For the better part of a day, KrebsOnSecurity, arguably the world's most intrepid source of security news, has been silenced, presumably by a handful of individuals who didn't like a recent series of exposés reporter Brian Krebs wrote. The incident, and the record-breaking data assault that brought it on, open a troubling new chapter in the short history of the Internet.
The crippling distributed denial-of-service attacks started shortly after Krebs published stories stemming from the hack of a DDoS-for-hire service known as vDOS. The first article analyzed leaked data that identified some of the previously anonymous people closely tied to vDOS. It documented how they took in more than $600,000 in two years by knocking other sites offline. A few days later, Krebs ran a follow-up piece detailing the arrests of two men who allegedly ran the service. A third post in the series is here.
On Thursday morning, exactly two weeks after Krebs published his first post, he reported that a sustained attack was bombarding his site with as much as 620 gigabits per second of junk data. That staggering amount of data is among the biggest ever recorded. Krebs was able to stay online thanks to the generosity of Akamai, a network provider that supplied DDoS mitigation services to him for free. The attack showed no signs of waning as the day wore on. Some indications suggest it may have grown stronger. At 4 pm, Akamai gave Krebs two hours' notice that it would no longer assume the considerable cost of defending KrebsOnSecurity. Krebs opted to shut down the site to prevent collateral damage hitting his service provider and its customers.
An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes TechCrunch:
When Google announced Angular 2 in 2014, it created quite a stir in the web development community because this new version wasn't just an update, but instead a complete rewrite that wasn't compatible with the older version... "Angular 1 first solved the problem of how to develop for an emerging web," the company writes... "Six years later, the challenges faced by today's application developers, and the sophistication of the devices that applications must support, have both changed immensely."
Announcing the final release version of Angular 2 last week, Google thanked the open source community, saying "We are grateful to the large number of contributors who dedicated time to submitting pull requests, issues, and repro cases, who discussed and debated design decisions, and validated (and pushed back on) our RCs." TechCrunch writes that Google's Angular team "now also recommends that developers use TypeScript to write their apps...a Microsoft-developed superset of JavaScript that adds features like static typing and class-based object-oriented programming."
An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes InfoWorld:
"Move fast and break things," the saying goes. Apple does both with the 3.0 version of its Swift programming language...its first full point revision since it became an open source project... In a blog post detailing the full body of changes for Swift 3.0, Apple singled out the two biggest breaking changes. The first is better translation of Objective-C APIs into Swift, meaning that code imported from Objective-C and translated into Swift will be more readable and Swift-like. The bad news is any code previously imported from Objective-C into Swift will not work in Swift 3; it will need to be re-imported.
The other major change... Most every item referenced in the standard library has been renamed to be less wordy. But again, this brings bad news for anyone with an existing Swift codebase: Apple says "the proposed changes are massively source-breaking for Swift code, and will require a migrator to translate Swift 2 code into Swift 3 code."
Apple will provide migration tools in version 8.0 of their XCode IDE, "but such tools go only so far," notes the article, questioning what will happen to the Linux and Windows ports of Swift.
I’m a serial fidgeter. Put me in a meeting and I’ll bob my knees like a maniac, I’ll tear apart coffee cup holders into little shreds, and I’ll pick off the nail polish off my fingers. Now there’s a less destructive solution to all this fidgeting, and it’s all contained in one elegant little cube. Each of the six sides holds a fun little doodad to fidget with: clicker buttons; a joystick; a lightswitch flip; a flat, worry stone-like surface; gears and a rolling ball; and a spinning dial.
With the charmingly named Antsy Labs, brothers Mark and Matthew McLachlan created a Kickstarter for their Fidget Cube, which they are calling a "vinyl desk toy." In a little over a week of the campaign, the project blew past its $15,000 goal, and is now...
Reader Joe_Dragon shares a Gizmodo report: ITT Technical Institute is officially closing all of its campuses following federal sanctions imposed against the company. The for-profit college announced the changes in a statement: "It is with profound regret that we must report that ITT Educational Services, Inc. will discontinue academic operations at all of its ITT Technical Institutes permanently after approximately 50 years of continuous service. With what we believe is a complete disregard by the U.S. Department of Education for due process to the company, hundreds of thousands of current students and alumni and more than 8,000 employees will be negatively affected." ITT Tech announced it was closing all of its campuses just one week after it stopped enrolling students following a federal crackdown on for-profit colleges. ITT Tech and other higher education companies like it have been widely criticized for accepting billions of dollars in government grants and loans while failing to provide adequate job training for its students. Last year, ITT Tech received an estimated $580 million in federal money (aka taxpayer dollars), according to the Department of Education.
