Cynthiabagiertaylor

The Chandelier Tree is a wonderful intervention just over the hill from where we live. Six couples have stood under it to get engaged, according to The Eastsider. Hopefully we’ll see more public creativity like this in the coming years.

The Lorain County Correctional Institution shows pirated movies to prisoners, "even as inmates serve time for illegally downloading movies." Richard Humphrey, 22, who was sentenced to the prison for selling pirated copies of movies, said, "How do you expect someone to be rehabilitated when there's authority figures that are running those institutions that are copyright infringing?"

Bren, a self-confessed "noodle fanatic," has written a guide to the delights of Singapore's Changi airport, which he calls "Disneyland for backpackers." It is certainly a nice airport, the best airport ever built on the site of a notorious death-camp, but Bren misses its best feature: the outdoor rooftop pool. I always try make Singapore my stopover when I fly to Australia, and do an hour's worth of nighttime lengths in the pool before re-boarding. I like his play on William Gibson's classic moniker for S'pore, too: Disneyland With the Death Penalty."

Changi really does rock: butterfly gardens, cheap amazing food, great electronics, cheap massage, free Playstations, and free movie-theaters! Read the rest

More gorgeous pancakes from Nathan "Saipancakes" Shields: this week, it's cephalopod flapjacks. Dig that chambered nautilus!

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Lawrence Lessig has announced the next step in his campaign against corruption in American politics with the launch of MAYDAY, a Superpac intended to raise enough money through small donations (and, eventually, major ones) to elect a large enough roster of congressmen and senators that they can pass meaningful campaign finance reform, making Superpacs and other perversions of democracy a bad memory.

MAYDAY is trying to raise $1M in the next 30 days, and to build this sum into a "moneybomb" that can be dropped onto the 2016 elections. They're doing it through a Kickstarter-like mechanism, so your pledge only comes out of your bank account if the full amount is raised. They're calling it a moonshot. It's audacious, improbable, and desperately needed. I only wish that I could donate (I'm a foreigner). Tell you what, if you throw in an extra buck for me, I'll add an extra hundred pounds to the UK equivalent when and if it launches.

In 2014, we want to make fundamental reform the issue in 5 congressional races.

From that, we'll have a better sense of what victory in 2016 will take. And we'll put Congress on notice that in 2016, we'll be back.

So for 2014, we have two fundraising targets:

The first is $1 million by the end of May. If we meet that goal, that $1 million will be matched, and we'll move to the second target.

That second target is $5 million by the end of June. If we meet that goal, that $5 million will also be matched, and our fundraising for 2014 will end.

We will then have the funds we need to hire the best campaign shops we can to use 100% of these kickstarted funds to win in these 5 districts.

Mayone.US

The Launch of the MAYDAY Citizens’ SuperPAC

I like Glen Mullaly's photo of these 1950s-era rocket ship toothbrush holders.

Speed Weed is a marijuana delivery service chain in southern California. Amanda Lewis of LA Weekly rode along with a delivery driver and wrote about it.

4:20 p.m.: Next stop: a new customer in Encino, who ordered $40 of Granddaddy Purple and $60 of Pineapple Express. The packaging for the latter says, "Seth Rogan [sic] avail for additional fee." Covington writes all of the descriptions; he says a lot of people call and ask, in all seriousness, how much it would cost to get the movie star to come over.

4:24 p.m.: "We have a ton of porn star clients," Joyner says. "Porn and weed definitely go hand in hand. They're usually very good tippers."

4:59 p.m.: We get off the 101 and pull up to a row of freeway-adjacent, hideous condos. Joyner calls the customer and says he will meet her in front of the lobby.

5:07 p.m.: Two girls with dyed blonde hair come out of the building, one in studded jorts and the other barefoot, in yoga pants. "I just moved here from Chicago, like, a year ago," says the barefoot girl, marveling at the fact that she can get weed delivered. "Like, is this real life?" She pays in cash and doesn't tip.

Weed on Wheels: Marijuana Delivered to Your Door in 40 Minutes or Less

yourmotherseyes:

The Vagenda Magazine asked their Twitter followers to tweet them edited headlines

This is my favourite thing at the moment

Woman had skin all along

th3goatfather:

"Girls deliver ice. Heavy work that formerly belonged to men only is being done by girls. The girls are delivering ice on a route and their work requires brawn as well as the patriotic ambition to help." September 16, 1918.

