Alec Kinnear

Israel was slapped diplomatic sanction in 2004 for Mossad using fake New Zealand passports. During the Dubai assassination one Mossad operative took advantage of the German law that entitles any Jewish individual of German origin to get a German passport automatically. He got the passport, then flew straight to UAE before getting caught on the CCTV camera. Now we have an Iranian passport in a buffoon's pocket. The magnetic bombs used to kill the Iranian scientists were identical to the one one used in New Delhi. It was the first of its kind to be used in India. On top of that, all the explosions targeting Israeli diplomats were so inefficient, that they were either prevented without causing damage, or so low intensity that it didn't kill anyone. None of them were targeting anybody important. To top everything, Bibi declared it was Iranian terrorism immediately, as if he had a prepared speech in his hand. I don't believe Mossad is not smart enough to realize people don't get it. The fac - Alec Kinnear

For instance, if you're a great designer, it doesn't necessarily mean you're a great manager of designers. In a normal company, though, you'd have to be promoted to manager to move up in the company's hierarchy. At Apple you can be paid more to do the same job. The idea is to get people in the perfect job, and keep them there. Lashinsky says Jobs, "Let people's talent their jobs, not the jobs define the people." - Alec Kinnear

Graph of income gap - Alec Kinnear

SonOfNyeBevan 11 February 2012 5:58AM A lot of posters, and indeed many of the Commentators associated with the Guardian either ignore the elephant in the room, or cannot see it due to ignorance. One will attempt to address this fundamental economic issue. First and foremost we can now see that many countries are addicted to debt in one form or another, and due to a confluence of numerous economic conditions, this addiction has increased greatly since the late 1990's - namely 'THE GREAT MODERATION.' Global financial institutions have acted in a manner to the drugs cartels, initially extending debt at cheap rates, once a nation becomes addicted to this fix, the screw is turned to extract greater and greater interest repayments - quite simple really. Now during the Great Moderation when credit/ debt was cheap and inflation low, financial institutions needed ways to increase profits and extract great wealth out of thin air - hence financial engineering, the explosion of derivatives, d - Alec Kinnear

If you are considering filing a patent application in five or more countries (count a European Patent Office application as one country); or if you are going to consider applying for foreign patents on your invention, but are not sure where; or if you will be applying for foreign patents, but you would like to delay the substantial expense of filing many applications beyond the usual one year from US filing, you would be well advised to think about doing your foreign filing through the Patent Cooperation Treaty ("PCT"). Most major countries have now signed the PCT, and new countries are continually being added. We at Brown and Michaels have successfully filed for a number of foreign patents, both directly and through the PCT, and have excellent associates in most foreign countries. We can advise you about the advantages and disadvantages of each method. - Alec Kinnear

great site with contextual use of german phrases - Alec Kinnear

The olive tree was revered as a health source by the ancient Greeks, who used many components of it. Both olive oil and olive leaf extract contain the chemical oleuropein, which is a strong antifungal. Oleuropein doesn't kill fungi or yeast directly, rather it disrupts the reproductive cycles and is able to reduce populations quickly, according to "Medical Herbalism." Oleuropein also reduces and stabilizes blood sugars, which acts to starve yeast and fungal forms because they require sugar for food. - Alec Kinnear

Bachelot Caron practise photography as an anti-discipline. Combining mise en scène and the craftiness of graphic palette processing, they push transgression to the limits, overlaying artifice of pose with equally artificial retouching. Their art consists in the deliberate display of the improbable. In other times – a century ago, let’s say – the enemies of Pictorialism would have howled, “That’s not photography!” Fortunately history has since shown that “photography” covers more than one reality register. - Alec Kinnear

Here are a few details of my various legal battles with MI6. Over the years, it has become clear that one of their tactics against me has been to attack me with writs and confiscations etc at every opportunity primarily to drain my resources by forcing me to employ lawyers to defend myself. Here is a brief timeline of their actions against me: - Alec Kinnear

Great sophisticated gradient generator. - Alec Kinnear

A British company called Gamma International previously marketed a piece of software to governments, called FinFisher. The software took advantage of the iTunes exploit and allowed those with the software to spy on those who used the software. What’s most worrying about this is that Apple allegedly found out about the flaw in 2008, according to Brian Krebs, a security writer. But the company did nothing about it until earlier this month when it released iTunes 10.5.1 — leaving the exploit open for over three years. - Alec Kinnear

The fact is that investigators were also already aware of the company from their own case files. In 2002, for example, one of the company's managers was given a suspended sentence of 21 months and issued an unusually steep fine of €1.5-million ($2.06 million) for attempting to bribe an official from the Customs Criminological Office. What's more, in 2000, criminal police from a number of states conducted simultaneous raids while investigating suspected corruption linked to the company. - Alec Kinnear

Public attention to digital surveillance tools being marketed to law enforcement agencies worldwide is spurring discussion about whether antivirus companies are doing all they can to unmask these intruders. Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer for Finnish security firm F-Secure, first blogged about FinFisher in March 2011, when protesters in Egypt took over the headquarters of the Egyptian State Security and gained access to loads of confidential state documents, including those that appear to show the government purchased licenses for the program. Hypponen said F-Secure has stated unequivocally that it will detect any malware that it knows about, regardless of whether the malware is being actively used by government authorities for surveillance. But he said not all antivirus companies have made similar public commitments. - Alec Kinnear

