Andrew

Here's a great graphic from LSE Cities that depicts population density in a much more granular and telling way than a simple summary statistic like people per square mile could:

One thing to note here is that while it's tempting to interpret the tall bars as indicating tall buildings, that's not necessarily the case. The densest areas of New York and Hong Kong really do feature enormous towers, but Mumbai is dense largely because the average household occupies very few square feet of building footprint.

Graphic designer Luca Masini of Zerouno Design created a series of graphics that feature questions or phrases that commonly annoy photographers.

“We have compiled a list of the most annoying and irritating phrases that can reach the ear of a photographer, not only from the customers in this case, but also by improvised photographers, friends, relatives, boyfriends, etc,” Masini writes.

Can you think of anything else that wasn’t included here?

As smartwatches from Apple and Google threaten to take a bite out of the market for traditional watches, older brands are stuck playing defense. But how do add features like notifications and health-tracking to a watch that still runs on gears and springs?

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Famous professional athletes have all kinds of post-playing careers. Some stay involved as coaches, others become TV analysts for the sports they love, and a few strike it rich in business as entrepreneurs. For at least two former baseball stars, their interests have led them down a different path: professional photography.

Ken Griffey Jr., who was one of the most prolific home run batters in the history of Major League Baseball, has been seen recently on the sidelines of football games with serious photography gear in tow. And this isn’t just a case of someone with deep pockets dabbling in a new hobby — Griffey has been shooting for big publications.

He recently attended the college football Fiesta Bowl and covered the game at ground level his son, Arizona wide receiver Trey Griffey, was playing in the game, and Griffey was shooting the event for ESPN.

ICYMI: Ken Griffey, Jr. was just out here taking photos at the #FiestaBowl. http://t.co/GIRJ1DufNX pic.twitter.com/5737Ev3lqg

— Pac-12 Networks (@Pac12Networks) January 1, 2015

Here’s one of the photographs he captured:

One of the pic's I took of @daylight_05 at the Fiesta bowl…. #nike #nikefootball #zona #zonazoo #arizonafootball #5 #fiestabowl

A photo posted by Ken Griffey Jr (@therealkengriffeyjr) on Jan 1, 2015 at 12:21pm PST

Sports Illustrated reports that Griffey has gotten pretty serious about photography since leaving the big leagues. Early last month, he was seen covering a Green Bay Packers NFL game during Monday Night Football.

Griffey isn’t the only big baseball star to have picked up a camera after hanging up his glove. Pitching legend Randy Johnson is a professional photographer now too. He actually majored in photojournalism while pitching in college at USC, and he began photographing again for major media outlets after his retirement.

Here’s an interview in which he talks about his involvement in photography:

…and here are a few more videos that offer a glimpse into things Johnson has gotten involved in as a photographer:

You can find a selection of Johnson’s photographs over on his impressive online portfolio. It doesn’t seem like Griffey has a photography website, but you can find some of his shots through his Instagram page.

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Image credits: Header image based on photo by Keith Allison

It's probably hard to remember such a thing in 2015, but NBC used to be the network leader in primetime comedies. Today one of its biggest shows ever, Friends, has arrived on Netflix. The agreement to bring Rachel, Monica, Phoebe, Joey, Chandler, and Ross to the streaming service was announced back in October, but New Year's Day — right now — is the first time subscribers can start binging on the 10 seasons of what ranks as one of the most popular sitcoms in TV history.

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An anonymous reader writes: Have you enjoyed reading the constant flow of news about how red light cameras are failing? They've been installed under the shadow of corruption, they don't increase safety, and major cities are dropping them. Well, the good news is that red-light cameras are on the decline in the U.S. The bad news is that speeding cameras are on the rise. From the article: "The number of U.S. communities using red-light cameras has fallen 13 percent, to 469, since the end of 2012, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a nonprofit scientific and educational organization funded by the insurance industry. That includes the 24 towns in New Jersey that participated in a pilot program that ended this month with no pending legislation to revive it. Meanwhile, the institute estimates that 137 communities use speed cameras, up from 115 at the end of 2011."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The images in photographer Emma Phillips‘ ‘Salt‘ series may look like they were captured in desolate polar regions of the world, but they actually show a location in Western Australia. Phillips created the project when she came across a salt refinery with mountains of salt piled up, forming strange white alien landscapes.

The Melbourne, Australia-based photographer first discovered the refinery while traveling across Australia in 2010. The region it’s located (near the Nullarbor Plain) is where most of Australia’s salt supply comes from.

Phillips says she simply walked through the gates of the mine, pulled out her Hasselblad camera, and spent an hour or so capturing different views. The area was relatively small, but Phillips says she tried to frame the shots so that there is no sense of scale.

Phillips has also turned the work into a self-published book that’s just as minimalist as the photos it contains:

You can find more of Phillips’ work over on her website.

(via Wired)

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Image credits: Photographs by Emma Phillips and used with permission

As the holiday season winds down, you may start to consider some kind of detox regimen. Take a walk through any pharmacy or natural health store, and you’ll find no shortage of products that will allegedly help you: from clarifying shampoo, to detoxifying teas and juices, and, at the more extreme end, supplements, enemas, and even colon cleanses.

But before you succumb to this incredibly persistent and appealing notion, you should know that the idea of using some product to "detox" is gobbledygook.

Recreational "detox" is an ancient idea that has been "consigned to the dustbin of medical history"

We were kicked out of Eden because, almost as soon as we were created, we ate a toxic apple. Since then, perhaps to atone for this original sin, many of us have fallen prey to the idea that we can somehow get rid of nasty — usually nebulously defined — toxins in our bodies to be purer, cleaner, and lighter.

In ancient Egypt, physicians thought that toxic substances could be produced in people’s bodies (particularly within the feces) and that these toxins were the cause of disease, and needed to be expelled. This idea — called "auto-intoxication" — persisted, according to the medical journal the Lancet, and even microbiologists believed in it through the last century.

Microorganisms, lurking in the gut because their progress was retarded by intestinal stasis, were causing putrefaction and generating odious toxins. The root cause was often constipation.

