spriteleigh

The Cops in Bike Lanes tumblr is just what you'd expect: photos from around America of police cars illegally stopped in bike lanes, a practice that forces cyclists to abruptly and dangerously enter the stream of automotive traffic.

The photos are often annotated by their submitters; the commentary on the photo above notes that "There is clearly plenty of room for this van to parallel park and not obstruct the bike lane if the officer gave half a second’s thought to cyclists' safety."

Cops in Bike Lanes (via Making Light)

(Video Link)

Bad dubbing, shaky animation, overly large and creepy eyes? Yes, this video by Nacho Punch has everything you'd expect to see in a cheesy 1980's anime, only with the added fun of the Dark Side, ewoks and Chewbacca. 

While there's no way this series would have ever gotten as big as the original movie trilogy if this was all Lucas released, it's possible they would have sold even more toys -just like the original Transformers cartoons did. And hey, we geeks still would have watched the show with wide-eyed wonder, we probably just wouldn't see as many Slave Leias at every comic book convention.

Via BoingBoing

(Video Link)

First Jean-Claude Van Damme did the Epic Splits stunt in real life between two semi trucks, then an animated Chuck Norris outdid Van Damme with an Epic Splits stunt between two airplanes with a bunch of spec ops guys balanced on his head, Channing Tatum apparently did the splits too but I don't think anybody ever saw that one.

And now we have the only Epic Splits video that actually matters, besides the original that is because Van Damme's stunt was pretty darn cool, featuring some sweet action figure stop motion by Kyle Roberts- here's Wolverine doing the Epic Splits his way, complete with a grumbly little monologue and some Sentinel destruction.

Via Nerd Approved

Bloo sez, "With the advent of the US election cycle, it's a great time to reference a remix featuring Lessig - a blues featuring prolific ccmixter contributor

(YouTube link)

New Year's Eve on film can be funny, sad, nostalgic, hopeful, drunk, or just happy -but they all have Auld Lang Syne to tie them together. These clips are from the movies Ocean's 11, One Way Passage, The Gold Rush, Waterloo Bridge, An Affair to Remember, Wee Willy Winkie, Scandal, The Apartment, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Bachelor Mother, and It's a Wonderful Life. Someone needs to append When Harry Met Sally into this. Happy New Year!

Brian sez, "Lawrence Lessig, former EFF board member, chair of the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, founder of the Center for Internet and Society, founding board member of Creative Commons, and former board member of the Free Software Foundation is taking on a new project -- walking across New Hampshire.

"The idea is to raise awareness of the massive amount of political corruption in the American democratic system, and make it the #1 issue in New Hampshire in time for the 2016 Presidential Primaries. This three-minute video (from the guy who did the Windows 8 and Data Caps animations) explains the project, called the New Hampshire Rebellion, in cartoon form."

Animated: How the New Hampshire Rebellion will make corruption the #1 issue of 2016 (Thanks, Brian)

Ask a man to watch your dog for you at work and you’d better have someone check in on them from time to time, or you may not like the pics you find online. Reddit user mmsspp has been posting pics of himself and his boss’ dog Wrigley re-enacting scenes from famous movies, and the only real problem is they all seem to be from love stories or scenes of romance.

The dog looks cute and all but I can’t imagine anyone wanting to share photographic evidence of their creepy love affair with a dog online, but maybe mmsspp justifies it by claiming they’re just pretending to be in the movies. Yeah right!

Via DesignTAXI

The Verge's Kyle Chayla tracked down the real-life dog from the Doge meme!

When 51-year-old Japanese kindergarten teacher Atsuko Sato started seeing strange pictures of her eight-year-old Shiba Inu dog Kabosu popping up on the internet this past August, she was a little freaked out. “I was taken aback,” Sato, an elegant, brown-haired woman given to wide smiles, recalled. “It felt very strange to see her face there. It was a Kabosu that I didn’t know.”

Sunday's Snowden leaks detailing the Tailored Access Operations group -- the NSA's exploit-farming, computer-attacking "plumbers" -- and the ANT's catalog of attacks on common computer equipment and software -- were accompanied by a lecture by Jacob Appelbaum at the 30th Chaos Communications Congress. I have seen Jake speak many times, but this talk is extraordinary, even by his standards, and should by watched by anyone who's said, "Well, they're probably not spying on me, personally;" or "What's the big deal about spies figuring out how to attack computers used by bad guys?" or "It's OK if spies discover back-doors and keep them secret, because no one else will ever find them."

