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Richard Branson is not just a billionaire businessman. He's also a father and grandfather who understands the challenges of being a new parent

That's how Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, described his support for a very generous parental leave policy adopted by Virgin Management, the investment and brand licensing arm of Branson's empire

Virgin Management will now provide employees with four years of experience up to 100% of their salary over a 52-week period of shared parental leave. Those with fewer than two years of experience will receive 25% of their salary. The policy applies to both men and women, and to parents who adopt Read more...

More about Children, Business, Parenting, Family, and Virgin

No ROI in security you say? Try a 1,425 per cent profit margin

Exploit kit traders and ransomware slingers are in one of the most profitable industries in the world, landing a whopping 1,425 percent profit margin for raiding legitimate trade.…

News of a beloved film being remade is rarely good news. The closest you can get, however, is something along the lines of Dwayne Johnson starring in a remake of John Carpenter‘s Big Trouble in Little China. I’m 100% behind the “Why remake a perfect movie?” argument but if it’s going to happen anyway, Johnson as the star is a major plus.

Johnson’s attitude toward the movie is an even bigger plus. In a new interview, the San Andreas star said he hopes they can be respectful to the original and even wants John Carpenter himself to come on board. Read the quotes below.

Johnson was at the Guys Choice Awards where he talked to Entertainment Weekly.

I loved reading the reactions from the fans, that they were so polarized – I’m the same way. My response is: know that I come to the project with nothing but love and respect for the original, which is why we want to bring on John Carpenter.

He explains.

I loved the original when I was younger and I loved the main character – all the characters. It felt like if we surrounded ourselves with the right group of people, the right writers who loved the movie too and wanted to honor it, bring on John Carpenter in some capacity … If we did that, then we have a shot at hopefully making something good.

Johnson didn’t have an answer for how, exactly, Carpenter would play a part but did say if in the writing of the film it didn’t work, they’d all walk away.

Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz (X-Men: First Class) are writing the remake which, just last week, Carpenter himself said he had nothing to do with or no problem with. Maybe this is just Johnson’s first time floating out this idea. Or he’s waiting to see a script, which doesn’t exist yet.

How would you like to see John Carpenter involved in the Big Trouble in Little China remake?

 

The post Dwayne Johnson Wants John Carpenter To Work On ‘Big Trouble In Little China’ Remake appeared first on /Film.

Not that anyone needed another reason to fear hospitals, but here’s a good one: Security researcher Brian Rios has discovered vulnerabilities in popular hospital drug pumps that allow hackers to remotely change drug dosages.

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So many choices, so little time.

In honor of the 20th anniversary of the illustrious Frappuccino, Starbucks has release six new flavors: Cotton Candy, Caramel Cocoa Cluster, Lemon Bar, Cinnamon Roll, Red Velvet Cake and Cupcake.

The Cotton Candy and Lemon Bar flavors are coffee-free, for patrons out there who are cutting back on caffeine (while also amping up their sugar intake). The sweet additions will be sold nationwide starting on June 8th

From June 19 through June 30, fans of the new flavors are encouraged to vote on their favorite new creation online. It's not entirely clear how Caramel Cocoa Cluster is different from a regular Caramel Mocha Frapp, so our money is on the Cinnamon Roll. Read more...

More about Pics, Starbucks, Business, Coffee, and Watercooler

No matter how much the internet may change over the years, there are at least two constants: absurd flame wars, and the wildly specific message boards from which they’re wrought. Perhaps the greatest of these virtual cesspools is Clown-Forum.com, a forum for clowns.

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We learned this morning that Super Meat Boy is coming to PlayStation 4 and PS Vita. I was ecstatic, and not merely because the game is going to be free at launch for PlayStation Plus members. Most of all, I looked forward to playing it again with the DualShock 4's stellar d-pad.

That was up until this afternoon when my repressed memories of a certain frustrating level crawled out of the abyss. You know the one. There are arguably more challenging levels found in Super Meat Boy, but none strike fear in my heart quite like those in The Kid's Warp Zone. Ugh.

The relief you experience after clearing that set for the first time is overwhelming. You can breathe regularly knowing you'll "never have to do that again!" With my muscle memory for this specific character long gone, I can't help but feel like there's only one winning move here.

Maybe I'll leave this one to Brett.

It’s hard to complain about a day at the beach, but sand can be a big pain. It sticks to your body and makes a mess in your car. To get it off easily, try baby powder.

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The first six Mega Man games are coming to PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One this year as part of a larger effort to preserve gaming's history.

Mega Man Legacy Collection is from the team at Digital Eclipse, whose focus is as much on game preservation as it is on creating fresh content that works with today's hardware. In addition to the games, the studio built in a number of features that celebrate the long-running Capcom series.

