Michael Collins

The pointer is from Ángel Cabrera, link here.

Didn't see a thread here (saw on GAF):

 

Starting today and through Feb. 2, The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures Anniversary Edition is free on the E-shop for all 2DS, 3DS, and 3DS Xl systems.

 

Just log into the shop and enjoy.

 

I'll delete if it's a duplicate post.

 

Cheers!

You can find Ezra’s words here.  Do read the whole thing, here is one excerpt:

Today, we are better than ever at telling people what’s happening, but not nearly good enough at giving them the crucial contextual information necessary to understand what’s happened. We treat the emphasis on the newness of information as an important virtue rather than a painful compromise.

The news business, however, is just a subset of the informing-our-audience business  —  and that’s the business we aim to be in. Our mission is to create a site that’s as good at explaining the world as it is at reporting on it.

Matt Yglesias, Dylan Matthews, and Melissa Bell (and others to follow) will be coming along.  Here is David Carr on the venture.

Addendum: The jobs ad is quite useful:

Project X (working title) is a user’s guide to the news produced by the beat reporters and subject area experts who know it best.

We’ll have regular coverage of everything from tax policy to True Detective, but instead of letting that reporting gather dust in an archive, we’ll use it to build and continuously update a comprehensive set of explainers of the topics we cover. We want to create the single best resources for news consumers anywhere.

We’ll need writers who are obsessively knowledgeable about their subjects to do that reporting and write those explainers — as well as ambitious feature pieces. We’ll need D3 hackers and other data viz geniuses who can explain the news in ways words can’t. We’ll need video producers who can make a two-minute cartoon that summarizes the Volcker rule perfectly. We’ll need coders and designers who can build the world’s first hybrid news site/encyclopedia. And we’ll need people who want to join Vox’s great creative team because they believe in making ads so beautiful that our readers actually come back for them too.

Sound like you? Then apply now.

And Ezra explains more here.

Kevin D. Williamson argues it died because it was successful. 

The omnibus budget deal slithering its way toward President Barack Obama’s desk for signing abandons the automatic spending cuts that resulted from an earlier fiscal compromise. Why was the sequester abandoned? Like the Gramm-Rudman Act a generation earlier, the sequester had to be stopped for one fundamental, undeniable, bipartisan reason.

It worked.

Sigh.

inhaleaggression:

Pete is the best
bansheebotpete.tumblr.com
IG: bansheebotpete
Follow him!!!!

bookoisseur:yggdrasilly:

These men are perfection. [x]

Okay Wheaton is spelled wrong in the captions but this is still great.

Posted by Mateusz Jurczyk and Gynvael Coldwind, Information Security Engineers

At Google, security is a top priority - not only for our own products, but across the entire Internet. That’s why members of the Google Security Team and other Googlers frequently perform audits of software and report the resulting findings to the respective vendors or maintainers, as shown in the official “Vulnerabilities - Application Security” list. We also try to employ the extensive computing power of our data centers in order to solve some of the security challenges by performing large-scale automated testing, commonly known as fuzzing.

One internal fuzzing effort we have been running continuously for the past two years is the testing process of FFmpeg, a large cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video written in C. It is used in multiple applications and software libraries such as Google Chrome, MPlayer, VLC or xine. We started relatively small by making use of trivial mutation algorithms, some 500 cores and input media samples gathered from readily available sources such as the samples.mplayerhq.hu sample base and FFmpeg FATE regression testing suite. Later on, we grew to more complex and effective mutation methods, 2000 cores and an input corpus supported by sample files improving the overall code coverage.

Following more than two years of work, we are happy to announce that the FFmpeg project has incorporated more than a thousand fixes to bugs (including some security issues) that we have discovered in the project so far:

$ git log | grep Jurczyk | grep -c Coldwind
1120

This event clearly marks an important milestone in our ongoing fuzzing effort.

FFmpeg robustness and security has clearly improved over time. When we started the fuzzing process and had initial results, we contacted the project maintainer - Michael Niedermayer - who submitted the first fix on the 24th of January, 2012 (see commit c77be3a35a0160d6af88056b0899f120f2eef38e). Since then, we have carried out several dozen fuzzing iterations (each typically resulting in less crashes than the previous ones) over the last two years, identifying bugs of a number of different classes:

• NULL pointer dereferences, 
• Invalid pointer arithmetic leading to SIGSEGV due to unmapped memory access, 
• Out-of-bounds reads and writes to stack, heap and static-based arrays, 
• Invalid free() calls, 
• Double free() calls over the same pointer, 
• Division errors, 
• Assertion failures, 
• Use of uninitialized memory. 

We have simultaneously worked with the developers of Libav, an independent fork of FFmpeg, in order to have both projects represent an equal, high level of robustness and security posture. Today, Libav is at 413 fixes and the library is slowly but surely catching up with FFmpeg.

We are continuously improving our corpus and fuzzing methods and will continue to work with both FFmpeg and Libav to ensure the highest quality of the software as used by millions of users behind multiple media players. Until we can declare both projects "fuzz clean" we recommend that people refrain from using either of the two projects to process untrusted media files. You can also use privilege separation on your PC or production environment when absolutely required.

Of course, we would not be able to do this without the hard work of all the developers involved in the fixing process. If you are interested in the effort, please keep an eye on the master branches for commits marked as "Found by Mateusz "j00ru" Jurczyk and Gynvael Coldwind" and watch out for new stable versions of the software packages.

For more details, see the “FFmpeg and a thousand fixes” posts at the authors’ personal blogs here or here.

Captain William Overstreet Jr. died in Roanoke, Virginia at the age of 92. During World War II, he flew a P-51 Mustang fighter plane. During the liberation of France, he performed one of the most daring fighter combat actions ever witnessed.

