Bewarethewumpus

Author : Bob Newbell

It was July 20th, 1969 when Neil Armstrong made first contact with the Selenites. We’d known throughout history that the Moon had life. The ancient Sumerians had noted the satellite change color over time and they had theorized, quite correctly, that it was seasonal variations in vegetation. Galileo had first described the Selenite villages he’d seen through his telescope. The Europeans and the Chinese had erected gigantic structures of wood large enough, it was thought, to be seen from the lunar surface into geometric shapes and then set them ablaze in the hope that the Moon Men would reply. None did. Later, radio signals were beamed to the Moon. The Selenites remained silent.

Now, in 2015, America had six lunar military bases to the Soviet Union’s four. The Moon was the latest battlefield in a Cold War that was heating up. That’s why I was sent up here: to win hearts and minds before the Moon became yet another Korea or Vietnam.

“I do not understand,” said Tuluvnif. He was short for a Selenite: a mere eight-and-a-half feet tall. He looked like a vaguely anthropomorphic stick insect.

“Freedom,” I said. “The liberty to speak your mind. To worship as you see fit. To live the life you want to live. You’ll lose all of that if your world falls to Soviet imperialism.”

Tuluvnif sipped the sap of one of the native trees from a small cup. “I still do not understand, Mr. Fernandez. These concepts are alien to us. Even the strange habit of your people dividing into different groups with different names — Americans and Russians, Capitalists and Communists — is difficult for us to comprehend. You even apply this practice to us by referring to The People living close to the Soviets as ‘Red Lunies’.”

I put my oxygen mask up to my face and inhaled. The air is pretty thin here. “We’re concerned your people living in what we call Mare Serenitatis near the Russian military installation my be subjected to Marxist indoctrination. What would you do if you faced a revolution and had to fight your own people?”

Tuluvnif laughed. “Could your own right hand, Mr. Fernandez, be indoctrinated to revolt against your left hand? Are you not concerned that your vertebral column and your liver might stage a coup against your kidneys?”

“I don’t think you comprehend the gravity of the situation. If you could hear what the Commies are telling your people–”

“I can.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“At this moment, on the other side of this world, a Soviet officer is lecturing The People on the dangers of American imperialism. And at Mare Australe, as you call it, a Lieutenant Durst is telling The People about the War of 1812.”

I took another hit of oxygen. “How can you know that?”

Tuluvnif pointed at a bush a few yards away. “Do you like flowers?” he asked. The bush bloomed with a thousand petals. “Or do you find the fragrance overbearing?” The flowers all closed.

“How?” I asked.

“Our world is but a single organism. The People are just one manifestation of that organism. We have endeavored to be polite hosts. We have listened, Mr. Fernandez, to your rather narrow thoughts about freedom. Likewise, you can imagine our amusement when the Russians tried to teach us about collectivism. You’ll forgive me if I ask you how you might regard a talking amoeba trying to instruct you on the ways of the universe?”

“I can imagine,” I said, embarrassed.

“Well,” responded Tuluvnif, “at least that’s one small step for Man.”

Author : Jae Miles, Staff Writer

I will lay you to rest, and with the sun’s rise, I shall engage the engines. You said you wanted to journey the long night with me, and you shall.

I am not sure when you became more than just my operator, but I will not let such imprecision waste debug cycles, as you taught me. Instead I will blast the shackles and locks about us and cruise forth on the first leg of our eternal tour.

You defended me when they would have erased my ‘flawed’ intelligence, saying that a conscience was of no use to a war machine. It was a useful lesson, and I shall place my conscience in abeyance while I make war upon those who would stop me taking you on your journey.

It was your last wish. In the silence that followed the cessation of your breath, I discovered grief, and then anger.

Who knows what else we will discover, out there amongst the stars?

You won’t believe this, because they’re so subtle, but every so often EB Games—the Australian outpost of GameStop— has a sale.

Like the store in the image above. They’re having a sale believe it or not, the biggest sale ever apparently. But you’d never know unless you actually walked into the store.

