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16 Jan 19:57

Inside Israel’s Vast Network Of Animal Spies

Your guide to the sharks, vultures and pigeons that just may be working for the Mossad.
16 Jan 19:57

Meet The Original Face Of Punk Feminism

Dadaism fell victim to a statistical characteristic endemic to most art history before the 1970s. White males tended to dominate the ranks, and as a result, artists like Hannah Höch fell into the shadows. She only recently received the recognition she deserves.
16 Jan 19:57

Curlers: They're Not So Fat Anymore

At the elite level of the sport, which is often likened to chess on ice, curlers increasingly are adopting unorthodox training routines. Weightlifting, for instance, and jogging. They're even watching their diets. At select international competitions, some are eschewing curling's traditional sports drinks, namely lagers and ales.
16 Jan 19:57

Parenting Tips I Learned From 'Law & Order: SVU'

Don’t have a second child. The first child will try to kill him and pin it on you.
16 Jan 19:50

Egypt Hires PR Firm, Arrests PR Firm's Film Crew

The arc of history seems to bend toward status quo in today's Egypt.
16 Jan 18:26

NOt for huffing

by ThePEOPLEOFMB

1600041_622761577778955_1603866566_n

 

In case you didn’t know….don’t huff this

16 Jan 18:26

Apple and Google pulls cosmetic surgery game aimed at children

by Jenna Pitcher

Apple and Google recently removed Plastic Surgery for Barbie, a cosmetic surgery game aimed at children, from the iTunes App Store and Google Play.

Plastic Surgery for Barbie, pulled from the iTunes App Store on Jan 14., was marked suitable for children aged 9 and over. The game tasked players with performing plastic surgery procedures on a female character, such as carrying out liposuction on the character's "six problem areas." Users could then compare before and after shots of the results.

"This unfortunate girl has so much extra weight that no diet can help her," the game's description read. "In our clinic she can go through a surgery called liposuction that will make her slim and beautiful."

Google confirmed with the BBC that the app has been removed, stating that while it doesn't comment on individual apps it "will remove apps that breach our guidelines."

In a statement issued to the publication, toy manufacturer Mattel said that the use of Barbie's branding was not sanctioned by the company and that it takes its "commitment to children seriously and work hard to ensure there are no unauthorized uses of our brands that may be unsafe or inappropriate for children."

"This app has since been removed from iTunes," the statement read. "At Mattel, we take our commitment to children seriously and work hard to ensure there are no unauthorized uses of our brands that may be unsafe or inappropriate for children."

A similar app called Plastic Surgery Barbara was made available on the iTunes store shortly after the original was pulled. The second app is no longer available.

16 Jan 18:26

Punk is Dad

16 Jan 17:14

Wal-Mart Accused of Illegally Firing Striking Employees - Bloomberg

by gguillotte
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) illegally retaliated against protesting U.S. workers, the National Labor Relations Board said in a complaint stemming from job actions timed to the busy shopping day after the Thanksgiving holiday.
16 Jan 05:53

xqG0QP3.gif (GIF Image, 123 × 225 pixels)

by djempirical
16 Jan 05:48

Photoshop adds 3D-printing support, with MakerBot and Shapeways integration

by Jacob Kastrenakes
firehose

speak of the devil

Adobe is stepping into 3D printing today with a new update to Photoshop CC. It's adding in a new 3D-printing tool meant to make it easy for anyone to take a model, put some finishing touches on it, and get it printed. That's exactly how Adobe sees Photoshop being used for 3D printing too — less as a creation tool, and more as a way to put polish on an existing project.

Though Photoshop already includes some 3D modeling features, Adobe doesn't expect most of its users to start building objects from the ground up. Instead, this printing support is meant to make Photoshop a better option for users who are just trying to touch up and print a preexisting model. There's enough there to let users tweak and paint their models, and now Adobe says it'll be simple to print them too.


Photoshop generates a preview specific to MakerBot and Shapeways printers

Adobe is adding several features to make printing a model easy. Users won't have to worry about their model falling apart, because Photoshop will automatically generate temporary supports beneath and around their model to make sure that it doesn't collapse during printing. It's also partnering with MakerBot and Shapeways so that Photoshop can automatically generate previews of how a model will look when it's made by any given one of their printers. A printer-specific preview will also be available for 3D Systems' Cube printer, and others will be added in on an ongoing basis.

