In 1938-39 on the eve of World War II, Nicholas Winton established an organization to rescue Jewish children living in Czechoslovakia from the Holocaust by giving them safe passage to Britain, which had recently approved a measure allowing refugees younger than 17 entry into the country. Winton’s organization ended up saving 669 children — future poets, politicians, scientists, and filmmakers among them. Getting these children out of Czechoslovakia was literally a matter of life and death. From Winton’s Wikipedia page:

The last group of 250, scheduled to leave Prague on 1 September 1939, were unable to depart. With Hitler’s invasion of Poland on the same day, the Second World War had begun. Of the children due to leave on that train, only two survived the war.

Although he continued his humanitarian work after the war, Winton rarely spoke of his efforts in saving the children. The full scope of what he had done was revealed only after his wife found a scrapbook in 1988 of the children’s names and the names of the British families that had taken them in. The public learned of Winton’s efforts on a TV show called That’s Life. Winton believed he was attending the show as an audience member, but it was revealed that he was actually sitting amongst about 2 dozen of the now-grown children that he had saved:

For his efforts, Winton was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2003. He died just a year and a half ago, at the age of 106.

Tags: Holocaust   Nicholas Winton   TV   video

This particularly bad example of regular expressions and client side validation was originally published in 2009. I thought Australia was supposed to be upside down, not bass ackwards. - Remy

---

"The company I work for sells vacation packages for Australia," writes Nathan, "and for whatever reason, they're marketed under different two different brands — redacted-travel.com.au and redacted-travel.com — depending on whether you live Down Under or somewhere else in the world."

Nathan continues, "one of the requirements for the international website (redacted-travel.com) is to disallow people from within Australia and New Zealand to make bookings. But the way this is done from the front end... well, it's a real gem."

/**
  *Checks to see if Australia is typed into the other country box
  */
  function checkContactCountry(inputBox)
  {
    var validator = new RegExp(
         /^(A|a)(U|u)(S|s)(T|t)(R|r)(A|a)(L|l)(I|i)(A|a)
          |(N|n)(E|e)(W|w)(Z|z)(E|e)(A|a)(L|l)(A|a)(N|n)(D|d)
          |(N|n)(E|e)(W|w) (Z|z)(E|e)(A|a)(L|l)(A|a)(N|n)(D|d)$/);

    if(validator.test(inputBox.value))
    {
         alert("Your Residential Address must be outside Australia. "
             + "Enter your residential address outside this country,"
             + "or visit redacted-travel.com.au to make a booking if "
             + " you live in Australia.");
         inputBox.focus();
         inputBox.select();                  
    }
 }

The U.S. Has Radicalized the Middle East

ISIS Is Run By Former Iraqi Generals … Many Are Members Of Saddam Hussein’s Secular Baath Party Who Converted To Radical Islam In American Prisons

U.S. Foreign Policy Created Many More Terrorists Than It Killed

The New Yorker reports:

ISIS is run by a council of former Iraqi generals, according to Hisham Alhashimi, an adviser to the Iraqi government and an expert on ISIS. Many are members of Saddam Hussein’s secular Baath Party who converted to radical Islam in American prisons.

In other words, ISIS was created by not only the war in Iraq, but American terror-creating foreign policy.

As we’ve reported for years, U.S. foreign policy is creating many more terrorists than it’s killing.

The U.S. Has Radicalized the Middle East

Wittingly or unwittingly, the U.S. has radicalized the Middle East.

The U.S. carried out regime change in Iran in 1953 … which led to radicalization in the country. Specifically, the CIA admits that the U.S. overthrew the moderate, suit-and-tie-wearing, Democratically-elected prime minister of Iran in 1953. (He was overthrown because he had nationalized Iran’s oil, which had previously been controlled by BP and other Western oil companies). As part of that action, the CIA admits that it hired Iranians to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its prime minister.   If the U.S. hadn’t overthrown the moderate Iranian government, the fundamentalist Mullahs would have never taken over. Iran has been known for thousands of years for tolerating Christians and other religious minorities.

