firehose

andisen:

awwww-cute:

Ready for battle

:3

Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "Just in time for the April 15 IRS filing deadline comes news from the Washington Post that hundreds of thousands of taxpayers expecting refunds are instead getting letters informing them of tax debts they never knew about: often a debt incurred by their parents. The government is confiscating their checks, sometimes over debts 20—30 years old. For example, when Mary Grice was 4 (in 1960), her father died ... 'Until the kids turned 18, her mother received survivor benefits from Social Security ... Now, Social Security claims it overpaid someone in the Grice family in 1977. ... Four years after Sadie Grice died, the government is coming after her daughter. ... "It was a shock," says Grice, 58. "What incenses me is the way they went about this. They gave me no notice, they can't prove that I received any overpayment, and they use intimidation tactics, threatening to report this to the credit bureaus."' The Treasury Department has intercepted ... $75 million from debts delinquent for more than 10 years according to the department's debt management service. 'The aggressive effort to collect old debts started three years ago — the result of a single sentence tucked into the farm bill lifting the 10-year statute of limitations on old debts to Uncle Sam.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As investment money continues to pour into Silicon Valley, startups already flush with cash are being given sizable additional rounds of venture capital.

	Courtney shared this story from The ToastThe Toast:
	"The only abortionist a woman needs is the sky itself."

---

It has recently come to my attention that there is a film featuring Katharine Hepburn as an aviatrix who commits an abortion/suicide by flying into the sun, and I am simply furious with each and every one of you for keeping this from me.

“That…that can’t possibly be right,” I hear you stammer weakly. OHO, CAN’T IT. I present to you the plot summary of Christopher Strong:

Kate plays Lady Cynthia Darrington, an aviatrix who meets and falls in love with Sir Christopher Strong played by Colin Clive. Sir Strong is married and rather then tell him that she is going to have a baby and since she knows their relationship is doomed she decides to take a challenge to attempt the world speed record. Her plane climbs to 30,000 feet where she takes off her oxygen mask, loses control and dies in the crashing airship.

Can you imagine. I cherish the thought that the original script called not for Cynthia to be an aviatrix but a society woman who dies from a regular, run-of-the-mill botched abortion, and Hepburn herself decided to make things a little more interesting.

“Say, fellas. Love the script. It’s terrific stuff, the real Tabasco. But what if the girl’s a pilot?”

“A…pilot? But she’s a socialite.”

“Sure, that’s a great gag. But catch this angle: she does the abortion herself by flying into the sun.”

“I don’t follow.”

“‘Course you don’t, boys, keep up. She wants to beat the world altitude record, see? And to also have an abortion and die.”

“You…you really think that’s a good idea, Kate?”

[pounds table] “Boys, we’d be crazy not to make her a lady daredevil pilot. I wouldn’t do the picture otherwise.”

“Well, if you think so…but most girls have abortions on the ground, don’t you think, Kate?”

“I think my character would prefer to have one by flying into the sun. If she’s going to have an abortion, she might as well break the sound barrier while she’s at it.”

“You’re the boss, Kate.”

“Damn right, lads. And one more thing. Find a way to make my character wear a moth costume in this picture.”

“A moth costume?”

“That’s right. Here, have a cigar.”

The 1930s were a wonderful time. Women were constantly breaking the sound barrier to have abortions and giving cigars to henpecked studio heads. You couldn’t turn around without kissing a lady reporter who worked like a man and played like one too, and the streets of New York City were crawling with female stenographers who’d kill you as soon as look at you. And Katharine Hepburn made at least one movie with a trailer like this:

Which was a promotion for, you might remember, a film where she played a lady pilot who has an abortion by flying towards the sun (Tagline: “Higher and higher! Faster and faster! She gave herself to the great god Speed, and tried to run away from the fires within her!”).

Let us consider the following posters for Christopher Strong. Would you say that this effectively communicates “lady daredevil has illicit affair, then flies to a lonely death”?

You would not? Nor I; we are of one mind on the subject. Let us try again. Perhaps we will get closer with the next one.

Oh, that’s better, that’s a great deal better. Her thousand-yard-stare is part Jack Torrance and part Hannibal Lecter. “Who is this man sitting next to me,” her face seems to say. “Why aren’t I flying ’round the world right now?” But we can do better.

There we are. That’s the one. The only abortionist a woman needs is the sky itself.

