EduDesinstalando
Google has reportedly paid the makers of Adblock Plus, the single most popular browser extension on Chrome and Firefox, to look the other way when it comes to its web advertisements. According to the German news site Horizont, Google and other unnamed companies are paying to be included on a "whitelist" that prevents their pop-ups, banners, and display ads from being blocked by the free service.
EduMuito feliz por ter abandonado todo e qualquer windows de vez.
EduPor que isso me faz lembrar daquela série The Lone Gunmen?
Just a few weeks remain until the final eight episodes of Breaking Bad begin to air on AMC. Fans across the world have begun to rewatch the previous seasons in anticipation. (New Yorkers can catch prior seasons of the show for free at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center Amphitheater from July 26-30.) There’s a good chance, however, that the world of Breaking Bad be closed for good come this fall.
For months we’ve heard show creator Vince Gilligan was considering a spin-off series focusing on Walter White’s crooked lawyer, Saul Goodman, memorably played by Bob Odenkirk. Gilligan admitted he wants to do the show, but has been unsure of how to go about it. Prequel? Maybe a sequel? In a new interview, Gilligan doesn’t answer that question, but does say he and fellow writer Peter Gould are moving “full speed ahead” with the project. They hope to pitch it to Sony in the near future. As of now, it’s Gilligan’s only planned post-Breaking Bad project.
The Wrap spoke with Gilligan at length about the project, and he said the following:
Since Peter created the character, it felt more than right to be working with him on this, and we are plugging away coming up with a pitch and a take on it for the network and studio and hopefully everyone will agree that there’s a really fun show to be had here. And hopefully we’ll get it up and running, and then Peter will run it. I’d love to see that happen. It’s not a done deal yet, but it’s definitely something we’re full speed ahead on trying to get going.
Later in the interview, Gilligan said the two biggest questions they need to answer are whether it’ll be a half-hour show or an hour, and whether to set it before the events of Breaking Bad or after the events of Breaking Bad:
I have to be coy as to whether it even could be a sequel. Because you never know, when the dust settles at the end of our final eight episodes, where everybody’s gonna be and who’s gonna be left standing. I can’t even say for sure that it could be a sequel. It may be, it may not.
POTENTIAL SPOILERS FOR PREVIOUS SEASONS OF BREAKING BAD FOLLOW.
Lastly, Gilligan admitted, if it is a prequel, it could give him the opportunity to bring back Giancarlo Esposito’s iconic character, Gus Fring.
Head to The Wrap to read more from Gilligan about the potential Saul Goodman series. Do you want it to be 30 or 60 minutes? Prequel or sequel?
At Comic Con, TV shows and movies create special room keycards for some of the big hotels, and it's just an extra bit of promotional shwag. But this year, Person of Interest is using its keycard to point out how prescient a lot of its surveillance themes have turned out to be, in a somewhat cheeky fashion.
    
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EduDeve ter sido criado por aquele programa Sensacionalista.
Google Glass hasn't even fully arrived on the consumer market, but wearable computing competition is already heating up as Samsung announced its Glass competitor: the Samsung Apex. The head-mounted display will serve up both television and internet access while simultaneously sucking your dick.
It's unclear yet whether this move will actually win over users. While Glass does not have the ability to pleasure your genitals itself, Hangouts has been positioned as a way for couples to view live, multi-user video chats of themselves having sex while taking part in the act.
[NSFW] Samsung Announces Its Glass Competitor 'Apex' That Does Everything, Including Oral Sex was written by the awesome team at Android Police.
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Twitter / AFP: "Egyptian protestors direct laser lights on a military helicopter flying over the presidential palace in Cairo."
Bullet time has been around since at least the first Matrix movie (actually there was a Gap ad before that), and despite it being an oft-used cinematic technique, it still hasn’t gotten old. [Jeremiah] wanted to tap into the awesomeness of bullet time, and managed to come up with a great camera rig using only a GoPro and a ceiling fan.
The build really relies on only two components: a GoPro camera and a ceiling fan. In [Jeremiah]‘s videos, a ceiling fan is mounted between two trees on a sturdy piece of lumber. The GoPro is suspended from one of the fan blades with the help of a piece of wood, a hinge, and a short bit of cable. After [Jeremiah] wired up the fan to a dimmer switch he could control the speed of the fan and Bob’s your uncle.
This isn’t the first time a GoPro has been used for a bullet time rig. In fact, our buddy [Caleb] did a similar build by spinning the camera around on a lazy suzan. Gotta love the high frame rate available on the GoPro, huh?
Vidias after the break.
What would the glossies and gossip mags all be buzzing about if real superheroes destroyed New York City while protecting the world from CG aliens? Probably a lot like this.
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EduNem tava sabendo.
