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submitted by BigJ76 [link] [309 comments]

Exploding Kittens, the cat-themed card game, has become the most backed Kickstarter campaign in the history of the service. As of this morning the game's three-man team, which includes the creator of the popular web comic The Oatmeal, has been promised money by more than 108,000 people.

But the campaign is far from over. There are still 22 days left, and if the momentum keeps up Exploding Kittens could become the most funded Kickstarter ever. Kicktraq, a service that plots the funding trends for ongoing Kickstarters, shows they have the potential to earn more than $14 million. That would put them ahead of the Ouya game console, the Pebble smartwatch, and a high-tech portable cooler called Coolest Cooler.

Designer Elan Lee told Polygon...

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If you look at anything closely, you'll begin to see things you never saw before. That's why it's super fun to look at really common objects up close because it reveals a whole 'nother side, the world is both beautifully detailed and disgusting from up close. Pyanek did that in the series Amazing Worlds Within Our World.

Read more...

submitted by TrypeWritter [link] [872 comments]

Who says the Russians, increasingly isolated by the west (Europe and the US threatened over the past 24 hours to escalate sanctions yet again) and increasingly more welcome by China, India and the rest of the non-western world...

... don't have a sense of humor? Days after the speaker of the Russian Duma, Sergei Naryshkin, faced scathing criticism of Russia's
annexation of Crimean peninsula when he spoke at the Parliament Assembly
of Europe, he has come up with a novel suggestion when he asked a committee to study a proposal to condemn the reunification of Germany in 1990.

The logic: (unlike in Crimea) there was no public referendum to merge the two nations, which in turn goes to the legality of the most powerful nation in Europe, a nation, which however as the following maps demonstrate, is still quite divided in most aspects despite over 25 years of unity:

More from DPA:

Russian lawmakers said Wednesday that they will discuss a proposal to condemn West Germany‘s "annexation" of East Germany.

 

Sergei Naryshkin, the speaker of the State Duma, ordered the lower house of parliament‘s international affairs committee to look into the proposal from a Communist Party deputy, Russian news agencies reported.

 

The deputy, Nikolai Ivanov, said that the committee should prepare a declaration that condemns the annexation of the German Democratic Republic by West Germany. "Other than in Crimea, no public referendum was held in the GDR," Ivanov said according to the Duma‘s homepage.

 

Moscow made Crimea a part of the Russian Federation in March, after a controversial referendum that was condemned by the West for being held under the presence of Russian troops.

 

Naryshkin has said that it would be wrong to compare German unification with Crimea.

 

"By the logic of those who call (Crimea) an annexation, you can easily say that the Federal Republic of Germany annexed the German Democratic Republic," Naryshkin said on Sunday. He added that Russia was against such logic, the RIA Novosti state news agency reported.

 

East and West Germany unified in 1990, one year after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The unification was explicitly approved by the Soviet Union and the Western allied powers who had overseen Germany‘s partition during the Cold War.

And, if that fails, there is always the matter of the Confederate South...

submitted by 6ftTurkey
[link] [52 comments]

Etsy seller Knickerocker brought us these  cute, frilly cupcake panties. Makes your butt look..(Read...)

submitted by RhllorTheLordOfLight [link] [286 comments]

Facebook has often been regarded as one of the best places to work in the tech industry. After all, their interns make $25,000 more than the average citizen. And famously, employees on Glassdoor voted Facebook the No. 1 best company to work for overall.

Not bad, right?

Wrong, according to some Facebook employees, both past and present, in a number of open threads on Quora.

Various engineers, software developers, and anonymous sources from Facebook's front lines divulge the details about the worst things about working for the social network.

To be clear, we're not saying these complaints represent the average experience. These are just the opinions of a small number of individuals. Every large company has its detractors, including Facebook. Here's what they have to say.

"For six weeks out of the year, I'm on 24/7 on-call duty."

During on-call duty, engineers are responsible for keeping the service up and running, come what may. "For those weeks I don't leave town on the weekend; make especially sure not to have 'one too many' at any social gatherings I attend; and most importantly, carry and immediately respond to a charged phone where I can be reached 24/7, including leaving the ringer on on the nightstand as I sleep." - Keith Adams, Facebook engineer.

"The wall does not exist at Facebook."

"At most companies, you put up a wall between a work personality and a personal one, which ends up with a professional workspace," says a Facebook engineer who chose to remain anonymous on Quora. Because the culture of Facebook implicitly encourages employees to "be themselves," the company lacks the "professionalism" found at other firms, the engineer says.

"Majority of the management staff has little idea or focus on creating a team."

