Merijn

Steven Hawking came up with a simple and clever way of seeing if time travel is possible. On June 28, 2009, he threw a party for time travellers from the future…but didn’t advertise it until after the party was already over.

In an effort to improve the chances of the party invite being noticed by future generations, Peter Dean, working with approval from Hawking, has made this gorgeous hand-printed poster of the party invitation:

There’s also a smaller less-expensive version of the poster in grey and a fetching yellow/orange.

raspberry pi hired a cop who used raspberry pis to build surveillance tech, and is now being flippant towards and blocking anyone who is less than jazzed about that decision

cool cool cool

Whenever someone stands near me at a concert and constantly records on their phone, I sing loudly, badly, and as close to the phone as I can. I like to think I'm trying to help them live in the moment, but in reality I just find it funny

The moment that first seemed highly unlikely, then just a little unlikely, then all of a sudden pretty plausible has finally happened. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is seeking to block Microsoft from its $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard (and its Call of Duty IP), under the reasoning that it “would enable Microsoft to suppress competitors to its Xbox gaming consoles and its rapidly growing subscription content and cloud-gaming business.”

To support this notion, the FTC cited the Microsoft acquisition of Bethesda / ZeniMax, and it noted, “Microsoft decided to make several of Bethesda’s titles including Starfield and Redfall Microsoft exclusives despite assurances it had given to European antitrust authorities that it had no incentive to withhold games from rival consoles.” FTC Bureau of Competition Director Holly Vedova found that this demonstrates a pattern of withholding content from “gaming rivals,” so they want to block the Microsoft acquisition of Activision Blizzard to prevent such activity from continuing.

Some of the FTC’s characterizations of events are a bit questionable. Notably, it describes Activision as “one of only a very small number of top video game developers in the world that create and publish high-quality video games for multiple devices,” in order to highlight the damaging effect it would have for consumers if its games were Xbox console exclusives. Literally almost every part of that statement is up for debate.

As an olive branch just this week, Xbox head Phil Spencer announced that Microsoft had come to an agreement to put Call of Duty on Nintendo consoles for the next 10 years if the Activision Blizzard merger is completed. So it’s clear that Microsoft is willing to play ball with the FTC in order to get the Activision Blizzard acquisition completed (no matter how furious Sony and PlayStation are). However, I’m no lawyer and can’t claim to say how things will play out. Fortunately, The Escapist does have a lawyer writer or two kicking around, so stay tuned for additional developments and insights.

After FTX declared bankruptcy, the entire FTX.us domain was redirected to a page providing information on the bankruptcy proceedings.

However, NFTs that had been minted on the FTX platform relied on metadata from an API at that domain, meaning that the NFTs are now pointing to broken links. Owners of these NFTs can still see that the NFT exists, but images no longer work—even when viewing the NFTs in their own wallets, or when listing them for sale on other platforms.

Other projects that rely on the FTX NFT platform's API, such as the Coachella NFT project, also broke: the Coachella NFT platform shows 0 NFTs in existence. Those NFTs still show up where they are listed on external NFT platforms, although the images and metadata are broken.

• Tweet by jac0xb.sol
• Coachella NFT marketplace
• Broken Coachella NFT on the Magic Eden marketplace

While I was a bit distracted my girlfriend what kink I had but never done, I blurted out the first thing that came into my head - watersports. The very next weekend she pissed all over me. It was the most unerotic thing I have ever experienced.

At my mates wedding someone said his sister was pregnant. Being a bit pissed I rubbed her belly and congratulated her. I forgot he had another sister. After deciding not to kill myself I approached his other sister and repeated the above. I also forgot he had a third sister.

I used to regularly buy a bag of mozzarella with the intention of using it on my frozen pizzas over a few weeks. Every time I ate the entire lot in one day. The stuff is like crack. I've had to stop buying it as I have absolutely no self-control.

My wife was out for the evening, so tried on one of her dresses and make up as you do. Problem is i got through a bottle of whisky, crashed out on the sofa. My wife packed her bags & left me the very next day. Gutted she took the dress though.

Married and been together for many years. We have a healthy sex life, however, since following fesshole I'm scared to leave the house too often incase my husband wanks himself to death.

The letters "LP" appeared in yellow spray paint up and down our street one afternoon. My pal reckoned they were for new lamp posts and we wondered what would happen if we added a few more. 30 years later the street still has a ridiculous amount of lighting.

I'm 78 years old and have gone on a number of computer courses for retirees exclusively so I can find out how to safely download kinky porn on our home PC without the missus finding out.

