Bewarethewumpus

The Bernoulli effect, as explained by Cerulean Lunacy from the science side of Tumblr.

If you've ever wondered how to pronounce Admiral Ackbar's name properly, here's a fan giving a hard-boiled lecture to Conan, who accidentally mispronounced it. This is serious Star Wars business.

And no, this is not a trap.

Fan Correction: Admiral Ackbar Isn't Pronounced Like That! [Team Coco, YouTube]

To contact the author of this post, write to: gergovas@kotaku.com

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Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer

I have successfully synchronized myself with this system’s most evolved planet. As my physical form materializes in the nitrogen rich atmosphere I zero in on an artificially constructed dwelling. It is full of crude technology. Visual/audio and communication devices abound, along with appliances for both preserving and cooking organic food. Then there is basic waste removal plumbing and quasi-advanced temperature control. Overall these beings appear to be verging on the modern ways that I am used to and are probably on their way to interstellar integration.

There is one being home. Surprisingly my intelligence meter sends back a very low-end scan. I have seen their technology. I know that my scanner is missing something. As I appear in a common area the being spies me and launches into a tirade of unintelligible shouts and taunts. I immediately send out soothing, calming messages via telepathy. The quadruped responds quickly and ceases its verbal barrage. It obediently sits back on its haunches and seemingly awaits further communication.

Typically I can communicate quickly with just about any intelligent or quasi-intelligent species but with this one it takes a while. At first I think it is telling me that it has been enslaved here, but then I determine that it is actually quite satisfied with its living arrangement. “Tell me more,” I say in mind speak, as I continue to try and ascertain how this being manipulates all of the complicated devices in its home without opposable thumbs.

Meanwhile, the Johnsons enjoy their day at the beach, secure in the thought that their faithful mutt, Brutus, is safely guarding their home.

The summer action film has action comedy, and a raccoon with a machine gun. Does the new trailer make you excited or nervous for the film?

mahramore:

shots fired

Author : Jae Miles, Staff Writer

It took me twenty years. I mortgaged everything I had, including family, friends and the love of my life. But G-Nano was worth it. A revolutionary method where leading-edge technology would restore the Earth’s damaged biosphere as a side effect of improving everyone’s lives. The adaptability of the code allowed scalability that ran from going one-on-one with disease organisms to cleaning the plastic islands at the ocean gyres. I submitted the patent request along with the gigabytes of proving data, then waited for the calls to start.

After a month, there was only one: “Professor David Adams? This is James Rufford of the Ministry of Defence. A car will be outside your block in two hours. It will bring you to discuss your patent application.”

The driver was courteous, as was everyone I met on the way to the nicely-appointed office where James Rufford waited. He looked up as I came in, his wall screens displaying the highlights of my work.

“Professor Adams. Firstly, may I compliment you on the genius of your work. Secondly, may I apologise for the fact that it is about to be classified beyond public scrutiny forever.”

I just stood there, my mouth hanging open. He gestured me to a chair.

“You cannot be serious.”

He smiled: “I am. Let me show you why.” The wall screen showed a grainy, scanned photograph of a group of bearded, top-hatted gentlemen standing next to a wooden frame that supported a tall, naked being with hourglass-shaped openings where its eyes should be.

“In 1754, a Dakerda scout crashed in the Lake District. While computers were unknown to the gentlemen of the time, the mechanicals salvaged from the wreckage were revelations to them. What the only survivor told them before he died was an epiphany. The Dakerda were looking for a new planet as theirs was ruined. Earth fitted the bill: clean with a primitive civilisation. At that time, the gentlemen involved rightly concluded that we could not withstand the Dakerda. So they came up with plan.”

I raised my hand. “The Industrial Revolution. Mechanisation to evolve the technologies we needed.”

He shook his head: “Nearly right. They decided to make Earth unappealing.”

I slammed my fist down on the table: “Surely it is time for that policy to be reversed. We have the technology now.”

“In 1947, another Dakerda scout came down in Roswell. Analysis of that vessel against what little remained of the 1754 wreck showed technological advances on par or exceeding our progress. Their computers took us thirty years to crack.”

Rufford looked at me: “The Dakerda remain so far beyond us that it is doubtful we would even slow their invasion of Earth down.”

I just stared at him. The implications were horrific.

“Professor Adams, we cannot ‘clean up’ Earth. The moment we succeed, the Dakerda will invade and wipe out humanity. We must keep the pollution while we work on expanding into space. Our only defence is to become a star faring race so we can flee. Of course, if we fail, the polluted Earth will eventually spell our doom anyway.”

