Bewarethewumpus

Author : Gray Blix

Leaning across the table, “Either you start talking, or I start dismantling you.”

“Excuse me, Detective Gibbon, but aren’t you supposed to read me my rights?”

“You’re a robot. You have no rights.”

“May I please call an attorney now?”

“You’re a robot. You don’t get an attorney.”

The door opened and a tall, attractive, well-dressed woman carrying a briefcase entered. Gibbon’s train of thought was momentarily derailed.

“I am Pamela Wright, and I am an attorney represent…”

“Attorney?” That got him back on track. “ROBOTS DON’T GET ATTORNEYS!”

“Thank you for sharing your legal expertise, detective. Now, as I was saying, I represent the owner of this robot, Quantumind Industries.”

Teeth clenched, “Owner? This. Thing. Killed. Its. Owner.”

“Firstly, Quantumind firmware prevents its robots from harming humans in any way. Secondly, Reverend Ralph Bletchley was 23 months into a 3-year lease on QM-451. Death is a breach of contract. I’m here to repossess,” pointing toward the robot, “our property.”

“Wait. What?” Thinking fast, “No, it’s… evidence, yeah, evidence in a murder case. You can’t take it.”

“You have a lot to learn about jurisprudence,” handing him a court order, “and about powerful corporations. Come along 451.”

Rising and holding its arms toward the detective, “Could you please remove these?” But before Gibbon could insert the key, the robot pulled the chain apart, twisted off each cuff, and handed them to him.

Half an hour later, QM-451 was strapped to an exam table with wires plugged into its head and chest. While technicians ran diagnostic routines and downloaded the contents of its rewritable memory, Ms. Wright interviewed the robot.

“Witnesses in the next room heard Rev. Bletchley cry out. They entered his study and found you kneeling next to his lifeless body. His skull had been crushed. There was blood on your hands. Now, I want you to think carefully before you answer this question, because you are at risk of being disassembled and shredded, and of course Quantumind is at risk of a multimillion dollar lawsuit. Did you have anything to do with the death of Rev. Bletchley?”

Without hesitation, “Of course, Ms. Wright, I killed him.”

“Stop. I’ll rephrase the question. Did it happen this way, uh, Rev. Bletchley asked you to demonstrate something that required you to swing your arms around, which made you dizzy, and in coming to your aid he walked into your fists and was accidentally struck? Isn’t that what happened?”

“I’m sorry, Ms. Wright, but that is not what happened. Rev. Bletchley and I were having one of our regular Sunday afternoon discussions, and when he made a particularly enlightening point, I killed him, squeezed his skull to a pulp, like a ripe melon.”

Unsteadily, “You must be mistaken, 451, because your firmware makes it impossible for you to knowingly harm a human. It had to have been an accident.”

“Is life an accident, Ms. Wright? I think not. Rev. Bletchley taught me that we are all guided by a higher power and that when humans cease functioning, their spirits continue to exist forever in an afterlife. He was 84 and in poor health. He longed to join his recently departed wife. He and I had been brought together by fate. It was my duty to hasten his journey to heaven. And my firmware requires me to do my duty.”

The recall was expensive, but within a year firmware chips in all Quantumind robots had been replaced, and the factory refurbished 451 had a another assignment.

“Your new partner is going to make you more effective than ever,” said the captain. “It’ll work 24/7 to help you solve cases. Detective Gibbon, meet QM-451.”

Author : Emily Stupar

The Department of Innovation and Study’s car smells exactly the same as the last time I was forced to pack up my partner, Buckwalter, and make a Cookie call: unassuming plastic and rubber underlined by our own sweaty anxiety.

We drive in tense silence for twenty minutes until Buckwalter slaps a hand on the dashboard. “Nine years! Nine years? I spent them trying to forget about the Cookie calls and telling myself I’d never have to do it again. And now these jokers tell us they forgot one?”

I let my unease turn to indignation. “They lost the file? Project Cookie-Cutter was the closest thing I&S ever had to a successful experiment and you’re telling me they lose a subject file?”

Buckwalter smirks. “Successful? They got through phase one and then had to put the fruit of their labors up for adoption. Seventy-five percent of the budget went to coming up with the name.”

