firehose

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Trailrunner7 (1100399) writes "If law enforcement gets hold of your locked iPhone and has some interest in its contents, Apple can pull all kinds of content from the device, including texts, contacts, photos and videos, call history and audio recordings. The company said in a new document that provides guidance for law enforcement agencies on the kinds of information Apple can provide and what methods can be used to obtain it that if served with a search warrant, officials will help law enforcement agents extract specific application-specific data from a locked iOS device. However, that data appears to be limited to information related to Apple apps, such as iMessage, the contacts and the camera. Email contents and calendar data can't be extracted, the company said in the guidelines."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yesterday, the global snack giant Mondelez announced plans to combine its coffee business with D.E. Master Blenders to create a company with annual revenue of more than $7 billion. The combined company, which will be called Jacobs Douwe Egberts, would be the largest “pure play” coffee company in the world.

Its biggest individual brands, including Jacobs, Carte Noire, and Pilão, are most popular outside of North America.

Overall, the company’s retail value would lag behind Nestle’s, according to data compiled by Euromonitor. But it would be the largest in terms of retail volume. The chart below shows the market shares of current major brand owners, compared with the proposed combined company, Jacobs Douwe Egberts:

Mondelez will get $5 billion of cash up front and maintain a 49% stake in the combined business.

The other side of the deal is Douwe Egberts owner Joh. A Benckiser (JAB), which is the investment arm and holding company of the billionaire Reimann family.

That family is pretty fascinating in its own right. JAB is mostly owned by four very private siblings, Renate Reimann-Haas, Wolfgang Reimann, Stefan Reimann-Andersen, and Matthias Reimann-Andersen.

The family’s wealth dates back to the German chemical company Benckiser, which was started in 1823. It moved into consumer goods in the 50s. The family took the company public in 1997, and merged with the British consumer goods company Reckitt and Colman two years later. The family still owns around 10% of what’s now Reckitt-Benckiser, which owns brands ranging from Durex to Lysol to Strepsils.

Albert Reimann inherited the whole company in 1952 and left 11.1% to each of his nine adopted children. The four controlling Reimanns bought out control from their other siblings. 

The family has chosen an unusual strategy. Rather than focusing on property, stocks, and bonds, their company is run by three highly pedigreed CEOs (paywall) who make big deals for luxury and consumer goods companies. So far the company has held them, rather than flipped them.

In addition to the new coffee behemoth, the family owns a substantial luxury portfolio which includes brands such as the high-end shoe brand Jimmy Choo, the perfume maker Coty, and the Swiss shoemaker Bally. Before its $9.8-billion purchase of D.E. Master Blenders, the company spent a combined $1.3 billion on the retail coffee chains Caribou Coffee and Peet’s, though the businesses are run separately.

Here’s Mondelez’s graphic showing the consumer brands that the two companies will combine:

The deal comes at a time when coffee prices are at record highs, affecting the bottom line for everybody in the industry from retail operations like Starbucks to these big agglomerations of brands. Coffee futures are up about 86% year to date, according to Factset. It’s a pretty good time for economies of scale.

Hey, hey - it’s me.

running-dog:

A life lived among dogs.  My pack: 2004, 2005, 2006, 2009, 2009, 2010 (with my partner’s dogs) 2011, 2012, 2013

Astronomers have created the first realistic virtual universe using a computer simulation called "Illustris." Illustris can recreate 13 billion years of cosmic evolution in a cube 350 million light-years on a side with unprecedented resolution.

Hello Kitty Reversible Plush: Pizza

celestedoodles:

reboot T’Pring comin’ to tell Spock the wedding is off

kalidraws:

✧Purple Bishounen✧

18x24 3 color screenprinted poster for Telegraph Gallery’s Prince Tribute Show! Look at all the awesome posters! Buy one! Bring him home, let him treat you right~

(THIS WAS A LOT OF FUN YOU GUYS)

netbuzz writes: "The worst of DRM is set to infest law school casebooks. One publisher, AspenLaw, wants students to pay $200 for a bound casebook, but at the end of class they have to give it back. Aspen is touting this arrangement as a great deal because the buyer will get an electronic version and assorted online goodies once they return the actual book. But they must return the book. Law professors and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are calling it nothing but a cynical attempt to undermine used book sales, as well as the first sale doctrine that protects used bookstores and libraries."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As the NBA works to remove Donald Sterling from ownership of the Clippers, Shelly Sterling is determined to remain in power.