Facebook's "make an impact" mantra makes the entire company's workforce focus only on personal wins, not on the success of the team as a whole, according to one anonymous former Facebook employee. "There is very little value placed on a manager that has the ability to motivate the masses. This emphasis is also placed on the manager to be an individual contributor as well. The fact that you have people reporting to you seems to be just be something there, rather than your main responsibility," this employee says.

"While I would love to say that my manager(s) were the only ones who struggled with leadership, it's simply not true. Majority of the leaders there do. They are so focused on themselves and what should be tertiary issues of politics and who likes who, little time is focused on the people."

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Even the classiest people at Walmart are still bizarre and interesting individuals…

Georgia

The post Top Of The Morning appeared first on People Of Walmart.

The National Film Board of Canada produced this video (originally on film) in 1949 to show how igloos are made in far North Canada.

Using hard-packed snow, two Inuit men skillfully build an igloo as an overnight shelter. The operation takes roughly 90 minutes while their sled dogs patiently wait outside.

The video shows how the packed snow is used as building blocks. All the snow is taken from inside the circle, so the floor is much deeper than might be expected. By cutting the first row into a sloping shape, an upward spiral can be created. Interestingly, the right handed builder works counter-clockwise while a left handed one would work clockwise.

Nomadic Inuits would make igloos as temporary homes. They could take as little as 40 minutes to construct, using only a knife. When the home gets dirty or hunting becomes scarce, they can easily move on and rebuild.

[h/t: TheKidShouldSeeThis.com]

As Sears Holdings, the parent company of Kmart and Sears, tries to save itself from impending doom, the company is closing a number of its weaker stores. In the current round of cuts, Kmart stores are heavily affected, but the company wants to assure residents of one California town that in spite of empty shelves, their local Kmart store is not about to close.

A round of Kmart store closings happened around the holidays, so you can’t blame fans of the store in Blythe, CA for speculating that the store was doomed when they saw empty shelves. Shoppers’ speculation that the store was about to close makes sense, because a chain wouldn’t ship fresh merchandise to a store that was about to have its entire contents or moved to other nearby stores.

Sears says that it isn’t going anywhere right now, though. “We remain committed to serving our members and customers in the Palo Verde Valley area,” a company spokesperson told the Palo Verde Valley Times. That’s good, because the store is in a relatively remote part of the state, where the next nearest discount stores are more than 45 miles away and are actually in Arizona.

To point out the painfully obvious, if Kmart can’t make it in an environment where the nearest Walmart is more than 45 miles away, then the discount chain has no chance of surviving in general. The empty shelves may have been due to the company’s known problems with suppliers at the moment. It could also be that the isolated store was so successful over the holidays the corporate bosses didn’t even expect it.

ALERT: Blythe Kmart NOT closing [Palo Verde Valley Times]

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submitted by weexpectedTHIS [link] [232 comments]

We have digital documents that have become just as accepted as paperwork — from contracts to concert tickets — so why not that holy grail of wheeled freedom for the minor set, the driver’s license? Delaware wants to start the technological trend of having digital driver’s licenses, with the state legislature adopting a resolution to start looking into the process.

The Legislature adopted a resolution last week that directs the Delaware Division of Motor Vehicles to study and consider digital licenses, reports DelawareOnline.com.

“We’d like to go first,” said Jennifer Cohan, director of the Delaware DMV says. “If it works for Delaware, then it will be a new option for Delaware citizens to show proof of driver’s license and identification.”

Other states are working on it as well: Iowa is crafting a pilot program with the vendor it shares with Delaware and 40 other states. That app will launch in 2016.

Drivers would still have a choice of a hard plastic license as well, with the digital version being an additional option.

To gain access to the information in the app — including birthdate, name, address, signature and photo, like on hard licenses — you’d have to provide facial, fingerprint or voice recognition as well as a personal-identification code.

Not everyone is on board, as some security experts warn that it’s unclear what information would be shared where and with whom.

“Would you really want to put an app on your phone that the government wrote?” Chase Cotton, professor of practice in the University of Delaware’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, told the news site.

“They’re probably not going to do anything bad, but most people have a lot of private information on their phones,” he said, adding that digital IDs are probably going to happy anyway.

Others in the police force have questions about traffic stops — what if the driver’s phone has lost power, and how can an officer take the digital license away after a drunken driving arrest if they can’t take the phone?

Iowa’s answer is a mobile app for law enforcement phones that would read digital driver’s license, so the phone would never have to change hands, Andrea Henry, director of strategic communications for the Iowa Department of Transportation told DelawareOnline.

Delaware eyes digital driver’s licenses [DelawareOnline.com]

Look, it isn't easy making GIFs on the computer without the right applications, so it's giving us a headache thinking of the work that goes into each of these graffiti-turned-GIFs by an artist named INSA. Especially the one you see above, because the...