firehose

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mattfractionblog:

Welles, Reed, & Cotten have tea on the set of The Third Man before recording the cuckoo clock speech, 1949.

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penguintim:

Me:

You:

You won't be getting those quarters back. But then again, it's not 1972 — why are you playing pinball?

djempirical

#rapeculture

Upskirt and downblouse photos — taking photos of a woman's body up her skirt or down her shirt without her knowledge or consent — is illegal in Australia and New Zealand, can be prosecuted in the UK under the Sexual Offences Act, has just been made illegal in Massachusetts, US, and is in the process of becoming illegal in New Jersey.

In spite of this, a smartphone accessory marketing itself as suited to just such activities is currently seeking funding on Indiegogo. The Peek-I spy cam is a pop-up periscope that allows the user to take photos on a 90-degree angle. It's worth noting that similar products are already available to smartphone photo enthusiasts; the difference lies in the marketing.

"Thanks to Peek-I, you can take a picture from around a corner without being noticed," the product description reads. "You can also get great shots of weirdoes walking down the street right next to you, without them realising what you are doing. Want a picture of your secret crush? You can make that happen and your crush won't even think you are stalking him or her, because you will be looking in a different direction."

It also takes care to add the warning, "If you want to take sneaky pictures of people without them knowing, this is the way to do it. Just don't be creepy about it."

This, however, is belied by the images of the device in action. Possible scenarios presented include taking a sneaky photo under a table of a girl's legs, or taking a photo down the blouse of a waiter — actions which, as noted, contravene the law in several locations around the globe.

According to Indiegogo's Terms of Use, campaigns to raise funds for illegal activities are strictly prohibited. In a statement to CNET Australia, Indiegogo states the campaign is "currently under review, which is part of Indiegogo's process any time the community voices concerns over a particular campaign."

The campaign, however, remains live and collecting funds on the crowdfunding website — currently at over US$9000 of its US$1000 goal — raising questions about Indiegogo's review process. Kickstarter, for example, states that it suspends a campaign when it violates the websites rules so that the company can investigate.

When pressed by CNET Australia for more information on its review process, Indiegogo was not forthcoming, replying only that "Indiegogo doesn't publicly disclose its process in order to protect its community of campaign owners and contributors."

Original Source

Champ is going to the Saints, where he can play either safety or cornerback for an improving defense.

Champ Bailey is headed to the New Orleans Saints after agreeing to a two-year contract with the organization Friday, according to ESPN's Mike Triplett. Bailey will spend 2014 playing for a team other than the Denver Broncos for the first time since 2003.

Whether Bailey makes the Saints significantly better is the big question. He's a future Hall of Famer, and was still effective when he managed to get healthy for the Broncos last season. However, Bailey appeared in just five games due to a Lisfranc injury, and failed to record an interception for the first time in his 16-year career.

Depth is a nice thing for NFL teams to have, and Bailey certainly gives the Saints that. He can play corner or safety, and may be better suited for the latter position now that age has sapped some of his athleticism. Bailey may not necessarily start at either position next season, with significant money invested in Keenan Lewis, Jairus Byrd and Kenny Vaccaro, and Corey White stepping up as a viable cornerback last season as a former fifth-round pick. When offenses spread the field against the Saints, however, Bailey will very likely be on the field.

Bailey's signing could open up the Saints' options in the 2014 NFL Draft. The Saints still need help along the offensive line and in the pass rush. SB Nation's latest mock draft had New Orleans targeting cornerback Bashaud Breeland in the second round after taking outside linebacker Demarcus Lawrence in the first. A player like center Marcus Martin out of USC could be a better pickup in the second round now that the secondary looks relatively secure.

Michelle Goldberg diagnoses what increasingly ails us at The Nation:

It’s increasingly clear that we are entering a new era of political correctness. Recently, we’ve seen the calls to #CancelColbert because of something outrageous said by Stephen Colbert’s blowhard alter ego, who has been saying outrageous things regularly for nine years. Then there’s the sudden demand for “trigger warnings” on college syllabi, meant to protect students from encountering ideas or images that may traumatize them; an Oberlin faculty document even suggests jettisoning “triggering material when it does not contribute directly to the course learning goals.” At Wellesley, students have petitioned to have an outdoor statue of a lifelike sleepwalking man removed because it was causing them “undue stress.” As I wrote in The Nation, there’s pressure in some circles not to use the word “vagina” in connection with reproductive rights, lest it offend trans people....

At times like this, politics contract. On the surface, the rhetoric appears more ambitious and utopian than ever—witness, for example, the apparently sincere claim by Suey Park, creator of the #CancelColbert hashtag, that Twitter activists intend to “dismantle the state.” But at the same time, activism becomes less about winning converts and changing the world and more about creating protected enclaves and policing speech.

