Do You Use Reddit?

There's been a change in the rules at Reddit lately, so I thought it prudent to tell you that as of now, you are no longer allowed to post your kiddie porn to Reddit.

In other news, until now, apparently it was okay to post your kiddie porn to Reddit.

You can still post your pictures of dead children, though.

If you'd like essentially this same post, but much longer and infinitely more snarky, ExtremeTech has you covered.

Jonathan's Card

Last July 14, a guy from Providence, Rhode Island named Jonathan Stark decided to engage in a little social experiment. He had a Starbucks gift card. Lots of people go to Starbucks. So what would happen if he made public the barcode of his gift card and allowed this one card to be used by anyone? If they wanted to buy a coffee with it, they could go ahead. If they wanted to load their own money onto the card, well, isn't that nice of them. Stark uploaded a card, made a website, "Jonathan's Card", and a Twitter account explaining the idea behind it and keeping track of the current balance on the card, and let the chips fall where they may.

As it turned out, people played along pretty much as he'd intended. A lot of people played along, in fact. The card went viral, up to and including its being the topic of a Penny Arcade strip. As the strip indicates, clearly, not everyone was totally pure-hearted about it, but then, this was a social experiment, and you have to account for that possibility. And it did cause a lot of the users to carry on the pay-it-forward nature of the exercise.

And it would have probably just gone on as such, had Jonathan's Card not also attracted Sam Odio, who had an exercise of his own: write a code telling him when the balance on the card got up to a certain amount, sit at a Starbucks, wait for the code to tip him off, and when it did, head to the register and transfer all the money on it to his own card. Over five hours, he had walked off with $625. Granted, this plan had a second phase- sell his card on eBay and donate the proceeds to the charity Save The Children, but it wasn't enough to make up for the fact that he'd compromised Jonathan's Card and ruined things for everyone else, who now had to worry about whether any money they were putting on the card was going towards coffee or towards Odio, and while some people supported Sam, most verbally unloaded on him. (The eBay listing was removed because of a rule that says gift cards for sale can't exceed a value of $500.)

Odio's older brother Daniel, meanwhile, was putting whatever money Odio took right back onto the communal card. Sam, catching a whole lot more flak than support from people offended by his actions, offered to hand back the money he took if Stark thought Odio was stealing; Stark responded, "My impression is not the one that matters. The impressions that matter are those of the people who have been touched by and participated in Jonathan’s Card. If you’d like to speak to them, you can do so on their Facebook page." The entire episode gave all observers and participants a pretty meaty ethical debate to chew on for a while; the second link in this paragraph shows Techdirt trying to work through that dilemma.

Meanwhile, there was a lot of speculation that Stark was actually a Starbucks employee and this was some sort of piece of viral marketing. It wasn't, though Starbucks knew of the card and was rooting it on from the sidelines even though, technically, Starbucks cards aren't supposed to be used communally and its very existence was a violation of the terms of use.

Besides, Starbucks isn't very good at doing its own viral marketing. In 2006, they e-mailed some of their employees in the southeastern US a coupon for a free iced coffee and told them to forward the coupon to friends and family. They did. Then the coupon got forwarded some more. And some more. And some more. And some very much more. And the coupon got out of the southeast in a hurry to boot. In almost as much of a hurry, the coupon had gotten out to so many people that Starbucks had completely lost control of it, so much so that they opted to stop honoring the coupon. This was not a popular decision amongst all the people who had coupons, which by now was quite a few people. One of those people, upon being refused a coffee, walked straight to a nearby lawyer and struck up a $114 million class-action lawsuit (no word on how it turned out). Meanwhile, competitor Caribou Coffee, who was at the time selling iced coffee of their own on a trial basis, announced that for one day, if Starbucks wasn't going to honor the coupons, they would.

A couple years later in 2009, Starbucks tried again. Operating on the theory that some people thought Starbucks was just an uncool place to go to and drowning out the mom-and-pop cafes in town, they decided to take three Starbucks in Seattle and, as a trial, strip all indicators that they were Starbucks shops, instead rechristening them as things like "15th Avenue Coffee & Tea" that were "inspired by Starbucks". Nobody was fooled for a second. Even if you change the decor, the locals are going to remember that there was a Starbucks there immediately beforehand and the employees are the same and the coffee tastes the same, and the dots are going to be connected pretty quickly. And if they weren't clear on the concept, the actual neighborhood cafes were all too happy to shout it from the rooftops. In 2011, 15th Avenue Coffee & Tea was turned back into a formal Starbucks. One of the three targeted for remodel didn't even get as far as the renaming. (As far as I'm aware, the other one, Roy Street Coffee & Tea, is still under that name, though it's widely known as the "stealth Starbucks".)

