It's kinda tangential to RPG news, so I wasn't originally going to cover this. But enough people have emailed me links to it that there's clearly interest in the subject. Hasbro has just sold its game manufacturing plants (one in Massachusetts, USA; and one in Waterford, Ireland) to Cartamundi, a Belgian company. They're not getting out of the publishing of games, just the physical manufacturing side, and this affects CCGs and boardgames rather than RPGs.
The plants produce Magic: The Gathering, Monopoly, and many other Hasbro games.
In a sentence familiar by now to D&D fans, Duncan Billing (executive vice president, chief global operations and business development officer)
So why is that public URL more secure than it looks? The short answer is that the URL is working as a password. Photos URLs are typically around 40 characters long, so if you wanted to scan all the possible combinations, you'd have to work through 1070 different combinations to get the right one, a problem on an astronomical scale. "There are enough combinations that it's considered unguessable," says Aravind Krishnaswamy, an engineering lead on Google Photos. "It's much harder to guess than your password."
It's a perfectly valid security measure, although unsettling to some.
Security firm Netragard has suspended its exploit acquisition program two weeks after it was found selling a potent piece of attackware to the Italian malware developer Hacking Team.
Netragard has long insisted that it sold exploits only to ethical people, companies, and governments. An e-mail sent in March and leaked by one or more people who compromised Hacking Team networks, however, showed Netragard CEO Adriel Desautels arranging the sale of an exploit that worked against fully patched versions of Adobe's Flash media player. Hacking Team in turn has sold surveillance and exploit software to a variety of repressive governments, including Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia.
"Our motivation for termination revolves around ethics, politics, and our primary business focus," Desautels wrote in a blog post published Friday. "The Hacking Team breach proved that we could not sufficiently vet the ethics and intentions of new buyers. Hacking Team unbeknownst to us until after their breach was clearly selling their technology to questionable parties, including but not limited to parties known for human rights violations."
Trump was approached about purchasing the Patriots, but didn't want to take on the team's debts.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump released financial documents last week to show that he's worth more than $10 billion, but the 69-year-old business magnate once may have had an opportunity to be the owner of the New England Patriots, as well.
According to the Boston Globe, Trump was approached by the Sullivan family about buying the team. Billy Sullivan founded the Patriots as members of the American Football League in 1960, but was facing bankruptcy in 1988 and attempted to sell the team.
Trump was interested, but didn't want the burden of taking on the team's debts.
"Donald had a real interest and he felt the Sullivan family was honorable in their dealings with him," a source close to Trump told The Boston Globe. "But his people told him between the team and the stadium there was $104 million in debt, and that was too much for him to handle."
Instead Victor Kiam bought the team for $84 million, but was forced to sell the team four years later. Just a couple years after that, Robert Kraft bought the team for $172 million.
Two decades and four Lombardi Trophies later, the Patriots are now worth an estimated $2.6 billion, according to Forbes in August 2014, making them the second-most valuable NFL team.
Of course, purchasing the Patriots wasn't as simple as Trump shaking hands with Sullivan. As Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk pointed out, Trump was at the forefront of an antitrust lawsuit filed against the NFL in 1986. As owner of the USFL's New Jersey Generals, Trump pushed other USFL owners to challenge the NFL, although the lawsuit and the league proved unsuccessful ventures.
Convincing three-fourths of the NFL's owners to then approve Trump, just two years after he filed suit against them, would have been an uphill climb. Although, blazing through disapproval and jokes is something Trump has done before.
British comedian Simon Brodkin ran on stage as Sepp Blatter was about to give a press conference, tossing a handful of dollar bills at the soon-to-resign FIFA president and claiming to represent the "North Korea 2026" World Cup bid:
The images of Blatter with money fluttering down around him are iconic:
The disgraced FIFA president, whose reign will come to an end over a massive corruption scandal, was offput, recoiling as the money came down and leaving the conference until the area was clean.
Brodkin has made a name for himself crashing events where he isn't wanted -- the comic, who often plays a character named Lee Nelson, ran onto the pitch to practice with Manchester City in 2013 and recently attempted to perform alongside Kanye West at Glastonbury.
Somewhere, a official in North Korea just realized if they did throw enough money at FIFA, they probably could host the 2026 World Cup.
SB Nation presents: Sepp Blatter has been an awful...ly great FIFA chairman
Nike's latest high-top sneakers look as flashy as any in its line-up, but they've got a secret power. The Zoom Soldier 8 Flyease (above) was designed specifically for people with disabilities, and incorporates a wraparound zipper system that lets wearers peel open the shoe with one hand, slipping their foot in with ease. It should make life that little bit easier for people who have physical difficulties, says Nike, including amputees, stroke victims, and Parkinson's sufferers.
The LeBron Soldier 8 variant of the FLyease design. (Nike)
The technology, named Flyease, was designed by Nike's Tobie Hatfield, who began developing the latest version of the shoe after receiving a letter from Matthew Walzer, a young man with cerebral palsy. Walzer's disorder makes his muscles stiff and weak, and as he was about to head off to college, he was worried that he wouldn't be able to tie his own shoes without help. Walzer wrote to Nike for help.
"Matthew was looking really for a basketball style, he really loved basketball, he loved LeBron James," says Hatfield in a promotional video about the new technology. "And so I said, 'I'm going to take this zipper in the back so this can literally just peel open.' The main thing was about getting him in the shoes, adjusting the shoes, closing the shoes, and then being able to get out of the shoes all by himself."
