firehose

All of them were narrated by a man who is British, or by an American who sounds that way.

Link (Thanks, monkeytypist)

WASHINGTON—Disoriented and “freezing his goddamn nuts off,” a naked Vice President Joe Biden reportedly awoke Thursday morning on an autopsy table in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, White House sources confirmed. “Huh?...

WASHINGTON—After Republican lawmakers reached a last-minute agreement Wednesday night to end the government shutdown and raise the debt ceiling, sources confirmed today that the GOP yielded its fight against Obamacare mere moments before the preside...

Or at least why he shouldn't team up with Badman, the imbecilic hero played with such gusto by Pete Holmes. Warner Bros., if you want to use this scene verbatim in the Batman/Superman movie, I'm totally cool with that.

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Even as House Republicans were capitulating on the demands that had precipitated this standoff, they were convening a hearing to get to the bottom of why the National Park Service had shuttered the memorials on the National Mall, hauling NPS director Jonathan Jarvis before the committees on oversight and natural resources in an effort to portray the closures as a politically motivated effort to turn up the heat on the GOP.

Original Source

WHERE THE BOX of emergency contraception was supposed to be, on the shelf of the downtown Portland Rite Aid this September, there was something else instead: a square sign printed with tiny text. The sign said you have to talk to a pharmacist to get Plan B One-Step. It also said you need ID, to show you're older than 17. Two things are wrong with this picture.

hypnosec writes "The MPAA and Gary Fung, owner of IsoHunt.com, have settled their case out of court, with the torrent indexing site closing as part of the deal. The judge presiding over the MPAA vs. IsoHunt.com case, Jacqueline Chooljian, canceled the hearing which was planned after she was informed that both the parties have settled outside court. 'The website isoHunt.com today agreed to halt all operations worldwide in connection with a settlement of the major movie studios' landmark copyright lawsuit against the site and its operator Gary Fung' reads the press release." Only a few days after the MPAA was accosted by the judge for seeking damages several times the total worth of isoHunt: "But if you strip him of all his assets — and you’re suggesting that a much lesser number of copyright infringements would accomplish that, where is the deterrence by telling the world that you took someone’s resources away because of illegal conduct entirely or 50 times over?" Still, the settlement seems unfair: The MPAA has asked the court for $110 million, when the MPAA itself admitted that isoHunt only has $5 or $6 million. So much for the optimism for isoHunt's successor.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

scalesofperception:

Harbour Aerial Views | Bernhard Lang

SoP - Scale of Environments

The newest iteration of Windows has begun rolling out, and is winning positive reviews. (Here's an in-depth review from Ars, and a more concise one from Wired — both give 8.1 a thumbs-up). Kelerei wrote with the above-linked TechDirt article on the release, noting that it is a staged rollout rather than global. Starting this morning, though, 8.1 is available to some customers. Kelerei writes: "The upgrade is optional (and free) for existing Windows 8 users, though if one looks at the changes, it's hard to imagine why those already on it wouldn't upgrade."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original Source

They're hooked, healthy, hyper-zealous and hang out in the corners of the Internet discussing Mods and nic-juice with a deep lexicon of vaper slang. This is the vape scene — the subculture of e-cigarette fanatics that's coming out from the underground.

Bet you didn't see this coming.

lady Trek in a Piece of the Action

“

Here are the 18 senators, all Republicans, who voted against the final deal to end the shutdown and avert a debt default.

Republican Sens. Tom Coburn (Okla.), John Cornyn (Texas), Mike Crapo (Idaho), Ted Cruz (Texas), Mike Enzi (Wyo.), Chuck Grassley (Iowa), Dean Heller (Nev.), Ron Johnson (Wis.), Mike Lee (Utah), Rand Paul (Ky.), Pat Roberts (Kansas), Jim Risch (Idaho), Marco Rubio (Fla.), Tim Scott (S.C.), Jeff Sessions (Ala.), Richard Shelby (Ala.), Pat Toomey (Pa.), David Vitter (La.).

— Jennifer Bendery

”

-

Senate Republicans Who Voted Against The Deal (via thepoliticalfreakshow)

I will reblog this everyday until midterm elections come around, if that’s what it takes, so help me god.

(via note-a-bear)

Ah, the Dingbat Squad.

(I am having such a case of schadenfreude today. It would be unalloyed if their stupidity hadn’t cost good hard-working people money and damaged the US economy, and if they hadn’t also, entirely offhandedly, sat around for the guts of two weeks idly dicing with the fiscal welfare of the rest of the planet.)

