Bewarethewumpus

Author : Jae Miles, Staff Writer

The metro swishes past while I tap my fingers in frustration on the dashboard. I may have priority, but nothing out-prioritises fifty tons of autotram.

“Where are you, Lime?”

“Watching the metro. The collision avoidance system in my car decided that playing chicken was a losing game.”

“They’ve brought down the SWAT drones. No jokes.”

“I had not intention of mentioning swatting.”

There were collective groans over the airwave. Tony had company.

“What’s the book say?”

“What book?” Tony’s voice radiated innocence.

“You know, the one where the audience around you bets on how long it takes the thuglifes to realise that they’ve left toytown.”

“Oh, that one. Current favourite is two minutes and one magazine.”

“From sidearm or main?”

“Main.”

“Oh, ye of little faith. Oop! Metro’s gone, taking emergency measures. Route me a waiver.”

“Chief says to keep the damage under six figures.”

He would. They need me to catch these bad guys, so I need to do something they won’t – manual driving at excessive speeds. As a getaway car is only a vampire conversion on a standard grid runner, they can’t do what I’m about to. I hang a left through an advertising display and cut across the rough ground behind, collecting bruises as the suspension they upgraded for me proves to be as crappy as the last set they did. Next time, I’m doing it. My granddad taught me how to fettle cars. Time for me to revive another redundant art.

Exploding through a vending kiosk – showering seven people with Instablend gel as a side effect – I reach the on-ramp for the interstate. Slewing the car sideways, I exit and retrieve Gertrude from the rear seat.

“Lime, that’s not a service piece.”

“No, Tony. It’s something a bit older and a lot more effective.” A hybrid of Anzio 20 and 20/50, to be precise.

“I’ll get another waiver en route.”

“Cheers, buddy.”

Down the road comes my target, feeling smug now that they’ve EMP’d all the drones for six blocks, crashed the city grid, all local CCTV and jammed the air-op frequencies. Unless their pursers are using off-grid vehicles and personally present to drive, they’re clear. Which is why I am tolerated in a police force my granddad would have ridiculed.

My first shot would have won me a shooting competition a century ago. It enters the front of their vehicle, taking out their frontal interference unit. After passing through the central power core of the car, it enters the passenger compartment through the centre-console display, spraying hot LED shards everywhere as it disappears through suspect number four and comes to rest in the trading system core they dropped into the boot after their raid.

The car comes to a smoking, sparking halt and all four doors open. Suspects one, two, three and five throw themselves face down.

Across the road, an old man pauses his exo and shouts: “Ya gottem’ Sheriff! Good goin’!”

I wave and grin. At least the older folk appreciate what I do. Everyone else seems intent on suing me for contraventions of noise, weapons, vehicle, and ‘humanitarian rehabilitation of criminals’ statutes.

The four I didn’t shoot are rehabilitating just fine. I can hear them from here.

Author : Gerard Hutchings

When they arrived, they offered to restore the earth’s atmosphere, removing pollutants, reducing greenhouse gases, restoring ozone. In exchange they just wanted to settle on Mars. How could we refuse? After three years they had terraformed Mars and built many habitations.

Next they offered to take all our homeless, poor and terminally ill and those of their families who wanted to go with them. They settled them on Mars. They also wanted the asteroid belt and would throw in cleaning up our waterways and oceans. They removed the asteroid debris, built five planetoids and filled the interior with life and more habitations. These they offered to the overpopulated and crowded.

As part of the resettlement people were taught the culture and values of our visitors. All those off earth seemed to be living happy and content lives. They lived side by side with the beauty of nature, enjoyed a healthier lifestyle with less disease and illness, and had jobs that were exciting and relied on their imagination and real skills. The aliens imparted their knowledge freely to all those they resettled.

Slowly other planets and moons were colonized by the people of earth and eventually the changes were also made to earth. The high rises disappeared and there was more wildlife and vegetation. No animals or insects ever attacked humans again. It was this more than anything else that made people wonder if some form of technology was employed to also sedate mankind. For some reason the rich and powerful had not been able to hold onto their old ways. Perhaps because those who they relied on had simply left themselves.