This photo was taken at the 2008 knighthood ceremony of Sir Nils Olav, a penguin who lives at the Edinburgh Zoo but is the official mascot of the Norwegian Royal Guard. In 1982, Nils Olav received his first Norwegian military promotion, to Corporal. As of 2005, his rank is Colonel-in-Chief. Periodically, the Norwegian Royal Guard visits Edinburgh, and Nils is called out to inspect the troops.

Of course, while national pride is forever, penguins only live so long. Most of the promotions and the knighthood have actually gone to the second Nils Olav, the first having died in the 1980s.

Later this year, the US Supreme Court will issue a ruling in the case of Sebelius vs. Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. — answering whether a corporation can have religious beliefs that enable it to opt out of the mandate requiring company-purchased insurance to cover all forms of birth control. That’s the legal question. But the case also orbits around a separate question that has roots in both science and religious belief. Hobby Lobby doesn’t want to provide health insurance that covers the costs of birth control because that includes IUDs, or intrauterine devices.

The owners of Hobby Lobby believe that IUDs actually cause abortions. Birth control activists say IUDs never cause abortions, and work by preventing pregnancy, just like you’d expect birth control to do. Who is right? According to scientific research, neither of them — though the birth control activists are much closer to being right than Hobby Lobby.

IUDs are basically just little pieces of plastic. In the United States, there are two types available, both shaped like a capital “T”. One, the ParaGard, has thin copper wire wrapped around the bars of the T. The other, Mirena, secrets a type of progestin, a hormone that’s used in other forms of birth control, like the Pill. Either way, a doctor uses a thin tube to slide the IUD, T arms folded, through a woman’s cervix and into her uterus. You can leave it there for years. There’s nothing to remember, as with the pill or a condom. And it has a low failure rate — fewer than 1 in 100 women will get pregnant in a year while using an IUD. Compare that to the Pill — 9 pregnant women out of 100 in a year — or a condom — 18 out of 100 — and you can see the appeal. As a bonus, the IUD, and particularly the ParaGard, is also a form of birth control that nursing mothers can use without affecting their milk supply.

But how do they work? To understand this better, I turned both to scientific research — most of which dates to the late 1970s and early 1980s, little has been done since — and to experts. In particular, Horacio Croxatto. He’s a surgeon and biologist, and founder of the Chilean Institute of Reproductive Medicine. He’s also one of the scientists who conducted the studies that people are referring to when they say that IUDs don’t cause abortions.

The confusion surrounding how IUDs work dates back to animal studies conducted in the 1960s, Dr. Croxatto told me. The first study to examine the mechanism of IUDs was done in 1964 on rats and clearly showed that, in rats, IUDs do prevent fertilized eggs from implanting in the uterus. But, Dr. Croxatto said, those results turned out to not be applicable to human women. Or, for that matter, to females of other animal species.

Rats have a reproductive system that’s very different from humans. Instead of a large, central uterus, their uterus branches into two distinct horns. Because of that, scientists were able to use one horn as the control and put an IUD in the other. They mated the rats, and then killed and dissected them at 1, 2, 5, and 10 days after mating. When they cut the rats open, they could see how eggs were being fertilized and developing normally on both sides, but those fertilized eggs were only implanting and growing in the uterine horn that had no IUD. In other words, the IUD was preventing fertilized eggs from becoming viable pregnancies. Biologists and doctors define pregnancy as beginning at implantation. So, technically, preventing implantation isn’t an abortion. That said, the people who own Hobby Lobby define pregnancy differently, as beginning at fertilization. If humans were like rats, then their fears would be justified.

But, when scientists tried to replicate the results in other test animals, they found completely different mechanisms. For instance, a similar study in sheep, which also have uterine horns, showed that eggs weren’t being fertilized in the control side, or the side with an IUD. Researchers eventually figured out that the presence of an IUD made the peristaltic contractions — muscle movements in the uterus that usually move sperm towards the fallopian tubes — operate in reverse.

When scientists tested the mechanism of IUDs in other animals they also found it working in different ways. Basically, Croxatto said, you can’t extrapolate the results in one species to assume how IUDs work in another.

