Bewarethewumpus

(310): You popped the Plan B pill then clapped twice, said "mischief managed" and headed tward the bar.

Author : chesterchatfield

“So then, you know what he does? He falls to his knees. His knees, like in happiness. I mean can you imagine? Lived on an island for six years alone- hasn’t said a single word since they rescued him, then, gets off the helicopter and at the very sight of L.A. – polluted, disgustin’, stinkin’ Los Angeles- at his first sight of civilization he falls to knees and says one word. Just one word. You wanna know what it was? Hallelujah. Hallelujah! He was praisin’ God! Ain’t that ironic? Beautiful tropic island vs. L.A.” The old man shrugged his shoulders. “Always thought it was a weird story.”

I nodded at the man, lost in my own thoughts. He was just another independent, one of several I had run into in the last several months. A matted beard made it hard to distinguish age, but old enough that he wouldn’t last long out here, skirting cities.

By the next morning, he’d disappeared. Wandering— maybe he’d get caught. Maybe they would Change him and he would never have to sleep on the cold, hard, ground again.

Family gone, lost in the wilderness, I just walked, heading towards civilization with no goal at all. I wished I’d invited that man to come with me. Maybe we could have been happy together.

I kept on hiking.

That night I dreamed my father came home from work and he was Changed. He was wearing a clean new blazer and his curly hair was straightened, parted symmetrically down the middle. He gently explained that he was now perfect and we had to be too. My brothers refused and they all started fighting until they were just a heap of bodies on the floor. My mother and I buried them, and she stared calmly down at their graves. Then she finally looked up at me with glassy eyes and whispered, “Hallelujah.”

I awoke in a cold sweat, trying to hold onto the dream as it slipped away. I opened my eyes to the newly risen sun.

After another two days I finally got a glimpse of light. City lights, revealing the valley where my relatives used to live. I hoped they were down there somewhere, perfect and happy.

I stood at the base of the very last hill, then trekked up slowly, stopping to rest just before the top, drawing out the time before I had to look out over the other side. I tried to imagine some Changed guards watching, waiting to catch a glimpse of me and send in the cavalry. Maybe I would sneak past them and become a hero; rescue the thousands of perfect people living in the city. Ha. Or maybe they didn’t give a rat’s ass if I wandered into their shiny city or starved out here in the cold.

I walked the last few steps backwards, facing the mountains. Then I turned and just stood, taking it all in.

For miles, there was only row after row of cookie-cutter houses. They each had one sleek black car parked in the driveway. In the distance rows and rows of dark buildings sat like silent sentinels. Same height and distance apart from the others, lined with symmetrical windows.

I shivered as I stood on my hill, observing everything from an elevated view.

I thought of that nameless old man’s story and reached up a hand to touch my rough, sunburned face.

“Hallelujah, indeed.”

Do not follow this troublemaker, @RubenBolling.

And whatever you do, do not join the INNER HIVE, which is surely some kind of secret cabal of secular, humanist, moral-relativist, evolution-hugging mathe-manics who get comic strips emailed to them BEFORE publication, which is clearly unnatural.

Freeweibo, an anti-censorship organization that works on free speech issues in China, has discovered that the Chinese version of Microsoft's Bing search-engine censors its US version to match the censored results that would be shown within China. Search terms such as "Dalai Lama, June 4 incident (how the Chinese refer to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989), Falun Gong and FreeGate" return results dominated by censored Chinese news outlets like Baidu Baike and Chinese state broadcaster CCTV. The same searches run on the English version of Bing return pages from Wikipedia, BBC, the New York Times, etc.

Google's Chinese-language competitor displays much more parity between the Chinese and English editions -- the Chinese Google results for controversial subjects include Chinese articles from the BBC and Wikipedia.

Microsoft will not comment on the matter.

Update: Microsoft has commented:

"Bing does not apply China's legal requirements to searches conducted outside of China," Bing Senior Director Stefan Weitz notes in a prepared statement. "Due to an error in our system, we triggered an incorrect results-removal notification for some searches noted in the report, but the results themselves are and were unaltered outside of China.

As of 10PM Pacific on 12 Feb, many of the "controversial" search terms still generate results pages dominated by Chinese state media.

