I'm going to pretend that grooveshark is immune to this die-off.
walterbyrd writes "Streaming services are ailing. Pandora, the giant of its class and the survivor at 13 years old, is waging an ugly war to pay artists and labels less in order to stay afloat. Spotify, in spite of 6 million paid users and 18 million subscribers who humor some ads in their stream, has yet to turn a profit. Rhapsody axed 15% of its workforce right as Apple's iTunes Radio hit the scene. On-demand competitor Rdio just opted for layoffs too, in order to move into a 'scalable business model.' Did no one wonder about that business-model bit in the beginning? Meanwhile, Turntable.fm, a comparatively tiny competitor with what should have been viral DNA, just pulled the plug on its virtual jam sessions this week—and it just might be the canary in the coal mine."
The letter E, the influential vowel and one of the most frequently used letters in the English language, died yesterday. The vowel was 2,800 years old.
McGruber writes "The Wall Street Journal's Michael Totty shares some stereotype-shattering statistics about IT workers: Most of them don't have college degrees in computer science, technology, engineering or math. About a third come to IT with degrees in business, social sciences or other nontechnical fields, while more than 40% of computer support specialists and a third of computer systems administrators don't have a college degree at all! The analysis is based upon two job categories as defined by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics: network and computer systems administrator, and computer support specialist."
I remember this book getting passed around on the bus. creepy shit.
flickr user: guy schmidt
Because Hollywood execs want to make money and ensure that this generation of children will never sleep again, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark — a tome containing tales penned by a demon from hell — will be turned into a movie. Okay, fine, the stories are really urban legends and scary stories collected by author Alvin Schwartz. He is probably not a demon, or even part demon, but he singlehandedly traumatized many children with his book and two sequels.
Now, some 32 years after the first Scary Stories book was published, CBS films "has sprung for a pitch from Saw writers Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan" to adapt Schwartz's book, Deadline's Jen Yamato reports. Yamato also has some rough details about the plot:
I’m told it was a competitive bidding for the project, which will see Melton and Dunstan adapt some of the Scary short stories into a screenplay about a group of outcast kids who stand up to their fears to save their town when nightmares come to life.
That got us to thinking about the stories which stories ate our dreams and twisted them into nightmares. And here are some picks that we hope the movie doesn't ignore:
"The Red Spot"
Arachnophobia? Check. Hypochondria? Yup. Boils? Mmhmm. Add those three together and a girl named Ruth and you have a story which made every young kid imagine that every rash, bump, mole, or zit on their cheek was actually a spider's nest waiting to erupt.
"The Girl with the Green Ribbon"
This story forever ruined women's neckwear for me.
The real reason why my coworker Elspeth Reeve always pauses before entering a full elevator isn't because she hates being crowded. It's because she wants to make sure that she won't plummet to her death.
"Harold"
A story that makes you glad you never had to work on a farm:
"Sam's New Pet"
Oh Sam, your parents are really terrible.
If all else fails, Melton and Dunstan should just create a 4-minute slideshow of illustrations by Stephen Gammell, the mastermind who seared this creepy lady (among other things) into our brains:
what Lana's been up to... not sure we need to ref the bible. could be more of a snow white and romeo&juliet mashup, with famous people as dwarves...? Still watching since it is so long, but i have to say I was really into her work on the first two albums, and am looking forward to the new one, 'ultraviolence'. also there are strippers. and she says 'ungirth' and 'thence' in the spoken word sections. ha!
This is another one of those "inflated-headline-gets-you-to-click-and-read" where the huge sounding controversy never really surfaces. I did enjoy the potential of additional subtlety to the selfish-gene meme. And I'll again quote Hitchens (apparently erroneously quoting Keynes... http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2011/02/11/keynes-he-didnt-say-half-of-what-he-said-or-did-he/) and say, "when the facts change, I change my mind. And you sir?" I find my understanding of the selfish gene mechanisms can accommodate gene accommodation. and you sir?