Nominally, Jake's talk is about the details of the spying tools developed by the NSA, but the talk goes well beyond that. The meat of the talk is the analysis of the legal framework under which these are developed and what the consequences to the wider world are.

The development and hoarding of vulnerabilities in widely used systems represent a risk to everyone who relies on those systems -- not just people the NSA want to spy on. Even if you trust the NSA, you need to know that every bug the NSA keeps secret is a bug that might be independently discovered by another agency you don't trust -- or a criminal group -- and used to attack you. Not because you're a special target, but because an untargetted attack aimed at the whole Internet happens upon you and turns your computer into something that spies on you to sexually exploit you or clean out your bank-account or just sell off all your World of Warcraft stuff.

To drive home this point, Jake details a secret NSA exploit from its catalog, and points out that another speaker at 30C3 had actually independently discovered that exploit and disclosed it at the same event. The lesson: anything the NSA discovers and doesn't patch will be discovered by someone else and exploited.

Jake discloses the way that the NSA determines which targets are fair game for deeper scrutiny, including having your mobile phone in close proximity to an existing target, like Jake himself. To drive home the point, he switches on his phone and says, "Right, anyone who's phone is on now is on the list now."

Beyond the political and technical messages, Jake's speech is great for the details of the spycraft disclosed in it -- the fact that Iphones are completely compromised and can be successfully attacked 100 percent of the time (Jake suspects that this suggests collaboration on the part of Apple) and the fact that Wifi can be intercepted and compromised from eight miles away and that the NSA might use drones against Wifi.

30c3: To Protect And Infect

Michelle Nijhuis's five year old daughter insisted that Bilbo Baggins was a girl. After arguing about it for a while, Michelle decided to read her The Hobbit, switching Bilbo's gender-pronoun throughout. And it worked brilliantly. Bilbo is a great heroine: "tough, resourceful, humble, funny, and uses her wits to make off with a spectacular piece of jewelry. Perhaps most importantly, she never makes an issue of her gender -- and neither does anyone else."

Pat Murphy wrote a novel based on this premise: There and Back Again, which is a retelling of The Hobbit as a science fiction story in which all the characters are female (in contrast to Tolkien, whose world is all but empty of women of any sort). It is, sadly, long out of print, but available used and well worth your attention.

In the meantime, this kind of on-the-fly changes to stories are part of what make reading aloud to your kid so much fun. Poesy often requests (demands) editorial changes to the books I read her, some of which have been surprisingly effective at improving the text.

Bilbo, it turns out, makes a terrific heroine. She’s tough, resourceful, humble, funny, and uses her wits to make off with a spectacular piece of jewelry. Perhaps most importantly, she never makes an issue of her gender—and neither does anyone else.

Despite what can seem like a profusion of heroines in kids’ books, girls are still underrepresented in children’s literature. A 2011 study of 6,000 children’s books published between 1900 and 2000 showed that only 31 percent had female central characters. While the disparity has declined in recent years, it persists—particularly, and interestingly, among animal characters. And many books with girl protagonists take place in male-dominated worlds, peopled with male doctors and male farmers and mothers who have to ask fathers for grocery money (Richard Scarry, I’m looking at you). The imbalance is even worse in kids’ movies: Geena Davis’ Institute on Gender and Media found that for every female character in recent family films, there are three male characters. Crowd scenes, on average, are only 17 percent female.

More insidiously, children’s books with girl protagonists sometimes celebrate their heroines to a fault. Isn’t it amazing that a girl did these things, they seem to say—implying that these heroines are a freakish exception to their gender, not an inspiration for readers to follow. Children’s lit could benefit from a Finkbeiner Test. (Well-intentioned kids’ media can, ironically, introduce their youngest listeners and viewers to gender barriers: The first time my daughter heard the fabulous album Free to Be … You and Me, she asked “Why isn’t it all right for boys to cry?”)

One Weird Old Trick to Undermine the Patriarchy

(Image: Lani Malu)

HOT SINGLES IN YOUR AREA, LURKING IN THE DARK AREAS AT THE CORNERS OF YOUR VISION, WAITING FOR THE TIME TO BE RIPE, FOR YOU TO BE RIPE

— Dread Singles (@hottestsingles) December 30, 2013

HOT SINGLES IN YOUR AREA, CROONING A DIRGE OF KNIVES, HEARTS BEATING IN A TERRIFYINGLY UNIFIED RYTHM, HEARTS THEY HOLD TOWARDS YOU, DRIPPING

— Dread Singles (@hottestsingles) December 28, 2013

HOT SINGLES IN YOUR AREA, WAKING FROM FITFUL SLEEP, PALE TONGUES TASTING THE AIR, RESTLESS BENEATH BORROWED SKIN, WAITING FOR THEIR SUMMONS

— Dread Singles (@hottestsingles) November 21, 2013

Romance is a captivating attraction that drags you into the bowels of a madness that will destroy you before you can ever understand it. And hot singles in your area want to give it to you tonight!