Twenty years. I mulled over what he had told me to work out why I had been brought in. With a smile, I extended my hand: “How can I help?”

He looked relieved: “Your designs bear similarities to the architecture of some Dakerda systems. We’d like you to discover how they work.”

“I would be delighted.”

Prankster Jack Vale recently freaked strangers out at the beach by walking up to them and talking about personal information he gathered from their social media updates. Jack has tried this social media experiment out in the past, but this time he goes for more of a stalker vibe.

I stalked people at the beach by researching their social media profiles. How did I find them? They all posted public pictures of themselves on Instagram and Twitter! And so the quest began!

The UK National Health Service has initiated a plan to take the nation's private health records and sell them off to private companies in a process overseen by notorious multinational bumblewads ATOS. If you live in the UK England, your records -- mental health records, prescriptions, records of surgeries including abortions, and other sensitive personal information -- will be handed over to a wide-ranging group of companies all over the world.

Unless you opt out. And opting out isn't easy. There's no central place to opt out. Instead, you have to send a letter to your GP's surgery, which means you have to look up your GP's surgery's address, compose a legally sufficient letter, print it out, find an envelope and a stamp -- etc.

However! There's a better way. A group of volunteers whom I trust implicitly, including the astounding Stef Magdalinski (who made the Faxyourmp service that is the ancestor of Theyworkforyou) have created Fax Your GP, a dead-simple form that will look up your GP's fax number for you, create a form opt-out letter you can fill in in just a few easy steps, and then they'll fax that letter directly to your GP's surgery. I just opted out.

The NHS leaflet explaining care.data says you should ‘let your GP know’ if you want to opt out.

But GP surgeries are busy. If you ring up wanting to opt out they’ll ask you to write to them instead. That’s fair enough – their priority is treating the sick.

It’s 2014. The NHS really should have made it easy to opt out via the web.

So we thought we’d help out.

First, we found the fax numbers for every GP practice (sadly, very few let you email them). After you’ve entered your details, our clever computers automatically fax your letter asking to opt-out of the care.data database straight to your GP practice.

It’s free. It’s secure. And we don’t store any of your personal data once your opt-out fax has been received by your GP. So we won’t email trying to sign you up for other campaigns.

Fax Your GP (Thanks, Stef!)

Filmed on the Japanese island of Ōkunoshima (aka Rabbit Island).

[yuyulamlam/via]

larstheyeti:

Heart’s desire.

[theodd1sout]

Since its quiet launch on Saturday, more than 55,000 people have watched and tried to play the massively-multiplayer co-op version of Pokemon Red that is currently being hosted on Twitch.tv.

James Clapper, President Obama’s top national security official, is probably best known for having been caught lying outright to Congress about NSA activities, behavior which (as some baseball players found out) happens to be a felony under federal law. But – like torturers and Wall Street tycoons before him – Clapper has been not only shielded from prosecution, and not only allowed to keep his job; he has has now been anointed the arbiter of others’ criminality, as he parades around the country calling American journalists “accomplices”. Yesterday, as Wired’s Dave Kravets reports, the “clearly frustrated” Clapper went before a Senate committee (different than the one he got caught lying to) to announce that the Snowden disclosures are helping the terrorists:

We’re beginning to see changes in the communications behavior of adversaries: particularly terrorists. A disturbing trend, which I anticipate will continue . . . Terrorists and other adversaries of this country are going to school on U.S. intelligence sources, methods, and tradecraft. And the insights they’re gaining are making our job in the intelligence community much, much harder. And this includes putting the lives of members or assets of the intelligence community at risk, as well as those of our armed forces, diplomats, and our citizens.

As Kravets notes, “Clapper is not the most credible source on Snowden and the NSA leaks.” Moreover, it’s hardly surprising that Clapper is furious at these disclosures given that “Snowden’s very first leak last June” – revelation of the domestic surveillance program – “had the side-effect of revealing that Clapper had misled the public and Congress about NSA spying.” And, needless to say, Clapper offered no evidence at all to support his assertions yesterday; he knows that, unlike Kravets, most establishment media outlets will uncritically trumpet his claims without demanding evidence or even noting that he has none.

But in general, it’s hardly surprising that national security officials claim that unwanted disclosures help terrorists. Fear-mongering comes naturally to those who wield political power. Particularly in post-9/11 America, shouting “terrorists!” has been the favorite tactic of the leadership of both parties to spread fear and thus induce submission.

