firehose

The co-founder of frozen yogurt chain Pinkberry was sentenced Friday to a maximum seven years in prison for beating a panhandling homeless man with a tire iron.

On Wednesday, the National Weather Service issued an official evening forecast for the Baltimore/D.C. area that sounded like the freaking end of days.

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Lupita Nyong'o has reportedly met with J.J. Abrams about a role in Episode VII. We've been hearing a lot of intriguing names popping up as potential stars in the next Star Wars film, but this may be the most exciting: word has it that the Oscar-winning star of 12 Years a Slave has met with Abrams about a possible role.

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The Internet is currently ablaze over a video of strangers having a first kiss, but what was likely the first kiss committed to film was between two models—two female models. Oddly, the photographer filmed a same-sex kiss because, not in spite of, mores of the era. Artful nudity below.

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House of Cards, S02E11, about 25 minutes in. Gavin is tracking Stamper’s cell phone. Code makes sense: there is a loop that tracks the phone’s activity at every iteration and a “status” object that we don’t see but has a method (appropriately named “activityMonitorReturn”) that returns the activity when there is one. Neat.

Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia announced on Saturday afternoon that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 left its planned route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing a week earlier as the result of deliberate action by someone aboard.

The Bacterionomicon:

A bestiary of Real-world diseases turned into DnD mosnters.

I won’t break Twitter with this selfie, but I know I’ll break some hearts.

Check out more Pet Selfies at Beggin’s Tumblr.

popular shared this story from Boing Boing.

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When Tony Benn was a Member of Parliament, he would go around with homemade plaques celebrating heroes of democracy, such as suffragette* Emily Wilding Davison, and illegally screw them to the walls. He copped to this during a sitting of Parliament in 2001, saying, "I have put up several plaques—quite illegally, without permission; I screwed them up myself. One was in the broom cupboard to commemorate Emily Wilding Davison, and another celebrated the people who fought for democracy and those who run the House. If one walks around this place, one sees statues of people, not one of whom believed in democracy, votes for women or anything else. We have to be sure that we are a workshop and not a museum."

*The term "suffragette" is considered pejorative (or at least diminutive) in Canada and the USA, where the preferred term is "Suffragist." The British movement for women's suffrage adopted the name and bore it proudly, sometimes pronouncing it with a hard "G," as in "SuffraGETte the vote."

(via Retronaut)

For those of you parents out there who haven’t made a decision on whether or not to vaccinate your kids, because you’ve been waiting to hear what that trick from The Hills whose last name sounds like an appetizer on the Red Lobster menu has to say about it, you don’t have to wait any longer. She’s finally spoken! Kristin Calamari was on Fox Business’ The Independents to pimp out her style show for E! and her shoe line for Chinese Laundry and the subject of vaccinations came up, because the subject of vaccinations always comes up when a trick is talking about her style show and shoe line. The host of The Independents, Kennedy (yes, that Kennedy), brought up vaccines and Kristin let it be known that the son she has now and the son she’s pregnant with will never be vaccinated. Kristin doesn’t want them to get autism and when Kennedy let her know that there’s no link between autism and vaccines, she said that she read a lot of books and saw it on Homeland or something. Basically, Kristin Cavallari knows stuff! I mean, who cares that polio and the measles are making a comeback?!

Kennedy: Are you opposed to vaccines?

Kristin: We don’t vaccinate.

Kennedy: Really? You’re one of those (Ed note: I’m not sure what the hell Kennedy says here, but I think she says “communists“)?

Kristin: I’ve read too many books about autism and the studies.

Kennedy: No, no, there’s no links. Read the links that say autism and vaccines have no-

Kristin: Well, there is a pediatric group called Homestead, Homestead or Homefirst, now I have pregnancy brain I got them confused—they’ve never vaccinated any of their children, and they haven’t had one case of autism. And now one in 88 boys is autistic, which is a really scary statistic.

Kennedy: Well, my mom vaccinated us and she doesn’t have any cases of autism either. Isn’t that weird?

Kristin: The vaccinations have changed over the years, there’s more mercury and other…

Kennedy didn’t ask what Jay Cutler’s thoughts on vaccines are, but I’m sure if you asked him, he’d stare at you blankly for a full 15 seconds and after a stream of drool dribbled out of the corner of his mouth, his brain would turn back on again and he’d ask you to pull his finger.

And yeah, by “read too many books,” Kristin means that she read one of Jenny McCarthy’s statuses on Facebook or some shit.

via Uproxx

The Setup interviewt Menschen zu ihren Tools und Arbeitsplätzen. Then this happened (and yeah, it’s real, apparently):

What hardware do you use?

My tools for national security consulting are primarily a semi-auto .22 rifle with a silencer. They are virtually completely silent and can pierce car doors and other light armor. They are perfect for urban environments.

My accessory tools are mostly extremely strong espresso and research chemicals from China that are classed as “Smart Drugs”. They allow me to solve 2nd order partial differential equations in my head and to spontaneously create 4 dimensional images of software structures that I can mentally manipulate.

John McAfee – Security consultant (via Hacker News)

riebeckite:

veronicaslides:

gray-firearms:

Train don’t give a fuck

CHOO CHOO MOTHER FUCKER SUCK MY DICK

~Dashing though the snow~

GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY WAY

É uma das mais egocêntricas e megalomaníacas que existem.