Dread Singles is a Twitter feed that mixes up the words of the horror writer H.P. Lovecraft with dating websites spam advertisements. Sign up now to destroy your soul!

-via Nerdcore

SMBC Comics

Annie Machon -- an ex-MI5 spy who left the agency after blowing the whistle on the agency's illegal activities -- has launched a fund to offer financial support to other whistleblowers, called the "Courage Fund to Protect Journalistic Sources."

Machon left MI5 and disclosed that the agency had illegally spied upon British government ministers, that it had lied in order to send innocent people to jail for bombings in Ireland, had conducted illegal wiretaps, and had worked with MI6 in an assassination attempt on Gaddafi.

She announced the fund at the 30th Chaos Communications Congress, in Hamburg, with a stirring, scathing speech that took governments to task for invasive, bulk spying:

“It is incredibly corrosive to the human spirit to know that everything you say, everything you do, even if you just want to have a private conversation with your mother, is being listened to,” she said. “Now we all know we are being listened to and surveyed in this amazingly Panopticon-like manner.”

People like Snowden and Manning must be given support, she said, or civil liberties will continue to be eroded.

“So many journalists write so many stories, but what happens to the whistleblowers? They’re left swinging in the wind,” she said. “If they can’t survive the process of coming forward, then we will not have these people.”

British Ex-Spy Launches Fund to Support Whistleblowers Like Snowden [John Borland/Wired]

(Image: Annie Machon at OHM, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 91027340@N03's photostream)

2013 was a banner year for the Pirate Bay, despite having been forced to change domain names half-a-dozen times. The site saw a 50% increase in uploads in 2013, to 2.8 million links, presently being swarmed by nearly 19 million users. The Pirate Bay is reportedly developing a peer-to-peer browser that will be much harder to block using existing censorship techniques.

Pirate Bay Uploads Surge 50% in a Year, Despite Anti-Piracy Efforts [Ernesto/TorrentFreak]

Among the 3,842 free feature length films at Archive.org are these newly uploaded B-movies:

Forced Landing (1941): "The action takes place in a Pacific island country, where everyone speaks English, with an assortment of accents. One of the main characters, played by J Carrol Nash, has the appearance of a Mexican bandit, with a Chico Marx speaking style."

The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962): "After being decapitated in a car crash, 'Jan in the Pan' needs a new body, and deranged surgeon/fiancee Herb Evers begins stalking strippers with the hope of performing a full-body transplant and eventually getting the best of both worlds. Naturally, things do not go quite as planned."

The Wild And Wicked (AKA Flesh Merchant) (1956): "In this 1950s exploito film, sweet young thing Joy Reynolds visits 'fashion model' sister Lisa Rack in Hollywood, but soon joins her sister in the sordid worlds of nude modeling and prostitution."

Sunset Murder Case (1938): "Sally Rand stars as a nightclub performer whose police detective father is murdered. She determines to use her wiles to identify the killer, and see him brought to justice."

The King Murder (1932): "Fairly closely based on the real-life murder of New York showgirl Dorothy 'Dot' King in March 1923. Like the character of Miriam King in the movie, the real Dot King was both a perpetrator and a victim of blackmail, and was having simultaneous affairs with at least two rich married men."

Procatinator is exactly what it sounds like: a procrastination site featuring cats. Load it, and you will see a screen-size cat gif accompanied by a more-or-less appropriate musical soundtrack. Just try to quit loading cats before the whole day is gone!

The cat you see here was accompanied by "Roller Coaster of Love" by RHCP. Oskar the blind kitten playing with a hairdryer is accompanied by "Winds of Change" by the Scorpions. Links on the left make it easy to reload or grab the URL of a selection you particularly like. This one is another of my favorites. -via Everlasting Blort

(Video Link)

Broadcast news is full of opportunities for anchor related errors, whether they misread the teleprompter, say something because they don’t realize the cameras are rolling, or have their on location report interrupted by a drunken idiot or some guy flashing his full moon.

