Sunday, February 14, 2016

My tax dollars at work? I would ask what they were thinking, but clearly they were not thinking.
I am a radicalised goat hell-bent on jihad’ – the FBI’s new anti-Isis video game
I’m a susceptible goat speeding down the path to Islamic extremism, but first I must negotiate the green-and-grey blocks of infidel propaganda. No, wait; I’m a radicalised goat, hell-bent on jihad, but my extremist beliefs are threatened by green-and-grey blocks of debate. Or could it be that I’m trying to master the FBI’s virtually unplayableit’s almost as infuriating as Flappy Bird – new online anti-extremism game, which involves manoeuvring a wayward goat through a sub-Minecraft-style obstacle course whose metaphorical intent is all but unfathomable?
The game, entitled Slippery Slope, is supposed to educate impressionable kids on “the distorted logic of blame that can lead a person into violent extremism”, but it’s also indicative of how clueless governments can be when it comes to reaching out to the kids. Slippery Slope is part of an online initiative launched by the FBI called Don’t Be a Puppet: Pull Back the Curtain on Violent Extremism, which uses games and quizzes to inform young people about radicalisation.


(Related) I had to check to be certain it was real!
What is Violent Extremism?


(Related) But don't believe just one website.


(Related)
FBI tries to keep kids from becoming terrorists by creating world’s worst video game




This pretty much fails to sum him up. Even when I didn't agree, I found his writing amusing.
Longest-serving member of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia dies
by Sabrina I. Pacifici on Feb 13, 2016




'cause I'm a jazz fan.
Montreux Jazz Festival Launches Video Archive Spanning Almost 50 Years
by Sabrina I. Pacifici on Feb 13, 2016
Via The Quietus: “Montreux Jazz Festival turns 50 in July this year. To celebrate, the Swiss festival has launched a new digital platform for its archive of concert videos. Montreux Jazz Live is the culmination of an eight-year project to digitise the festival’s video archive, which goes back to 1967. Currently featuring over 800 videos, Montreux Jazz Live presents a wide range of festival footage in one place, with detailed information about each artist and show, intuitive links and playlists.”




I suspect that if students found a paper they wanted to use in their dissertation, they would have to pay for a legitimate copy. On the other hand, you can pay for a lot of stuff that might fit into your dissertation but which turns out to be worthless. Just saying.
Database of 48 million pirated research papers is focus of litigious revolt against paywalls
by Sabrina I. Pacifici on Feb 13, 2016
Meet the Robin Hood of Science by Simon Oxenham – The tale of how one researcher has made nearly every scientific paper ever published available for free to anyone, anywhere in the world.
“On September 5th, 2011, Alexandra Elbakyan, a researcher from Kazakhstan, created Sci-Hub, a website that bypasses journal paywalls, illegally providing access to nearly every scientific paper ever published immediately to anyone who wants it. The website works in two stages, firstly by attempting to download a copy from the LibGen database of pirated content, which opened its doors to academic papers in 2012 and now contains over 48 million scientific papers. The ingenious part of the system is that if LibGen does not already have a copy of the paper, Sci-hub bypasses the journal paywall in real time by using access keys donated by academics lucky enough to study at institutions with an adequate range of subscriptions. This allows Sci-Hub to route the user straight to the paper through publishers such as JSTOR, Springer, Sage, and Elsevier. After delivering the paper to the user within seconds, Sci-Hub donates a copy of the paper to LibGen for good measure, where it will be stored forever, accessible by everyone and anyone.”




For the Gaming Club.
1,500 Windows 3.1 shareware apps are now free, immortalized on your browser
… Now, Scott and his crew have done it again with the Windows 3.X Showcase—made up of a whopping 1,523 downloads (and counting), all running in a surprisingly robust, browser-based JavaScript emulation of Windows 3.1.
… The primary "3.X Showcase" landing page should be your first stop, which contains a small, curated selection of notable and weird offerings. SkiFree's monstrous, cartoonish yeti roams free and wild here, as do some card, gambling, chess, and board games. (One of those, Merlin, puts some fantasy twists on the game Risk and asks players to find and bring a key to "the Gate of Billium, called Bill Gates.")
… For Scott's money, the appeal of this Windows 3.X Showcase comes from the deeper dives afforded by its separate game, app, "toy," and "productivity" archives. (The games library is by far the largest, having more than 1,100 entries as of press time.) In many cases, you'll have to click around to figure out just what an app is about—like "filesave," an application that exists solely to save any open documents from other programs, or "gravity," a graphically simple simulation app that can be used to determine planets' orbits based on various points of data.
The whole collection offers quite the 3.1 rabbit hole. Need a legally dubious Ms. Pac-Man clone? Say hello to Ms. Chomp. How about a Magic 8 Ball simulator? Right here. What about an app whose sole purpose is to help users keep tabs on whether or not their Domino's Pizza order arrived within the chain's guaranteed 30-minute window of the early '90s? Pizza.exe to the rescue.


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