howlingbears

Tumblr is a computer generated dream world, built in order to change a human being into this *morpheus holds up poorly drawn anime dragon*

— Eiffel 65 - Blue.wav (@ABigBagOfKeys) August 7, 2012

“One U.S. Supreme Court justice referred to Netflix as “Netflick.” Another seemed not to know that HBO is a cable channel. A third appeared to think most software coding could be tossed off in a mere weekend.”

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The people ultimately responsible for making legal rulings in the modern world are often dangerously out-of-touch with it. [via Lawrence Hurley @ Business Insider] (via huffpostpolitics)

This is terrifying.

(via ibingeonbonbons)

Sadly, so are most of the people who make the laws in the first place (remember when Senator Ted Stevens said that the internet was a “series of tubes" that could get clogged?

(via blue-author)

dat-soldier:

sonnetscrewdriver:

dat-soldier:

did-you-kno:

Source

back the fuck up

There’s another story that I like about a Chinese general who had to defend a city with only a handful of soldiers from a huge enemy horde that was in all likelihood going to steamroll the place flat within hours of showing up.

So when said horde did arrive, they saw the general sitting outside the city’s open gates, drinking tea. The horde sent a couple of emissaries over to see what was what, and the general greeted them cheerfully and invited them all to come and take tea with him.

The horde decided that this was a scenario that had “MASSIVE FUCKING TRAP” written all over it in beautiful calligraphy and promptly fucked off.

Whoever that general was, he was clearly the Ancient Chinese equivalent of Sam Vimes.

did he just invite us over for tea nah man i’m out

batmanisagatewaydrug:

We really need to talk about this scene a lot, because holy wow. The MCU movies have definitely been getting a little darker since the Avengers, and Iron Man 3 was definitely the grimmest of that particular trilogy so far, but scenes like this? This is pure optimism. Tony is told he can save 4 out of 13, and then he saves all 13 of them anyway, because these people can work together and help Tony save them. 

If a similar scenario had happened in the Dark Knight Saga or Man of Steel, you know damn well 9 out of those 13 people would have been dead. Hell, Bruce or Clark would have been lucky to even save the 4, because DC movies have gone down a route of unrelenting grtty realism that makes good old super heroics virtually impossible. Bruce can’t save the city without faking his own death; Clark can’t save the world without becoming a murderer.

But even in the darkest hours of the Marvel Universe, Tony Stark can damn well save 13 people plummeting to their certain death. Is it realistic? Hell no. But it was an awesome victory that both Tony and the audience needed at this point in the story, and by god it was heroic.

It was just last week we learned Mika Mobile's follow-up to Battleheart was submitted to Apple, so when we saw the game show up in the New Zealand App Store this morning we weren't totally sure if it was some sort of soft-launch, an accident, or what. Well, it turns out it was simply a very fast approval process and the release date was set for May 28th, a day earlier than the typical App Store release day, which means that Battleheart Legacy [$4.99] is now officially out in the US and the rest of the world.

It's been quite a journey, but Battleheart Legacy is finally here. Not that it was a particularly long development, as the game was only announced last November, but the original Battleheart was just so great that it made this follow-up especially hard to wait for. I'm impatiently watching my own download progress tick by ever so slowly, but so far all the early impressions in our forums have been overwhelmingly positive. Whether you were a fan of the first Battleheart and are looking for this unique spin on the formula, or are simply a fan of action RPGs of all kinds, you'll definitely want to check out Battleheart Legacy.

peashooter85:

The Great Carrot Deception of World War II.

During the Battle of Britain, a battle in which the German Luftwaffe (air force) expected to simply sweep the RAF (Royal Air Force) out of the skies, the Germans were baffled as to how the British were able to put up such a staunch defense.  What was most confusing of all was that the British seemed to know where all their attack were coming from.  British pilots were even able to intercept and shoot down German bombers in the pitch black of night. 

What the Germans didn’t know was that the British had an ace up their sleeve.  British radar technology had advanced to the point that British fighter pilots could find and shoot down enemy bombers directed by an onboard radar interception unit.  Knowledge of Britain’s radar technology was top secret, and the Brits certainly didn’t want the Germans to find out.  The British War Ministry quickly cooked up a cartoonish and bizarre cover story for their success.

The Ministry single out a successful pilot named John Cunningham for a unique propaganda campaign.  John Cunningham, nicknamed “Cat Eyes” had shot down 19 German bombers at night using the new onboard radar system.  Cunningham was also a man loved to eat carrots, sometimes eating dozens at a time in one sitting. Thus the British War Ministry cooked up an ridiculous carrot of their own; the reason for the RAF’s night fighting success was because British pilots ate carrots.  Chalk full of Vitamin A, the carrots gave British pilots almost superhuman night vision.  To cement their story, a propaganda campaign was started to convince the British people that carrots were good for eyesight.  They printed posters claiming carrots gave people nightvision, necessary for survival in blackouts and bombing raids.  They advertised on the radio, they printed leaflets, they even introduced a special carrot pop for children. 