Que batalha épica.

d0rkyg1rl:

fallarcy:

thetalkingpoltergeist:

midgardmorningstar:

amnesia-amethyst:

 

omg i fucking love this

It’s like in the second to last gif the owl is saying “I got kissed by a really cute boy”

"…oh my" 

is this DIsney in HD

Look how cute and pretty this sweet little owl is!

In 2010 a scandal that erupted when designer Mark Fast decided to use four plus-size models (US sizes 8-10) in his catwalk show at London Fashion Week.  Protesting his decision, his stylist and creative director quit, leaving him just three days to find replacements.

The incident is a great example of how even relatively powerful figures (e.g., designers with catwalk shows) often have to pay a price for deviating from cultural rules. Designers are often criticized for only hiring waif-like models, but this shows that they don’t get to do whatever they like without consequences.

 

While it’s easy to condemn Fast’s stylist and creative director for walking out on him, the truth is that even being associated with deviance can bring consequences.  Sociologist Erving Goffman introduced the idea of the “courtesy stigma” to refer to the stigma that attaches to those who are merely associated with a stigmatized person. A recent Grey’s Anatomy episode dealt with exactly this idea in a story about the reaction to an attractive blonde married to an obese man. Her willingness to stay with such a person was a source of curiosity and disbelief.  Similarly, siblings of the mentally ill or mothers of children with  attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder might suffer courtesy stigma when people wonder if the mental illness is genetic or the parenting is bad, respectively.

So, while it’s tempting to say that Fast’s employees hold reprehensible ideological beliefs (a hatred or intolerance for “plus-size” women), it’s also possible that they thought being associated with the show could hurt their chances of success in a very competitive career.  In an industry that stigmatizes fat so powerfully, I can imagine it might be terrifying indeed to be seen as endorsing it.

Cite: Goffman, E. (1963) Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Originally posted in 2010.

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

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Wasn’t it always a fresh character sheet?

That was my favorite. I knew I was going to make a new character.

I still get happy when I see a character sheet of any kind. :)

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Today's item -- and this is the final item -- from the NSA's Tailored Access Operations (TAO) group implant catalog:

RAGEMASTER

(TS//SI//REL TO USA,FVEY) RF retro-reflector that provides an enhanced radar cross-section for VAGRANT collection. It's concealed in a standard computer video graphics array (VGA) cable between the video card and the video monitor. It's typically installed in the ferrite on the video cable.

(U) Capabilities
(TS//SI//REL TO USA,FVEY) RAGEMASTER provides a target for RF flooding and allows for easier collection of the VAGRANT video signal. The current RAGEMASTER unit taps the red video line on the VGA cable. It was found that, empirically, this provides the best video return and cleanest readout of the monitor contents.

(U) Concept of Operation
(TS//SI//REL TO USA,FVEY) The RAGEMASTER taps the red video line between the video card within the desktop unit and the computer monitor, typically an LCD. When the RAGEMASTER is illuminated by a radar unit, the illuminating signal is modulated with the red video information. This information is re-radiated, where it is picked up at the radar, demodulated, and passed onto the processing unit, such as a LFS-2 and an external monitor, NIGHTWATCH, GOTHAM, or (in the future) VIEWPLATE. The processor recreates the horizontal and vertical sync of the targeted monitor, thus allowing TAO personnel to see what is displayed on the targeted monitor.

Unit Cost: $30

Status: Operational. Manufactured on an as-needed basis. Contact POC for availability information.

Page, with graphics, is here. General information about TAO and the catalog is here.

In the comments, feel free to discuss how the exploit works, how we might detect it, how it has probably been improved since the catalog entry in 2008, and so on.

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blondeisawesome:

Putin “taking notes” during Obama’s speech.

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An anonymous reader writes "Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles wrote in a sworn declaration in the company's U.S. bankruptcy filing he suspected hundreds of thousands of bitcoins were missing on Feb. 7, more than two weeks before it finally halted trading. That means Mt. Gox allowed its customers to continue trading, knowing that its bitcoin stash was wiped out and collecting as much as US$900,000 in trading fees. Since Mt. Gox said it was also missing $27.3 million in cash from customer deposits, it raises the possibility that customers — despite seeing a cash balance displayed in their account — might have actually been buying bitcoins that did not exist, with cash that was already long gone."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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itwbennett writes "The MOOC (massive open online course) failure rate is notoriously high — only 1% of people who take the beginning computer science programming class, CS50, that Harvard offers over the EdX online platform complete it. A new effort in St. Louis called LaunchCode is changing that — and solving the city's programmer shortage. For the past several weeks, about 300 hardy souls have been gathering in a downtown St. Louis library to listen to the CS50 lectures and work together on the various programming problem sets. But the support offered by the all-volunteer run LaunchCode doesn't end with meet space. They're also doing an end-around on the traditional coder hiring process by pairing the students who complete the course with experienced programmers in one of more than a 100 tech companies who are looking for talent."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

My previous hero was this guy who photoshopped himself to celebrity photos, but I think he’s been usurped with this legendary photobomb queen…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If I ever step foot inside a club, this is exactly how I’m spending my time.  Unless “Talk Dirty” comes on… In that case, I’ll have to bust a move.  (Do people still say, “bust a move?”  I’M GONNA BRING IT BACK!  No I’m not.)

The post Girl Photobombs Promotional Club Photos with Gross Faces, and is Now My Hero appeared first on POPHANGOVER.