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Unfettered capitalism is shitballs
Iran 'sends monkey to space for second time' - BBC News
BBC News |
Iran 'sends monkey to space for second time' BBC News Iran says it has successfully sent a monkey into space for the second time this year as part of a programme aimed at manned space flight. President Hassan Rouhani said the monkey - named Fargam, or Auspicious - returned from space in perfect health. Iran Recovers 2nd Astronaut MonkeyFars News Agency Iran sends second monkey into space, says Iranian presidentRepublica Life and Style wRap: A monkey comes home from spaceRappler Tottenham News -Lincoln Journal Star all 78 news articles » |
Twitter / MaryKateLively: @suey_park http://t.co/MKViYI4iCF
Follow Up: Portland airport must run anti-logging ad per County Court
firehoselol
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submitted by getchpdx [link] [32 comments] |
University Accidentally Accepts 2,500 Students It Meant To Reject
The Inevitable Fall Of The Reddit Moderator
firehose'Reddit CEO Yishan Wong has admitted that the site has yet to break even, and the last year has seen a string of new features (like revamped multireddits) and media initiatives (a Black Friday livestream). So it’s natural to ask whether the new ToS, long more rumor than reality, reiterates the values and relations typically assumed to define the site, or prefigures changes aimed at finally pushing Reddit into the black.
Reading the document itself suggests it’s probably a bit of both.
Much of the new agreement is devoted to formalizing conventions (like the prohibition on giving out another users’ personal information) that fell into place organically over the years. In doing so, the administrators have given legal coverage to some features that may ultimately help the site out of its financial hole, but also to others that trap users in less than ideal situations.
...
As §28 spells out, “moderating a subreddit is an unofficial, voluntary position”—a point that has not always been clear to the site’s users. It’s also one of the most critical and thankless roles any redditor can play, trapping them between the authority of the administrators and the outrage of their fellow users.
The new agreement canonizes that dilemma. While §5 explicitly absolves the administrators of any responsibility for monitoring what happens on the site, moderators are required to remove offending content whenever it’s brought to their attention. That could be far more complicated than in the past, since a rather flimsy provision (§25) seems to make a legal requirement of following the site’s informal and ever-changing etiquette. Under the new ToS, then, moderators actually end up being more responsible than administrators for the site’s content and for the behavior of other contributors.
The administrators aren’t even responsible for the moderators, according to §27, though they can demote them for failure to enforce the rules, or for any reason at all, really. The barely disguised message there is that, though they can be penalized for failing to enforce Reddit policy, moderators are on their own, legally speaking. Nor are they compensated for their efforts, and in case there was any question, Reddit has no plan to change that.
In fact, the new ToS explicitly bars moderators from seeking compensation from other sources, a provision meant to prevent bribery but one which would also stand in the way of schemes to use crowdfunding techniques to compensate moderators for their significant time and efforts.
What that amounts to is an unpaid workforce, beholden to the site’s standards and subject to an authority that’s allowed to be capricious. As I’ve argued before, that’s a situation that all but ensures that Reddit will undergo periodic crises.'
Silicon Valley Holiday Parties Are What Wall Street Holiday Parties Used To Be
Adobe Creative Cloud Subscriptions Hit 1.4 Million in Fiscal 2013
firehoseburied lede: "Adobe said fiscal 2014 will be the last year it posts any "meaningful … perpetual revenue" from the Creative Suite, meaning if you really want any more seats of CS6, you should buy them sooner rather than later, since the company is closing the door on perpetual licenses."
Newswire: Are you Sarah Connor? No, Game Of Thrones' Emilia Clarke is
After a process of elimination that involved asking dozens of potential actresses whether they were Sarah Connor, the trail of bodies and senseless bloodshed has at last led to Game Of Thrones’ Emilia Clarke. As reported earlier, Clarke was in close contention with Brie Larson for the role in the Terminator reboot, which will find her playing the future mother of rebel leader John Connor (likely to be played by Jason Clarke; no relation), in a story that involves yet another revision to the story’s twisted timeline. And Deadline adds that it hears the storyline also involves “a trip into the future,” which is, frankly, one timeline twist too many to consider on a Friday night. You can if you want to. We’re taking our own “trip into the future” by getting drunk. Have a good weekend.
