firehose

New submitter robertchin writes "Michael Barr recently testified in the Bookout v. Toyota Motor Corp lawsuit that the likely cause of unintentional acceleration in the Toyota Camry may have been caused by a stack overflow. Due to recursion overwriting critical data past the end of the stack and into the real time operating system memory area, the throttle was left in an open state and the process that controlled the throttle was terminated. How can users protect themselves from sometimes life endangering software bugs?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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1900s Edwardian Lapis Signet Ring, 14K Gold, $650

Gerard Rubio’s open-source knitting machine, OpenKnit, can make you a custom sweater in just an hour. I’ve waited in line for a fitting room for longer than that! via hackaday.

For all the hubbub about 3D printers leading a way into a new era of manufacturing, a third industrial revolution, and the beginnings of Star Trek replicators, we really haven’t seen many open source advances in the production of textiles and clothing. You know, the stuff that started the industrial revolution. [Gerard Rubio] is bucking that trend with OpenKnit, an open-source knitting machine that’s able to knit anything from a hat to a sweater using open source hardware and software.

We’ve seen a few builds involving knitting machines, but with few exceptions they’re modifications of extremely vintage Brother machines hacked for automation. OpenKnit is built from the ground up from aluminum extrusion, 3D printed parts, a single servo and stepper motor, and a ton of knitting needles.

The software is based on Knitic, an Arduino-based brain for the old Brother machines. This, combined with an automatic shuttle, allows OpenKnit to knit the sweater seen in the pic above in about an hour.

Read more.

Arbitration. We’re adding arbitration clauses to our Terms of Service and Dropbox for Business online agreement. Arbitration is a faster and more efficient way to resolve legal disputes, and it provides a good alternative to things like state or federal courts, where the process could take months or even years. If you prefer to opt out of arbitration in the Terms of Service, there’s no need to fax us or trek to the post office — just fill out this quick online form.

The ever-looming specter of death is bad enough — but imagine Facebook not being able to monetize your data after you've kicked the bucket?

What if William Shakespeare wrote Star Wars? It would probably go a little something like this. After the first book's popularity, author Ian Doescher has re-imagined The Empire Strikes Back with a Shakespearian twist. And we've got an exclusive first look at some of your favorite scenes.

Read more...

Since it first launched its iPhone app in 2012, Simple has pitched itself as the anti-bank. So when news broke yesterday that it had sold itself for $117 million to BBVA, the giant multinational bank holding company, you could be forgiven for doing a double take.

The internet's favorite bromance will discuss their current Broadway run, their iconic roles in television and film, and why the online world may just be their best stage yet.

LOIS LANE Does It Better In New One-Shot:

thegoddamnbader:

Almost five days from now the moment every Lois Lane fan has been waiting almost 15 years for will arrive – the moment an in-continuity solo book starring everyone’s favorite journalist will be made available for the public to hungrily consume like there is no hope for tomorrow. What is this wonderful thing? SUPERMAN: LOIS LANE #1, a new one-shot to be released February 26th.

But oh, there is… there is hope for tomorrow. Because we have a Lois Lane comic, oh my god, oh my go-

Excuse me; it’s hard to contain myself when I’m salivating over my keyboard. Nonetheless, this one-shot may be the first step towards having a Lois Lane solo series for the first time in over three decades, so I can say that there’s a lot riding on this one little oversized one-shot comic book.

Even though it still has “SUPERMAN” in the title for some reason, as if we don’t know who Lois Lane is unless we’re reminded of Superman. But at least plain “Superman” is better than “Superman’s Girlfriend”. I’ll take what I can get.

nonsensicalpatterns:

ME THIS IS ME

jennylewren:

Taylor Swift ain’t got nothing on Gwen Stefani until she writes a full album about a break up and then forces the guy to play bass on every song and then tour with her

alex-v-hernandez

We’d like to give a quick status on the new Premium plans and thank you all for the support.  It’s been a little over a week since we introduced the new paid accounts and the support from our community has been terrific.  That said, we still have a ways to go to meet our goals and are working diligently to address as much of your input as possible.

Here are answers to many of the frequent questions that we’ve been receiving over the past week.

Q: Why no Paypal?

A: We just released Paypal payments. You can now use either secure credit card payments through Stripe, or checkout using Paypal.

Q: Why didn’t you do ads?

A: As we mentioned in our previous posts, we’re heavily committed to the open web and feel that ads put our neutrality in jeopardy.  We haven’t completely ruled out future advertising for non-premium accounts, but we will do everything possible to avoid that decision.

Q: What happens when my grace period or trial expires and I’m over the free feed limit?

A: If you’re over the limit and your trial is expired, then your feeds will stop updating. We won’t ever lock you out of The Old Reader, and you’ll always be able to see what your friends are sharing, and you’ll always be able to export your subscriptions to OPML.

Q: Does “6 months of post storage” extend to shared items and comments?

A: We keep shared items and comments forever. Those are never removed. The only posts that will ever be removed are the read and unread posts that you haven’t shared, liked, or starred.

Q: If feed refreshes are shared, how do the tiered feed refresh speeds work?

