Markku.lempinen

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Fallout, Fallout 2 and Fallout Tactics are free on GOG right now through Saturday, December 14 at 9AM ET. All this free Fallout is in celebration of GOG's 2013 DRM-Free Winter Sale, which offers more than 600 games for at least 50 percent off through December 29 at 9AM ET.

GOG has roped in a few well-known YouTube personalities to promote daily sales of up to 75 percent off, and GOG users can vote on bundles they wish to see 80 percent off the following day. GOG members are also able to choose one of three daily mystery deals. All purchases are covered by GOG's 30-day money-back guarantee, which allows players to get their money back if a game doesn't run or has game-breaking bugs.

The Fallout series is officially changing owners - from Interplay to Bethesda - on January 1, and GOG will have to remove Fallout, Fallout 2 and Fallout Tactics from its library. But they're free now, so go on and grab 'em.

Get three free Fallouts today in GOG's Winter Sale originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 12 Dec 2013 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This weekend, the trailer for No Man's Sky lit up the indie gaming scene. Why is it so special? Because the developer, Hello Games, appears to have completely nailed three things. First, it looks like a straight-up fun space sim. Second, it has a gorgeous look inspired by paintings by legendary science fiction artist Chris Foss. Thirdly, most excitingly, the whole game world is procedurally-generated. A sandbox universe of unpredictable, explorable wonder, but with top-knotch graphics and a decisive sense of style.

Indie Statik warns about the traditional problem with procedurally-generated games, going all the way back to Elite: an underlying sameness to all the apparent variety.

Procedural generation is great for natural features--caves, trees, geography--but is often a poor substitute for design when it comes to man-made things like cities, buildings and dungeons. I'm going to be there on day one with No Man's Sky, though.

Duncan, the good fellow at Brick Tease, has recreated the classic, brilliant, no-hold-barred car-chase-in-a-mall sequence from The Blues Brothers (a movie I watched once or twice a day in tenth grade) with Lego. Then, just to show you how closely he hewed to the original, he released a side-by-side comparison. And if that wasn't enough, he produced a 12-minute documentary showing how he did it. (via IO9)

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In the city of Miami Gardens, outside of Miami, FL, the police use aggressive campaigns of stop-and-frisk and absurd arrests to bolster their records, to the great detriment of the African-American majority who live there. For example, a young man named Earl Sampson has been stopped by Miami Gardens police 258 times; they've searched him more than 100 times; and they've arrested him for trespassing 56 times. He's never been convicted of anything apart from simple possession of small amounts of marijuana.

Sampson's trespassing arrests occurred at his place of work, a convenience store called the 207 Quickstop; Sampson was repeatedly arrested for trespassing there, over the loud objections of his employer, Alex Saleh, who owns the store, and who explained to police that Sampson was not trespassing in his store.

When Saleh gathered video evidence that showed the police had falsified their arrest reports and violated the rights of his customers, he was targeted for police harassment, including falsified vehicle stops and personal threats. Saleh is suing for federal civil rights violations, alleging that Miami Gardens police "routinely, under the direction of the city’s top leaders, directed its officers to conduct racial profiling, illegal stops and searches and other activities to cover up illegal misconduct."

Saleh, whose store is tucked between a public park and working-class neighborhoods, contends that Miami Gardens police officers have repeatedly used racial slurs to refer to his customers and treat most of them like they are hardened criminals.

“Police line them up and tell them to put their hands against the wall. I started asking myself ‘Is this normal?’ I just kept thinking police can’t do this,’’ Saleh said.

Last year, Saleh, armed with a cache of videos, filed an internal affairs complaint about the arrests at his store. From that point, he said, police officers became even more aggressive.

One evening, shortly after he had complained a second time, a squadron of six uniformed Miami Gardens police officers marched into the store, he says. They lined up, shoulder to shoulder, their arms crossed in front of them, blocking two grocery aisles.

“Can I help you?” Saleh recalls asking. It was an entire police detail, known as the department’s Rapid Action Deployment (RAD) squad, whom he had come to know from their frequent arrest sweeps. One went to use the restroom, and five of them stood silently for a full 10 minutes. Then they all marched out.