America has long supported the fundamentalist Islamic radicals in Saudi Arabia, and funded their radical madrassa schools.  At the same time, we have attacked moderate Arabs … leading to a proliferation of the crazies.

Our Wars In the Middle East Have Created More Terrorists

Security experts – including both conservatives and liberals – agree that waging war in the Middle East weakens national security and increases terrorism. See this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this.

Ooops.

Killing innocent civilians is one of the main things which increases terrorism. As one of the top counter-terrorism experts (the former number 2 counter-terrorism expert at the State Department) told me, starting wars against states which do not pose an imminent threat to America’s national security increases the threat of terrorism because:

One of the principal causes of terrorism is injuries to people and families.

The Iraq war wasn’t even fought to combat terrorism. And Al Qaeda wasn’t even in Iraq until the U.S. invaded that country.

And top CIA officers say that drone strikes increase terrorism (and see this).

Furthermore, James K. Feldman – former professor of decision analysis and economics at the Air Force Institute of Technology and the School of Advanced Airpower Studies – and other experts say that foreign occupation is the main cause of terrorism

University of Chicago professor Robert A. Pape – who specializes in international security affairs – points out:

Extensive research into the causes of suicide terrorism proves Islam isn’t to blame — the root of the problem is foreign military occupations.

***

Each month, there are more suicide terrorists trying to kill Americans and their allies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other Muslim countries than in all the years before 2001 combined.

***

New research provides strong evidence that suicide terrorism such as that of 9/11 is particularly sensitive to foreign military occupation, and not Islamic fundamentalism or any ideology independent of this crucial circumstance. Although this pattern began to emerge in the 1980s and 1990s, a wealth of new data presents a powerful picture.

More than 95 percent of all suicide attacks are in response to foreign occupation, according to extensive research [co-authored by James K. Feldman - former professor of decision analysis and economics at the Air Force Institute of Technology and the School of Advanced Airpower Studies] that we conducted at the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Terrorism, where we examined every one of the over 2,200 suicide attacks across the world from 1980 to the present day. As the United States has occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, which have a combined population of about 60 million, total suicide attacks worldwide have risen dramatically — from about 300 from 1980 to 2003, to 1,800 from 2004 to 2009. Further, over 90 percent of suicide attacks worldwide are now anti-American. The vast majority of suicide terrorists hail from the local region threatened by foreign troops, which is why 90 percent of suicide attackers in Afghanistan are Afghans.

Israelis have their own narrative about terrorism, which holds that Arab fanatics seek to destroy the Jewish state because of what it is, not what it does. But since Israel withdrew its army from Lebanon in May 2000, there has not been a single Lebanese suicide attack. Similarly, since Israel withdrew from Gaza and large parts of the West Bank, Palestinian suicide attacks are down over 90 percent.

***

The first step is recognizing that occupations in the Muslim world don’t make Americans any safer — in fact, they are at the heart of the problem.

Our Program of Torture Created Terrorists

In addition, torture creates new terrorists:

• A top counter-terrorism expert says torture increases the risk of terrorism (and see this).

• One of the top military interrogators said that torture by Americans of innocent Iraqis is the main reason that foreign fighters started fighting against Americans in Iraq in the first place (and see this).

• Former counter-terrorism czar Richard A. Clarke says that America’s indefinite detention without trial and abuse of prisoners is a leading Al Qaeda recruiting tool

• A former FBI interrogator — who interrogated Al Qaeda suspects — says categorically that torture actually turns people into terrorists

• A 30-year veteran of CIA’s operations directorate who rose to the most senior managerial ranks, says:
  

  Torture creates more terrorists and fosters more acts of terror than it could possibly neutralize.

• A former US Air Force interrogator said that torture just creates more terrorists

• A former U.S. interrogator and counterintelligence agent, and Afghanistan veteran said, “Torture puts our troops in danger, torture makes our troops less safe, torture creates terrorists. It’s used so widely as a propaganda tool now in Afghanistan. All too often, detainees have pamphlets on them, depicting what happened at Guantanamo.”

