Blocking websites is in vogue for copyright holders all around Europe. They normally need to go to court to have allegedly-infringing sites blocked at the ISP level but in Portugal no such formality is required.

In recent months local Internet providers have already blocked hundreds of websites for allegedly linking to copyright infringing content. The action is the result of a voluntary arrangement between the Ministry of Culture, the Association of Telecommunication Operators, and copyright holders including anti-piracy group MAPiNET.

The lack of judicial oversight has been a concern for activists ever since the introduction of the agreement. Now it appears their fears were not unfounded.

Ultimate Music is a site operated by journalist and blogger Josep Vinaixa. He reports on entertainment industry news, such as track and album releases, and also embeds YouTube videos. In the image below one can see a typical piece which announces the launch of an album by Sigma and embeds an official Sigma video from YouTube.

Vinaixa works with international record labels who send him information about releases and even request that he embeds their videos in his site. However, local anti-piracy group MAPiNET believes that embedding YouTube videos is illegal unless Vinaixa’s website is licensed.

In an email from MAPiNET dated Dec 18 and shared with TorrentFreak, the anti-piracy outfit warns Vinaixa that he needs to “change his conduct” or face the consequences. (broken English email quoted verbatim)

“On the past 30 of July we have celebrated a MoU with the Portuguese association of ISPs APRITEL, Portuguese Cultural inspection entity IGAC, and others,” the email states.

“On this MoU websites that have more than 500 copyright protected works or if 2/3 of his content is copyrighted material presented there with no authorization from the legal rights owner are eligible to be blocked by DNS in Portugal.

“If this website do not change its conduct within the next 24 hours we will make all the diligences to proceed with the DNS blocking request.”

Less than an hour later a bemused Vinaixa responded, asking MAPiNET what could possibly be wrong with writing about artists and embedding their official videos in his news articles.

“I really want to fix this because I don’t want any problem. I’m just promoting the new music releases,” he explained.

After receiving no response, Vinaixa’s site was blocked by ISPs in Portugal on Christmas Day. The message now seen by visitors is shown below, as first reported by Revolução dos Bytes.

Credit: Revolucaodosbytes.pt

(Translated: The site you want to access is blocked in the wake of compliance of a Entitdade Regulatory notification)

On December 29, Vinaixa wrote to MAPiNET again.

“You blocked my site in Portugal and you didn’t answer my message. I want to fix this and make my site available in Portugal again. Can you please tell me what I have to do?” he begged.

On January 5, 2016, Vinaixa received a reply but it was not what he’d been hoping for.

“According to the information we have gathered from the Portuguese Music Licensing Company (PassMusica) and all music related Collective Management Entities, you have not submitted any licensing request for your site to operate in the Portuguese Territory,” MAPiNET explained.

“Having said that, we recommend you, as a first step, to obtain the correct licensing for your site to work properly and according to the Portuguese Legislation, and therefore we urge you to address the above mentioned entities.”

So, after being blocked by MAPiNET, Vinaixa turned to PassMusica for help.

“My website is a music site about new releases and future artists from all parts of the world. All the music / videos are from official channels like Youtube, Spotify, Soundcloud or Vevo,” Vinaixa told the licensing outfit.

“I do not understand what I could do wrong, for you to block my access throughout your country. I simply want to return to be operational in Portugal and fix something if there is something to fix. Thank you so much.”

Again, the response was disappointing.

“Further to your email, we can confirm that we have not received any licensing request from you in order to operate in Portugal. Furthermore, we also have information that you have not requested authorization [from] the Record Company to make the music videos and tracks available through your website, as all the platforms you’ve mentioned have requested,” PassMusica told Vinaixa.

“We appreciate that the music and all the videos are from official channels, but those channels have negotiated directly with the record companies in order to be able to make such usage of music, as we are sure you have not. Also, those channels, in their disclaimers do not authorize such utilization.”

But according to Vinaixa, that is nonsense.

“Excuse me but that’s not true,” he told PassMusica earlier this month.

“All the labels from UK, Australia, USA and Spain send me the information about the releases from their artists and they want me to put all of the videos and audios (official link) on the site.”