Vertigo has released a slew of details on Neil Gaiman's Sandman prequel, including an image , title, and release date. The first issue of The Sandman: Overture, will be released on October 30th this year, followed by five more issues, each released two months apart. Renowned comic book artist J.H. Williams III will draw the six-part miniseries. He's well-known for creating haunting artwork and unconventional layouts, and has previously worked on Alan Moore's Promethea and the recent Batwoman series. Cover work for the series will be produced by Williams and Dave McKean, who created some of the original comics' iconic covers.
The new comics are set before the events of the original series, and will tell the story of Dream / Morpheus, the...
“We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites. While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader.” – Google, March 2013.
Today, Google Reader’s remaining users will “Mark All As Read” one last time. There are two schools of thought on Google’s decision to move on from its aging RSS aggregator, never adopted by the mainstream: one, that’s it’s pretty much the worst thing to ever happen to the Internet. Ever! And two: who cares?
Even though I count myself as someone who falls into that earlier group, it’s hard to argue against Google’s thinking in the matter. Following websites using RSS feeds is just not something the “normals” do. So an RSS reader like Google’s remained in the hands of the tech elite, the domain of the I.T. crowd, the programmers, the researchers, the journalists.
The rest of the world merely surfs the web, and now they just tweet.
But Google Reader was special because it was one of the last remaining places on the Internet you could really call your own. In every other way, the nature of news reading on the web these days and the social services that now dominate your attention are crafted by others who dictate what you will read and when. Whether browsing through an editorially run news site, parsing your Twitter stream or reading your Facebook News Feed, the links before you are those that others have deemed important.
There’s value in this signal, of course – a sense of what’s trending in the larger world allows for serendipitous discovery. But it’s also a relinquishing of control. Oh sure, you can choose who to follow, but it’s not the same as choosing which news news sources’ feeds you will subscribe, why, and how often you will read them.
In Google Reader, I’ve gleefully stuffed websites into collections like “B-List” and “C-List” and “Can’t Miss” and “Panic Button,” instead of more proper names like “top tech sites” or “Apple bloggers.” It’s my decision which headline collections get scanned with a glance, and which writers will see me devouring their every word.
Meanwhile on Twitter, every missive is as important as the one that preceded it. A photo of your cat. News from the war. A beautiful sunset on Instagram. A government overthrown. It’s a real-time firehouse of information that you dip into as you can. There’s no unread count. You just refresh and refresh and refresh for more.
Having never caught on as a social network in its own right outside of a niche group of users, Google Reader couldn’t rival something like Twitter. The writing was on the wall for its demise when Google ripped out the social features in the product back in October 2011 in order to make room for deeper integration with Google’s newer social network Google+.
The move, essentially a big @#$% you to Reader’s small but highly engaged audience of users, may have come as a surprise to some, but with the internal thinking at Google, perhaps it was a miracle that Reader was being given any sort of development attention at all.
In the definitive recounting of Google Reader’s history here on BuzzFeed, Brian Shih, who became Reader Product Manager in fall 2008, spoke of how the team had to fight internally for what, in terms of Google’s scale, was a really, really, really small project. “Someone hung a sign in the Reader offices that said “DAYS SINCE LAST THREAT OF CANCELLATION.” The number was almost always zero,” he said.
At Google, senior execs only cared about absolute user numbers, not on growth or market share.
But even though Google Reader could never compete in numbers with Gmail or other Google products, it wiped out the market of RSS competitors, while letting its 800-pound gorilla sit and rot.
Today, Google is too busy trying to change the world with self-driving cars and face computers, search engines that think for you and a balloon-powered Internet to care about Google Reader. It’s thinking of how to dominate mobile and connect the next 5 billion users to the web – lofty goals that leave no time for a silly little product from Web 2.0′s early days.
At least by shutting down Reader, Google is admitting that its stewardship in this area has failed.
Google can’t – and no longer wants to – do it all.
We’ve seen evidence of that already in the systematic shutdowns of other dated, stagnant services through Google’s “Spring Cleanings.” Google Reader was not the first, nor will it be the last that fails to survive these cuts. Google Alerts and Feedburner are other prime candidates at this point.
We’re retiring Reader on July 1. We know many of you will be sad to see it go. Thanks for 8 great years! http://t.co/0jtSqBnORp
— Google Reader (@googlereader) March 13, 2013
Ever since Google’s announcement this spring, many new services have stepped up to help fill the void Google Reader leaves behind, but none will ever fill its shoes. None of those that now vie to become the new incumbent even have search built in, for example. A few promise “yeah, it’s coming” but too many startups begging for a second look think that merely supporting RSS feeds makes them a Google Reader clone.
Google Reader wasn’t a list of things to read. It wasn’t a collection of RSS feeds.
