D G

Take a look at that fried chicken sandwich/French fry/potato chip you’re about to eat. It could soon cost you more money to reach deep-fried satisfaction, as the crops necessary to make the vegetable oil used by many companies to fry your favorite foods to a golden crisp are struggling in Canada.

The canola seeds grown in Canada’s Prairie provinces that are then crushed to make the oil used by McDonald’s, KFC, Taco Bell and Frito-Lay are suffering after a dry spell this year, reports Bloomberg, making it harder for farmers to produce enough oilseeds for the second year in a row.

“We’ve just been missing every rain,” one grower from Saskatchewan told Bloomberg.

Canola has had issues lately in Canada, with prices spiking 18% from a four-year low last September. Other crops like wheat, barley and lentils are also having issues because of the lack of moisture.

And it could get worse — the price of canola, or rapeseed as it’s also called, could climb even more if the dry spell lasts into June, hitting the highest price since May 2014, one expert explains.

When the companies that buy the oil needed for deep fryers have to pay more, it’s very likely that the extra cost could be passed on to the consumer, so cherish the cheapness you’re enjoying every time you bite into a golden, salty piece of fried potato delight while you can.

Deep-Frying Anything Gets More Expensive as Canada Soil Goes Dry [Bloomberg]

submitted by HallucinoJER [link] [247 comments]

submitted by SentrixHD [link] [322 comments]

On Sunday, a dispute about a parking lot escalated into a dispute in a parking at the Waco Twin Peaks Bar And Grill. When all was said and done, the “true biker shootout” left 9 bikers dead, 18 bikers stabbed and/or shot, and 170 bikers arrested. 

Sorting out precisely what went wrong when a “loose confederation” of biker gangs gathered at the Texas “breastaurant” to discuss matters of mutual interest has so far been challenging, but authorities believe they may have gotten to the bottom of the matter. 

Apparently, the event got off to a rather inauspicious start when the Cossacks showed up uninvited. After that, one biker accidentally rolled over another biker’s shoe, at which point the battle was officially joined, proving once again that it doesn’t take much to turn a biker gang annual meeting into a shootout. 

ABC has more:

A deadly weekend shootout involving rival motorcycle gangs apparently began with a parking dispute and someone running over a gang member's foot, police said Tuesday.

 

Waco police Sgt. W. Patrick Swanton said an uninvited group appeared for Sunday's meeting of a loose confederation of biker gangs at a restaurant.

 

One man was injured when a vehicle rolled over his foot. That caused a dispute that continued inside the restaurant, where fighting and then shooting began, before the melee spilled back outside, Swanton said.

 

Authorities offered few details. It was not clear which gang was responsible for running over the biker's foot or which gang the aggrieved biker belonged to...

 

Preliminary autopsy results showed all nine of the dead were killed by gunshots. Many were hit in the head, neck, chest or torso. Most of the men were in their 40s, but they ranged in age from 27 to 65, according to reports released by a McLennan County justice of the peace.

 

Police have acknowledged firing on armed bikers, but it was unclear how many of the dead were shot by gang members and how many were shot by officers.

One thing about biker gang meetings is that coming unarmed could be the last mistake you’ll ever make. Additionally, there's no way to know, going in, how far things might escalate, so it's best to prepare for everything, with hand-to-hand combat being the base case but acknowledging, if only to yourself, that there are a variety of bear case scenarios, including, but certainly not limited to: a bat fight, knive-throwing, a motorcycle chain battle, or ultimately, a true biker shootout. 

Given the above, we weren't surprised to learn that the number of weapons found hidden at Twin Peaks exceeded the number of bikers present. 

Via The Waco Police Dept. Facebook page:

Weapons Count Update

 

I have asked the Crime Scene Supervisor to give me a more firm count of weapons discovered from the Twin Peaks Restaurant so far. The first number I gave this morning was a best guess estimate from looking at the overall crime scene and was over estimated. My apologies for the confusion and I should have waited to release a more specific count not estimate.

 

The crime scene officers specifically stopped at my request to count weapons and have now been able to determine that count and it is 318 and still counting. We do expect the numbers to continue to rise. Please understand this is an extremely complex crime scene and they specifically took the time out to be able to give me a more accurate account late this afternoon. Those weapons include clubs, knifes, brass knuckles, firearms, and chains with padlocks attached to them intended and used as weapons.

 

The earlier estimate was an attempt to give me a count and it was initially believed the number was higher than we now know. We stand corrected at 318 and counting, with the crime scene still being processed. The weapons appear to have been discarded as Officers arrived and some hastily hidden. The have been found in sacks of chips, stuffed between bags of flour, stuffed into the bench seating, hidden in shelves, thrown into trash cans, placed in the kitchen stoves, discarded on floors and even so far as to attempt to flush a handgun down a commode. An Ak-47 was found in a vehicle parked in the parking lot as well as body armor.