In Miami Gardens, store video catches cops in the act [Julie K. Brown/Miami Herald]

(via Sean Bonner)

Matthew says: "Polish artist Michal Krasnopolski has created a series of minimalist movie posters for classic films. The posters are based on a very simple grid consisting of 'a circle and two diagonals inscribed in a square.' I'm ashamed to admit I don't quite get Pulp Fiction or North By Northwest."

The North By Northwest poster is showing a compass pointing NXNW, but I, too, am not sure what the Pulp Fiction poster is depicting. In any case, Krasnopolski's series is brilliant!

Minimalist movie posters

The New York Times has endorsed the Trans-Pacific Partnership; a trade deal negotiated in utmost secrecy, without public participation, whose text is still not public. From leaks, we know that TPP wasn't just anti-democratic in its process -- it also contains numerous anti-democratic provisions that allow private offshore companies to overturn domestic law, especially laws that allow for free speech and privacy online. TPP is slated for fast-tracking through Congress, minimizing any scrutiny of a deal negotiated behind closed doors before it is turned into law. From what we've seen of TPP, it recapitulates all the worst elements of ACTA and then some. The Electronic Frontier Foundation needs you to write to your lawmaker demanding full and public debate on TPP.

The paper's statement emphasizes how the Obama administration strives to make TPP's policies “an example for the rest of the world to follow.” But if that's the case, then it's all the more important that the agreement be published immediately. Such a significant body of international law regulating digital policy must not be negotiated without proper, informed public debate. The secrecy of the process itself ensures that only some private interests will be represented at the expense of others. In addition, the U.S. Trade Representative's history of pushing forth extreme copyright enforcement policies through other trade agreements gives little assurance that users' rights will be considered in the TPP.

Trade representatives are working to finalize TPP negotiations by the end of the year. Negotiators are scheduled to meet in Salt Lake City next week to negotiate outstanding issues in this agreement, including provisions on liability for Internet Service Providers and anti-circumvention measures over DRM. Following that, trade delegates are seeking to finalize and sign this agreement in December in a ministerial meeting in Singapore.

It's unfortunate that news outlets are giving little coverage to TPP, when media attention could have a major impact on how the US and the other 11 nations draft digital policy. But public media coverage is precisely the sort of accountability that official secrecy thwarts. Instead of endorsing an agreement the public can't read, a responsible paper would condemn the secrecy involved. And if the Times has seen the text and knows what's contained in the TPP, then they have a responsibility to publish the text immediately and expose the US government's back room dealings.

Al Jazeera used the Freedom of Information Act to get the NSA to disclose its talking points for public speaking events. The least surprising of these is the cheap invocation of 9/11 as an excuse for any wrongdoing, phrased thus: "I much prefer to be here today explaining these programs, than explaining another 9/11 event that we were not able to prevent." It's the Giuliani Gambit, and it's as repellent as it is obvious.

Under the subheading “Sound Bites That Resonate,” the document suggests the statement “I much prefer to be here today explaining these programs, than explaining another 9/11 event that we were not able to prevent.”

NSA head Gen. Keith Alexander used a slightly different version of that statement when he testified before Congress on June 18 in defense of the agency’s surveillance programs.

Asked to comment on the document, NSA media representative Vanee M. Vines pointed Al Jazeera to Alexander’s congressional testimony on Tuesday, and said the agency had no further comment. In keeping with the themes listed in the talking points, the NSA head told legislators that “it is much more important for this country that we defend this nation and take the beatings than it is to give up a program that would result in this nation being attacked.”