Andre Combe's Intestinal auto-intoxication (Rebman, London) was a bible for those who believed in this sort of thing. "Intestinal auto-intoxication is the toxaemia caused by qualitative or quantitative alterations in normal digestion", Combe insisted. "By normal digestion we do not mean only that described by physiologists, but the more complete and complicated digestion which takes place in every normal man [sic] … besides the digestion by the enzymes of the stomach and intestines, there occurs in every man a digestion brought about by the action of the microbes which live and thrive in the digestive tract."

By the early 1900s, however, our understanding of physiology evolved, and scientists sent auto-intoxification "to the dustbin of medical history," according to the Lancet. But this hasn’t stopped clever marketers from selling the idea that we can be, somehow, less toxic by using special products. (This is different from the medical definition of actual life-saving detox from overdose or addiction — more on this later).

"The idea of detox gives credit to a principle that is ridiculous and exploits people in many ways, not least of which is financial," said Dr. Edzard Ernst, an expert on the science of alternative medicine and emeritus professor at Exeter University.

"The body doesn’t need any help detoxifying. There’s no known methods for healthy people to help the body get rid of unwanted stuff any better than it already does."

People who claim they are helping you detox almost never define their enemy

As we all pursue a more pure, toxin-free state, what’s incredible is that most of us don’t even know which toxic enemy we are running from.

In 2007, the science advocacy group Sense About Science contacted the manufacturers of 15 "detox" products — ranging from teas to hair straighteners. When pressed, not a single detox peddler contacted could come up with a definition of what they meant by detox, or define their devilish toxin.

"We concluded that ‘detox’ as used in product marketing is a myth. Many of the claims about how the body works were wrong and some were even dangerous," they said.

The author of this Lancet article tried to figure out, through an informal analysis of detox diet books, what toxins were being targeted and what harm to health they posed. "Not one of the books provided any answers," he concluded.

Our bodies "detox" naturally, every day

Science-based medicine has long rejected the concept of a detox, as you will have gathered by now, unless it is being used to refer to situations where someone is poisoned or, say, weaned off a heroin addiction.

This is mostly because we now know, through a range of organ systems — from the liver, to the kidney, the skin, the gut, and lungs — our bodies have evolved to do a pretty damn fine job of getting rid of harmful stuff by themselves.

Anyone who has nursed a hangover knows this to be true: you feel ghastly but, sure enough with a bit of time, your organ systems go to work to get rid of all the over-indulgences that made you feel terrible. Your liver has enzymes that transform toxic substances like alcohol into more benign ones that you then excrete in bile or through the kidneys. Your kidneys, among other detoxifying functions, get rid of unwanted chemicals and waste through urination.

In the absence of disease, these processes happen automatically, every second we live, and we don’t need outside help to get them going. No supplement, tea, or diet has been proven to somehow do the job instead or enhance these systems, said Dr. Ernst.

"Alcohol is obviously a toxin. But [even alcohol] and most food stuffs are broken down into some or many compounds which might be mildly toxic unless we have a liver to take care of it, we have a kidney to excrete it, et cetera."

There's nothing you can buy that will help that process along, he emphasized. Not even dramatic colon cleanses. "These empty your guts," said Dr. Ernst, "and it's quite dangerous since it may deplete your electrolytes to dangerously low levels. Perforations of the guts have been reported. Deaths have been reported. And it does precisely nothing except for taking some excrement out of your body which would normally would be excreted."

How to get back to health after a period of indulgence

After a period of over-indulgence, like the holidays, there are a few things that can boost your immediate sense of well being, and maybe even improve your long-term health outcomes: get a good night's sleep, limit your alcohol intake, do some exercise, and eat a balanced diet. Unfortunately, these things don't come in a magic pill form, and usually require a level of commitment that lasts for longer than a one week detox cleanse.

Last week, eager Christmas celebrators across the world hooked up their brand new Xboxes and PlayStations only to find that both online networks were down, leaving countless new games totally unplayable.

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After more than a decade of traversing the red planet, NASA's Mars Opportunity rover is facing some problems in its old age — namely, ones with memory. According to Discovery News, the rover has been going through bouts of "amnesia" thanks to failures in its flash memory storage.

"The Opportunity rover uses two different types of memory: "volatile" and "non-volatile," NASA project manager John Callas told Discovery News. The volatile memory is akin to a computer's RAM, so any data stored there is wiped every time the rover shuts down. The non-volatile memory is where the important data like telemetry — the measurements the rover is collecting — is stored so that it can be accessed whenever Opportunity is powered on. The problem with the...

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Android: Your phone's default layout caters to the right-handed user. If you're left-handed, switch your layout to right-to-left with just a tap to be more comfortable using your device.

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David Becker / Getty Images

In less than a week from now, Re/code — alongside scores of other tech publications — will be reporting from the International CES, a sprawling annual techfest that showcases an overwhelming amount of consumer gadgetry.

For exhibitors, it’s a chance to show off new products or concepts. For industry professionals, Las Vegas supplies the perfect setting for schmoozing and deal-making. For journalists, it’s an opportunity to get a glimpse of what’s coming down the pipeline, and also an opportunity for every public relations rep to pitch us on life-changing headphones and stuff.

But what does it mean for you, our Re/code readers? Probably not so much, even though CES will likely dominate the early tech headlines in 2015.

So, here’s a guide that will help you cut through the hype.

The first rule of CES is there is no CES.

Just kidding.

Truth be told, this nerd Super Bowl is a huge, huge show — the world’s largest of its kind. The 3,500 exhibitors span more than two million square feet in Las Vegas and includes enough gadgetry to fill 35 football fields. The Consumer Electronics Association, which puts on the show, said it expects between 150,000 and 160,000 industry professionals to attend CES this year, on par with last year’s show.

Given its size, there’s bound to be some cool stuff — drones, wearables, “smart” home products and car tech will be big themes — but there’s also bound to be junk. If only there were smart glasses that could help us sift through it all. Or a Tinder app for CES gadgets. Swipe left.