Trailrunner7 writes "The Apple iMessage protocol has been shrouded in secrecy for years now, but a pair of security researchers have reverse-engineered the protocol [original analysis] and found that Apple controls the encryption key infrastructure for the system and therefore has the ability to read users' text messages–or decrypt them and hand them over at the order of a government agency. ... The researchers found that while that basic framework makes sense from a security point of view, there are a number of issues with the iMessage system. One major issue is that Apple itself controls the encryption key infrastructure use for iMessage, and has the keys for each individual user. The upshot of this is that Apple has the ability to read users' messages if it so chooses. The researchers who looked at iMessage, known as Pod2g and GG, said that there is no evidence that Apple is in fact reading users' iMessages, but it's possible that the company could. Users' AppleID passwords also are sent in clear text to the Apple servers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last night, as the standoff over the debt ceiling and government shutdown came to an end, against the wishes of Sen. Ted Cruz, his speechwriter quickly pivoted to the topic that Republicans think will be their winning issue in the 2014 midterms: the horrors of Obamacare. As a Congressional employee, Amanda Carpenter complained, "Um, I'm still losing my healthcare plan. Nothing changes." This is true, as a Congressional staffer, Carpenter will next year have to purchase health insurance on an Obamcare exchange. But she left a the key reason for this change out of her complaint: she can't keep her current healthcare plan because of a Republican amendment to Obamacare, which her boss supported. She should actually count herself lucky: Cruz failed to eliminate Obamcare subsidies for Carpernter and other Congressional staffers which would have dramatically raised her cost of insurance. Not only did Cruz want to strip wanted to not only strip members of Congress of this subsidy, but also take it from all other federal workers. "I’d like to see the Vitter amendment broader," Cruz said on the Senate floor in September.

This disconnect between cause and effect has been a familiar phenomenon: create the problems that can be railed against.  In 2011, during the last debt limit showdown, for instance, Tea Party Republicans warned that an economic disaster was looming because the federal government was spending so much money — and the only way to stop that later crisis was to create an immediate one by threatening to breach the debt limit. (Budget fights have cost us 2 million jobs since 2010, according to a report by Macroeconomic Advisers. But we have averted the global calamity that would come with breaching the debt limit.) Or think back to the strange moments of Republicans who had called for a government shutdown protesting that war memorials had been shut down. 

On Fox News on Wednesday night, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio promised that as Obamacare continues to go into effect over the next six months, Americans would turn against it. "There is going to be an all-out revolt in this country over that. And that is, I think, the moment to absolutely act and say we are going to get rid of this law and then look for opportunities in the future to replace it," Rubio said, as Politico notes. The glitches in the federal Obamacare exchange site — which covers 34 states — are almost entirely the Obama administration's fault. But many of the other problems will be Republicans' creation. About 8 million poor Americans will not get health care help because they live in one of the 26 states that refused to expand Medicaid, even though the federal government would pay for the entire cost through 2016. In at least 17 Republican-controlled states, Republicans have made it more difficult for people to become Obamacare "navigators" — guides who help people sign up for Obamacare by requiring licensing exams, background checks, and fees, or limiting what they can say. New income verification requirements could make it harder to sign up on the exchanges. And then there's the case of congressional staffers like Ted Cruz's.

The reason Cruz's speechwriter will not longer be eligible for her federal insurance plan is a Republican measure inserted in the Affordable Care Act that required the law to "apply" to members of Congress and their staff by making them buy health insurance on Obamacare's state exchanges instead of continuing their coverage under the Federal Employees Health Benefits program. "Apply" is in scare quotes because Obamacare requires people to buy insurance if they can't get it through their employer — which was not the case with Capitol Hill aides. In fact, employers with more than 50 full-time workers are required to offer insurance (a mandate that has been delayed a year). So in essence, these rules to make sure Congress isn't "exempted" from Obamacare are actually giving it special treatment.

The government shutdown — waged to stop Obamacare, or at least turn public sentiment more strongly against it — had many perverse political effects for Republicans. Support for Obamacare actually increased in polls. The shutdown drowned out news of the Obamacare insurance exchanges' disastrous rollout. And, in the last days of the standoff, last minute haggling over the Vitter amendment actually drew attention to how incredibly expensive health insurance is, even for middle class people, in a way we haven't seen since the law was passed in 2010. Hill staffers emailed The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza worried that the possibility the Vitter amendment would be included in a deal. A Republican Senate aide said, "My healthcare costs are already going to sky rocket, but being responsible for 100 percent of my premiums just isn’t realistic on my salary. I know I’m not the only staffer looking for a job off the hill because I knew this was a possibility." A Democratic House staffer said:

I will make $22,800 this year after taxes. That is it. I am a 30 year old married congressional staffer with a 20 month old son who depends on my job for his health insurance. My husband has to pay for his own health care through his salary, and it would cost him over $1000 a month to cover the whole family. I just started in this position 6 months ago, after being out of work for a year and staying at home with my baby. I need my health insurance, and I cannot afford to pay $600 a month for coverage. Without this so called “subsidy” (the same “subsidy” congressional staffers have been receiving for years before the ACA) both myself and my son will be uninsured.

The high price of health care is one of the major problems that Obamacare was created to address. In September, Commerce Department data revealed that medical price inflation was growing at the slowest rate in 50 years. Over the last four years, heath care spending has grown 3 to 4 percent a year, down from between 6 and 9 percent a year. We don't know yet how much of this is attributable to Obamacare. The recession certainly played a role. But it's not the bad news that Rubio is rooting for.