Revealed: NSA pushed 9/11 as key 'sound bite' to justify surveillance [Jason Leopold/Al Jazeera America]

(via Reddit)

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Slate's Joseph Lapin suggests a way of making the Simpsons "relevant" again: The Characters Should Start Getting Older

[Killing off a character is] just a temporary fix: It will not restore the show’s reputation as innovative or groundbreaking. To reclaim that type of territory, and reestablish its hold on the American zeitgeist, The Simpsons needs to think much bigger. So here is what I’m proposing: The Simpsons should break free from its static biological present. The characters need to age. Yes, a cartoon, a 2-D world where the laws of nature are constructed in a writers’ room, should suddenly be forced to carry, like Homer chained to the “Stone of Shame,” the same burden all humans are forced to carry: growing older.

No. It's already done. They should just end the show itself, before it really starts to stink.

An accidentally published, unredacted document from a lawsuit against the TSA reveals that the Taking Shoes Away people believe that "terrorist threat groups present in the Homeland are not known to be actively plotting against civil aviation targets or airports." That is to say, there is no identifiable risk to America's skies -- and all of business with shoes and pornoscanners and horrible, abusive incidents involving toddlers, people with mental disabilities, cancer survivors, rape survivors, and the whole business of treating travellers like presumptive terrorists is all to prevent a problem that, to all intents and purposes, doesn't exist.

...The Court actually failed to seal the unredacted brief, and they have published in full the leaked document. The document — as of yet still available to the public through the PACER court records system — is properly labeled as “sealed” by the clerk’s office, meaning they received and understood my instructions that the document was not to be public, but neglected to hide the attachment from public view.

The information revealed, which I may now comment on since a third party has made it publicly available, is devastating to the TSA’s argument that virtually strip-searching the public using its $1B nude body scanner fleet, as well as literally putting their hands in the pants of travelers during full-body pat-downs, is necessary to prevent airplanes from dropping out of the sky at the hands of terrorists. In 2011, the year after the scanners became primary screening, TSA intelligence officials concluded that “terrorist threat groups present in the Homeland are not known to be actively plotting against civil aviation targets or airports.”

The TSA has a lot of explaining to do, both to members of Congress and to the general public, all of whom were misled as to the threat we face and the justification for the most intrusive searches ever performed on the public at large in the United States in the history of this great nation. The terrorists that the TSA has made the country fear, it admits, do not actually exist.

@TSA Admits In Leaked Doc: No Evidence of Terrorist Plots Against Aviation in US

UK Prime Minister David Cameron has vowed to punish the Guardian for publishing leaks about the campaigns of lawless, reckless spying by GCHQ and the NSA. He's asked Parliament to find a legal rubric for cracking down on newspapers that publish stories of compelling public-interest such as the Snowden leaks. He made a bizarre accusation that the Guardian's cooperation in the destruction of its computers (made under dire threat) was an admission of guilt.

In the end, what Cameron is doing is making it clear that the UK can have no free press. It can only have stenographers. When the government threatens to have you investigated for reporting on the excesses of government, you've created massive chilling effects, and guaranteed much greater corruption and abuse, as you've wiped out a key factor in keeping those things in check. Cameron's statements reflect poorly on the wider UK and its supposed belief in free speech and a free press.

UK Prime Minister Urges Investigation Of The Guardian Over Snowden Leaks; There Shall Be No Free Press [Mike Masnick/Techdirt]

(Image: The Guardian's Redesign - Titlepiece, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from gigijin's photostream)

Jean-Michel good to hear from you my fiend !

 

Finished this one yesterday . It was a fun build and the old Tamiya kit has a good fit and a descent interior for the age of the kit .Tamiya paints were used for the exterior .Extra RW 61 rounds were contributed by our friend Tony Lee .

 

 

Here's the bad news: the World Wide Web Consortium is going ahead with its plan to add DRM to HTML5, setting the stage for browsers that are designed to disobey their owners and to keep secrets from them so they can't be forced to do as they're told. Here's the (much) worse news: the decision to go forward with the project of standardizing DRM for the Web came from Tim Berners-Lee himself, who seems to have bought into the lie that Hollywood will abandon the Web and move somewhere else (AOL?) if they don't get to redesign the open Internet to suit their latest profit-maximization scheme.