This real-time global wind map will completely devour your weekend
It's high time you met earth, a plainly titled, interactive datavisualization that offers visitors a realtime glimpse of global wind patterns. WARNING: If you're into this sort of thing, this visualization is a major, major time-suck. Seriously, it's utterly hypnotic.
    
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Do It Now: Be Sure to Shut Off Your Hose Bibs for the Winter
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Courtney
shared this story
from  Apartment Therapy | Saving the world, one room at a time:
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| reminder for my cold-weather friends. (I forgot last year, which is part of why our pipes froze. whoops.) |
You've probably heard it said that you should shut off your hose bibs for the winter season. When the weather dips below freezing, any unprotected water pipes, such as those leading to a hose bib, are susceptible to freezing. When water freezes it expands, and can exert a pressure of up to 2,000 pounds per square inch. That's a lot of pressure in a solid pipe with nowhere to go, leading to bursts and costly repairs.
Please Stop: The Trans Joke at the Spike Video Game Awards
firehoseauugggggghhhhh
Joel McHale, no
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Courtney
shared this story
from |
| Samantha Allen on Racialicious! |
By Guest Contributor Samantha Allen, cross-posted from The Border House
[Trigger Warning: Discussion of transphobic joke, real-life experiences of transphobia.]
Like many graduate students, I was still finishing up last week’s work at 6 PM on a Saturday. I put on Spike TV’s annual Video Game Awards (re-branded this year as VGX) to have some background noise while I put the finishing touches on a paper.
I expected the usual: some Michael Bay-esque graphics packages, some puerile pandering to their core demographic of adolescent boys, some Mountain Dew, some Doritos, some trailers. I can stomach that, even laugh at it. Less than five minutes into the program, however, co-host Joel McHale jokingly put the rumors to rest that Wario had “undergone sex reassignment surgery.”
If you’re reading this, you might know that a joke like that is politically ill-advised. It violates the comedic wisdom that one should punch up rather than punch down. It not only repeats the exoticizing focus on transgender people’s genitals, it also casts transgender identity itself as something scandalous and laughable.
What you might not know is what it feels like to hear a joke like this, what it’s like to be triggered. To that end, let me tell you a story about a period of my life that I don’t often discuss. Seven years ago (prior to my transition), I was still in a place where I could only present female occasionally. I hadn’t yet had the earth-shattering realization that I needed to transition but I still needed space to explore crucial aspects of my identity. I was fortunate enough to be dating someone who supported me in that endeavor.
We were in New York one night while I was presenting female. The night was warm, the sky was clear; we decided to be tacky tourists and go to the top of the Empire State Building. In line, some boys approached us and tried to talk to us. At the time—without the benefits and, indeed, the privileges of experience and hormones that I have now—my appearance did not hold up under close scrutiny and they “read” me, they recognized that I was not cisgender.
They laughed and laughed and laughed. They howled. They followed us all the way through the line and into the elevator where the laughter continued in our faces. My very existence was hilarious to them. The fact that there was a human underneath the sloppy eye makeup and the tattered dress either did not occur to them or, worse, it didn’t matter to them. I realized for the first time that night that, were I to transition, I would be a living, walking joke. It’s experiences like this that keep people from transitioning for years.
When I hear a trans joke in a venue as public as a nationally broadcast television show, I’m instantly back in that elevator. I’m no longer the confident woman that I’ve become over the last couple of years; I’m a scared little girl cowering in the corner, reeling from the ridicule, wondering if they’ll follow me all the way home.
Spike, do you realize what you do to people outside your target demographic when they try to engage with your work? If you realized, would you still do it? Do I want to know the answer to that question?
I could write you an angry polemic about video game culture right now. I could undertake educational efforts to help video game commentators understand transgender identity. I’ve done that. I keep doing it and nothing happens. Nothing changes. There’s always another gaffe, another joke, another game.