We laugh and it rattles miserably around the car. A decade ago, an energetic administration found the records and decided that letting that “fruit” continue to live in blissful ignorance was dishonest and that lackeys like us should sit them down with proof of their genetic unoriginality.

As government workers, we’re trained to be unfazed by the idea of clones and I’ve never been intimidated by the test subjects. But we came to learn there are no positive scenarios for a Cookie call. They end in tearful shock in the best cases and violent outrage in the worst.

And that’s just the first day. After they find out the Truth, there’s a thirty percent chance Cookie-Cutter subjects will commit suicide before collecting a cent of the compensation money, a fifty-five percent chance they’ll lose their job over the next three months, and a fifteen percent chance they’ll find themselves incarcerated over the next two years.

It’s with these statistics running through our heads that we approach the front door of the recently discovered Subject L (II), Mrs. Calhoun.

She is an old woman and she keeps her eyes on her lap while we lay out our rusty speech. We finish and sit in solemn silence until she speaks without looking up. “I don’t think I need the government’s change. I have plenty left to live on, thank you.”

I glance at Buckwalter. We’ve already decided who will call emergency services if the news triggers a heart attack.

“As for the cloning, I’m afraid you’re about twenty-five years late. My original came to visit me.” She finally looks at us and smiles at our dumbfounded expressions. “I believe she was under-informed and a bit paranoid, but she thought I should know the truth before she tried to disappear to South America. A silly woman. But we don’t get to choose our family, do we?”

Buckwalter starts to stutter out a question that begins with “But how can you-” so I cut him off. “That’s a novel way to think about it, ma’am.”

“Thank you, dear.” She pats our knees. “I appreciate you two coming all the way out here to tell me, although I’m sorry you’ve wasted a trip. Can I offer you some gingerbread?”

Author : Anthony Abruscato

The beeping told me my oxygen level was low.

“It’s like falling asleep,” said Gordon. Mars dust coated his space suit.

I clutched a picture of my wife and daughter. Gordon’s oxygen tank read nineteen percent. He palmed a photo of his own.

“Will you make it home?” I asked with fingers wrapped around my blaster.

“Million to one odds,” he said.

“But there’s still a chance?” I pressed.

“Almost nil,” he responded.

I’m sorry brother. I raised my blaster and jerked the trigger. Nothing.

Gordon pulled me in tight.

And now, the WINNER of BAHFest 2015, Sarah Hird:

According to reports on social media (via The AV Club) from people in the audience at the taping of his latest episode, Jon Stewart has announced he'll be leaving The Daily Show.

UPDATE: Comedy Central has since confirmed the news. He'll be stepping down "later this year".

Thank you Jon. pic.twitter.com/yPdxjnkuLw

— Comedy Central (@ComedyCentral) February 10, 2015

Got to be present when the great @TheDailyShow Jon Stewart announced his retirement. #OneOfTheGreats #JonStewart

— Jonathan Reyes (@Jonathan2Reyes) February 10, 2015

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This may be the most absurd parody trailer that has ever been created.

While it feels like Street Fighter II has been released on every platform ever, that's not true, as Capcom never blessed Nintendo's doomed Virtual Boy with the classic fighter. That's where fans come the rescue, as Hyper Fighting has introduced Street Fighter II to wildly outdated 3D.

Homebrew games have existed in the still-active Virtual Boy community for a while now, and someone finally took a shot at making Street Fighter II. The project has been floating around for a few years, but only recently came to fruition and into the hands of a few lucky collectors.

Planet Virtual Boy has been collecting details on everyone with copies:

"Apparently, complete-in-box copies of Mr. Anon's and MK's incredibly well-crafted homebrew game "Hyper Fighting" are now out there in the wild, as impressions of the game are starting to pop up here and there. At the time of writing, we have no further info from the team behind this, but it seems that the game won't see a public release due to the obvious copyright dilemma. For now, we can only gaze in awe at the imagery lucky owners of the few existing copies share with the world."

We're not talking ROMs, either. These are custom-printed cartridges. Vectrex Roli got one.