Eight-year-old Ruby Kavanagh is a world-class junior golfer, and according to her newly updated Instagram profile, a self-proclaimed drone-killer. The young golfer was practicing her drive swing when she hit the ball directly at a $1,299 Yuneec Typhoon H hexacopter drone.
At first watch, the video seems almost too well-executed to be real, raising some questions I want answered. How do we know this wasn't a staged moment caught on camera after 12 tries? Why did the drone hover about looking stunned for a second, before falling to the side? Nobody thought, "Hey, maybe we shouldn’t put a drone directly in front of a child with a thunderous golf stroke?" She did seem really sorry though, you guys, and I do have a soft spot for apologetic...
This DIY floating shelf pops open to reveal a secret compartment where you can hide away anything you like for easy access. Here’s how to build one of your own.
This week at IFA in Berlin LG introduced a new flagship UltraWide display. The new monitor is called the LG 38UC99 and it's LG's largest UltraWide display to date, with a diagonal size of 37.5 inches. With a horizontal resolution of 3840 pixels, and support for 99% of the sRGB color gamut, LG appears to be positioning the monitor as one well suited for displaying UltraHD content filmed in an aspect ratio of 2.35:1 or 2.40:1. Gamers aren't left out either, with support for AMD FreeSync being included as well.
The basic specifications for the panel are listed below. There aren't any big surprises as far as the panel goes, with a resolution of 3840 x 1600, a 5ms GtG response time, a peak brightness of 300 nits, and a contrast ratio of 1000:1. When you look at the monitor as a whole there are a few interesting points. The monitor has a built in USB 3.0 hub, which is generally expected of high end monitors, but in this case there are two USB Type-A connectors as well as a USB Type-C connector. LG has noted that the Type-C port can charge mobile devices, but there's no word yet on whether they support high wattage charge modes as part of the USB Power Deliver spec.
The monitor also has two 10W speakers, and it can be paired with smartphones or other devices via Bluetooth to play audio wirelessly. I would expect that most users interested in buying the LG 38UC99 for watching movies will also have a good set of speakers to go with it, but the feature is there for users who may not have enough desk space to fit such a large monitor and a sizeable pair of speakers.
LG UltraWide 38UC99
Panel
37.5" IPS
Resolution
3840 × 1600
Refresh Rate
60 Hz
Response Time
5 ms gray-to-gray
Brightness
300 cd/m²
Contrast
1000:1
Viewing Angles
178°/178° horizontal/vertical
Color Saturation
99% sRGB
Pixel Pitch
0.23 mm
Pixel Density
110 ppi
Anti-Glare Coating
Yes
USB Hub
3-port USB 3.0 hub: two USB-A, one USB-C receptacles
USB-C port supports charging
Audio
10 W × 2
Launch Price
$1499 (?)
LG can really be credited with bringing 21:9 displays to market in any significant capacity. A few years ago it was just a niche form factor, and prior to that it didn't really exist at all. Since then it has been adopted by many different users, including fans of movies, gamers, and users looking to improve on productivity without having to set up two separate displays. In the case of the 38UC99 the display is curved, which may limit its appeal among some groups, particularly those who need proper accuracy for geometry displayed on the monitor like users doing computer assisted design work.
Right now the LG 38UC99 doesn't have an official price, but several reports have stated that it will cost $1499 at launch. That places it strictly in high-end territory, but that's not really a surprise for a monitor of this size with these specifications.
In a final ruling announced Friday, the Food and Drug Administration is pulling from the market a wide range of antimicrobial soaps after manufacturers failed to show that the soaps are both safe and more effective than plain soap. The federal flushing applies to any hand soap or antiseptic wash product that has one or more of 19 specific chemicals in them, including the common triclosan (found in antibacterial hand soap) and triclocarbon (found in bar soaps). Manufacturers will have one year to either reformulate their products or pull them from the market entirely.
As Ars has reported previously, scientists have found that triclosan and other antimicrobial soaps have little benefit to consumers and may actually pose risks. These include bolstering antibiotic resistant microbes, giving opportunistic pathogens a leg up, and disrupting microbiomes. In its final ruling, issued Friday, the FDA seemed to agree. “Consumers may think antibacterial washes are more effective at preventing the spread of germs, but we have no scientific evidence that they are any better than plain soap and water,” Janet Woodcock, director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER), said in a statement. “In fact, some data suggests that antibacterial ingredients may do more harm than good over the long-term.”
