Linked List: April 21, 2015

Tuesday, 21 April 2015

Distillery Workers Arrested in Theft of Pappy Van Winkle 

The AP reports:

Prosecutors say the scheme led by rogue distillery workers lasted for years and involved tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of whiskey but began to unravel when whiskey barrels were discovered behind a Franklin County shed.

The theft targeted the Buffalo Trace and Wild Turkey distilleries, they said, and included some of the most prestigious brands in the business, including pricey Pappy Van Winkle bourbon. It had been going on since 2008 or 2009, officials said.

Franklin County Commonwealth’s Attorney Larry Cleveland said last week the case involves “more than I could imagine one person drinking in a lifetime.”

I don’t know, I can imagine quite a bit.

Twitter Begins Identifying Abusive/Harassing Tweets Algorithmically 

Shreyas Doshi, Twitter’s director of product management:

Second, we have begun to test a product feature to help us identify suspected abusive Tweets and limit their reach. This feature takes into account a wide range of signals and context that frequently correlates with abuse including the age of the account itself, and the similarity of a Tweet to other content that our safety team has in the past independently determined to be abusive. It will not affect your ability to see content that you’ve explicitly sought out, such as Tweets from accounts you follow, but instead is designed to help us limit the potential harm of abusive content.

Something about Twitter brings out the absolute worst in some people. There’s a pattern to it, though, which has long made me suspect it could be addressed at least partially through spam-filter-like algorithms. Good changes to their policies on harassment too.

Robert Rietti, James Bond Voiceover Artist, Dies at 92 

The Hollywood Reporter:

Rietti also provided the voice of the cold-blooded, eyepatch-wearing Emilio Largo (portrayed onscreen by Adolfo Celi, who spoke with a thick Italian accent) in Thunderball (1965), and he spoke as the cat-loving evil genius Ernst Stavro Blofeld (this time played by Englishman John Hollis) in another Bond film, For Your Eyes Only (1981).

“In nearly every Bond picture, there’s been a foreign villain, and in almost every case, they’ve used my voice,” he once said.

It was Rietti whom audiences heard out of the mouth of British Intelligence chief John Strangways (Tim Moxon), who is killed near the start of the first Bond movie, 1962’s Dr. No. Rietti is then heard a couple of minutes later, replacing the voice of another character at a card table.

His Bond work also includes dubbing as Japanese secret service agent Tiger Tanaka (Tetsuro Tanba) in You Only Live Twice (1967), donating several voices to Casino Royale (1967) and appearing onscreen in Never Say Never Again (1983).

Never heard of Rietti before, and no idea the voices for all those characters were done by the same actor.

Update: German voice actress Nikki van der Zyl did the same thing for a bunch of the women characters in the early Bond films. (Via Reginald Braithwaite.)

The First Apple Homepage 

Kevin Fox:

But that was 1997. What did Apple.com look like at the very birth of the World-Wide Web? Say around 1992?

I’m a digital pack-rat, and I’ve been on the Internet a long time. I remember a very different, more playful Apple.com homepage. I remembered a page that was more Fractal Design Painter and less grids and columns. I remember taking a screenshot of that page because I liked the look of it. But where would it be today?

I remember the one from 1997, but I don’t remember this original one. Might have been gone by the time I got around to using the web — I was more of a gopher/usenet guy back then.

Developers on Their ‘Biggest WatchKit Mistakes’ 

Speaking of Apple Watch developers, Realm has assembled some interesting lessons learned from WatchKit developers. E.g. this design lesson from Neil Kimmett:

The biggest mistake we made with our WatchKit app was including lots of padding around text elements. When designing for desktop and for mobile, we’re used to nice big margins between the edges of our screens and any text written on those screens. However, in WatchKit, if you use a black background, the frame of the watch acts as a natural margin for your content. So butt that text right up against the edge of the screen! It’ll look strange in the simulator, but natural on the device. It has the added benefit of giving you a bit more screen real estate to play with — a very limited resource on the Watch!

Apple Offers Some Developers Opportunity to Place Expedited Order for Apple Watch Sport 

Matthew Panzarino, writing for TechCrunch:

Apple is sending out emails to developers, offering them a chance to purchase an Apple Watch Sport for delivery by April 28th. It’s doing this to encourage them to test and develop for the Watch, according to the text of an email sent to developers and shared with us.

The email, pictured below, says that Apple wants to give developers the opportunity to test WatchKit apps on Apple Watch as soon as it’s available. It offers the ability to purchase one Apple Watch Sport with the 42mm silver casing and a blue sport band. The Watch is guaranteed to ship by April 28 at 2015, which is probably the biggest draw as if developers hadn’t pre-ordered already then they were looking at June or July delivery times.

The same model — Sport with blue band — doesn’t ship until “June” for regular orders through their online store.

Also noteworthy, given Panzarino’s good sources:

It’s likely that several million (I’m hearing more than estimates I’ve seen out there so far) Apple Watch units have been sold already — and that more have been ordered than previously reported.

(By “ordered”, he means ordered by Apple from its supply chain.)

The Tullock Paradox 

Re: the previous post on relatively low sums of money going a long way in political lobbying, DF reader Jerry Brito pointed me to the Tullock Paradox:

The term Tullock paradox refers to the apparent paradox first observed by the public choice economist Gordon Tullock on the low costs of rent-seeking relative to the gains from rent-seeking. The paradox is basically that rent-seekers seeking political favors can usually bribe politicians to give them the favors at a cost much lower than the value of the favor to the rent-seeker. For instance, a rent seeker who hopes to gain a billion dollars from a particular political policy may need to bribe politicians only to the tune of ten million dollars, which is about 1% of the gain to the rent-seeker.

See also: Tyler Cowen has been writing about the Tullock Paradox for years at Marginal Revolution.

Report: Google Is Fifth-Biggest Spender in U.S. Lobbying 

Hamza Shaban, reporting for BuzzFeed:

Google ranked fifth in the amount spent on lobbying in the first quarter of 2015 among all organizations that lobbied Congress and federal agencies, according to an analysis by MapLight. The search giant spent $5,470,000; for context, that is more than four times the amount that Apple spent, and nearly $1 million more than Comcast did.

While the amount itself may be eye-opening, it’s little surprise that Google has stepped up its lobbying efforts given the regulatory pressures it has faced. While the Federal Trade Commission ended its antitrust investigation into Google in 2013, FTC staffers did conclude that the company “used anticompetitive tactics and abused its monopoly power in ways that harmed Internet users and rivals,” the Wall Street Journal found through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Looking at these numbers, what strikes me is how low these sums are. $5.5 million is almost nothing to Google. Nothing. They reported $14 billion in profit last year. That means they spent 0.04 percent of their profit on lobbying here in the U.S. The scale is just whacked: a few million dollars means nothing to big companies like Comcast, Apple, and Google, but it means a lot in terms of political influence.