A couple of years ago, at a massive conference of neuroscientists — 35,000 attendees, scores of sessions going at any given time — I wandered into a talk that I thought would be about consciousness but proved (wrong room) to be about grasshoppers and locusts. At the front of the room, a bug-obsessed neuroscientist named [...]
sfcrazy writes "The creator of the most sought after 'Android' of the world has been secretly working on creating a robotics division within Google. The search engine giant has acquired over seven robotics companies recently to create the robotics unit which is being headed by none other than Andy Rubin himself. Andy made the disclosure in an interview given to the New York Times." Their initial goal is to automate the woefully manual process of electronics manufacturing.
Third Position writes "Many of us yearn for a return to one golden age or another. But there's a community of bloggers taking the idea to an extreme: they want to turn the dial way back to the days before the French Revolution. Neoreactionaries believe that while technology and capitalism have advanced humanity over the past couple centuries, democracy has actually done more harm than good. They propose a return to old-fashioned gender roles, social order and monarchy."
In a perfect world, each map projection would be judged on its own merit and applied to the job that suits it best. But perfect worlds are boring. So why not put two projections in a good ol' eye-gouging, tooth-chipping, back-alley fight for supremacy?
An anonymous reader writes with news of a device built by a company in the U.K. which uses pulses of electromagnetic energy to disrupt the electronic systems of modern cars, causing them to shut down and cut the engine. Here's a description of how it works: "At one end of a disused runway, E2V assembled a varied collection of second-hand cars and motorbikes in order to test the prototype against a range of vehicles. In demonstrations seen by the BBC a car drove towards the device at about 15mph (24km/h). As the vehicle entered the range of the RF Safe-stop, its dashboard warning lights and dials behaved erratically, the engine stopped and the car rolled gently to a halt. Digital audio and video recording devices in the vehicle were also affected.''It's a small radar transmitter,' said Andy Wood, product manager for the machine. 'The RF [radio frequency] is pulsed from the unit just as it would be in radar, it couples into the wiring in the car and that disrupts and confuses the electronics in the car causing the engine to stall.'"
for BjornG- now you can mash the charger right in there.
TheRealHocusLocus writes "Extreme bandwidth is nice, intelligent power management is cool... but folks should be spilling into the streets in thankful praise that the next generation miniature USB connector will fit either way. All told — just how many intricate miracle devices have been scrapped in their prime — because a tiny USB port was mangled? For millennia untold chimpanzees and people have been poking termite mounds with round sticks. I for one am glad to see round stick technology make its way into consumer electronics. Death to the trapezoid, bring back the rectangle! So... since we're on roll here... how many other tiny annoyances that lead to big fails are out there?" The new connector will be smaller too.
The latest version of Android contains a baffling list of more than 1,400 English words that Google has quietly deemed inappropriate. Here's a look some of the more bizarre examples that Google's predictive algorithm has been instructed to ignore.
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Industry Tap reports that there is a place so quiet you can hear your heart beat, your lungs breathe and your stomach digest. It's the anechoic chamber at Orfield Labs in Minnesota where 3ft of sound-proofing fiberglass wedges and insulated steel and concrete absorbs 99.99% of sound, making it the quietest place in the world. 'When it's quiet, ears will adapt,' says the company's founder and president, Steven Orfield. 'The quieter the room, the more things you hear. You'll hear your heart beating, sometimes you can hear your lungs, hear your stomach gurgling loudly. In the anechoic chamber, you become the sound.' The chamber is used by a multitude of manufacturers, to test how loud their products are and the space normally rents for $300 to $400 an hour. 'It's used for formal product testing, for research into the sound of different things — heart valves, the sound of the display of a cellphone, the sound of a switch on a car dashboard.' But the strangest thing about the chamber is that sensory deprivation makes the room extremely disorienting, and people can rarely stay in the dark space for long. As the minutes tick by in absolute quiet, the human mind begins to lose its grip, causing test subjects to experience visual and aural hallucinations. 'We challenge people to sit in the chamber in the dark — one reporter stayed in there for 45 minutes,' says Orfield who says even he can't stand the quiet for more than about 30 minutes. Nasa uses a similar chamber to test its astronauts putting them in a water-filled tank inside the room to see 'how long it takes before hallucinations take place and whether they could work through it.'"