• The Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously stated:

“The administration’s policies concerning [torture] and the resulting controversies … strengthened the hand of our enemies.”

• Two professors of political science have demonstrated that torture increases, rather than decreases, terrorism

• General Petraeus said that torture hurts our national security

• And the reporter who broke Iran-Contra and other stories says that torture actually helped Al Qaeda, by giving false leads to the U.S. which diverted its military, intelligence and economic resources into wild goose chases

Remember, the secular Iraqi generals who now lead ISIS converted to radical Islam in American prisons … where they were undoubtedly tortured.

veesci:

awwww-cute:

Han Solo and Chewy

Today's Deal: Save 66% on FTL: Faster Than Light!*


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NSA Apologists Try to Smear Snowden as a “Russian Spy” … Exactly Like Authorities Tried to Smear Daniel Ellsberg, Ben Franklin and Samuel Adams

But Even the FBI and NSA Say There’s No Evidence that Snowden Worked With Others

~~~

While NSA apologists like Mike Rogers say that Snowden is a Russian spy, the New York Times observes:

Officials at both the N.S.A. and the F.B.I. have said their investigations have turned up no evidence that Mr. Snowden was aided by others.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation points out that the Nixon administration also tried to smear Daniel Ellsberg as a Russian spy:

While it’s well-known that Rep. Rogers has a long history of making things up and telling the media, it’s less known that his tactics are drawn straight from Richard Nixon’s playbook, when his administration tried to discredit Daniel Ellsberg after he leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971.

Ellsberg is commonly looked at as the quintessential whistleblower today, but shortly after he leaked the top secret Vietnam War study, the Nixon administration made a concerted effort to paint him as a Soviet spy in the press, using anonymous quotes and non-existent ‘secret’ evidence. (Sound familiar?)

This is from the New York Times on August 11, 1973:

An attorney for Dr. Daniel Ellsberg has chided the Senate Watergate committee for failing to challenge what he called “totally false and slanderous” testimony by the former White House aide, John D. Ehrlichman, suggesting that Dr. Ellsberg delivered copies of the Pentagon papers to the Soviet embassy.

“During his testimony before your committee, Mr. Ehrlichman repeatedly asserted that the Pentagon papers had been given in 1971 to the Soviet Embassy and implied that this might have been done by my client, Dr. Daniel Ellsberg, or with his knowledge,” the attorney, Leonard B. Boudin, who wrote the committee. “These allegations are made of whole cloth; they are totally false and slanderous of Dr. Ellsberg.”

In December 1973, the New York Times reported on Nixon administration’s alleged reasoning for starting the White House Plumbers unit, which conducted several illegal operations against Ellsberg and the Watergate break-in:

One was a fear—nourished in part, some sources said, by Henry A. Kissinger, then the President’s national security adviser—that Daniel Ellsberg, who said he turned over the Pentagon papers to the press, might pass on to the Soviet Union secrets far more important than any information contained in the Pentagon study of the Vietnam war.

Specifically, the sources said, the White House feared that Dr. Ellsberg, a former Rand Corporation and Defense Department official, may have been a Soviet intelligence informer who, in the weeks after publication of the Pentagon Papers in June, 1971, was capable of turning over details of the most closely held nuclear targeting secrets of the United States, which were contained in a highly classified documents known as the Single Integrated Operation Plans, or S.I.O.P.

The second major concern was that a highly placed Soviet agent of the K.G.B., the Soviet intelligence agency, operating as an American counterspy, would be compromised by continued inquiry by the special prosecutor and the Senate Watergate committee into the Ellsberg case. The agent informed his F.B.I. contact that a set of the Pentagon papers had been delivered to the Soviet Embassy in Washington shortly after a Federal court had ordered The Times to stop printing its series of articles on the papers.

In July 1974, the New York Times published a leaked Nixon administration memo written in August 1971 on how they could discredit Ellsberg’s principal lawyer Leonard B. Boudin:

Most of what Daniel Ellsberg has said in public since he acknowledged stealing the Pentagon Papers seems calculated to position him as having responded to an order of morality higher than his onetime solemn undertakings to his country. This rationale, let it be remembered, was earlier employed by atomic spies Klaus Fuchs, David Greenglass, Morton Sobell and Bruno Pontecorvo.

And although there is as yet no conclusive evidence that Daniel Ellsberg acted on specific instructions of the Soviet Union—as did those earlier informants—the distinct possibility remains that Ellsberg’s “higher order” will one day be revealed as the Soviet Fatherland. For history is replete with repetition and notable similarities exist.

…

But in the case of Daniel Ellsberg the benefits of [an acquittal] will accrue to the Soviet Union, the Vietcong and Communist China. For if Boudin is again successful—as he has been so often in the past—the agents of foreign powers will enjoy a liberty of action never before accorded them in the history of our country.

Whether it’s the Nixon administration or anyone else, any allegations made with no proof—and under the veil of secrecy—deserve extreme skepticism and strong pushback from the press. Rep. Mike Rogers’ evidence-free smears against Edward Snowden are no different.

Indeed, Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Adams did exactly what Edward Snowden did … and were likewise labeled as traitors by the British government.

 

If you're not already a physicist, you need to mentally prepare yourself for MIT professor Max Tegmark's explanation of how our entire universe isn't just described by math, but is math. Scientific American published an excerpt from Tegmark's new book, Our Mathematical Universe, which explains that our universe is just an external reality made of a mathematical structure covered up by "baggage." He uses a couple of surprisingly gripping analogies to explain this, like describing a "basketball trajectory" in terms of particles and parabolas, and how the "Immortal Game" in chess can be stripped down to relationships between the game's abstract entities. While it's not a strictly new theory, it's mind-blowing stuff that Tegmark makes...

Continue reading…

Only a FOOL Still Believes the NSA

 

The NSA and other intelligence officials have been repeatedly caught lying about their spying programs.

Officials in the legislative, judicial and executive branches of government all say that the mass surveillance on Americans is unnecessary:

• 3 Senators with top secret clearance “have reviewed this surveillance extensively and have seen no evidence that the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records has provided any intelligence of value that could not have been gathered through less intrusive means”

• Another Senator with top secret clearance agrees, and so does the congress member who wrote the Patriot Act, and more than 100 congress members from both parties

• As does the official panel created by President Obama to review NSA spying, made up of top former White House officials and other government insiders, including the head of counter-terrorism under Clinton and Bush and former deputy CIA director Michael J. Morrell

• NBC News reports:

A member of the White House review panel on NSA surveillance said he was “absolutely” surprised when he discovered the agency’s lack of evidence that the bulk collection of telephone call records had thwarted any terrorist attacks.“It was, ‘Huh, hello? What are we doing here?’” said Geoffrey Stone, a University of Chicago law professor….

“That was stunning. That was the ballgame,” said one congressional intelligence official, who asked not to be publicly identified. “It flies in the face of everything that they have tossed at us.”

The conclusions of the panel’s reports were at direct odds with public statements by President Barack Obama and U.S. intelligence officials.

• A non-profit, bipartisan policy group says that NSA mass surveillance has no impact on terrorism

• CNN terrrorism expert Peter Bergen says that mass surveillance is not needed to stop another 9/11

• Former president Clinton (and apparently Carter, as well), agree that mass surveillance is unnecessary

• As do the chairs of the 9/11 Commission which was created by Congress and the White House

• As does the counter-terrorism czar under the Clinton and Bush administrations, Richard Clarke. And see this

• As does a federal judge (and see this)

Top terrorism and security experts also agree, saying that:

• Mass spying by the NSA has never stopped a single terrorist attack

• Mass surveillance doesn’t protect us from terrorism

• Mass spying actually interferes with our ability to stop terrorism

Indeed, the NSA itself no longer claims that its mass spying program has stopped terror attacks or saved lives. Instead, intelligence spokesmen themselves now claim that mass spying is just an “insurance policy” to give “peace of mind”.