The Human Studies

It wasn’t until the 1970s that scientists actually studied the mechanism of IUDs in human women. The studies done on animals couldn’t be replicated exactly in humans. (Anybody up for mating followed by death and dissection?) So, instead, researchers came up with other ways to do the tests.

For example, they looked for the hormone released when an egg has been fertilized and is in the process of implanting in the uterus. Human chorionic gonadotropin is the same hormone that a pregnancy test looks for and it’s present beginning about 7 days after ovulation. HCG can’t tell you much about the earliest stages of fertilization, but we know that levels of the hormone rise and then fall in women who have very early miscarriages that failed to implant, so it stands to reason that, if IUDs were preventing fertilized eggs from implanting, you’d see the same sort of thing.

The trouble is, there’s lots of different ways to measure HCG. Some of those methods are more sensitive than others. And it’s a measurement that’s easy to get wrong, with a risk of both false positives and negatives. Because of this, we don’t even know, exactly, what percentage of pregnancies end in miscarriage — some studies say it’s as low as 6%, some say as high as 57%. It’s not surprising, then, that studies of HCG levels in women with IUDs have had varying results. In 2007, though, Dr. Croxatto reviewed the research. He found five studies that showed transient increases in HCG in 15-44% of the cycles of women with IUDs. He found 14 studies that showed HCG increasing in only 0-2.7% of the cycles of women with IUDs. In general, the 14 studies that suggest HCG levels don’t increase very often, if at all, in women with IUDs were done with better techniques and are considered more reliable.

With the help of microscopes, scientists also searched for actual eggs, both fertilized and unfertilized. You can do this in a couple of ways. First, scientists can inject liquid into the uterus, flushing it out like you’d flush out hard-to-reach engine systems in a car. Then, you collect the fluid that comes out and look for eggs. For instance, a study that Croxatto did in 1974 found eggs (some fertilized, some not) in 22% of the uterine flushes they did on women who weren’t using birth control. In women with IUDs, on the other hand, flushing revealed eggs in only 1.5% of the searches.

Fourteen years later, a study done by a different set of researchers turned up similar results. This study examined the fallopian tubes of women who had gone in for surgical sterilizations. Some of them had IUDs, some didn’t. Most of the women abstained from sex before their surgeries, at the request of the researchers. But among the small group that did not, the scientists found fertilized eggs in 50% of the control subjects. They found none in the women with IUDs.

That study also had an interesting twist. Among the women who had abstained from sex, scientists found significantly lower numbers of unfertilized eggs in the women with IUDs. Why would having an IUD reduce the number of unfertilized eggs in a woman’s reproductive tract? Croxatto says that seemingly weird result points towards the mechanism that makes IUDs work.

Biological Recoil

All over your body, your immune system is hard at work, looking for invaders and jumping into action to drive them out. The front line shock troops in this battle are white blood cells, which seek out unwelcome microbes and attack them — poisoning some and devouring others in a process called phagocytosis. The bulk of evidence suggests that this same process is what makes IUDs work, Croxatto says. When you put an IUD in your uterus, your immune system registers it as an intruder and starts to attack. White blood cells can’t kill a piece of plastic and copper, but they give it their best shot, and those efforts end up killing the majority of sperm that reach the uterus. The effect is even stronger in IUDs made with copper, like ParaGard, because copper ions are also toxic to sperm.

There have been at least two studies that asked women who were planning a sterilization surgery to have sex first, so scientists could look for sperm in their discarded fallopian tubes. As you might expect, women who weren’t using birth control had lots of sperm up in there. Women who were using inert plastic IUDs (a type of IUD that’s no longer sold in the US) had some sperm. Women using copper IUDs had none. Not a single sperm.

That’s a stark contrast between humans and those rats that IUDs were first tested on. Croxatto says the difference lies in how sperm travel. In rats, sperm reach the uterus protected by a bubble of semen that keeps angry white blood cells at bay. Human sperm have no such luck, their semen gets left behind in the vestibule of the vagina. So if an IUD is in place, the immune response it creates kills sperm.

And Croxatto thinks that same process explains why scientists also found fewer unfertilized eggs in women who used IUDs. There’s not really a barrier between the uterus and the fallopian tubes in human women. So uterine fluid, filled with white blood cells and copper ions, is free to move into the fallopian tubes, where it destroys unfertilized eggs the same way it destroys sperm. That idea isn’t as well established as the effect on sperm. But it makes sense.