It’s a wonder news broadcasts make it on the air at all, and when things inevitably do go wrong the internet is waiting to share these bloopers with the world. Here’s a compilation of the best news bloopers of 2013, which range from silly to ribald, honest mistakes to people acting downright dumb. (NSFW due to language)

Via Super Punch

The Facebook group Plus Size Modeling put up a simple post that has gone wildly viral. Should toy companies make fashion dolls that reflect the body shapes of curvier women?

Keep in mind that if Barbie were scaled up to human size, she'd be 5'9", weigh 110 pounds, have a 39" bust, an 18" waist and 33" hips. Her shoe size would be 3. If Barbie looked like the typical 19-year old American, she'd look this. But what if she looked like someone more rubenesque?

-via Ace of Spades HQ

POLL: Should Mattel make a plus size Barbie doll?

• Yes, because it would reflect reality.
• No, because it would reflect reality.

Ex-CIA agent Philip Giraldi takes a stab at explaining how his fellow retired spooks -- Democrat and Republican -- can be so comfortable with a president who has given himself the power to order assassinations and a regime where the constitution has been effectively suspended. It's all down to American Exceptionalism: "It's OK when we do it, because we're the good guys."

(Video Link)

Nothing gets people singing Hakuna Matata quite like a good old fashioned Lion King reference, and when you combine the beloved 90s Disney movie with cute kittens you’ve created a video that’s bound to take the interweb by storm.

The Pet Collective knows how to use cuteness in their videos to maximum effect, and now this Cute Kitten version of The Lion King is about to get them so much viral love!

Just like their previous videos such as Pug Puppy Version of Home Alone and Pug Puppy Version of Elf, this one stars a cuddly cast of young critters (from the People And Cats Together rescue) and a kid narrator to make the whole thing off the charts adorable.

Via Geekosystem

Yesterday in Hamburg, Glenn Greenwald gave an astounding, must-watch keynote address to the gathered hackers at the 30th Chaos Communications Congress, or 30C3 (Greenwald starts at 4:36). Greenwald excoriated the press for failing to hold the world's leaders to account, describing what he did with the Snowden leaks as challenge to the journalistic status quo as well as the political status quo. This is a leaping-off point for an extended riff on the active cooperation between the press and the national security apparatus, an arrangement calculated to give the appearance of oversight on surveillance activities without any such oversight (for example, BBC reporter expressed shock when he said that the role of the press should be to root out lies from senior spies, saying that generals and senior officials would ever lie to the public).

Greenwald draws a connection between private companies and spying, expressing hope that Internet giants will finally understand that their profitability is endangered by their collaboration with spies. He describes these companies as having "unparalleled power" to curb state spying.

He exhorted the hackers at 30C3 to do their best to make the Internet as secure for its users as possible, saying that without their contributions, all is lost. He urges them to strike back at Silicon Valley intelligence collaborators like Palantir, who pose as hip and technie to attract bright young people to help with their mission to attack privacy.

The whole speech is important; it praises Chelsea Manning, Wikileaks, and Daniel Ellsberg, as well as other brave whistelblowers, and said that the Snowden project built on their work. He said that the heavy-handed attacks on whistleblowers by the US government have only revealed the state's corruption and inspired more insiders to go public.

Notably, Greenwald revealed that the NSA and GCHQ are spying on in-flight Internet service, something that had not been revealed to date.

The audio is already on Soundcloud, and I've extracted the audio as an MP3 and put it on the Internet Archive (MP3).

Keynote Glenn Greenwald 30C3

(YouTube link)

Leonardo DiCaprio stars in an epic film in which he gets into a lot of trouble in his youth, grows up, takes a boat ride, becomes stranded in a strange foreign land, flies a plane out, and eventually becomes fabulously wealthy and successful, although he's still committing crimes. The story is strung together from clips from… (counting) 18 movies! They are listed in order at the YouTube page. According to his IMDb page, DiCaprio has actually been in 29 feature films, plus six television series. This supercut from Official Comedy might just win him that elusive Oscar.  -via Laughing Squid

NSA whistleblower William Binney warns that the agency collects so much useless information that it can't process it effectively. The Snowden leaks about the MUSCULAR surveillance program (tapping the fiber links connecting up the data-centers used by Internet giants like Google and Yahoo) corroborate Binney's view: in 2013, NSA analysts asked to be allowed to collect less data through MUSCULAR, because the "relatively small intelligence value it contains does not justify the sheer volume of collection."