Back in 2013, the FDA first proposed the ban and called on soap manufacturers to submit data that would show that their products were both harmless and could out compete plain soap in de-germing humans. The agency reports that manufacturers either didn’t bother submitting data or offered up data that wasn’t convincing. In the meantime, many manufacturers have already started phasing out triclosan and other antimicrobial compounds from their products.
Los Angeles-based photographer Laura Izumikawa Choi is winning hearts across the Web with her portraits of her 4-month-old daughter Joey Marie Choi. While Joey naps, Laura carries out cosplay photo shoots using creative costumes and props.
The photo series has earned Laura’s Instagram account over 277,000 followers so far. Here’s a selection of the gems:
Apple Employee
Pokemon
Ghostbusters
Little Mermaid
Sound of Music
Run DMC
Star Wars
Paul Bunyan
Karate Kid
BFG
In-N-Out Employee
Skrillex
Beyonce
Cinderella
Wayne’s World
Guns N’ Roses
Dragon Ball Z
You can follow along with this project through the Instagram account @lauraiz. You can also find more of Choi’s work through her photography website.
I love Marvel and the Marvel cinematic universe. Getting to see all of the comic book characters I grew up with come to the big screen in such a way is a dream I never thought I'd see realized when I was a kid. My wife enjoys the films as well, and we've dressed up together for Halloween, and she's wonderfully tolerant of my Hot Toys collection. Along with Star Wars, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, it's something I look forward to sharing with our two boys when they're old enough.
However, despite what the prevailing archetypes would suggest, loving Marvel does not automatically predispose me to "hating" DC. In the same way that I own both a PS4 and an XBox One, because I love games I see no reason to pick a side. As far as I'm concerned, there's plenty of room for superhero movies from Marvel and DC to exist side by side; in no situation do I see one unable to get made/watched because of the other. They do not preclude eachother, so in my opinion as a comic book fan, the more movies the better. I'm only gaining entertainment if both Marvel and DC are doing well.
I'm explaining this so that I hope you understand that at no point was I rooting for the DC cinematic universe to fail. I never went into one of those movies hoping it would be bad. And honestly, I don't think I would call any of them bad. However, I wouldn't call any of them good, either. And certainly not great.
When Man of Steel came out, I enjoyed it for the most part. Some of it seemed a little thin, and little jumbled, and a little rushed. But really, I did not have as big of a problem with the ending as some people did. In fact, it wasn't until afterwards, reading all of the complaints, that I really gave it much thought. So yeah, Superman being involved in so much destruction and death was a little contrary to what we expect from the character, but I think as I watched it was thinking to myself "Well, this is a brand new Superman. He's just started doing this hero thing publicly, and he's fighting a Kryptonian who doesn't give a shit. He's happy to destroy the planet. Maybe Superman doesn't have as much of a choice about where/how this fight goes down. In the heat of battle, does he really even have time to think about it?"
When Batman vs Superman was revealed, it was clear they were going to directly address the ending of Man of Steel, and I was very optimistic. If BvS was able to frame the ending of MoS as the very event that defines Superman's values going forward, if it was what made him look back and say "No, never again. I have to be better than that, more careful than that." then it would be justified. They would show us the Superman we expected being created, and formed by his experiences, as opposed to being infallible from the get-go.
I was disappointed when BvS came out and started getting torn apart in reviews. By the time my wife and I went to go see it, I was not excited. I was determined to see it and form my own opinion, but my expectations had been lowered. Maybe the lowered expectations helped me enjoy the film, for what it was, but I did not walk out of the theater thinking "I need to see that again!" It was a heavy movie, with lots of problems. I won't rehash them, because most of us have seen the movie/read the reviews, and I agree with a lot of what they said. So again, not a terrible movie (and the extended edition did improve it a little), but I wouldn't call it a good film.
Which brings us to Suicide Squad, which according to reports is a mess because of Warner Bros.' kneejerk reaction to the BvS response. If insiders are to be believed, they rushed in to reshoot/meddle with Ayers' original vision, and so the movie we got has an identity crisis; two different movies that have been spliced together and at no point becomes anything other than mediocre and inconsistent. It is neither dark and edgy enough to be dangerous/fresh, nor as fun and wild as the trailers led us to believe.