Science and religion

So, does that mean the birth control activists are right? That IUDs never prevent fertilized eggs from implanting? Not exactly.

While we know IUDs do an impressive job of preventing fertilization, we also know that they’re perfectly capable of preventing implantation, as well. ParaGard, the copper IUD, can be used as emergency contraception. Say you have sex, and the condom breaks. You can go in to the doctor the next day, or even as many as five days later, get a ParaGard, and almost eliminate your chances of getting pregnant. But sperm reach the fallopian tubes within minutes of ejaculation. So the IUD can’t be working by killing off sperm. “In that case, it’s clearly abortifacient,” Croxatto says. “No doubt about that.”

When birth control activists and religious groups face off about how IUDs work, what they’re actually arguing over is the primary mechanism of IUDs. People like the owners of Hobby Lobby believe that IUDs mostly work by preventing implantation, which is, to them, an abortion. Activists (and scientists) point to the data that strongly suggests the opposite — IUDs can prevent implantation, but they mostly work by preventing eggs from being fertilized in the first place. Then, of course, there’s also that pesky semantic disagreement about what constitutes a pregnancy and, thus, an abortion.

This is what I mean by both sides being right, but birth control activists being moreso. If you go by the scientific definition, where pregnancy begins at implantation, then IUDs definitely don’t work by causing abortions. If your religious beliefs lead you to think pregnancy begins at fertilization, well, the data suggests that, sometimes, rarely, IUDs used as birth control might abort a fertilized egg. In that way, everybody’s right. But the science — what we know about IUDs from evidence — suggests that the primary mechanism is to prevent fertilization, not to prevent implantation. So, in that way, Planned Parenthood is more correct than Hobby Lobby, no matter what deeply held religious beliefs the company’s owners may have.

There's more to the research than I've written about here. If you want to learn more about how IUDs work and how we know how they work, I'd recommend these sources:
• A 2007 peer-reviewed paper by Horacio Croxatto that reviews and summarizes previously published research.
• A 1989 editorial published in the scientific journal Studies in Family Planning by Irving Sivin, senior scientist at The Population Council.
• A 1987 World Health Organization report on IUDs, their safety and mechanism of action.

DISCLAIMER: I’m personally pro-choice. I think birth control should be covered as a part of health care, no different than birth, pap smears, or any other aspect of women’s health. I use an IUD, myself, and do not particularly care if it occasionally prevents a fertilized egg from implanting in my uterus.

Photo: Shutterstock

itscarororo:

*salivates*

what

joequinones:

Power Boy, by Cory Walker

http://corenthal.tumblr.com

A sad story of two marmosets documented by animal behavior researcher Bruna Bezerra, who was observing the primates in their northeast Brazil home:

The pair had been the dominant male and female since observations began. When the female fell out of the tree, her partner engaged in a number of behaviors, including embracing her, sniffing at her, chasing other monkeys away, sitting by her, and trying to copulate with her. He also emitted alarm calls normally used when a predator is near. And several months after her death, the male disappeared from the marmoset group, never to be seen again.

More: Do Monkeys Grieve for Fallen Mates? | Science/AAAS. Here's the study, in the journal Primates. There's video, too. [via Ed Yong]

Worth a trip to Finland after September 2014 just to buy a few and send postcards to conservative US lawmakers or, say, the Pope.

Slate: This fall, the country will begin selling stamps that feature the “confident and proud homoeroticism” of Tom of Finland, an artist renowned as “beyond question the most influential creator of gay pornographic illustration.”

Tom of Finland, aka Touko Laaksonen, once famously said "If I don't have an erection when I'm doing a drawing, I know it's no good."

Fuckin' cryptocurrencies, how do they work? Fans of ICP who are fed up with using actual US dollars to pay for all-you-can-slurp Faygo and ethanol cocktails at festivals can rejoice with the news of a new, bitcoin-y cryptocurrency. "According to juggalocoin.org, the currency is designed for the group’s substantial Juggalo community, and is available to purchase now." It was created by a juggalo named Papa Nutt. [Guardian. HT: Dean Putney]

(via GoComics.com)

Remember Bunnie Huang's fully open laptop? Bunnie and Sean "xobs" Cross prototyped a machine he called the "Novena" in which every component, down to the BIOS, was fully documented, licensed under FLOSS licenses, and was totally modifiable by its owner.