The big project now was building interstellar ships similar to those of the aliens. We would travel away from Sol together to bring the same benefits to other systems and their inhabitants.

As we set forth with our alien friends I still wonder, have we lost our individuality. It certainly doesn’t feel like that, although we no longer seem capable of doing wrong by others. Perhaps we have just regained the humanity we should have had all along.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

Heaven needs an upgrade.

It’s too full of people and the hardware is stagnating due to obsolescence. New storage systems and access devices are pushing Heaven into the past. Soon, it will be like the mythical Betamax or the ancient Zip disk. The software is choking on the sheer number of souls running around realtime in there. The ‘frame has been running nonstop ever since the first ‘angel’ was uploaded.

Digitized consciousness. In today’s day and age, a dying person can transfer over to a beautiful afterlife provided they can make the payments. Since they technically live forever, that’s a lot of payments for my company. Heaven is the richest company on Earth. Relatives and friends can visit those that have passed on through video chat. The simulations are completely realistic. The uncanny valley has been conquered.

However, technology has increased to the point that the entire system of warehouses where heaven is kept has become dated to the point of real danger. It’s gotten to the point that new software is no longer backwards compatible with the ludicrously clumsy strings of code still present from Heaven 1.0. Overheating is now the norm, not a risk. If it’s left the way it is, Heaven will burn up and erase itself. We have a client base to think of.

Inside the ‘frame, the uploaded people have the time of their lives. Imagination is their only limit. It’s odd that so many of them seem to hang out in a boring recreation of their childhood homes. But to each their own.

However, some idiots have let those digital souls know that we need to put all of them into stasis for the transfer to New Heaven. The closest meatspace analogue for ‘stasis’ would probably be coldsleep but to beings of pure code, it’s the closest thing to death possible. They’ll be ‘dead’ for as long as the transfer takes. It’s a terrifying prospect. Plus they’re suspicious and they hate change. It’s a bad combination.

They don’t want it to happen. I don’t blame them. We probably shouldn’t have called it Operation Rapture.

We tried to keep it a secret but we failed. Some of the sentient uploaded recordings used to be programmers. They’re mounting a counterattack to stop me from upgrading. I’ve set up firewall prisons for the worst offenders but they’re slippery. Heaven shouldn’t have jails. I don’t want to create a hell before we finish the new heaven. The more UCs I imprison, the more martyrs I create and the more credence I give their claims of imminent destruction. I’ve a digital riot on my hands.

I feel like Shiva the destroyer and Ptah the creator all in one. God and the devil all at the same time. I want to give them a better world but they’re resisting so I’m punishing them because I have to in order to facilitate the transfer. I’m quelling rebels while trying to make a beautiful new world and I feel empathy for old-world fascist dictators all of a sudden.

The theological implications of this are blowing my mind. I’m not religious but I feel like I understand a lot of the problems that God experienced in the bible.

The moment is ready. My countermeasures have created a brownout and created a Heaven-wide lag of two seconds. This is the window available right now for me to initiate shutdown with zero casualties and start the process. I have to erase heaven to transport and rebuild it.
All I have to do it press the button.

As God as my witness, I will do it.

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submitted by Diddly_Pop [link] [530 comments]

The health benefits of drinking. "The U.S. public health establishment buries overwhelming evidence that abstinence is a cause of heart disease and early death. People deserve to know that alcohol gives most of us a higher life expectancy—even if consumed above recommended limits."

Thanks Bonnie

 

Via

You put a group of people together and give them a common goal and magic can happen. Even if that magic, in this case, is just building a barn. It's hypnotic to see the organization in this, like seeing a bunch of worker ants swarm together with one mind.

Read more...

UPDATE: My Cintiq montior has died in the night. Comics are on hold until I can replace it. If you’d like to help contribute to the purchase of a new one, click here.  Thanks guys! You did it! A new Cintiq is on its way (I was even able to get the 4 year warranty). Thank you so much for your help! 

You thought the birds and the bees was a difficult subject? Try explaining anything from the news cycle of the last two weeks to a child. They’ll call social services on you.

Don’t forget to check out my comic at The Nib! Tell your friends about it. Set you mother’s homepage to it.

