Links - 11th August 2013

"Seeing the glass as half empty is more positive than seeing it as half full. Through such a lens the only choice is to pour more. That is righteous pessimism." - Criss Jami

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'No link' between sleep, tiredness - "New Swedish research has shown that there is little or no relation between how much sleep people get at night and how tired they feel, the head researcher said. "The length of sleep is not a good measurement to analyse whether we get enough sleep or not," Torbjoern Aakerstedt told AFP of the studies conducted at the Stress Research Institute of Stockholm University. "It's genetically conditioned and dependent on age and health," he said."

LulzSec Suspect Learns Even HideMyAss.com Has Limits - "Users of anonymous email services: read your terms of service carefully. The limits of what some anonymous email services will tolerate became clear last week, over revelations that VPN service provider HideMyAss.com, based in the United Kingdom, turned over information that led to the arrest of 23-year-old Cody Kretsinger in Phoenix"

3 girls who shaved head bald for charity told to wear wigs in school by principal - "The school's rules do not allow "punk, unfeminine or sloppy hairstyles". Said principal Marion Tan: "It's very clear in our mission: it's about their turnout as a young lady." And if the girls were allowed to go bald, others might take advantage. "Can you imagine if I were to say yes, I'd have everybody coming to school with a bald head. Sometimes it's a fad, so they would take advantage of the situation"... Three other schools, whose female students took part in Hair for Hope, told The Straits Times that students were allowed to go bald"

Breasts lead to arrest of Anonymous hacker - "Also on display was a picture of a woman, her breasts lowering themselves tantalizingly toward the camera, with a sign beneath them reading: "''PwNd by w0rmer & CabinCr3w <3 u BiTch's''... the photograph of the breasts apparently linked authorities to Ochoa -- because, taken with an iPhone, it contained GPS information. The information allegedly suggested she lived in Melbourne, Australia. Further burrowing led the police to discover a posting on Ochoa's Facebook page that allegedly revealed his girlfriend was Australian. The claim is that police have managed to match pictures of her that Ochoa allegedly posted on Facebook to the breast image. To the untrained eye, this might seem curious, as the Facebook pictures allegedly show her face, while the taunting picture does not. Perhaps the authorities have gone beyond mere facial-recognition technology and are in possession of software that can match other bodily parts with astonishing accuracy."

Unrepentant 'bongo bongo land’ Ukip MEP says he'll 'apologise to country's ambassador' - "Asked what he would do if he was criticised by the Ukip leadership Mr Bloom said: “I’d say righto, sorry, sorry everybody. If I’ve offended anybody in bongo bongo land I shall write to the ambassador at the Court of St James and apologise to him personally.” After laughing Mr Bloom added: “My job is to upset the Guardian and the BBC. I love it. I love it.” Today presenter James Naughtie replied: “You’re not upsetting anyone here. It’s quite entertaining in fact.” In the footage of his July speech at the meeting in Wordsley, near Stourbridge, Mr Bloom says: "How we can possibly be giving a billion pounds a month when we're in this sort of debt to bongo bongo land is completely beyond me.”"

Women Aggressive Toward 'Sexy' Peers - ""I was convinced, having lived a life as a woman, that we're not as pleasant as some people make us out to be"... Vaillancourt invited 86 women to participate in a study on conflict resolution. But she was really interested in how the women would respond to a young female student entering the room wearing either a T-shirt and khakis or a low-cut top and mini skirt... "This is not something that sort of happened," said Vaillancourt, describing the consistently "bitchy" responses. "Ninety-seven percent of the women were inappropriate"... The two women who refrained from making judgmental jabs, Vaillancourt said, were "probably checking their BlackBerrys"... "When women present themselves as being sexually available, it compromises the power-holding position of the group," said Vaillancourt. It's in the group's best interest, therefore, to punish women who violate the unspoken rule"
This is basically Why Women Hate Sluts, Prostitutes and Porn.
The main culprits of "slut-shaming"... are other women. But of course they don't get blamed because only men are evil, since third-wave feminism "argues for gender equality yet holds men and women to completely different standards"
Apparently "51% of workplace bullies are females who victimize other women"

What’s an Idea Worth? - NYTimes.com - "There would be no time sheets, no dress code and, most radical of all, no billable hours. He was convinced, in fact, that the billable hour was part of a series of mistakes that took all the fun out of his profession. To him, it seemed like a relic of a dying economic age and one that was depriving his industry of billions in profit. The notion of charging by units of time was popularized in the 1950s, when the American Bar Association was becoming alarmed that the income of lawyers was falling precipitously behind that of doctors (and, worse, dentists)... Just as Apple doesn’t want to be in the generic MP3-player business, Blumer didn’t want to be just one more guy competing to charge a few hundred dollars an hour to do your taxes. A few years ago, he said, he realized that the billable hour was undercutting his value — it was his profession’s commodity, suggesting to clients that he and his colleagues were interchangeable containers of finite, measurable units that could be traded for money. Perhaps the biggest problem, though, was that billing by the hour incentivized long, boring projects rather than those that required specialized, valuable insight that couldn’t (and shouldn’t) be measured in time. Paradoxically, the billable hour encouraged Blumer and his colleagues to spend more time than necessary on routine work rather than on the more nuanced jobs"

