MCLEAN, VA—Acknowledging they had trouble locating the appliance at first, guests of local couple Steven and Diane Bazelon reported Monday that the two are apparently wealthy enough to have the type of refrigerator that blends into the kitchen...
Over 63,000 signed an anti-Eich petition over the weekend, presumably thanks to Instagram's new, insta-evil photo filter.
CREDO
The controversy over Brendan Eich's hire as Mozilla Corporation CEO has prompted the company to continue its PR offensive. Over the weekend, Mozilla once again declared its support of LGBT rights, advocacy, and marriage equality despite the hire of an anti-gay marriage campaign donor as CEO.
On Friday, the company posted a statement on its official blog titled "Mozilla Supports LGBT Equality." While the post echoed many of the statements made by Eich last week regarding company policies such as the Community Participation Guidelines, it also used clear language about the touchy subject at hand. "Mozilla’s mission is to make the Web more open so that humanity is stronger, more inclusive, and more just," the post said. "This is why Mozilla supports equality for all, including marriage equality for LGBT couples. No matter who you are or who you love, everyone deserves the same rights and to be treated equally." (Emphasis added.)
Hampton Catlin, the Firefox Marketplace developer who pulled his company's apps in protest of Eich's hire, responded positively to Mozilla's statement via Twitter, saying, "I'm very happy that Mozilla is unequivocal in its support now. Took longer than it should, but #proud." Still, Catlin's company blog continued to lead with an anti-Eich post that concluded, "Simply speaking, the right thing for him to do is either aggressively start rebuilding bridges with his community or step down [as CEO]."
Inside these walls so holy, Where mutual love’s the key, There is no traitor, for we Forgive our enemy. Mother, tell your children Not to walk my way. Who is not cheered by such a plan Should not be in the race of man.
Chinese authorities have seized $14.5 billion in villas, cars, art and other assets owned by those with close links to former security chief Zhou Yongkang, the most powerful Chinese official to be targeted for corruption in over 60 years. Authorities have seized about 300 apartments, luxury liquor, antiques, silver, gold, and cash in both in yuan and foreign currencies, as well as local and overseas bonds and stocks.
As we’ve reported, Zhou once held one of the highest positions in the party, where he increased spending on public security to surpass that of even the Chinese military. He has been the reported target of a high level anti-corruption investigation personally overseen by chairman Xi Jinping. Zhou hasn’t been seen in public since late 2012, when he retired.
But going after Zhou isn’t just the latest front in Xi Jinping’s campaign to take down the corrupt high-level officials known as “tigers,” as well as lowly “flies.” The investigation of Zhou is also about political retribution. And the recent targeting of his staff, allies, and family members may be a warning shot to anyone considering allying with those that oppose Xi.
Zhou opposed the ouster of Bo Xilai, the former party secretary of Chongqing who was on track to join China’s powerful standing committee, possibly as the next head of domestic security. The figure of Bo, now in prison, still looms large over the party among those who support his approach to governing. He was a charismatic official with populist appeal who championed more state control of the economy, in direct contrast with some of the economic reforms Xi wants to implement.
Now, virtually anyone with connections to Zhou is at risk. Over 300 of Zhou’s relatives, political allies, staff and other associates have been detained or questioned over the past four months, according to Reuters, which cites two unnamed sources who had been briefed on the investigation. That includes about 10 officials who rank as high as vice minister—as well as over 20 of Zhou’s bodyguards, drivers, and other staff. ChinaFile and Foreign Policy have translated this graphic (paywall) that maps out the web of Zhou’s connections:
A map of all those with connections with Zhou who could be targeted.
Netease
This crackdown is a risky move for Xi, who is still consolidating power over the party. He has broken an unspoken rule that retired members of the powerful Standing Committee, also known as party “elders,” are not to be investigated. Putting Zhou on trial could further distance a public that’s already weary of the party’s show trials and corruption cases. Bo Xilai’s trial, for instance, galvanized his supporters, some of whom demonstrated outside of the courthouse. Even former president Jiang Zemin, who has been supportive of the corruption crackdown, has reportedly cautioned (paywall) Xi against going too far.
Zhou, as a former member of the standing committee and domestic security head, was privy to many backdoor dealings, and could well have damning information about other party officials. If he’s about to go down, he just might try to take the party with him.
'built on a central steel-pole frame with a circular track so that it could be rotated on its axis to follow the arc of the sun’s light during the day'
George Bernard Shaw in his writing hut he named “London.”