It was your own, personal Google. A search engine built on top of the sites you cared about. A Google News with the stories you wanted to see. A taxonomy where you chose the labels, and drove the SEO. Google Reader was your web, your slice of the Internet.
Social media, now, is theirs.
Reader’s death isn’t the end of a product, it’s the end of an era. We have protested, bargained, begged, and cried. Now we have to accept and adapt.
Google Reader, thank you for eight great years.
Goodbye.
shift-a
OK kids, it's time. Throw this on in one tab http://t.co/Mj3njMeWZn open "All Items" in @GoogleReader & "Mark all as read" One. Last. Time.
— Jason Shellen (@shellen) July 1, 2013
EduEstou usando esse pra testar também. Parece ótimo.
If you're still looking for a Google Reader replacement, time is running out! We have some alternatives, but Feedspot is a new contender that offers a simple webapp for reading the news, sub-feeds for tags, starred items, and favorites, and tons of social features for sharing stories with friends.
Feedspot is in public beta, and getting your data imported from Google Reader is easy. Once you've created an account, you can either import your subscriptions.xml file from Google Takeout, or you can just tell Feedspot to log in to Reader and grab your feeds. It's a one-click process (and Feedspot doesn't ask for any more permissions than it needs to grab your subscriptions), and it only takes a few minutes.
Once your feeds are all imported, you're dropped at the home page—your feeds and folders are on the left, and unread articles are on the right. Keyboard shortcuts make browsing and reading feeds easy (click the drop-down next to your profile icon to see them all). The service supports sharing via Twitter and Facebook, and if you're a Gold user (more on that in a moment) you get Instapaper, Pocket, Evernote, Buffer, Readability, and Evernote. You can publish starred articles, favorites, or just share stories individually. Beyond reading your feeds, sharing stories and connecting with friends, Feedspot also allows Gold users to generate custom sub-feeds for any category of articles you choose, like your starred articles, shared articles, or articles in a specific folder or category.
Feedspot isn't perfect—there are no mobile apps (although visiting Feedspot on your phone gives you a functional mobile version of the site), and while the service is free, some of the best features are only available to "Gold" users (including the sharing and sub-feed features we mentioned, along with faster feed updates and priority support) which you only become by referring 10 of your friends to sign up. Either way, it's worth a look if you're still searching for a replacement. Hit the link below to give it a try.
EduPor que não. Né?
Google has crept on all of us over the course of developing Google Maps into the ubiquitous product that it has become, and now the company is enabling us to start creeping on each other as well.* Today Google has kicked off a pilot program opening up use of the Street View Trekker to third parties. If you're a member of a tourist board, non-profit, university, research organization, or something otherwise interesting, you can apply to borrow the Trekker and help capture images of the hard-to-reach places Google has yet to access.
Never heard of the Street View Trekker? It's a rather versatile tool that enables Google to capture 360-degree photos of places that aren't exactly pedestrian friendly.
You Could Become The Next Street View Trekker And Contribute To Google Maps was written by the awesome team at Android Police.
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EduEu imaginava.
On the morning of June 30 in 1908, a gigantic fireball devastated hundreds of square kilometres of uninhabited Siberian forest around the Tunguska river. The first scientists to investigate the impact site expected to find a meteorite, but they found nothing. Because no traces of a meteorite were found, it many scientists concluded that the culprit was a comet. Comets, which are essentially muddy ice balls, could cause such a devastation and leave no trace.
But now, 105 years later, scientists have revealed that the Tunguska devastation was indeed caused by a meteorite. A group of Ukrainian, German, and American scientists have identified its microscopic remains. Why it took them so many years makes for a fascinating tale about the limits of science and how we are pushing them.
Eyewitness reports of the Tunguska event help paint a partial picture. As the fireball streaked across the sky, a blast of heat scorched everything in its wake, to be followed by a shock wave that threw people off their feet and stripped leaves and branches from trees, laying a large forest flat. Photos reveal the extent and force of the impact, showing trees that look like bare telegraph poles, all pointing away from the impact site.
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“I lie every second of the day. My whole life is a sham.” - George Costanza
[more behind the Seinfeld scenes]
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
EduNa lista de heróis junto com o cara que vazou as fotos da Scarlett Johansson.
On Friday, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden was formally charged by the United States government with espionage, theft, and conversion of government property in a sealed criminal complaint in the Eastern District Court of Virginia. According to the Washington Post citing anonymous sources, the United States has also asked Hong Kong to detain Snowden on a “provisional arrest warrant.”
Snowden, of course, famously leaked a series of documents to The Guardian and The Washington Post—and continues to do so. On Friday, the UK-based paper revealed that a British spy agency has been involved in tapping communications directly from fiber optic cables passing through the United Kingdom, based on documents Snowden provided.