Vinaixa told the licensing outfit he’s been working with the labels for three years and no one has ever complained. In fact, all he gets is thanks for his cooperation in promoting the labels’ artists.

“I don’t understand why Portugal blocked me when all the other countries are working with me, the labels and the artists’ advertising agencies. I just want to work properly as I have been doing around the world for 3 years. So you do not tell me I have no license, because I work closely with almost all the record labels.”

So for now Vinaixa and his site is in limbo while being treated like the dozens of hardcore pirate sites on MAPiNET’s register. They are no longer responding to his questions and Portuguese users are still unable to view his site.

According to a 2014 decision by the EU’s Court of Justice, if content is already freely available after being legally published and isn’t already subject to restrictions such as a subscription or pay wall, embedding is not a breach of EU law.

TorrentFreak contacted MAPiNET on two occasions to hear its reasons for blocking Ultimate Music but the anti-piracy group did respond to requests for comment.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

lacigreen:

new vid: LUBE 101!  i’m passionate about proper genital friction yall.  in this video i cover:

✔ types of lube/what’s best for your purposes
✔ why most drugstore lubes suck
✔ the science of lube

Flat Earth it is, then.

With a twist -

Police say the man suspected of accidentally shooting a stranger at a Renton movie theater told them he carried a firearm because he feared mass shootings.

Dane Gallion, 29, told officers he took the gun to Regal Cinemas 14 at the Landing on Thursday night because he was “concerned about recent mass shootings in public places,” according to a police account in a probable-cause statement released Saturday.

That same anxiety prompted him to keep the gun unholstered in his waistband, the statement says...

Police said Gallion told them he had taken medicine for anxiety in the morning and that he’d had a pizza and a 22-ounce beer before the movie.

I'm going to close comments for this post because I know what they will be. 

I'm waiting to see whether he and his family will pay for the medical expenses of the woman he shot and whether he will be punished with anything other than a severe reprimand and a requirement to attend gun-safety classes.

Almost three years ago, a feminist activist committed what many not-so-impartial observers apparently see as an unpardonable sin: she was less than polite to a small squad of Men’s Rights activists at a demonstration in Toronto. At least one of these gentlemen caught her outburst on video, and uploaded it to YouTube.

You know the rest: the video went viral, and the activist, a red-headed woman known as Chanty Binx (or “Big Red,” to the douchebag army), found herself suddenly transformed into “The Posterchild of Everything Wrong with Feminism,” as one of her haters put it. Her face has become ubiquitous in antifeminist memes, and she’s endured nearly three years of harassment.

Earlier this month, antifeminist YouTuber Sargon of Akkad — who makes his living pandering to some of the internet’s worst lady haters — posted an animated video by another antifeminist YouTuber in which an angry Islamist and an angry feminist sing a song explaining that they pretty much believe all the same things. (For some reason, this nonsensical theory is something that a lot of antifeminists have convinced themselves is true.)

The angry Islamist in the video is a familiar racist stereotype, complete with “funny” accent. [Correction: He’s evidently supposed to be a parody of this guy, known as Dawah Man, a legitimately terrible person you wouldn’t think atheists would have to strawman in order to criticize..]

The angry feminist, meanwhile, isn’t a generic figure; she’s an especially crude caricature of Binx, spouting nonsense that neither Binx nor any other feminist actually believes: the video ends with her encouraging the Islamist to rape her, because it’s not really rape if a Muslim does it, dontchaknow.

It’s a vicious, hateful little cartoon made worse by the fact that these words are being put in the mouth of a real woman who’s been the target of a vast harassment campaign for years.

Yesterday, Richard Dawkins, apparently seeing this horrendous video as a clever takedown of some brand of feminism that he must think actually exists, shared it with his 1.3 million Twitter followers:

Dawkins, a well-respected scientist-turned-embarrassing-atheist-ideologue, has become notorious for his endless Twitter gaffes. But this is plainly worse than, say, his famously pathetic lament about airport security “dundridges” taking his jar of honey; his Tweet contributed to the demonization of a real woman who’s already the target of harassment and threats.