Danny O'Brien from the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains the wrangle at the W3C and predicts that, now that it's kosher to contemplate locking up browsers against their owners, we'll see every kind of control-freakery come out of the woodwork, from flags that prevent "View Source" to restricting embedded fonts to preventing image downloading to Javascript that you can't save and run offline. Indeed, some of this stuff is already underway at W3C, spurred into existence by a huge shift in the Web from open platform to a place where DRM-hobbled browsers are "in-scope" for the WC3.

We pointed out that EME would by no means be the last "protected content" proposal to be put forward for the W3C's consideration. EME is exclusively concerned with video content, because EME's primary advocate, Netflix, is still required to wrap some of its film and TV offerings in DRM as part of its legacy contracts with Hollywood. But there are plenty of other rightsholders beyond Hollywood who would like to impose controls on how their content is consumed.

Just five years ago, font companies tried to demand DRM-like standards for embedded Web fonts. These Web typography wars fizzled out without the adoption of these restrictions, but now that such technical restrictions are clearly "in scope," why wouldn't typographers come back with an argument for new limits on what browsers can do?

Indeed, within a few weeks of EME hitting the headlines, a community group within W3C formed around the idea of locking away Web code, so that Web applications could only be executed but not examined online. Static image creators such as photographers are eager for the W3C to help lock down embedded images. Shortly after our Tokyo discussions, another group proposed their new W3C use-case: "protecting" content that had been saved locally from a Web page from being accessed without further restrictions. Meanwhile, publishers have advocated that HTML textual content should have DRM features for many years.

Lowering Your Standards: DRM and the Future of the W3C

"You're a lawyer. You know u can't tweet stuff like that and expect to get on an @easyJet flight."

— Mark Leiser (@mleiser) September 24, 2013

Mark Leiser, a law professor who writes a tech law column for The Drum, says he was denied boarding on an Easyjet flight after he tweeted critical remarks about the airline (he said that a delayed flight had caused a soldier on his flight to miss a connection and that Easyjet had refused to help). According to Leiser, a member of staff told him, "You're not allowed to talk about Easyjet like that and then expect to get on a flight."

“I put out a tweet about it and then when I got in the queue, and a member of staff approached me and asked if she could have a quick word," Leiser explained. "She said she understood I’d said something on social media about easyJet and then told me they were not allowing me to board the flight.

“I said you’re kidding me; I asked where that had come from and she told me I should know I’m not allowed to do that. I was stunned. I told her I didn’t really understand what she was telling me and she said: ‘You’re not allowed to talk about easyJet like that and then expect to get on a flight’.”

“She then asked me to step out of the queue and repeated that she was not letting me on the flight. I told her she’d better get somebody down to discuss this and she told me the manager was on his way to speak to me. Then she told said she couldn’t believe I thought what I’d done was appropriate. I was just sitting there in disbelief.

“So the the manager arrived and told me that based on my tweet they couldn’t let me board the flight because I wasn’t allowed to do that and I should know better. He then called over to the girl on the counter to instruct my bags be taken off the flight. It wasn’t until I asked him if he’d heard of free speech that the tone changed. He asked me if I was a lawyer and I told him I taught law at Strathclyde.

"He quickly had a word with his staff and then told me I’d better get on the flight because they were waiting for me. If I hadn’t had my ID badge I don’t think he’d have let me on the flight."

EasyJet under fire after claims it refused to let The Drum columnist Mark Leiser on board for sending critical tweet [Angela Haggerty/The Drum]

(via Digg)

This dramatic video from Bot and Dolly shows off their robotic camera systems by projection mapping a 3D animation onto two screens as they're waved around by one and a half ton robotic arms. In July, Boing Boing co-sponsored the Robot Film Festival held in their incredible studios. There I learned that while this film appears to be shot from a hand-held camera, it's probably made with a camera on a robot arm following a recorded path made by motion tracking a hand-held camera to a tenth-of-a-millimeter precision. Bot & Dolly had no comment on whether or not that's the case in this film.

I don’t think I’d want to be on the wrong side of this one. It’s not often that I see a helicopter design that looks original, but this one by flickr user piratesxlovexrum is awesome. It’s aggressive and bold, and looks vaguely Soviet-inspired. And I have to point out that great bit of photography.