So tonight, Geoff Keighley, producers, journalists, if this note manages to make it to your desk, all I’m asking is that you stop. Please stop. Please stop.
Update: Immediately after this article went live, Joel McHale introduced a reader comment by saying, “He, she or he-she says …”
Hexagonal Tile-Laying Game Fest, 2013
It's that most wonderful time of the year! The holiday when families come together and induldge in colourful capitalism. That's right, I'm talking about Economic Hex-Based Tile Laying Game Fest: 2013.
In this year's hex fest we review the moreish Suburbia , the quaint Keyflower, remember the daring Archipelago, and in doing so unearth our Game of the Year.
Pour yourself a glass of hexnog, dear viewer. Tis' the season!
Some Pros and Cons of Organizing Your Bookshelves by Color
firehose"CONS: You will never find your books again"
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popular
shared this story
from  The ToastThe Toast.
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PROS:
1. Your bookshelves will be truly and undeniably beautiful. (See image).
2. The process of color-coding your bookshelves will take many enjoyable hours, in which you will find yourself faced with questions that are at once banal and delightful. Will you employ a ROY G BIV scheme? If so, where will you put your black books? Your white books? Your beige? Do the bright orange-spined Penguins look best clumped together or evenly-
distributed throughout the orange section? Will you ever get to ask Jeanette Winterson how she feels about Written on the Body being sandwiched between The Marx-Engels Reader and Sula? (Because you think she’d like it).
3. You will learn important life lessons. For example, a book that is both red and blue may be placed successfully in either the red or blue section, and look as if ’twas ever thus.
4. You may concede all life-altering decisions to the tyranny of your color-coding. For example, merging your book collection with your boyfriend’s upon moving in together does not have to be a (terrifying and/or exhilarating) decision at all. All books in the apartment must submit to the color-coding law of the apartment, which insists that you shall have no other methods of organization, including organization by partner, before it.
5. New guests will remark upon your bookshelves immediately upon entering your apartment and will be too blinded by their beauty to notice your apartment’s dust bunnies, its overflowing dish rack, and the fact that not a single picture on your walls (and there are a lot of them) is hung evenly. You will no longer have to joke awkwardly that you hung them that way “on purpose to cultivate a Gertrude Stein salon aesthetic” when the truth is that you just have negative interest in using a level.
6. Every time you look at your bookshelves you will be assured that you are a good person because have brought real beauty into the world.
CONS:
1. You will never find your books again, because even though you may know the color of all of your books’ covers, you will certainly not know the color of all of their spines. And what they haven’t told you in your several publishing jobs, or in your PhD program in English, is that contrary to popular belief, a book’s cover often doesn’t match its spine.
2. The fact that you have not figured this out for yourself earlier is shameful, and you will find yourself dwelling on this while endlessly scanning your shelves every time you need a book, which is a lot, because you’re supposed to be writing your dissertation, but instead you are looking for your books.
3. You will be forced to articulate this particular shame every time a new guest appears in your apartment, because all new guests inevitably ask: “but how do you find your books?” You will refer them to the large “BE CALM” Louise Bourgeois print unevenly hung on your wall; this print is recommended for all color-coders.
4. You will expose your relationship to the possibility of your personal nightmare, which is the book-dividing break-up scene in Annie Hall, except in your life, all of the poetry books AND all of the books on death and dying are yours. You will think that your relationship will last, but you will always write your name in your books, just in case, and you will have to live with the fact that you are this type of person.
5. Your color-coded bookshelves will need constant attention. Every new book demands reorganization, and each reorganization is exponentially less fun than the one before it.
6. You will eventually have too many books and not enough apartment to continue color-coding. You will fight, but you will not win. First, you will buy new skinny bookcases from Bed Bath and Beyond to flank the TV in the living room. Then, some IKEA Expedits will appear in the bedroom, and encircle the dresser. Then, the Billys will come to surround the bed. The beautiful rainbow bookcases will still be in the living room, for the viewing pleasure of guests, but the bedroom will be filled with the leftovers—the many library books, your boyfriend’s endless art magazines, books that have been discolored by the sun, the stark white teaching editions of Shakespeare, his books about health problems, the books you are ashamed to own up to having read (some of them about health problems), the beige books that do not fit into either the black and white or the rainbow bookcases.
