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Since 1989 a television program called America's Funniest Home Videos has been sharing examples of finely crafted home video footage with television viewers. 

Vintage home videos, like those found on that famous home video clip show, are crawling out of their VHS slipcovers and into your eyeballs thanks to the video oddities at Memory Hole.

(YouTube Link)

The fine folks at Everything Is Terrible have let their finely honed instincts for bizarre visual fare blossom into the Memory Hole- a collection of remixed retro videos sure to elicit a response.

(YouTube Link)

Whether that response is the viewer yelling WTF?! with a smile or running away from their computer screen in a cold sweat depends on how old your eyeballs are, and how well you handle home video oddities like this disturbing little bathtub ditty:

(YouTube Link)

According to the latest data from wireless research firm RootMetrics, Verizon Wireless still takes the speed crown, despite significant improvements in particular by T-Mobile. The firm's latest study broke the country down into eight geographical regions, then studied the maximum upstream and downstream speeds delivered by each of the big four carriers.

Rootmetrics notes that Verizon's network saw the highest maximum observed downlink speeds when averaged across all eight regions, with a speed of 57.21 Mbps. T-Mobile was in second place at 42.63 Mbps, slightly ahead of AT&T's score of 42.39 Mbps (though with notably better upstream performance).

As is the case with most of these studies, Sprint remains in last place at 22.23 Mbps, despite claims this week by the company's CFO that their Network Vision LTE upgrades are "substantially complete." The report cites the "relatively slow pace" of the company's faster Spark upgrades, which are currently only available in 29 markets.

The full study offers significantly more data and makes for interesting reading, and the RootMetrics website offers some additional location-specific data.
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Mashed potatoes are a tasty addition to any meal, but it can be hard to gauge how much you need to make. There's nothing wrong with saving some leftover spuds if need be and this method makes it easy to store and reheat for later.

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If any of you have photos of you receiving hecka epic Christmas presents in the 90s, feel free to submit

This 1970 Ford Mustang Boss 302 (chassis 0F02G170318) looks nice and is said to be a matching numbers car in good running and driving condition. We always like seeing these with factory steelies and caps, and aside from a Marti report this one further benefits from a new timing chain, gears, cam, lifters and a valve job. Find it here on eBay in Scottsdale, Arizona with reserve not met.

submitted by alphadog3939 [link] [635 comments]

Despite The Pirate Bay's efforts to escape an increasingly hostile environment in Sweden, the torrent site has been taken offline today. TorrentFreak and Swedish paper Dagens Nyheter report this is the result of a police raid as confirmed by Fredrick...

Take-Two chairman and CEO Karl Slatoff today hit out at a petition that persuaded major Australian retailers to pull Grand Theft Auto 5 from their shelves.

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Electronic Arts is giving away Maxis' classic city building game SimCity 2000 for free right now as part of the publisher's "On the House" promotion for Origin.

As EA is quick to point out, there's no catch; players can download the Windows PC version of SimCity 2000 Special Edition for free, as long as they have an Origin account. EA has previously given away free copies of Dragon Age: Origins, Peggle, Wing Commander 3 and other games to warm players up to Origin.

SimCity fans who might not have a copy of SimCity 2000 and don't want to download Origin have an inexpensive alternative; GOG.com is currently selling the game for $2.99, DRM-free.

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These are the 5-pound gummi skulls designed and sold by Vat19 (of disgustingly large 26-pound gummi bear and python fame) and Firebox. The $40-55 skulls comes in blue raspberry, grape, and red cherry, pack over 7,000 calories, and more than enough sugar to give your children's children's grandchildren diabetes. Did you know you can buy real human skulls on eBay? Because you can, they're just expensive. Plus you're not supposed to use them for black magic or whatever, which is fine because I technically only practice brown magic anyways. Keep going for a couple more shots.

This is the Cthulhu Christmas wreath created by Maika Keuben (of Cthulhu Christmas tree fame). It's the perfect wreath to let carolers know they've come to the wrong house to sing at. But by the time they realize it, it will be too late, and the tar and feathers will already be flowing from an open upstairs window. Keep going for a slideshow of the entire build process.

