firehose

New York Comic Con reportedly attracted more than 130K attendees over four days, meaning the six-year-old event is now roughly the same size as Comic-Con International, which has had to cap attendance due to space limitations.

Is iOS 7 Fatally Flawed? The short answer is no. Simply because there is no such thing as fatally flawed designs: we can always learn from mistakes. What’s surprising is that we don’t learn from someone else’s mistakes: Apple ignored some of the hurdles that Microsoft experienced with flat design and swipe ambiguity in Windows 8. We still have to see whether Apple’s strong design guidelines will protect most app designers from not getting lost in the flat 2D world. Early experience with applications redesigned for iOS 7 is fairly negative: several have worse usability than their iOS 6 versions.

tastefullyoffensive:

[nineteenletterslong]

Steven Poole over at The New Republic:

Gladwell is a brilliant salesman for a certain kind of cognitive drug. He tells his readers that everything they thought they knew about a subject is wrong, and then delivers what is presented as a counterintuitive discovery but is actually a bromide of familiar clichés. The reader is thus led on a pleasant quasi-intellectual tour, to be reassured at the end that a flavour of folksy wisdom was right all along. Little things really can make a big difference; trusting your gut can be better than overthinking; successful people work hard.

Poole goes on to dismantle many of Gladwell's setups:

A bizarre coda to this story shows the weaselly potential of Gladwell’s method. Up the road from the state school where he has been talking to a nice teacher, there is a private school, which boasts that its average class size is 12. Oh dear, thinks Gladwell. “Why does a school like [this] do something that so plainly makes its students worse off?” The odd thing is that he simply doesn’t know whether the students there are worse off, because he doesn’t know whether the staff teach in a way that suits their small classes. If they do, then the students won’t be worse off at all. So does Gladwell talk to anyone at the school to find out? He does not. Perhaps he fears ruining the story.

I'm just not a fan of this trend where we exchange hard thinking for easy parables. I know this puts me at odds with many a modern nerd, but I dislike what people like Malcolm Gladwell and Seth Godin do. They provide easy rationalizations that just don't work in a complex world. They can be fun and sometimes they can motivate people to do better. But I think a poster of a cat does a better job. At least a poster doesn't imply that there is a recipe or specific conclusion you can easily quote. It just makes you think.

We're drowning in the "well, actually" culture of Freakonomics. This is a time when quick and clever appears to be more popular than "I just don't know. I need more data and hard work."

Nate the greatest writes "The Kernel started an uproar last week when they 'discovered' that the Kindle Store and other ebookstores sell adult content in the erotica category. None of the content is actually illegal, but it is icky enough that the major ebookstores decided to respond by removing anything even vaguely questionable. Unfortunately, they went to far, resulting in an act of censorship the likes of which we haven't seen since Paypal went after the indie ebook distributor Smashwords. The Daily Mail reports that WH Smith went so far as to shut down their website with the promise that it won't reopen until all self-published titles have been removed, and according to BBC News B&N is also deleting content. Numerous authors have reported on KBoards that Amazon and B&N have removed far more than just the titles that feature questionable content like pseudo-incest; they appear to be running keyword searches and removing any title that mentions innocuous words like babysitter, sister, or teenager. And they're not the only ones; there's a new report that Kobo has jumped on the ban wagon as well."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lives in a small office room converted into living quarters, equipped with a bed, telephone, sun lamp, computer with internet connections, shower, treadmill and a small kitchenette.

The travails of businesses seeking loans in the euro zone are well known. A new report shows that small businesses are suffering the worst. Corporate loans of less than €1 million ($1.4 million) have plunged from their pre-crisis peak by more than 80% in Ireland and 60% in Spain, according to research by Bain & Co. and the Institute of International Finance.

This is particularly bad news for the euro zone’s troubled “periphery”, where small businesses comprise a much larger share of the economy than elsewhere on the continent. Companies with fewer than 50 employees provide more than 50% of all jobs in Italy, Spain and Portugal, the highest percentages in Western Europe.

And amidst these already difficult conditions, things are even worse for female-owned firms. The Bank of Italy recently published a batch of papers on the subject, with eye-opening findings.

This bank branch has a glass ceiling

In Italy at least, researchers found no difference in the profitability or productivity of similar firms based solely on the owner’s gender. Yet there is evidence that following the financial crisis, female-owned firms—which tend to be small—were refused bank loans more often than male-owned counterparts in Germany, Italy and Spain. This is despite the fact that banks were quicker to write off the bad loans of male-owned firms—which is another way of saying that lenders were more confident that female-owned firms would honor their debts, even in times of stress.