Go read the whole thing.

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redletterdave writes: "At the Fire TV unveiling, Amazon officials sounded like they perfectly understood how frustrating TV streaming devices are for their owners. Amazon focused on three main problems: Search is hard, especially for anything not on a bestseller list; streaming devices often provide slow or laggy performance; and TV set-top boxes tend to be closed ecosystems. The Fire TV is Amazon's attempt to solve these three problems—the key word here being 'attempt.' Perhaps Amazon's homegrown solution was a bit premature and its ambitions too lofty, because while Fire TV can do almost everything, little of it is done right." An example given by the review is how the touted Voice Search works — it doesn't interact at all with supported apps, instead bringing up Amazon search results. Thus, even if you have access to a movie for free through Netflix, using the Voice Search for that movie will only bring up Amazon's paid options.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New submitter FikseGTS (3604833) writes "A Tesla Model S owner located a 4 pin connector on the left side of the Tesla Model S dashboard that turns out to be a disguised ethernet networking port. After crafting his owns patch cable to connect with the Tesla's port, a networking connection was established between the Tesla Model S and a laptop computer. The Model S is running a 100 Mbps, full duplex ethernet network and 3 devices were found with assigned IP addresses in the 192.168.90.0 subnet. Some ports and services that were open on the devices were 22 (SSH), 23 (telnet),53 (open domain), 80 (HTTP), 111 (rpcbind), 2049 (NFS), 6000 (X11). Port 80 was serving up a web page with the image or media of the current song being played. The operating system is modified version of Ubuntu using an ext3 filesystem. Using X11 it also appears that someone was able to somewhat run Firefox on both of the Model S screens. Is a jailbroken Tesla Model S on the way?" Some more details on this front would be appreciated, for anyone who has a Tesla they'd like to explore.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Michael B. Jordan posted this picture to Instagram with the caption "The Torch has been passed! #FlameOn." Dammit, Michael. You're giving me palpitations. (Blastr)

When photographers James and Karla Murray began working on their book, ”Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York,” they were simply attempting to show photos of the last family-owned businesses remaining in New York City. However, they quickly realized that as soon they were photographing these shops, they were shutting down, only to be replaced by corporate businesses or simply left to fall apart.

Ten years after the initial photos for the book were taken, the Murrays returned to many of these locations to photograph what is in place today, revealing an intriguing and sometimes depressing picture of an ever-changing city…

E 14th St & Union Square W, Union Square

Grand St & Ludlow Street, Lower East Side

2nd Ave & 10th St, East Village

2nd Ave & E 1st St, East Village

West Houston Street near Varick Street, Greenwich Village

Grand St & Ludlow St, Lower East Side

9th Ave & W 46th St, Hell’s Kitchen

Bleecker Street & Carmine Street, Greenwich Village

8th Ave & W 46th St, Times Square

Bowery & E 2nd St, East Village

2nd Ave & E 12th St, East Village

Lenox Ave & W 125th St, Harlem

Ludlow St & E Houston St, Lower East Side

E 116th St & 1st Ave, Harlem

Lenox Ave & W 131st St, Harlem

Morningside Ave & W 125th St, Harlem

Chambers St & Church St, TriBeCa

Hester St & Essex St, Lower East Side

Defying the life expectancy for characters who behave like that, It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia has been renewed for two more seasons—which will bring the length of show’s run to 12 seasons, making it the second-longest-running live-action comedy in TV history, tied with My Three Sons. (Not to be confused with It’s Always Sunny’s alternate title, My Two Legal Charges, My Roommate Who Might Be My Biological Kid, And The Knucklehead Who Thinks He Knows Karate.) The renewal is part of an overall deal with Rob McElhenney, Charlie Day, and Glenn Howerton’s RCG Productions, one that keeps the trio in the FX family through 2017. At that point, according to computer models and the previously announced end dates for other FX Networks programs, 100 percent of all original shows on FX and FXX will have some sort of connection to McElhenney, Day, and Howerton ...

“

17% of cardiac surgeons are women, 17% of tenured professors are women. It just goes on and on. And isn’t that strange that that’s also the percentage of women in crowd scenes in movies? What if we’re actually training people to see that ratio as normal so that when you’re an adult, you don’t notice?

…We just heard a fascinating and disturbing study where they looked at the ratio of men and women in groups. And they found that if there’s 17% women, the men in the group think it’s 50-50. And if there’s 33% women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men.

”

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Source: NPR: Hollywood Needs More Women

Seriously, go listen to this.

(via josette-arnauld)

Are you in New York? Do you like Civilization V, and art? Stop by the Whitney museum to see Me Playing Civilization, a performance art piece that consists of... a guy playing Civilization V, seven hours a day, five days a week, until May 25th.