Wikileaks, a whistle-blowing website that exposes secrets on almost every level, has shone the spotlight on a company that allows hackers to completely control a person’s computer, granting them access to all kinds of personal information. And they do this by manipulating one of our most trusted computer programs: Apple iTunes. Wikileakes released over 200 files containing evidence about this brand of hacking, nicknamed Spy Files. As part of the Spy Files, Wikileaks posted a link on Twitter which showed a short video demonstration on the hacking in action, provided by Gamma Group, an intelligence coalition. The video shows how a product named 'FinFly ISP' is installed into the servers of an internet service provider (ISP); the bug then send a fake software update notification to a user's iTunes application. - Alec Kinnear

At the time, Mostafa Hussein, a 30-year-old doctor, told SPIEGEL ONLINE of finding a sheaf of documents when he and other protesters stormed the building in March. The documents included a software offer dated June 2010 for a complete package of surveillance software, installation and training for state investigators. The estimated cost was around €330,000, including one year of support. The offer included "Remote Intrusion Software" and "Remote Infection Tools." In other words, programs that could be used to install snooping software on a target computer. The offer contained the logo of Gamma International UK Limited and it also included mentions of programs like "FinSpy" and "FinFly Lite." - Alec Kinnear

• Choose a long, familiar-to-you sequence of ordinary words, with spaces between them as in an ordinary sentence, which more and more sites now allow. “Lake Winnebago is deep and chilly,” for instance. Or “my favorite packer is not brett favre.” You could remember a phrase like that, but a hacker’s computer, which couldn’t tell spaces from characters, would see only one forbiddingly long password sequence. • Choose a shorter sequence of words that are not “real” English words. I once lived in a Ghanaian village called Assin Fosu. I can remember its name easily, but it would be hard to guess. Even harder if I added numbers or characters. • Choose a truly obscure, gibberish password—“V*!amYEg5M5!3R” is one I generated just now with the LastPass system, and you’re welcome to it—and then find a way to store it. Having it written down in your wallet is one, though the paper it’s on shouldn’t say “Passwords” at the top. The approach I prefer, and use for some passwords, is to entrust them - Alec Kinnear

This week, NVIDIA released drivers for their line of "Fermi" cards for Mac OS X.  Besides supporting their new flagship Quadro 4000, these drivers support the GeForce GT 430, GTS 450, GTX 460, GTX 465, GTX 470, GTX 480. They also show increased OpenGL, Quartz Graphics, and User Interface performance for NVIDIA 2xx cards. To use the new drivers on any system, we made an alternate installer, tonymacx86 NVIDIA Update, that overcomes the official installer's system limitations - Alec Kinnear

First, Apple is not going to collect "user data", they are collecting OS X system data about "your device, system and application software, and peripherals" so that they can "facilitate the provision of software updates, product support, and other services to you". There is no reason to equate "your device, system and application software, and peripherals" to all your spreadsheets, documents and email. Second, the CIA, US embassies, Banks and other Government and companies do not provide Macs (Windows and linux too) off the Apple store shelf for their agents and employees. They modify the systems to make them secure to their standards (with the assistance of the vender, Apple, or Microsoft). They have very secure Networks that limit connectivity to their own secure network, and include encryption on the data transferred. - Alec Kinnear

Come on - Apple talks a good game, but has always been pro DRM. Their OS is a massive DRM-fest, in a way that even Windows is not. - Alec Kinnear

Despite the attractiveness of the Mac App Store, there are some good reasons to consider staying with non-MAS versions of apps. With an understanding of the points covered here, you should be better prepared to make an informed decision. - Alec Kinnear

This feels like quite the contradiction to me. I’ve always been firmly of the belief that Adobe hasn’t ported Photoshop to Linux because we have our own ecosystem already. - Alec Kinnear

"In some senses, large payouts became a cultural expectation at banks and a source of competition among the firms. For example, as Merrill Lynch's performance plummeted, Merrill severed the tie between paying based on performance and set its bonus pool based on what it expected its competitors would do. Accordingly, Merrill paid out close to $16 billion in 2007 while losing more than $7 billion and paid close to $15 billion in 2008 while facing near collapse. Moreover, Merrill's losses in 2007 and 2008 more than erased Merrill's earnings between 2003 and 2006. Clearly, the compensation structures in the boom years did not account for long-term risk, and huge paydays continued while the firm faced extinction." - Alec Kinnear

When shopping for these gadgets, a thought should be spared to the US foreign policy because buying American is translated into direct support (i.e. financing) of the appalling US behaviour around the world. - Alec Kinnear

I validated these results. The large dataset was 4.7 million comments. It's much, much faster to query the individual approval statuses. It seems that statuses with more members take longer, so inferring the "1" result by subtracting the other results from the total is a nice speedup. On a small site (50,000 comments), there was still a speedup, going from 50ms to 10ms. So I think we should do this for every site, not just sites with large numbers of comments. I'm going ahead with a patch. - Alec Kinnear

My macbook pro was stolen a few days ago, all my work from the last 2 years is gone because of my mistake of not backing my photography up. My career is at a standstill and I have to restart everything. to address your question, mac does not flag stolen computers, they say you have to contact your local law enforcement. All mac does is flag the serial number so that the mac cant get repaired. When its brought into repair it simply says "invalid serial number." So no, you wont get caught for stealing, you just wont be able to get it fixed, ever. morally i hope you will report the seller. I am a pretty poor student who has lost everything only days before finals. my career is at a halt, and so is my education, and i cant even continue to work on anything because i don't have the money to buy a computer to do it on. - Alec Kinnear

SOPA and PIPA threaten Wikipedia in many ways. For example, in its current form, SOPA would require Wikipedia to actively monitor every site we link to, to ensure it doesn't host infringing content. Any link to an infringing site could put us in jeopardy of being forced offline. The trust and openness that underlies the entire Wikipedia project would be threatened, and new, restrictive policies would make it harder for us to be open to new contributors. - Alec Kinnear