But given that mass surveillance by governments on their own people have always been used – for at least 500 years – to crush dissent, that the NSA has a long history of spying on Congress for political purposes, and that high-level NSA whistleblowers say that the NSA is using spying to blackmail politicians and social critics and to prosecute people the government dislikes, the question is whose peace of mind the programs preserve

And while the NSA claims that disclosure of its spying programs hurts America’s security, that’s what authoritarians always say. For example:

• When leakers disclosed that the FBI was conducting mass spying on – and smearing – anti-war Americans, attorney general John Mitchell said that the leaks would “endanger” the lives of government agents

• Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Adams did exactly what Edward Snowden did … and were likewise labeled as traitors by the British government

So how can anyone believe the NSA at this point?

Unfortunately, fear of terror makes people unable to think straight … and when the government undertakes a large, idiotic project – like launching the Iraq war – many people will go to great lengths to grasp at straws to try to rationalize the government’s ill-conceived campaign.

The minority of Americans who believe the NSA have – sadly – fallen for the same trick …

Everything is a Remix Case Study: The iPhone from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

1. Cyberpunk 2013 — a roleplaying game shows a Gibsonian view of 2013 from 1988. (via Ben Hammersley)
2. The Future Computer Utility — 1967 prediction of the current state. There are several reasons why some form of regulation may be required. Consider one of the more dramatic ones, that of privacy and freedom from tampering. Highly sensitive personal and important business information will be stored in many of the contemplated systems. Information will be exchanged over easy-to-tap telephone lines. At best, nothing more than trust—or, at best, a lack of technical sophistication—stands in the way of a would-be eavesdropper. All data flow over the lines of the commercial telephone system. Hanky-panky by an imaginative computer designer, operator, technician, communications worker, or programmer could have disastrous consequences. As time-shared computers come into wider use, and hold more sensitive information, these problems can only increase. Today we lack the mechanisms to insure adequate safeguards. Because of the difficulty in rebuilding complex systems to incorporate safeguards at a later date, it appears desirable to anticipate these problems. (via New Yorker)
3. Lantronix XPort Pro Lx6 — a secure embedded device server supporting IPv6, that barely larger than an RJ45 connector. The device runs Linux or the company’s Evolution OS, and is destined to be used in wired industrial IoT / M2M applications.
4. Pond — interesting post-NSA experiment in forward secure, asynchronous messaging for the discerning. Pond messages are asynchronous, but are not a record; they expire automatically a week after they are received. Pond seeks to prevent leaking traffic information against everyone except a global passive attacker. (via Morgan Mayhem)

Phone Keypad

I use one of those old phones where you type with numbers—for example, to type "Y", you press 9 three times. Some words have consecutive letters on the same number. When they do, you have to pause between letters, making those words annoying to type. What English word has the most consecutive letters on the same key?

Stewart Bishop

We can answer that question with the following headache-inducing shell command, which finds all words in a given list which use the same key a bunch of times in a row:

cat wordlist.txt | perl -pe 's/^(.*)\$/\L\$& \U\$&/g' | tr 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ' '2223334445556667777888999' | grep -P "(.)\1\1\1\1\1"

The winner, according to this script, is nonmonogamous, which requires you to type seven consecutive letters (nonmono) with the "6" key.[1]It's actually tied with nonmonotonic. These no doubt both lose to more obscure words which weren't in the wordlists I used.

Phone Keyboard Sentences

It's rare for a word to have all its letters on the same key; the longest common ones are only a few letters.[2]Like "tutu". Nevertheless, using only these words, we can write a high def MMO on TV, a phrase whose words use only one number key each.

There are plenty of other phrases like this, although some of them are a bit of a stretch:

Typing issues like this aren't limited to old phone keyboards. For any text input system, you can find phrases which are weird to type.

QWERTY Keyboards

It's a well-known piece of trivia among word geeks that "stewardesses" is the longest common word you can type on a QWERTY keyboard using only the left hand.