Evan Booth wondered if it was possible for terrorists to craft deadly weapons using only items for sale at the duty free shops and newsstands beyond the TSA checkpoints.
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Economist Edward Hadas writes in the NYT that developers of bitcoin are trying to show that money can be successfully privatized but money that is not issued by governments is always doomed to failure because money is inevitably a tool of the state. 'Bitcoin exemplifies some of the problems of private money,' says Hadas. 'Its value is uncertain, its legal status is unclear, and it could easily become valueless if users lose faith.' Besides, if bitcoin ever really started to take off, governments would either ban it or take over the system says Hadas. The authorities might be motivated by a genuine concern about the stability of a shadow monetary system or they might act out of self-preservation because tax evasion would be too easy in a parallel economy. 'Part of the interest in virtual currencies like bitcoin is that their anonymity can provide a convenient cloak for criminal activity. Part is technological — this is a cool idea. And part is speculative — gamblers bet that bitcoin's value will increase,' concludes Hadas. 'Truly private money is an inferior alternative to the money that comes with the backing of a political authority. After all, no bank or bitcoin-emitter can be as public-minded as a government, and no private power can raise taxes or pass laws to unwind monetary excesses.'" Could be there's something good about money that can't be manipulated by law. Some people at least think there's plenty of value in Bitcoin and similar currencies, despite the risks. And those risks aren't at present probably aren't enough to comfort the unforunate Welsh fellow who (HT to reader judgecorp) who "has realised he threw out a hard drive containing 7500 bitcoins, worth £4 million at today's prices. it is now under four feet of garbage in a landfill site the size of a football pitch."
James Franco and Seth Rogen are close. We know this because they just made a video comparing their love to the love of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian.
And what bond in the universe is greater than theirs? None, I say. Last week, West released the video for "Bound 2," his latest single from Yeezus, in which he dresses like a lumberjack and makes sweet, simulated love with Kardashian, his wife and the mother of his child, while she's naked in his lap. They ride a motorcycle together. There's clip art playing on a green screen in the background.
So thankfully, Rogen and Franco have come along with "Bound 3," the parody video this song richly deserves. Franco plays the Kanye part, all brooding and stunting in multiple layers of flannel, while Rogen is relegated to the vogueing Kardashian role, wearing nothing more than his impressive back hair. They match the real video nearly shot-for-shot, and even come together for an intimate smooch at the end.
ericgoldman writes "People often feel passionately about fonts, but government decisions shouldn't depend on what font people choose for their written submissions. In Massachusetts, a sex offender overturned the decision of a hearing officer after it was determined that (among other possible biases) the hearing officer posted to Facebook that he 'can't trust someone who drafts a letter in arial font!' and 'I might be biased. I think arial is inappropriate for most things.' This is just the latest example of how social media rants by government workers are causing problems for the workers — and the people they deal with."