 

Weapon breakdown so far is this:

118 Handguns

1 Ak-47

157 Knives

 

43 others

With that, we can offer the following speculative reconstruction of the incident:

The Cossacks didn’t get an invite to the Twin Peaks meeting but decided to crash the party. When they arrived in the parking lot, tempers flared and in the heat of the moment, someone inadvertently ran over someone else’s foot. At that point, all present simultaneously realized that hostilities were imminent, prompting a mad rush for everything from automatic weapons to chains with padlocks.

The rest, as they say, is biker gang history. 

*  *  *

submitted by Dkeskin
[link] [63 comments]

Because waste elimination is perceived as somewhat undignified, we sometimes choose to ignore the idea that culturally or historically important areas could actually harbor ... poop. And lots of it. These five notable locations happen to be contaminated by plenty of misplaced fecal matter.

1. Mount Everest

With an average of 700 climbers every season and exactly zero janitors, the world’s most formidable mountain has been stockpiling number twos for decades: By one estimate, more than 26,000 pounds of it is deposited every year. The problem has become so acute that in March 2015, Nepal announced Everest was practically a biohazard and reminded visitors to carry all of their trash back down with them. While considerate, this will not address the existing threat: In a terrifying prediction, one geologist told Think Progress that climate change could mean all the poo buried in melting snow might one day resurface.  

2. The Streets of San Francisco

The undulating, roller-coaster layout of San Francisco’s streets has made them possibly the country’s most famous urban roadway. So why poop on it? The city is home to over 7000 homeless people who have only limited access to bathroom facilities, meaning their bowel movements are often left in the street. There were nearly 1000 "reports of human excrement" in June 2014 alone, according to the city. One resident even created a poop map, which allows people to type in an address and assess their chances of stepping in it. 

3. The Landgate Arch

Rye, East Sussex, England is home to a magnificent medieval structure dating back to the 14th century: the roofless Landgate Arch, built in the time of King Edward III. When district representatives checked in on it in early 2015, they found they could barely budge the doors. That’s because 25 tons of pigeon poop had accumulated thanks to the open-air design. An environmental clean-up crew was dispatched to vacuum the waste out, with lead scrubber Mike Walker offering a sober assessment: "It was like walking on a giant chocolate cake." 

4. The National Mall

Washington, D.C.'s reflective pool attracts a number of tourists, both human and fowl—but it’s the latter that has ridiculously poor public manners. Canada geese frequent the Mall, each one leaving up to two or three pounds of poop on the grounds every day and turning what should be a casual stroll into a fecal landmine. Park services have recently taken to walking border collies on the premises, which corral the geese into other, poop-friendly areas.  

5. The Playboy Mansion

In a 2006 tell-all titled Bunny Tales, former Hefner Girlfriend Izabella St. James claimed life inside the fabled Playboy Mansion had a distinct odor. With a number of dogs roaming the halls, she alleged it was not uncommon to step in their waste or witness Hugh Hefner scrambling to retrieve poos from dogs that weren’t yet housebroken. When a stained bedroom carpet was replaced, St. James bemoaned that it was a patterned dark blue, making it even harder to spot the piles. Hefner would later issue a denial of some of her claims while confirming others. He did not address whether houseguests have to check the bottom of their shoes.

NVIDIA's driver team is at it again. The company drew outrage from the PC enthusiast community, for developing drivers that prevent GPU overclocking on its GeForce GTX 900M series notebook GPUs, in February 2015, with the introduction of its GeForce 347.29 WHQL drivers, blaming it on a "bug" that allowed overclocking on previous drivers. When called-out and under pressure from the community, it re-enabled overclocking on these chips, with the following GeForce 347.88 drivers, with an equally lame quasi-apology.

Hoping that nobody would notice, the company seems to have reinstated the overclocking block, or "clock-block" as the community is calling it; with its R350 and R352 drivers, such as the GeForce 352.86. Enthusiasts in notebook-centric communities such as NotebookReview, discovered that the latest GeForce drivers prevent overclocking if it reads a "lock-bit" in the video BIOS. Below are the two excuses the company exhausted by means of mutual-contradiction.