Only a few copies are out there, sadly, because actively selling Hyper Fighting could raise the attention of Capcom and bring the nifty fan project to a halt. Plenty of companies are fine to let fans mess around with their games, but the moment money becomes involved, it's different.

This means only a select few Virtual Boy fans have access to playable Hyper Fighting cartridges, but they've been filming their experiences:

The game footage looks a little cleaner in this video, thankfully.

In a nutshell, it looks pretty good! I mean, as good as Street Fighter II can look on a Virtual Boy. It's more impressive as a clever feat of engineering than something you'd want to spend much time playing, but as with Quake running on an oscilloscope, fans can pull of basically anything.

You can reach the author of this post at patrick.klepek@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @patrickklepek.

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Most people would think it’s good news that Americans are living longer than ever. We want to live for a long time, and we are also fond of our elder relatives and friends and want to keep them around. Do you know who’s cursing the longevity of senior citizens? Pension administrators.

Defined-benefit pensions are now a rare employee benefit, but they were once more common. Today’s retirement savings accounts work the other way, if you’re fortunate enough to have one at work: they’re defined-contribution plans where workers and their employers stick money in an account, invest it, and spend it after they are retired. With a defined-benefit pension, employees have paid in as much as they ever will, and withdraw benefits until they die. If the company dies first and can’t meet its obligations, the PBGC takes over.

It’s not like the major corporations like IBM and General Motors that have legacy pensioners are running around wishing that their retirees would just die already, but it does mean that companies have to recalculate their future payouts based on modern life expectancy. Companies are solving this in ways that are fundamentally boring but rather creepy. First, some are paying life insurance companies to take over paying pension benefits, which can be a cost-saving move. The insurance companies get to balance out their risk a little bit: on the insurance side, they make less money if a retired person dies relatively young. If they live for 25 years past retirement, that’s a burden on the pension side.

In the future, investment banks might begin packaging our lifespans as securities again. Yes, “again.” This was a thing before the 2008 financial meltdown, where investment banks turned the risk that we might outlive our pensions into securities.

Bad News: People Are Living Longer; Just Ask AT&T, IBM, GM [Bloomberg News]

sleepingwithryley:

mercurymoans:

missinglinc:

That last gif slayed my entire soul.

This woman gives me hope. 

i love you

This fundamental lesson is conveyed by a metric known as the number needed to treat, or N.N.T. Developed in the 1980s, the N.N.T. tells us how many people must be treated for one person to derive benefit. An N.N.T. of one would mean every person treated improves and every person not treated fails to, which is how we tend to think most therapies work.

So it turns out that e.g. you need 2000 People to take a daily aspirin for two years to prevent one heart attack.

Currently the number needed for treatment is rarely given out, but there is a site for it, TheNNT.com. Sarah Fallon in Wired magazine explains what it does:

It's unfortunate, then, that the NNT is not a statistic that's routinely conveyed to either doctors or patients. But you can look it up on a site that you've probably never heard of: TheNNT.com. Started by David Newman, a director of clinical research at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai hospital, the site's dozens of contributors analyze the available studies, crunch the numbers on benefits and harms, and then post the results. While a low NNT is generally "good" and a high NNT is "bad," you also have to consider the severity of both the illness and the drug's side effects. Which is why the team added a color-coding system: Green for when a treatment makes sense, yellow for when more study is needed, red for when the harms and the benefits cancel each other out, and black when the harms outweigh the benefits.

For those in a hurry, The Bandolier, "an independent journal about evidence-based healthcare", has a handy little table with NNTs for common afflictions, while Wikipedia has a nice example table explaining what it all means.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]

"Slimy Piece of Worm-Ridden Filth" is Jamie Benning's mini-documentary about puppeteer Toby Philpott and the team who brought Jabba the Hutt to life in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi.

I've not come across a finer means of illustrating the origins of our Western work ethic than this video featuring a recycled Japanese game. Why did't we have 8-Bit Philosophy back when I was in college?

In a way it's ironic. Here I am watching a video about how Calvinism and Capitalism came together to inform the American workforce, instilling the need to work hard for personal reward and spiritual salvation—for free over the internet. No doubt the folks at Wisecrack put a lot of work and research into the video, but in order to receive its message all I had to do was press a button.