Some Hong Kong legal watchers though, have wondered if Snowden’s fleeing to Hong Kong was a better choice than it might seem at first blush. Apparently, the High Court in the quasi-city-state has issued an order requiring the government to create a new procedure to consider asylum applications. Until such a procedure is achieved, asylum seekers can ostensibly stay indefinitely.
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Ellen Page, the actor starring alongside Willem Dafoe in Quantic Dream's upcoming video game Beyond: Two Souls, has hit out at another game for using her likeness without permission. Answering a Reddit AMA question on whether she was aware of Ellie, a major character in Naughty Dog's The Last of Us, Page said she wasn't happy about being the alleged source of inspiration.
"I guess I should be flattered that they ripped off my likeness," said Page. "But I am actually acting in a video game called Beyond: Two Souls, so it was not appreciated."
The Last of Us was first revealed in late 2011, several months before Page's role in Beyond: Two Souls was announced. The character of Ellie has changed appearance since the original incarnation,...
EduFoda.
We understand the concept [Jean] used to create a 3D scan of his face, but the particulars are a bit beyond our own experience. He is not using a dark room and laser line to capture slices which can be reassembled later. Nope, this approach uses pictures taken with several different focal lengths.
The idea is to process the photos using luminance. It looks at a pixel and it’s neighbors, subtracting the luminance and summing the absolute values to estimate how well that pixel is in focus. Apparently if you do this with the entire image, and a set of other images taken from the same vantage point with different focal lengths, you end up with a depth map of pixels.
What we find most interesting about this is the resulting pixels retain their original color values. So after removing the cruft you get a 3D scan that is still in full color.
If you want to learn more about laser-based 3D scanning check out this project.
[Thanks Luca]
Apple addicts likely have August 16 starred on their iCalendar. That’s when the Steve Jobs biopic, Jobs, starring Ashton Kutcher and Josh Gad is finally hitting theaters. Directed by Joshua Michael Stern, Jobs follows the iconic entrepreneur from his college days up through the creation, decline and eventual revitalization of the Apple brand. It had its world premiere at Sundance to decidedly mixed reviews and the distributor delayed the opening. The film is finally being released, though, and the first trailer has now been revealed.
Thanks to Yahoo (via The Film Stage) for the heads up.
I’ve already seen this movie and, even knowing it’s flawed, this trailer makes me want to see it again. I’m not exactly crazy about the super-modern Macklemore song over it, but it does fit. What are your thoughts on the trailer? Will you be rushing out to see Jobs?
Jobs, directed by Joshua Michael Stern, stars Ashton Kutcher, Josh Gad, Dermot Mulroney,Lukas Haas, J.K. Simmons and Matthew Modine. It opens August 16.
We follow Steve Jobs (ASHTON KUTCHER) from the enthusiasm and self-discovery of his youth through his darkest days, brightest triumphs, and the ultimate power of his drive, his passions, and his undying will to change everything we thought possible. Dark, honest, and uncompromising, “Jobs” plunges into the depths of Steve Jobs’ character, uncovering his driving motivations, his gifts, his flaws, his failures, and his ultimate successes.
EduCerteza que tudo que isso significa é que vão fazer uns perfis falsos e dar like nas fanpages da passeata.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
There’s been a lot of talk on this site and elsewhere about Man of Steel: some people love it, some people hate it; some people probably haven’t even seen it yet. But whatever you think about the movie, we think it’s important to note one important fact that nobody seems to be discussing. We all know that Superman has two dads…but did you realize that both of them ARE SECRETLY ROBIN HOOD?
[Inarguable proof]
EduE o público comemora.
There can be only... none? Ryan Reynolds has exited the long-in gestation/development hell remake of Highlander, in which he was going to play immortal Scotsman Connor MacLeod, leaving the project without a lead actor or a director.
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EduNem soube.
We’re shocked and stunned to report that actor James Gandolfini has died suddenly while on vacation in Italy after a suspected heart attack. Gandolfini was 51 years old. He will be missed.
Gandolfini is best known for his role as Tony Soprano in HBO’s The Sopranos in which he won the Emmy three times. Gandolfini’s 26 year acting career included roles in The Last Boy Scout, the Quentin Tarintino-scripted True Romance, Terminal Velocity, Crimson Tide, Get Shorty, The Juror, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, Where The Wild Things Are, Killing Them Softly, The Man Who Wasn’t There, In The Loop, The Mexican, Zero Dark Thirty and most recently The Incredible Burt Wonderstone. His last film was the Dennis Lehane-adaptation Animal Rescue which will be released next year. James was in pre-production on the new limited series Criminal Justice.
I’ve included Gandolfini’s appearance on Inside The Actors Studio after the jump, which gives a retrospective of his acting career.