CES may be big, but it’s not necessarily a big deal.

Re/code’s Walt Mossberg wrote an excellent essay last year about this. (Others have written candidly about the self-loathing CES inspires in all of us.)

But there’s an element of truth to it all. At one time, the show was a very significant event. Now, as the new-product cycle compresses, and as giant tech companies like Apple, Google, Lenovo, Motorola, Microsoft, Samsung and LG host their own separate launch events throughout the year, CES has waned in importance. The CEA says that last year’s show featured a “record amount of innovation,” but I still have no idea how they quantify such a thing.

Put it this way: For us tech folks, it has become the equivalent of a high-school reunion. You’d rather have a more intimate outing with the people who actually matter to you, and everyone is already up on all the news, thanks to social media.

Even though Apple doesn’t “do” CES, everyone will be talking about Apple.

Apple may not use CES as any kind of product launchpad — and why would they? — but the Cupertino-based company has managed to suck the air out of Las Vegas on at least a few occasions in recent years. Right smack in the middle of CES 2007, there was that whole “introducing iPhone” thing at Macworld. During CES 2011, the Wall Street Journal reported that the iPhone would finally be coming to Verizon’s wireless network. The following year, Apple blogs breathlessly reported that the (nonexistent) Apple television set would be the “elephant in the room” at CES.

This year, expect a lot of Apple Watch chatter, as competitors show off their wearable wares. And plenty of other hardware makers will be boasting integration with Apple’s newish software platforms, like HomeKit, HealthKit and and CarPlay.

Speaking of cars, the automakers could make the biggest waves.

Some say that the American attitude toward car ownership is changing, especially among young people. But more than 246 million vehicles were still registered in the U.S. in 2014. And over the past few years, automakers have really upped their game at CES, showing off “connected” car features and teasing autonomous vehicles.

CES 2015 will be no exception: At least 10 auto companies will be in attendance at the show, up one from last year. This includes Audi, BMW, Toyota, General Motors, Mercedes-Benz and Ford. The latter two will be giving keynote speeches on Monday and Tuesday of next week, and our sense is that we’re going to be seeing a lot of self-driving cars, as well as news from Toyota around fuel-cell technology.

TV makers will try every which way to sell new TVs.

Curved displays! Glasses-free 3-D! 4K! OLED! Quantum-dot technology! All of these sound exciting, even without exclamation points, and if you stroll by the massive Samsung or LG or Panasonic booths at CES, you will inevitably see crowds of conference-goers staring at gorgeous displays.

But if you should find yourself among the hypnotized, try to keep a few things in mind. For one, many of these displays are too large and expensive for the average consumer. A few are also concept products that might not ever make it to market; if they do ship, don’t expect to see them until Q2 or Q3.

“True” 4K is still a bit of a unicorn, even if you buy a 4K TV. Unless you’re watching a movie or TV show that was shot in 4K, you’ll be watching upscaled 1080p content. It will look pretty good, but it still won’t look like native 4K. And if you’re streaming 4K Web video, the quality will depend on bandwidth.

And finally, there’s the cold dose of reality that global TV sales declined significantly in 2012 and 2013, the most notable plunge in a decade, according to research firm IHS iSuppli (we don’t have data yet for 2014). That could certainly change in 2015 — and 4K displays have already come down significantly in price — but much of it will depend on a broader economic recovery.

Bonus Tip: No, the Adult Entertainment Expo no longer overlaps with the International CES.

I’m not quite sure why I still get asked about this; I guess people really got a kick out of the juxtaposition of tech geeks with porn stars. But the two shows haven’t synced up timing-wise since 2011, much to the chagrin of some show-goers. The AVN Expo at the Hard Rock (hold your jokes, please) kicks off Jan. 21.

It’s debatable, however, which one features the more cutting-edge technology.

Programmer Pekka Väänänen has rendered a playable version of the classic first-person shooter Quake on an oscilloscope. Video game demakes — adaptations or ports that recreate a game in art styles or on hardware from before their time — have become trendy in recent years, but this demo is a particularly old-fashioned throwback. In 1958, physicist William Higinbotham created one of the first video games, a tennis simulation that ran on a Donner Model 30 analog computer and an oscilloscope display. That game used dots on a 2D plane; Väänänen's creation draws the shooter's 3D space in a style reminiscent of a high school student's sketch book.

Väänänen's announcement explains the creation of the demonstration, and includes some open...

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The way things are panning out, the Sony movie The Interview is on course to become one of the most controversial movies of all time.

The comedy, which depicts the violent death of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, made headlines worldwide when the so-called Guardians of Peace hacking group threatened Sony if it was released. Facing what amounted to a “terrorist” threat, theaters all around the U.S. backed away from showing The Interview in the week leading up to Christmas.

After pulling the movie completely, Sony had a change of heart and on Christmas Eve released the music online via YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Live. Predictably the movie was quickly gobbled up by pirates, with the latest figures suggesting that in just two days the movie has been downloaded 1.5 million times.

But while Sony deals with rampant piracy issues at one end, it’s now facing copyright infringement allegations of its own. According to new claims, Sony used copyrighted music in The Interview without permission and without compensating an artist.

Yoon Mi-rae (real name Natasha Shanta Reid) is a US-born hip hop and R&B singer who currently releases music on the Feel Ghood Music label. In January 2013 as part of MFBTY (My Fans Better Than Yours), the 33-year-old hit the number 1 spot in the Korean Music Charts and in September reached the same heights on Billboard’s Kpop Hot 100 list with her song ‘Touch Love’.

But while these recognitions were achieved by fans buying her music, she’s now in the spotlight for not getting paid for her work. It appears that Yoon Mi-rae was in negotiations with Sony to have her track ‘Pay Day’ appear in The Interview. Even though no agreement was reached, Sony used the music anyway.

“There were initial discussions for using ‘Pay Day‘ in the movie, but at some point, the discussions ceased and we assumed that it would not follow through,” Feel Ghood Music says.

“However, after the movie was released, we learned that the track had been used without permission, legal procedure, or contracts.”