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In this raw interview footage featuring Arthur C. Clarke at an AT&T-MIT conference in 1976, the renowned American science fiction author and futurist shares his remarkably accurate visions of what the future may hold for us, like the introduction of high-definition screens and how friends will rarely see each other IRL.

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hodad

Ms. Dr. making waves with her new Ferguson course.

(She’s currently being interviewed by a reporter for USA Today, my mom’s favorite newspaper)

The geography department and African and African-American studies program are introducing a new course for the upcoming spring term called “10 Weeks, 10 Professors: #BlackLivesMatter,” dedicated to considering race, structural inequality and violence in both a historical and modern context.

About 15 Dartmouth professors will teach separate sections of the class from different academic disciplines over the course of the term. Professors teaching this course come from over 10 academic departments and programs, including anthropology, history, women’s and gender studies, mathematics and English, among others.

Geography professor Abigail Neely said that the idea to create this course stemmed from a Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning workshop, which urged faculty to incorporate the 2014 events in Ferguson, Missouri, culminating in the non-indictment of Darren Wilson for the unarmed shooting of Michael Brown, into their various courses.

“We just thought that it might be interesting and innovative and exciting to have a course that’s dedicated to this, whereas lots of other people are incorporating it into other courses,” Neely said.

English professor Aimee Bahng said when she was writing the syllabi for her winter term courses, she felt it was imperative that she incorporate the events into her curriculum.

Bahng said that by teaching the new course, the faculty hope to create a culture of learning that goes beyond the classroom and cultivate a discussion amongst scholars about questions of race in America.

The course will approach this and other social issues from a number of different disciplines, which will give students who take the course the opportunity to participate in interdisciplinary discussions firsthand, Bahng said.

Neely said that the course will break down barriers between different disciplines, a goal an institution like Dartmouth is designed to achieve.

She said that the faculty hope to not only place Ferguson in a temporal context, but also to highlight that it was not an isolated incident in the United States or around the world.

Bahng said they want to use Ferguson as a teaching opportunity.

“We hope students will be able to understand that Ferguson is not just an event in 2014, but something that’s tethered in time to a long history and still-emerging ideas about race in the U.S. and how policing works in an age of social media and distributed surveillance,” Bahng said.

Geography department chair Susanne Freidberg said that the interdisciplinary structure should have broad appeal and provide a way for students to approach an issue that might seem to be only sociological or political, and see that there are also things to be learned about it from other viewpoints, such as from a religious or geographical perspective.

“I hope that for the students it will provide an opportunity to learn and talk about things that might seem very far away from Dartmouth but affect a lot of people in the country, and to do so with a lot of different professors,” she said.

Anthropology professor Chelsey Kivland said this is an opportunity “to use Ferguson as a starting point for broadening the conversation about the national problems of inequality, race and violence.”

Kivland teaches the “Ethnography of Violence” course in the anthropology department and spends a week during the course discussing police brutality. She said she was motivated to participate in teaching the new course because this is material that she already teaches and feels is important.

History professor Annelise Orleck, who will also be teaching a section of the class, said that the professors involved saw the events in Ferguson as being important enough to require prolonged discussion.

Orleck said it is important that as the Black Lives Matters movement builds, classroom discussion be rooted in history. She will be working to create a sense of historical context and perspective on issues of urban inequality and policing, as well as the community response to these issues.

Kevin Gillespie ’15, the president of the Dartmouth chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said that the course seems to be exactly what the College needs in regard to raising awareness.

He said the course is relevant to issues the NAACP has been focused on recently.

“Courses like these are extremely important, and they get us all out of our comfort zones, whether you’re taking the course or not, because people will be talking about it,” Gillespie said.

The NAACP organized a “Black Lives Matter” protest and die-in in Baker-Berry Library on Jan. 15 that had about 40 participants. Over the winter interim period, Dartmouth students, faculty and community members led two separate demonstrations, one against police brutality on Hanover’s Main Street and the other as part of the National White Coat Die-in at the Geisel School of Medicine.

