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16 Nov 00:17

What Do You Think Cable News Doctor? Could It Be Both? 



What Do You Think Cable News Doctor? Could It Be Both? 

14 Nov 18:16

APNewsBreak: Houston's Harris County adopts sweeping policy aimed at protecting LGBT inmates - Seymour Tribune

by djempirical

HOUSTON — The sheriff of Houston's Harris County has adopted a sweeping policy designed to protect and guarantee equal treatment of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender inmates, including allowing transgender individuals to be housed based on the gender they identify with instead of their biological sex.

Original Source

14 Nov 18:16

Mozilla backtracks, says no current plans to launch Firefox phones in US

by Jacob Kastrenakes

Mozilla currently has no plans to bring Firefox OS smartphones to the United States, reports CNET. Though Mozilla previously said that it expected to see phones running the new operating system launch next year in the US, it now says there are no such plans for that to happen. That doesn't mean Firefox OS won't be coming to the United States at all though: it is already available through a developer device, and Mozilla is reportedly speaking with partners about the possibility of bringing it over. The main reason it's focusing outside the US, Mozilla tells CNET, is because of price. Mozilla wants to maintain its aim toward emerging international markets, where low-cost Firefox OS devices will have a better chance of finding success.

14 Nov 18:03

“We still don’t encrypt server-to-server data,” admits Microsoft

by WIRED UK
Shutterstock

A senior Microsoft executive has told a European parliamentary committee that the company does not encrypt its server-to-server data communications.

Dorothee Belz, EMEA VP for Legal and Corporate Affairs, made the remark when answering a question from Claude Moraes, MEP, during a meeting at the European Parliament on Monday.

"Generally, what I can say today is server-to-server transportation is generally not encrypted," she said. "This is why we are currently reviewing our security system."

Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments


    






14 Nov 18:03

Photos of Sexy Men and Cute Kittens in Matching Poses

by Kimber Streams

Des Hommes et des Chatons

Des Hommes et des Chatons is a Tumblr blog that collects photos of sexy men and cute kittens in matching poses. See more of the funny (and occasionally spot-on) photos at Des Hommes et des Chatons.

Des Hommes et des Chatons

Des Hommes et des Chatons

Des Hommes et des Chatons

Des Hommes et des Chatons

Des Hommes et des Chatons

Des Hommes et des Chatons

images via Des Hommes et des Chatons

via Snap!, My Modern Metropolis

14 Nov 18:00

So the Cover Oregon website is up, but it only supports IE and specifically excludes Mac Safari and Chrome

14 Nov 17:34

Google Halts Sales of HP's USB-Charging Chromebook 11 Over Overheating

by timothy
sfcrazy writes "In a surprising and unexpected move, Google and its partners have removed the recently launched HP Chromebook 11 from shelves. Users were complaining about the issues with the trackpad and performance of the laptop." Specifically (as also reported by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer), some of the laptops have been reported to overheat.

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14 Nov 17:17

rstevens: The “FUCK THIS.” ice scraper is the definition of a...



rstevens:

The “FUCK THIS.” ice scraper is the definition of a delightful, inexpensive holiday gift. 

#stockingstufferideas

14 Nov 17:14

Microsoft Releases Browser-Based IDE, Visual Studio Online

by samzenpus
rjmarvin writes "Microsoft today announced a web-based development environment for app creation to complement Visual Studio 2013, called Visual Studio Online. Microsoft Senior V.P. S. Somasegar says the new web-based IDE is designed for quick tasks related to building Windows Azure websites and services. Microsoft will be releasing the Visual Studio Online Application Insights service in a limited preview to show developers how to deploy and perform in conjunction with Visual Studio 2013's new features."

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14 Nov 17:08

Justin Bieber's Hot New Startup: A Selfie-Only App Made By A Brony

It's like Instagram, but with half of it missing, no filters, a worse name, and the possibility of profiting Justin Bieber.
14 Nov 17:07

Ford Tells Crack Smoking Mayor To Stop Using Its Logo

Rob Ford signed shirts emblazoned with “Ford Nation” incorporating the automaker’s logo at an event yesterday. This did not make the American automaker happy.
14 Nov 17:05

Meet The Former Punk Rocker Who Can Liberate Your FBI File

Ryan Shapiro's technique is so effective at unburying sensitive documents, the feds are asking the courts to stop him.
14 Nov 17:04

15-year-old Portlander dreams about a fried rose petal food cart

firehose

attn: saucie
http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2013/11/15-year-old_aims_to_open_his_o.html

"Chris Sessions fries organic rose petals, sprinkles them with powdered sugar and serves them with one of three sweet dipping sauces."