The information was first collected by censorship blog Greatfire.org. Author Charlie Smith said he had originally discovered the discrepancies while checking for information on his own website, FreeWeibo.com, a site for anonymously searching Chinese social media.

“The first thing we noticed was our index page was not showing up. It specifically did not show the homepage. But it was in Google,” he said.

“It’s a bit crazy. Any Chinese person who is searching in Chinese from overseas is being treated as if they have the same rights as a resident of mainland China. So we won’t show them the accurate search results if they search for Dalai Lama. What you get is state controlled propaganda,” he said. “Except they don’t tell you the results have been censored. If you were in China they would at least tell you that.”

“We thought there had been a mistake so we wrote to Microsoft and they said ‘no comment,’” he said.

Microsoft did not return calls for comment from the Guardian.

Bing censoring Chinese language search results for users in the US [Dominic Rushe/The Guardian]

(via /.)

New Comic: The Old Ways

Uh, thanks, Grandma.

Tuesday, February 11 — 12:00 AM

It’s time for the Olympics again, and that means Mario and Sonic are going head-to-head in a battl–wait, what the!?

Yep, for those of you who missed it, Sonic and crew (especially our bulky boy Knuckles up there) are getting a somewhat-dramatic reworking in “Sonic Boom,” an upcoming CGI TV show and Wii U game. A few forumers were wondering if I’d make a comic about this, and with the Winter Olympics just starting up, the timing seemed right for this kind of gag.

The extra-long legs at the end was a gag I came up with at the last moment and decided to milk it for all it was worth, ’cause why not? Sorry that you keep getting the strangest BitF comics, Sonic…!

-By Matthew

On what seems to be just another ordinary day, a man is exposed to sexism and sexual violence in a society ruled by women. [SLYT; NSFW; Nudity; Sexual violence]

Michael Botticelli, the deputy director of the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy, tried to play coy with Rep. Earl Blumenauer about the administration's willfully ignorant position on marijuana prohibition, but the congressman wasn't going to have any of it, and gave him a terrific tongue-lashing.

In the end, Botticelli mustered up some unconvincing false outrage and played his "won't someone think of the children" card. I feel sorry for Botticelli, because he looks like he wants to blurt out the truth but he knows his boss will have his head if he does.

Joel from the Vinesauce Twitch.tv channel shows how to royally destroy a computer with a copy of the Windows XP operating system installed.

After the Sandy Hook shootings, at presidential behest, $10 million was allocated to to explore links between gun violence and video games. A year later, Mike Rose reports that nothing seems to be happening.

It's been more than a year since the meeting with Biden, and more than a year since Obama called for $10 million to be set aside for research into whether new media, such as violent video games, influence root causes of gun violence. In that time, you probably haven't heard much about that research. That's because it never actually happened, nor did any funding change hands. As discovered in my various talks with individuals and researchers close to discussions, any potential research efforts from Congress broke down fairly rapidly following the meeting with Biden, and hardly anything has been said since.

An unsuprising P.S. to this round of the game scapegoating scarehouse: despite screaming tabloid suggestions that he was inspired to kill by Call of Duty, it turned out that Adam Lanza wasn't a hardcore gamer at all. He liked innocuous kid-friendly fare such as Dance Dance Revolution and Super Mario. The report into his rampage focused on the fact that he was a) mentally ill and b) had easy access to guns and ammunition.

Here's what we know in a nutshell: The best research into the field has found very little evidence of a link between violence in games and real-life violence, and past research suggests that video game violence has even less impact that other media, like television for example. There is absolutely no consensus amongst researchers -- and even when a group does claim to find that link, they are quickly rebutted by numerous others.

Take the boys-club crap of the video game internet, put it in a time machine and… you get a funny/sad comic that might just make it a bit more clear just how awful it is for the women who suffer the harassment of unenlightened dudes.

By setting this strip in the early 20^th Century, cartoonist Shaenon K. Garrity subversively drives home just how outdated the attitudes behind sexual harassment and hostility are. I chuckled at the sly Yellow Kid cosplay and Nintendo Playing Card Co. jokes in the background and winced at references to recent headlines. But, mostly I was struck by the loneliness the protagonist must feel at not being able to really enjoy a thing she loves.