In a recent New York Times op-ed detailing how exploitation of terrorism fears is the key to sustaining the modern surveillance state, Northwestern University Philosophy Professor Peter Ludlow wrote that “since 9/11 leaders of both political parties in the United States have sought to consolidate power by leaning … on the danger of a terrorist attack”. He recounted that ”Machiavelli notoriously argued that a good leader should induce fear in the populace in order to control the rabble” and that “Hobbes in ‘The Leviathan’ argued that fear effectively motivates the creation of a social contract in which citizens cede their freedoms to the sovereign.” It would be surprising if people like Clapper didn’t do this.

But what has struck me is how seriously many media figures take this claim. In the vast majority of interviews I’ve done about NSA reporting, interviewers adopt a grave tone in their voice and trumpet the claims from U.S. officials that our reporting is helping the terrorists. They treat these claims as though they’re the by-product of some sort of careful, deliberative, unique assessment rather than what it is: the evidence-free tactics national security state officials reflexively invoke to discredit all national security journalism they dislike. Let’s review a bit of history to see how true that is.

Here, for instance, is Dick Cheney, in a June, 2006 speech, condemning The New York Times for its reporting on the NSA warrantless eavesdropping and SWIFT banking programs, sounding exactly like James Clapper yesterday, along with countless Democratic commentators and blogs over the last year:

Some in the press, in particular The New York Times, have made it harder to defend America against attack by insisting on publishing detailed information about vital national security programs.

First they reported the terrorist surveillance program, which monitors international communications when one end is outside the United States and one end is connected with or associated with al Qaeda. Now the Times has disclosed the terrorist financial tracking program.

On both occasions, the Times had been asked not to publish those stories by senior administration officials. They went ahead anyway. The leaks to The New York Times and the publishing of those leaks is very damaging to our national security.

The ability to intercept al Qaeda communications and to track their sources of financing are essential if we’re going to successfully prosecute the global war on terror. Our capabilities in these areas help explain why we have been so successful in preventing further attacks like 9/11. And putting this information on the front page makes it more difficult for us to prevent future attacks. Publishing this highly classified information about our sources and methods for collecting intelligence will enable the terrorists to look for ways to defeat our efforts. These kinds of stories also adversely affect our relationships with people who work with us against the terrorists. In the future, they will be less likely to cooperate if they think the United States is incapable of keeping secrets.

Cheney was joined by George Bush, who called the NYT’s reporting “disgraceful” and said: “The fact that a newspaper disclosed it makes it harder to win this war on terror.” Bush White House spokesman Tony Snow added: “In choosing to expose this program, despite repeated pleas from high-level officials on both sides of the aisle, including myself, the Times undermined a highly successful counterterrorism program and alerted terrorists to the methods and sources used to track their money trail.”

Bush made exactly the same accusations in 2005 as Clapper did yesterday after the NYT back then (finally) revealed the NSA’s warrantless eavesdropping program. “My personal opinion is it was a shameful act for someone to disclose this very important program in a time of war. The fact that we’re discussing this program is helping the enemy….It is a shameful act by somebody who has got secrets of the United States government and feels like they need to disclose them publicly.” A week later, Bush officials announced a criminal investigation of the leaks and said: “Our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk. Revealing classified information is illegal, alerts our enemies, [and] endangers our country.”

Meanwhile, the GOP-led House actually passed a formal resolution condemning the NYT and “call[ing] on news organizations to avoid exposing Americans ‘to the threat of further terror attacks” by revealing U.S. government methods of tracking terrorists.” Then House Majority Leader John Boehner said: “We’ve just tipped off all of the terrorists around the world that here is another way that we could have caught you, but now you know about it.” Rep. Mike Oxley, the GOP Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, called the paper’s reporting “treasonous”, saying: “We are at war, ladies and gentlemen. Now some of you folks find that an inconvenient fact.” GOP Congressman Peter King called for the prosecution of the Times journalists and editors responsible for the stories – “We’re at war, and for the Times to release information about secret operations and methods is treasonous,” he said – just as he’s done for journalists involved in the current NSA reporting.

These same platitudes have been hauled out by U.S. officials for decades. When Daniel Ellsberg disclosed the Pentagon Papers, Nixon officials repeatedly smeared him - with no evidence – as likely working in conjunction with Russia (sound familiar?), while he and the NYT were repeatedly accused of damaging national security, putting our men and women in uniform in harm’s way, and helping America’s enemies.

Political officials hate transparency.They would rather be able to hide what they’re doing. They therefore try to demonize those who impose transparency with the most extreme and discrediting accusations they can concoct (you’re helping terrorists kill Americans!). The more transparency one imposes on them, the more extreme and desperate this accusatory rhetoric becomes. This is not complicated. It’s all very basic.