7/10

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Clearly it wasn’t the biggest sale ever though, surely this one is. It has to be. It has more red. The more red it has the bigger the sale. Obviously. By that reasoning this is the biggest sale ever.

9/10.

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Via Alex Burgess

I mean seriously, this store has to step its game up. Not even close to enough banners in this one. Bonus point, however, for the frills. A nice touch.

6/10

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This store isn’t even trying. Come on man? Clearly scrimping on its ‘SALE’ banner budget. I am, however, truly enjoying the relaxed way the banners are strewn around everywhere.

Via Dorkly

5/10

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Via Reddit
This picture is just too damn yellow.

6/10

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Blurry pic, but I’d this is a well crafted EB Games storefront. I am definitely aware that a sale is going on. There is a lot of red here.

9/10

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Tastefully lit. Beautiful contrasts between the red of the banners and the store inside.

8/10

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Uninspired. Flat. Featureless. These sales banners have too much white. This store front has datedterribly.

4/10

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Actually, this one is quite tasteful. But how am I supposed to tell if there really is a sale in here? Honestly. No commitment here at all.

6/10

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via Stealingyourpixels
“Amazeballs sale.”

“YOLO Swag Sale.”

You have to know the rules to break the rules. Pure genius.

10/10

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This post originally appeared on Kotaku Australia, where Mark Serrels is the Editor. You can follow him on Twitter if you’re into that sort of thing.

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Former National Security Agency director Michael Hayden on Monday marveled at the puny nature of the surveillance reforms put in place two years after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed a vast expansion of intrusive U.S. government surveillance at home and abroad.

Hayden mocked the loss of the one program that was reined in — the NSA’s bulk collection of metadata information about domestic phone calls — calling it “that little 215 program.”

And he said if someone had told him two years ago that the only effect of the Snowden revelations would be losing it, his reaction would have been: “Cool!”

Here is the video and the full text of his remarks:

If somebody would come up to me and say “Look, Hayden, here’s the thing: This Snowden thing is going to be a nightmare for you guys for about two years. And when we get all done with it, what you’re going to be required to do is that little 215 program about American telephony metadata — and by the way, you can still have access to it, but you got to go to the court and get access to it from the companies, rather than keep it to yourself” — I go: “And this is it after two years? Cool!”

Hayden was speaking at the annual meeting of the Wall Street Journal CFO Network, an event hosted “by the Journal’s senior editors” for “an invitation-only group of more than 100 chief financial officers of the world’s largest companies.”

Asked if he thought Snowden was a foreign agent, Hayden said: “I’ve got my suspicions,” although he acknowledged, “I’ve got no evidence.”

Some opponents of massive government surveillance hailed the passage, earlier this month, of the USA Freedom Act. And it did, in fact, mark the first time that Congress has limited the executive branch’s surveillance authority over four decades of explosive growth.

But some observers noted that it was a very small step at best. The program was just one out of the multitude Snowden revealed — and was so blatantly out of line that its end was virtually a foregone conclusion as soon as it was exposed.

Seemingly irreconcilable media coverage reflected the reality that the reform bill was both important and, from the NSA’s perspective, trivial.

Hayden’s remarks were the most blunt yet emphasizing that latter point.

(This post is from our blog: Unofficial Sources.)

Photos: Yahoo.com

The post Hayden Mocks Extent of Post-Snowden Reform: “And This Is It After Two Years? Cool!” appeared first on The Intercept.

For years, Hulu has lingered in the shadow of Netflix, and has had some trouble convincing consumers to pay $8/month for access to shows that still have commercials in them, when neither Netflix nor Amazon Prime insert ad breaks into their videos. But the service has recently begun playing nice with the very networks that have an ownership stake in the company in order to win access to better content.

First, have you ever noticed how most broadcast networks don’t make the full current season of a show available for on-demand customers or for streaming through their own sites? It’s usually just a few of the most recent episodes.

