Simon Ostrovsky

Simon Ostrovsky (Russian: Симон Островский; born February 2, 1981) is a Soviet-born American documentary filmmaker and journalist best known for his coverage of the 2014 crisis in Ukraine for VICE News and Selfie Soldiers, a 2015 documentary in which he re-enacted a Russian soldier's social media posts to track him to Ukraine. He was briefly held hostage by pro-Russia militants there in April 2014. Ostrovsky won an Emmy Award in 2013 for his work with VICE.

Career

Ostrovsky started his career in documentary filmmaking in 2007 after spending six years as a print reporter in the former Soviet Union, where he covered Russia for The Moscow Times and then Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan for the French news agency Agence France-Presse.

In 2007, Ostrovsky produced an exclusive report for BBC Newsnight investigating government-sponsored child labor in the cotton industry of Uzbekistan, which a US embassy cable published by Wikileaks credited with reigniting the global campaign against Uzbek cotton. Ostrovsky traced the supply chains of multinational garment retailers like TopShop, Walmart and H&M to Uzbekistan, leading many Western cotton buyers to eventually boycott the country.

Simon

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Russian roulette

Russian roulette (Russian: Русская рулетка) is a lethal game of chance in which a player places a single round in a revolver, spins the cylinder, places the muzzle against their head, and pulls the trigger. "Russian" refers to the supposed country of origin, and roulette to the element of risk-taking and the spinning of the revolver's cylinder being reminiscent of spinning a roulette wheel.

Because only one chamber is loaded, the player has a one in x chance of hitting the loaded chamber, where x is the number of chambers in the cylinder. So, for instance, for a revolver that holds six rounds, the chance is one in six. That assumes that each chamber is equally likely to come to rest in the "correct" position. However due to gravity, in a properly maintained weapon with a single round inside the cylinder, the full chamber, which weighs more than the empty chambers, will usually end up near the bottom of the cylinder when its axis is not vertical, altering the odds in favor of the player. This only applies to swing-out cylinder type revolvers, and only if the cylinder is spun outside of the revolver and allowed to come to a complete stop before locked back in.

VICE

The software program VICE, standing for VersatIle Commodore Emulator, is a free and cross platform emulator for Commodore's 8-bit computers, running on Amiga, Unix, MS-DOS, Win32, Mac OS X, OS/2, Acorn RISC OS, QNX QNX, GP2X GP2X, Dingoo Dingoo A320, Syllable Syllable OS, and BeOS host machines. VICE is free software, released under the GNU General Public Licence.

It's also available for a variety of platforms: for instance VICE for Microsoft Windows (Win32) is known as WinVICE, the OS/2 variant is called Vice/2, and the emulator running on BeOS is called BeVICE.

History

As of version 2.1, released December 19, 2008, VICE emulates the Commodore 64, the C128, the VIC-20, the Plus/4, the C64 Direct-to-TV (with its additional video modes) and all the PET models including the CBM-II but excluding the 'non-standard' features of the SuperPET 9000. WinVICE supports digital joysticks via a parallel port driver, and, with a CatWeasel PCI card, is planned to perform hardware SID playback (requires optional SID chip installed in socket).

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, often abridged as Last Week Tonight, is an American late-night talk and news satire television program airing on Sundays on HBO in the United States and HBO Canada, and on Mondays (originally Tuesdays) on Sky Atlantic in the United Kingdom. The half-hour long show premiered on Sunday, April 27, 2014, and is hosted by comedian John Oliver. Last Week Tonight shares some similarities with Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, where Oliver was previously featured as a correspondent and fill-in host, as it takes a satirical look at news, politics and current events on a weekly basis.

Oliver has said that he has full creative freedom, including free rein to criticize corporations. His initial contract with HBO was for two years with an option for extension. In February 2015, it was announced that the show has been renewed for two additional seasons of 35 episodes each. Oliver and HBO programming president Michael Lombardo have discussed extending the show from half an hour to a full hour and airing more than once a week after Oliver "gets his feet under him".