The death was first reported by Deadline and Variety has since confirmed the death with HBO.
Edu"iane Brum, one of the boldest living writers in the country"
Of all the ways to account for the sudden jolt of mass uprising in Brazil recently, none has been more consistent than the metaphor of a sleeping giant rousing from sleep. A re-appropriated Johnnie Walker ad literalizes the point: ‘The Giant Awakened’ (O Gigante acordou), adopts the simple technique of divulging newspaper headlines against a black backdrop. The headlines detail the squandering of public funds, defenselessness against violent crime, the indignities of incarceration, lack of access to adequate hospitals, and child hunger, before a green giant—whose body is made up of the rocky green coast of Rio de Janeiro that, freshly détourned in the ad, stands in for all of Brazil—takes its rightful place among the walking living.
Brazilian journalist Maria Caldas, called the mobilizations the ‘end of autumn, [where] Brazilians awaken to their present.’
Eliane Brum, one of the boldest living writers in the country, wrote a column called “How Much Do 20 Cents Cost?” referencing the initial spark: ‘What is so threatening in these 20 cents, to the point of making governments of the democracy carry out scenes from the dictatorship, is probably something that was believed dead here: utopia. The dangerous news announced in the streets, the new development that the State tried to smash with the hooves of São Paulo police, is that, at last, we are alive.”
None of this happened overnight. Not even the first isolated rumblings of discontent in early June account for it, though certainly the abject violence that police unleashed on demonstrators on June 13 had a powerful effect in galvanizing the so-called sleeping giant. Witness the famed photograph of a woman shot in the face with a gas hose at point-blank range, the open space around her aggrandizing the police’s unbridled use of force. Brazilian television anchors, who barely disguise their hatred of ‘masked youths’ at demonstrations, are wont to point out how the polícia militar are lock, stock and barrel armed and helmeted for warfare. (Appropriately, photographer Victor Caivano has experience shooting both the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars.)
Before going further let me be open and frank: I find it difficult to write about Brazil. I have spent a decade of my life in relation to the country in some way—living in Brazil (first as a student of Portuguese), writing from Brazil (South/South was begun in Rio de Janeiro), or writing about Brazil (a major portion of my dissertation, a forthcoming collection of poems, etc.). I don’t find that it gets easier. It has always struck me, despite its famously syncretic and combinatorial cultural aesthetics, a complete world in and of itself. Its history of enslavement and disenfranchisement and brutality runs deep, as do stereotypes about the acclaimed happy outlook of its denizens (football; sun; bronzed asses; what’s not to be happy about?).
That Brazil has been flung into a global proscenium, first since the rise of a liberal democratic process after decades of military regimes, then following its status as an ‘emerging growth market’ under Lula, has not made the frustration (‘how to talk about Brazil in just so many words’) a lighter affair. You feel the ricochet of Economist-y headlines bloviating about Brazil’s ‘rise,’ that triumphant clasp of the market. It’s endless, nauseating, and often dishonest. Yes, there has been a rise—but what the events of this month show is that the Brazilian people will not have their intelligence insulted about who has benefited the most from it, and at whose expense.
Five P’s: public space and services, property, politicians, police, and press.
PUBLIC SPACE & SERVICES
Before it was called the ‘Cidade Maravilhosa’ (give or take, ‘Wonderful City’), Rio de Janeiro’s nickname was ‘Cidade da Morte’ or City of Death. The urban planning undertaken under Francisco Pereira Passos (1836-1913) was largely structured to mirror an image of prosperity—certainly not death—to the outside world. (This obsessive drive to locate and project progress brought with it a high social cost, namely the creation of favelas or informal housing structures all around the city.) Pereira Passos’ urbanism overwhelmingly favored private developers, as well as wealthy citizens and international tourists, and that legacy resonates in contemporary Rio.
In other large metropolitan places, too, transportation to and from the city became as important as the architectural and urban transformations themselves. Mobility and livelihood became intrinsically linked and remain so since. It is no surprise, then, that the flicker that struck the match is rooted in public service transportation. Capital has been invested to benefit housing and leisure for the wealthy since earliest urbanization efforts: it did not begin with FIFA, though the major sporting events of 2014 and 2016 grossly amplified its effects. (No coincidence that ‘the largest protests are happening in cities which will host the World Cup games,’ activist Fabio Malini told the New York Times). Active circulation is far more crucial than the stadium structures that will be promptly vacated, and Brazilians know it. While the favelas frequently suffer the deadly effects of mudslides and floods, for example, development projects speed ahead.