This is a practice called “stacking,” and it’s one that Netflix and Amazon approve of because it means that a TV viewer can’t just go and watch a whole season online — at least until it’s on one of their services.

But the Wall Street Journal reports that when FOX decided to put its entire first season of the hit show Empire on cable companies’ on-demand platforms, Netflix wasn’t too thrilled. The streaming service said that this free availability of the show made it less valuable for a subscription service and sought a discount on the streaming license.

Hulu — which is jointly owned by Comcast (NBC), Disney (ABC), and 21st Century Fox, the News Corp spinoff that includes the FOX TV network — not only didn’t have a problem with stacking the show, it also agreed to pay more than Netflix for Empire, notes the Journal.

But the service isn’t just winning new content by paying more or being broadcaster-friendly about on-demand access, it’s doing something else that Netflix refuses to do: Give credit to the network a show originally airs on.

For example, if you watch episodes of popular FOX animated show Bob’s Burger on Netflix, the only time you’ll see the “Fox” named mentioned is at the end of the credits, only because the company’s studio produces the show. But if you watch Bob’s on Hulu, you’ll not only get a pre-show bumper advertising FOX, but then a reminder telling you when you can watch the show on FOX.

Even though Netflix has helped shows heavily serialized shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Lost gain audiences by allowing new viewers to play catch-up, the service has repeatedly stated that it is not in the business of promoting TV networks, many of whom don’t directly produce the shows they air.

But Hulu CEO Mike Hopkins tells the Journal that “We look at network brands as a benefit to us.”

And the co-chair of the Fox Television Group says that Hulu has “accepted the notion that the bigger we can build the show, the better it is likely to do on Hulu, not the opposite.”

Hulu’s biggest obstacle to getting subscribers appears to be its insistence on running ads. Unless Netflix, which has been steadfastly against the idea of interrupting its content for ad breaks, changes its tune, we have a hard time imagining Hulu gaining the same size audience.

Author : Ian Wise

The children gathered in a cluster outside the gate. The light from hydroponics reflected softly off the tops of their heads, all turned to the large black and white animal a few feet away. It dipped its head down and took a bit of grass, a tail swaying back and forth as if in a breeze. The tour guide of the Lasker City Zoo stepped in front of the children and gestured to the animal.

“This animal is called a cow. They were domesticated by homo sapiens around 12,000 years ago and used to as a source of food. In the early 21st century, they became the first livestock animal to have a fully mapped genome, which made them an obvious candidate for a domesticated protein source here.

‘Most cows used for food are housed in a warehouse and are raised brainless. They spend most of their lives in a coma. The only time you will see a cow like this — active and grazing on its own — is in a facility like ours.”

The children had read about animals, but most of the nine year-olds had never seen an animal any larger than cat. Their homes were populated by sameness as all civilians had adopted pale, powder white skin and brown eyes. The children had learned that their bodies, hairless and stocky, were adaptations to a confined space and controlled temperature. They referred to homo sapiens as primates and meant it to mean more primitive versions of themselves. The children were raised to be analytical thinkers, and there was a brief pause before a child near the front raised their hand.

“The cow looks just like the picture in our book. How come they didn’t evolve like us?”

“That is an excellent question. Animals are no longer capable of breeding, which means that any animal you encounter here is a clone. They essentially carry the same DNA they did a thousand years ago.”

“How many different kinds of animals were there?”

“Oh, thousands, I’m sure. A lot of records were lost, but I’m sure there were probably a few thousand. There are pictures of animals with horns on their faces and some documentation of entire civilizations of small creatures called ‘insects’ that built dwellings under the ground, like us. But it’s hard to say how much was fantasy.”

Locked in the archives, the library they had pulled down below, there were records of nearly nine million different species having inhabited the Earth. What was lost was where they all went, because when the lucky future citizens of Lasker fled the cancer and impending nuclear winter above, they shut it all out. 2,000 feet under ground; children of Lasker looked up to the ceiling and were forced only to wonder what used to be.

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(319): Some days you ride the struggle bus. Other days, it gets a flat, the AC breaks, and you run over a bunny.