Chris: “What do other women do who don’t risk their lives flying?”
Cynthia: “I don’t know. I only know I want to go up again. I want to break records. I want to train hard and not eat and drink all the time. I want to get up at dawn. I want to smell the fields and the morning air, and not mind getting oil in my hair and hands. And I want to talk with the boys I’ve flown with again.”

And have abortions by flying into the sun. And have, lest we forget, abortions by flying into the sun.

Read more Let’s Talk About The Movie Where Katharine Hepburn Has An Abortion By Flying Into The Sun at The Toast.

Georgia governor Nathan Deal today signed a bill that will grant local video game developers $25 million in tax credits, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. The legislation, part of House Bill 958, will give tax breaks to Hi-Rez Studios,...

Having a giant-headed Betsy Ross is nothing new at Sixers' games, but the even present threat of her appearing behind you and dancing is disconcerting.

It's the eyes... those cold, dead, shark-like eyes. When she's dancing it's semi-okay, when Betsy stops and stares it suddenly becomes your worst nightmare.

Please just keep doing the Nae-Nae, we liked you better that way.

Before Jon Pertwee starred in Doctor Who during the first half of the 1970s, he was already spreading the word of science and technology — witness this amazing short film in which he extols the wonders of vacuum tubes and valves.

Read more...

 

This is absolutely amazing!

voguesoldiers:

Koan - Complot Magazine, November 2013 ♕

popular shared this story from jwz.

---

So that's good news.

A person fully vaccinated against measles has contracted the disease and passed it on to others. The startling case study contradicts received wisdom about the vaccine and suggests that a recent swell of measles outbreaks in developed nations could mean more illnesses even among the vaccinated. [...]

Ultimately, she transmitted the measles to four other people, according to a recent report in Clinical Infectious Diseases that tracked symptoms in the 88 people with whom "Measles Mary" interacted while she was sick. Surprisingly, two of the secondary patients had been fully vaccinated. And although the other two had no record of receiving the vaccine, they both showed signs of previous measles exposure that should have conferred immunity.

Jim Jarmusch, Dead Man, 1995

Fritz Lang, Metropolis, 1927

T.S. Eliot

Target is offering a Nintendo 2DS and Pokemon X hardware bundle at a steep discount this week, pricing the set at just $99.99 while supplies last. The package includes a black-and-red Nintendo 2DS and a digital copy of 2013's Pokemon X. The bundle...

itwbennett (1594911) writes "Following the contentious and ultimately failed appointment of Brendan Eich as CEO last month, the Mozilla Corporation has appointed Chris Beard to the board of directors and made him interim CEO. Beard starting working as chief marketing officer for Mozilla in 2004, and oversaw the launch of its current browser, Firefox, in 2005. Beard also managed the launches of Firefox on Android and the Firefox OS for mobile phones." See the official announcement. Quoting: "We began exploring the idea of Chris joining the Board of Directors some months ago. Chris has been a Mozillian longer than most. He’s been actively involved with Mozilla since before we shipped Firefox 1.0, he’s guided and directed many of our innovative projects, and his vision and sense of Mozilla is equal to anyone’s. I have relied on his judgement and advice for nearly a decade. This is an excellent time for Chris to bring his understanding of Mozilla to the Board."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Last Thursday, after waking up to the news of Dropbox’s most recent announcements,¹ I couldn’t have been less impressed. To quote myself from a chat I had with a friend: “Dropbox is an unfocused mess.” But then I actually watched the event.

I’ve long been a believer in cloud storage; back in college I experimented with storing files on shared hosting (and accessing them via FTP!), and was a day one subscriber of Amazon S3. I couldn’t have been more excited when Dropbox was launched in 2008, and not only moved my personal files to it but also used it to build a syncing system for a computer-based teaching system I had developed.² At business school I would conservatively say I was responsible for 50 new Dropbox customers, and I’ve had the 100GB plan ever since it was available. As a consumer, I’m a fan.

The entire premise of this blog, though, is to take off the consumer product-focused hat, and instead look at the larger strategic picture and business fundamentals. On the first point, I’ve long been and remain very bullish about cloud storage as a business. Forgive the stretched analogy, but in a lot of ways cloud storage is to the enterprise as messaging, the other emerging category I’ve followed with interest, is to consumers.

• Messaging targets what is most important to consumers: their communication with their friends and family (in many ways it is our connections that define us). Corporations, though, are defined by the sum of people, processes, and priorities, represented as data.³ This makes storage of that data equally indispensible.

