Andrewhhill

Source: Shutterstock.com

The "Polar Bear Ice Tray" is a sealed bottle that makes icecubes and then facilitates their easy removal. The sealed container keeps freezer flavors away, and once it's all frozen, you can dislodge the ice by giving the bottle a whack on a countertop and then pour it out of the mouth. Looks like a clever way of solving an old problem, though I haven't tried it myself.

polar bear ice tray (via Red Ferret)

Read this if you want to stay out of jail.

When my friend Aaron Swartz committed suicide in January, he'd been the subject of a DoJ press-release stating that the Federal prosecutors who had indicted him were planning on imprisoning him for 25 years for violating the terms of service of a site that hosted academic journals. Aaron had downloaded millions of articles from that website, but that wasn't the problem. He was licensed to read all the articles they hosted. The problem was, the way he downloaded the articles violated the terms and conditions of the service. And bizarrely -- even though the website didn't want to press the matter -- the DoJ decided that this was an imprisonable felony, under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which makes it a crime to "exceed your authorization" on any online service.

The DoJ reasoned that if the law said that doing anything "unauthorized" was a crime, and if the long, gnarly hairball of legalese that no one reads before clicking "I agree" set out what you were allowed to do, then violations of that "agreement" were a felony.

Aaron's death galvanized some Congresscritters to do something about this oversight. The ancient CFAA predated the widespread use of terms of service in everyday activities like hanging out with your friends, reading the newspaper, getting an education or signing up for a dating service. Congress did not intend to create a situation where companies that provided services could put any unreasonable condition they wanted into an "agreement" you might never see ("By using this website, you accept all terms and conditions") and then ask the DoJ to put people in prison for decades if they violated them.

The reform to CFAA was welcome and long overdue. But the DoJ has asked some members of the House Judiciary Committee to make it worse.

Under the amendments, which might be voted on as early as April 10, violating terms of service could be defined as racketeering -- so that you could be prosecuted as though your violation of terms of service made you into a mobster.

They also add "conspiring" to violate terms of service to the list of offenses that are a felony under the CFAA. So you can be thrown in jail just for talking about ways to violate terms of service.

The amendments also make it a felony to obtain information that you are entitled to obtain, if you do so in a way that violates terms of service. My wife and I share some online accounts, including our "family" airmiles account with British Airways, which we both contribute to and use, but only my wife can see the details of them (she signed up for the service, so it's linked to her login). We're both entitled to see those details, but poor service design makes it impossible to do this without sharing a login and password. No problem, except that BA's terms of service forbid this. So looking up my own airmiles, which I earned, and which I'm entitled to see and use, would be a felony under these amendments because I was looking at them in a way that violates BA's terms.

The amendments also include increased powers for seizure of property, which will enable the Feds to take away the assets you might use to defend yourself against a CFAA claim.

This is a trainwreck. It will allow the DoJ to put every single American Internet user in prison at their discretion, because we all violate terms of service every day. For example, Seventeen magazine's terms of service forbid you from visiting its website if you're under eighteen (!), and that means that its 4.5 million underage readers would all be felons under the CFAA, and liable to decades in prison.

The fact that Congress is contemplating this is a testament to its awful authoritarian venality. The fact that they're doing it as part of a reform triggered by Aaron's death is a fucking travesty.

Aaron helped design the widgets that put through 8,000,000 phone calls to Congress about the awfulness of SOPA and killed legislation that everyone on the inside considered unstoppable. Now, Demand Progress -- the group Aaron helped found -- has got another "Tell Congress" widget, which we've embedded for today. You can (and should) embed it too. You can get your own at FixTheCFAA.com, along with a cute tool to put your social media profile photo behind bars and let your friends know what's going on.

Today, we save the Internet. Again.