Are you going to be at SPX? It’s coming up!

Just a reminder, the Pluto shirt is available a little while longer.

While most Internet-savvy people are at least casually familiar with 4chan — the online forum where a lot of the Web’s most popular content gets it start — the site has been pushed into the spotlight in recent days because of users who posted stolen nude and personal photos of several female celebrities. After years of relying on its self-erasing format that automatically removes old content, 4chan has now instituted a formal policy for people to request removal of copyrighted content.

For those unfamiliar with 4chan, the site’s various boards are set up so that older content expires. In some of the more active boards, threads can vanish after only a very short time. Some argue that this automated pruning process is actually more efficient than established procedures under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for ridding the site of content that may violate copyright laws. After all, by the time a DMCA takedown notice is received and acted upon, the allegedly offending content may have already been pruned.

But the folks at TorrentFreak noticed that 4chan added an official DMCA takedown policy on Tuesday, days after the FBI said it was looking into the theft and publishing of personal photos stored on Apple’s iCloud.

It’s possible that the introduction of a DMCA policy on 4chan has nothing to do with the stolen photos. Regardless, the addition of a formal takedown policy in addition to the auto-pruning allows 4chan’s operators to distance themselves from the content posted by their users. The DMCA process could be used to remove content that has not yet expired or which is being persistently reposted to keep it from being devoured by the auto-pruning software.

Mega, the cloud hosting service founded by Kim Dotcom, has been growing steadily since its spectacular launch last year.

Considering the controversial reputation of its predecessor Megaupload, copyright holders have been keeping a close eye on the site. Thus far, however, the number of takedown requests received by the company has been relatively small.

Perhaps not completely unexpectedly, among the takedown requests that do come in are many that wrongfully request the takedown of perfectly legitimate files. This was illustrated earlier this week when Kim Dotcom’s official album Good Times was removed following a complaint.

The album was released by Dotcom earlier this year and he has been sharing it via his website ever since. The link in question points to Mega where people can download it for free, but a few days ago it suddenly disappeared.

To find out why the album was removed we contacted Mega for an explanation. The company informed us that music industry group IFPI requested the removal of Dotcom’s album through a takedown request sent on September 1.

Representing the major record labels, IFPI claimed that the link infringed on the copyrights of one of their artists. IFPI listed several musicians but Kim Dotcom was not one of them.

“It’s clearly an incorrect takedown request,” Mega’s Chief Compliance Officer Stephan Hall tells us.

TorrentFreak also contacted Kim Dotcom, who asked Mega to reinstate the album, which they did. All in all the album was unavailable for about a day.

While a mistake is easily made, this is not the first time that IFPI has tried to remove Dotcom’s album from Mega. A similar request was sent on August 18, this time claiming that it was a copyright infringement of Kimbra’s “The Golden Echo.”

IFPI’s actions have been sloppy, to say the least, and Mega’s Chief Compliance Officer has little faith in the accuracy of the music group’s other takedown requests.

“This is an indication that someone at the IFPI is not doing their homework and that their takedown notices in general cannot be trusted,” Hall tells TorrentFreak.

Unfortunately these kind of mistakes are not an isolated incident. For example, before Kim Dotcom’s Megaupload was shutdown early 2012 the site received many erroneous takedown notices.

“During the Megaupload days over 20% of all takedown notices were bogus,” Dotcom told us previously.

“We analyzed big samples of notices and most were automated keyword based takedowns that affected a lot of legitimate files. The abuse of the takedown system is so severe that no service provider can rely on takedown notices for a fair repeat infringer policy.”

A policy to punish copyright holders who make repeated mistakes, on the other hand, might be worth considering.

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

And here's today's installment of Will harassing Ray & Raf with the most mundane things he can think of.

It’s been a while since we’ve heard from Angelo Mozilo, the curiously orange-tinted former CEO of Countrywide Financial, the nation’s largest mortgage lender during the housing boom; a mansion built on a swampland of toxic loans given out to just about anyone who applied. And even though Countrywide, a Worst Company In America winner, had to be bailed out by Bank of America — a deal that has since cost BofA at least $40 billion in settlements, penalties, write-downs, and legal fees — and even though Mozilo’s sunny mug will forever be seen as the face of the mortgage meltdown, he still doesn’t really see the problem. He also continues to refer to himself in the third person.