Carpenter tweeted on Tuesday, "It's almost November and I have no idea what my health plan will be or what it will cost in January. This. Is. Awful." She will be paying more because Republicans want her to, though not as much as her own boss was hoping. On the other hand, Cruz is probably not unhappy that she's publicly complaining about it.

Original Source

On his personal blog, J.H. Williams III reflects on the end of his "Batwoman" run at DC Comics, and says he's "depressed" over the circumstances.

What

Artist Guthrie Lonergan has created “Burgers,” a mesmerizing website with hundreds of scrolling, multiplying, clickable hamburgers. Head over to Lonergan’s website to experience it for yourself.

image via Burgers

OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy

yes

Original Source

“Just to be clear, I did not have incredible autonomy until afterward. I had signed most of my rights away in order to get syndicated, so I had no control over what happened to my own work, and I had no legal position to argue anything. I could not take the strip with me if [...]

Low-income students made up at least half the public school student population in 17 states in 2011, a marked increase from 2000, when four states topped 50 percent. Read related article.

Original Source

"TOO TOUGH TO BEAT" - Kid Chameleon (Sega - Genesis - 1992)

requested by murderermarv

If you’ve been keeping up with Tiny Texas Houses then you’ve probably seen the many unique tiny houses they’ve put together over the last 6 months.

As if building all their houses isn’t enough, they’ve also released a full length tutorial series on how to start your own salvage mining business and teardown structures to re-purpose materials. They call it “The Salvage Mining Tutorial Series.”

Brad Kittel, owner of Tiny Texas Houses, explains a wide range of subject matter relating to the salvage world and how to be successful in it. You can stream the full length series online here or purchase the full DVD box set here for a very affordable price…especially considering the amount of wisdom and information packed into the series!

Tiny Texas Houses has also come up with a unique and fun way to contribute to their projects and causes. They are allowing supporters to purchase “Airspace” on “The Acre of Hope” (a one acre area at their facility in Luling, Texas dedicated to supporter contributions and fan club participation). Esentially, they have set aside an acre of property where individuals can purchase “Airspace” by the square inch ($20.00 per square inch) above the acre and receive a fun “Certificate of Airspace Ownership” with your name on it via email.

Brad Kittel explains….

“This is Tiny Texas Houses’ way of providing our fans and supporters something that they can actual “own” and be a part of. I know a lot of our fans can’t afford a Tiny House right now, so this is our way of making our ideas accessible to them. All the money we raise from the Airspace Certificates goes towards our educational endeavors like the “How to Build a Tiny Texas House” tutorial videos and other projects like the development of the Tiny Texas Villages.”

Everyone who contributes will not only receive the certificate of ownership via email, but also becomes a charter member of The Pure Salvage Living Renaissance and can receive substantial discounts on merchandise, workshops, and even a Tiny Texas house. All Airspace owners are also encouraged to come out to the Tiny Texas Houses property at their convenience and “capture” their “Airspace” in containers that Tiny Texas Houses provides onsite.

“It’s a fun idea and the fans love it. The idea to do this actually came from one of our fans answering a questionnaire. It’s been great…who would have thought we would receive some much support by selling “Airspace!” says Brad with a smile.

To purchase “Airspace” and become a Charter member to the Pure Salvage Living Renaissance go here: http://puresalvageliving.com/the-pure-salvage-living-renaissance-presents-the-airspace-certificate/

Visit tinytexashouses.com or puresalvageliving.com for more information.

How to Annoy the NSA: Adopt the Highway to Its "Secret" Data Center

The Fifth Estate kicks off with a montage detailing the entire history of news, beginning with hieroglyphics and continuing through Martin Luther nailing his Ninety-Five Theses to the church door, a telegraph relaying the sinking of the Titanic, FDR’s first inaugural address, Walter Cronkite reporting on the JFK assassination, the fall of the Berlin wall, and 9/11. Somewhere in there, probably, is the invention of the biopic, of which Bill Condon’s timely yet tepid Julian Assange movie is a resolutely typical example. Based on two books—one by Daniel Domscheit-Berg, whom the film employs as a viewer surrogate—The Fifth Estate has been preemptively dismissed by the WikiLeaks founder as a work “not of fiction, but of debased truth.” That description implies more verve than this would-be cross between The Social Network and Carlos can manage. It’s hard for a film to feel urgent when it ...

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Rep. Justin Amash, a libertarian-leaning Republican from Michigan, pointed to one part of the exercise he saw as a victory: that it made President Barack Obama appear unreasonable.

This is the best episode of Top Chef so far this season. We're only three episodes in, so that isn't the boldest statement I've ever made, but it's a good, gripping episode, balanced between chef drama and fancy cooking. Two chefs go home in "Commander's Palace," which is more than I expected; it seems like the series started with a bigger roster of chefs and it's trying to trim down that list fast. I don't mind it, as far as plot goes. It means that things really do feel hectic and important the whole time.

I don’t mind it when Top Chef goes down the road of creating a dish that sounds cool or creates a sort of spectacle—last week’s food truck challenge ended up being quite interesting. But it’s more engaging to watch a chef do something smart ...

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