While today scientific studies prove that carrots, at best, might improve vision a little bit, the propaganda campaign was certainly pumping out a steady stream of over-exaggerated BS.  However, the British public certainly bought it.  More importantly to some degree the Germans bought it as well.  While it is unknown if German High Command accepted the “carrot theory”, there are recorded instanced of German Luftwaffe pilots eating an excess of carrots to improve their vision.

After the Battle of Britain the carrot campaign continued to the point that even other Allied Powers were printing their own carrot propaganda.  Today the myth is still alive and well, and millions of children around the world are forced to eat their carrots due to World War II propaganda.

“We now know that 24 hours without sleep, or a week of sleeping four or five hours a night induces an impairment equivalent to a blood alcohol level of .1 percent. We would never say, ‘This person is a great worker! He’s drunk all the time!’ yet we continue to celebrate people who sacrifice sleep for work.”

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Insights from the doctor who coaches athletes on sleep. Pair with the science of what actually happens while you sleep and how it affects your every waking hour.

More on sleep here.

(via explore-blog)

Rolfe Winkler, reporting for the WSJ:

In a December letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which was disclosed Tuesday, the search giant said that it could be serving ads and other content on “refrigerators, car dashboards, thermostats, glasses, and watches, to name just a few possibilities.”

Google made the statement to help justify why it shouldn’t disclose revenue generated from mobile devices, a figure the SEC had requested and that companies like Facebook and Twitter both disclose. Google argued that it doesn’t make sense to break out mobile revenue since the definition of mobile will “continue to evolve” as more “smart” devices roll out.

“Our expectation is that users will be using our services and viewing our ads on an increasingly wide diversity of devices in the future,” the company said in the filing.

What a depressing, oppressive view of the future.

In August of last year, developer Full Control released Space Hulk on PC, a video game adaptation of the tabletop board game of the same name. Full Control had been hinting that their version of Space Hulk would be coming to iOS, and indeed the following December Space Hulk [$4.99 (HD)] was released for the iPad for $9.99. Today, for the first time since releasing, Space Hulk is on sale for $4.99, half off its regular price. In conjunction with the sale, Space Hulk has just received an update adding co-op multiplayer functionality, as well as a new multiplayer lobby. The game's online multiplayer works cross-platform with the Mac, Linux and PC versions of the game.

Overall, the video game adaptation of Space Hulk has seen mixed reviews, I think mostly due to it retaining many of its complexities and "hardcoreness" from the physical board game version. But, if this type of game is your cup of tea, five bucks is a pretty incredible price to grab the iPad version for. It's significantly cheaper than what the game goes for on PC, and if you enjoy it, there's several additional campaigns available as IAP. You can also find tons of information and impressions of Space Hulk in our forums.

viragunn:

striboga:

khaleesidaenadefiant:

coolkidmitch:

coolgame:

dlgr:

obtuse-obscenity:

Well damn…

duuuuuuuuude….this is not the first time I’ve reblogged this comic and it won’t be the last.

CRYING

Oh. Wow. This is fantastic.

I reblog this every time it comes across my dash, and I cry every time I read it.

Eric Johnson, writing for Recode:

Twitch is a fast-growing service that lets people — mostly men — watch livestreams of other people — mostly men — playing videogames.

And it is booming: When Twitch started up in June 2011, it claimed five million users a month. In 2012, it was up to 20 million. By the end of last year, that number had jumped to 45 million. Broadband service provider Sandvine says Twitch now accounts for 1.35 percent of Internet traffic during peak hours in North America. That’s more than HBO Go’s 1.24 percent.

My 10-year-old son loves watching videos of people playing video games. I thought this was odd at first, in a grumpy dad “These kids today…” way. Then last week, while watching my beloved New York Yankees for the umpteenth time this year, it hit me: there’s nothing different about watching video of one sort of game (video) than another (sports). I watch hundreds of hours of baseball every year.

Tricia Duryee, writing at GeekWire, calls Twitch “the ESPN of the video game industry”, which I think captures the potential opportunity here perfectly.

icantbelieveitsalawblog:

"Introverts Assemble!" by Tatsuya Ishida, from "11 Comics Every Introvert Will Understand"

For my introvert friends

This morning, a friend noted a discrepancy between two recent headlines at The Mac Observer:

• March 5: “Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer to Retire, Luca Maestri to Take Over”
• May 7: “PR Queen Katie Cotton Leaving Apple”

I tweeted the two headlines and corresponding URLs, with a single word of commentary: “Hmm”. I said no more partly because I was near the 140-character limit, and partly to see what the reaction would be. Some got it, but many repliers missed my point, mistakenly thinking it was related to an exodus of executives from the company.¹

My point was to draw attention to the disparate job descriptions: “Apple CFO” vs. “PR Queen”.