You can read an extensive wartime biography here. Captain Overstreet was a daring and aggressive pilot. During training, he did loops around the Golden Gate Bridge. Later, in Europe, during the spring of 1944, he had escort duty on a bomber mission. He chased after a German fighter plane through central Paris:

The German’s engine was hit, and Bill stayed on his tail braving the intense enemy flak. His desperation undoubtedly growing, the German pilot aimed his plane at the Eiffel Tower and in a surprising maneuver, flew beneath it. Undeterred, Bill followed right behind him, scoring several more hits in the process. The German plane crashed and Bill escaped the heavy flak around Paris by flying low and full throttle over the river until he had cleared the city’s heavy anti-aircraft batteries.

(Len Krenzler/Action Art)

For his wartime record, the French ambassador to the United States presented Captain Overstreet with the Legion of Honor in 2009.

-via Ace of Spades HQ

(Photo: Roanoke Star)

stupidcoolfinnparty:

omfg

Philip emails me:

Your recent book was very persuasive–and I see an interesting connection between your thesis and the “super-forecasters” we have been trying to select and then cultivate in the IARPA geopolitical forecasting tournament.

One niche we humans can carve out for ourselves is, under certain fleeting conditions, out-smarting algorithms (one of the extreme challenges we have been giving our supers is out-predicting various wisdom-of-crowd indicators).

You have brought us many forecasters over the years (including some “supers”) so I thought your readers might find the attached article on the research program  in The Economist of interest.

Our recruitment address is: www.goodjudgmentproject.com

The website writes:

The Good Judgment Project is a four-year research study organized as part of a government-sponsored forecasting tournament. Thousands of people around the world predict global events. Their collective forecasts are surprisingly accurate.

You can sign up and do it.  Here is a related article from The Economist.  Here is a good Monkey Cage summary of what they are doing.

fuckyeahdementia:

(via TumbleOn)

Happy Hothidays from your friendly neighborhood wampa! Remember to hang up your human stockings so that Hotha Claus will leave you presents when he visits. Just make sure that your stocking is fully disarmed and left with no means to resist.

A co-worker of redditor imnojezus used needle felting to add a scenic layer onto a pre-existing Christmas sweater. Now imnojezus is trying to convince her to sell it. She’d make a lot of money with a gem like this!

-via The Mary Sue

scotchtrooper:sandandglass:

Stephen and his Ewok puppy. 

Kerpow!

Oh, is it cold up north? I didn’t know. You see, where I am in Texas, it’s quite pleasant. Why, I went running in short-sleeves yesterday! Some of you, such as cartoonist Beth Evans, may have to spend too much time scraping ice. I think that I’ll go for a swim instead.

P.S. Be sure to check out our exclusive interview with Beth Evans.

Argentina (Parts I, II, III)

(Photo: Yale News)

This is NWA 7325, a meteorite that allegedly fell to Earth in southern Morocco in early 2012. Scientists think that it came from the planet Mercury. We have about 70 meteorites from Mars and 180 from the moon. But this rare gem of a meteorite is the only one from the innermost planet.

How can they tell? The rock’s magnetism matches that of Mercury perfectly. It also has high amounts of magnesium and chromium but a low amount of iron, which is apparently what scientists would expect from a chip off of Mercury.

The meteorite is on display at the Peabody Museum at Yale University until September 2, 2014.

-via American Digest

Share and Enjoy:

Marvel has confirmed that Drew Goddard will run the show on Netflix's Daredevil series. The Cabin in the Woods director will write and direct the first episode as well as serve as showrunner and executive producer for the 13-episode series. Hurrah!

Read more...

Researchers diving off the coast of Hawaii have found a sunken 400-foot (122 meter) "Sen-Toku" class submarine. One of the largest pre-nuclear subs ever built, the "mega sub" was torpedoed by the U.S. shortly after the Second World War to prevent the Soviet Union from getting their hands on the super-advanced technology.

Read more...

dduane:

The 1920s were a heyday for rocketeers, who were attaching rockets to just about anything. Austrian space travel promoter Max Valier was pretty much the champ at this, creating everything from rocket-powered sleds and boats to rocket-propelled railroad cars and the first rocket airplane.

Read more...

The character of Doctor Wily works because Capcom got the formula right for the start and hasn’t really messed with it much since. It’s the exact same reason Ganon/Ganondorf, from The Legend of Zelda series, and Bowser, from the Super Mario Bros. series, work too. Sure, there have been some slight deviations along the way or additional lore included, but the formula is pretty much the same. For better or for worse these are tried-and-true gaming villains that have proven themselves time and time again. Good job guys! Here’s hoping your evil plans continue to be foiled for generations to come.

On the positive side, the location is fantastic.

On the negative side… everything else.

Curbed spotted this studio apartment at 539 Octavia (at Ivy), currently listed on Craigslist.

The “cozy” apartment measures a minuscule 280 square feet, which Curbed says makes it the smallest apartment available for rent in SF. It features a “small refrigerator” and a “brand new convection/microwave oven,” neither of which is pictured in the ad. However, we do get glimpses of an ADA-compliant shower and a tiny sliver of a kitchen.

This little gem will run you a ballsy $1950 a month. If you’re interested in seeing it in person, there’s an open house tomorrow from noon to 1pm.

What is going to fill the television-viewing hole left by Breaking Bad? It may very well be a TV adaptation of Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's foul-mouthed, blasphemous, supernatural road comic Preacher.

Read more...

hawaii:

The last Blockbuster movie rental ever was ‘This is The End.’ And it was rented at a Hawaii store.