Érica de Oliveira, a 22-year old student and activist told the New York Times: ‘Today’s protests are the result of years and years of depending on chaotic and expensive transportation.’ Indeed, the Free Fare movement (Movimento Passe Livre or MPL), the National Assembly of Students (Assembléia Nacional de Estudantes or ANEL), and other groups have been organizing for at least a decade on the ground. The dispersal of dogged work in various cities is important, as is the egalitarian form of activism such work has taken (the MPL, for example, is an independent, horizontal movement, and Brazilian politicians swooping in to claim they’re in talks with their leaders have fooled few).
Here is what some of that dogged effort has reaped: at Pinheiros metro station in São Paulo, a stirring rendition of the Brazilian national anthem sung ensemble. It’s not a cheap attempt at nationalism but a palpable, unifying public energy few have witnessed in recent years.
The last time Brazilians occupied public space in large-scale numbers was in 1964, 1983, and 1992. In the latter, arguably the largest mass demonstration in modern Brazilian history, a mass rally demanded the impeachment of President Fernando Collor de Mello.
‘I haven’t felt a sense of union and common good like this since the protests against [Collor] in 1992. It’s a real test for our democratic institutions.’ (Theo Ueno, SP in BBC)
The cronyism of the Collor administration shook the entire country, including an indignant leader of the Worker’s Party named Luís Inácio da Silva, who had lost to him in the ’89 elections.
Nearly two decades later, at the 2007 preparations for the Pan-American Games under Lula’s presidency, a new motto for Rio was announced. From Cidade da Morte to Cidade Maravilhosa to… ‘Esporte quer dizer futuro’ (Sports Mean Future). The president of the Copa do Mundo boasted, ‘We will have a constant flux of investments. The 2014 World Cup will allow Brazil to have a modern infrastructure. In social terms, it will be very beneficial. Our objects is that Brazil become more visible in the global arena. It will be a tool to promote social change.’
It is not only Lula and Dilma Rousseff’s trenchant alliance with the global sports oligarchy at the expense of public benefit that is notable. ROAR Magazine:
The symbolic alliance between Lula, the hero of the labor movement of the 70s and 80s, and Paulo Maluf, the last presidential candidate of the moribund military regime, shows that the political class is just interested in power itself and does not have an actual political project to offer. But thanks to them and their watchdogs inside the police force, the ‘movement of the 20 cents’ is becoming a movement allowing us to say what we think, to assert the right to say that one wishes to live in a real democracy.
PROPERTY
Rio’s first ‘mega-event’ was the South-American football championship in 1919, where the European construction of a stadium was adopted. The construction of the Laranjeiras Stadium involved the destruction of an important downtown historic center, as have various landmarks since.
Brazil, like the United States, is a hugely property-conscious society—probably no coincidence that both countries accounted for a large portion of the transatlantic slave trade when human beings were converted into chattel. Ideological convictions about property’s supreme value run extremely deep. An attack on property is quickly ascribed to ‘violence’ even if no individuals are hurt or injured, and in my experience of watching events unfold this month, that has been near-universal.
What structures are being taken by the people? The Legislative Assembly in Rio, a symbol of entrenched government power, was among the most spectacular building. An announcer talking over this footage moans, ‘You will lose all popular support! This is the house of the people! The house of democracy!’ He even concern-trolls the demonstrators about what will happen to them: ‘the cops will arrive and smother you with tear gas and bullets’ (one of the more remarkable things about Brazilian media—perhaps even more than their dribbling counterparts in the United States—is their open, near-total devotion to authoritarian power).
If this is the ‘house of democracy’ being attacked with such hatred, doesn’t that make the cause for hatred infinitely more important? Whose notion of property, access, and secure means is really being upheld there in the first place? And wouldn’t such a house belong to the people anyway?
Brazilian friends instead chose to focus on its symbolic meaning, describing it to me as ‘queda de bastilha’ or ‘tomada de bastilha,’ the fall or storming of the Bastille. After all, the downtown Palácio Tiradentes which was the site of a large demonstration was, like the Bastille, also converted into a prison.
POLITICIANS
Like many countries today, Brazil is living through a civil war between the state and the people. This war, up until a few weeks ago, was taking place without much noise; but was in no way more peaceful than it is now. For over a century, Brazil has been governed by politicians who see the revenue from taxes payed by their citizens—those who they ought to represent—as a mere bank account. Entire states belong to a certain group or a political dynasty; families who, before being elected to office, had already been the feudal lords of enormous latifundios, with family trees as old as the arrival of the Portuguese in Brazil. In Brazil, more than anywhere else in the world, the oppressors of today are the oppressors of tomorrow.
From a pretty perch in Paris, at the height of some of the worst skull-cracking visited on Brazilian demonstrators, Geraldo Alckmin tweeted, ‘Depredation, violence, and obstruction of public paths are unacceptable. The Governor of São Paulo will not tolerate vandalism.’