Eventually, you will begin to think that you should implement a sub-organizational system by reducing book repeats—by moving one of the books that you have two copies of to the bedroom. Your guests only need one color-coded copy of The Postmodern Condition to find you annoying, one copy of The Corrections to find you insufferable, only one copy of Catch-22 to know that you were once a precocious teenager.
But how could you decide whose to leave and whose to move? Your oatmeal hardcover On Beauty and his deep red paperback copy of the same, your strikingly ugly copy of Mrs. Dalloway, his somewhat less ugly Mrs. Dalloway—these books he read and loved (or read and pretended to love), because you asked him to read them and to love them.
7. Your sub-organizational system, and all other possible subsystems will fail along with your original color-coding system. You will settle for a beautiful, color-coded living room that holds the books that you both have both of. Know that this is your expression of love. You will settle for faded and beige books, ill-looking and ill-tempered, in the bedroom, watching both of you while you sleep. Know that this is also your expression of love. Submit to the tyranny of your schemes, and then, don’t do it any longer.
Read more Some Pros and Cons of Organizing Your Bookshelves by Color at The Toast.
comicblah: This is a pretty cool Red Sonja cover by Jenny...
This is a pretty cool Red Sonja cover by Jenny Frison!
Good LORD.
Jenny Frison for the WIN. WOW!
NFL fines roundup: Brandon Marshall fined again for footwear
firehose"Earlier this season, Marshall was fined for wearing green cleats in recognition of Mental Health Awareness Week. In Week 14, Marshall wore orange cleats. His choice earned him a $15,000 fine from the league, according to ESPN. That brings Marshall's fine total to $25,500 for the season."
For hitting Marshall in the head, Dallas Cowboys defensive back Orlando Scandrick was fined $21,000.
Brandon Marshall has expensive taste in cleats.
For the second time this season, Chicago Bears wide receiver Brandon Marshall has been fined for his choice in footwear.
Earlier this season, Marshall was fined for wearing green cleats in recognition of Mental Health Awareness Week. In Week 14, Marshall wore orange cleats. His choice earned him a $15,000 fine from the league, according to ESPN. That brings Marshall's fine total to $25,500 for the season. Dallas Cowboys defensive back Orlando Scandrick received an even bigger fine for hitting Marshall in the head, though. According to USA Today, Scandrick was fined $21,000.
Roast of RGIII
PFT Commenter celebrates RGIII's accomplishments this season by putting him on the hot seat.
Marshall and Scandrick weren't the only NFL players fined this week. Buffalo Bills safety Jairus Byrd received a $15,750 fine for his below-the-knees hit on Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Mike Glennon. Steelers center Cody Wallace was fined $15,000 for an unnecessary roughness, stemming from a hit to the groin of Miami Dolphins defensive lineman Randy Starks. Both fines were reported by ESPN.
Along with Byrd, Baltimore Ravens linebacker Courtney Upshaw and Dallas Cowboys defensive end George Selvie also received $15,750 fines for roughing the passer penalties, according to USA Today.
Houston Texans safety D.J. Swearinger and New Orleans Saints punter Thomas Morstead were fined $7,875 for facemask penalties. Colts safety LaRon Landry also got a $7,875 fine for removing Giovani Bernard's helmet in a game against the Bengals. To round out the fines for Week 14, Cardinals defensive end Darnell Dockett was fined $7,875 for stepping on Chris Williams' hand against the Rams last week. These fines are all according to USA Today.
More from SB Nation NFL
• Spencer Hall rejects a special offer from the Redskins
• Philip Rivers steals Peyton Manning's limelight | Fan stabbing reported
• Expert picks for Week 15 | NFL Power Rankings: Broncos back on top
• Breaking Madden: Tony Gonzalez, cranky old man of destruction
• Ex-NFL defensive end Stephen White on Vereen, Volunteers and more
DissidentX
DissidentX is a censorship resistance tool.