14 Nov 17:03

Photo



14 Nov 17:03

Make your own collages straight from Google search

by Aaron Souppouris

Edward Tufte is a master of his field. The celebrated statistician is an information design and data visualization expert, known for his many writings on the subject including Envisioning Information and Visual Explanations, which pioneered the idea that visuals were of the upmost importance when communicating ideas and information.

A vocal opponent against broadly used visualization tools like PowerPoint, Tufte discourages the use of decorative visuals when displaying data, arguing that they can distort and editorialize the facts. His writings have informed and inspired a generation of statisticians and designers alike, and now he's collaborated with software engineer Adam Schwartz to share a free web app with the rest of us.

ImageQuilts is a Chrome extension that acts as a plug-in for Google Images. After installing the app, you'll see a new button appear above your image search results, prompting you to make an ImageQuilt. Clicking on the button jumps you into an intuitive interface that lets you build a collage based on the results of your search. There are lots of customization options; you can change the image size, order, zoom into images, remove images, and also choose between grayscale, inverted, or full color. After tinkering around with the settings and removing irrelevant images, you're left with a coherent (and hopefully attractive) collage that represents your chosen subject.

There are some great examples of how powerful ImageQuilts can be over at the plug-in's website, but we've put a few of their examples together with a few of our own below. As you'll notice, some are more successful than others; but when choosing an architect, designer, or artist, ImageQuilts does a superb job of capturing their essence.

The same can (generally) be said for simple phrases and nouns, such as "scrap metal dumping" or "candy," but when searching for products you'll often get a mess of concepts and press shots mixed in with images that Google Images has pulled from news articles, making the job of curating the collage a little cumbersome. There's also no simple way to export or share your collages — you'll have to just take a screenshot of the results.

Complaints aside, ImageQuilts is a great tool for summarizing and organizing visual data. A viewer scanning over, for example, an artist's ImageQuilt will quickly understand what they're about. Tufte suggests that viewers will often learn more about a topic from ImageQuilts than conventional search results.

14 Nov 16:59

Photo



14 Nov 16:58

Man, boy die after shooting on New Orleans bridge - WNYT


Man, boy die after shooting on New Orleans bridge
WNYT
(AP) NEW ORLEANS - A man and a 7-month-old boy have been fatally shot in an apparent ambush on a New Orleans bridge. Police spokesman Frank B. Robertson III told The Associated Press that someone opened fire on the 25-year-old man Wednesday ...

and more »
14 Nov 16:58

samis-fitspiration: ask-msfortune: hobgoblinhero: 1871house: ...



samis-fitspiration:

ask-msfortune:

hobgoblinhero:

1871house:

Strawberry Short Snake

OH MY GOD NO

THIS IS TOO ADORABLE

AND THE PUN IS KILLING ME

looksss delisscioussss

14 Nov 16:58

"So thanks a lot, anti-vaccine parents. You took an ethical stand against big pharma and the autism..."

“So thanks a lot, anti-vaccine parents. You took an ethical stand against big pharma and the autism your baby was not going to get anyway, and, by doing so, killed some babies and gave me, an otherwise healthy 31-year-old woman, the whooping cough in the year 2013. I understand your wanting to raise your own children as you see fit, science be damned, but you’re selfishly jeopardizing more than your own children. Carry your baby around in a sling, feed her organic banana mash while you drink your ethical coffee, fine, but what gives you denialists the right to put my health at risk”

- I’ve Got Whooping Cough. Thanks A Lot, Jenny McCarthy.  (via thenewrepublic)
14 Nov 16:57

Report: Spike Jonze and Megan Ellison considering a leap into video games

by Jenna Pitcher
firehose

great

Director Spike Jonze and producer Megan Ellison are talking about making the transition from film to video games, according to a Badass Digest report.

In Q&A after a showing of his latest film, Her, at the AFI Film Festival in Los Angeles, Jonze was asked about his interest in the interactive medium and responded that he was talking with Ellison (The Master, Zero Dark Thirty, Spring Breakers) about making video games.

14 Nov 16:56

LYNCH SPIN

by bubbaprog
LYNCH SPIN

ANIMATED: Jordan Lynch is cheating, showed up at your house with a PS4 controller

14 Nov 16:55

Vesper Sync Diary #6 - Merging Notes

firehose

"It’s not important to keep a history of changes."
ha ha fuck you

The Rules

  1. Conflicts are not permitted.

  2. A note should merge at the property level. (If you change note text on your day phone and a note’s tags on your night phone, both phones should get both changes.)

  3. Real time determines which change wins.

  4. A client doesn’t have to be up-to-date before it can push changes to the server.

  5. The order of calls to the server must not matter.

  6. It’s not important to keep a history of changes.

It’s not Like SCM

With SCM, changes have parents and children. SCM systems work wonderfully and we developers rely on them, but that model doesn’t fit here. I don’t care if change B descends from change A — the only thing that matters is that change B happened later in real time (wall-clock time).