In fact, it's possible to write entire sentences with just the left hand. For example, try typing the words We reserved seats at a secret Starcraft fest. Weird, huh?

Let's take a look at a few more sentences—written with the help of some even messier shell commands and Python scripts[3]I constructed these sentences by searching text logs for sentence fragments that fit a particular constraint, then randomly connecting those groups together using a technique called Markov chaining. You can see the code I used here.—which follow various constraints:

Left hand only

Right hand only

Home row only

Top row only

And lastly, if anyone wants to know why you're not more active on social media, you only need the top row to explain that you're ...

Yesterday Google launched an early access preview of Android Studio, an integrated development environment (IDE) for Android based on IntelliJ IDEA. This one-stop shop for coding, compiling, and testing includes all the standard Android SDK tools, plus build support, quick fixes, tools to catch major coding flaws, and a preview window. The Android Developer Tools session at Google I/O went into massive detail on the new project. The 53-minute session is embedded below, in case you couldn't make it.

One of the cooler features of Android Studio is the multitalented preview window, which shows your code running on mock-ups of most of the standard Nexus devices in a real-time layout.

• [For Developers] ADT 20/SDK Tools r20 Previews Are Here - Brand New Property Editor(!), NDK Support, Performance Improvements, Bug Fixes Galore
• Android Developers, Listen Up: ADT 14 And SDK Tools r14 Previews With Much Needed Improvements Are Now Available For Download
• For Developers: ADT 17 And SDK Tools r17 Previews Available For Download, Now With Network Usage, Fixed Proguard, Enhanced Lint, And More
• NVIDIA Introduces Nsight Tegra, An Android Development Environment Inside Visual Studio - And It's Free

[Google I/O] 53-Minute Android Developer Tools Session Video Shows Everything You Want To Know About Android Studio IDE was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Time for fun with charts! A famous chart in the early retirement community is The Crossover Point from the book Your Money or Your Life, which shows that you’ve reached financial independence when your investment income equals your monthly expenses:

Fellow blogger Adrian of 7million7years also shared a related chart from Chris Han of Quora, where wealth is the shaded area between your income and expenses:

Specifically, if you plotted all your income and expenses over time, the shaded area between would the amount you’ve saved your entire financial life. Bigger shaded area, bigger nest egg.

(Math nerds: The units of income are dollars/time, i.e. $50,000 per year. Therefore, the area under the curve – integrals anyone? – is indeed dollars. If you measured the area under the curve for the green line, that would be all the money you’ve ever made. Do the same for the red line and that’d be all the money you’ve ever spent. The difference is what you’ve saved. Ignoring investment returns, that is indeed your wealth!)

The Problem

I’ve worked with people making $30,000 a year, and with those making over $300,000 a year. In both places, there are folks working until they’re past 65+ and still worrying about retirement. I suspect this is why:

See the problem? Expenses tend to rise with income (lifestyle inflation), so that the size of the wealth wedge tends to stay the same! Sure, your house may be bigger and your car may park itself, but if their chart looks like this, they would all end in the same place if they faced extended unemployment: BANKRUPTCY.

The Solution

You have to mind the gap between income and expenses. This is another one of those simple but hard principles of personal finance. Some people find it easier to increase income. Some people find it easier to minimize expenses. It really doesn’t matter, as long as you keep the same amount of distance between the two lines the amount saved is the same.

Here are some parting thoughts. Chris adds:

Decreasing the slope of the red line becomes significantly harder over time as you grow accustomed to your lifestyle.

Adrian adds:

…it is easier to grow Wealth dramatically by increasing the slope of the green Income line than it is to decrease the slope of the red Expense line.

I would add that while increasing income is super-duper-awesome, lowering expenses has a double-impact. The lower your expenses, the bigger the Wealth wedge, and the smaller the Wealth wedge you need to be financially free. A high-income person and an average-income person could save the same amount, but the person with a much lower income could have a higher multiple of their expenses saved up and thus actually be better off financially.