DETROIT (AP) — A suburban Detroit man was in critical condition Thursday with severe head injuries after a neighborhood mob beat and kicked him when he stopped to check on a 10-year-old boy who stepped from a curb into the path of his pickup. The driver — who lives just north of Detroit in Macomb County's Roseville — wasn't at fault in the accident, said Detroit police Sgt. Michael Woody. "A preliminary investigation shows the kid stepped off the curb in front of him," Woody said. "No way he could have stopped in time."

On February 25th, the Sun let loose an X4.9-class solar flare . It was our parent star's most violent outburst of the year. When the debris from the ensuing coronal mass ejection collided with Earth's atmosphere, it produced one of the most colorful auroral displays in recent memory.

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More PROD3000.

Agbogbloshie: the world’s largest e-waste dump – in pictures | Environment | theguardian.com

Discarders of electronic goods expect them to be recycled properly. But almost all such devices contain toxic chemicals which, even if they are recyclable, make it expensive to do so. As a result, illegal dumping has become a lucrative business.

Photographer Kevin McElvaney documents Agbogbloshie, a former wetland in Accra, Ghana, which is home to the world’s largest e-waste dumping site. Boys and young men smash devices to get to the metals, especially copper. Injuries, such as burns, untreated wounds, eye damage, lung and back problems, go hand in hand with chronic nausea, anorexia, debilitating headaches and respiratory problems. Most workers die from cancer in their 20s

“The left likes to say you cant repeal this law,” he said. “I think that’s ridiculous. This is a country that’s done tremendous things.” But underneath his bravado, Jindal’s new plan nodded towards the changing political environment as Obamacare’s implementation continues apace. If the administration keeps hitting its targets, a Republican president trying to repeal the law will have to reckon with 36 million Americans covered through the exhanges or Medicaid by 2017. Eliminating the law would threaten to abruptly pull insurance away from tens of millions, an unappetizing prospect for a party that’s spent months telling Americans how angry they should be about false claims of “If you like your plan, you can keep it.” Much of Jindal’s plan is in line with previous conservative health care proposals: things like block granting Medicaid, turning Medicare into a voucher program in which seniors can purchase private plans, allowing insurance companies to sell plans across state lines, and limiting malpractice lawsuits. A more controversial element, though still familiar from a variety of GOP plans, is to slash tax breaks for employer health care plans and use the savings to provide a deduction for individuals to buy insurance. The standout, however, is that Jindal proposes committing substantial federal dollars to address Americans with pre-existing conditions, many of whom could not obtain affordable or reliable coverage under the old system.

Army Spec. Ivan Lopez — who opened fire at Ft. Hood on Wednesday, killing three and wounding 16 before killing himself — bought his weapon at the same store that supplied both Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan for his deadly rampage in 2009 and an Army private for a failed plot to execute a similar massacre in 2011, according to two federal law enforcement sources. Hasan killed 13 people and wounded more than 30 using a pistol from the Guns Galore store in Killeen. It was the deadliest military base shooting in U.S. history. Two years later an AWOL Army private from Kentucky, Naser Jason Abdo, entered the same store and bought gunpowder, shotgun shells and a handgun. In that instance the store notified authorities, who arrested Abdo at a nearby motel where he was plotting to attack a restaurant popular with Ft. Hood personnel. An employee at Guns Galore said that the owner’s wife had talked to the FBI. An employee reached by phone declined to say whether store workers noticed anything of concern about Lopez, who legally purchased a semi-automatic .45-caliber Smith & Wesson pistol. “It’s an ongoing investigation. We have been told to redirect everybody to the FBI,” the employee said.

Inside Amy Schumer—featuring sketches, standup and interviews from comic Amy Schumer—had Comedy Central’s most-watched series premiere in all of 2013, even though the network’s audience is 60 percent male. The show drew in a 50/50 male-female demographic throughout its first season last year and even scored better ratings than Comedy Central’s other new show in 2013, The Kroll Show, beating it by 12 percent in the male ages 18-34 demographic.

Some have chosen to put all of the money earned by their first success into a subsequent project. Jonathan Blow, the creator of Braid, a 2006 Microsoft-published game that was, arguably, the first mainstream indie success, also became a millionaire through his game. Blow’s single extravagance was the purchase of a crimson Tesla Roadster for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. He funnelled the remainder of the money he earned—which he estimates to be around four million dollars—into his next game, The Witness, due for release later this year. Blow’s production comes with increased risk: it will need to sell many more copies than Braid to make back its costs. Blow says he doesn’t feel any pressure to turn a profit. “I am just pursuing the ideas that I myself find most interesting,” he told me. “I am not trying to make the most mass-market thing.”