The awesome Lindy West pointed this out to him in a series of Tweets and linked to one of my posts cataloging some of the abuse Binx got after the video of her went viral.

In a series of eloquent and angry Tweets, she made clear to Dawkins how and why he was misusing his huge platform and contributing to an atmosphere of hate online. Dawkins, alternately indignant and defensive, ultimately took down the offending Tweet, but not before making other Tweets that were nearly as bad. Dawkins can’t even do the right thing without being a dick about it.

Let’s watch Lindy at work:

 

After what was apparently an unsatisfactory response from Dawkins — I couldn’t find his Tweet, if there was one — West repeated and expanded upon her basic points. [EDIT: The unsastisfactory respose, West tells me, was that Dawkins posted a link to one of the videos of Chanty Binx at the Toronto demonstration.]

Well, that got his attention:

So there you have it: when informed that a tweet of his will almost certainly worsen the vicious harassment faced by a young woman whose only “crime” was being rude to a couple of MRAs in public, Richard Dawkins, a one-time winner of  the American Humanist Association’s Humanist of the Year Award, replies by saying that “she deserves nothing more than ridicule.”

West replied:

Dawkins then decided to suggest that perhaps Binx was, you know, crazy:

Dawkins ultimately agreed to take down his Tweet linking to the execrable video. But he offered no apology. And he went on to suggest that just maybe Binx had … threatened herself.

We’ve seen this, er, argument before.

Does Dawkins have any conception of just how much abuse women like Chanty Binx get? If she were sending herself all the threatening and harassing messages she gets, she wouldn’t have time to eat or sleep.

And I wonder if Dawkins thinks she drew the caricature of herself that was used in the video he retweeted.

Thoughtful as ever, Dawkins made sure to remind his 1.3 million followers that Binx still deserved all the mockery they could deliver. Just not the death threats please!

And he begged his readers to think about the real victims here — those people, like him, who might have to curtail their mockery somewhat because their terrible, terrible fans might be inspired to hurt someone.

RIP, Richard Dawkins’ comedy career.

Is Dawkins actually unaware that by punching down at a woman who’s already been the target of a three year harassment campaign he almost certainly is contributing to the threats he claims to deplore? It’s hard for me to believe that he could be so naive. But the alternative explanation — that he knows full well that he’s encouraging the harassers — is even more disquieting.

One good thing has come out of this ugly episode today: The Northeast Conference on Science & Skepticism has un-invited Dawkins from its event this year. A post on the group’s website today explains:

The Northeast Conference on Science & Skepticism has withdrawn its invitation to Richard Dawkins to participate at NECSS 2016. We have taken this action in response to Dr. Dawkins’ approving re-tweet of a highly offensive video.

We believe strongly in freedom of speech and freedom to express unpopular, and even offensive, views. However, unnecessarily divisive, counterproductive, and even hateful speech runs contrary to our mission and the environment we wish to foster at NECSS. The sentiments expressed in the video do not represent the values of NECSS or its sponsoring organizations.

We will issue a full refund to any NECSS attendee who wishes to cancel their registration due to this announcement.

The NECSS Team

Good for them. The atheist movement needs to stand up to the haters and harassers in its midst, including those like Dawkins, who may not directly harass or threaten but who use their huge platforms to amplify and embolden this hatred and harassment.

It would be nice if Dawkins were to actually learn something — a little humanity, a little humility? — from this incident, but when it comes to the subject of feminism Dawkins seems incapable of taking in new information, much less learning anything from it.

EDITED TO ADD: And now, as if to prov what I just said in that previous paragraph, Dawkins is now second-guessing his decision to take down his tweet linking to the video, because GamerGaters are telling him that Chanty and I made up the evidence of the abuse she got.

NOTE: Lindy West has a book coming out soon. Pre-order it below!




CORRECTION: I added  a bit noting that the Islamist in the cartoon video is supposed to be a parody of a real person.

EDIT: I added a line about Dawkins tweeting a link to a video of Chanty Binx at the Toronto demonstration.

Europa Water Siphon

What if you built a siphon from the oceans on Europa to Earth? Would it flow once it's set up? (We have an idea for selling bottled Europa water.)

—A group of Google Search SREs

No, but I like where you're going with this.