Donald Sterling's wife and Los Angeles Clippers co-owner Shelly Sterling is hoping to maintain ownership of the team despite the NBA's plans to force her husband to give up the franchise, according to the Los Angeles Times'  James Rainey, Mike Bresnahan and Nathan Fenno.

NBA commissioner Adam Silver hit Donald Sterling with a lifetime ban from the league along with a $2.5 million fine for racist comments that were recorded by a former girlfriend and later released to TMZ. The NBA is currently pushing to remove Donald Sterling from ownership, but Shelly Sterling believes the ban doesn't apply to her or the rest of her family.

Silver has said that his ruling was for Donald Sterling only, and that no firm decisions had been made on any family members. But most involved in the league, including players, fans and other owners, would prefer to see the Clippers move on from the Sterling family altogether.

However, Shelly Sterling wants to keep the team, which is something the NBA apparently wasn't expecting. Sterling has retained a law firm to assist her in her attempts to retain ownership, and she has put out several statements over the past few days as co-owner of the team. First, she denounced her husband's racist comments, and then she praised the NBA for putting Clippers president Andy Roeser on an indefinite leave of absence.

Despite Shelly Sterling's attempts to get back in the league's good graces, it's likely that they will do anything they can to remove her from power along with her husband. Even if she's not included in the vote to force Donald Sterling to sell the team, she might still need approval from the other owners to take control. Based on the general sentiment of the owners, that seems unlikely to happen.

Even so, the Sterling's appear willing to fight this in court, and the whole situation may not get resolved for quite some time.

Editor’s note: This little nugget was originally an InDesign Magazine Tip of the Week, but since it’s not documented anywhere that we could find, it is the very definition of an InDesign “secret,” and thus must be shared here too. By the way, sign up now to receive the Tip of the Week, so you don’t […]

vixyish:

explodinghye:

oh gee let’s go look up some reference for cherno alpha’s feet they’re so cool

ah yes how neat i see the— wait 

is thAT WHAT I THINK IT IS??//? ??  ?? ?

IM SO FUCKIG NDONE WITH EVERYTHING 
THEY DIDN’T NAME IT FROM CHERNIY (BLACK IN RUSSIAN)
THEY DIDN’T NAME IT FROM CHERNOBYL 
NO 
SASHA AND ALEKSIS KAIDANOVSKY NAMED THEIR FUCKING ROBOT /AFTER THE RUSSIAN DEVIL HIMSELF/

*Night on Bald Mountain plays*

After weeks of anticipation, the 2014 Met Gala has finally landed in New York City at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Stars and models alike walked the red carpet in stunning evening wear designs. This year’s Met Gala’s exhibit is “Charles James: Beyond Fashion”. It takes a look at the twentieth century couturier Charles James known for his sculptural and revolutionary ball gowns. Many of the attendees adhered to the theme of evening wear dress in top labels including Ralph Lauren, Oscar de la Renta, Balmain and more. Check out our roundup of looks below and we’ll update as more credits and images come in.

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We were fascinated with the search for the Malaysian plane and the search for survivors on the South Korean ferry. Why wasn't the media also focused on searching for the missing girls?

chrono-mugen:

sizvideos:

Neil DeGrasse Tyson Ruins Your Zombie Fantasies Forever - Video

This is everything my homie been saying for forever

Why zombies are wack

The Boston Globe Spotlight Team’s investigation of off-campus housing in Boston revealed that a collision of greed, neglect, and mismanagement is endangering young people in America’s college capital, enriching some absentee landlords who maximize profits by packing students into properties, and routinely ignore the dictates of critical housing codes.

In 2008, Serge Orru, the head of the French section of the World Wildlife Fund, came up with the idea of displaying 1,600 pandas—the number still alive in the wild—at landmarks across the country. Six years, twenty countries and more than one hundred cities later, the pandas are preparing to visit Hong Kong in June.

Read more...

In the 31 years since an engineer named Charles Hull invented 3D printing, it has gone from a way for car companies to quickly prototype plastic parts to something that’s touted as a technological cure-all. Meanwhile, the price of consumer 3D printers has come down dramatically, and last month, office-supply retailer Staples opened a handful of “experience centers” in Los Angeles and New York City where customers can try out the printers before buying them.

The claims for the technology have become increasingly grandiose. Proponents say it will be routinely used to build homes, food, and human tissue. 3D printing “has the potential to revolutionize the way we do almost everything,” US president Barack Obama declared at the 2013 State of the Union.