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"Even the most ridiculous design has a purpose" says the creator of this virtual countdown timer in the building game Minecraft. Well, the purpose of this design is to remind us of our place in the universe with a clock that will run for longer than there will be computers to simulate it.

YouTuber spumwack wanted to make the most useless machine he could think of in Minecraft. After a few designs, he eventually came up with a door attached to a clock. The useless part? The clock won't finish counting until after our entire (real) universe has decayed to inert nothingness. He does an excellent job explaining all of the changes the world, society, and the universe will go through as he shows off the contraption.

Although amid all the large scale explanations, I thought the second clock was the most relevant:

The second clock is a little more ambitious. 22 hours from now, it will finish its cycle and most people who have watched this video will forget what they saw and will likely never think about it ever again.

If you'd like to run the clock yourself, you can download his Minecraft world from a link in the video's description.

The Universe Death Clock via @tweetsauce

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McGruff the Crime Dog was sentenced to 16 years in prison on Monday for possession of 1,000 pot plants and more than two dozen weapons, including a grenade launcher. John Russell Morales, 41, an actor who once played McGruff, was arrested in 2011. (NBC News)

The Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada gives candy its "Health Check" seal of approval. This doesn't sit well with Yoni Freedhoff, MD, an assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Ottawa, who made a video in which he told the dietitians at the Heart and Stroke Foundation that they ought to be ashamed of themselves and mortified.

Wisdom from the Church of the Everlasting Cheezeburger!

Phroyd

In December, the Australian government approved a plan by India's Adani Group to expand a coal port, and now the government's given the go-ahead to dump the 3,000,000 cubic meters of muck that will be dredged for the project onto the struggling Great Barrier Reef. The GBR, which is a World Heritage Site, is already officially classed in "poor" health, and the ocean floor around it will now be smothered with vast amounts of waste, destroying fragile habitats and crippling a key player in the world's ocean ecology. The Australian government says that the reef will not suffer as a result, but independent scientists who investigated the question firmly disagree.

Conservationists warned it could hasten the demise of the World Heritage-listed reef, which is already considered to be in "poor" health, with dredging smothering corals and seagrasses and exposing them to poisons and elevated levels of nutrients.

The reef is already facing pressures from climate change, land-based pollution and crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks.

"This is a sad day for the reef and anyone who cares about its future," said WWF Great Barrier Reef campaigner Richard Leck.

"The World Heritage Committee will take a dim view of this decision, which is in direct contravention of one of its recommendations."

Australia OKs Dumping Dredge Spoil in Barrier Reef [AFP/Discovery]

(via /.)

James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), the architect of the Patriot Act, has repudiated his Frankenstein's monster -- though it took the NSA mass-spying scandal to do it (yo, James, where were you for the 10-ish years of horrors before Snowden's leaks?). He's told American spooks that if they keep on blocking reform to their habits, he'll lead an effort to tank the Patriot Act's spying provisions when they come up for renewal this June, and he sounds serious: "Unless Section 215 is fixed, you, Mr. Cole, and the intelligence community will end up getting nothing because I am absolutely confident that there are not the votes in this Congress to reauthorize 215." (via Ars Technica)

Just Ella is a new short film from Jim Munroe, creator of the awesome science fiction mockumentary Ghosts With Shit Jobs. It was made for the Lo-fi Sci-fi 48 Hour Film Challenge, and is a taste of a new Jim Munroe project called Haphead, which will be made with the same crew and cast as "Just Ella." Jim's looking for production volunteers in Toronto for Haphead, email if you want to help

“Just Ella” posits a future overrun by gibbering monstrosities. Ella takes refuge in a “the Ossington Safehouse, a collectively-run space dedicated to human sovereignty.” But despite doing the assigned tasks on the chore list, the Safehouse isn’t safe — the terrors outside are nothing compared to those within.

Contains perhaps the first cinematic example of autocomplete used for a dramatic reveal.