"The tiny structure of only 64 square feet (5.9 m2), was built on a central steel-pole frame with a circular track so that it could be rotated on its axis to follow the arc of the sun’s light during the day. Shaw dubbed the hut ‘London’, so that unwanted visitors could be told he was away ‘visiting the capital.’" (via wiki)
"it seems like change for change's sake — except there is no change!"
Parks and Contradiction
Established in 1967, the National Park Foundation is the official charity of the National Park Service, the agency of the United States federal government that has managed the country's national parks since 1916 when it was formed and today employs over 20,000 people at 401 parks. The National Park Foundation raises private funds, makes strategic grants, forms partnerships, and increases public awareness. Last week, to announce the centennial celebration of the National Park Service in 2016 — which will involve "a broad public engagement campaign to reintroduce the national parks and the work of the National Park Service to a new generation of Americans" — a new logo was introduced for the National Park Foundation, designed by New York, NY-based Grey. Confusingly, though, they also introduced a new logo for the National Park Service that does NOT replace the current National Park Service logo.
Marking the first phase of the campaign, the National Park Service and the National Park Foundation unveiled two new additions to the National Park Service brand family (see below). Building off of the National Park Service's iconic arrowhead, the new graphic identities highlight the partnership between the National Park Service and its Congressionally-chartered nonprofit partner, the National Park Foundation. The arrowhead will continue to serve as the official seal of the National Park Service.
Let's start with the straightforward change: The National Park Foundation's old ranger hat-slash-scenic landscape logo is replaced with a new logo featuring an arrowhead, a symbol that has been part of the National Park Service's identity since the 1950s. The old logo had a naive charm to it but, as far as good design, it didn't quite inspire much. The new logo is simple and striking — more like the U.S. Army logo with its single star icon. The typography is contemporary and attractive so no qualms there. The problem of this exercise is the introduction of a sibling logo for the National Park Service.
The official caption for this is, "1) The Arrowhead Symbol is the registered service mark of the National Park Service, protected by the trademark laws of the United States. It is in use and will remain in use. 2) New accompanying mark for National Park Service. Not yet in use. 3) New brand identity of the National Park Foundation. In use."National Park Services logo does NOT change.Footer at the National Park Foundation logo, establishing the relationship of the two entities.
The relationship between the new National Park Foundation logo and the existing arrowhead logo for the National Park Foundation is evidently clear in the screen capture of the former's website (shown above) and both entities have made it abundantly clear that the existing arrowhead logo will not go away… so why introduce a new logo for the National Park Service anyway? Why create unnecessary confusion? If at some point, in 2015 or ’16, when this centennial campaign gets underway, they start using both new logos, will they always have to include the third and current arrowhead logo? It just seems like a strange strategy and a complicated way to promote this two clearly related entities. For now, it seems like change for change's sake — except there is no change!
Gone Home is still about making choices within the constraints of rules, even if the choices and rules aren't relatively obvious
not sure how this is a question even among formalist assholes
ha ha wait I just noticed the Crescente byline, ergo a one-source story with Crescente asking questions he refuses to attribute to himself ("But for some, "some have questioned"); nevermind
With no violence, no action, no threat, no way to die or be hurt, Gone Home still managed to captivate its audience, receiving accolades and nominations for game of the year from websites, newspapers, magazines, the industry and, most recently, even the Games for Change conference.
But for some, one odd question remains: Is Gone Home a video game?
Unlike with movies, music and literature, the thing that defines video games still remains, in some corners, a debated issue.
Gone Home is a game of exploration and narration, an effective vehicle for story telling. But its lack of puzzles and combat, and the inability to lose or even change the outcome, have some questioning its gaming legitimacy.
Steve Gaynor, writer and designer at Gone Home developer Fullbright Studio, agreed during a recent talk at the Game Developers Conference that these missing elements set it apart from what he called "modern mainstream video games," but said the title still has very much in common with game experiences.
Three key things that make Gone Home a video game, he said, is its central focus on player agency, the game's inherent spirit of playfulness and the variability of player experience.
The game, told through the first-person perspective of Kaitlin Greenbriar, opens with the young woman returning home to an Oregon mansion after a year-long trip abroad. Players must explore the home, reading notes, finding recordings and interpreting clues, to piece together why Greenbriar's parents and younger sister are missing.