Siphons are neat—they let you pump water up and over a barrier using just a tube and gravity. You can use siphoning to empty swimming pools, fill awkwardly-shaped containers, or get up to all kinds of trouble.[1]I asked some friends to suggest which thing in their house they'd be most upset to find someone siphoning water into. Answers included: Spice drawer, gumball machine, tea collection, bottle of vitamins, watercolor paint set, bag of rice with a cell phone in it, mint-condition instant oatmeal collection, carefully tuned musical glasses, ice hotel, prizewinning sand castle, sodium action figure collection, gremlin cage, Martian soil sample, dehydrated astronaut ice cream, and rack of those water-sensing self-inflating lifeboats.

It's not necessarily obvious at first glance, but siphoning works because of air pressure. Before we answer the Europa question, it may help to go over how siphons work.

If you take a tube full of water and point the ends down, gravity will try to pull the water down, making it fall out of both sides. If the water did start to fall out, a vacuum would form in the middle, since there's no way for air to get in to fill the gap. Each column of water would then have a vacuum on one side and air on the other, which means it would be pushed back up into the tube.

In reality, this doesn't happen; the air pressure stops the vacuum from opening up in the first place, and the water just sits there in the tube. Or, at least, it would if it were perfectly balanced.

If the water in one end is slightly lower than the other, then the column of water on that side pushes down harder against the air than the column on the other side. This imbalance causes the water to "tip" and run out of the heavier end.

To siphon something, you can just keep feeding more water into the tube on the higher side. As long as the surface of that water is higher up than the place where the water is coming out, the siphon will keep running.

If the column of water is more than about 34 feet[2]10 meters​[3]2 giraffes high, the pressure from the weight of the water becomes too strong for Earth's air pressure to counteract, and the water does fall out from both sides and briefly create a vacuum.[4]Although as the pressure drops, the water boils away to fill it, so you can't actually get too close to a pure vacuum this way. However, if you use something like olive oil (or mercury), you can get much closer. This means that on Earth's surface, you can't siphon water over a barrier that's more than 34 feet high. In Denver, where the air pressure is lower, the limit is 28 feet. In a vacuum—in theory—you can't siphon at all.[5]In practice, it turns out siphons do work in a vacuum, at least a little bit, because the "stickiness" of the water keeps it from pulling apart in the middle.

Europa has barely any atmosphere, so you won't be able to do much siphoning. But you also can't siphon water out of the atmosphere from a planet in general. A column of atmosphere, which is miles high, pushes down only as hard as a column of water 34 feet high. The water column is smaller because water is much denser than air. As long as the stuff on top is less dense than the liquid below it, you can't use the pressure from the stuff on top to siphon the liquid up above the stuff on top.[6]Most of the time, things sort themselves into layers, with the denser ones on the bottom. Occasionally, in the Earth, layers of dense rock will end up above layers of less-dense oil. This is why—when oil wellheads break—oil can sometimes come spurting out without any help from the pumps.

Even if you could generate a lot of pressure, pumping water from Europa's surface would take some work. Europa's gravity is weaker than Earth's, which means lifting something up from the surface of Europa takes less energy, but it's still not easy. The energy required to "climb out of Europa's gravity well" is the same as the energy required to climb up 209 kilometers against Earth's surface gravity. (Earth's gravity well, by comparison, is about 6,379 kilometers "deep"—click on this comic for an illustration.)

Once you've lifted the water out of Europa's gravity well, you then have to lift it the rest of the way out of Jupiter's, which is a lot deeper. Then, you have to do more work to push the water on a trajectory where it intercepts Earth. In terms of energy, the whole task is roughly equivalent to lifting the water about 2,500 kilometers in Earth gravity:

You could send the water to Earth by launching it from the surface of Europa at about 7 km/s. Conveniently, since Europa has no atmosphere, you don't need to use inefficient rockets to climb up to space. You can launch the water directly from the surface using something simpler, like a coilgun.

When the water reaches Earth, it can use atmospheric braking to slow down, and the individual bottles could be steered directly to their targets. Timing the deliveries would be tricky, sure, but it sure would be impressive if you got it right. Plus, you could totally one-up Amazon's drone delivery scheme.