The Wet Lord bleeds.

Mr. Ballmer and Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, were walking across the law firm’s lobby, when Mr. Ballmer — absorbed in reading a document from Nokia related to the deal — tripped on a glass coffee table. Letting out a loud shriek, Mr. Ballmer fell to floor, hit his head and began bleeding above his eyebrow. Executives from Nokia sequestered in a conference room elsewhere in the offices were baffled by the sound, wondering whether Mr. Ballmer was reacting badly to a counter-proposal they had made. His security detail patched him up, and Mr. Ballmer resumed negotiations.

There's something strangely convincing about the idea Ballmer would literally shriek at the sight of an undesirable proposal.

Or, more accurately, you want to buy several, along with the pain elemental, and then attach them to a mobile over a baby's crib, thus making that child impervious to any fear once the colonization of Mars begins within its lifetime.

Other option: Dangle it from the ceiling over the bed of anybody who played Doom growing up and enjoy the cacophonous variety of screaming they provide.

So many options. Purchase either or both at the Bethesda store.

Of course you want this Cacodemon plushy originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 05 Sep 2013 21:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Good morning and happy Labor Day! I hope you all are enjoying  a nice day off. Well, I finished this kit last night and got pictures this morning. Not the greatest kit, a lot of fit issues and lack of detail really hamper construction. What can you expect from a kit that is probably about 30 years old. We really could use a newer model, alas, unless the new movies have some Star Destroyers in them this may not come to pass. Anyway enough of my griping, Continuing to fuel my resurging passion for Star Wars, here is my latest addition, an Imperial class Star Destroyer.

Hope you all like it, please let me know what you think!

-Stephen

 

I love the 287, did you use parts from relevant model kits. I have the Huma kit on my shopping list.

This is my most usual so far. Huma's 72nd Fw Triebflugel built last year.

 

 

 

It’s no secret that I love Monty Python, so it’s really no surprise that someone like Rifiröfi would be able to successfully appeal to my vanity in order to share his own LEGO Monty Python creations. The thing is, Rifiröfi LEGO recreations of key scenes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail are really quite good — wonderful custom minifigures presented with well-built scenes in pseudo-official box art.

Here’s The Rabbit of Caerbannog, with its “nasty, big, pointy teeth!”

Fortunately, the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch is at hand to assist King Arthur and his brave knights.

But one of my favorite scenes is when *SPOILER* Sir Bedevere establishes that Connie Booth’s character is a witch because she weighs the same as a duck.

Okay, fine, I can’t pick a favorite scene. Here’s the Black Knight.

Finally, no depiction of Monty Python and the Holy Grail would be complete without the French knights and Arthur’s assault on their castle.

Check out all of Rifiröfi’s LEGO Monty Python scenes on Flickr. And since I’m in a mildly self-aggrandizing mood, you can take a trip in the wayback machine with me and visit my own LEGO Monty Python photoset on Flickr. (For the record, I think Rifiröfi’s scenes are way better than mine — some of the earliest LEGO photos I posted online back in 2004.)

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Flickrite Obedient Machine recently posted this adorable little version of Han Solo’s blaster (technically the DL-44 heavy blaster pistol), chock full of interesting parts use. The brown carrot as the handle is especially nice.

MSP! built Babylon 5.

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund -- tireless free speech crusaders who fight for comics' legitimacy -- commissioned a great educational resource about comics' role in literacy called Raising a Reader (PDF).

This new resource is written by Dr. Meryl Jaffe, with an introduction by three-time Newbery Award honoree Jennifer L. Holm (Babymouse, Squish) and art by Eisner Award winner Raina Telgemeier (Smile, Drama) and Eisner Award nominee Matthew Holm (Babymouse, Squish). Raising A Reader! was made possible by a grant from the Gaiman Foundation.

You can get print-ready digital files from the Foundation, and they'll have print copies at at San Diego Comic-Con.

CBLDF Releases RAISING A READER, a Resource for Parents and Educators