This is an Instructable created by SFHandyman detailing how to make your own gummi LEGO bricks and minifigs. It's not too complicated. Will they taste better than real LEGO bricks? No, nothing is ever better than the real thing. "You do realize you're talking about eating plastic." Eating plastic is what made me the man I am today. Plastic, mud, bugs, and lead paint chips. Lead paint used to be my favorite kind of chips even more than Cool Ranch Doritos and I used to like Cool Ranch Doritos a LOT. Keep going for a video of the finished product.

Long before Google and eons ahead of Bing, Lycos was the Internet's search engine. In fact, the company was one of the first to implement spidered web indexing. And while Lycos hasn't made many headlines lately, the company still maintains an impress...

submitted by TheSevenSaveUs [link] [162 comments]

“This guy” is Herrmann, and he’d really be more accurately described as a legend. We found him hitchhiking up AZ-209 and gave him a lift back to his camp; a Geo Metro loaded with living gear and a little kitchen that’d he’s been wandering around America in for a very long time.

Read more...

(Photo: Christian Lukhaup/ZooKeeys)

This is the Cherax pulcher. The latter term is related to the Latin adjective for “beautiful.” And indeed it is!

This delicious-looking crawfish has been only recently classified. A German scientist named Christian Lukhaup found it in Hoa Creek, West Papua, Indonesia. It grows up to 12 centimeters long and is noted for its coat of many colors, including shades of blue and purple.There are at least 19 known Cherax species. This one has shown up at local markets since about the year 2000.

I’ll take 5 pounds—extra spicy, please.

-via The Soul Is Bone

I have a ton of these shirts left so I’m lowering the price to $10… 

Available here

submitted by HugsAndCuddles [link] [337 comments]

submitted by 1Voice1Life [link] [159 comments]

submitted by Local-Lynx [link] [1334 comments]

Every month Google receives dozens of millions of DMCA takedown requests from copyright holders, most of which are directed at its search engine.

However, with Google Fiber being rolled out in more cities, notices targeting allegedly pirating Internet subscribers are becoming more common as well.

These include regular takedown notices but also the more controversial settlement demands sent by companies such as Rightscorp and CEG TEK.

Instead of merely alerting subscribers that their connections have been used to share copyright infringing material, these notices serve as automated fines, offering subscribers settlements ranging from $20 to $300.

The scheme uses the standard DMCA takedown process which means that the copyright holder doesn’t have to go to court or even know who the recipient is. In fact, the affected subscriber is often not the person who shared the pirated file.

To protect customers against these practices many ISPs including Comcast, Verizon and AT&T have chosen not to forward settlement demands. However, information received by TF shows that Google does take part.

Over the past week we have seen settlement demands from Rightscorp and CEG TEK which were sent to Google Fiber customers. In an email, Google forwards the notice with an additional warning that repeated violations may result in a permanent disconnection.

“Repeated violations of our Terms of Service may result in remedial action being taken against your Google Fiber account, up to and including possible termination of your service,” Google Fiber writes.

Below Google’s message is the notification with the settlement demand, which in this example was sent on behalf of music licensing outfit BMG. In the notice, the subscriber is warned over possible legal action if the dispute is not settled.

“BMG will pursue every available remedy including injunctions and recovery of attorney’s fees, costs and any and all other damages which are incurred by BMG as a result of any action that is commenced against you,” the notice reads.

Facing such threatening language many subscribers are inclined to pay up, which led some to accuse the senders of harassment and abuse. In addition, several legal experts have spoken out against this use of the DMCA takedown process.

Mitch Stoltz, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) previously told us that Internet providers should carefully review what they’re forwarding to their users. Under U.S. law they are not required to forward DMCA notices and forwarding these automated fines may not be in the best interest of consumers.

“In the U.S., ISPs don’t have any legal obligation to forward infringement notices in their entirety. An ISP that cares about protecting its customers from abuse should strip out demands for money before forwarding infringement notices. Many do this,” Stoltz said.

According to Stoltz these settlement demands are often misleading or inaccurate, suggesting that account holders are responsible for all use of their Internet connections.

“The problem with notices demanding money from ISP subscribers is that they’re often misleading. They often give the impression that the person whose name is on the ISP bill is legally responsible for all infringement that might happen on the Internet connection, which is simply not true,” he notes.

While Google is certainly not the only ISP that forwards these notices it is the biggest name involved. TF asked Google why they have decided to forward the notices in their entirely but unfortunately the company did not respond to our request for comment.

Update: Google responded to our inquiry, more details here.

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

Sugar is basically ubiquitous and it looks like it could be used to make morphine, which is a refined form of heroin. Recent research shows that a genetically modified strain of yeast, when exposed to sugar, could be used to ferment the opioid. Yes, ...

submitted by jabbapage
[link] [42 comments]

submitted by KevlarYarmulke
[link] [71 comments]