Sony, who are already facing a world of pain following the hacking and near destruction of their IT systems in recent weeks, will now face a copyright infringement lawsuit over the unauthorized use of the ironically named ‘Pay Day’.

“We will be taking legal action against Sony Pictures as well as DFSB, the agency that had been carrying out the discussion regarding the use of the track,” the label says.

It seems unlikely that this lawsuit will result in a messy legal battle. The huge publicity the movie has enjoyed in the past few weeks will virtually guarantee decent sales for Sony, even without lucrative box office revenues. Yoon Mi-rae should not only be able to secure a piece of that but also raise her profile in a way that would not have been possible had Sony paid her in the first instance.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

schwit1 writes with this excerpt from The Daily Beast: America's $400 billion, top-of-the-line aircraft can't see the battlefield all that well. Which means it's actually worse than its predecessors at fighting today's wars. .... The problem stems from the fact that the technology found on one of the stealth fighter's primary air-to-ground sensors—its nose-mounted Electro-Optical Targeting System (EOTS)—is more than a decade old and hopelessly obsolete. The EOTS, which is similar in concept to a large high-resolution infrared and television camera, is used to visually identify and monitor ground targets. The system can also mark targets for laser-guided bombs. ... Older jets currently in service with the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps can carry the latest generation of sensor pods, which are far more advanced than the EOTS sensor carried by the F-35. ... The end result is that when the F-35 finally becomes operational after its myriad technical problems, cost overruns, and massive delays, in some ways it will be less capable than current fighters in the Pentagon's inventory.

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When Xbox and Playstation players wanted to test their Christmas gifts a few hours ago, they were welcomed by an unpleasant surprise.

Lizard Squad, who repeatedly DDoSed the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live’s servers in recent months, were back with a Christmas gift nobody asked for. Another DDoS attack resulting in yet more downtime.

One of the affected players was Kim Dotcom, who’s an avid Xbox player himself. But instead of cursing Lizard Squad to high heaven he decided to make them an offer.

Although the general belief may be that it’s best not to negotiate with “terrorists,” Dotcom decided to give it a try.

“Hi @LizardMafia, I want to play #Destiny on XBOX Live. I’ll give your entire crew Mega lifetime premium vouchers if you let us play. Cool?” he tweeted.

Lizard Squad is apparently easy to please as they were willing to stop the attacks in return for 3,000 free cloud hosting vouchers.

After getting approval from Mega’s management, Dotcom and Lizard Squad eventually came to terms through Twitter’s back-channel.

Once the vouchers were in Lizard Squad’s possession, the attacks did indeed slow down and Christmas was saved. While some still experienced some outages due to the earlier attacks, many players were able to join their favorite games again.

“Thanks @KimDotcom for the vouchers–you’re the reason we stopped the attacks. @MegaPrivacy is an awesome service,” Lizard Squad tweeted, confirming the successful intervention.

Dotcom, meanwhile, is happy that he can play Destiny but wishes that his other troubles could be resolved this easily too. Whether the U.S. Department of Justice will accept Mega vouchers is doubtful though.

“Obviously, diplomacy works. I recommend that the U.S. Government gives it a try. #MakeLoveNotWar #UseMegaVouchers,” Kim noted.

Of course there’s no guarantee that Lizard Squad will keep their promise during the days to come, but Dotcom said he will render the vouchers useless if attacks resume.

Merry Christmas everyone…

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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An anonymous reader writes with the story of Frederic Tudor the man responsible for the modern food industry. "A guy from Boston walks into a bar and offers to sell the owner a chunk of ice. To modern ears, that sounds like the opening line of a joke. But 200 years ago, it would have sounded like science fiction—especially if it was summer, when no one in the bar had seen frozen water in months. In fact, it's history. The ice guy was sent by a 20-something by the name of Frederic Tudor, born in 1783 and known by the mid-19th century as the "Ice King of the World." What he had done was figure out a way to harvest ice from local ponds, and keep it frozen long enough to ship halfway around the world. Today, the New England ice trade, which Tudor started in Boston's backyard in 1806, sounds cartoonishly old-fashioned. The work of ice-harvesting, which involved cutting massive chunks out of frozen bodies of water, packing them in sawdust for storage and transport, and selling them near and far, seems as archaic as the job of town crier. But scholars in recent years have suggested that we're missing something. In fact, they say, the ice trade was a catalyst for a transformation in daily life so powerful that the mark it left can still be seen on our cultural habits even today. Tudor's big idea ended up altering the course of history, making it possible not only to serve barflies cool mint juleps in the dead of summer, but to dramatically extend the shelf life and reach of food. Suddenly people could eat perishable fruits, vegetables, and meat produced far from their homes. Ice built a new kind of infrastructure that would ultimately become the cold, shiny basis for the entire modern food industry."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Christian Richter is a fine art architecture photographer based in the small town of Jeßnitz, Germany. A fan of exploring old, abandoned buildings, Richter has often come across tall spiral staircases that look both beautiful and disorienting when viewed from the very top looking down. These staircases form a photo series of his that is aptly titled, “Abandoned Staircases.”

Richter tells us that he grew up in East Germany. After the reunification of Germany, many large buildings ended up being abandoned in Richter’s part of the country. He began exploring these structures for fun and then began to focus on them years later when he entered the world of photography.

“You must visit many, many buildings to find a great staircase,” Richter says. He now travels across Europe in search of them. Once he locates one, he sets up his Canon 5D mark II, 16-35mm f/2.8 L lens, and tripod, and then composes a photograph to focus on the patterns and textures “of impermanence.”

Many of the shots are 5 frame HDR photos that have been lightly processed in Lightroom and Photoshop. Here’s a selection of the photos so far:

You can check out more of Richter’s work by visiting his website.