A challenge mode gives players an opportunity to take on remixed elements from the first six games. One example involves taking on all six Mega Man bosses consecutively. Another gives players one health bar to get through all the stages in a single game. Leaderboards connected to the challenge mode let players compare their results with friends. Read more...

More about Entertainment, Gaming, Capcom, Mega Man, and Mega Man Legacy Collection

The twinkly flashing lights of fireflies are a classic sign of summer, but the insects aren’t blinking for your aesthetic benefit. They’re courting in an absolutely cutthroat meet market, and some scientists are afraid that human activities could be making it harder for them to succeed. This summer, you can help figure out whether that’s true.

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April showers, as the saying goes, bring May flowers. Apparently, though, in Earth's new climate regime there is a corallary to this, which goes something like, "May downpours bring deadly floods and all-time rainfall records." At least that was the case this year.

According to data released Monday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, May was the wettest month on record in the contiguous U.S. NOAA says the average May precipitation total for the lower 48 states was 4.36 inches, which was 1.45 inches above average

This was the wettest May on record, and the wettest month of any month since instrument record-keeping began in 1895. So much rain fell that if converted into gallons it would amount to more than 200 trillion gallons of water, according to the AP Read more...

More about Texas, Global Warming, Flooding, Us World, and Us

As if to prove that nobody gets blacklisted forever, Troy Duffy, whose struggles with Harvey Weinstein appeared to be a career-killer in the documentary Overnight, keeps finding ways to make money off of a movie that barely ever played in theaters, yet sells a crap-ton of merchandise at Hot Topic every St. Patrick's Day. Presumably costar Norman Reedus' newfound fame on The Walking Dead doesn't hurt, either. So up next is a prequel series, with a first episode to be written and directed by Duffy, who says, "For years I've been obsessed with telling a real origin story with Boondock." (Read: "For years I've tried to make literally anything else, and this is the only thing of mine that ever gets a green light.") Reedus and Sean Patrick Flanery are being courted as executive producers, though the series would presumably star younger actors. No word on if Billy Connolly might return to play God.

Say goodbye to cables? Researchers at the University of Washington just successfully tested Wi-Fi charging.

With the ever-increasing number of smart, connected devices in our lives and the rise of the Internet of Things, there's a real need for a more elegant charging solution than cables running everywhere.

A recent report in Wired detailed how the researchers equipped a variety of devices with sensors to take Wi-Fi signals from a router and turn them into DC power

The team wanted the system to integrate with pre-existing Wi-Fi infrastructure, so they gave an off-the-shelf Asus router a software update to make it work as both a wireless power source and as a conventional Wi-Fi router. Rechargeable batteries installed with the team's custom sensors were charged up to 28 feet away, with a camera working up to 17 feet away and a temperature sensor working up to 20 feet away. Read more...

More about Gadgets, Wi Fi, Tech, Internet Of Things, and Wireless Charging

“

Get a rat and put it in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So there you go. It’s our theory of addiction.

Bruce comes along in the ’70s and said, “Well, hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.” So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, it’s got in Rat Park. It’s got lovely food. It’s got sex. It’s got loads of other rats to be friends with. It’s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And they’ve got both the water bottles. They’ve got the drugged water and the normal water. But here’s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. There’s a really interesting human example I’ll tell you about in a minute, but what Bruce says is that shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. So the right-wing theory is it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment.

[…]

We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? We’ve created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need. 

The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff—in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.

”

-

Johann Hari,

Does Capitalism Drive Drug Addiction?

(via bigfatsun)

As a recovering addict this is an interesting read. I’m constantly battling right-wingers telling me it’s my fault and always being told by doctors it’s in my nature. But hearing this about my environment makes a lot of sense, I fell into addiction in a very bad time in my life when I was very isolated, and most of the addicts I know are the same. Addiction is definitely related to depression and this is affected by environment. I like this article.

(via soymilkbitch)

Bruce Alexander did the Rat Park experiments in the seventies.  I am kind of horrified and outraged that I’ve heard about the empty-cage rat experiments but never once about his.

(via animatedamerican)

You may think you're being original, but when it comes to bus pranks, drivers have seen them all

When this kid tries to pull the old, "not actually boarding the bus, just tying my shoe" prank, the driver doesn't yell — he simply shuts the door.

The prankster was not happy, but at least his friends were amused.

[H/T:Reddit]

More about Viral Videos, Pranks, Funny, Watercooler, and Videos

Ferris Bueller, you're our hero.

It's been 30 years to the day since everyone's favorite leopard-vested high school truant took his fateful day off (pinpointed by data from the Braves vs. Cubs game he attended), and the classic movie has aged beautifully. (Even though the movie itself didn't come out until a year later, in 1986.)

That is, except for the fact that a majority of Bueller's series of stunts would absolutely backfire if he was in high school in 2015

Technology moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss a status update. Read more...

More about List, Social Media, High School, Ferris Bueller S Day Off, and Film