At current electricity prices, the launch would cost a minimum of 50 cents (US) per bottle. Of course, getting electricity on Europa is probably a bit more expensive than getting it on Earth,[7]Or would need an awfully long cord. and setting up the purification plant and bottling operation on Europa wouldn't be cheap, to put it mildly.

All in all, you're going to have to charge an awful lot per bottle to break even on this whole operation. And if it turns out Europa's water has some weird alien pathogen in it, you might accidentally kill all your customers.[8]And, possibly, everyone else.

This may sound like your plan is pretty impractical and unrealistic, especially since there's no point to it all. Water is water. Once you've purified the water on Europa to make it drinkable, it won't be much different from water here on Earth. On the other hand, we ship water around the world from Fiji for no reason, so who knows. Maybe, with the right marketing, this idea could work.

Classical nude statues at Italy's Capitoline Museum were covered up this week in anticipation of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's visit. Some politicians and art critics called out the stupidity. From The Telegraph:

The president’s aides were also reportedly anxious that he not be photographed too close to a giant bronze statue of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius on horseback.

The Iranians objected to what one Italian newspaper delicately described as “the attributes” or genitalia of the huge horse, which dates from the second century AD.

thatfriendlyblackguy:

caliphorniaqueen:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And the fact you can do it in 140 characters is even worse.

archiemcphee:

Today the Department of Miniature Marvels is delighting in an awesome new project by Google Maps (previously featured here). They traveled to Miniatur Wunderland, the world’s largest model railway, located in Hamburg, Germany, and mapped it so that it can be explored on their Street View site.

“…to capture the nooks and crannies in Miniatur Wunderland, we worked with our partner at Ubilabs to build an entirely new—and much smaller—device. Tiny cameras were mounted on tiny vehicles that were able to drive the roads and over the train tracks, weaving through the Wunderland’s little worlds to capture their hidden treasures.

Populated by over 200,000 itty-bitty citizens, Miniatur Wunderland features 13,000 meters (42,650 feet) of track that travel through miniature replicas of German provinces, famous locations in the USA, and a fully functional airport.

Click here to learn more about this geektastic project and take your own virtual tour of Miniatur Wunderland, which now also contains a miniature Google Street View car that was created to commemorate collaboration.

[via Laughing Squid]

Holy shit this is amazing.

dduane:

vortexsophia:

Seriously, has no one proposed this man to the Vatican for sainthood? Surely there must be a miracle or three lying around out there that’s associated with him…

Remember “the standard you walk by is the standard you accept” guy, former chief of army in Australia, David Morrison? He has been honored with the Australian of the Year award. That’s good news. Also, there’s some background on that speech.

That speech was developed with his aide, then speech writer and fellow Australian of the Year finalist Catherine McGregor.

It included a lot of personal experience from Ms McGregor — the former highest ranking transgender military officer in the world.

Mr Morrison was among the first people Ms McGregor revealed her gender struggles to.
“I was really taken aback as I had no inkling that this was the overriding issue in (Ms McGregor’s) life,” he said in a magazine interview about the moment Catherine revealed her secret to him.

“I thought about it, but only briefly, before I concluded that this was the time to step forward and provide support. She is my mate. I don’t care what the person I used to know as Mal looks like now. I do care, and deeply, about her wellbeing.”

He refused her offer to resign and supported her both professionally and as a mate throughout her transition. Now an advocate for gender equality and transgender issues, Ms McGregor considers Mr Morrison one of her greatest supporters.

So he doesn’t just give a good talk, he walks the walk. What a guy, and it’s great that Australia recognizes his value.

fuckyeahcyber-punk:

Sunset_Tower by Gryphart

Yeah, yeah, she’s kissing the Sphinx, but are we just going to ignore the little man hanging off her boob?

Those hardcore rock music fans will have already recognised this famous band recreated in LEGO by grubaluk. They’ve been rocking since 1975 and have played with some of the biggest names in music: Julie Andrews, Elton John, Liza Minelli, Paul Simon. Of course, we are talking about Dr Teeth and The Electric Mayhem, the house band from The Muppet Show.