theodp writes " I hope my father dies soon," Dilbert creator Scott Adams wrote Saturday in a frustrated, angry, and poignant blog post. 'My father, age 86, is on the final approach to the long dirt nap (to use his own phrase). His mind is 98% gone, and all he has left is hours or possibly months of hideous unpleasantness in a hospital bed. I'll spare you the details, but it's as close to a living Hell as you can get. If my dad were a cat, we would have put him to sleep long ago. And not once would we have looked back and thought too soon. Because it's not too soon. It's far too late. His smallish estate pays about $8,000 per month to keep him in this state of perpetual suffering. Rarely has money been so poorly spent. I'd like to proactively end his suffering and let him go out with some dignity. But my government says I can't make that decision. Neither can his doctors. So, for all practical purposes, the government is torturing my father until he dies.' Adams also had harsh words for those who would oppose assisted suicide, 'I don't want anyone to misconstrue this post as satire or exaggeration. So I'll reiterate. If you have acted, or plan to act, in a way that keeps doctor-assisted suicide illegal, I see you as an accomplice in torturing my father, and perhaps me as well someday. I want you to die a painful death, and soon. And I'd be happy to tell you the same thing to your face.' His father passed a few hours after Adams wrote his screed. Challenged later by the SF Chronicle's Debra J. Saunders, an opponent of assisted suicide, Adams stood firm on his earlier words. So, can Adams succeed in convincing the U.S. where Dr. Jack failed?"
Nearly twelve years after the fall of the Taliban government, Afghanistan may reintroduce public stoning as a punishment for adultery, according to a draft of a new penal code leaked to Human Rights Watch.
The Guardian and the Telegraph both independently verified that public stoning is, in fact, included in the new penal code draft authored by a group led by Afghanistan's Justice Ministry. "Men and women who commit adultery shall be punished based on the circumstances to one of the following punishments: lashing, stoning [to death]," article 21 in the draft states, according to the Guardian. The Telegraph explains that "Unmarried adulterers should be subject to 100 lashes. If they are married, the punishment is stoning in a public place."
As Time points out, Afghanistan's current penal system has been in place since 1976, but does not outline public stoning as a potential punishment. Still, the practice was common for adulterers at the height of Taliban rule up until 2001 and a potent symbol of the regime's brutality.
But this new draft would make the punishment official, in writing, and surely anger human rights groups and the many countries who have supported Afghanistan over the transition from Taliban rule. If Afghanistan adopts this new law, it would likely be a huge blow against President Hamid Karzai, who already has a questionablehistory supporting Afghan women. “It is absolutely shocking that 12 years after the fall of the Taliban government, the Karzai administration might bring back stoning as a punishment," Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “President Karzai needs to demonstrate at least a basic commitment to human rights and reject this proposal out of hand.”
If you've seen the recent viral video that involves three little girls turning their stereotypically girly toys into an awesome Rube Goldberg machine ? while a version of the Beastie Boys song "Girls" plays in the background ? then you probably know about the company behind it: Goldiblox, a company who manufactures toys to help teach young girls about engineering principles and inspire the female makers of tomorrow.
Nearly 50 years after its release, Bob Dylan's classic "Like a Rolling Stone" has finally got an official music video, and it's pretty much the best thing ever.
USA Today: Thousands of Venezuelans lined up outside the country’s equivalent of Best Buy, a chain of electronics stores known as Daka, hoping for a bargain after the socialist government forced the company to charge customers “fair” prices.
…Members of Venezuela’s National Guard, some of whom carried assault rifles, kept order at the stores as bargain hunters rushed to get inside.
“I want a Sony plasma television for the house,” said Amanda Lisboa, 34, a business administrator, who had waited seven hours already outside one Caracas store. “It’s going to be so cheap!”
…The president, who took over from Hugo Chávez in April 2013, appeared on state television Friday calling for the “occupation” of the chain, which employs some 500 staff.
“This is for the good of the nation,” Maduro said. “Leave nothing on the shelves, nothing in the warehouses … Let nothing remain in stock!”
…Daka’s store managers, according to Maduro, have been arrested and are being held by the country’s security services. Neither Daka nor the government responded to requests for comment.
…when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law–men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims–then money becomes its creators’ avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket.
flickr user: guy schmidt 
A couple of years ago, at a massive conference of neuroscientists — 35,000 attendees, scores of sessions going at any given time — I wandered into a talk that I thought would be about consciousness but proved (wrong room) to be about grasshoppers and locusts. At the front of the room, a bug-obsessed neuroscientist named [...]