James Clapper is saying exactly what Dick Cheney and George Bush before him said, and those three said what John Ehrlichman and Henry Kissinger said before them about Ellsberg. It’s all spouted with no evidence. It’s rote and reflexive. It’s designed to smear and fear-monger. As Professor Ludlow notes, “Fear is even used to prevent us from questioning the decisions supposedly being made for our safety.”

Maybe it’s time for journalists to cease being the leading advocates for state secrecy and instead take seriously their claimed role as watchdogs. At the very least, demand evidence before these sorts of highly predictable, cliched attacks are heralded as something to be taken seriously. As it is, they’re just cartoons: ones that are played over and over and over.

Murtaza Hussain contributed research and reporting.

The post Clapper Reads From the Bush/Cheney/Nixon Playbook to Fear-Monger Over Transparency appeared first on The Intercept.

For nine years, the U.S. government refused to let a Stanford PhD student named Rahinah Ibrahim back in the country after putting her on the no-fly list for no apparent reason. For eight years, U.S. government lawyers fought Ibrahim’s request that she be told why. Last April, despite his promise in 2009 to do so only in only the most extreme cases, Attorney General Eric Holder tried to block Ibrahim’s case by asserting the state secrets privilege, declaring under penalty of perjury that the information she wanted “could reasonably be expected to cause significant harm to national security.”

Last week, a federal judge publicly revealed the government’s explanation for Ibrahim’s long ordeal: an FBI agent had “checked the wrong box,” resulting in her falling under suspicion as a terrorist. Even when the government found and corrected the error years later, they still refused to allow Ibrahim to return to the country or learn on what grounds she had been banned in the first place.

Holder, in his April declaration, restated his own new state secrets policy, that “[t]he Department will not defend an invocation of the privilege in order to: (i) conceal violations of the law, inefficiency, or administrative error; (ii) prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency of the United States Government”.

Then he did exactly what he had said he wouldn’t do.

The bogus national security claims invoked were even more outrageous because they were used to continue the persecution of someone the government knew to be innocent.

Ibrahim’s ordeal started on January 2, 2005, when she arrived at San Francisco International Airport to catch a flight to Malaysia for a Stanford-sponsored academic conference. A citizen of Malaysia, she had been living in the United States for four years on a student visa. But when a ticket agent saw her name on the no-fly list, he called the police.

Despite being wheelchair-bound due to complications from a medical procedure, Ibrahim was handcuffed and taken to a detention cell where she was reportedly humiliated and threatened by San Francisco police officers. She was denied access to medication she had been travelling with, despite suffering excruciating pain due to a recent surgery. Her obvious medical distress apparently won her no sympathy. As she recounted in an interview about the incident years later: “My back felt as if it was hit by an electric shock with every beat of my heart and I repeatedly asked for painkillers and nearly collapsed, but they ignored me.” Shaking and in tears, she was eventually allowed to board her flight to Malaysia but found herself banned from returning on the way back.

In an effort to clear her name and return to her life in the United States, Ibrahim launched a lawsuit against the U.S. government challenging her placement on the federal no-fly list. However at every step of the process government officials impeded her ability to challenge or even examine the allegations against her by invoking the state secrets privilege.

U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup ordered her removal from the no-fly list in January. And last week, he unsealed a redacted 38-page court filing disclosing the “mistaken information” that led the government to throw an innocent woman’s life into turmoil.

As a 2008 presidential candidate, Barack Obama specifically criticized the Bush administration’s abusive state secrets policy. The Obama/Biden “Plan to Change Washington” critically noted that “the Bush administration has invoked a legal tool known as the ‘state secrets’ privilege more than any other administration to get cases thrown out of court.”

After taking office, Obama declared: “We must not protect information merely because it reveals the violation of a law or embarrassment to the government….I will never hide the truth because it’s uncomfortable.”

But he then proceeded to cite the state secrets privilege to stonewall lawsuits on such topics as CIA torture and extrajudicial assassinations. A lawsuit filed by Binyam Mohammed – a man subjected to extraordinary rendition who suffered “medieval” torture including the slashing of his chest and genitals with a scalpel –was thrown out after the Obama Department of Justice invoked the privilege, with DOJ attorney Douglas N. Letter asserting at the time: “This case cannot be litigated…the judges shouldn’t play with fire in this national security situation.”

The troubling questions regarding the abuse of the state secrets privilege are obvious: If officials of the federal government are willing to use it to conceal a bureaucratic error, how far would they be willing to go to cover up serious crimes such as torture and assassination?