Some politicians, especially those of the center-right and center-left fearful of losing electoral seats, rushed to validate ‘peaceful’ and ‘legitimate’ protests.
FIFA, a species of Second Estate nobility at this point, ‘expressed “full confidence” that Brazilian authorities have shown they can manage disorder in the streets.’
As if in response, deputy minister of communications Cesar Alvarez braved at a FIFA media briefing at Maracana stadium, ‘I would not say we have lost control, no.’
Protests coincided with the Confederations Cup, a preamble to the World Cup championship. Demonstrators in the tens of thousands gathered outside stadiums in Rio and Brasília (the stadium here is among the most expensive of the six new ones built, costing nearly $600 million), exactly the sites the government hopes to show off to nervous investors. The armed guards that FIFA has hired to protect its stadiums from mass movements such as this one are rarely written about; despite their presence, people have kept up the momentum.
Inside the Confederation Cup’s opening event, President Dilma Rousseff was booed.
POLICE
[6/17/13 9:49:59 PM]: A coisa tá feia no rio [things are ugly in Rio]
[6/17/13 9:50:13 PM]: Policial disfarçado de civil [police disguised as civilian]
[6/17/13 9:50:31 PM]: Tiros com balas de verdade [shots with real bullets]
One of the major frustrations of ordinary people in Brazil—this could be true of a multitude of societies—is how the country is seemingly over-weeded and devoid of law at the same time. This national bête noire stretches across personal and political persuasions.
The mobilization got the name ‘vinegar revolt’ from reports of police confiscating the protesters’ only form of self-defense against tear gas. A filmed exchange between CartaCapital reporter Piero Locatelli makes the jolting, overbearing presence/absence of law apparent.
Locatelli is stopped and asked why he’s carrying vinegar. He answers it’s because of the sickness he incurred from inhaling tear gas the ‘last time I was doing my job.’ The officers freely allow their name tags to be filmed: someone gave them these orders, and they’re very confident in what they’re doing (one mumbles, ‘I’m receiving an order’). Locatelli is taken to a police captain who many YouTube commenters believed to be ‘visibly drugged out.’ The journalist is detained and shuffled away.
At a press conference following the incident—undoubtedly this media exchange existed solely on account of filmed evidence, and because card-carrying press was involved—lieutenant-colonel Marcelo Pignatari voices gravely, ‘There was a substance with him that he alleges is vinegar. It will be submitted to the police for confirmation.’ A substances he alleges is vinegar. Before signing off, Pignatari answers a journalist that no, vinegar is not a banned or controlled substance. Yet you can’t blame the journalist for asking. The entire incident is a fascinating encapsulation of how unwritten law operates in practice, and whose bodies, rights, and livelihoods are trampled in the process.
The brutal and grotesque use of tear gas and rubber bullets against unarmed civilians last week was but another incident of police violence in what is a decades-old phenomenon (and one that arguably has its roots in slavery in Brazil). Throughout the twentieth century, police violence was a feature of arrests and crowd control, especially in poor areas. Even in the 1960s, police death squads operated in favelas during the military regime, prompting the press to distinguish between death squads against “criminals” and torture against political prisoners. The end of the dictatorship did not bring an end to such violence, in no small part because such violence well predated the military regime of 1964-1985, and such violence has continued to define police tactics and methods throughout much of urban Brazil well into the 21st century.
Few in contemporary Brazil can forget the massacre of Carandiru, which as I previously discussed saw its overseers not only go virtually unpunished but receive cushy government appointments.
Police executions in ordinary life were called ‘premeditated’ and ‘calculated’ in a BBC report: ‘[E]xecutions by death squads appear to be a traditional feature of Rio policing.’
Such historical attributes put atrocious police abuse, including the use of live assault rifles and ammunitions, into perspective.
PRESS
My number-one enemy in Brazil is the Globo media conglomerate and every residual outfit like it. The media operate as a disgraceful aristocracy. Ownership of the networks is in the hands of a few extremely wealthy families. Admittedly coverage of the most asinine events physically repulses me.
Little wonder that on Monday the World Cup site was hacked and replaced with a promotional video siding with the demonstrations. The Brazilian government’s own World Cup site was hacked for hours. The Twitter account for Veja—a Newsweek or Time equivalent, but with more bared teeth—was also hacked, to great jubilation.
Disdain for the media didn’t happen overnight, either. In 2011, a pride march extracted a Globo reporter from their sights with the chorus ‘O povo não é bobo, fora Rede Globo’ (the people aren’t stupid, get out Globo Network).
Distressingly, serious investigative Brazilian journalists and bloggers who diverge from the servile interests of the mainstream, corporate behemoths are routinely attacked. Brazil holds the fourth highest total number of journalist murders in the world (see Committee to Protect Journalists’ ‘Where Journalist Murders Go Unpunished‘).