• Because they are the locus of what matters to our “real” life, messaging apps are a tremendous platform for all types of value-added services, ranging from stickers to better express ourselves, to shared entertainment (with oh-so-alluring in-app purchases), to an easy way to manage the day-to-day friction of life, from taxis to dining to buying something special.⁴ Similary, because cloud storage contains the data that for all intents and purposes is a corporation, it too is a fantastic platform opportunity for all types of value-added services, including specialized applications, appliances, and other cloud services.⁵

• From a product perspective, both messaging and cloud apps are relatively simple and on their way to being commoditized. There are high double-digit messaging services with more than 10 million users, and all of the major tech players are driving the cost of cloud storage to zero. This means that differentiation will not be achieved through technical acumen alone.

  This final point has, at least until the last few months, led many to dismiss both messaging and cloud services from a business perspective. However, what more and more people are realizing is that both deal in incredible scarce resources: attention, in the case of messaging, and perfectly unique data⁶ in the case of cloud storage.

You’ll note, of course, that I explicitly talked about storage in the context of the enterprise; the problem for Dropbox is that while they have a fantastic consumer product, they have traditionally not focused on businesses, the main category that has demonstrated a willingness-to-pay. As I wrote in Battle of the Box:

Dropbox’s model makes sense theoretically, but it ignores the messy reality of actually making money. After all, notably absent from my piece on Business Models for 2014 was consumer software-as-a-service. I’m increasingly convinced that, outside of in-app game purchases, consumers are unwilling to spend money on intangible software. That is likely why Dropbox has spent much of the last year pivoting away from consumers to the enterprise.

To that point, Dropbox held an event last November to announce their new Dropbox for Business. Last Thursday I actually watched the video of this event (thinking it was last week’s event), and it couldn’t have been a more dreary affair: Drew Houston interminably telling (again) the story of Dropbox’s founding, followed by an awkward segueway into the introduction of basic business features that only scratched the surface of what enterprises truly need in a cloud storage solution.

The beginning part of this week’s event wasn’t much better. An uninspired rehash of Dropbox for Business and a recreation of functionality Sharepoint has had for years were, for the business model side of me, all that mattered, and they were nice, but nice doesn’t get you far. Not helping matters was the Mailbox demo: while Auto Swipe was very cool, Mailbox isn’t even close to being a real enterprise solution (it was telling that Mailbox for Desktop was demoed on a Mac⁷). Mailbox, at least, fits my initial reaction: a distraction.

But then came Carousel.

First, off, let me clear: Carousel looks amazing. But what was far more impressive, and telling in my mind, was the way in which Houston talked about the problem Carousel was meant to solve. You could feel his angst at the millions of photos we collectively are losing for lack of management, and his giddiness at what they had come up with. And, this is where I take off my business and strategy hat and speak with my heart: it was genuinely touching, and inspirational.

Touching and inspirational, unfortunately, don’t get you far in the enterprise; touching and inspirational, though, matter more than anything in the consumer space. Last week’s event made this eminently clear: Dropbox’s soul is that of a consumer company,⁸ not an enterprise one. And that matters.

From a purely objective business-minded basis, Dropbox is not only right to pivot to the enterprise, but are in fact wasting their time with products like Carousel. However, as I’ve written previously, it’s better to change your strategy than to try and change your culture. Business is not a game played by robots; it’s about real people building products that they believe in, and this presentation has completely changed my mind: Dropbox should build products for consumers, with just enough business icing to let IT look the other way.

The rub, as I noted, is that it is difficult to see how Dropbox earns its $10 billion valuation while competing head-on with Google and Microsoft, whose business models entail driving the cost of storage to zero. It’s clear Dropbox has long seen photos as a potential lever, going so far as to degrade the user experience of their apps with constant badgering to automatically import your photos (and thus push you past your free 2GB allotment). Carousel is a much better effort in this regard; storage will be free unless it is differentiated, and Carousel does just that.

Product alone, though, does not win in the consumer space; marketing is equally if not more important, and Dropbox does not have the most inspiring history in that regard.⁹ I actually think this presentation was a good start, although the video promoting Carousel was far more compelling in the context of the presentation than it was when I watched it in isolation. The issue, though, is that marketing takes significant investment, both in talent and in resources, yet Dropbox is funneling most of their money into the aforementioned business product.

My initial worry for Dropbox, then, still stands. I don’t think you can be both an enterprise and a consumer company, particularly in a space as competitive as cloud storage. Dropbox needs to pick a direction and go all out, and, in this case (and in opposition to where I stood a week ago), I think they should go with their heart.

