David Wolman for Wired:
The majority of counterfeiters, as one federal investigator told me, are meth heads who, after three nights without sleep, suddenly get the bright idea to scan a $20 bill, bleach a bunch of $5 bills, and print the image of the $20 on that same paper. Even the most senile merchant can usually spot these shams.
But with his scrupulous craftsmanship, Kuhl placed himself among a rarefied class of counterfeiters who can produce truly high-quality fakes. They possess sophisticated knowledge about paper and dyes, and they have expertise in printing machinery and banknote security features such as watermarks and color-shifting ink.
Rodrigo Campos and John McCrank for Reuters:
For nearly 20 minutes on the morning of Facebook Inc’s trading debut last Friday, the line Nasdaq had opened up to keep traders informed about the social media company’s $16 billion IPO had been mute. Well after the stock was supposed to have opened at 11 a.m. New York time, no one from Nasdaq was talking - and there was still no sign of trading.
Finally, at 11:28 a.m., an unidentified person announced that the shares would open in about 2 minutes. Nasdaq also said orders and cancellations were still being processed, according to several sources listening to the call.
Those crucial 20 minutes created confusion that turned into chaos over the next few hours as market makers - the brokers who quote bid and offer prices - struggled to figure out what was happening. They were rebuffed in their attempts to get Nasdaq to halt trading and sort out a growing number of problems.
Michael Wolff for New York Magazine:
The traditional exits, of a sudden heart attack, of dying in one’s sleep, of unreasonably dropping dead in the street, of even a terminal illness, are now exotic ways of going. The longer you live the longer it will take to die. The better you have lived the worse you may die. The healthier you are—through careful diet, diligent exercise, and attentive medical scrutiny—the harder it is to die.
Matt Gurney of The National Post:
As the people have fled, abandoning whole tracts of Detroit to nature and the criminal element, the city’s tax base has vapourized. Empty houses contribute no property taxes to city coffers, and depress land values among the homes still holding families in the area. A new plan to save the city, down to barely 700,000 residents (from a height of 2,000,000), will see large areas of Detroit effectively officially abandoned. And a part of that plan will be turning out the street lights.
As it is, many of the lights have gone out on their own. An estimated 40% of the street lights in Detroit are already broken, and the city doesn’t have the money to repair them even if there was any public demand for them to be in working order. Seventeen percent of the street lights date back to the 1920s and would cost hundreds of millions to repair or replace. Many others have long been stripped for their metal wiring. The city hopes to borrow enough money to replace and upgrade roughly half of the lights operating in the city, but will only do so in certain areas. It hopes this will encourage Detroit’s existing population to concentrate itself in a more economically viable, smaller core.
The Economist:
Outside China, people tend to assume that the country’s impressive economic growth is due to exports. As the chart below, drawn from our special report on China’s economy, shows, this notion has always been exaggerated and is now plain false. China grows thanks to high levels of investment—far higher than those seen in previous Asian miracles such as South Korea and Japan. The corollary of this is low levels of private consumption.
The Telegraph:
The new EU legislation requires websites ask users for their ‘informed consent’, and will divide the type of consent into different categories.
A new code of conduct, introduced by the London office of the International Chamber of Commerce, aims to help businesses comply with new EU legislation which comes into force on Sunday. Breaches of the code could cost companies £500,000.
It will introduce four new categories for cookies, which the ICC suggests will be identified with four icons.
To no one’s surprise, not everyone is happy with the legislation. For a quick rundown of what this all means, I suggest you read GigaOm’s quick-and-dirty guide.
Jim Dalrymple:
The reason that most people bring up regarding the release of a 7-inch iPad is the Kindle Fire. Analysts and media types insist that Apple needs to bring a smaller tablet to market to ward off the threat from Amazon.
There are a couple of things to consider with this argument. First, people that use that as the basis for the release of a 7-inch iPad are full of shit. Second, using that argument shows they don’t understand Apple and how the company works.
Spot on.
OJ Winge for Cisco:
[…] Cisco will no longer invest in the Cisco Cius tablet form factor, and no further enhancements will be made to the current Cius endpoint beyond what’s available today. However, as we evaluate the market further, we will continue to offer Cius in a limited fashion to customers with specific needs or use cases.
Moving forward, we intend to double down on software offerings, like Jabber and WebEx, that provide the anytime, anywhere, and any device experiences. We will leverage key learnings and key collaboration experiences native to Cius in our other collaboration products.
Peter Bright of Ars Technica:
Microsoft wants Windows developers to write Windows 8-specific, Metro-style, touch-friendly applications, and to make sure that they crank these apps out, the company has decided that Visual Studio 11 Express, the free-to-use version of its integrated development environment, can produce nothing else.
If you want to develop desktop applications—anything that runs at the command line or on the conventional Windows desktop that remains a fully supported, integral, essential part of Windows 8—you’ll have two options: stick with the current Visual C++ 2010 Express and Visual C# 2010 Express products, or pay about $400-500 for Visual Studio 11 Professional. A second version, Visual Studio 11 Express for Web, will be able to produce HTML and JavaScript websites, and nothing more. […]
Just to make doubly sure that nobody will dare try to produce desktop applications without paying Redmond for the privilege, Microsoft has gone a step further than crippling Visual Studio Express. The Windows SDK for Windows 7 includes a C++ compiler and all the requisite bits and pieces to develop Windows applications. You’d have to do a bit more work to get things set up than you do with Visual Studio, as it’s a little barebones, but it’s enough. But that won’t be the case for Windows 8: the Windows SDK for windows 8 will not include a compiler toolchain at all, lest any sneaky developers try to cheat the system and use it to write desktop apps.
Sounds like good times.
Guy English:
I believe that many Apple observers have been too invested in picking off the low hanging fruit of obviously out-of-touch commentators, columnists, and analysts. Apple is winning. It’s fun to pick on the idiots, and we do tune in for the affirmation that engenders, but that’s not insight. It’s a tag team wedgie patrol. It takes a cleaver intellect to dismantle bullshit but, ultimately, it often just ends up with pantsing the dumb guy. Rather than doing that let’s aim to pants the A-grade quarterback.
Here are the top three problems I believe Apple faces in the near term.
A great read.
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