Kjhoulihan

It's a legislative shot across the bow of the FBI, who are demanding back-doors in phones and other devices, claiming "children will die" unless our pocket supercomputers are designed to allow untrusted parties to secretly take them over. Read the rest

A promo video from Pinkroccade, a prominent IT contractor to Dutch local governments, makes the case for spying on wearables (if your heart-rate rises because you're about to be mugged, the police could be alerted, and get GPS from your phone, find nearby phones belonging to people with criminal records, check the view from your Google Glass, and respond -- case closed).

Read the rest

Chinese artist and photographer Ju Duoqi works with vegetables. She was born in Chongqing in 1973, and studied at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. Shown here, selections from her 2010 series, “The Fantasies of Chinese Cabbage.” Read the rest

I don’t know if I’m in a bad mood. Maybe I’m just in a bad mood. But I got angry watching this trailer for a new Christian movie about two virgins who wait until marriage to get it on. It turns out the guy’s getting deployed the day after the wedding, so they only have one night to make sweet, sweet, Jesus-y love… but they keep hitting obstacles every time they try:

I know I’ve only seen the trailer, and I know I’m not really the target audience, but I’ll go ahead and tell you why the movie doesn’t work for me.

The premise is dumb.

I don’t feel bad for these characters at all. They chose to wait, and now they’re upset because everything’s not completely perfect on Night One? Too. Damn. Bad.

Maybe they shouldn’t have waited if they knew the guy was being deployed.

Maybe they shouldn’t have treated sex like it was the reward for marriage.

Maybe they should stop trying to make everything perfect and just jump each other on the porch of that locked house.

I don’t know how this movie ends. Maybe they do end up having sex. Or maybe they realize being with each other emotionally is more important that what they do with their bodies. Or maybe they decide to wait a little longer until the guy comes back home. Or maybe the guy dies in the war and they regret their stupid decision and everyone in the audience demands their money back.

Or maybe I’m just in a bad mood.

(via Christian Nightmares)

Those ghosthunter shows are all looking for evidence of an afterlife and of spirits hanging about to communicate with us, and finally a group of ghosthunters in Oklahoma have found it. They’ve been exploring a decrepit basement in an abandoned urban building — you know, the kind of place where teenagers might hang out and drink and get into mischief — and they left up a chalkboard, and when they weren’t around, messages appeared on it. Deep, cryptic, strange messages, so they must be from ghosties.

The lanky cowboy with the slow drawl is totally mystified by the paranormal message with its deep historical resonance scrawled on the board.

“THE CAKE IS A LIE.”

So profound. So inexplicable and enigmatic. I wonder what it means? Perhaps one of you will have insight into this perplexing arcane sign from another world.

The idea that companies exist solely to produce shareholder value can be traced to a 1970 editorial by Milton Friedman. Writing in Forbes, Steve Denning calls this The World's Dumbest Idea, and gives pretty comprehensive evidence to support that notion: "As often happens with bad ideas that make some people a lot of money, shareholder value caught on and became the conventional wisdom."

[It's 4:30am. I'll color this one when I wake up.]

Coulson Lives! Yay! Except that sort of deflates the emotional impetus for the unification of the team in the 3rd act of The Avengers! Boo! I have complex and conflicting emotions about a thing just like one of Joss Whedon’s characters! Yay! Oh no, I’ve been killed tragically, just like one of… You get the idea.

I am, in a word (SPOILERS: The word in question is “very.”) VERY excited about Marvel’s Agents Of SHIELD. The full trailer make it look like a more fun version of Fringe. Not that Fringe wasn’t fun. This just looks MORE fun. Perhaps more light hearted. I really hope it manages to bring back that “comedy in the face of tragedy, but also totally solid action and complex story telling” formula that has been missing from TV for so long. I can’t think of a single show that’s melded those attributes without leaning too heavily on one in spite of the others since Firefly, or before that, Buffy. Wait… I’m sensing a pattern here.

As for J.A.R.’s super secret role, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he is “basically Luke Cage” without actually being called “Luke Cage.” Seems like something they might do in order to free up licensing for the character and give them more creative freedom with his powers and backstory.

• Is J. August Richards Actually Luke Cage on Agents of SHIELD?
• J. August Richards Isn’t Playing Luke Cage In ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D

COMMENTERS: So is it just me or are super heroes still overwhelmingly white? I know there are efforts being made to introduce more variety in the hero landscape (the new half-hispanic, half-black Spider-Man comes to mind), and I know I haven’t been a big comic reader since I was 14 (about 17 years ago), but I still don’t see much diversity among the metahumans. Though it seems DC is more diverse than Marvel. That could also be a total misconception on my part, but it SEEMS that way. You tell me.

you’d think gargoyles would be pretty tough to mess up, but i’m pretty sure batman runs afoul of the end-user license agreement