So seeing as Jonathan's Card was actually working out pretty well for them for once, until Odio came along, Starbucks was willing to look the other way on it. But now that the card had been compromised and the social experiment ruined, they pretty much had no choice but to let Stark know they were shutting down the card. That happened on August 12, a little under a month after the experiment began. Stark, for his part, looked at the bright side, noting on the card's website after receiving the notification from Starbucks:

We believe this is the start to a bigger more glowing picture. In the last 5 days or so, we've received hundreds of stories of people doing small things to brighten a stranger's day: Paying for the next car at the drive through. Sharing a pick me up with someone who has had a rough time. Charging up a phone card and sharing it with strangers at the airport. The list goes on, and on, and on...

So, tonight we lose our barcode. But of course, we never needed it in the first place.

As for Odio, Stark noted, "The card wasn’t hacked. He was standing in the store swiping the card just like anybody else." He was also critical of the notion that one person screwed it up for everyone, saying, "From the inside that's not how I see it at all. Tons of people were way more generous than I thought. Just because one person spray painted the mural doesn't make it a failure." Keeping in that vein, a Facebook page devoted to Jonathan's Card was maintained to direct people's energies toward related efforts, though it appears to have faded to silence in December.

And for the most part, the social experiment appears to have ended in success.

Run For Your Lives

Oh God. The robots know origami.

....oh God. The robots ARE origami. Foldable paper robots are lifting 100 times their own weight and operate only on puffs of air that are about twice the strength of human exhalation. And the link is showing that they've teamed up with the bendy invertibrate robots I warned you about back in November. We're screwed now. Run. Run for the hills.

Random News Generator- United States

I was wavering between doing an update on Beyaz, a birth-control pill we've covered here last May, or running the Random News Generator.

The RNG landed on the United States. (Yes, the US is in the hopper as well. Our number just hadn't come up until now.) So I guess we're covering Beyaz anyway.

First off, though, since there's free rein now to do any story out of the United States, let's give a mention to Benton Harbor, Michigan, where since the spring of last year, an appointed 'emergency manager', one Joseph Harris, has been given dictatorial-level authority to run the town in whatever manner he deems necessary in order to bring the city out of the red financially, stripping the power from Benton Harbor's elected officials, who had no authority to do anything but call and adjourn meetings and take minutes, until such time as they were barred from even attending them without Harris' permission. In the time since, Harris has given this list of orders, viewable at your leisure. They include firing and replacing the mayor pro tem, cancelling Constitution Week, and condemning a hotel which sat across the street from Whirlpool headquarters. Whirlpool, for its part, stands accused of essentially blackmailing Benton Harbor into giving Whirlpool whatever it wants on pain of them leaving town and taking thousands of jobs with them.

So far, Benton Harbor is still running a deficit, and was late in paying its taxes besides.

Rachel Maddow and Eclectablog have been watching Benton Harbor particularly closely, and they've now found that Harris has put the town's radio station on eBay. There are, as of this writing, two bids; the high bid is $5,100.

That noted, back to Beyaz.

Our last visit to the topic was a running of a series of commercials that showed, in order, the ad for a pill called Yaz; a government-mandated 'clear-up' ad manufacturer Bayer was forced to then run; an ad gathering people for a class-action suit because Yaz put pregnant women at risk of blood clots; and finally, an ad for Beyaz, which was quickly called out as basically Yaz with some vitamin B9 tossed in, which does little for the blood clots.

Watson Pharmaceuticals, a generic-drug company based out of Parsippany, New Jersey, is currently working on a generic of Beyaz. Which is well and good- except for why we'd want more of that pill around- but you have to wait for the patent to expire before you can do that. Bayer's patent on Beyaz doesn't expire until 2014. Bayer has, of course, balked. The patent's still active, after all. They have to defend it.