The Flyease system being demonstrated on a prototype shoe. (Nike)
Hatfield and other Nike designers worked with Walzer over the course of three years, shipping him prototype shoes and getting feedback over Skype. To create the sneakers, the company's engineers had to build a new zipper designed to smoothly navigate curves without forcing the wearer to yank on the strap, and added internal cords to the shoe that run from its heel to its top so that the design tightens itself as it's zipped up.
"It’s still not perfect by any means," Hatfield told Fast Company. "We know we can continue to make improvements, but we wanted to give access to those who need this sooner than later." The Zoom Soldier 8 (and its sponsored partner, the LeBron Soldier 8) will go on sale in limited quantities on Nike's website on July 16th.
Canadian artist Guillaume Lachapelle explores the infinite in this series of mysterious 3D printed dioramas titled Visions. Sitting atop pedestals in a darkened gallery, the eerie “rooms” rely on lights and mirrors to create the illusion of vast spaces that seem to reflect into much larger open spaces. These pieces were on view last year as part of a solo show at Art Mur in Québec, and you can see more of them up close over on Artsy.
Given Doppler’s experience with earplugs, it’s not hard to imagine that a volume knob “on your world” was a feature Doppler would nail with “Here.” And it works. As Kraft adjusted the volume knob on “Here’s” smartphone app, the sounds I was hearing went up and down.
But this in itself isn’t revolutionary. Words like that come with Doppler’s ambitions to be able to effectively mute specific kinds of sound: a baby crying, the subway screeching, your partner snoring. “Here” uses a series of algorithms to modify certain frequencies as they enter your ears. The earbuds capture the incoming sound waves, processes the audio in real-time, and play it in your ear without any perceptible delay.
In the version I tested, these custom filters seemed to be a bit of a blunt instrument, but Kraft says this is one area that will be extensively developed during the “incubation” period, when the first version of the product will only be available to the 2,855 backers who pledged over $US635,000 in a recent Kickstarter campaign. This stage will last through the end of 2015.
But these functional elements — the volume knob and the filters — are not what captured my imagination. And they’re not what makes Kraft get giddy. The part of “Here” that truly felt like step forward in the way we perceive sound was the music features.
These fall into two basic categories. The first is the equaliser. “Here” uses five sliders to change how you hear the bass, mids, and trebles of music playing out in the real world. Picture being able to turn the bass up at a concert — or down if you are having trouble hearing the singer. And it functions beautifully, even in the prototype I tested.
Watching Kraft turn up the bass and knowing that sound was originating from a speaker and not the earbuds themselves was a surreal experience. It reminded me of the cognitive disconnect I get when using the Oculus Rift, that strange feeling of something being real and not real at the same time.
Denver police shot and killed Paul Castaway, 35, a Lakota Sioux man. Officers say they shot him after he came “dangerously close” while holding a long knife, but witnesses say otherwise.
'This week, the Portland Japanese Garden’s leadership announced it was in the process of closing the funding gap on a major $33.5 million dollar expansion, led by the prestigious Tokyo-based architecture firm Kengo Kuma and Associates. While leaving the five existing gardens untouched, the project will expand the 5.5 acre property by about 11,000 square feet and add three new LEED-certified buildings and seven new garden spaces.
In addition to a new bonsai terrace, moss hillside garden, and a chabana (tea flower) garden, the new construction will include:
An overhauled entrance more in tune with the gardens themselves. Say goodbye to the generic driveway, say hello to a water garden! A cultural village and courtyard for demonstations and performances A 22-foot high Japanese castle wall built by a 16th generation Kyoto mason. Speaking at a press conference outside of the garden on Tuesday, KKA’s design director, Balazs Bognar, was careful to note the restricted nature of the project.
“The gardens are at the heart of the design. To be very clear, we are not touching the existing gardens,” he said. “Those in themselves, if I dare say, are perfect. There’s no need for further editing. What we are doing as an architect team is simply to fill in the gaps and to provide what is not there. And to allow visitors to come and put themselves in the right frame of mind before they enter the gardens.”'
Many aspects of cosplay are time consuming, but if you find yourself performing similar tasks over and over again as you work, it’s a good idea to take a moment to see if you can do anything to make them easier. Nicole of beaufrog worked on a few projects that required pleats and measuring, pinning, and ironing pleats is quite labor intensive. She realized creating a pleating board would make the process go more quickly and would ensure the pleats were straight and uniform. She wrote a how-to post with images but also shared a tutorial on YouTube:
On Friday, a wildfire northeast of Los Angeles spread so quickly that it jumped onto I-15 during gridlock, forcing passengers to flee as the flames engulfed their vehicles. But amid the chaos, helicopters were grounded for 20 minutes due to firefighting's most futuristic nuisance—drones.
In an incident overview, the US Forest Service wrote that "An Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS or drone) halted tanker operations for about 25 minutes on Friday afternoon, but operations soon resumed.” CNN reports that there were actually five drones in the airspace above the fire, according to a San Bernardino County Fire spokesperson they spoke to.
Eric Sherwin of the San Bernardino County Fire Department told CNN, "Fortunately, there were no injuries or fatalities to report, but the 15 to 20 minutes that those helicopters were grounded meant that 15 to 20 minutes were lost that could have led to another water drop cycle, and that would have created a much safer environment and we would not have seen as many citizens running for their lives.”
Super Opinionated.
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