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Image credit: Photographs by Christian Richter and used with permission

From a New York Times Magazine excerpt of Nicholas Carlson’s upcoming book, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo:

In many ways, Yahoo’s decline from a $128 billion company to one worth virtually nothing is entirely natural. Yahoo grew into a colossus by solving a problem that no longer exists. And while Yahoo’s products have undeniably improved, and its culture has become more innovative, it’s unlikely that Mayer can reverse an inevitability unless she creates the next iPod. All breakthrough companies, after all, will eventually plateau and then decline. U.S. Steel was the first billion-dollar company in 1901, but it was worth about the same in 1991. Kodak, which once employed nearly 80,000 people, now has a market value below $1 billion. Packard and Hudson ruled the roads for more than 40 years before disappearing. These companies matured and receded over the course of generations, in some cases even a century. Yahoo went through the process in 20 years. In the technology industry, things move fast.

Carlson’s take is pretty brutal, and paints a bleak picture for Yahoo’s prospects as an independent company. (Activist investors are pushing for a merger with AOL.) And it doesn’t seem like Mayer is going to get much more time.

I would argue that Yahoo lost its way early. Yahoo was an amazing, awesome resource when it first appeared, as a directory to cool websites. Arguably, the directory to cool websites. It was hard to find the good stuff on the early web, and Yahoo created a map. Their whole reason for being was to serve as a starting point that sent you elsewhere.

Then came portals. The portal strategy was the opposite of the directory strategy — it was about keeping people on Yahoo’s site, instead of sending them elsewhere. It was lucrative for a while, but ran its course. And it turned out that the web quickly became too large, far too large, for a human-curated directory to map more than a fraction of it. The only way to index the web was algorithmically, as a search engine. And one search engine stood head and shoulders above all others: Google.

Yahoo reportedly had an opportunity to buy Google in 2002 for $5 billion. Yahoo, under the leadership of CEO Terry Semel, declined. And that was the end of Yahoo.¹ We all know hindsight is 20/20. There are all sorts of acquisitions that could have been made. But I would argue that acquiring Google in 2002 (if not earlier) was something Yahoo absolutely should have known they needed to do. The portal strategy had played itself out. All they were left with was their original purpose, serving as a starting page for finding what you were looking for on the web.

Buying Google in 2002, at whatever cost, was the only way for Yahoo to return to those roots. Google wasn’t just something shiny and new — it was the best solution to date (even now) to the problem Yahoo was originally created to solve. In a broad sense, buying Google would have been to Yahoo what buying NeXT was to Apple in 1997: an acquisition that returned the parent company to its roots, with superior industry-leading technology and outstanding talent.²

In short, Yahoo’s early 2000s leadership had no understanding whatsoever why Yahoo had gotten popular and profitable in the first place. That serving as the leading homepage for the entire web was important and profitable, and that the only way to maintain that leadership was to acquire Google.

Google, on the other hand, learned an important lesson from Yahoo. The basic gist of portals never really died: Google has gone on to build all sorts of properties like Gmail, Google News, Maps, and Google Plus, all of which are designed to keep users on Google-owned sites. But Google never conflated these things with web search. The google.com home page remains to this day as spartan as when it first appeared, and they fully understand that the point of it is to send users to other sites.

Yahoo’s loss of focus on indexing the web was a mistake in the late ’90s. They had a chance to completely correct that mistake by acquiring Google in the early 00’s. They blew that chance, and it’s been all downhill for them ever since.

At the end of last week, we dug up news of Project Goliath, a secret Hollywood project to investigate and discredit Google on issues of copyright and web freedom. But while the documents showed how bad things had gotten between Google and Hollywood, they also showed how eagerly many state attorneys general took up the MPAA’s anti-Google crusade – particularly Mississippi’s Jim Hood. And less than a week after the documents were made public, that eagerness is starting to have real consequences.

Hood has been at the center of many of the recent legal actions against Google in the US, investigating the company for involvement in both pharmaceutical counterfeiting and content piracy, but never assembling enough evidence for concrete...

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T-Mobile has revealed its Uncarrier 8.0 announcement: it's called data stash. But a better name is probably data rollover. The fourth place US carrier will now let select customers carry unused data into future billing cycles. "High-speed data you don’t use each month automatically rolls into a personal Data Stash so you can use it when you need it for up to a year," the company said in a press release. To take advantage of the new promotion, you must be a Simple Choice customer who has "purchased additional 4G LTE data." T-Mobile says customers must be paying for at least 3GB of data each month for smartphones and 1 GB or more for tablets. Customers with a lower data ceiling won't be able to count on data stash to help avoid throttling.

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An anonymous reader writes: We keep hearing about the revolutionary properties of graphene, an atom-thick sheet of carbon whose physical characteristics hold a great deal of promise — if we can figure out good ways to produce it and use it. The New Yorker has a lengthy profile of graphene and its discoverer, Andre Geim, as well as one of the physicists leading a big chunk of the bleeding-edge graphene research, James Tour. Quoting: "[S]cientists are still trying to devise a cost-effective way to produce graphene at scale. Companies like Samsung use a method pioneered at the University of Texas, in which they heat copper foil to eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit in a low vacuum, and introduce methane gas, which causes graphene to "grow" as an atom-thick sheet on both sides of the copper—much as frost crystals "grow" on a windowpane. They then use acids to etch away the copper. The resulting graphene is invisible to the naked eye and too fragile to touch with anything but instruments designed for microelectronics. The process is slow, exacting, and too expensive for all but the largest companies to afford. ... Nearly every scientist I spoke with suggested that graphene lends itself especially well to hype."

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Nightmare fuel for designers.

via BartAndCo.com 

Congressional negotiators reached a deal this week that would extend most government funding through fall 2015 — learn all about it here. But since this is basically a must-pass bill, party leaders have thrown in several provisions that little or nothing to do with funding the government, but are instead gifts to important interest groups or constituencies. Here are 5 of the shadiest.

1) Campaign finance limits will be weakened

One part of the compromise would give political parties the ability to raise a whole lot more money. Previously, the limit on giving to a party committee was $32,400 per individual per year. The spending deal makes certain changes to campaign finance laws that would effectively let party committees to raise ten times as much more money from individual donors as current limitations allow, according to an analysis by Matea Gold of the Washington Post.