It has the capability of steganographically encoding messages in files. Special features include:
- Messages cannot be decoded without the key
- A single decoder for all file types and encoding techniques, including all future ones
- Format-specific encoders can be easily written without having to worry about information theoretic encoding or cryptography
- Support for multiple messages to multiple keys in a single file
"fan" - Rolling Thunder 3 (Now Production/Namco - Genesis -...
"fan" - Rolling Thunder 3 (Now Production/Namco - Genesis - 1993)
Star Wars epiphany: College girls dress like Han Solo | Metro News
OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy(Via OMS.)
Today on the internet it is spotted that the standard raa/college uniform of navy gilet, cream shirt, dark leggings and boots is not dissimilar of that of Star Wars Corellian smuggler Han Solo.
That’s pretty much where the similarities end, given that Han spent his days plundering the depths of the universe in support of the Rebel Alliance, whereas Earth-dwellers of this attire spend theirs trying to find the checkout in a relentlessly dark branch of Hollister – but it’s weird, huh?
All we need now is for the Trade Federation to start wearing OBEY hats and puffa jackets in Episode VII and our minds will be truly blown.
The Bleeps Are Fake on that Duck Family Show
The Robertson family of Duck Dynasty have won over millions of fans with their unaffected, genuine attitude and behavior. But much of what fans see on the smash A&E series is totally fake — and patriarch Phil Robertson is the first to admit it!
Robertson confessed how TV editors in L.A. “with no moral compass” distort his family’s reality in a recent video interview for The Christian Post.
“They inserted fake beeps like somebody had used profanity, but no one had used profanity,” he explained. “…So I asked those guys who produce the show, I said, ‘Lemme ask you something. What’s the point of the fake bleeps?’”
The only good thing to come out of this nonsense is that it reminded me of this brilliant use of fake bleeping...
Vintage ‘Internet’ Brand Transistor Radio Pre-Dates the Internet
Antiques expert Mark Hill stumbled upon this Internet brand transistor radio while perusing a vintage shop in Amsterdam. Hill believes the radio, sold by the British firm Internet Radio Product Ltd., is from the late 1960s or 1970 at the latest—the term “internet” was first used in reference to the emerging technologies which became the Internet back in 1974.
photos by Mark Hill
via Boing Boing
On the eve of the end of the bailout…
On the eve of the end of the bailout…
Kitten Meets Bearded Dragon For the First Time
firehosebeardy baby beat
A tiny orange tabby kitten meets a bearded dragon for the first time. The kitten goes berserk. The lizard, however, is completely unimpressed, but gives a big smile for the camera at the end of the video.
video via Big Banana Borders
via Metro News
Heat Fans Growing Frustrated With Team’s Lack Of NBA Titles Since June
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SteamOS Has Its Own Graphics Compositor
firehose'Changes that Valve made to their Debian Wheezy base included backporting eglibc 2.17, adding updated graphics drivers, switching to the Linux 3.10 kernel, auto-updates from Valve SteamOS repositories, and they have written their own custom graphics compositor.
About this SteamOS compositor running atop X.Org, Valve's notes say, "Custom graphics compositor designed to provide a seamless transition between Steam, its games and the SteamOS system overlay."
Right now only NVIDIA graphics via the NVIDIA binary Linux driver are supported by the SteamOS 1.0 Beta.
In terms of why Valve went with Debian Wheezy over Ubuntu, the FAQ reads, "Building on top of the Debian core is the best way for Valve to deliver a fully custom SteamOS experience to our customers." '
The nVIDIA-only support is depressing as fuck, even if it's temporary. (Seriously? Not even Intel?)
@voidfiles_is_reading: App Store Review Skimming http://ift.tt/1fryLFz #newsblur
firehose"Part of the frustration is much deeper than that, and goes to a deeply scummy tactic Apple’s let proliferate. I’m going to call this skimming reviews: you pop up a request for a dialogue, but in a way that encourages only people who are going to leave good ones to do it."