Grubaluk has built the original five members of the band: Dr. Teeth on vocals and keyboards, Animal on drums, Floyd Pepper on bass guitar, Janice on guitar, and Zoot on saxophone. There are lots of nice touches used to bring these characters to life, and the wild colours of the muppet characters certainly help with part selection in this case. My favourite is definitely Zoot – that nose looks perfect in LEGO. Plus everybody knows that the guy playing sax is always a hottie!

You can see close up views of the band members and other Muppets including Swedish Chef and Waldorf & Statler in the builder’s Flickr album.

I’ve never been a fan of Top Gear, hearing only at second hand how awful Jeremy Clarkson was, but I am now appalled at both his opinions and the fact that Sunday Times gives him space to spew. I’ve quoted excerpts below the fold — you might want to skip them if a ranting ignorant transphobe would ruin your breakfast.

Jeremy Clarkson has attacked the trans community in his latest column for The Sunday Times – claiming the issues facing transgender people have been over exaggerated.

He begins the diatribe by claiming left-wing activists have decided that we must now all turn our attention to the plight of people who want to change their name from Stan to Loretta.

As far as I was concerned, men who want to be women were only really to be found on the internet or in the seedier bits of Bangkok, he continues.

They were called lady boys, and in my mind they were nothing more than the punchline in a stag night anecdote.

Clarkson – who was sacked by the BBC last year – goes on to claim that he has joked about the issue with an NHS doctor, before slamming the parents of a trans child for indulging their whims.
I wanted to seek them out and explain that they were free to live a lunatic life, they must not – and I was going to emphasise this with spittle -, be allowed to poison the mind of a child.

It’s what kids do: dream impossible dreams, he argues.

You don’t actually take them seriously. You don’t take them to a hospital when they’re 10 and say, He wants to be a girl, so can you lop his todger off?

Because what’s going to happen five years later when he’s decided that being a man isn’t so bad after all and he’s in the showers at the rugby club?

This is just so far out there that I’m surprised that no editor stopped him and said that we do have some standards here.

Apparently, to his mind, someone who puts on a dress once or sneaks into the girls’ bathroom is now all it takes to be a transgender woman, and that transgender women are all prostitutes.

The BBC saw fit to sack him after 13 years on television. How long will it take the Sunday Times to come to their senses?

Piracy comes in all shapes and sizes and even large multinationals can sometimes cross the line.

According to Font Brothers, American toy multinational Hasbro did so when it started to use the “Generation B” font for its My Little Pony products, without permission.

The Generation B font was created by Harold Lohner and is commercially exploited by Font Brothers.

One of the best known uses of the font is for the popular My Little Pony toys and videos. However, according to a complaint filed at a New York federal court Hasbro failed to obtain a proper license, so My Little Pony is using a pirated font.

“Defendant Hasbro has used or instructed others to use unauthorized copies of the Generation B Font in the creation of, but not limited to, all products, goods, merchandise, television and film properties, and advertising materials connected with the ‘My Little Pony’ product line..,” the complaint reads.

“Defendant Hasbro has created unauthorized and infringing copies of the Generation B Font Software and impermissibly distributed the same to third parties,” it adds (pdf).

Font Brothers claim that the font is being used across a wide variety of products and the company list various examples.

While small differences can sometimes be tricky to prove that an unauthorized font is used, in this case it is also used on Hasbro’s website. The stylesheet of the website specifically mentions the Generation B and a copy of the font stored and distributed through Hasbro’s servers.

My Little Pony website using the Generation B font

In the complaint Font Brothers write that they contacted Hasbro about the infringing use, but the toy maker refused to license the font for My Little Pony products and merchandise.

“Defendant has refused to comply with Plaintiff’s reasonable request for appropriate software licensing fees given the services already rendered by Plaintiff’s GENERATION B type font software, despite several demands for such action.”

As a result, Minnesota-based Font Brothers are claiming substantial damages and requesting a jury trial to resolve the matter.

“Font Brothers has lost, and will continue to lose, substantial revenue from Defendant’s wrongful use, copying, distribution, and creation of unauthorized infringing works based upon the GENERATION B font software.”