Just Ella (via JWZ)

Robbo sez, "Dave Raphael of Dave's Blog has an interesting post about a conversation he recently had with Verizon support and discovered some uncomfortable - yet wholly unsurprising - truths about how Verizon is selectively limiting bandwidth to AWS services and adversely affecting the quality of Netflix. The open admission of this by Verizon support was unexpected - but the fact it is happening should be of no surprise to anyone but the ignorant and naive."

Frankly, I was surprised he admitted to this. I’ve since tested this almost every day for the last couple of weeks. During the day – the bandwidth is normal to AWS. However, after 4pm or so – things get slow.

In my personal opinion, this is Verizon waging war against Netflix. Unfortunately, a lot of infrastructure is hosted on AWS. That means a lot of services are going to be impacted by this.

Verizon Using Recent Net Neutrality Victory to Wage War Against Netflix [Dave Raphael/Dave's Blog] (Thanks, Robbo!)

Former State Department official Stephen Kim announced today he will plead guilty to leaking classified information to Fox News journalist James Rosen and will serve 13 months in jail.

The case sparked controversy last year when it was revealed the Justice Department named Rosen a “co-conspirator” in court documents for essentially doing his job as a journalist. But a largely ignored ruling in Kim’s case may have far broader impact on how sources interact with journalists in the future.

In Espionage Act cases involving sources or whistleblowers, defendants naturally want to explain to a judge or jury that the information they may have given to journalists (and the American public) didn’t harm US national security. The bar for this was already too low; in the past, the government didn't have to show actual harm, but at least they had to show the information could potentially harm national security. The judge in Kim’s case ruled the government didn’t even need to do that.

As secrecy expert Steven Aftergood reported at the time:

Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled that the prosecution in the pending case of former State Department contractor Stephen Kim need not show that the information he allegedly leaked could damage U.S. national security or benefit a foreign power, even potentially. Her opinion was a departure from a 30-year-old ruling in the case of U.S. v. Morison, which held that the government must show that the leak was potentially damaging to the U.S. or beneficial to an adversary. (emphasis ours)

This means that it doesn’t matter if the information leaked by Kim was properly classified, or if it should have been classified at all. Kim could not argue the information he gave to Rosen may have been innocuous. The ruling also gives the government carte blanche power to classify whatever it wants—including waste, abuse, and crimes—and keep it secret under the threat of prosecution of anyone who could potentially reveal it. As the defense argued at the time, this ruling turns the Espionage Act into an Official Secrets Act, which Congress has continually refused to enact over the last century.

Because of this ruling, and other rulings in Espionage Act cases that bar defendants from explaining their intent to inform the American public to a jury, Kim likely had no choice to plead guilty. This is also why if Edward Snowden came back to the US he quite literally cannot receive a fair trial: he would be legally barred from making his case in court.

The Kim case yet another example of the broken nature of how the government deals with leaks, in which the Justice Department has complete discretion to ignore the leaks they like, and prosecute the leaks they don’t like. Kim’s lawyer Abbe Lowell made this point eloquently in his statement today:

Stephen’s case demonstrates that our system for prosecuting leaks in this country is broken and terribly unfair. Lower-level employees like Mr. Kim are prosecuted because they are easier targets or often lack the resources or political connections to fight back. High-level employees leak classified information to forward their agenda or to make an administration look good with impunity. In fact, in this case, news reports from the same day demonstrate that Stephen was not the only government employee discussing the topic at issue. Stephen may have told the reporter what the reporter already knew from others, but Stephen was the only one charged.

“Leak” cases are prosecuted under the Espionage Act, a 100-year-old law with crushing penalties that was never intended to apply to conversations between a government employee and a news reporter. The Act and its penalties are designed to punish traitors and spies – not State Department analysts answering questions from the media about their area of expertise. Stephen faced more than a decade in jail for the type of public discussion of foreign policy issues that ought to be encouraged. This Administration and Congress should address these problems, as they undermine the basic fairness of our criminal justice system.

It’s clear the Espionage Act is inherently unfair to sources and whistleblowers. As Congress debates NSA reform, they should also be considering repealing the Espionage Act once and for all.

Last night at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, science educator Bill Nye debated young Earth creationist Ken Ham regarding the origins of life and the universe.