A: We do our best to store and fetch only unique feeds, so we fetch new posts for a feed once, and deliver the new posts for each user who is subscribed to that feed.

So, if one of the users who is subscribed to that feed decides to become a premium user, all of the feeds that user is subscribed to will begin updating faster. Any free users subscribed to the same feeds will get the faster refresh time as well.

Q: What is the Instapaper and Readability integration?

A: Instapaper and Readability integration is setup, so that if you go into settings and authorize those services, any time you Star a post, it will be shared to to those services. You don’t need to click “Sent to” and be redirected off to the other site. Just click Star and it all happens in the background.

Q: Where’s the bookmarklet?

A: The bookmarklet is a high priority feature for us. We think it’s a very valuable feature to be able to take any article you come across and put it into The Old Reader for later reading. It’s a bit of a big change, since now we don’t have the concept of a post without a feed, but we’re on it and it will be available soon.

Thanks for using The Old Reader!

*I’d suggest checking out that Core77 post, because this video looks like design-fiction, and it isn’t.

http://www.core77.com/blog/digital_fabrication/joris_laarmans_latest_anti-gravity_3d_printer_basically_conjures_metal_out_of_thin_air_26474.asp

“As its name suggests, MX3D-Metal can print lines of steel, stainless steel, aluminum, bronze or copper ‘in mid-air.’

How much the world’s armies embrace gays

THE armed forces and homosexuality do not make natural bedfellows. Though tales from ancient Greece vaunt the heroism of gay soldiers, modern armies are mostly squeamish on the subject. So when New Zealand's brass let its soldiers participate in a gay-pride parade, it helped put the country first on a new index that ranks 103 of the world's armed forces by how open they are to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people. Countries at the bottom of the list—compiled by The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, based on 21 indicators across five categories—are mostly those where homosexuality is a crime or considered an illness. Yet surprises abound. America's relatively low ranking at 40th is largely because it bans transgender personnel, though it has gay-friendly policies. In Israel, where military issues are ever-present, the army seems more progressive than society. Only 40% of the population accept homosexuality, whereas the armed forces completely opened up to LGBT people in 1993, almost a decade before Britain (which is tied for second).

firehose shared this story from Diane Duane.

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The Game Changed in Venezuela Last Night - and the International Media Is Asleep At the Switch:

shaddicted:

Dear International Editor: Listen and understand. The game changed in Venezuela last night. What had been a slow-motion unravelling that had stretched out over many years went kinetic all of a sudden.

What we have this morning is no longer the Venezuela story you thought you understood.

Throughout last night, panicked people told their stories of state-sponsored paramilitaries on motorcycles roaming middle class neighborhoods, shooting at people and  storming into apartment buildings, shooting at anyone who seemed like he might be protesting. People continue to be arrested merely for protesting, and a long established local Human Rights NGO makes an urgent plea for an investigation into widespread reports of torture of detainees. 

Venezuela’s domestic media blackout is joined by a parallel international blackout, one born not of censorship but of disinterest and inertia. It’s hard to express the sense of helplessness you get looking through these pages and finding nothing. Venezuela burns; nobody cares.

Let me put this clearly. Y’all need to step it up. The time to discard what you thought you knew about the way things work in Venezuela is now.

Pray for Venezuela too, same horrid stuff of nightmares is happening there… and international media fails to report on that.

Spread the word.

As any dedicated dog owner will tell you, canines often appear to grasp the emotional content of what's being said to them. An unprecedented brain scanning study now shows this is likely true — and that this capability pre-dates domestication.

Read more...

This morning I saw the following tweet from Steven Levy, a Wired reporter who's written a number of interesting books about software people and the great companies they've built

I hate it when something I look at on Amazon turns up in a Facebook ad. It doesn't help me, it creeps me.

— Steven Levy (@StevenLevy) February 17, 2014

As part of my day job at Microsoft, I've begun to learn more about how advertising across the internet works on a technical level and it is quite interesting to learn how an image of a some head phones I looked at an e-commerce site ended up staring back at me from an ad on Facebook later that day.

The fundamental technology that makes this possible is Facebook Exchange (FBX). The infographic below provides an overview of how it enables ads from ecommerce sites to show up on Facebook and I’ll follow that up with a slightly more technical explanation.

Source: Business Insider

Facebook Exchange is a Real-Time Bidding platform which enables Facebook to sell ad slots on their page to the highest bidding advertisers in fractions of a second. Typically advertisers and publishers who own the pages where ads show up end up working together through an intermediary called a Demand Side Platform (DSP). A DSP such as AdRoll provides one of their retail partners such as American Apparel or Skull Candy with code to put tracking pixels on their site which allows the user to be identified and context such as what pages they’ve visited to be recorded. The retail partner then goes into AdRoll’s interface and decides how much they are willing to pay to show ads on various networks such as Facebook (via FBX) if a user who has visited one of their pages is shown an ad.