Giorgio Calcagnini, a professor at the University of Urbino in Italy, is currently updating his previous research on female-owned firms’ access to credit. In Italy he finds that lenders require many more guarantees from women. Specifically, female entrepreneurs are required to pledge collateral from their business as well as personal guarantees, putting a broader range of their assets at risk to get identical loans to men.

These extra hurdles discourage women from applying for credit in the first place, one of the common reasons cited for why the flow of credit appears less fluid for female-owned firms. The dataset Calcagnini has been studying ends in 2008; things are “probably worse since then,” he says. “It is really bad in Italy right now.”

Refused in Rome, missing out in Milan

“Young female entrepreneurs have had the worst possible time,” adds Stefano Manzocchi, a professor at LUISS University in Rome. The addition of more female entrepreneurs over the past decade in Italy, Spain and elsewhere in southern Europe has not been met by a change in attitudes by bank managers, he says. The longstanding relationships that govern small-business loans at banks in these countries mean that newer companies—which are disproportionately run by women—find it hard to convince lenders of their creditworthiness, particularly since the financial crisis has made lenders more wary.

It is hard to overlook the fact that much of the recent research on gender-based access to finance originates in Italy. On existing evidence, the face of Europe’s credit crunch is a young, entrepreneurial Italian woman.

Safari Keyword Search:

Safari Keyword Search is a simple extension for Safari 5.1 and above that can change the default Safari search engine and enables keyword searching from the address bar. This is a simple but powerful feature that gives you access to several search engines using simple keywords. For example, you can search Wikipedia for information on monkeys by typing w monkeys in the address bar.

popular shared this story from Abstruse Goose.

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When clicked, the Undo Guy yaps out phrases such as “Oh, no!”, “Yikes!” “Uh-oh!”, “Whoops!”, “¡Espara un minuto!”, “No, no, no!”, “Wait a minute!”, “No way!”, “Phew!” “I made a boo-boo, yeah!”, “Oh, dear!” “♪Undo, undo!♪”, “Yuck!” “Uh-uh!”, “Oh, man!”, “My bad!”, “♪Ooh, don’t want it!♪”, “Oops!”, “♪¡Ay Caramba!♪” and “Now, wait a minute!” in an odd voice, including a robot and a little girl. The Undo Guy is popular among children.

Link

head butt - Rival Schools (Capcom - PSX - 1998)

requested by enjoythesh0w

BBC News

Man charged with Buckingham Palace intrusion BBC News A 44-year-old man has been charged with trespass and possession of a knife after being arrested at Buckingham Palace, Scotland Yard has said. David Belmar, from Haringey, north London, will appear in custody at West London Magistrates' Court on ... Crumbling grandeur: Queen Elizabeth's palaces left to rotThe Australian Overspending by British Royals Draws Scrutiny from ParliamentWall Street Journal British police stop man with knife from entering Buckingham PalaceFox News Boston.com -Reuters India all 191 news articles »

Elephants Never Forget – That’s Why They Drink and Bad Decision “B” shirts are going, going, now only $15 bucks and soon to be gone.

Here is a question from a recent symposium:

People spend 4 hours per week watching sports and 40 listening to music. But the music industry is one sixth the size of the sports industry. Why?

No time-shifting for live contests, much less piracy, less substitutability (there is only one Super Bowl), and greater indivisibility of product would be the beginnings of an answer.  The source is here, hat tip goes to Ted Gioia.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year!

In one of the documents recently released by the NSA as a result of an EFF lawsuit, there's discussion of a specific capability of a call records database to identify disposable "burner" phones.

Let’s consider, then, the very specific data this query tool was designed to return: The times and dates of the first and last call events, but apparently not the times and dates of calls between those endpoints. In other words, this tool is supporting analytic software that only cares when a phone went online, and when it stopped being used. It also gets the total number of calls, and the ratio of unique contacts to calls, but not the specific numbers contacted. Why, exactly, would this limited set of information be useful? And why, in particular, might you want to compare that information across a large number of phones there’s not yet any particular reason to suspect?