An old guy at my golf club had cancer and used to joke that he wants a hole in one before he dies. Par 3 on our course is a blind shot, I waited and ran onto the green, put his ball into the hole and ran off. He's passed now but that night was the happiest of ever seen him.

More like....

I'm a police officer. Saw a woman shoplifting food stuffs today. Watched her steal bread, milks and eggs, chocolate and other stuff. I accidentally forgot to do anything about it. Soz.

Wim works on a web app with a problem. Specifically, the error log is the fastest growing file on the system. Well, perhaps that's not the problem, but actually a symptom. Like so many applications, it's a PHP web app with a MySQL backend, and the previous developer made… choices.

$sqlisgt = "insert into ser_gen_tj values (4, '$type_juridiction', '$enr[23]', 'O')";

There's your SQL injection vulnerability. Just dump variable values directly into SQL statements, what could go wrong?

Well, one problem is that sometimes this application needed to handle names. Names, especially in French, frequently contain '. So this wouldn't work:

$sql = "INSERT INTO personne VALUES ('$matricule','$nom','$prenom','$tel',Null);";

A single quote in $nom would break the query, it'd become syntactically invalid. And that's why the log file was the fastest growing set of data in the system. But the developer responsible "fixed" this, don't you worry.

$sql = "INSERT INTO personne VALUES ('$matricule',\"$nom\",\"$prenom\",'$tel',Null);";

Thank goodness no one has a " in their name, I suppose. Still, Little Bobby Tables is going to have a field day with this application. Or should I say, Petit Robert D'Tables.

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My wife doesn't know but, I drop the answer to Wordle into casual conversation each morning. I like to think this subliminally helps her in the very competitive daily Wordle competition she has with her work colleagues. She's now winning.

twitterisgoinggreat.com is a great continual timeline of the disaster going on with Twitter h/t @corinne_podger

When I was younger, I deliberately swallowed a 5p coin just to see how long it would take to travel through my body. Hearing it ching against the toilet bason was utter fulfilment.

Did Twitter Blue tweet just cost Eli Lilly $LLY billions?

Yes.

twitter is marking links to twitter ↔ mastodon crossposter services as "potentially spammy or unsafe"

Whenever I flush a turd from my 4th floor apartment, I have visions of its shocked expression falling through the vertical pipe to the sewer below. Like Alan Rickman at the end of Die Hard

absolutely block on sight

here's a bright spot: Tennessee has outlawed slavery tonight

Big oak tree in our garden sheds 1000s of acorns, hubby is constantly clearing them, & hates them. I have a supply in a bag and if he is being a dick, I throw them hard, at his head, from the bedroom window, when he is under it clearing them. I hear him cussing when one hits.

I had to use incognito mode at work when doing a presentation, automatically typed in pornhub dot com out of habit in front of 100+ people

Last weekend, I built fedifinder.glitch.me/. It scans the accounts you follow on Twitter for fediverse handles and links. Those are then sorted by instance to make it easier for you to decide which instance to join and follow the accounts you already like. Can even be imported.

A poster on Reddit asks: What are two events that took place in the same time in history but don’t seem like they would have? A few of my favorite answers (from this thread and a previous one):

When pilgrims were landing on Plymouth Rock, you could already visit what is now Santa Fe, New Mexico to stay at a hotel, eat at a restaurant and buy Native American silver.

Prisoners began to arrive to Auschwitz a few days after McDonald’s was founded.

The first wagon train of the Oregon Trail heads out the same year the fax machine is invented.

Nintendo was founded in 1888. Jack the Ripper was on the loose in 1888.

1912 saw the maiden voyage of the Titanic as well as the birth of vitamins, x-ray crystallography, and MDMA.

1971: The year in which America drove a lunar buggy on the moon and Switzerland gave women the vote.

NASA’s Gemini program was winding down at the same time as plate tectonics, as we know it today, was becoming refined and accepted by the scientific community.

Spain was still a fascist dictatorship when Microsoft was founded.

There were no classes in calculus in Harvard’s curriculum for the first few years because calculus hadn’t been discovered yet.

Two empires [Roman & Ottoman] spanned the entire gap from Jesus to Babe Ruth.

When the pyramids were being built, there were still woolly mammoths.

The last use of the guillotine was in France the same year Star Wars came out.

Oxford University was over 300 years old when the Aztec Empire was founded.

Related: true facts that sound made up, timeline twins, and the Great Span.