Despite the fact that there is only one story to tell, and only one ending, Gaynor calls the experience a dialog between the player and the designer of the game.
"It's an edited discussion," he said. "The designer established the rules and your inputs are changing that conversation every session that you play.
"The content that you encounter appears differently than for someone else. It is unique to each user and their interpretation. The interactivity of it makes the experience unique to yourself."
That's because, Gaynor argued, the player's own interpretations of what they see and how they approach examining the home changes those interpretations for each player.
"Every note is always in the same place, but the game is about entering a space and imbuing this with meaning," he said. "The structure of your experience is unique to you even though you don't get to decide what happens in the story."
Gaynor said the developers also went to great lengths to subtlety acknowledge to the player that the developer knew they were there because the designers didn't want it to feel like just an empty house, but an adventure in a home written by real people.
Some have questioned why Gone Home's powerful story wasn't delivered simply as text, with no graphics, a throw-back to the text adventures popularized in the 80s.
"The story wasn't written in isolation and applied to those mediums," Gaynor said. "It was written for the medium it was intended for. We didn't decide to tell a story and figure out a gamer to make around it. The game came first and the narrative was designed for that.
Ultimately, he added, Gone Home is a game because it is a story told within an interactive environment which allows the players to decide how to tackle the unwinding of the game's fiction and its interpretation.
"There is a deep trust in the player to explore of their own volition and not to be told what to do," he said, "to understand how the whole game works."
Good Game is an internationally syndicated weekly news and opinion column about the big stories of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Brian Crecente is a founding News Editor of Polygon.
all-time fastest ways to get me to unsubscribe from a person: "I wrote another Cthulhu poem last night"
I wrote another Cthulhu poem last night. If you thought my last one was dark, … well, you haven’t seen anything yet. Seriously, this one really goes off the deep end of dark. Consider before reading. An Ode to Oblivion
When the bow breaks, the cradle will fall,
Down into Cthulhu goes cradle and all.
How my heart longs for nothingness.
My soul, I hope he doth bless.
Crunchy my body, my soul is sweet,
May I be a tasty treat,
No more pain, an end to sorrow,
A freedom from life I’d love to borrow.
An end from this world I seek,
Sharing this gift, freeing this bleak
Exist’nce from starting again anew,
In my heart I know it true.
May my Master feast on me,
Turn my body to entropy.
Hair and skin and soul the same,
Crush this world with cleansing flame.
Now within the circle I lay
When it’s over my skin shall flay.
Candles around me all alight
Into oblivion, oh what a sight!
Peace of nothing, truth of all,
Opening the door for chaos to crawl.
This one gift I give to humanity.
Form and spirit are forever now free.
WIV Labs, the company behind Korean search engine Daum, has just unveiled a beta version of question and answer site, Qaster. Unlike similar knowledge crowdsourcing services like Yahoo Answers and Quora, Qaster relies entirely on an existing service for its Q&As — namely, Twitter. Enter a key word into the dialog box and the service will bring up all of the matching questions asked by users on the microblogging site. And just like Twitter, you can retweet or favorite the questions and answers you like best.
yo dawg I heard you hated SQL so I made a SQL interface for your NoSQL
' The CONNECT engine enables dynamic access to diverse data sources dynamically, including unstructured files such as log files in a folder, or any ODBC database, from within MariaDB 10. Great for ETL (Extraction, Transformation and Load) and Real-Time analysis. Dynamic Columns store disparate labelled data objects in each row of a table in much the same way as NoSQL technologies. Access data from Cassandra data directly inside MariaDB 10, and interoperate directly with a widely adopted Big Data technology.'
noahfecks (2379422) writes "Version 10 of the most famous fork of MySQL MariaDB has been released. Its developers said that is many times faster than MySQL, also claiming that its replications slaves are crash free. More details of this release can be found on the blog."
Google Naps is an amusing parody of Google Maps from Netherlands-based creator Kakhiel and creative agency Venour that uses the latter’s API and users’ computer locations to create a list of nearby napping spots. Users can easily submit their own napping spots, including whether it’s a bench, bed, field, or bridge, to add to Google Naps with a left-click of their mouse.
the douche baton respectfully passed down from douchebag to douchebag
Phil Spencer, former VP of Microsoft Studios, is now head of Microsoft's Xbox division, overseeing Xbox, Xbox Live and Microsoft Studios teams. Spencer reports to Software EVP Terry Myerson.