Because what good is a blank canvas if you aren't going to paint it with a bunch of cartoon characters, 60-year old grandfather and prison warden Michael Baxter currently has 203 Simpsons character tattoos, the highlight being this entire back piece. That is some serious dedication. Michael has spent over £6,400 (~$10,025) and 130 hours adding Simpsons characters to his body, with the hopes of getting all major characters and taking away this guy's record for the hardest core Simpsons fan who's not sure how to show it. Keep going for a closeup of the Moe's Tavern section.

Thanks Mike (from Spain)

 

The post The Real Cookie Monster appeared first on Bits and Pieces.

Microsoft is currently fighting a legal battle with the U.S. government, who wants to search the company's servers in Ireland using a U.S. search warrant. An anonymous reader points out a new court filing from Microsoft that argues the U.S. itself would never stand for such reasoning from other governments. Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith writes, If the Government prevails, how can it complain if foreign agents require tech companies to download emails stored in the U.S.? This is a question the Department of Justice hasn’t yet addressed, much less answered. Yet the Golden Rule applies to international relations as well as to other human interaction. In one important sense, the issues at stake are even bigger than this. The Government puts at risk the fundamental privacy rights Americans have valued since the founding of the postal service. This is because it argues that, unlike your letters in the mail, emails you store in the cloud cease to belong exclusively to you. Instead, according to the Government, your emails become the business records of a cloud provider. Because business records have a lower level of legal protection, the Government claims it can use a different and broader legal authority to reach emails stored anywhere in the world.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Through a licensing deal with Microsoft, Train Simulator studio Dovetail Games will release Microsoft Flight Simulator X on Steam on December 18, 2014 "at a spectacular introductory price."

It's sad Microsoft couldn't be bothered to put the beloved title on a widely-used platform like Steam years ago, but that's our Microsoft. Dovetail Games says the new Steam edition of FSX has updated multiplayer functionality and Windows 8.1 support and, hah, there's also promise of "a range of add-ons" arriving next year. That's our DLC-loving Dovetail, right on cue.

Flight Simulator X is one of those all-time greats I couldn't get into partially because I'm inept and partially because it requires investment even if you just want to screw around and crash planes, but don't let that stop you. Plenty of people swear by it and for good reason.

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submitted by iBleeedorange
[link] [142 comments]

Two months ago, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in the case of Integrity Staffing Solutions c. Busk et al., concerning the question of whether employees at a warehouse–an Amazon distribution center, in this case–should be paid for the time that they spend waiting for security checks when they leave work. The Supremes issued a unanimous decision earlier than expected, and they say that security checks should not be considered part of the job at a distribution center.

The original lawsuit was a class action filed against Integrity Staffing, a company that Amazon contracts to recruit and pay warehouse workers. The two lead plaintiffs, employees of Amazon distribution centers in Nevada, claimed that the process of waiting and submitting to a search for stolen goods took half an hour each day when they left work, and that since this was a mandatory part of their jobs, they should be paid for it.

The Supreme Court reversed a federal appeals court decision declaring that workers should receive overtime pay for security screenings. While employees are searched for the benefit of the company (in this case, Amazon), having their belongings X-Rayed is not part of their job duties. While eliminating the screenings could lead to “shrinkage” problems for Amazon, waiting in security lines is not part of the warehouse workers’ duties.

Opinion analysis: No overtime pay for after-work security check [SCOTUSblog]

A man received the following text from his neighbor:
“I am so sorry Bob. I’ve been riddled with guilt and I have to confess.
 
I have been helping myself to your wife, day and night whenever you’re not around.
In fact, more than you. I do not get it at home, but that’s no excuse.
 
I can no longer live with the guilt and I hope you will accept my sincerest apology with my promise that it won’t, ever happen again.”

The man, anguished and betrayed, went into his bedroom, grabbed his gun, and without a word, shot his wife and killed her.

A few moments later, a second text came in: Damn autocorrect! I meant “wifi, not “wife”… !

Thanks Mike (from Spain)

 

The post Text from the neighbor appeared first on Bits and Pieces.