AdRoll then provides data to Facebook that allows the user to be uniquely identified within Facebook’s network. Later when that same user goes to Facebook, Facebook puts out a request on its Ad Exchange saying “Here’s a user who you might be interested in, how much are you willing to pay to show them an ad?”, AdRoll then cross-references that user’s opaque identifier with the behavioral data they have (i.e. what pages they were looking at on an advertiser’s site) and if there is a match they make a bid which will also include their ad for the page that piqued their interest. If the retailer wins the auction, then their ad is chosen and either rendered in the news feed or on the right hand side on Facebook’s desktop website. Each of these pieces needs to happen in fractions of a second but is still slow enough that rendering ads tends to noticeably be the slowest part of rendering the webpage.

In fact, there was a grand example of retargeting in action while I was researching this blog post. When I started writing this blog post I checked out AdRoll’s web page on how to use their service to retarget ads on Facebook. A few minutes later, this showed up in my news feed.

You can tell if an ad is retargeted on Facebook by hovering with your mouse cursor on the top right of the ad (on the desktop website) and then selecting the options. If the “About This Ad” link takes you somewhere outside Facebook then it is a retargeted ad.

Some ad providers like Quantcast provide an option to opt-out of retargeting for their service while others like AdRoll link to the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) opt –out tool which provides an option to opt-out of retargeting for a variety of ad providers. Note that this doesn’t prevent you from getting ads and is instead just a signal to advertisers that you’d rather not have your ads personalized.

If you found this blog post informative I've begun a regular series of blog posts intended to answer questions about online advertising on Microsoft properties such as Bing & MSN and on industry trends. Hit me up on Twitter with your questions.

Now Playing: Ice Cube – Hood Mentality

In her new book, Nice Girls Still Don’t Get The Corner Office, Lois Frankel, an executive coach and public speaker, has identified 133 errors women make that derail their career. This new edition covers 33% more errors in how women self-sabotage their career from when the book debuted a decade ago.

1. Serving as the conscience. Weigh the costs of pointing out minor infractions with the consequences and potential retaliation, she says. You may undercut your career if you act as a whistleblower or don’t learn how to “bend the rules” a bit.
2. Skipping meetings. Give up the idea that they’re interesting, valuable or worth the time. Instead, they’re time to “meet and greet, or play show-and-tell.” Speak up and use meetings to market your brand and insights.
3. Giving away your ideas. It happens often: A woman suggests an idea and it’s overlooked. Then a man expresses it and it’s golden. Instead, women need to ask a question after they present their idea such as “Are there any objections to immediately getting to work on this?”
4. Protecting jerks. Women are “jerk flypaper.  Not only do we attract them more than men do, but we also tolerate them longer,” Frankel writes. Instead, women need to distance themselves from colleagues who behave badly or make work miserable. If it’s your boss, find another job.
5. Doing the impossible.  Don’t be the miracle worker, Frankel says. When women meet impossible deadlines or deliver on a tiny budget, they’re seen as a worker-bee and given more work. Instead, be more realistic and use the extra free time to build relationships that will help you through your career.

She also warns women not to be invisible or to ask permission—especially for things like vacation days or spending on projects that are well-funded.

Follow Vickie on Twitter at @WorkingKind. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com

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Pop Chart Lab has created a stylish tea towel printed with a handy chart full of confusing cooking measurements. It is available to purchase online.

Handy as it is absorbent, this culinary cheat sheet outlines multiple measurements and their sundry transpositions, so that you’re never left wondering how many teaspoons are in a tablespoon, how many tablespoons are in a quart, and how many quarts are in a gallon–all in the form of a kitchen towel! It even includes conversions for cooking’s finer proportions: the dash, the smidgen, and the pinch.

image via Pop Chart Lab

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

MARTY! CARL! SORRY TO BURST IN LIKE THIS BUT I WAS UP ALL NIGHT DOING AN INADVISABLE COMBINATION OF COCAINE AND PCP AND THINKING UP NEW MARKETING STRATEGIES AND I BELIEVE I’VE GOT JUST THE THING TO TURN THIS WHOLE VENTURE AROUND! DO YOU HAVE A MINUTE? AM I INTERRUPTING?

The brand seeks to mix traditional menswear tailoring and soulful print choices for the contemporary gentleman with style. Dent de Man also offers a contemporary silhouette to reflect personality and lifestyle.

The Dent de Man spring summer 14 collection delivers vintage African prints in full throttle. They stay true to their traditional tailoring ethos in terms of cuts, lines and silhouettes but re-invented in terms or shapes. I shared the image above with a friend and mumbled something to the fact that it’s like a future take on African style and I agree. Will be reviewing the label’s AW14 collection soon.

We met this stylish Japanese duo in Harajuku. You may recognize Asami and Itoo from our previous street snaps.

Asami is wearing a lace dress from OC with a black coat, white tights and a houndstooth bag by Ralph Lauren. Her heeled shoes are from Betsey Johnson. She told us she likes shopping at Faline Tokyo and Sister, and that she’s into rock music. Find her on Twitter or Instagram for more info.

Itoo is wearing a resale coat and leather biker jacket with Lina Osterman jeans featuring spikes at the knee. His backpack is Mission Workshop and his boots are Dr. Martens. His favorite shop is Cannabis, and you can follow him on Twitter and Instagram.

Click on any photo to enlarge it.

dgaider:

tastefullyoffensive:

[via]

This made me laugh WAY more than is reasonable.