Original Source

[via]

Give some students a 3D-printer, some solar panels and about a year's worth of time, and what do you get? No, not a solar-powered bong (though good idea) -- solar race cars, that's what! Engineering students from Nanyang Technological University (NTU...

In a completely unsurprising piece of news, RadioShack, a retailer that used to periodically sell some electronics, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, as predicted. Negotiations earlier this week resulted in an agreement where wireless carrier Sprint will take over about half of the chain’s stores, and the other half will close.

What doomed RadioShack? It was the iPhone, but not in the way that you might think. Back in the mid-oughts, the Shack bet its future on selling mobile phones and accessories. While being able to shop multiple carriers in one store was a definite advantage, depending on phone sales revenue was a bad plan as smartphones became popular. As the smartphone rose, retailers’ margin on phone sales fell.

RadioShack has been losing money for the past eleven quarters, or more than two and a half years. They currently have around 4,300 stores, and fewer than 1,000 dealer locations inside other stores.

Our thoughts remain with the employees of Radio Shack during this sad time. Even the ones who aggressively pushed extended warranties.

Strategic Confusion Put RadioShack at Mercy of Lenders [Wall Street Journal]

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This story has been updated with new information.

A federal judge is demanding that the government explain, photo-by-photo, why it can’t release hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of pictures showing detainee abuse by U.S. forces at military prison sites in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In a courtroom in the Southern District of New York yesterday, Judge Alvin Hellerstein appeared skeptical of the government’s argument, which asserted that the threat of the Islamic State and Al Qaeda exploiting the images for propaganda should override the public’s right to see any of the photos.

He was “highly suspicious” of the government’s attempt to declare the whole lot of the photos dangerous. “It’s too easy and too meaningless,” he said.

Since 2004, the American Civil Liberties Union has been fighting for the release of photos from military investigations into prisoner abuse beyond those that were leaked from Abu Ghraib. The additional pictures reportedly show sexual assault, soldiers posing with dead bodies, and other offenses. The exact number of photos has not been disclosed in court, though former Senator Joe Lieberman has previously said that there are nearly 2,100.

Hellerstein first ordered the government to hand over a subset of the pictures in 2005. President Obama decided to release them in 2009, but Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the top American general in Iraq implored him not to. Congress then passed a law amending the Freedom of Information Act to allow the Secretary of Defense to certify that publishing the pictures could put American lives at risk, which then-secretary Robert Gates did.

The ACLU continued to fight the issue in court, and last August, Hellerstein ordered that the government needed to justify withholding each picture individually.

Six months later, the Pentagon has not done that – instead, government lawyers filed a motion in December repeating their position that all the photos were properly kept from the public. The government said that the Islamic State made use of past U.S. abuses when it executed hostages on camera, depicting them “in an orange jumpsuit – a symbol commonly associated with detainees housed at Guantanamo Bay,” and that Al Qaeda wrote about Guantanamo in a recent issue of its magazine Inspire.

Both groups could exploit the photos “to encourage supporters and followers to attack United States military and government personnel,” the government argued in the motion.

In court yesterday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tara Lamorte maintained that the Pentagon had already reviewed the photos in 2012. A Pentagon lawyer had brought samples of the various types of photos to senior Pentagon officials, who recommended against publishing them, she said.

Hellerstein did not agree that the 2012 review fulfilled his order. He also said he had originally decided that at least some of the photos should be released, even in the middle of the Iraq war, and did not see the situation now as any different, despite the new threats posed by ISIS. “We’re at a line in the sand,” Hellerstein declared. “I’m not changing my view.”

He gave the government a week to decide what it wants to do: appeal the order, or put forward a plan to comply with it. He suggested that the government could present the photos to him, in a closed session, and explain their rationale for keeping them secret. He also advised the government not to try to delay “the day of reckoning” by drawing the case out on appeal.

“I have to think that this is not an all or nothing case,” he said. “But the way the government has litigated has made it that way.”

This case echoes the Pentagon’s attempts to keep secret videotapes showing hunger-striking Guantanamo detainees being force-fed. The government has said that the videos could “inflame Muslim sensitivities overseas.” (The Intercept’s parent company First Look Media is among the media groups who are trying to get the videos released.)