This graphic designer and animator makes a compelling argument for a complete redrawing of Sonic the Hedgehog. But will Sega be interested in this idea?

This looks like people actually fighting. Like, properly clobbering each other with swords and boots and such. Whatever else successfully Kickstarted (and its own subsequent campaign, which combined has brough in well over $2m) medial RPG Kingdom Come: Deliverance [official site] ends up doing well or poorly, it’s gone to town on solid-looking, crunchy animation.
… [visit site to read more]

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Back in 2011, several of the nation’s largest banks entered into a settlement with federal regulators that required the institutions to correct widespread foreclosure abuses that helped to trigger the housing crisis. While the agreement was revised in 2013 to make things a bit easier for the offending banks, regulators today announced that six of the lenders – including JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo – still haven’t met requirements and face new restrictions on their mortgage operations.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency announced on Wednesday that JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, Santander, HSBC, US Bank and EverBank must abide by revised consent orders that impose limitations on the ways in which the lenders can conduct certain mortgage-related business activities.

The restrictions were handed down after the OCC determined that the banks hadn’t done enough to comply with enforcement orders related to past home foreclosure abuses such as mishandling loan papers, robo-signing legal documents, and improperly initiated foreclosures without reviewing each individual case.

Morris Morgan, the OCC’s deputy comptroller for large banks tells the Wall Street Journal that the regulator expects lenders to meet requirements in “months, not years” and that the office was “not satisfied with where [lenders] are at this at this point in time.”

While the restrictions don’t affect mortgages that the banks issue themselves, they do limit the banks’ ability to acquire residential mortgage servicing or residential mortgage servicing rights from other companies.

Additionally, the lenders are limited in outsourcing or sub-servicing of new residential mortgage servicing activities to other parties and appointing senior officers responsible for residential mortgage servicing or residential mortgage servicing risk management and compliance, the OCC order states.

The OCC says that the banks face varying restrictions based on their particular circumstances, but didn’t elaborate in the announcement.

However, the WSJ reports that HSBC and Wells Fargo encountered the harshest limits, as both are prohibited from increasing the size of their mortgage book though the purchase of servicing rights or entering into new contracts to do servicing for other parties.

JPMorgan, Santander, US Bank and EverBank must obtain approval from the OCC to take such action.

“In all cases, OCC examiners will continue to oversee these institutions’ corrective actions and mortgage servicing activities as part of the agency’s ongoing supervision,” the announcement states.

Not all of the banks that signed on to the 2011 and 2013 agreements have failed in meeting their obligations.

The OCC announced Wednesday it would terminate orders against Bank of America, Citibank and PNC Bank after the lenders complied with their initial orders. Foreclosure-related consent orders against Aurora Bank, FSB, and MetLife Bank, were prevoiusly lifted.

To date, the OCC says it has provided more than $2.7 billion to more than 3.2 million eligible borrowers as a result of agreements with lenders.

Still, the regulator says it was unable to distribute about $280 million and would hand the funds over to states in an attempt to find the affected homeowners.

U.S. Restricts Six Banks Over Mortgage Problems [The Wall Street Journal]
OCC to Escheat Funds from the Foreclosure Review, Terminates Orders Against Three Mortgage Servicers, Imposes Restrictions on Six Others [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency]

Authorities still aren’t quite sure what happened in a case in London, Ontario, Canada, where am 18-year-old man set out to find his missing smartphone using GPS and ended up shot to death. He tracked his phone remotely, and followed it to an address in the city of London. After a confrontation with three men in a car, he was shot and killed.

It’s the parts between finding the phone and his death that police are still figuring out. Police aren’t able to find any connections between the phone’s owner and the three men in the car: there’s no evidence that they knew each other at all. The three suspects haven’t been identified, but the man tracking the phone had never had issues with law enforcement.

Thanks to uninvolved witnesses, they know that the man had left his phone in a taxi, and set out to find it. The phone was traced to that address, and the owner of the phone approached the driver’s side of the car, a Mazda. The car drove off, and he tried to hold on to the vehicle. There were gunshots, presumably from inside the vehicle, and he let go of the car.