Now, Bunnie and Xobs have teamed up with Sutajio Kosagi for a crowdfunding campaign to take the laptop into production. $500 gets you the board, $1200 gets you a desktop version, $2000 gets you a laptop and $5000 get you a "heirloom laptop" in a handmade wooden case crafted by Portland-area luthier Kurt Mottweiler.

The Novena is "not a device made for consumer home use" -- it has lots of components that are exposed during normal use, has no moisture- or static-resistance built into it, etc. It's intended as a piece of high-quality lab equipment for people interested in the long-term project of building fully open, everyday use computers where surveillance, abusive commercial practices, and other proprietary horribles are substantially harder to accomplish than in the current hardware/software ecosystem.

Noah Swartz notes, "I for one am super excited about it because it's meant specifically for hackers and tinkerers. The motherboard has a Spartan-6 CSG324-packaged FPGA built right into it, and if you opt for the conversion-tablet form factor you also get bunni's own battery controller which allows you to use cheap RC car or airplane batteries instead of expensive laptop specific ones by moving the load balancing circuits off of the battery itself. Also the internals of the case are covered in mounting holes (dubbed the peek array after Nadya Peek: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIUE8VVLjCE) which allow you to affix whatever sort of add-ons you want to the inside of the laptop."

I've put in for one of the laptops. I can't wait.

In the design shown here, you can access the internals without having to remove a single screw – in fact, the laptop opens itself for you. With the slide of a latch, the screen automatically pops open thanks to an internal gas spring. As the internals are naked when the screen is up, this is not a computer for casual home use. Another side benefit of this design is there's no fan noise – when the screen is up, the motherboard is exposed to open air and a passive heatsink is all you need to keep the CPU cool.

Another feature of this design is the LCD bezel is made out of a single, simple aluminum sheet. This allows users with access to a minimal machine shop to modify or craft their own bezels – no custom tooling required. Hopefully this makes adding knobs and connectors, or changing the LCD relatively easy. In order to encourage people to experiment, we will ship desktop and laptop devices with not one, but two LCD bezels, so you don't have to worry about having an unusable machine if you mess up one of the bezels!

The panel covering the “port farm” on the right hand side of the case is designed to be replaceable. A single screw holds it in place, so if you design your own motherboard or if you want to upgrade in the future, you're not locked into today's port layout. We take advantage of this feature between the desktop and the laptop versions, as the DC power jack is in a different location for the two configurations.

Finally, the inside of the case features a “Peek Array”. It's an array of M2.5 mounting holes (yes, they are metric) populating the extra unused space inside the case, on the right hand side in the photo above. It's named after Nadya Peek, a graduate student at MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms. Nadya is a consummate maker, and is a driving force behind the CBA's Fab Lab initiative. When we designed this array of mounting bosses, we imagined someone like Nadya making their own circuit boards or whatever they want, and mounting it inside the case using the Peek Array.

Novena (Thanks, Noah!)

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April 2nd, 2014: OKAY YES changing Dinosaur Comics to a comic where the pictures constantly change was only for April Fools' Day, I GUESS. I guess this is why all those tech companies test the waters by launching new features on April 1st, huh? You can play off your hopes and dreams as a joke. If you want to recreate this experience, add "&butiwouldratherbereading=onaprilfoolsday2014" to the end of any qwantz comics URL, or, to recreate it EVEN HARDER, add "&butiwouldratherbereading=somethingthatwilldestroymybrain". There are a bunch of other overlays too! If you are vision-impaired in the way that means reading black text on white is tricky, there's also a "white-on-black" inversed version (assuming your browser supports it: Chrome does). Turns out this feature has legitimate uses! One year ago today: welcome to a world where the word "reputation" doesn't exist and everything is understood in terms of corporations – Ryan

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whoah, you can get to be or not to be in the latest humble bundle!
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March 31st, 2014: ECCC was amazing and also the best. Thank you everyone who came out! It was... the most fun?? I will write more about it later when I am less exhausted! EXCITING THINGS HAPPENING: Issue 4 of The Midas Flesh is out now! You can get it at your local comic shop, or online! To Be or Not To Be is in The Humble Ebooks Bundle! Name your own price, support charity, and get 10 books by a bunch of great authors including Yahtzee Croshaw, Steven Gould, John Scalzi, and also I'm in there to for some reason! One year ago today: beach-based fun times, FINALLY – Ryan

Here's a terrific gallery of images from NASA's archives imagining life in space colonies. They were made in the 1970s so everything and everyone looks like they are from the 1970s.

