name>
The default port for IBM DB2 is many times one of the following: 446, 6789, or 50000. Usually, if the default port is being used by the database server, the :<port> value of the JDBC url can be omitted.
JDBC URL Examples:
jdbc:db2://neptune.acme.com:6789/test
jdbc:db2://127.0.0.1:6789/test
via DB2 JDBC Driver and URL Information.

If anyone could claim to be leading by example in an age of austerity, it is José Mujica, Uruguay’s president, who has forsworn a state palace in favour of a farmhouse, donates the vast bulk of his salary to social projects, flies economy class and drives an old Volkswagen Beetle.
But the former guerrilla fighter is clearly disgruntled by those who tag him “the world’s poorest president” and – much as he would like others to adopt a more sober lifestyle – the 78-year-old has been in politics long enough to recognise the folly of claiming to be a model for anyone.
“If I asked people to live as I live, they would kill me,” Mujica said during an interview in his small but cosy one-bedroom home set amid chrysanthemum fields outside Montevideo.
via Uruguay’s president José Mujica: no palace, no motorcade, no frills | World news | The Guardian.

Glenn Greenwald and Jeffrey Toobin went head-to-head on Monday’s “AC360,” debating whether Edward Snowden was right to expose secret NSA surveillance programs.
A federal judge ruled Monday that the NSA’s surveillance of Americans’ cell phone records — a secret program that Snowden revealed to Greenwald — is likely illegal. Snowden, who fled to Russia to escape the reaches of the American government and is still seeking permanent asylum, praised the ruling in a statement.
“How could it not vindicate him?” Greenwald said about the ruling on Monday night. “I think it’s not only the right but the duty in Edward Snowden’s situation to come forward at great risk to himself and inform his fellow citizens about what it is that their government is doing in the dark that is illegal.”
via Glenn Greenwald To Jeffrey Toobin: NSA Ruling Vindicates Edward Snowden.