The big problem here is that we're three movies in to DC's cinematic universe now, and the main takeaway everyone has after each one is "Well, the next one is going to be the one that rights the ship." So after BvS came out, Suicide Squad was hailed as the movie that was going to finally give the DCCU some momentum, and now it's "Well, Wonder Woman looks like it will be good, so that will be the one."
But that's getting pretty old pretty quick. Warner Bros. can't just keep promising "we'll fix everything in the next film" because each one of these very public stumbles is damaging the DC cinematic brand and excitement in these movies as a whole.
And while they still make money at the box office, they're not making as much as they would if the word of mouth was positive, and I expect each middling release will affect the next film to some degree. If the DCCU starts becoming both a critical and a financial disappointment, it's going to disappear. I feel this is evidenced by Warner Bros.' announcement this week, amidst all the bad press surrounding Suicide Squad, that there will be a sequel to the Harry Potter Universe film 'Fantastic Beasts'. Almost, if not an attempted distraction, as if to say "Hey, at least we still have Harry Potter! You guys like Harry Potter, right?!"
Update your iPhones (those who have them, at least).
Enlarge / iPhone Spyware known as Pegasus intercepts confidential data. (credit: Lookout)
Apple has patched three high-severity iOS vulnerabilities that are being actively exploited to infect iPhones so attackers can steal confidential messages from a large number of apps, including Gmail, Facebook, and WhatsApp, security researchers said Thursday.
The spyware has been dubbed Pegasus by researchers from mobile security provider Lookout; they believe it has been circulating in the wild for a significant amount of time. Working with researchers from University of Toronto-based Citizen Lab, they have determined that the spyware targeted a political dissident located in the United Arab Emirates and was launched by an US-owned company specializing in computer-based exploits. Based on the price of the attack kit—about $8 million for 300 licenses—the researchers believe it's being actively used against other iPhone users throughout the world.
"Pegasus is the most sophisticated attack we’ve seen on any endpoint because it takes advantage of how integrated mobile devices are in our lives and the combination of features only available on mobile—always connected (WiFi, 3G/4G), voice communications, camera, email, messaging, GPS, passwords, and contact lists," Lookout and Citizen Lab researchers wrote in a blog post. "It is modular to allow for customization and uses strong encryption to evade detection."
lol, maybe I should share this with my cousins... rofl
New research led by scientists at the Australian National University's Research School of Earth suggests that humans first started to significantly change the climate in the 1830s, near the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The findings have been published in the journal Nature, and "were based on natural records of climate variation in the world's oceans and continents, including those found in corals, ice cores, tree rings and the changing chemistry of stalagmites in caves." Sydney Morning Herald reports: "Nerilie Abram, another of the lead authors and an associate professor at the Australian National University's Research School of Earth Sciences, said greenhouse gas levels rose from about 280 parts per million in the 1830s to about 295 ppm by the end of that century. They now exceed 400 ppm. Understanding how humans were already altering the composition of the atmosphere through the 19th century means the warming is closer to the 1.5 to 2 degrees target agreed at last year's Paris climate summit than most people realize." "It was one of those moments where science really surprised us," says Abram. "But the results were clear. The climate warming we are witnessing today started about 180 years ago."
An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: I'm surprised this hasn't surfaced on Slashdot already, but yesterday Phoronix reported that systemd will soon be handling file system mounts, along with all the other stuff that systemd has encompassed. The report generated the usual systemd arguments over on Reddit.com/r/linux with Lennart Poettering, systemd developer and architect, chiming in with a few clarifications.
Lennart argued it will greatly improve the handling of removable media like USB sticks.
On Friday, August 12, it was announced that Brendan Dassey — a convicted killer in the 2005 murder of Teresa Halbach and one of the subjects of the Netflix documentary series Making a Murderer— could be a free man, or get a new trial.
The reason for theruling was that Duffin decided that Len Kachinsky, Dassey’s lawyer, committed "indefensible" "misconduct" while representing Dassey, WISN-TV (an ABC affiliate) reported.
In his ruling, Duffin also explained that Dassey’s confession should be considered involuntary because of the way the police conducted themselves. Duffin wrote:
These repeated false promises, when considered in conjunction with all relevant factors, most especially Dassey’s age, intellectual deficits, and the absence of a supportive adult, rendered Dassey’s confession involuntary under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. The Wisconsin Court of Appeals’ decision to the contrary was an unreasonable application of clearly established federal law.