Space Colony Art from the 1970s

Andrew “weev” Auernheimer is serving a 41-month sentence for visiting a publicly available webpage and revealing that AT&T had not secured its customers' sensitive financial information. Now, weev's lawyers are appealing, and in the opening day's arguments, Assistant US Attorney Glenn Moramarco admitted I don’t even understand what [Auernheimer actually did.]" Then he compared it to blowing up a nuclear power-plant.

Homemade cider

2048 is a super addictive tile matching game.

I apologize if you lose a few hours of your life.

The insanely high score is that of my girlfriend not me.

A new Snowden leak reveals that all the voice calls in an unnamed country are recorded and saved for 30 days on a rolling basis, with millions of voice "cuts" (clippings) harvested from the corpus for long-term storage by the system. The system, called MYSTIC, has been running since 2009, and its search tool, RETRO, has been fully operational against a whole country's phone calls since 2011.

President Obama has stated that " the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don't threaten our national security" -- this is a hard statement to square with the idea of recording all the voice calls made in an entire country.

The Washington Post article detailing the programs states at least five more countries are now covered by MYSTIC, with a sixth coming online.

The emblem of the MYSTIC program depicts a cartoon wizard with a telephone-headed staff. Among the agency’s bulk collection programs disclosed over the past year, its focus on the spoken word is unique. Most of the programs have involved the bulk collection of either metadata — which does not include content — or text, such as e-mail address books.

Telephone calls are often thought to be more ephemeral and less suited than text for processing, storage and search. Indeed, there are indications that the call-recording program has been hindered by the NSA’s limited capacity to store and transmit bulky voice files.

In the first year of its deployment, a program officer wrote that the project “has long since reached the point where it was collecting and sending home far more than the bandwidth could handle.”

Because of similar capacity limits across a range of collection programs, the NSA is leaping forward with cloud-based collection systems and a gargantuan new “mission data repository” in Utah. According to its overview briefing, the Utah facility is designed “to cope with the vast increases in digital data that have accompanied the rise of the global network.”

NSA surveillance program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay phone calls [Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani/Washington Post]

Ryan writes, "I was a backer of the Veronica Mars movie, one level of backer got you a digital download of the movie. They ended up going with Warner Bros owned/backed Flixster. So for me I have an apple TV and a Roku. Flixster doesn't support appleTV or airplay, the Flixster channel for the Roku will crash anytime you try to watch anything. Flixster also will not allow you to watch the movie on a computer that has dual monitors."

The studio will allow you to buy a better experience on a non-Flixster service, send them the bill, and get a refund (but only if you complain first).

There's a copy of the movie on The Pirate Bay with more than 11,000 seeders, which means that this Flixster business is doing precisely nothing to deter piracy, and is only serving to alienate megafans who voluntarily donated money to see this movie made, and to subject the studio itself to potential millions in administrative costs and refunds to investors who were forced into the retail channels.

The studios can't conceive of an "audience" that has an active role in, or any right to, the media they enjoy: not even when that "audience" is more properly viewed as the product's investors. What's more, they're the angel investors who bought in when the product was highly speculative and assumed 100% of the risk; the studio is just the VC who came along to put in a round of safe money after the project had proven out. In any real business-setting, the angels would be suing the pants off of the VCs and winning.

DRM has become a cult-belief among some studio execs, a point of pride without recourse to rationality. When your religious dogma causes you to lock the movie's investors out of the movie itself, perhaps it's time to reconsider your dogma.

They claim this is all studio restrictions but I find that laughable being that the movie is a Warner Bros movie Flixster is a Warner Bros service and If I purchased the movie on iTunes or Amazon or downloaded via a bittorrent I could watch it on my AppleTV in HD

Many unhappy comments regarding this choice on the kickstarter page also.

There's also no GNU/Linux version of Flixter, so your reward for being a GNU/Linux user who gave your personal, actual money to make this movie is a kick in the pants.

Warner Brothers to “Veronica Mars” Backers: Okay, Okay — Use iTunes or Amazon if You Want