The greatest illustration of mania this week happened on José Luiz Datena’s show on Globo’s Globo‘s competitor Bandeirantes. Few have dared to insult the intelligence of every single living Brazilian with Datena’s stumbling ineptitude. Datena asked viewers to call in voting whether or not they are in favor of this form of protest (‘Voce é a favor deste tipo de protesto?’). Disappointed with favorable results, he egged on, ‘I would vote no!’ The ‘sim’ votes rise wildly to risible horror.
Idiocy was not restricted to the national news.
Every day this movement grows is a thorn at the side of the market boosterism of the past decade and a chance for greater dignity.
Addendum: Carla Toledo Dauden’s highly effective video ‘No, I’m Not Going to the World Cup’ has made its way around the world a few times already, and doesn’t even rely on showing severe police repression to make its point. It is well worth viewing.
EduCool.
This fall, DC is going beyond, er, Batman Beyond to reveal the Justice League of the year 3000. Veteren JL team Keith Giffen, JM DeMatteis and Kevin Maguire will write and draw the books, but for the moment, the real excitement comes from artist Howard Porter's redesigns of the heroes. Check 'em out!
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EduUhn,
Well, that didn't take long. Feedly just announced its new Google-free back end this morning, and two of the top RSS apps in Google Play have been updated to support it. We might make it through the demise of Google Reader after all.
Press (screen above) has been bumped to version 1.3.2, and made a few changes in addition to adding Feedly Cloud support. Here's everything:
As for gReader, it's now on version 3.3.0.
Press And gReader Already Updated To Support Feedly Cloud was written by the awesome team at Android Police.
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EduExcelente
When MTV unveiled their new take on Teen Wolf in 2011, their efforts were initially met with eyerolls from folks old enough to remember the original Teen Wolf. The new series didn’t bear much of a resemblance to its ostensible source material, which had been a somewhat cheesy ’80s comedy. If anything, the new show was much more like the angsty Twilight, with its ripped, frequently shirtless shapeshifters.
But perhaps it’s for the best that MTV took the property in an entirely different direction after all. Because according to Jack Black‘s new Teen Wolf sequel Adult Wolf, Scott Howard’s life went on a steep downward trajectory after adolescence. ”Back in high school I had it all: Brains, skills, girls, but after graduation, everything just fell apart,” he reflects. “Now I’ve got no job, no girlfriend, and one very annoying roommate.” Check out the “sizzle reel” after the jump.
Black unveiled Adult Wolf on Jimmy Kimmel Live. As revealed in the video below, the onetime teen wolf’s life has gotten downright depressing. His equally hairy, equally cranky father (played by Black’s Tenacious D partner Kyle Gass) isn’t much better off. Worse, their very unhappiness is the reason they can’t turn back into humans anymore — they’re stuck “because our hearts are filled with bitterness and regret,” as the papa wolf explains.
But there’s hope! A nasty encounter with John C. McGinley inspires the pair to get their lives back on track. All they need is $9,000 for a full body wax — and wouldn’t you know it, there’s a father-son basketball tournament coming up with a $9,000 prize for the winner. Ed Begley Jr., Rachel Bilson, and John Wall (of the Washington Wizards) also star.
Okay, in case it wasn’t abundantly clear, this isn’t an actual follow-up to Teen Wolf — there’s no such thing in the works, unless you count the aforementioned MTV show. But doesn’t it kinda seem like just a matter of time before someone sees this video and decides it’s a good idea to make it actually happen? Do you think the results would be better or worse than Teen Wolf‘s real sequel, Teen Wolf Too?
EduUhn. Nem sei o que dizer.
The strange tale of John McAfee keeps getting stranger. In a video posted to YouTube last night, the antivirus software founder and part-time fugitive callously sends up the program he helped create. Framed as a four-minute instructional video, "How To Uninstall McAfee Antivirus" features plenty of green screen, degraded women, smoking, drugs, partial nudity, and firearms. In the "humorous" skit's last act, McAfee finally gets around to explaining how to remove his former company's anti-virus software. Enjoy a bizarre NSFW four minutes and 26 seconds you'll never get back.
EduRelevante
Smiling, happy Lego characters are becoming less and less common, researchers have identified. Experts at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and the Industrial Research Institute for Automation and Measurements in Poland studied over 3,655 figures and found that the number of happy faces on Lego characters has fallen since the 1990s, giving rise to more angry and fearsome expressions. It is believed that Lego's introduction of conflict-based themes has encouraged the change, with new sets often depicting battles between good and evil. In its report, The Guardian looks into whether angrier faces are negatively affecting young children and explains why Lego believes it is good for kids to play out conflicts with their toys.