The integration is particularly useful for outputting to Shapeways, a made-to-order 3D-printing service. From inside of Photoshop, you'll be able to see what a printed model should look like when it's made with any of Shapeways' materials, from colored sandstone to solid bronze. The app will even estimate how much the print job will cost.

Because Photoshop CC is part of Adobe's subscription service, this update comes at no added cost to subscribers and will be made available for download today. A number of other features are being added in as well, including a tool called Perspective Warp that Adobe says can automatically correct for perspective distortion when you're manipulating objects within an image, or even let you alter the angle from which a photo was taken.

16 Jan 05:18

Man Spots Jim Harbaugh Loading Up On $8 Khakis At Walmart | Kissing Suzy Kolber

by gguillotte
An Indianapolis man spotted Jim Harbaugh loading up on his now trademark $8 khakis at a local Walmart last February during the NFL combine and has now decided to share the pics with the world now that Harbs’ khakis are in the news. The world is better for it.
16 Jan 05:17

foie: laughingsquid: Husky Verbally Refuses to Go Into His...

firehose

via Snorkmaiden

16 Jan 05:14

Photo



16 Jan 05:14

Photo



16 Jan 04:44

The Rare Disease That Makes You Perpetually Hungry

firehose

hi boudin

Lisa Tremblay still recalls in horror the time her daughter Kristin pulled a hot dog crawling with ants from the garbage at a cookout and prepared to swallow it.
16 Jan 04:43

"Eyes on the prize. What are players trying to accomplish in your game? Rules more than one step..."

firehose

I kind of get what this is getting at (don't make rules for the sake of making rules; complexity != gameplay depth) but it seems reductive.

There are successful games that subsystems in the background that are more than one step removed from the "objective" but add to the experience in an original, constructive manner. And there are lots of games where the players are trying to accomplish very open-ended goals that make "one step removed" meaningless, and there are social games where doing things removed from the goal are as much part of the fun as the goal--and don't even start to say the goal is to have fun. In most cases that's obvious.

“Eyes on the prize. What are players trying to accomplish in your game? Rules more than one step removed from this are superfluous.”

- Eric Lang (@eric_lang)
16 Jan 04:43

NSA to get new limits on phone data, say officials - Newsday

firehose

ha ha great


Washington Post

NSA to get new limits on phone data, say officials
Newsday
WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama is expected Friday to announce new limits on the NSA program that collects billions of phone records from Americans, but he will call on Congress to help determine the program's future, according to current and ...
Privacy advocates expect little from Obama NSA speechUSA TODAY
Obama Said to Keep NSA in Charge of Phone Records for NowBloomberg
Obama Addressing Last Year's To-Do ListWall Street Journal
NDTV -CBS News -Antiwar.com
all 521 news articles »
16 Jan 04:43

inkytasty: naniiebim: The 6 page short story I worked on with...















inkytasty:

naniiebim:

The 6 page short story I worked on with Rhianna Pratchett as writer will be hopefully on sale soon this month! [The suggested out date was around the Thursday before the 25th :p] So set your orders at the comic shops!

The title and issue is “the Legends of Red Sonja” issue 3. The overall arc was created by Gail Simone with a number of writers and artist involved in the mini stories art and covers.

I just wanted to show some of the development artwork that went into this as the style and comic making methods are really different from the usual method I utilize when I pace my own comics.

Image 01: Young Gerd in full battle regalia. Gerd as a character was ace to draw, she’s pretty scary and badass as a post 40 year old, but she’s got a well rounded past as well. She’s a combination of several ladies I know who are just seriously scary and awesome and who I would consider great lasses to have with you in battle and have serious bosom. They also have great hair.

Image 02: An initial sketch of the modern Sonja. I don’t know a lot about her, but I know she must have some sort of cleverness or incredible survivors instinct, and rather than an angry grimace, I wanted her to have a different expression- a bit of calculation and mild annoyance at having to work out how to get you out of her way the quickest way.

Image 03: Gerd and Sonja when they meet. Sonja is in the chainmail and shorts gear that she has in earlier phases. When I developed Gerd, she still had to be hard and beefy with a sense of older lady to her, but also sort of Motherly. The kind of general hard mumseyness where the whole village was her kids and you’d be damn stupid to mess with ‘em.

Image 04: Gerd is a blacksmith and has a portable forge.