Maybe—but not yet. And unless you’re an engineer, it’s hard to tell the hype from the reality. So after Hull was nominated for the European Inventor Award from the European Patent Office (he’s up against the inventors of the QR code), we asked him to explain what the biggest fans of 3D printing get wrong, what to do about 3D-printed guns, and where some of the technology’s hidden applications might lie. Here are some extracts of the conversation.

Quartz: 3D printing has become hugely hyped. It’s now shorthand for a kind of techno-utopian thinking. What do you think about some of the rhetoric surrounding it?

Charles Hull: Some writers and people who talk about 3D printing get over-enthused. Most of the stuff they talk about will happen someday—eventually. But there’s the here-and-now and the near-term future, where a lot of that stuff is definitely hype and won’t happen. I’m very steeped into what can happen in the relatively near term. So I just tend not to pay too much attention when the hype gets too obscure.

There are going to be tremendous advances in manufacturing capabilities with 3D printing, but you need to understand that it’s in concert with other advances in automation and computing and so forth. So 3D printing isn’t necessarily the only component. There’s a lot of things in the digital-manufacturing world that are advancing together to really improve local manufacturing. Sometimes 3D printing is used as a substitute word for the whole digital-manufacturing field. And you kind of have to be in the manufacturing realm to understand or appreciate that. It may be OK that 3D printing is used as a shorthand, but it’s only a part of a broader movement.

Also, how soon will all those advances in manufacturing happen? The answer is that it’s a very evolutionary process with lots and lots of relatively minor advances. So from a day-to-day working in the field, it’s more working on the particulars without too much vision for the longer-term totality of it.

When you hear stories about guns being made by 3D printing, or speculation about printing human tissue, does that concern you at all?

Yeah, it’s a concern. That’s where the people who come up with and enforce the public-safety laws, that’s their concern and responsibility. 3D printing is probably not the best way to make a gun these days. If somebody wants to make guns, there are lots of technologies to do it with. I think the fact is that people who want to make guns now can make guns. It’s maybe the responsibility of the people who police legal issues to adapt to the technology.

I’m curious about some of the less glamorous but maybe more useful applications of 3D printing.

You might have seen the Google Ara phone that’s being developed. All the enclosures for the modules of the phone will be 3D printed, with the idea that they can be customized and individualized for each person. So everybody can have a phone that they themselves helped style. Maybe that actually is glamorous, but it’s more along the lines of what 3D printing can do, because as you get the technology into manufactured applications, then complexity and customization are freed. But my perspective is improving the production speed of 3D printing and getting all the hardware and software established so this can happen.

laurenmagnussen:

This running joke about Kenneth being immortal was literally my favorite part of 30 Rock.

firehose shared this story from Business Insider.

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It has been our pleasure to be your game manufacturer over the past nearly 5 years. We want to support you in everything we do. We’re constantly refining our processes, upgrading our raw materials, and equipment, and as a result our costs increase. After careful analysis we found we’ve been losing money on several items. In order to stay in business for another five years, we unfortunately find ourselves in the difficult position of raising prices on some of our printed components.

Here is the complete list of changes:

Documents go from $0.45 to $0.65 per sheet.
Small, Medium, Large, Tall, and Tarot Booklets go from $0.82 to $0.98 per sheet.
Jumbo Booklets go from $0.99 to $1.10 per sheet.
Dice Stickers go from $2.75 to $4.09 per sheet.
Token Stickers go from $2.75 to $3.68 per sheet.
Small Square Mats go from $1.56 to $1.73 per sheet.
Skinny Mats go from $1.56 to $1.63 per sheet.
18 Card Wraps go from $1.99 to $2.21 per sheet.
Medium Game Boxes go from $4.99 to $5.25 per sheet.

We realize many of you are working on entries for The Flux Capacity Publishing Challenge and these prices could hurt your entries, so we’ve increased the max cost to $44.99 to help make up the difference.

We are in the process of contacting those of you with outstanding Crowd Funding Manufacturing Agreements to negotiate a solution for those of you who have already launched your Crowd Funding Campaigns.

Real TV Exec Notes:

ellenkushner:

dog0food:

Apparently there’s a twitter account for Hollywood writers to submit some of the crazy requests TV execs give them back in their script notes. My Reality TV professor sent them to my class in an email. These are hilarious but also scare me for my own future as a screenwriter…

…

Why I don’t think I’d be very happy working in Television.

Ah God, I swear I’ve heard about half of these. (headclutch) THIS IS VERY VERY BAD.