As detailed in Making a Murder, which launched on Netflix in December and quickly became wildly popular, both Dassey and his uncle, Steven Avery, were accused of, put on trial for, and convicted of Halbach’s murder. Once the documentary launched, both men became the subject of frequent news headlines and calls for retrials after the show highlighted how the investigation and trial were handled (or rather, mishandled, in the show’s point of view).
Kachinsky was appointed to represent Dassey after Dassey confessed to police on March 1, 2005, that he’d helped Avery kill Halbach. But the footage of the confession later suggested that investigators had essentially pushed Dassey, who by his own admission is not very smart, into confessing by using leading questions.
In response to Dassey's conviction being overturned, Making a Murderer directors and executive producers Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos issued the following statement:
"Today there was a major development for the subjects in our story and this recent news shows the criminal justice system at work. As we have done for the past 10 years, we will continue to document the story as it unfolds, and follow it wherever it may lead."
Not gonna lie - I kinda wanna see this movie now. (NSFW-L and Spoilers, probably)
When you purchase a ticket for Seth Rogen’s Sausage Party — a tale of anthropomorphic food and religion — you are implicitly agreeing to be jackhammered by 90 minutes’ worth of dick jokes courtesy of Rogen and his friends (here, he shares screenplay credits with Kyle Hunter, Ariel Shaffir, and Evan Goldberg).
But you’re also placing a bit of a bet.
Is it possible to make dick jokes that go beyond the obvious hot dog and bun gag? Are there any other food objects as raunchy or as perfectly phallic as a hot dog? Will I get to see any food objects fuck a bagel? Will Rogen grant me a racist, sexist, blasphemous orgy involving starches, candy, and various cured meats?
Rating
4
The answer to all of those questions, which are clearly the ones keeping Americans up at night, is yes.
Sausage Party is a movie where the answers to any and all of life’s itchy, hairy problems can be found in or expressed with dick jokes. It makes Amy Schumer look like Ellen DeGeneres, Judd Apatow like Garry Marshall, and Superbad like Modern Family. The film takes every juvenile thought you’ve ever had about food, fucks it to death with a turnip, and makes you watch. It is a burst of equal-opportunity offensiveness.
And it’s one of the best movies I’ve seen this summer.
Sausage Party isn’t content with just being dumb
Sausage Party. (Sony)
Amidst Sausage Party’s whirlpool of lurid sex jokes and on-those-nose gags — like a character who is a lesbian, Latina taco shell — is a story about religion and empathy.
The film’s central character is a hot dog named Frank (Rogen). Frank and his fellow hot dogs, as well as every other item in the grocery store (including his girlfriend, a bun named Brenda voiced by Kristen Wiig), see humans as benevolent gods who will take them to the Great Beyond. It’s said to be a place where they can shed their earthly wrappers and live glorious lives, and this mythology is helped along by a song from Disney great Alan Menken. But it’s threatened when Honey Mustard is returned to the store and attempts to tell the rest of the groceries about his experience.
And Frank believes him. Or believes him enough to try to find the truth about the gods.
Frank’s struggle is to figure out a way to communicate to his fellow foods what he believes in his heart to be right, and what he believes will save them. That maybe the story or stories everyone has been led to believe should be questioned.
On this journey, he’s accompanied by Brenda and other food refugees like Lavash, who’s obsessed with lubing his folds with extra virgin olive oil, and the plain and unremarkable Bagel, who believes Lavash and his friends like Baba Ganoush are illegally setting up camp in his aisle.
It’s not difficult to see our own reflections, our own relationship to faith in Frank’s trial — that we all have our own way we think or don’t think about God, and how difficult and contentious it’s become to talk with someone who doesn’t see eye to eye with you.
Sausage Party, despite what it would have you believe, is an earnest and at times tender human story — a contemplation on faith wrapped in many layers of raunch.
But when it’s dumb it’s oh-so-fantastic — and in some ways, similar to Toy Story
Sausage Party. (Sony)
While it’s fascinating to see the film’s existentialist heart pulse and its thoughtfulness leap, Sausage Party’s true strength and its biggest selling point is its extreme humor. Rogen and his fellow screenwriters have become the Greek muses of vulgarity: Their level of filth is only matched by the expertise and innovation they exhibit in deploying it.