Previously, the limit on giving to a party committee was $32,400 per individual per year. Under the new proposal, a donor can give money toward earmarked funds - for presidential conventions, party headquarters buildings, or recounts - that will be subject to separate, higher, contribution limits. By directing his or her money in that way, a donor will soon be able to give $324,000 to a party each year, if this bill is signed into law. The provision was negotiated by top aides to Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, report Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan of Politico.

The change is an effort for the parties to regain control of campaign fundraising, after years where larger and larger sums have been steered to outside groups. It could be argued that this is a good thing, because the parties are theoretically more accountable for their fundraising and spending than outside groups, and have to disclose their donors (see Jonathan Bernstein for more). Still, it's being thrown into this last-minute must-pass bill without any significant public debate.

2) Big banks will get to trade "custom swaps"

Congress shouldn't support the budget package until the Wall Street giveaway is removed. Watch & share ASAP: http://t.co/ZDr5rIhppe

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) December 10, 2014

The spending deal includes a gift for big banks too. Currently, Section 716 of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law says FDIC-insured banks can't trade "custom swaps," which are difficult for regulators to supervise. The government funding bill would repeal this part of Dodd-Frank and allow these banks to trade these financial products again, as Matt Yglesias explains. Erika Eichelberger of Mother Jones found that the provision appears to have been written by Citigroup's lobbyists.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren has harshly criticized the inclusion of this provision in the compromise as a sop to powerful financial interests, and called for it to be removed. The House Appropriations committee's Republican staff argues, in contrast, that the provision "protects farmers, ranchers, [and] job creators from onerous regulatory burdens."

3) A major health insurer will get a big benefit

At National Review, Yuval Levin flags a section of the deal seemingly designed to benefit one big health insurer. Obamacare's medical-loss ratio requirers insurers to spend a certain amount of their premium payments on medical claims or quality improvements. However, the law's language led the IRS to rule in January that Blue Cross/Blue Shield couldn't count quality improvements to meet this requirement, because it's already getting tax benefits from being a nonprofit. This provision of the spending deal would let Blue Cross/Blue Shield do this.

"This section is, simply put, a special favor for Blue Cross/Blue Shield allowing them to count "quality improvement" spending as part of the medical loss ratio calculation required of them under Obamacare," Levin writes. "And it's made retroactive for four years, saving them loads of money."

4) The marijuana legalization DC voters approved will be blocked

A marijuana plant. (Uriel Sinai / Getty Images News)

Though voters in Washington, DC, approved an initiative to legalize marijuana in November, Congress is now trying to stop it from happening. Even though marijuana legalization in DC will save the district money overall — since pot laws would no longer need to be enforced — this spending deal blocks it.

The way it works is that the spending deal contains a provision blocking both federal and local funds from being used to implement legalization. "The budget bill would prohibit DC Council from spending its time and resources to approve the legalization initiative and send it to Congress," write German Lopez. "Under federal law, that's a necessary step for legalization to take effect."

This change comes at the request of Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD), who Politico's Manu Raju and Jonathan Topaz say is "the leader of a small band of anti-marijuana hardliners in Congress" who were lobbying behind the scenes to block legalization in DC.

5) More coal plants overseas will get US government financing

Should the US government be in the business of financing US coal plants overseas? Between 2007 and 2013, the Export-Import Bank loaned out $2.2 billion for coal power plants, and $5.2 billion for coal mining, abroad. But last year, President Obama announced new restrictions on the practice, responding to environmentalist concerns that it was funding dirty energy and exacerbating climate change.

Supporters of coal, including Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), pushed back. As a result, the spending deal blocks the Export-Import Bank and Overseas Private Investment Corporation from using money "to enforce these new restrictions on coal projects," the Huffington Post's Kate Sheppard reports.

House and Senate negotiators have crafted a $1.013 trillion deal to fund most of the government through 2015 (well, with one exception). The bill, which weighs in at more than 1,600 pages (full text here), will avert a government shutdown. But it's also loaded down with non-funding "policy riders" — including one that has Sen. Elizabeth Warren very, very annoyed — and is the kind of giant, secretive, backroom deal that Republicans have railed against in recent years.

Here's what to say if you're asked about it.

The basic deal: Neither side wanted a shutdown. And so both sides held to the spending framework Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Paul Ryan worked out in December 2013. The $1.013 trillion bottom line was, in that sense, set over a year ago — which is why this deal was pretty easy for House and Senate negotiators to reach. In other words the actual spending is just about the least controversial thing in the spending bill.

The one catch is the Department of Homeland Security. Republicans, angry about President Obama's executive action on immigration, are only funding the Department of Homeland Security until February. That way the new Republican Congress can go to war with Obama over immigration, if they so choose. But conservatives are split on whether that move presages Republicans punishing Obama for his overreach or proves Republicans are capitulating to it.

You're not going very far, little marijuana plant. (Shutterstock)

The smarter take: The biggest problem with this spending bill is all the stuff it does that has nothing to do with government spending. These are the "policy riders": little provisions tucked away in the bill that make sweeping policy changes in order to satisfy this or that congressional faction. One of those policy riders would loosen regulations on financial derivatives. Another would overturn Washington, DC's ballot initiative legalizing marijuana. A third would allow the Export-Import Bank to fund coal-fired power plants abroad. There's a provision that would allow political parties to raise 10 times more money from individuals. A fifth would give Blue Cross-Blue Shield a better deal under Obamacare.

Congress likes to brag about getting rid of earmarks, but these provisions are policy pork: they're giveaways to individual members of Congress or small factions meant to get the bill passed, but instead of giving away the money to build a bridge or a road or a community center, they give away new policy measures that could never pass if they weren't attached to this must-pass spending bill.

Why it's called "the CRomnibus": The bill is being referred to on the Hill as the "CRomnibus". That's because it's a mash-up of an omnibus bill, which is how Congress funds the government when things are working normally, and a continuing resolution (CR), which is how Congress funds the government when it can't come to a deal. In this case, the CR only affects the Department of Homeland Security, which, as mentioned before, will see its funding expire in February.