Demand Justice for Aaron Swartz

Once you've finished installing adhesive hooks in your cabinets to hold pot lids, you should use the extras to organize your rolls of foil and plastic wrap. More »

12-year-old girl: I don't want kids when I grow up.
Society: You'll change your mind when you get older. You're only 12. You're too young to know what you want.
16-year-old girl: I'm pregnant.
Society: How could you be so stupid? Do you know anything about safe sex? You should be ashamed.
20-year-old woman: I'm a single mother with an infant son.
Society: You should've gone to college first. You need a stable career before you can support a child.
33-year-old woman: I'm married and my spouse and I both have stable careers. I have two young daughters now.
Society: You're not staying home? Who's going to take care of them? You're just going to put them in day care while you work? That's selfish of you. You can't expect to raise decent kids with a full-time job.
45-year-old woman: I just had my first child.
Society: Why would you have a child when you're that old? Do you realize the health risks of being pregnant at your age? When your kid is a teenager you'll be a senior citizen. That's inconsiderate of you.
60-year-old woman: I haven't had any children.
Society: Your life must be so unfulfilling. Is there something wrong with you? Why didn't you want kids? How strange.

Look, I'm not sure what the answer to the Syria problem is. International relations are above my pay grade and I'm insufficiently informed. "Send in a gunboat," pace Jim Hacker, is not always the solution.

But I'm pretty sure we should all care slightly more than we do. The Economist makes its weekly, increasingly despairing call for sanity and humanity, which falls on deaf ears. Everywhere else, the story is buried somewhere in the "world" news. I guess we have tyrant fatigue, and refugee fatigue. Certainly we have Middle East fatigue. We have imperialism fatigue, and casualty fatigue. We've become an Eddie Izzard sketch: when faced with indiscriminate killing within a nation's borders, we're not even mad, just impressed.

And so we let The Onion pick up the slack.

Really, America?

That’s no moon…

Also, we’ve been adding some great features to our new project Forekast.com since launch, and there are many more to come! For a list of some of the improvements go here. Thanks!

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This is an ADULT LINK. Click at your own risk; you have been warned.

rurone:

Yessss

I have no words to express how much I love these.

In “Sexy and I Know It,” the singer makes a bold proclamation of his physical attractiveness and his cognizance of this fact.

But this seemingly simple statement is just the starting point for a discussion on the narrator’s sexiness: What if he isn’t sexy, but thinks he is (as is strongly suggested in the video)? Are there people who are sexy, but don’t know it? What about the rest of us who aren’t sexy and are painfully aware of this fact?

At first, I thought the different scenarios for sexiness as perceived by others and sexiness as perceived by self could be neatly captured in a two-by-two matrix:

But then I realized that I wasn’t covering an important third variable aside from sexiness and awareness of sexiness: expression of sexiness. For example, the “She’s All That Girl” never makes claim to her sexiness; what about those who are sexy, don’t realize that they’re sexy, and yet still claim that they’re sexy? What about those who aren’t sexy, know that they’re not sexy, but still claim that they’re sexy for ironic effect?

As far as I know, business school’s haven’t perfected the use of the three-by-three matrix yet, but thankfully, they have given us the tool we need to capture this complexity: the flow chart.

Or in this case, the LMFAO Chart.* Click the image for a larger version. I know you want to:

*I make not apologies. I’m Making Awful Puns And I Know It.

Related Posts

• The Musical Talmud: “Party Rock Anthem” by LMFAO
• The Female Character Flowchart
• The Musical Talmud: I Want It That Way
• The Musical Talmud: Sweetest Girl (Dollar Bill)
• The 10 Easiest Things Dance Songs Ask of You

The Musical Talmud, Flowchart Edition: “Sexy and I Know It” by LMFAO originally appeared on Overthinking It, the site subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve. [Latest Posts | Podcast (iTunes Link)]

via http://www.google.ca/reader/view/?tab=my#stream/feed%2Fhttp%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2Fwrongdistance

Yet Another Fucking Music Festival takes place during the hottest 3 days this summer at a really inconvenient location. Headliners include That Band All Over The Radio, 2 Dudes & A MacBook, Cute Girl With A Guitar And A Sundress, and The Sellouts. This rather spot-on parody poster is by entertainment, art, and design studio Neat Dude Collective. The poster is available for purchase.

via Laszlo Thoth

Marco Arment:

And we lucked out with Reader — imagine how much worse it would be if website owners weren’t publishing open RSS feeds for anyone to fetch and process, but were instead posting each item to a proprietary Google API. We’d have almost no chance of building a successful alternative.