Only Sith Deal In Absolutes! | Deconstructing Dark Forces Part 2: The End of Continuity - "If this Star Wars character was intended as a caricature of the philosopher, it is of the most unflattering sort. Depicted as a bulbous-headed, gangly, fanged, four-eyed, triple-jointed limbed member of the alien Ketton race, Derrida is not only an Imperial spy but hideous. Still, the biggest strike against the likelihood of mockery is that, beyond describing the Derrida character as fond of "mischief," for which the real-life Derrida has a reputation, there are no overt parodies of Deconstructionist philosophies in the alien's bio. As a definitive strike against this interpretation, however, the Derrida of Alliance Intelligence Reports is not only philosophically indifferent, but a female--suggesting that if the authors had any intention of parodying Derrida, it's so convoluted you'd probably have to be a Deconstructionist to figure it out. Fortunately, I can help with that."

Why is cycling so popular in the Netherlands? - "The bike is an integral part of everyday life rather than a specialist's accessory or a symbol of a minority lifestyle, so Dutch people don't concern themselves with having the very latest model of bike or hi-tech gadgets"

Traders resort to various means to ward off evil spirits - Oct. 31, 2003 - " From wearing the same lucky tie or underwear every day to using the same brand of pen, some traders are very superstitious when it comes to trading -- Halloween or no Halloween. .. Experts said that superstitions generally run high in jobs that involve risk. "Traders have a very high-pressure job and it's very intense," Dr. Bennett Leventhal, professor at the University of Chicago, told CNNfn. "I think that for many of them the superstitions and the little rituals help them decrease the level of the pressure, the tension and the anxiety.""

Apple's Crystal Prison and the Future of Open Platforms | Electronic Frontier Foundation - "Two weeks ago, Steve Wozniak made a public call for Apple to open its platforms for those who wish to tinker, tweak and innovate with their internals. EFF supports Wozniak's position: while Apple's products have many virtues, they are marred by an ugly set of restrictions on what users and programmers can do with them. This is most especially true of iOS, though other Apple products sometimes suffer in the same way. In this article we will delve into the kinds of restrictions that Apple, phone companies, and Microsoft have been imposing on mobile computers; the excuses these companies make when they impose these restrictions; the dangers this is creating for open innovation; why Apple in particular should lead the way in fixing this mess. We also propose a bill of rights that need to be secured for people who are purchasing smartphones and other pocket computers. Apple's recent products, especially their mobile iOS devices, are like beautiful crystal prisons, with a wide range of restrictions imposed by the OS, the hardware, and Apple's contracts with carriers as well as contracts with developers. Only users who can hack or "jailbreak" their devices can escape these limitations... Apple understands the importance of open platforms: their devices wouldn't exist without them... No place, and no system, can be perfect if it denies its citizens the freedom to change it, or the freedom to leave."
"The company's approach significantly differed from Wozniak's own while working at the company, he said, recalling his push to allow the Apple II to have eight expansion slots for additional memory, external storage and accessories. "Steve Jobs only wanted two slots - a printer and a modem is all people need. He never did engineering, he never wrote a program, he never came from what I did""

Fox News Host Never Asked Baptist College Professor Why He Wrote Book About Islam - "Last Friday, Fox News’s online show Spirited Debate conducted an interview with religious scholar Reza Aslan, a professor of religion, about his new book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. Aslan subsequently spent the entire interview defending his right as a religious scholar — a religious scholar who happens to be a Muslim — to write a historical book about Jesus. While host Lauren Green, the main religion correspondent for Fox News, spent the interview asking Aslan about his Muslim faith, Green never asked a professor from a university affiliated with Southern Baptists why he wrote a book about Islam in an interview two years earlier."

Father of bride walks her up the aisle... and marries her - "For Reverend Chris Woadden his duties did not end when he and his daughter Nancy reached the front of the church. As the vicar of St Peter's Church in Holton-le-Clay, Grimsby, he also conducted the service as his daughter tied the knot with her fiance Steven Dowey"
At first I thought this meant... something else

Xinhua tries to show Western execution, publishes fetish porn instead [SFW] - "Xinhua has published a gallery of images that it claims are stills from a Western execution, but which are actually screen-captures from fetish execution-porn. The gallery (here) is titled "Actual Record of Female Inmate's Execution - Exposing the World's Darkest Side," but features images from a porn titled "Lethal Injection""

Threesomes, sex with your friends, their colleagues and being more adventurous: Cosmopolitan sex survey reveals what men think about in bed - "While most men surveyed have slept with just one to three women, an energetic three per cent claim their 'number' is over 100 - but only half have had a one night stand. When asked if they could change one thing about their sexual past, 36 per cent wish they'd slept with more women and 32 per cent wish they'd been more adventurous... When it comes to their ideal woman, men say confidence is key, with 76 per cent saying they want a partner who knows what she's doing. Nearly half of all men questioned (44 per cent) think kissing is the most intimate thing a couple can do."
At first I thought 1-3 was quite low, but then I remembered that this is a winner-takes-all market