For her part, Ibrahim said by video-link at the trial: “I would like my children not to hate America because of what happened to me … I would like for nobody to have to go through what happened to me.”

The post Obama DOJ’s New Abuse of State-Secrets Privilege Revealed appeared first on The Intercept.

(949): The bad news is that I stole all your drugs. The good news is that ITS KICKING IN!

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Oh my goodness. Here I am, sitting in the Gawker Media offices on another Friday morning, just trying to get through the day, when suddenly Ubisoft releases 13 minutes of footage from South Park: The Stick of Truth and now I can't stop giggling at my desk and this is all quite embarrassing.

Stick of Truth is out on March 4 for PS3, Xbox 360, and PC. It might be the greatest game ever made. (Note: it might not actually be the greatest game ever made. We'll keep you updated once we actually play it.)

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Being a Pokémon master takes time and patience—beating a game in the franchise usually takes at least a couple dozen of hours. Now imagine trying to beat a Pokémon game while thousands of other people also control your avatar.

Now imagine that these thousands of people will do whatever they want to your avatar, as they may not even care if you beat the game at all.

If it sounds like madness, it kind of is. As of this writing, there are nearly seven thousand people watching a Pokémon stream of the original games, Red and Blue (it's not clear which one it is). Here's where it gets interesting: someone has set the emulator such that it takes inputs from the chat on the side of the Twitch stream. The game only seems to recognizes the four D-Pad directions, A, B, Start and Select. The stream is called "Twitch Plays Pokemon," and so far, it's glorious. Here's a chunk of footage from last night, though you can also watch it live here.

Watch live video from TwitchPlaysPokemon on TwitchTV

If you've ever watched a well-populated stream on Twitch before, you know how fast the chat on the side can move—it can be impossible to read what anyone is saying. Despite that inevitable chaos, the game takes all the inputs in real time, as you can see in the footage—what this means in practice is that the game progresses as if the main character was drunk and confused. It's rather amusing.

Progresses is the key word here: sure, playing Pokémon via Twitch chat means that there is a massive lack of coordination, resulting in situations where it may take minutes for a character to walk through one measly door. Still, Twitch chat is doing it. At the moment, they're trying their best to get past the Cerulean City gym, which is requiring them to grind a little together. Meaning somehow, at some point, they beat the first gym together (Cerulean is the second gym in the original games). I know—watching, it may seem baffling as to how Twitch chat has managed that, given that it has spent the last dozen hours trying to beat said gym and given that some people are clearly interested in trolling the game. But it has! The wonders of the internet never cease.

I wonder how long it'll take them to beat the whole game? You can watch Twitch's progress here.

(Top image via Wario64)

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Zach Weissmueller says:

A few years ago, I shared with you a video about the pattern of police raids on private property happening in California's Antelope Valley.

Well, a rather tragic and infuriating story brought me back to the desert. It's the story of Eugene Mallory, an 80-year-old retired engineer, whose home was raided by the LA County Sheriff's Dept. (which has been at the center of a number of scandals in recent years), in search of meth. No meth was found, but Eugene Mallory was shot dead in his own bedroom.

This video takes you inside Mallory's home, to the scene of the incident, and scrutinizes the Sheriff Department's official account. How was a warrant obtained, but not a single shred of evidence pointing to meth production found on the property? Why did deputies first claim Mallory was charging at them and then change their story? Why did one officer only yell "drop the gun" after he had already shot Mallory six times?

Police Shoot, Kill 80-Year-Old Man In His Own Bed, Don't Find the Drugs They Were Looking For

One of the RIAA's best friends in congress, Jerry Nadler, has been appointed to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet by Obama Congressional Democrats. The history of this committee is nothing short of grotesque: every time it looks like a copyright moderate/friend of the Internet might get appointed to it, it is declared redundant and shut down. Then, once the danger has passed and there's another loony, Internet-hating, censorship-happy copyright maximialist in place to fill a vacant seat, the committee once again becomes relevant and is resurrected.

The Burgess Shale, discovered in 1909 in the Canadian Rockies, has long been considered one of the greatest fossil sites ever found. Now, an extension of the site has been discovered, which rivals the original in quantity and quality of specimens, including rare fossil evidence of soft tissue.

The commander of the Iraqi militant group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) reportedly blew up 21 suicide bombers in training when he made an error during a live explosives exercise. 15 other trainees were injured. The popular imagination paints terrorists as hundred-foot-tall supermen with the power to destroy entire states simply by staring crosseyed at them, but the reality is that people who are willing to be suicide bombers -- and those who exploit them -- may not be very bright at all.