What brings us here is that Watson has formally challenged the patent. Watson does a lot of this kind of thing, having recently settled generic-drug lawsuits with Johnson & Johnson (Ortho Tri-Cyclen Lo, a birth control pill) and Mallinckrodt (Exalgo, a pain pill) just in the past month. A quick search also uncovers a lawsuit with Momenta and Sandoz over blood-thinning pill Lovenox, another one with Unimed over testosterone gel AndroGel, and there's this and there's this and there's this and there's this and you get the idea. If you get the feeling that it's actually part of Watson's business model, you'd probably be right; after a drug's patent expires, if you're the first generic to get approval, you get 180 days of market exclusivity before the floodgates open to everyone else. The clock doesn't necessarily start when the generic hits store shelves- court tie-ups can run the clock dry before the drug can be brought to market- but sometimes it does start when it hits the market, and it's enough of an incentive to want to be first in line, even if you have to jump the gun to do it.

And if Watson didn't jump the gun, someone else would. Lawsuits of this nature are routine (PDF) in the generic-drug industry, and often end in a settlement in which the generic holds off on entering the market until an agreed-upon date in exchange for a) being first, and b) not being financially de-pantsed by the patent-holder. If you'll go through the Watson lawsuit stories linked, you'll find that that's how things typically end.

So if things hold, you can expect Watson to release generic blood-clotting birth-control pills to a pharmacy near you before you know it.

Election Coverage Do's And Don'ts

Since we're getting into high-gear election coverage, before we get too much further into the process, let's just take today to remind all you people covering the election what is and is not something that voters might be able to use when they step into the booth, using recent election news as examples:

DO COVER:
*The congressman facing an insider-trading probe, in this case Spencer Bachus of Alabama. Especially if he's chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.
*People convicted of voter fraud. Especially if they're the top election official in the state, as happened in this story out of Indiana.
*Where candidates are getting their money or looking for money, or maybe not getting their money anymore. In this case, Sheldon Adelson has been single-handedly keeping Newt Gingrich in the race, and Foster Freiss has been doing likewise with Rick Santorum, but Adelson may be about ready to call it quits, meaning Gingrich has big problems.
*The potential of foreign money coming in as donations. Pick your least favorite country. Imagine money from there bankrolling a candidate. Enough said.
*In fact, pretty much anything that involves the words 'Citizens United' is an excellent choice.
*The topics that candidates choose to spend their time talking about given the chance. Although be wary of putting too much stock into it; given what happened after 2010, the topics candidates focus on during the campaign and the topics they'll focus on in office cannot be assumed to be one and the same.

DON'T COVER:
*A candidate's campaign playlist. Does anyone but you really care how many songs on the playlist are by non-American bands? Do YOU even care? Has anyone ever gone into a voting booth and said 'Well, I was going to vote for Bob, but he used a Beatles song of all things! We declared INDEPENDENCE from England, you cur!' The only way this might matter in the slightest is if the artist tells them to stop using it, and then that's getting into matters beyond the song itself.
*Ralph Nader. Honestly, he's the reincarnation of Harold Stassen at this point. I'm pretty sure my 3-year-old nephew has more of an impact on politics than Nader does at this point.
*Where people are getting their election news. Let me tell you where they get their election news: everywhere. Everywhere they turn. Let me tell you who cares: the media and that's about it. Let me tell you who cares who got the best ratings or who was first to call the election: nobody except the media. Who was first to call the 2008 election for Obama? I don't know, you don't either, and whoever was first was probably only first by, like, two seconds because everyone called it for him as soon as the West Coast polls closed. Here's what people care about: you not blowing the call entirely like you did in 2000. That's it. Get the call right and you're golden. Nobody cares who called the race first. People care about who won the race.

Oh, and bit of an update on yesterday's post: Steve Holland, who introduced the bill to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the 'Gulf of America', turns out to have done so for the purposes of satire. Holland, a Democrat, did it to poke at the kind of things the Republican Party spends their time and energy on. I'll cop to having gotten taken like everyone else that saw the article, but again, I wasn't worried about what the Republicans thought of it. I was worried about what Mexico thought of it. And also: if you have to explain that your joke is in fact a joke, your joke didn't work.

Freedom Post

You know what never stops getting stupid every time I hear it? Legislators trying to change the name of something carrying the name of a country they don't like to something blindingly patriotic. You look petty, you look foolish, and the odds are heavily stacked against you regarding the likelihood of the name actually taking.