What budget wonks are mad about: While congressional Democrats and Republicans both agree the CRomnibus abides by the preexisting spending caps, budget analysts disagree. Maya McGuinness, head of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, writes:

While it complies with discretionary spending limits on paper, it relies on several budgetary gimmicks to mask spending in excess of those limits. These include nearly $20 billion in phantom "savings" from CHIMPs (changes in mandatory programs) that are scored as savings on paper but produce none in reality, a shift of several billion from the base defense budget into the uncapped war budget, and at least $3 billion of hidden tax cuts and mandatory spending increases that are not offset,with the revenue losses explicitly exempt from PAYGO.

Much more on the bill's gimmicks here.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Why Elizabeth Warren is so angry: One of the policy riders repeals Section 716 of the Dodd-Frank financial reforms, which blocks FDIC-insured institutions from trading custom swaps (Matt Yglesias has a good explanation of the issue here). The rider has Warren fuming. "If big companies can deploy their armies of lawyers and lobbyists to get the Congress to vote for special deals that will benefit themselves, then we will simply confirm the view of the American people that the system is rigged," she said on the Senate floor. She's arguing Democrats shouldn't vote for the CRomnibus unless the language is deleted.

Why Senate Democrats will probably pass it anyway. Democrats see this as the best deal they're likely to get for 2015. They could detonate the negotiations... but that would potentially lead to a government shutdown. But perhaps that's a fight they could win, if they argue that it's corrupt for Republicans to shut down the government over a sweetheart deal for Wall Street.

But the bigger problem for Democrats is that the likely outcome of a "victory" is that Congress simply gives up and passes a short-term funding extension that makes 2015's funding the next Congress's problem. And the next Congress is going to be overwhelmingly Republican. So Democrats figure that if they don't agree to this package now they're likely to get something much worse later.

Why some conservatives hate the bill: Heritage Action is trying to persuade House Republicans to vote against the CRomnibus for a few reasons. The big one is that they want a real showdown, right now, over Obama's immigration action — they don't buy the idea that letting DHS funding expire in February is an acceptable substitute. Here's their case:

Some have suggested the short-term funding for DHS will provide conservatives another opportunity to block President Obama’s actions in early 2015, but that approach is problematic because: 1) it forces House Republicans, who are virtually unanimous in their opposition to the President’s actions, to cast an initial vote to fund that lawless action; 2) it would occur 100 days after the President’s announcement, meaning the program is likely to be up and running; 3) it removes nearly all the pressure on President Obama and his partisan allies to choose between defending their lawless amnesty policies and funding all other areas of government; and 4) leading Republicans have refused to offer up a viable plan to stop the President’s executive amnesty in February.

They also have problems with various accounting gimmicks in the bill, spending levels for certain agencies, and policy riders that didn't get included. They lament, for instance, that "riders blocking certain National Science Foundation climate research, prohibiting trade agreements regarding greenhouse gases, certain pro-gun riders and six riders on the aforementioned CFTC and SEC were all left behind in favor of liberal priorities."

Heritage Action also notes that the process that led to the bill is pretty hypocritical. "Representatives are being asked to vote on the massive, 1,603-page bill with little time to read and understand it," they write — exactly the thing that Republicans have been complaining about Democrats doing for years.

Why Republicans will probably pass it anyway: The spending bill does see a lot of Republican priorities through. The IRS, for instance, gets its funding slashed. The CRomnibus funds the Pentagon and avoids some deep, automatic cuts that might be triggered in the absence of a deal. And it meets the caps that Ryan negotiated in December 2013. For a good rundown of the Republican case for the law, read the release put out by Rep. Hal Rogers, the chair of the House Appropriations Committee.

But behind the policy is a political imperative. Republicans really, really don't want a shutdown. They just won an election. They don't want to destroy the momentum of the GOP Congress before it's begun. You can see this in Rogers' statement. The headline is "Omnibus Package Responsibly Funds the Federal Government, Avoids a Shutdown, Makes Good-Government Policy Changes". Avoiding a shutdown is so central to the thinking of Republican negotiators right now that they brag about it as one of the bill's headline accomplishments.

Finally, Republicans know they're going to get another shot at this next year, when a Republican Senate and a Republican House get to write the spending bill for 2016.

The bottom line: What the CRomnibus shows is how different the politics of federal spending are in 2014 than they were in 2013, or 2012. There's not much more agreement on the big questions now than there was then, but there's a lot less appetite for a high-stakes showdown. This bill, with all its policy pork and its weird compromises and the resigned response to its unveiling, is evidence that Washington is returning to normal. It's not a good normal, per se, but it's a less dangerous one.

Christmas caters to small children. The endless mythology around Santa and the endless fights over popular toys all center on bringing Christmas cheer to another generation of tiny humans who have yet to realize that everything is a lie.

One of the most popular lies to tell children in recent years has been the myth of the Elf on the Shelf. Here's everything you need to know.

It began with a children's book

The Elf on the Shelf: A Christmas Tradition is a children's book, written by Carol Aebersold and her daughter Chanda Bell. Self-published in 2005, the rhyming book tells the story of a group of Santa's elves who hide out in houses around the country to watch children and decide if they are naughty or nice. The book quickly became an extension of the Santa Claus Christmas fable. In 2008, it also won the Book of the Year prize from Creative Child Awards.

In 2008, the rise of the elf began. The Elf on the Shelf joined Facebook, and Aebersold and Bell, the authors, went on a book tour. The elf character began picking up momentum, and by 2012, he was a float in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. The Elf on the Shelf has been a best-seller every year since 2013.

The book says that at night, the elf flies back to the North Pole to tell Santa how children are behaving, before returning to their homes to hide. Thus, the elf plays a game of hide-and-seek with children, who look for their elf in a different spot in their house each day.

The book only sets up one rule that children must follow so that the elf can do its job: "Please do not touch me. My magic might go, and Santa won't hear all I've seen or I know."

After Christmas is over, the elf flies back to the North Pole, presumably to spend time with Santa until Thanksgiving the next year. Nobody ever seems to talk about why the most efficient delivery system for this Santa surveillance racket is sold in major department stores, or why the elves just started showing up in 2005, but there you go.