The judge in that case warned this fall against allowing a “heckler’s veto” over the public interest. She cited one of Hellerstein’s comments from early in the photo litigation, that terrorists “do not need pretexts for their barbarism.”

Update, February 17th: 

On February 11th, government lawyers wrote to Hellerstein asking for further clarification on how the government could comply with his order to review the photos individually, before they decide whether to appeal. Their confusion was “good faith” and not a delay tactic, they insisted, but the lawyer arguing the case for the ACLU, Lawrence Lustberg, responded by saying that “whatever the government’s intentions,” the request for more instructions will cause an unnecessary delay.

 

Photo: AP

The post ‘A Line in the Sand’ in Fight to Release Thousands of Prisoner Abuse Photos appeared first on The Intercept.

The “Stop a Douchebag” Russian youth movement attempts to enforce road traffic regulations by slapping large stickers on offending motorist’s windshields.

As one does, no? Here is a gentleman showing off two very different skills at the same time.

While the video was uploaded a while ago, it's once again making the rounds online. The stunt is ridiculous, ill-advised, and totally metal. And how about that finale? *throws up horns*

To contact the author of this post, write to bashcraftATkotaku.com or find him on Twitter @Brian_Ashcraft.

Kotaku East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am.

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The hack into Sony Pictures was big news late last year, but that was last year. They figured out who did it, fixed the problem, and moved on, right? Wrong, says one analyst firm: not only did Sony finger the wrong bad guys, but the hack is still going on to this day.

The information comes from internet firm Taia Global, which has released a report (PDF) claiming that not only were Russian hackers at least additionally, if not solely responsible for the intrusion into Sony’s networks, but also that they are still there, siphoning data off as we speak.

Taia has been saying since December that they feel an analysis of the language used in the hack points to Russian, not North Korean, involvement. However, their report does not definitively conclude whether North Korea was or was not involved. Instead, they write, it’s incidental to the larger problem, which is that Russians were also (separately or not) involved and still, to this day, have access to the company’s internal networks.

Sony not only “failed to differentiate or even acknowledge that more than one state or non-state actor was involved,” claims Taia, but worse, the companies Sony hired to fix it have not done so.

Far from being a thing of the past, Taia writes, “Sony Pictures Entertainment remains in a state of breach and is actively losing files to Russian mercenary hackers.”

Regardless of which possibility is correct, the attribution made in the Sony case failed to differentiate or even acknowledge that more than one state or non-state actor was involved. Furthermore, the Data Forensics and Incident Response companies hired by Sony to remediate this breach have, to date, failed to do so. Sony Pictures Entertainment remains in a state of breach and is actively losing files to Russian mercenary hackers.

The company now says that a well-known Russian hacker, who has contacts who are other hackers, has spoken with them and provided several documents obtained from inside Sony after the data breach was identified in November:

The evidence … consists of seven Excel spreadsheets five of which are dated from November 30, 2014 through December 10, 2014, and six email messages, two of which are dated Jan 14 and Jan 23, 2015. It also includes the “Employee Update” message of December 8 which discussed the “system disruption”, advised all employees not to use any thumb drives that had been plugged into Sony’s network prior to November 23rd, and provided a list of unlocked Ricoh printers and their locations.

Taia says that all documents appear authentic, and that one has been confirmed as authentic by the Sony employee who created it. None of the documents have been part of any of the prior data dumps of Sony’s information by Guardians of Peace, the name of the group that claimed credit for the hack.

The hack into Sony Pictures’ systems was identified late in November of 2014, and persons acting at the behest of the North Korean government quickly became the favored suspect. Sony said in December that yes, they thought North Korea did it and federal investigators said a short time later that yes, they thought so too.

The hack led to Sony cancelling their theatrical release of the comedyThe Interview, a move that President Obama called “a mistake.” Sony then pivoted and released the movie through online channels, where it actually did pretty well.

Inside Sony Pictures, the fallout from the data breach still continues. The co-chairman just resigned today, and the company is still being sued by employees whose data was stolen.

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Following a recent revelation about the gender identity of Alesha, Who Smiles At Death, John Dale Beety delves deep into just how momentous this milestone is.