Considering the scope of the alleged infringements, which affect pretty much the entire My Little Pony line, the potential damages run into the millions. In addition, Font Brothers demand the destruction of all products and material which utilize the infringing font.

Update: Hasbro quietly removed the font from their website, but Archive.org still has a copy.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Seems the little guy tried to cross the road...

Via the Comisión de Tránsito del Ecuador Facebook page.

What is the difference between USA and USB?

One connects to all of your devices and accesses the data, the other is a hardware standard.

(via r/funny)

Protonmail is a Swiss pro-privacy email provider that offers end-to-end encyption to its customers. When the Swiss government proposed the Nachrichtendienstgesetzt -- a bill to create a "mini NSA" with the power to effect warrantless mass surveillance, including hacking residents' computers -- the company called on its users and supporters to petition the government for a referendum on the law. (more…)

The convenience of carrying your favorite hot-sauce in individual sachets -- think "McDonald's ketchup pouches" -- can't be overstated. It's a particularly great format if you're a frequent traveller, as TSA screeners don't recognize the shape as a "liquid" on their X-rays, meaning you can just stash them in your bags and pockets and not worry about getting them all out when you reach a checkpoint. (more…)

Though UK Labour leader Corbyn is substantially to the left of Sanders, they're both far to the left of their parties' establishments, which are dominated by warmongering, banker-loving, anti-immigrant neolberals who have collaborated in moving the political "center" to the right of, say, Richard Nixon. (more…)

The term "Planet X" has a variety of meanings and uses.  After the discovery of Neptune, Percival Lowell "proposed the Planet X hypothesis to explain apparent discrepancies in the orbits of the giant planets, particularly Uranus and Neptune, speculating that the gravity of a large unseen ninth planet could have perturbed Uranus enough to account for the irregularities."

Today, the astronomical community widely agrees that Planet X, as originally envisioned, does not exist, but the concept of Planet X has been revived by a number of astronomers to explain other anomalies observed in the outer Solar System. In popular culture, and even among some astronomers, Planet X became a stand-in term for any undiscovered planet in the outer Solar System, regardless of its relationship to Lowell's hypothesis.  

This week, good evidence was reported for the existence of such a previously-undiscovered planet.  I've seen it referred to as Planet X or as Planet IX.

The embedded video gives a broad overview.  This article in Science provides more details.  Even more amazing than the existence of the planet is its extraordinary orbit:


In the schematic, the entire known solar system is represented by the small blue circle in the center (magnified in an offset in the upper part of the image).

The orbit of the inferred planet is similarly tilted, as well as stretched to distances that will explode previous conceptions of the solar system. Its closest approach to the sun is seven times farther than Neptune, or 200 astronomical units (AUs). (An AU is the distance between Earth and the sun, about 150 million kilometers.) And Planet X could roam as far as 600 to 1200 AU, well beyond the Kuiper belt, the region of small icy worlds that begins at Neptune’s edge about 30 AU.

Mind-boggingly awesome.

A friend from high school texted me a couple weeks ago to say that he’d made the Spinach and Cheese Strata for Christmas morning brunch and it was a big hit. Ever the smartass, I asked him where he’d found a whole room of people willing to eat bread and he said that this was Pittsburgh, where every salad has french fries on it and I said it sounded like a heavenly place and then he pointed me to this to prove his point.

... Read the rest of leek, ham and cheese egg bake on smittenkitchen.com

---

© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. | permalink to leek, ham and cheese egg bake | 91 comments to date | see more: Breakfast, Eggs, Gluten-Free, Photo

Space Jetta

What if I tried to re-enter the atmosphere in my car? (a 2000 VW Jetta TDI). Would it do more environmental damage than it is already apparently doing?

—Casey Berg

Believe it or not, throwing cars at a planet might be better for the planet than driving them on the surface. But it's hard to say for sure.

Volkswagen, as you've apparently heard, has been cheating on pollution tests since 2009. Your car was made before they started cheating, but that doesn't actually mean it pollutes less. Since the 1970s, the US has been tightening the rules around some of the exhaust gasses that create smog, like nitric oxide. By the mid-2000s, when the latest round of standards kicked in, Volkswagen apparently decided it was too expensive to keep up without sacrificing performance. Instead, they modified their cars to cheat on the tests, then lied to customers about how clean their cars were.