That’s Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. (Does the shutdown make more sense now?)

 ★ 

The latest from The Slingshot Channel: an Oreo Separation Pump Gun.

It's a basic human desire to destroy an OREO cookie with a pump action crossbow. Some men simply love neither cookie nor creme, so sometimes a man just needs to invent a badass crossbow to do the hard work of shooting the two from a powerful homemade weapon. Today, that man is meat lover and cookie-destroyer Jörg Sprave. Watch him operate the repeating 14-shot weapon he created that separates OREO cookies into very fine (but separated) crumbles.

(Thanks, Matthew!)

Seen at Cathletics.

The Red Ferret tried out AnyGlove, a capacitive gel you can apply to your gloves or other clothing -- once coated, your cloth can be used to operate a touch-screen: "The simple answer is yes it [works]. And very well, although we found that you needed to apply several coats, after drying each one, in order for it to work properly. You also need to make sure you apply enough liquid to soak the fingertip area properly, and don’t forget if you want full pinch zoom multitouch, you’ll need to do a couple of tips. Heavy SMS text users should of course remember the thumb! One of the advantages of the liquid is you can reapply it if the functionality fades after a while, and you can also customize your gloves with just the fingers you need."

AnyGlove – can you really make your favorite gloves touchscreen friendly? Yep! [Review] [Red Ferret]

AnyGlove [Amazon]

A "waking people up the hard way" supercut from clipnation.com. (Thanks, Joe Sabia!)

One can only sit on the DRM Chair eight times before it collapses. Thibault Brevet and friends created it in 48 hours for The Deconstruction hackathon.

A small sensor detects when someone sits and decrements a counter. Every time someone sits up, the chair knocks a number of time to signal how many uses are left. When reaching zero, the self-destruct system is turned on and the structural joints of the chair are melted.

(Thanks, Jason Tester!)

“Water can’t get in.”

Really cool print campaign for Sanyo’s Outdoor LCD TV done by Saatchi & Saatchi New Zealand.

Advertising Agency: SAATCHI & SAATCHI NZ, NEW ZEALAND, Auckland
Executive Creative Director: Mike O’sullivan
Creative Director: Luke Chess
Copywriter: Matthew Page
Art Director: Carolyn Davis
Account Manager: Lucy Pilkington
Account Supervisor: Angelina Farry
Typographer: Nick Smith
Photographer: Rory Carter
Producer: Paula Moy

Carly Rae Jepsen x Trent Reznor = "Call Me A Hole," by pomDeterrific.

(shoop by Rob Beschizza)

No Photoshop here. Redditor itwvet instead molded clay letters to spell "Africa." After placing a light behind them in the hut, he then refined the shapes of the letters so that they form a convincing elephant shadow.

Link

Platitudes don't always work out in real life....

Canadian artist Ian Baxter's "Animal Preserve" series from 1999 featured hundreds of stuffed animals "preserved" in liquid-filled jars neatly organized on shelves. (via FP)

Video games deaths in the style of Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies by Brentalfloss | Poster (h/t Shane Dingman)

Previously Popped Culture...
P Is For Pac-Man, T Is For Tetris
Z Is For Zissou: A Pop Culture Alphabet
A Dimension Not Only Of Sight And Sound

Make has the story of physicist David Neevel's Oreo-creme-removing device, which is rather a wonder:

His OSM (Oreo Separator Machine) was conceived and shown at Portland’s Mad Dog Garage, and the process goes something like this: The Oreo is placed on a tray, flipped vertically and cleaved in half by a motorized, ridiculously over-engineered hatchet. Aluminum arms then receive the halves and transfer them to a Dremel-based CNC machine, which obliterates the cream and presents it to the user for consumption.

David made a lot of sacrifices in making this, such as “try[ing] to find a good sandwich in this part of the city and stuff.” Regarding his robot, David also adds, “I don’t have a catchphrase, but if I had one, it’d be something like ‘Let’s get that cream out of there.’”

Machine Scrapes Oreos Clean of Cream [Michael Colombo/Make]