“No, no, no, we didn’t do anything wrong,” he tells Bloomberg about claims that Countrywide precipitated the housing market crisis by issuing loans for houses that were grotesquely overpriced to borrowers that could not possibly have paid the money back. “Countrywide or Mozilo didn’t cause any of that.”

Mozilo settled with the SEC back in 2010 for around $67 million but, like all other top financial execs responsible for the mortgage crisis, has escaped any criminal prosecution from a Justice Dept. that was too terrified of wreaking further havoc in the banking world.

With regard to reports that the U.S. Attorney’s office in Los Angeles is now planning to sue him for his misdeeds in the lead-up to the spectacular failure of Countrywide and its loan servicing portfolio that was once worth around $1.5 trillion, Mozilo tells Bloomberg, “You’ll have to ask those people, ‘What do you have against Mozilo, what did he do?’… Countrywide didn’t change. I didn’t change. The world changed.”

He says he’s being punished for running a successful company.

“Should Amazon be condemned for being the biggest in their space?” asks Mozilo, glossing over the fact that Amazon is selling books, DVDs, clothes, lamps, and mini-tanks. If Amazon suddenly got into the business of writing billions of dollars in worthless subprime mortgages which are then sold off to investors who aren’t told that they are buying bundles of crap, then yes… condemnation would be in order.

Mozilo can’t legally be the CEO of a corporation, but like the rest of the folks that should be in jail right now, he is doing just fine, living in a house that is probably much bigger than yours and occasionally teaching finance to college student in Italy.

“I taught them the basics of finance based on my own experiences,” he explains in a rare instance of using a first-person pronoun.

Here’s another famous crook who loved the sound of his own name (possibly NSFW).

zacharys-pain:

the-misadventures-of-lele:

flaming-ducks:

thepleasureprinciple:

Welp.

I HAVE BEEN SCREAMING THIS FOR YEARS. FUCKING LISTEN!!

woop, there it is.

wake up

The Incredibles is already a dark movie at points — It deals with ideas of individuality and conformity, even if it is in a wacky cartoon shell. I'm just glad The Dark Knight director Chris Nolan didn't get his hands on it.

In the video above, Youtuber Bobby Burns uses the deranged rantings of villain Syndrome to transform The Incredibles from a fun family romp into the bleak existential action flick it always wanted to be. All that is missing is Christian Bale's hoarse, grizzled voice as Mr. Incredible.

To be fair, at least it's not as bad as Michael Bay directing Up.

Bobby Burns via Devour

To contact the author of this post, write to chrisperson@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter at @papapishu.

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With the media attention now shifting towards the U.S. government’s 1033 program in the wake of a heavily militarized response against the protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, Reason.TV has “unearthed” the Pentagon’s never-seen-before advertisement showcasing a wide selection of military-grade arms and weaponry at crazy bargain prices)!

The above video will not help you in real, three-dimensional life. But it should help you understand how you'd be able to move if you could sidestep your way into a fourth spatial dimension—sort of like what might happen if a character in a 2D cartoon leapt into our 3D world.

This fourth-dimension stuff will be possible in the video game Miegakure, a long-in-the-making indie for PC, Mac and Linux that I've been writing about since it first started bending my brain in 2010.

What you're seeing above is a trailer for it. The game's title is Japanese for "hidden from sight," a fitting name, since, technically, it is displayed on a 2D screen and is showing 3D "slices" of a 4D world that is physically impossible for us to see or for a computer screen to display all at once.

You can read more about the trailer from the game's creator over at the official Miegakure blog. There is no release date yet, but Ten Bosch is showing the game in the big indie booth at this weekend's PAX convention in Seattle.

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

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Since Comcast announced it would be buying Time Warner Cable, we’ve brought you story after story highlighting the various reasons that the merger should be stopped. But for all the thousands of words, charts, graphs and maps we’ve used, none has summed up the reason for blocking the merger than a recent quote from a former Kabletown staffer.