One possibility that jumps out at me -- and perhaps anyone else who’s a fan of The Wire -- is that this is the kind of information you would want if you were trying to identify disposable prepaid “burner” phones being used by a target who routinely cycles through cell phones as a countersurveillance tactic. The number of unique contacts and call/contact ratio would act as a kind of rough fingerprint -- you’d assume a phone being used for dedicated clandestine purposes to be fairly consistent on that score -- while the first/last call dates help build a timeline: You’re looking for a series of phones that are used for a standard amount of time, and then go dead just as the next phone goes online.

Consider this another illustration of the value of metadata.

tomselleck69:

me and kc doin a big bad breakfast daddy shurt

It was a great search engine but a money-losing business—until it borrowed an idea from its biggest rival.

jmlarson:

Dr Doom. Ruler of his own country. One of the most intelligent people in the Marvel universe. Master of tech and of the magical arts. And is apparently a fan of Star Trek. :)

I’d never have doubted it. :)

The battle between Grand Theft Auto 5 and FIFA 14 rages on, with Rockstar reclaiming the UK No. 1 after EA Sports held it for two weeks. It's maybe a bit surprising to see Pokemon X and Y not on top, the duo instead placing in third and fourth in the all-formats chart.

If the two Poke-versions were combined they'd almost certainly be Numero Uno, however, since X and Y are first and second in the individual formats chart. Maybe the biggest stat for Nintendo is that the 3DS games' first week sales are around double of Pokemon Black 2 and White 2's debut showing - I'm sure we'll be hearing about very big numbers soon.

The other new release in the top ten is Beyond: Two Souls, Quantic Dream's PS3 game charting fifth. As for Dragon's Crown debuting all the way down in 19th, I have to wonder if the game's late European arrival and Sony's region-free policy played their part...

Continue reading GTA 5 reclaims rule in UK charts, wild Pokemon X, Y appear in top 4

GTA 5 reclaims rule in UK charts, wild Pokemon X, Y appear in top 4 originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 14 Oct 2013 08:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You might think people use their smartphones and tablets most when they’re out of the house: in the morning on their commute, or during the day at work. Probably not in the evening, when they’re at home with their TVs and computers.

This is exactly wrong. The chart above, first reported by PandoDaily and built from data collected by Localytics, an analytics company that focuses on app usage, shows that, in the US, people use their mobile devices the most at 9 p.m.

What does this mean for app developers and content creators? Depends on what you make. Videos, games, and social media apps are popular to use in the evenings, while news apps see their biggest spike around 7 a.m.

The general pattern of evening peaks also holds in other countries, though the profile throughout the day looks slightly different.

well… well first off, i’d say, seek professional help immediately. because i am wildly unqualified to answer your question with anything but experience. and first off, my experience says, if you are in such a deep and dark place where you say things like this to total strangers on the internet, you need to be in contact with someone that can help you start to heal.

second, i’d say… you’re wrong. i’d say the things any of us don’t know, especially about tomorrow, could blanket every grain of sand on every beach of the world with bullshit. And to simply assume you are done tomorrow because you are done today is a mistake. a factual mistake, an error, a critical miscalculation.

i’d say, read Tad Friend’s piece JUMPERS in which he seeks and finds and talks to people that jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge — and lived. And they all say the same variations this: “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.” 

And know that this piece has kept me in my seat on more than a couple dark nights.

And i’d say — i’d say i felt that way before too, and i was wrong.

And then i’d tell you something i don’t even think my wife knows. this happend years before we met — shit, more than a decade — and it’s not   the first time i came close to suicide was on a thanksgiving night. i’d eaten well and then as the house shut down i went into the bathroom, drew a bath as hot as i could manage to stand, and climbed into the tub with a razor  blade.

As i started to cut, as the corner touched my skin and that jolt of pain fired into my head, i stopped and thought — y’know, last chance. Are you SURE?

And i was tired. I sounded like you, that i knew there’d be ups again and downs but i was just so fucking TIRED i couldn’t stand the thought of having to get there. I felt this… this never-ending crush of days that were grey and tepid but for some reason i was supposed to greet each one with a smile. the constant pressure of having to keep my shit in all the time was just exhausting.

I wondered, then — well, is there anything you’re curious about. Anything you want to see play out. And i thought of a comic i was reading and i’d not figured out the end of the current storyline. And i realized I had curiosity. And that was the hook i’d hang my hat on. that by wanting to see how something played out I wasn’t really ready. That little sprout of a thing poking up through all that black earth kept me around a little longer.