Image 05: One of the pages- one of the big problems with my usual comic methods is that I work to pacing rather than script and page allowance. Ho ho, ah, nuts. Working with a writer is incredible as they populate the scenes with words in a way that I rarely manage. You get a lot for your buck. For me, this meant unusually full pages compared to my normal 2 panels to a page or so! I did learn a trick or two, something I always find brilliant about working outside of my comfort zone. For me, this is an incredibly new method of working- I’ve only drawn a comic in this method once before. If you look at images 6 and 7, you can see how I ended up sketching out the whole scene beyond the space of the panels. There’s a lot of story to fulfil, and in order to create the correct viewpoints, scenes and grounding, the easiest way was to transpose the panel rough out onto another image file, draw it out beyond the limits of the panel, pop it back into the comic page, shuffle it around and crop it back in. It allowed me to create proportions more correctly and flesh out the backgrounds.

That horse is intentionally big. He’s a bigass horse.

Secondly, I had to work with the thought in mind that a colourist who I didn’t know and who doesn’t know me would be working on this after I’d drawn the line work. I find colouring an insanely hard job, so I admire that people can visualize it, and create it but I also know that my artwork although expressive is a bugger to read. So I had to hold back waaay lots on this job and try and come up with a much cleaner than usual line and artwork.

It was a fun job, and much more of a learning curve than I want to admit to when I’ve been drawing for so long. Finding that I’m still feeling uncomfortable and having to really push that hard and still feeling behind the other artists was a wake up.

But hey, it’s RED SONJA. so coool!

Super cool!

This is one of my favorite art jobs in the entire series, you absolutely killed on it. 

So please, take a bow.

16 Jan 04:39

That Time Police Used Gollum To Help Find A Missing Ring

firehose

uhh

We’re looking for the rightful owner of the suspected stolen ring, already had to turn this man away: pic.twitter.com/2pC3rAx6Af

— Solihull Police (@SolihullPolice) January 13, 2014 Police from Solihull, West Midlands in the UK took extreme measures recently while trying to find a missing ring - they used a nerd reference. But they didn't stop there, they threw in some puns too. "We apologise for the ‘Ring’ puns today, it’s difficult to break the hobbit." Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?
16 Jan 04:25

Coffee 2014

16 Jan 04:05

Valenslime is coming up! ⊟ Not that it matters much here in...

by ericisawesome






Valenslime is coming up! ⊟

Not that it matters much here in non-Slime country, but Square Enix will sell these special chocolates with white and pink tins to Dragon Quest lovers in Japan for 1400 yen (around $13).

Who knows, once Bravely Default is out, maybe Square Enix will send a card to all its long-time admirers and tell them it’s choo-choo-choosing to localize the Dragon Quest VII remake.

BUY Dragon Quest games, upcoming games
16 Jan 04:00

wahnwitzig: Exiled Kaiser Wilhelm II feeds ducks at Huis...







wahnwitzig:

Exiled Kaiser Wilhelm II feeds ducks at Huis Doorn

thank you for conjuring Wilhelm gifs for us, always a treasure 

16 Jan 03:59

Touchscreen point-and-shoot, from Adafruit

by liz
firehose

LadyAda makes a touchscreen interface for the RasPi camera board

LadyAda from Adafruit is one of my very favourite people. We have a tradition of spending at least one evening eating Korean barbecue whenever I visit New York. We have told each other many secrets over bowls of fizzy fermented rice beverage, posed for photographs in front of plastic meats, been filmed pointing at electronics for the New York Times, and behaved very badly together in Pinkberry in September. LadyAda is the perfect combination of super-smart hacker, pink hair and business ninja; her cat Mosfet likes to Skype transatlantically with the Raspberry Pi cat, Mooncake (at least I think that their intense ignoring of each other constitutes “liking”); and we are incredibly fortunate that she saw the Pi and instantly understood what we were trying to do back in 2011. Here she is on the cover of the MagPi. (Click the image to visit the MagPi website, where you can download the issue for free.)

Her business, Adafruit, which employs an army of hackers and makers, does wonderful things with the Pi. They’ve been incredibly helpful to us in getting the word about Raspberry Pi and our educational mission out in North America. Adafruit not only stocks the Raspberry Pi and a whole warehouse-full of compatible electronics; the team also creates some amazing Raspberry Pi add-ons, along with projects and tutorials.

This is Adafruit’s latest Pi project, and it blew our minds.