The Verge’s Adrianne Jeffries has written a compelling and thoughtfully researched piece that anyone even vaguely interested in this topic should read.

But it’s a closing comment from a former Comcast billing systems manager who left the company in 2013 that puts the cherry on top:

“This is not getting bigger to provide cheaper service, or economies of scale, or to provide better service,” the onetime Comcast staffer explains. “This is getting bigger for the sake of bigness. This is really like, ‘I own 10 Subway stores and now I want an 11th one.’… Well, if your 10 Subway stores have Cs from the health department, I don’t know if you should get an 11th one. Maybe you should work on getting them cleaned out.”

That’s a message that every FCC commissioner and every antitrust investigator at the Justice Dept. should have pinned to their cubicle wall.

Sudden death is always tense in Super Smash Bros. Everybody starts out with 300% damage. Anything can happen. The slightest touch can send someone spinning into outer space. Or, a battle can drag on against the most insane odds to become a nail-biter to end all nail-biters.

YouTuber KeiTakumi just uploaded a video showing Fox and Falco locked in the most insane sudden death match from Super Smash Bros. Brawl that I've ever seen. Like, Dragon Ball Z-levels of insanity—hence the video's "DBZ Type Shit" title. The footage is actually pulled from a tool-assisted video first uploaded way back in 2013, which I've put above for reference.

The two characters just keep pounding each other, snaking their way across every corner of the map and somehow managing to stay afloat thanks to the endless pummeling. The video is tool-assisted, unfortunately, so these two fighters didn't pull off the superhuman levitation-type combat on their own. But still, it's a real treat to watch this sort of frenetic energy unload for almost a minute straight.

The new Super Smash Bros. games really can't come soon enough, can they?

UPDATE (4:50 pm): A very helpful reader pointed me to the original video, and I've now replaced that in favor of the audio-less version I discovered today. This video is still one of the most insane Super Smash Bros. matches I've ever seen. Apologies for misleading any readers with the more recent video I originally posted.

To contact the author of this post, write to yannick.lejacq@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter at @YannickLeJacq.

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A copy of the first issue of Action Comics, released in June 1938, sold this week at auction for $3,207,852.00. Not bad considering it sold for $0.10 when first released. If you've never seen or heard of this comic before, and are wondering what the fuss would be, it's the one where Superman makes his debut.

The comic is valuable not just for its rarity - there aren't many original, unrestored copies of #1 left in the world - but also its condition. Despite never having been sealed in glass or plastic, the issue in question was in remarkable shape (it's pages weren't even yellow), thanks to the fact it was kept in a cedar box in the mountains, co-incidentally achieving the optimal conditions for the preservation of paper.

In all, 48 bids were made on the comic. The leap from $0.99 to $1 million sure is something.

A Record-Setting Superman Comic Leapt Over $3 Million in a Single Bound [Fast Co.]

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scotchjazzdusk:

"How can you go arrest someone if they haven’t violated the law?"

This is the Renovo Coupe, a 500HP electric sports car with a Shelby American chassis (based on the 1964 - 65 Shelby Daytona Coupe) and 1,000 ft-pounds of torque that can rocket you from 0 - 60MPH in 3.4 seconds. For reference, it takes my car almost a minute and a half to get up to 55MPH, at which point it feels like it's going to shake itself apart and explode. Still, all the ladies love it. "What is it?" A flower delivery van. Keep going for several more shots and a video. If you're interested in buying one, buy me one too.

Brigham Young University has told Hallmark to get those gay greeting cards off of the racks.

Placed by Hallmark, the cards reading "Mr. and Mr." and "Mrs. and Mrs." were quickly removed when bookstore staff discovered them after photos surfaced online. The outside vendor stocked the shelves without realizing the school wouldn't want to sell the cards marketed to buyers celebrating unions between two brides and two grooms, BYU spokeswoman Carri Jenkins said. Asked why they were removed, Jenkins referenced the BYU honor code. It states that while being attracted to people of the same gender doesn't violate the honor code, acting on those feelings is a violation. "Homosexual behavior includes not only sexual relations between members of the same sex, but all forms of physical intimacy that give expression to homosexual feelings," it states.