What’s your insight into this deceptively simple chart?

Your Entire Financial Life in One Deceptively Simple Chart from My Money Blog.

---

© MyMoneyBlog.com, 2013.

We're just days away from the US release of Oblivion, and director Joseph Kosinski is adding another project to his to-do list: a new television show with AMC. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the network is developing Ballistic City, a futuristic cop drama described as "a blend of Chinatown and Blade Runner." It's being written by Travis Beacham, a writer with credits like Clash of the Titans and the upcoming Pacific Rim to his name. Kosinski is attached to direct the pilot and then executive produce the series.

According to the Reporter, the show is focused on a former police offer who finds himself exploring the criminal underworld of a city that is built into a "generational" spaceship heading for an unknown destination. D...

Continue reading…

In past few months, I linked to two collections of color photos of Paris taken in the 1910s and 1920s under the direction of Albert Kahn.

Recently Rue89 sent photographer Audrey Cerdan to recapture some of those old scenes in modern day Paris and knocked up an interface so that you can slide back and forth between the old and current photos. In some of the pairs of photos, pharmacies, tabacs, and boulangeries are in the same places. (thx, christophe)

Tags: Albert Kahn   Audrey Cerdan   early color photography   Paris

An anonymous reader writes According to the AP, the IRS is being "scolded for spending $60,000 dollars on an elaborate parody video that played at a 2010 conference. 'The video features an elaborate set depicting the control room, or bridge, of the spaceship featured in the hit TV show. IRS workers portray the characters, including one who plays Mr. Spock, complete with fake hair and pointed ears. The production value is high even though the acting is what one might expect from a bunch of tax collectors. In the video, the spaceship is approaching the planet 'Notax,' where alien identity theft appears to be a problem.' You can find the hilarious and/or nausea-inducing video on YouTube."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I love classic arcade shooters! Neon graphics, fast moving foes, and chirpy sound effects. That style takes me back to the days of playing Asteroid or Galaga on massive cabinets, where reflexes and planning were fundamental and a quarter only bought 3 lives. Spikepit Games brings some of that feeling back with Plasma Sky, but you can keep the change in your pocket.

Like other entries in the Shmup (Shoot'em Up) category, you are in control of a gunship as it battles through an army of oncoming foes. The standard fare of choreographed enemy waves and boss fights is backed by a familiar old-school techno beat, and collectable power-ups improve the ship's guns and grant special advantages like slowing enemies to a crawl.

Done With This Post? You Might Also Like These:

• Fire Maple Games (Of "Grisly Manor" Fame) Releases Second Puzzle/Adventure Game "The Lost City"
• [Review] Wave Launcher Is Like Having WebOS On A Phone That You Actually Want
• [Game Roundup] 5 Hidden-Object Games That Bring Mystery And Suspense To Android - Play Detective On-The-Go
• Monster Madness Powered By Unreal Engine 3 Creeps Into The Android Market, Complete With Zombies, Weapons, And... Gingerbread/Tegra Requirements

[New Game] Plasma Sky Delivers A Beautiful Space Shooter, Plus Lots And Lots Of Lasers was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

If you call yourself a gamer, odds are fairly good you've played through one or both of Valve's acclaimed Portal games. If so, perhaps — in between solving those mind-twisting puzzles — you've wondered what life would be like working inside Aperture Laboratories. A new Portal 2-inspired web series from Wayside Creations aims to satiate your curiosity.

Aperture R&D goes inside the cold, unwelcoming halls of the research facility, following a pair of scientists as they strive to earn the distinction of Lab Team of the Month. Even losing an esteemed colleague to a turret laser doesn't dissuade our protagonists from pursuing the prize. Episode one contains some nice references and callbacks to Valve's inventive series, and the acting...

Continue reading…

Watch as Ludovic Woerth & Jokke Sommer fly through a hole in a building in central Rio de Janeiro that looks not much more than 15 feet wide. Jesus.

And speaking of Jesus, another pair of wingsuiters flew under the arms of the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio a few years ago. (via @rands)

Tags: Rio de Janeiro   sports   video

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