"In this new job, Phil will lead the Xbox, Xbox Live, Xbox...
Once upon a time, Mel Gibson was a big movie star capable of anchoring major studio productions. He took some time off from acting to have a prolonged public breakdown, and has since popped up in indie oddities like The Beaver and as the villain in Machete Kills. Now he’s looking to make a comeback. Gibson will play the chief antagonist in The Expendables 3 later this year, and Deadlinereports that he’s in talks to star in Blood Father, “a Taken-style action thriller.” Penned by The Town writer Peter Craig, Blood Father revolves around an ex-con who tries to protect his estranged 16-year old daughter from a group of drug dealers. It will be directed by Jean-François Richet, best known for making Mesrine, a biography of a famous French bank robber.
Taken helped transform Liam Neeson from a guy known for his roles in stately literary ...
Along with caviar and truffles, foie gras (literally “fatty liver”) ranks among the most popular Western gourmet foods. But despite its citizens’ appetite for the stuff, as well as heavy lobbying from France, the Chinese government continues to ban foie gras imports from France, a policy it stuck with last week.
The Chinese government has not explained why it continues to ban imports. However, if it’s doing so to boost foreign investment in local industry, that’s working like a charm.
Euralis, the planet’s top foie producer, just announced that it will boost its production in China. Earlier this month, Euralis, which makes about a fourth of the foie produced in France, started building a new facility that will house 1 million tubby ducks by 2020 (97% of French foie gras comes from duck; the rest from geese). By May the factory will be up and running, churning out around 250 tons (227 tonnes) of foie gras, which works out to about 756,000 ducks a year, assuming 300 grams per duck liver (pdf, p.14).
That will be a big boost to China’s current annual production of around 1,000 tons of foie gras. Most of that comes from local companies, such as Sanrougey Fowls Company, the self-proclaimed biggest foie gras producer in Asia, which exports around three-quarters of its foie gras to five-star hotels on the mainland and in Hong Kong.
Of course, France still dominates, making around 20,000 tons a year—around 75% of global production. (Hungary is the runner up.) Most of that is produced by Euralis and around 5,000 other industrial farms.
But even though the French still love foie gras—apparently four out of five consider it a “must-serve” at parties (paywall)—not everyone is as enthusiastic. Those concerned about animal welfare are put off by ”gavage,” the force-feeding method whereby a tube is stuck down the bird’s throat directly into its stomach, a process that lasts for 12 to 14 days. On top of that, the birds are typically stuffed into cages so tightly packed that they can’t even move their wings—a practice the industry adopted when it shifted production to eastern Europe in the 1980s in order to boost production.
Industrial foie gras farms like those Euralis runs are frequent targets of animal rights movement outrage and, increasingly, government restrictions. Germany and Poland have both banned gavage. The US state of California forbids production and sale of foie gras altogether. The French agriculture ministry recently ordered producers to meet expanded cage requirements by 2016.
But the restrictions elsewhere could be a boon for Chinese foie gras. ”If foie gras production in Europe comes to an end, it would leave a gaping hole that the Chinese industry could then fill, as there are currently no laws prohibiting its production,” noted the state-run Global Times in March 2012.
Correction (March 31): An earlier version of this story misstated the number of ducks necessary to produce 250 tons (227 tonnes) of foie gras.
The Washington Post has created this excellent flowchart, which can help a confused Washington, D.C. shopper determine which of the the two “alternative” supermarkets is more personally befitting, Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s or perhaps, neither one at all.
A corridor scorched by the 1968 riots and seeded by the 2000 opening of what was then Fresh Fields (now Whole Foods Market) near 14th and P has reached full bloom several blocks north near 14th and U, where Trader Joe’s has sprouted as a bookend of privileged grocery goodness. Friday afternoon, four hours into its existence, Trader Joe’s bustled with suits and scenesters and the neighborhood curious, zipping past frozen pizzas whose crusts are made with “ancient grains,” chatting cheerfully with a lei-laden staff.
The Chinese high-speed rail system has grown to over 6,000 miles in five years and is already transporting 2 million passengers a day on trains that are rarely delayed and travel nearly 200 miles per hour. Airlines, take note.
Phil Spencer, former VP of Microsoft Studios, is now head of Microsoft's Xbox division, overseeing Xbox, Xbox Live and Microsoft Studios teams. Spencer reports to Software EVP Terry Myerson.
"In this new job, Phil will lead the Xbox, Xbox Live, Xbox...