Your mind has probably already gone to "freedom fries". Good first move. For those unfamiliar, back when the United States was gearing up to start the war in Iraq, France balked. In response to France's opposition, House representatives Bob Ney of Ohio and Walter Jones of North Carolina introduced legislation- legislation which passed- changing the name of French fries in the Congressional cafeteria to "freedom fries" and French toast to "freedom toast". An assortment of other restaurants across the country decided to score a cheap political point or two and do the same. The French embassy, for its part, basically told the United States that it had bigger things on its mind than what to call potatoes and to grow the hell up.

It was changed back to "French fries" in 2006 after Jones changed position on the war in 2005, coming to regard it as a mistake.

But it goes further back than that. In World War 1, when the United States was fighting Germany, sauerkraut was renamed "liberty cabbage", dachshunds were renamed "liberty hounds" and German measles were called "liberty measles". This came amongst beating up people who didn't buy war bonds and the mob in Collinsville, Illinois that lynched a German immigrant and wore red, white and blue ribbons to court where the jury let them off while a band played patriotic music, but that's not our focus. (Though it does further illustrate just how idiotic blind patriotism can make you if you let it.)

Mental Floss compiled a list of other renamings that don't just involve the United States- the Arab world made a Coca-Cola alternative called Mecca Cola in response to anti-Arab sentiment in America, New Zealand renamed French bread as "Kiwi bread" in response to France conducting nuclear testing in the area, and Iran called Danish pastries "Roses of the Prophet Muhummad" because of that cartoonist guy, among others.

Today's offender: Steve Holland, state legislator from Mississippi, who has introduced a bill to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the 'Gulf of America'.

Which is actually getting into more serious renamings. When you change the name of food, it just annoys your adversary. When you start trying to change the name of a part of the map that the two of you share, you start running the risk of getting into international-incident territory and, when it happens, it often veers into the realm of straight-up territorial disputes.

You see international disputes over naming rights fairly commonly on the map if you take the time to look. Eastern Asia sees it at least three times with China, Japan and the Koreas, not counting the dispute over the Korean peninsula itself in case you forget about that. First, you have what's internationally called the Sea of Japan, which South Korea prefers to call the "East Sea" and North Korea calls the "East Sea of Korea". There's also what are internationally called the Liancourt Rocks- South Korea calls them Dokdo; Japan calls them Takeshima. Third, there's what's internationally called Socotra Rock, which isn't even above sea level but which China calls Suyan Rock and which South Korea calls both Ieodo and Parango.

Granted, you might still not cause a stir with the act itself. After England ordered the Libyan embassy in London closed in 1984 in the wake of the death of policewoman Yvonne Fletcher at the hands of Libyan embassy officials, Moammar Gadhafi responded by ordering Libyan maps to remove England. There'd just be water there bordering Scotland and Wales. (The real source is one of my books, Dumb, Dumber, Dumbest by John J. Kohut. Sorry about the best online source I'm able to find being some guy's sermon.) But even then, relations had already deteriorated to the point where embassies were closing. The map change, again, is petty in the grand scheme of things.

Let's just hope Mexico sees the 'Gulf of America' proposal as petty and not anything more.

The Sacred Band of Thebes

It's probably a moot point now in the United States, given that Don't Ask, Don't Tell has been killed and buried. But A, there are still plenty of other countries out there and B, I came across it after the fight was already over anyway.

No matter. When the debate over ending it was taking place, a major argument against ending it was basically that gay soldiers would be too distracted by being around others of the same gender, despite the fact that, given that gay soldiers kept getting booted out for being found out, gay soldiers were already serving without any problems and the straight soldiers kept attesting to that.

But we could have gone back to Ancient Greece and found a fighting force built specifically around not just gay soldiers, but gay lovers. Now, if the distraction theory held, they'd have done terrible and this would be one of those adventures-in-stupidity stories I love telling.

Not so much. The force was called the Sacred Band of Thebes. Theban commander Gorgidas, in 378 BCE, compiled a group of 150 gay male couples, plucked from the regular Theban army. (No women, of course. This is still ancient Greece we're talking about.) The idea for an all-gay force germinated a few years earlier from a writing of Plato, called the Symposium (it's dated somewhere between 385 and 380 BCE), where a series of people speak, one at a time, on the topic of love.