This rules out Lamport clocks. They have their uses, definitely, but not in this case.

(I also rule out vector clocks, because the system would need to know about all the clients for a given user. Clients may come and go, which would make using vector clocks rather challenging. Even if I could use them, I’m not sure they’d enforce the real-time-wins rule.)

Last-Writer-Wins (to Server) Won’t Always Work

One simple way to make this work almost all the time is to say that the last change the server receives is the winner. (Many APIs work that way.)

The problem with that is when you make changes on your day phone, but it can’t connect to the server, then you go make changes on your night phone — then your day phone finally connects and overwrites the changes you made on your night phone. That violates rules #3 and #5.

Put another way: real time wins, but that has to be the real time that a person made a given change, not the real time that a change made it to the server.

How Merging Works

A note has a few properties that can change. (Text, tags, attachments, sortDate, archived status.)

For each of these properties there’s an additional property: a modification timestamp. (As in textModificationDate, tagsModificationDate, etc.) Those timestamps are set on the client: they’re the real time the user made that change.

Merging happens on both server and client, and it always happens the same way: when comparing a property, it compares the modification date for that property. The later modification date always wins.

This means that changes can arrive on the server and on clients in any order, delayed by any amount of time, and merging will always give the same result.

Why You Suddenly Feel Frightened

To the Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing you could add a ninth fallacy: client clocks are accurate.

They’re not. You can’t rely on them. But if you can’t rely on client clocks being accurate, how can this system work?

I’ve had some advice on this.

One idea is to have the client check the time against a Network Time Protocol server (or the sync server, which is probably simpler). If the time is off by some substantial amount, then let the user know that syncing may not work correctly, and that they should turn on setting the time automatically on their device.

Another idea is to get the time from the sync server, compare it to the client time, and calculate an offset to use when creating timestamps. That should allow the client to create accurate-enough timestamps.

I like this second idea best. Given a server that reports its time with each call, clients get plenty of opportunities to recalibrate. (The offset calculation would have to take into account the duration of a given call. I’d probably just assume that the server date refers to a date duration-of-call / 2 seconds ago. Close enough.)

There would also be sanity checks. Is a calibrated timestamp way in the past or the future? Is a new calibrated timestamp earlier than the existing timestamp for a given property or earlier than the last date reported by the server? (It’s not allowed to be.) Easy stuff.

The worst-case scenario is a client where the time keeps changing wildly. But, with frequent recalibration and sanity checks, even this rare case should work fine.

Failure

Syncing is, like baseball, a game of failure. This system accounts for all of these failures:

  1. Temporary network failure.

  2. Temporary server failure.

  3. Client clock failure.

  4. Temporary failure to get a client up-to-date with sync changes.

  5. Temporary failure for a client to send sync changes.

Once the failures clear up, everything will sync, and the result will be exactly the same as if there were no failures. (Note that client clock failure can be permanent and it will still work.)

How to Evaluate a Syncing System

I think a good syncing system has four attributes:

  1. It does what the user expects.

  2. It’s efficient.

  3. It resists failures.

  4. It continues to work.

I might add #5: it’s as simple as possible (though not simpler). Bugs are less likely when there’s nowhere they can hide. Achieving 1-4 is easier when the system is not complex.

What I like about this system is that it comes down to date comparison, and it’s hard to get simpler than that. Easy to write, easy to debug, easy to maintain.

14 Nov 16:54

Here’s a fantastic follow-up post from Owen Lett (the man...









Here’s a fantastic follow-up post from Owen Lett (the man who brought you this neat fantasy transit map of Victoria, BC) in response to yesterday’s tutorial about point type in Illustrator.

There’s a lot to like about this approach, especially the integrated type point and station marker (two overlaid points define both elements and both can be placed simultaneously) and the use of paragraph styles (an often-overlooked feature in Adobe Illustrator) gives the ability to quickly change things if required later on. The downside is the need to adjust margins via the tedious Character palette, although is that actually any worse than manually nudging with arrow keys?

pw3n:

This post is in response to Cameron Booth’s Point Type Label tutorial on his rather excellent Transit Maps blog. I’m writing this here because it feels a bit more efficient than bombarding him with a few dozen tweets.

I too use point type for labels on transit maps. But I also like to integrate paragraph and character styles wherever possible. I do this because, in theory, it makes it easier if I decide much later that I need to make a broad sweeping change (like choosing a new typeface or updating the character colour).

What I’ve also found is that by adjusting indents and baseline shifts, I can place the text point right in the middle of a station dot or at the intersection of two gridlines (see the second and third pictures for example; I’ve also shown how it can work for different station markers). If you’re using Smart Guides, everything should snap nicely into place.