If you somehow put your car in orbit, then let it re-enter the atmosphere and burn up like a satellite, that would put an end to the tailpipe pollution.

On the other hand, burned fragments of your car (and body) would be scattered throughout the stratosphere. So what impact does space debris have on our air?

The surprising answer is that no one really knows. Roughly one major piece of space debris, like a satellite or booster rocket, re-enters the atmosphere each day. We talk about them "burning up," but they don't really disappear. Big chunks of them make it to the ground (usually falling in the ocean or landing in the desert somewhere.) Other dust and fragments are scattered throughout the stratosphere, and no one really knows what effect they have on anything.

Your car's shockwave would also create nitric oxide, which would—briefly—eat a small hole in the ozone layer. That hole would "close up" quickly, and the overall impact on the ozone layer would be small compared to other sources of ozone depletion.

While your car would briefly harm the ozone layer, it would help with global warming. I don't know how long you expect to have your car, but if you drive it another hundred thousand miles, it will emit about 20 or 30 tons of carbon dioxide. By destroying your car, it's true that you'll be literally putting carbon into the atmosphere, but not nearly as much as you would by continuing to drive it.

In the end, the real problem isn't the re-entry—it's the launch. Rocket launches have a much larger impact to the environment than re-entry, although it's still small in the grand scheme of things since we don't launch very many rockets.

Which raises a final question: What are you and your car doing in orbit in the first place? Are you the only one? Or have all cars been teleported into orbit? If so, we could be in trouble.

It's unlikely that any one piece of satellite debris will hit someone. But there are several hundred million passenger cars in the United States alone. If all of them were suddenly shot into orbit and allowed to reenter, it's likely that somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand people would be injured or killed by falling engine blocks, transmissions, and half-melted axles.

On the other hand, about thirty thousand Americans are killed each year in motor vehicle accidents. So while launching all our cars into space—and letting them fall back down and hit us—might sound like a bad idea ...

... it's arguably a lot safer than continuing to drive them.

Remember Benjamin Golden, the former Taco Bell executive who beat up his Uber driver? Golden is now suing the driver for $5 million for recording the violent attack. From the Orange County Register:

As a result of the overwhelming media coverage, Golden says he suffered severe emotional distress, humiliation, anxiety and the loss of his job.

The lawsuit claims invasion of privacy, negligent infliction of emotional distress, intentional infliction of emotional distress, assault and battery. He is seeking damages in excess of $5 million.

Disney won its war on overflights by planes towing advertising banners in 2003, winning the only no-fly zone over a theme-park in the USA. (more…)

LEGO Certified Professional Ryan McNaught has been busy unveiling some fantastic new creations at Brickvention Australia. We showcased his incredible LEGO minifig-scale 120,000-brick sinking Titanic, and now we take to the skies with LEGO Concorde.

Ryan has chosen to build the iconic supersonic aircraft Concorde in miniland-scale. Building  Concorde in LEGO is cool, but it’s only when you see the other side of the build that the really impressive details emerge.

While one side shows the complete aircraft, the other is an ingenious cutaway view that shows a slice through Concorde.

At just over 4m long (over 13 feet) and some 65,000 bricks, Concorde took Ryan and his team 188 build hours to complete.  The cutaway view includes all sorts of great touches; the cockpit with knobs and switches, a galley area with croissant ready to serve, a jumble of luggage in the cargo hold and the inner workings of the landing gear.

Check out the massive engines on this supersonic beast.

I couldn’t spot any snakes on this plane…

Nikolai Mordan has built this awesome diorama of an Imperial base on Tatooine. It makes a fantastic backdrop for displaying LEGO’s UCS Imperial Shuttle, which looms ominously over the squads of stormtroopers and Imperial officers bringing the Imperial arm of order to the backwater oasis of Mos Eisley. I hope they find those droids they’re looking for.

Nikolai built this as part of a collaboration displayed at Wintercon, a Latvian geek convention.