The idea for the Sacred Band came from a speaker named Phaedrus, who took quite the opposite tack. Far from being a distraction, Phaedrus theorized, having your lover beside you would be an inspiration and incentive to fight even harder:

For I know not any greater blessing to a young man who is beginning life than a virtuous lover, or to the lover, than a beloved youth. For the principle which ought to be the guide of men who would live nobly – that principle, I say, neither kindred, nor honour, nor wealth, nor any other motive is able to implant so well as love ... And if there were only some way of contriving that a state or an army should be made up of lovers and their loves, they would be the very best governors of their own city ... and when fighting at each other's side, although a mere handful, they would overcome the world. For what lover would not choose rather to be seen by all mankind than by his beloved, either when abandoning his post or throwing away his arms? He would be ready to die a thousand deaths rather than endure this. Or who would desert his beloved or fail him in the hour of danger? The veriest coward would become an inspired hero, equal to the bravest, at such a time; Love would inspire him.

Gorgidas decided to give it a shot. At first, couples in the Sacred Band were paired up, but still split amongst the balance of the army- this group would get a few couples, this other group would get a few couples as well, etc. When Gorgidas was succeeded by Pelopidas shortly thereafter, the couples were made into a single, separate band of troops, placed right at the front. The Sacred Band became shock troops, the very first soldiers the opponent would see. And Pelopidas stood right there amongst them.

And they saw plenty of the Sacred Band. The force lasted for 40 years. That may not sound like all that much in the grand scheme of things, when you're talking something that happened thousands of years ago in the first place, but think of it from your perspective. That's as long as The Price Is Right has been around. (At least, the Bob Barker/Drew Carey version. Don't write in and bring up the old Bill Cullen version that started in 1956.)

Were they any good? Well, the 40 years they were around coincided with Thebes' heyday. Among the first people to see them were the Spartans, which was another reason for the Sacred Band's creation: in 382 BCE, Sparta had taken over a Theban citadel and Thebes needed something to drive them back out.

At the city of Tegyrae, the Sacred Band ran into a group of Spartans while on a recon mission, with the Spartans outnumbering them at least by a 2:1 ratio, maybe even 3:1. It didn't matter. The Sacred Band smacked the Spartans silly.

...wait, what?

Nobody saw that result coming. Thebes didn't see it coming. Sparta certainly didn't. Both thought that even an evenly-matched fight was going to be a struggle, and with that kind of advantage, the Spartans should have beaten the Sacred Band into the ground. Given what actually happened, Thebes got a boost of confidence while Sparta was left to figure out what just happened. Both geared up for a long war, one that would end at Leuctra in 371 BCE with Thebes thoroughly breaking Sparta's back, a win that would permanently ruin Sparta's influence over Greece.

Typically what would have happened is that each side would have put their big guns on the right side of their formation- it was a tradition thing- with the more inferior soldiers being put further and further to the left of the formation. Both sides' elites would presumably exploit their respective mismatches and the battle would go from there. That's not what happened at Leuctra. What happened at Leuctra was that the Theban commander flipped the script: the Sacred Band was put on the left of the Theban formation with a thick stack of backup troops behind them, while his inferior troops were not only placed toward the right, but toward the rear as well, in something of a diagonal formation. The Spartan elites wouldn't get their traditional mismatch. It worked; the Spartan elites couldn't handle the Theban elites plus the deep bench behind them, and never really made an impact on the fight. Things fell apart from there; the rest of the Spartans, seeing what was happening to their best troops, lost their resolve.

Let's just reiterate here that the band of gay lovers was used as not only soldiers, but the Theban elites, and that they're the ones who ended up breaking the influence of Sparta. Not bad.

So what ultimately happened to them? Philip II of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great happened to them at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BCE. That's what it took to beat them. Thebes- and most of the Rest of Greece as well- got steamrolled and added to Alexander's empire like everyone else. Interestingly, in the process of losing, while the other Thebans ran like hell, the Sacred Band, true to the original theory from the Symposium, stayed and fought to the last man. It may have been Alexander the Great bearing down on them, but that's still the person they love that he's bearing down on. Everybody died where they stood.

After the battle, Philip II took a survey of the field, and happened across the bodies of the Sacred Band. When he was told that that's who they were, he reportedly broke into tears and said, "Perish any man who suspects that these men either did or suffered anything unseemly."