Notes of Cabinet Meeting on Edmond Charles Genet, 2 August 1793. The Presidt. was much inflamed, got into one of those passions when he cannot command himself. Run on much on the personal abuse which had been bestowed on him. Defied any man on earth to produce one single act of his since he had been in the government which was not done on the purest motives. That he had never repented but once the having slipped the moment of resigning his office, and that was every moment since. That by god he had rather be in his grave than in his present situation. The Story Behind the Mysterious Guillotine on a Brooklyn Roof – VICE “So, yeah, this is kind of the idea behind that—just like, here’s your free healthcare. It’ll solve your problems.” Georgetown Law Students Object to Exam SoftwareMore than 500 law students at Georgetown University have signed a petition asking the law school to scrap its new exam software. In a letter to administrators, students raised privacy and security concerns about the Exam4 platform and objected to the requirement to install it on their personal laptops in order to take their finals. Changes to Twitter’s rules may kill off its most entertaining bots — Quartz. “But I am beginning to suspect that once we all leave […]

Glitch City – BLDGBLOG Sites of urban infrastructure and other industrial facilities integral to municipal management, from fire stations to fuel depots, appear to be the target of deliberate erasure in Baidu’s street maps. Nick Bostrom: ‘We are like small children playing with a bomb’ | Technology | The Guardian The axes of daunting-looking graphs in his papers will be calibrated on closer inspection in terms of “endurable”, “crushing” and “hellish”. In his introduction to Superintelligence, the observation “Many of the points made in this book are probably wrong” typically leads to a footnote that reads: “I don’t know which ones.” Does he sometimes feel he is morphing into Douglas Adams? These May Be the Only People Who Want Yahoo to Thrive – Bloomberg The world’s biggest oil traders take price slumps, trade sanctions and natural disasters in stride. The decline of a vintage Internet company has them quaking. Yahoo! Inc.’s Messenger has for almost 18 years been the default communication tool for the men and women who each day move billions of dollars’ worth of crude oil and petroleum products around the planet. _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9: the mysterious tale terrifying Reddit | Technology | The Guardian Reddit makes a fascinating platform for community-oriented fiction, and a perfect one for this slow-building and creepy invention, which fans have started calling “The Interface […]

MIT Media Lab Changes Software Default to FLOSS* — MIT MEDIA LAB — Medium Kind of insane that there was ever a need for ‘permission’ to release their own work. This student put 50 million stolen research articles online. And they’re free. – The Washington Post “There are many ways to argue that copyright infringement is not theft, but even if it is, it is justified in this case,” she said in an instant-message interview via Google. “All content should be copied without restriction. But for education and research, copyright laws are especially damaging.” What I learned from Om and Hossein These two people who I only know because they blog, are right — but then I thought — no I don’t agree. And yes, it’s something I’ve been struggling with, but for me the struggle is over. I write my blog not because I want to write a “good” blog post, or even one that’s read by a lot of people. And my own self is not scattered, it’s right here, and as long as I live it will continue to be here. And my online self doesn’t exist for the benefit of others, it’s here to help my real self develop his thinking and create a trail of ideas and feelings and experiences that I can look back […]