Disney and Pixar’s Toy Story is the comparison that comes to mind with Sausage Party — and not just in both films' slick animation or the idea that toys, like food, have a strange, adoring view of humans. In both stories, there’s extensive world-building at work.
The only difference is that Sausage Party’s world is, down to an atomic level, an exercise in crudeness.
The sausages talk about girth. Buns have boobs. Soy sauces and salsas speak in thick, lampoonish Asian and Latino accents. There are Nazi foods that want to eliminate the juices. Everyone hates the crackers. Tacos are lesbians. And you shouldn’t trust Tequila because Tequila is very date-rapey.
Then there’s what I consider to be Sausage Party’s seminal moment — an enduring, turgid food orgy where several types of foods are in, on top of, or pounding against each other — root vegetables rubbing their growths, carb-on-carb sex, grits fucking the hell out of crackers — while moaning enthusiastically like first-time performers in a cheap porno.
Really, there comes a point where you just have to admire Rogen and his collaborators’ commitment to this gag. Because you know this looney movie’s origin story begins with a fuzzy, druggy night and a dare. It’s nuts that anyone, including Rogen himself, decided to actually revisit its whackadoodle premise in the stern light of day and to dedicate months of their lives to it, relentlessly mining the deep, gray chambers in their brains for one more penis joke, one more gag involving food and genitalia, one more racist thing you can say about lunch.
That’s honorable.
While watching Sausage Party, I saw foods do so many intimate, sexual things to one another that my life will never be the same. But I also think I may have witnessed greatness.
In 2016, it's become acceptable to use an iPad as a camera. No longer the domain of parents on vacation, iPad photography has been coopted by the young, who shamelessly lift their large screens in the air, obstructing the view as they film entire concerts. Notably, The Verge's own Sean O'Kane defended the "iPad as camera" back in 2014.
The woman in this video, above, was reminded harshly by one of our close aquatic friends that tablet photography, no matter how accepted by tech critics and society at large, remains a social offense. "The world is okay with iPad photography," the dolphin seems to say by clutching the tablet with its long mouth, "But I will no longer keep silent!"
Of course, the video raises the obvious questions: why...
To be honest, I didn't even read this article before I shared it - cause I assume that if an article talks about Math and Pizza, it's just got to be good.
No, I’m not here on behalf of the evil Big Pizza lobby. According to simple math, if you’re buying multiple small pizzas instead of getting a bigger one, you’re almost always wasting money. This video breaks it down.
Since former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg delivered a sharply anti-Trump speech at the Democratic convention on Wednesday, political observers have been waiting with bated breath for Trump to respond.
Bloomberg’s speech seemed uniquely tailored to get under Trump’s skin. He said Trump was a hypocrite and a con artist who’s also a terrible businessman, and even seemed to question his sanity.
Plus, Bloomberg is not only a fellow New Yorker but a far richer one than Trump — even according to Trump’s exaggerated reporting of his own fortune — so his criticism has to sting a guy who measures people’s self-worth by the size of their bank accounts.
Shockingly enough, Thursday came and went without the candidate tweeting angry insults at the former mayor. But finally, on Friday morning, Trump could remain silent no longer:
"Little" Michael Bloomberg, who never had the guts to run for president, knows nothing about me. His last term as Mayor was a disaster!
But not only is Trump’s "Little Michael Bloomberg" nickname an unoriginal repeat of his primary season attacks on Marco Rubio, his attacks on Bloomberg’s last term as mayor are completely contradicted by what he said at the time:
Mike Bloomberg is doing a great job as Mayor of New York City. Ray Kelly is a great Police Commissioner. @MikeBloomberg
Keep in mind that this is just hours after Clinton suggested that Trump is so "easy" to bait that he shouldn’t be trusted with nuclear weapons. "He loses his cool at the slightest provocation," Clinton said. But as we’ve seen so often during this campaign, Trump can’t let a perceived insult stand without a crude, name-calling, misleading response.
Photographer Matt Sprouse of Greenwood, South Carolina, shot this clever parody of those popular water hair flip photos that typically feature girls with long hair (rather than guys with long beards).
Sprouse says the photo came about while he was testing a DiCAPac waterproof camera case he got from Amazon for $40 — the expensive underwater housings for his Nikon D750 just didn’t make financial sense to purchase.
“On Monday some friends and I went out on the not-so-clear lake in our hometown and decided to anchor up to watch the sunset,” Sprouse tells PetaPixel. “I brought my camera along in its waterproof bag (mainly for protection against splashing) and decided to see how “waterproof” this bag actually was.”