Julia Richert pointed to a similar discrepancy — two Philip Elmer-DeWitt headlines on his weblog at CNN/Fortune/Money:

• January 2012 (upon the hiring of John Browett to replace Ron Johnson): “A New Boss at the Apple Store”
• May 2014: “Angela Ahrendts’ Big First Week as Queen of Apple Retail”

Maybe you can find an article in which Peter Oppenheimer is described as Apple’s “finance king”, but I can’t. It’s true that Oppenheimer’s official title (“CFO”) aptly describes his position in a way that Cotton’s (“vice president of worldwide corporate communication”) does not. “Queen”, however, is the wrong way to shorthand it. Boss, chief, head, leader — honcho perhaps, if you want to be casual — any of these words can be used to convey authority. Queen, though, emphasizes something else: gender. It carries other connotations, none of them flattering: queens are arrogant, distant, prissy, entitled, superior; they become queens by birthright or marriage, not through merit.²

[UPDATE: Dan Benjamin points out that Elmer-DeWitt has used “king” in headlines, albeit not in the context of a substitute for a job title. Queen in the above cited examples is being used in lieu of gender-neutral words such as boss or chief.]

Unintentional sexism is sexism nonetheless. There’s almost never a good reason to use a different word to describe a woman’s job than the words you’d choose if the position were held by a man.

pomodoko:

Based on this post, I finally managed to finish my first fan comic for Captain America.

Smart piece by Will Oremus for Slate:

But Wall Street — along with everyone else who’s down on Twitter because it has “a growth problem” — is making a mistake by comparing it to Facebook. Twitter is not a social network. Not primarily, anyway. It’s better described as a social media platform, with the emphasis on “media platform.” And media platforms should not be judged by the same metrics as social networks.

Social networks connect people with one another. Those connections tend to be reciprocal. Facebook even checks in on you now and then to make sure you’ve actually met the folks who are sending you friend requests. As a social network, its chief function is to help friends, family, and acquaintances keep in touch.

Media platforms, by contrast, connect publishers with their public. Those connections tend not to be reciprocal. One Twitter user may be followed by millions of strangers whom she feels no obligation to follow back, any more than an evening news anchor feels the need to check in with each of her viewers every night at 6.

See also: Nitasha Tiku writing for Valleywag on Twitter and “monthly active users” as a metric for its growth.

Hold on a second, while I delete Comixology from my iPad.

Renowned comic book writer Gerry Conway:

And so, as we could have predicted, Amazon wrecks Comixology.

What has it been, less than a month since Jeff Bezos bought the most promising tool for renewing the mass distribution of comics in the digital era? I’ll give the man this: he’s moved faster to undermine an existing technology for the benefit of his own company than General Motors did when it sabotaged Los Angeles’s public transit Red Line for the benefit of the bus fleet they wanted to sell the City of Angels. Job well done, Jeff.

Alright, so admittedly this FTL: Faster Than Light [$9.99 (HD)] tip would've been way more useful about a month ago when the game launch and we reviewed it... But, hey, better late than never. As posted on the Gaming side of Stack Exchange, transferring your Mac/PC save file in to the iPad game is as easy as finding the right save file on your computer, using iFunBox on Windows or iExplorer on Mac, and putting it in the right spot.

Since the save files are fully compatible, you can just move them around as long as you put them in the right location. Head over to Stack Exchange for the full explanation, directory structure, and more. The only tricky part of this all is figuring out which you want to be your "main" FTL save. I'm in this annoying spot right now where I have distinctly different unlocks on both my iPad and PC... Now to scour Stack Exchange for a way to merge save files, then we'd really be talking.

Thanks, SynthOrange!

sanitaryum:

The Captain America/Puerto Rico pic  AND Marvel’s majestic response

choas-strife-pain:

"Take that away, what are you?"

wordsofdiana:

10 Panel to Screen Comparisons From Captain America: The Winter Soldier

10. Metal Arm Meets Immovable Force

9. Bucky Being Brainwashed

7. Who The Hell Is Bucky?

6. Visiting Fort Lehigh

5. Bucky Visits the Smithsonian

Read the full article: 10 Panel to Screen Comparisons From Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Speaking of Chris Ware, I’m deeply intrigued by his thoughts on Apple, from a 2012 interview with Christopher Irving for Graphic NYC:

“I really admire Apple’s design, and feel that the general idea and driving principle behind it almost since their inception is to make information tactile. They’re finally getting to this point now where one can manipulate information with the hands and the body. As designers, they’re also so sensitive in ways that I don’t think any other computer makers understand, as their chief designer knows it has to do with very measured, combined subtleties of tactility and weight and gesture and materials. In a way, they’re almost a nineteenth century company, more sensitive to the world of nature than to technology, or at least respectful of it. I can certainly see reading comics electronically, with the possibilities for inter-penetrability of story and image, but I think comics will have to develop into something completely different before that happens.”

(Thanks to DF reader Logan York.)

One stretch of road in the Netherlands may make you feel like you're cruising through a video game. A new glow-in-the-dark pavement has replaced power-sucking streetlights for a 500m (.3mi) piece of the highway. The result is a Tron-like street that shines courtesy of solar-powered photo-luminescent powder incorporated into the road paint. This is just a proof of concept, but its creator, Studio Roosegaarde, hopes to use parks as a testing ground for new versions of the product.

Filed under: Transportation, Alt

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Via: Ars Technica, Wired UK

Source: Studio Roosegaarde

Submitted by tropelocker.