"What they are doing is making themselves dysfunctional by taking all this data," Mr. Binney said at a privacy conference here. The agency is drowning in useless data, which harms its ability to conduct legitimate surveillance, claims Mr. Binney, who rose to the civilian equivalent of a general during more than 30 years at the NSA before retiring in 2001. Analysts are swamped with so much information that they can't do their jobs effectively, and the enormous stockpile is an irresistible temptation for misuse...

In a statement through his lawyer, Mr. Snowden says: "When your working process every morning starts with poking around a haystack of seven billion innocent lives, you're going to miss things." He adds: "We're blinding people with data we don't need."

NSA Struggles to Make Sense of Flood of Surveillance Data [Julia Angwin/WSJ]

(via /.)

(Image: Battersea Riverside Sign, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from wetwebwork's photostream)

Patrick writes, "After more than 125 years and countless crappy incarnations on film, A federal judge has issued a declarative judgment stating that Holmes, Watson, 221B Baker Street, the dastardly Professor Moriarty and other elements included in the 50 Holmes works Arthur Conan Doyle published before Jan. 1, 1923, are no longer covered by United States copyright law and can be freely used by creators without paying any licensing fee to the Conan Doyle estate."

The estate are notorious bullies, and have relied upon bizarre legal theories to extract funds from people who use the Sherlock canon characters in new works, even though those characters come from stories that are largely in the public domain.

“They’ve heard about the way the estate is going around bullying people,” said Darlene Cypser, a lawyer in Denver and the author of a self-published trilogy about the young Holmes, for which the estate initially demanded a licensing fee. (She declined to pay, she said.) “This has been coming for some time. I’m glad Les decided to take it up.”

Several other authors and publishers of Holmes-based work reported receiving somewhat friendlier versions of a threatening letter cited in Mr. Klinger’s complaint. In the letter Mr. Lellenberg suggested that the estate regularly worked with “Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and similar retailers” to “weed out unlicensed uses of Sherlock Holmes,” and would not hesitate to do so with Mr. Klinger’s volume as well.

Mr. Klinger did pay a fee for a similar collection in 2011 at the insistence of his earlier publisher, but this time said he is calling the estate’s bluff. “It’s the ultimate case of the emperor having no clothes,” said Jonathan Kirsch, a publishing lawyer who represents him. “Everyone is making the decision to pay for permission they don’t need to avoid the costs and risks of litigation.”

Suit Says Sherlock Belongs to the Ages [Jennifer Schuessler/NYT]

(Thanks, Patrick!)

(Image: A Study in Scarlet (Beeton's Christmas Annual), a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from 43021516@N06's photostream)

Lol My Thesis invites PhD candidates to submit snarky, one-sentence summaries of their theses ("Female condoms are cool. Also, Foucault." -- Anthropology, Brown; "We dug a lot of holes and still don’t know if measuring beryllium in dirt is useful, but it does cost a lot of money." --Geology, Amherst College). This is surprisingly funny. Feel free to summarize your term papers, theses, and dissertations in the comments.

Let’s apply anthropological theories to LDS missionary efforts, and, in the process, probably offend some people with our analysis. -- Anthropology, Grinnell College

A mathematical theory of discarding irrelevant crap when making a team decision. -- Electrical Engineering, Stanford University

The only time when DC Comics was not bad at female characters was when they had none. -- History, Dominican University of California.

The way fire risk at nuclear plants is assessed is bad and we should feel bad. Also, someone please pay me to fix it. --Reliability Engineering, University of Maryland

Lol My Thesis (via JWZ)

Contrary to my post from earlier this week, Iron Maiden did not decide to tour latinamerica based on Internet analytics about the countries where their music was most pirated. The author of the story made an "error." However, there was research showing that the countries where Maiden was making millions from live shows were also the countries where their music was pirated most.

U.S. District Judge William Pauley of New York, a Clinton appointee, has ruled (PDF) that the bulk-collection of metadata by the NSA and the phone companies is Constitutional. He called it a "vital tool" for fighting terrorism, and pooh-poohed claims that it was invasive, in part because people "voluntarily" give their data to large corporations. The suit was brought by the ACLU, and was dismissed by Pauley at government request. The ACLU will appeal.

Earlier this month, a different federal judge ruled that NSA spying was illegal. It was likely from the start that that case would go to the Supreme Court, but that likelihood just shot up now that there's a circuit split among the federal courts.