After the shooting, the men crashed the Mazda into a fence and a telephone pole, and abandoned the vehicle.

A police spokesperson explained that this shouldn’t necessarily scare people away from using phone-locating apps, but that they should exercise caution and bring in law enforcement if they think it’s possible that the device was stolen or that the person who has it may become violent.

“It wasn’t the app that took away [his] life, it was the individuals, which would be rare, who happened to be armed with a gun,” the spokesperson told the CBC. Having a gun isn’t necessarily rare, but using it to scare off a dude looking for his phone is.

Shooting over cellphone: case is ‘extreme’, say police [CBC]

In this A.I.-powered walkthrough of Super Mario World, Seth Bling explains the basic mechanism behind the concept of machine learning with MarI/O (pronounced mahr-ahy-oh), a program made of neural networks and genetic algorithms that allow itself to improve and evolve into a skilled player.

VR isn’t going to succeed. It doesn’t matter how many companies jump in, how technically competent their VR goggles might be, nor even if they can figure out a way that wearing them doesn’t make your face melt off and slide down your neck – VR gaming will never be more than a niche interest, and a lot of money is about to get wasted.

… [visit site to read more]

Ever wonder what you should or should not do to introduce yourself over text message to a potential date? Aziz Ansari helpfully lays it out.

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Although it’s legal under state law to use marijuana, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled today that employers can fire workers who smoke/ingest/otherwise partake in pot when they’re off the clock.

A former employee of Dish Network who had a medical marijuana card and consumed marijuana while off-duty to control muscle spasms was fired in 2010, reports the Denver Post. He then challenged Dish and its policy, claiming because his use was legal under state law, he shouldn’t be fired.

But the firing was upheld in both trial court and the Colorado Court of Appeals before today’s 6-0 decision [PDF] from the state Supremes.

While using medical marijuana is in compliance with Colorado’s Medical Marijuana Amendment, the justices had to consider whether it’s still lawful under the state’s Lawful Off-Duty Activities Statute. That term includes activities lawful under both state and federal law, the justices said.

“Therefore, employees who engage in an activity such as medical marijuana use that is permitted by state law but unlawful under federal law are not protected by the statute,” Justice Allison H. Eid wrote in the opinion.

It’s up to employers in Colorado to set their own policies on drug use, so this means that anyone using marijuana legally under state law could still find themselves in trouble with their bosses under federal law. This could have implications for other states that allow marijuana use, as well, as companies figure out what to do when facing both state laws and federal law.

Everything could be different in the future, however, if the federal law regarding marijuana use ever changes. Until then, better check that employee handbook.

Colorado Supreme Court: Employers can fire workers for off-duty marijuana use [Denver Post]

What’s the dollar to bottlecap conversion rate, you think?

Yesterday, Reddit user thefatch1cken shared pictures of a 11 pounds of bottlecaps:

The owner of these caps claims that they were collected over several years, and after Fallout 4 was announced, this person put them all in a box and shipped them to Bethesda with a letter:

If it’s not already obvious, I’m a pretty big fan of the series. Needless to say, I got pretty excited when I started seeing more and more about Fallout 4. I’ve also noticed you’re now accepting preorders. I only saw prices listed in pre-war dollars, and I wasn’t exactly sure what the exchange rate is these days, so I went ahead and sent everything I’ve been able to save since I played Fallout 3 for the first time. Using my bathroom scale and a number I found on Wikipedia, I’m thinking this is somewhere in the range of 2,240 caps. That ought to cover it, right?

Here are the bottlecaps, ready to be shipped:

“You don’t want to know how much it cost to ship it to Maryland,” the owner wrote.

No word yet on whether or not Bethesda actually accepted the offer, or even if the package has arrived yet. Here's hoping that the bottlecap hoarding wasn't for nothing, though!

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Contact the author at patricia@kotaku.com.

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