Here’s a sample set up, which you can see in the first picture:

  • A character style for the basics, such as font family, size, leading, tracking, colour. I made a second style for a terminus station which is the same as the base, but with bold weight.
  • A number of paragraph styles for a variety of station type alignments. Here I’ve got a map with lines at 45 degree angles, so I’ve eight styles and named them after compass directions.
  • I made one bonus style to show how you can set one up for text that’s been rotated (and yet the text point remains in the middle of the station marker).

Now the whole point of Mr. Booth’s post was to show that Illustrator doesn’t actually align text precisely; some manual adjustment is necessary to get everything looking optically correct. He moved each label manually. My method doesn’t solve the problem of requiring some adjustment. But now instead of moving each label, you leave the label in place and adjust the left or right paragraph indent (see last picture).

There are some downsides to this technique  The primary problem I run into is with multiple line station labels. If the label has a positive baseline shift, then you’re going to need to update the baseline manually or create a new paragraph style. And then you might start to end up with an unwieldy amount of styles.

Another downside here is that manual adjustments override the paragraph style. So if you update the style at a later date, it may not affect something you’ve adjusted manually (it depends on what you’re updating).

Lastly, there is the issue of Illustrator itself. Its paragraph and character styles palette just isn’t that great, especially compared to InDesign. I don’t blame it; Illustrator is meant for… illustration. But having spent years building books in InDesign, you really notice what’s missing in Illustrator’s style options. InDesign has so much more; you can create keyboard shortcuts for specific styles, you can have styles based on other styles, you can reorder the styles. Illustrator does well, but I often find myself frustrated with it.

Is this an ideal solution? Not entirely. it is very mathematical, so to get everything looking perfect you’re still going to need to do a lot of eyeball adjustments. However, I find it’s a good way to get everything set up initially and keep things consistent throughout a project.

14 Nov 16:48

Photo

firehose

via Tadeu



14 Nov 16:48

#30576

firehose

via Kara Jean

14 Nov 05:22

reidoriginals: Do you think the Olympic sponsors would get the...



reidoriginals:

Do you think the Olympic sponsors would get the message if enough people shared this photo?

Doubtful, but sure as hell worth a try.

14 Nov 05:19

NIU-Ball State #MACtion has taught dogs how to high-5

by Rodger Sherman
firehose

SBNation's GIF game is immaculate

NIU-Ball State is so beautiful, it's taught animals and humans to live together peacefully.

MACtion is amazing. Right now 9-0 Northern Illinois is playing 9-1 Ball State, and it's all embracing the MACtion spirit, in that the score is 27-27 in the fourth quarter thanks to no defense and lots of silliness.

MACtion is so magical, it's given dogs the ability to understand how awesome touchdowns are (GIF via Guyism).

Husky_medium

GOOD DOG

Yes, that's NIU's live husky mascot, Diesel, high-fiving after a TD. We souped up this beautiful moment in canine-human relationships:

Magicdog

MACtion is magic, y'all.

14 Nov 05:15

Prosecutors received case of sexual assault allegations involving Winston on ... - Washington Post

firehose

The report is only surfacing now, nearly a year after it was filed, because the Tallahassee Democrat newspaper asked for all police records involving Winston; Winston was never named in a police report or interviewed by police, so it never made a police blotter. If there was any attempt--by the victim, police, Winston, or FSU--to keep this quiet, it didn't work.
I don't know how to feel except sympathetic for the victim, who's going to be dragged through the deepest mud Floridians can find.


Washington Post

Prosecutors received case of sexual assault allegations involving Winston on ...
Washington Post
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — An assistant state attorney says prosecutors in Tallahassee did not receive information about sexual assault allegations involving Florida State quarterback Jameis Winston until Tuesday. Tallahassee police investigated Winston in ...
FSU's Winston investigated in sexual assault complaintTampabay.com
Prosecutors received Winston case on TuesdayMyFox Austin
Jameis Winston's Heisman Hopes Contingent On Sexual Assault InvestigationForbes
ESPN
all 268 news articles »
14 Nov 04:59

Two Secret Service Supervisors Cut From Obama's Detail After Alleged Misconduct

firehose

these fucking guys

A call from the Hay-Adams Hotel this past spring reporting that a Secret Service agent was trying to force his way into a woman’s room set in motion an internal investigation that has sent tremors through an agency still trying to restore its elite reputation.
14 Nov 04:58

The Sun Is About To Turn Upside Down

firehose

And I'd like to take a minute just take a stroll
I'll tell you how I become the sun of a system called Sol

Every 11 years, the Sun's magnetic poles reverse themselves. That has big implications for satellites, global communications and even astronaut safety.