Judge Pauley's ruling advanced the theory that mass spying detects "relationships so attenuated and ephemeral they would otherwise escape notice," though there's no evidence that this "attenuated relationship detection" leads to any useful counterterrorism -- and there's an abundance of evidence that it generates thousands and thousands of false positives: people judged guilty by a secret and unaccountable algorithm.

Pauley has subscribed to the NSA's Greater Manure Pile theory of crimefighting ("If the pile of manure is big enough, there must be a pony underneath it somewhere!"). The fact that the evidence in support of the Greater Manure Pile is secret means that its advocates can simply wink and lay their fingers alongside their noses and say "If you only knew what I knew..." and then ask for another billion dollars for their own surveillance empires.

Both rulings -- in support of, and against NSA spying -- cite Smith v. Maryland, a Supreme Court case that held that spying on one person's phone-metadata for a limited time was legal in order to catch a purse-snatcher. A secret interpretation of Smith was used by the Obama administration and the NSA to justify harvesting all phone metadata, of all people, all the time. Judge Pauley agreed that this was a reasonable interpretation. The ACLU disagreed: "[The decision] misinterprets the relevant statutes, understates the privacy implications of the government’s surveillance and misapplies a narrow and outdated precedent to read away core constitutional protections."

No doubt, the bulk telephony metadata collection program vacuums up information about virtually every telephone call to, from, or within the United States. That is by design, as it allows the NSA to detect relationships so attenuated and ephemeral they would otherwise escape notice. as the September attacks demonstrate, the cost of missing such a thread can be horrific. Technology allowed al-Qaeda to operate decentralized and plot international terrorist attacks remotely. The bulk telephony metadata collection program represents the Government’s counter-punch: connecting fragmented and fleeting communications to re-construct and eliminate al-Qaeda’s terror network.

Judge Rules NSA Bulk Telephone Metadata Spying Is Lawful [David Kravets/Wired]

Utility companies across America are fighting solar, imposing high fees on homeowners who install their own solar panels to feed back into the grid. This one was predictable from a long, long way out -- energy companies being that special horror-burrito made from a core of hot, chewy greed wrapped in a fluffy blanket of regulatory protection, fixed in their belief that they have the right to profit from all power used, whether or not their supply it.

Bruce Sterling once proposed that Americans should be encouraged to drive much larger trucks, big enough to house monster fuel-cells that are kept supplied with hydrogen by decentralized windmill and solar installations -- when they are receiving more power than is immediately needed, they use the surplus to electrolyze water and store the hydrogen in any handy nearby monster-trucks' cells. When the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining, you just plug your house into your enormous American-Dream-mobile -- no need for a two-way grid.

This solution wasn't just great because it aligned the core American value of driving really large cars with environmental protection, but also because it was less vulnerable to sabotage from hydrocarbon-addicted energy companies.

HECO, despite criticism from Hawaii’s solar industry, denies the moratorium is anything more than an honest effort to address the technical challenges of integrating the solar flooding onto its grid.

The slowdown comes in a state where 9 percent of the utility’s residential customers on Oahu are already generating most of their power from the sun and where connections have doubled yearly since 2008.

In California, where solar already powers the equivalent of 626,000 homes, utilities continue to aggressively push for grid fees that would add about $120 a year to rooftop users’ bills and, solar advocates say, slow down solar adoptions.

Similar skirmishes have broken out in as many as a dozen of the 43 states that have adopted net-metering policies as part of their push to promote renewable energy. In Colorado, Xcel Energy Inc. has proposed cutting the payments it makes for excess power generated by customers by about half, because it says higher payouts result in an unfair subsidy to solar users.

Utilities Feeling Rooftop Solar Heat Start Fighting Back [Mark Chediak, Christopher Martin and Ken Wells/Bloomberg]

(via /.)

(Image: Solar Panels All Done!, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from clownfish's photostream)

(YouTube link)

Kung Fury is a trailer that would like to be a real movie someday. Kung Fury is a cop who's also a martial arts master. He travels through time to defeat Hitler, with the help of Vikings -and dinosaurs! It's a sendup of '80s cop movies, with any movie trope that was ever (or might be) vaguely successful thrown in. I'd watch it. You know you would, too. Written and directed by Swedish filmmaker David Sandberg (Laser Unicorns), who also stars as Kung Fury. -via Daily of the Day

The Internet Archive announced 'Console Living Room,' a collection of games for the Atari 2600, ColecoVision and a number of other great consoles of the day! No Pitfall, however.

Internet Archive's Console Living Room