1. I’m based in Taiwan, 15 hours ahead of San Francisco
2. Probably not the best idea, considering it was still in beta, but Dropbox, along with a bit of AppleScript, continues to do the job perfectly
3. The three P’s reference is from Asymco
4. For more on messaging, see Messaging: Mobile’s Killer App
5. For more on cloud storage and platforms, see Box, Microsoft, and the Next Enterprise Platform
6. My data is irreplaceable, even as data in a general sense is a commodity
7. Not to mention the fact that only Mac’s have a good-enough trackpad for Mailbox’s gestures; I have yet to use a decent trackpad on Windows, and I’ve used a lot of Windows computers
8. Steve Jobs should have paid whatever it took to acquire Dropbox in 2011; it’s a nearly perfect match. Consumer at the core, like Apple, with expertise in Apple’s biggest product weakness.
9. Two things about that post:
   • I actually wrote that on another blog, which I imported to Stratechery to flesh it out at the beginning
   • While I stand by my criticism about syncing laptops and desktops, clearly sync is critical when it comes to “computers,” which, of course, includes phones and tablets

The post The Heart of Dropbox appeared first on stratēchery by Ben Thompson.

msm1267 (2804139) writes "A initial audit of the popular open source encryption software TrueCrypt turned up fewer than a dozen vulnerabilities, none of which so far point toward a backdoor surreptitiously inserted into the codebase. A report on the first phase of the audit was released today (PDF) by iSEC Partners, which was contracted by the Open Crypto Audit Project (OCAP), a grassroots effort that not only conducted a successful fundraising effort to initiate the audit, but raised important questions about the integrity of the software. The first phase of the audit focused on the TrueCrypt bootloader and Windows kernel driver; architecture and code reviews were performed, as well as penetration tests including fuzzing interfaces, said Kenneth White, senior security engineer at Social & Scientific Systems. The second phase of the audit will look at whether the various encryption cipher suites, random number generators and critical key algorithms have been implemented correctly."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

firehose shared this story from Splitsider.

---

firehose shared this story .

---

Being a professional designer and CAD engineer is awesome and gives you almost boundless possibilities to unleash your creativity. Basically anyone can get creative and design something in 3D. Today, a lot of 3D design applications like SketchUp are free, easy to use and require no prior experience. Need a success story to be inspired?

Kurt Plagge has been using SketchUp for 4 years. He started out with 3D modeling his kitchen to see how some modifications to the cabinets would look. Lately, for about a year now, Kurt’s been using it to produce models for 3D printing and he came up with the articulated cube.

“My first 3D printed object was a 50mm cube, but one piece. At that time, I didn’t know if I could even produce anything that could be successfully printed. When that one came back just like I had imagined it, I moved on to integrating moving components. This articulated cube is my fourth printed model and it was created to see how much detail and action I could achieve inside that relatively small volume. I was attempting to get the most bang for my sixteen bucks.”

Kurt Plagge

Kurt has spent around 30 hours to design this cube. Thrilled to unbox the 3D printed version that was delivered, he has made several modifications to improve the functionality of the model: Adding silicone o-rings to tighten up the hinges and gluing in thin strips of styrene plastic to fill some of the gaps between parts. These two techniques set up the model to work nice and tight.

Currently Kurt is working on a new variation of 50 mm cubes with moving parts, in which he is trying to reduce the need for post-printing processes to tighten up the moving parts.

Being printed (in polyamide) as one piece, the articulated cube is an amazing example of what anyone with perseverance and a passion for engineering can do with the help of SketchUp and i.materialise.

Has Kurt inspired you to design something creative too? Then do it, 3D print it through us and let us know about it. We’ll be happy to share your idea with our community. Contact us via community@i.materialise.be.

Do you like Kung Fu? Do you like Baz Luhrmann? This is going to be really...interesting. 

Southwest Airlines is known for their relaxed approach to flying, with no seat assignments and staff who often go above and beyond to be as informal as they can be. This flight attendant fully embraced that spirit with her hilarious flight safety instructions on a flight to Salt Lake City…

(via Hypervocal)

This young dad empathizes with his little tike’s plight but tries to reason with him, explaining that for now, there’s nowhere for the little guy to go. The baby doesn’t accept this pessimism…

(via Tastefully Offensive, updated to reflect that it’s a dad/son, not an uncle/nephew as originally thought)

Most promotional posters for movies feature a few comments from critics praising the work. But things get a lot more interesting if they featured 1-star Amazon reviews instead…

(from Awful Reviews, via Reddit)