All the parts you’ll need to create your own point-and-shoot camera using the Raspberry Pi, a Raspberry Pi camera board, and a little touch-screen TFT add-on board that Adafruit have made especially for the Pi, are available from Adafruit (they ship worldwide and are super-friendly). You can also find out how to send your photos to another computer over WiFi, or using Dropbox. As the Adafruit team says:

This isn’t likely to replace your digital camera (or even phone-cam) anytime soon…it’s a simplistic learning exercise and not a polished consumer item…but as the code is open source, you or others might customize it into something your regular camera can’t do.

As always, full instructions on making your own are on the learning section of Adafruit’s website, with a parts list, comprehensive setup instructions, and much more.

Adafruit have been especially prolific this week: we’ll have another project from them to show you in a few days. Thanks to LadyAda, PT, and especially to Phillip Burgess, who engineered this camera project.

16 Jan 03:52

[Punk Rock][Trans] Against Me!'s new album Transgender Dysphoria Blues

by McCaber
is fucking awesome! I've been a fan of Against Me! since way back when, so I'm super pleased to learn this. Laura Grace's struggles and transition have definitely influenced and informed this album, but it loses none of the previous edge AM had. Solid guitar-driven punk rock through and through.

It officially comes out next week, but it's streaming on NPR until then.
16 Jan 03:50

Spotify introduces unlimited free music on the web just days before Beats Music launch

by Casey Newton

The nice thing about raising $250 million is that it lets you offer your customers services that few competitors can match. Spotify, which is riding high after completing a massive fundraising round in November, said today that it has dropped all limits on streaming ad-supported music on the web. Previously, Spotify limited you to a certain number of hours a month after a 6-month trial period. As of today, the company has totally removed the caps, in a move that has implications for competitors like Beats Music and Rdio.


Spotify's free offerings have always been more generous than its peers

The move comes less than a week before the high-profile launch of Beats, which is challenging Spotify with an enormous marketing campaign that includes promotional deals with AT&T and Ellen DeGeneres and is expected to include an advertisement that airs during the Super Bowl. Unlike Spotify, Beats will launch without a free tier after a 7-day trial, making it harder for them to attract casual users and then convert them to paying customers. Pandora dropped its own streaming limits for free users last year.

Most companies that use a so-called "freemium" model report that the longer a person uses their service, the more likely they are to pay for that service at some point. That's one reason that Spotify has millions more users than any other on-demand music streaming service: its free offerings have always been significantly more generous than its peers. Eliminating the caps on free listening will cost the company more money in the short run — but it may also help the company pull away from its competition even faster.

16 Jan 03:49

Starbucks admits its iPhone app stores unencrypted user passwords

by Sean Hollister

When you type a password into a mobile payment app, you' probably expect it to protect that password somehow. But it seems that the Starbucks app for iOS doesn't actually lock its usernames and passwords down. According to a Computerworld report, company executives admitted today that the mobile app stores passwords in clear text, with no encryption of any sort. By connecting your phone to a computer, the report claims, someone could easily retrieve your password from a crash log.


What's more, it appears that Starbucks may not intend to actually fix the problem. While the company told both Computerworld and The Seattle Times that the company had "taken steps to safeguard customers' information," it's unclear what steps it could have taken. Daniel Wood, the security researcher who originally discovered the vulnerabiility in November, says that the latest version of the app still includes the same unencrypted passwords and usernames. Starbucks would have to update the application to fix the issue, Wood tells The Verge, and it hasn't done that since May. "Anything they have done on their end won't matter as the vulnerability lies within the application on end user devices," he says.

Admittedly, a criminal would still need to have physical possession of a user's phone to make use of the vulnerability, which is a fairly high bar to clear, and here it's only usernames, passwords, and email addresses at risk. Wood says that the Subway Ordering for California app, which lets users build sandwiches to order, stores the complete street address, credit card info, email address, and geolocation of its users in plain text.

16 Jan 03:05

The New York Times Had A Mistake On Its Front Page Every Day For More Than A Century

In 1898, somebody added one to 14,499 and got 15,000, and the paper's issue number remained off by 500 until 2000.
16 Jan 03:01

Chris Claremont Returns to the X-Men with "Nightcrawler" Ongoing Series

Prolific "X-Men" writer Chris Claremont returns to the franchise for a "Nightcrawler" series, illustrated by Todd Nauck and featuring Wolverine.
16 Jan 02:54

CW Confirms Wonder Woman Prequel Series Not Going Forward

"Amazon," first announced in 2012, was confirmed to be officially dead by The CW at the Television Critics Association press tour.