I realized then that it had been so long since i’d laughed. I was numbed out and shut down and just… i missed laughing. maybe if i laughed a little i could get moving again. so i’d wait for my comic to conclude, try to find a few laughs, and then reevaluate.

So I’m in the bathtub and i got this real sharp-ass razor, right? And i look down and there’s all my bits floating in the water like they do and i thought okay, let’s get funny and i got to work.

I shaved off exactly half my pubic hair vertically. The end result was a ‘fro of pubes that looked like a Chia Pet that only half-worked. I started to laugh as I did it. And every time i’d piss, looking down made me laugh. 

Because JESUS what a nightmare.

Shortly thereafter I got very heavily into Chuck Jones and Tex Avery. Way less chafing and way more funny.

jesus. i was still in high school at the time. dig if you will a picture of the chubby weirdo that was always giggling at his dick in the bathroom. that was me.

And then I guess I’d tell you about Dave, who did the same thing as me a few years later, only DIDN’T have my hilarious Chia Dick strategy in mind and got the razor in and up. And as he started to bleed out “Brown Eyed Girl” came on the radio and he realized he’d never get to hear that again so, in a bloody comedy of errors — I swear to god this is true — he got out of the tub, tried to get dressed the best he could, went downstairs calling for help only to find his family gone, went out to his car, and drove to doug’s house only to find doug not home and so, then, finally, he blacked out from blood loss sitting there in his car, playing a van morrison CD on repeat, until, by luck, Doug’s mom came home and found him. 

Fucking Van Morrison, y’know?

A song, a comic, something dumb, something small. From that seed can come everything else, I swear to god.

I guess last I’d say… I’d say that, look — if you reached out to me for an answer, than I have to reach back out to you and insist you hear it.  Because it means, what, you know me? My work? You read my stuff and thought, well, fuck, if anyone would know why I shouldn’t end my life, if anyone alive is QUALIFIED TO SAVE ME it’s the guy that had britney spears punch a bear? okay — okay, then, so as THAT GUY I’m saying: Get help. Now, today, tonight, whenever — get to a phone and find a doctor that can try to help you heal, that can try to recolorize your world again, that can help you start caring again. All you need is that one tiny thing, that speck, that little grain of sand. the World Series, AVENGERS 2, Tina Fey’s new show, the first issue of PRETTY DEADLY, some slice of the world you’ve never seen, some drink you love, who the fuck will love your dog like you do if you’re gone, what if jabrams KILLS it on the new STAR WARS, the hell are you doing for Halloween, you ever feed a dolphin with your bare hand? because i have and I am fucking telling you IT IS A THING TO EXPERIENCE and oh god WHAT FUCKING FONT WILL STARBUCKS USE ON THE CHRISTMAS DRINK SLEEVES THIS YEAR — i don’t care what or how dumb but i promise you somewhere in your life is that one fleck of dust that can help start you on the road back. That’s all it takes. One fucking mote, drifting through your head. 

And because you asked me I am answering you because i know, motherfucker, i know, i know, i know the hole you are fucking in because I was there myself and if you look hard you can still see my writing on those walls and if you stare long enough i swear to god it’s pointing to up

IN THE grand concourse of Bangkok’s main train station, Hua Lamphong, the future is on display. Hulking billboards announce the impending arrival of high-speed trains and an age of international connectedness. For those who happen not to pass through the capital, a two-month road show called “Building the Thai Future 2020” is touring the provinces to keep people abreast of the government’s plans for the country’s railways and other infrastructure.

In the past 20 years, train passenger numbers have collapsed from 88m per year to 46m. The government, it would seem, is no longer willing to tolerate the slide.

Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, briefly followed an Iranian "sex feed" over the weekend. At the time, reports Ilan Ben Zion, @PersianHotBook had only 15 followers—and it soon lost its latest fan.

The apparent Twitter faux pas was the second for Netanyahu among Iranians in a little over a week, after he was roundly mocked on social media for telling BBC Persian that Iranians should overthrow their government so they can be free to wear jeans. That comment was followed on Twitter by a groundswell of pictures of ordinary Iranians showing off their denim duds.

The Likud Central Committee said that it runs the account, that it suffered a "malfunction," and that it is investigating the "malfunction."

malformalady:

A rapier, manufactured in the mid-19th century by the technology of the old masters as a gift to one high-ranking person. Such exceptionally flexible rapiers were made in Toledo in the beginning of 17th century. They were sold in gun shops and coiled in a circle to show its flexible properties.

things i want include.