The elf in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. (Brad Barket/Getty)

With the book comes a toy — and encouragement of parental deceit

When parents purchase the book for their children, it comes with a small plush elf that they are invited to use to reenact the events of the book. It's an opportunity for parents to put their lying skills to the test, to see if they can convince their kids this elf is real, lives in their home, and communicates with Santa. In 2007, Jennifer Garner was photographed carrying an Elf on the Shelf box; shortly after, the Today show aired a segment about the toy and sales began to skyrocket.

You can buy the elf with "brown skin tone" or "light skin tone" and as a boy or a girl.

You can "personalize" your elf

You can name your elf whatever you want. As the book explains, being named is what allows elves to become powered by Christmas magic and fly back and forth to the North Pole. The book encourages families to create a tiny birth certificate for the elf with its name and the date of its "adoption."

Having trouble thinking of a name? Want to teach your children about peer pressure, social media, and conformity? These are some popular names for elves, according to Pinterest:

A list of suggested elf names. (Pinterest)

The toy can breed competition (and potentially feelings of inadequacy)

Because the elf is supposed to be "alive" and watching children to see if they're naughty or nice, this toy basically requires parents to move it to a new location every night. There are entire Pinterest boards of ideas for how to creatively place your elf in your house to delight your children (and make your Instagram followers envious).

The elf in the silverware drawer. (Pinterest)

The elf makes a grocery list. (Pinterest)

This can cause added holiday stress for a parent with young children. And on top of the actual work of remembering to move the elf around, there can be pressure in certain social circles to make your elf do the most interesting, creative, and performative things, so that you can shame and humiliate the elves of your children's friends.

The pressure has even led some parents to adopt drastic measures like saddling their elf with a serious case of the flu or a broken leg just to get some relief from the nightly elfin repositioning — not exactly the stuff warm holiday memories are made of.

"Is it any wonder that this kind of holiday madness, which dovetails with every strain of guilt mothers feel over their domestic imperfections, coupled with the catch-22 that if you do your job right, your children will never thank you for it (because all these goodies come from the Elf!), sometimes leads to a backlash?" Kate Tuttle wrote for the Atlantic in 2012.

The parenting benefits are iffy

As a parenting tool, the Elf on the Shelf is similarly controversial. The story makes clear that Santa is busy at the North Pole and unable to watch every child in the whole world, so the elf has been sent to do his dirty work for him. The elf serves as a tangible reminder that children are supposed to be "nice," not "naughty," and some parents use the elf as a way to discipline their children by reminding them that the "elf is always watching."

Yet this tactic comes with its own set of issues. As Petula Dvorak wrote for the Washington Post in 2012:

It's a Faustian deal. First, you get this amazing disciplinary tool. My little heathens instantly turned into angels the moment I said, "The Elf is watching." Not like the abstract "Santa is watching."This was a real, actual thing, staring down at them with dead eyes, perched on the curtain rod, then the bookshelf, then swinging from the chandelier. I was beginning to fear withdrawal come January.

Theoretically, teaching your children to be "nice" in order to satisfy an imaginary elf may not help them determine right from wrong but rather teach them to perform based on the promise of rewards. (One supposes parents could just keep the elf game going year-round, but that sounds exhausting and seems like it has the potential to backfire once your children realize their moral center was founded upon a toy.)

The elf is a symbol of the surveillance state disguised as a children's toy

"I watch and report on all that you do!" the elf warns in The Elf on the Shelf, adding that "the word will get out if you broke a rule." This sounds pretty familiar!

"Having been molded by this age of NSA overreach, [Edward] Snowden, Wikileaks and Anonymous, what bothers me most is that inviting Elf on the Shelf into the home unnecessarily extends surveillance culture into a place that should be free of it," Alex Steed wrote in a column for the Bangor Daily News in 2014. "Santa Claus is a myth that at best represents generosity at its finest. But with the elf, we choose to emphasize his surveillance. That is really weird."

Some find the very rules of the elf "game" disturbing. As digital technology professor Laura Pinto and co-author Selena Nemorin wrote in a paper published by the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives:

[T]he hands-off "play" demanded by the elf is limited to finding (but not touching!) The Elf on the Shelf every morning, and acquiescing to surveillance during waking hours under the elf's watchful eye. The Elf on the Shelf controls all parameters of play, who can do and touch what, and ultimately attempts to dictate the child's behavior outside of time used for play.

The toy, they write, "blurs the line between play time and real life" by dint of the elf's never-ending surveillance (at least during the Christmas season).

As Colleen Leahy writes for Fortune, "The Elf on the Shelf embodies, He sees you when you're sleeping/He knows when you're awake — lines disturbing to the cynical adult or Santa-fearing child." And even more than the Christmas song, the toy raises a thorny issue: What does it teach children when you allow them to believe they are being watched at all times and that this is ultimately for their benefit? At least to Pinto and Nemorin, it means we're setting them up for "dangerous, uncritical acceptance of power structures."

Plus, the elf brings up questions about security within private homes that can even scare some children. "Why inject a note of fear and suspicion into a season and a holiday that are meant to be about love, togetherness, and forgiveness?" Tuttle wrote.

This year has been hard enough. Now more than ever, we need the freedom to enjoy the holidays without the specter of big-government surveillance in our homes — no matter how whimsically packaged.

Tanya Pai contributed to this story.

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Watch: How pop culture turned into popular belief

judgecorp writes: Canonical just announced Ubuntu Core, which uses containers instead of packages. It's the biggest Ubuntu shakeup for 20 years, says Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth, and is based on a tiny core, which will run Docker and other container technology better, quicker and with greater security than other Linux distros. Delivered as alpha code today, it's going to become a supported product, designed to compete with both CoreOS and Red Hat Atomic, the two leading container-friendly Linux approaches. Shuttleworth says it came about because Canonical found it had solved the "cloud" problems (delivering and updating apps and keeping security) by accident — in its work on a mobile version of Ubuntu.

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