“Dusty, the majestic gentleman in the picture, and I seemed to have the same idea at the same time,” he continues. “Somehow the stars aligned and his head flung back and created the most spectacular wave of water coming out of his beard and I was ready with the camera. Parody complete.”
Image credits: Photograph by Matt Sprouse and used with permission
An anonymous reader writes from a report via The Next Web: Norway plans to build "submerged floating bridges" to allow drivers to cross its bodies of water. The Next Web reports: "The 'submerged floating bridges' would consist of large tubes suspended by pontoon-like support structures 100 feet below water. Each will be wide enough for two lanes of traffic, and the floating structures should ease the congestion on numerous ferries currently required to get commuters from Point A to Point B. Each support pontoon would then be secured to a truss or bolted to the bedrock below to keep things stable." A trip from Kristiansand to Trondheim is roughly 680 miles and could take as long as 21 hours due to the seven ferry trips required along the way. While building normal bridges would cost significantly less than the $25 billion in funds required for the tunnel project, the fjords and difficult terrain make them unsuitable candidates. The pricey tunnel project could cut the trip time to just 10 hours when it's expected to be finished in 2035.
Apple is turning Carpool Karaoke, the Late Late Show with James Corden segment that regularly goes viral, into its own TV show, which will air on Apple Music. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Apple has ordered 16 episodes, which will be released weekly once the series is ready. It's not known who will host the new show, though the Reporter says it's unlikely to be Corden.
For a Harry Potter-themed newborn shoot she did recently, photographer Kelsey Clouse made portraits of the tiny baby as a screaming mandrake.
In the magical world of Harry Potter, a Mandrake (the Mandragora) is a plant that has a root that looks like a human. The cry of a mature mandrake is fatal to anyone who hears it, but the scream of a baby mandrake will just knock you out for several hours.
Clouse, who runs Lune de la Rogue Photography, captured a perfect moment showing baby Theo screeching and his brother Harry Potter Sebastian wearing earmuffs to stay conscious. Clouse’s photo went viral on Facebook after she shared it back on July 3rd.
Image credits: Photographs by Kelsey Clouse/Lune de la Rogue Photography and used with permission
Nintendo is bringing back the NES — only a little smaller.
Today the company announced what it's calling the Nintendo Entertainment System: NES Classic Edition. It looks just like an NES, only a lot tinier, and it comes with 30 games built-in. You can connect it to your TV via an HDMI cable, and it also includes a controller designed to work just like the iconic rectangular NES gamepad. (The new controller will also connect to a Wii Remote, so that you can use it to play Virtual Console games on a Wii or Wii U.)
In addition to HDMI support and a lack of cartridges, the new mini-console also features one useful modern convenience: multiple suspend points, so that you won't have to fumble around with passwords when you start playing a...
Robots might be cheaper to employ than humans, but it seems they still need to work on their people skills. Last week, a robot security guard at the Stanford Shopping Center in Silicon Valley knocked down a toddler while on duty and then apparently just kept on driving. A report from local news channel ABC7 says the bot hit 16-month-old Harwin Cheng, knocking him to the floor.
Cheng was not seriously hurt by the incident, but we're still going to chalk this up as a violation of Isaac Asimov's first law of robotics: "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm." Here's ABC7's story:
It amuses shoppers of all ages, but last Thursday, 16-month-old Harwin Cheng had a frightening...
(open the article up outside of ToR to see the proper formatting)
I have to agree with Linus on this one - C++ style comments are my fav.
An anonymous reader shares a report on The Register: Linus Torvalds has unleashed a sweary rant on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, labelling some members "brain-damaged" for their preferred method of punctuating comments. "Can we please get rid of the brain-damaged stupid networking comment syntax style, PLEASE?" the Linux Lord asked last Friday. "If the networking people cannot handle the pure awesomeness that is a balanced and symmetric traditional multi-line C style comments, then instead of the disgusting unbalanced crap that you guys use now, please just go all the way to the C++ mode."Torvalds despises the following two comment-punctuation styles (with his comments):/* This is disgusting drug-induced* crap, and should die
*/ and:/* This is also very nasty
* and visually unbalanced */Torvalds prefers the following two styles:/* This is a comment */ and:/*
* This is also a comment, but it can now be cleanly
* split over multiple lines
*/
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