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LiveReload:

LiveReload monitors changes in the file system. As soon as you save a file, it is preprocessed as needed, and the browser is refreshed.

Even cooler, when you change a CSS file or an image, the browser is updated instantly without reloading the page.

For OS X, though a Windows alpha is available, as is guard-reload for folk who use Linux (or just prefer a CLI).

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New York Daily News

Biden: 'Neanderthal crowd' slowed VAWA renewal Politico Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday slammed the Republicans who slowed the passage of the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act as "this sort of Neanderthal crowd" in the House as he touted what he considers to be his unique ... Biden: House Republicans "Neanderthals"CNN (blog) Biden: 'Neanderthal' GOP Slowed VAWA PassageSunshine State News all 19 news articles »

When Fox Searchlight Pictures‘s $300 million-plus grossing “Black Swan” sought to control its production budget, in part by staffing with unpaid intern labor, it was contributing to the normalization of a practice that has no defensible basis in ethics or law. It took advantage of people’s desperate need to distinguish their résumés and the acceptance of this commonplace if peculiar fact of the youth labor market. Somewhere along the way, a laudable idea that work experience could have academic merit metastasized into an ad hoc free-for-all in which there is little consistency in policy (whether among employers or colleges), little governmental enforcement, and every reason for exploited young workers to cross their fingers and hope that they’re expected to labor for free for only a brief period.

People who defend unpaid internships are defending a notion of what they think unpaid internships should be, rather than what they are. A picture of how they have corrupted the labor market for film and television production, the field I was in, should clarify how damaging this practice has become. It is also holding back the emergence of a more vibrant and sustainable labor market that contributes to the much delayed economic recovery.

The normalization of unpaid internships effectively prevented me from earning a living—despite the steady need for the very kind of skilled labor I was regularly asked to provide. There is a terrible irony that in the midst of an historic employment crisis, you can now find steady work, so long as you don’t expect to be paid. Interns might be students (sold a bill of goods about experiential learning), recent graduates (having internalized the notion that their labor is worthless until they have more experience), or people like me: experienced workers transitioning into a new field (grudgingly accepting a strange “new normal”).

When I left a job on Wall Street—running a training program for recent college graduates whom we paid throughout their training—I first enrolled in a course to be trained and certified in film editing. But as wonderful as the training at The Edit Center in New York City was, the school suggested that the skills we had developed were not necessarily marketable, even though they were sought after by multiple employers.

Instead, we were advised to work for free for several assistant editing jobs and were regularly provided insider “opportunities” to do so while waiting an unspecified period of time for the first random employer to decide our skills were worth compensation. It’s disappointing that schools like The Edit Center apparently care more about maintaining relationships with employers, whose budgets would suffer if a higher standard were insisted upon, than encouraging financially viable solutions for their students.

And this is endemic of the unpaid internship practice, particularly in culture-production industries heavily reliant on freelancers. For workers forever looking for the next gig, this amounts to a ticking bomb. Either your savings (or your parental support) run out or you begin to get paid before it’s too late, meanwhile working unpaid for months at a stretch, providing labor that helps employers make successful organizations run.

My decision to sue Fox Searchlight Pictures was not only to insist on receiving the pay I was owed, but to deter it and other employers from continuing to engage in this toxic practice. It was to signal to other such intern-workers that society already has protections in place meant to prevent this kind of exploitation, to let them know that they are not alone if they find this practice an outrage.

This should be equally objectionable to virtue-of-hard-work conservatives and labor-solidarity progressives. The time has come for the era of unpaid internship wage theft to take its bow and exit the stage, and for a meaningful policy discussion about what a healthy, labor-market strengthening transition from school to work should look like.

You can follow Eric on Twitter at @EricGlatt. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com. 

Buried in a Brazilian television report on Sunday was the disclosure that the NSA has impersonated Google and possibly other major internet sites in order to intercept, store, and read supposedly secure online communications.

by atxdba

lacigreen:

forever reblog

adcacai:

acquaintedwithrask:

strawberry-fox:

live-love-laurens:

xxdarkwing:

21st Century AU fic where the founding fathers write the Declaration of Independence using Google Docs

“You guys! Stop deleting everything I write!”

“Unalienable!”
“Inalienable!”

I’M LAUGHING LIKE A MANIAC

"SO HELP ME I WILL LOCK THIS DOCUMENT IF YOU DON"T STOP CHANGING THE FONT SIZE JOHN HANCOCK!!!"

(snort). :)

According to Wirecutter's survey of top pen bloggers, it's the Uniball Jetstream.

My own favorite, the Pilot Precise (pictured above) comes in joint second place.

Of course, there's rarely any reason not to just use a pencil.

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dailypunctilio:

Why are you talking that way?

I thought you wanted to.

No, I don’t want to.

Lucas123 writes "On the news that Linus Trovalds's SSD went belly up while he was coding the 3.12 kernel, Computerworld took a closer look at SSDs and their failure rates. While Torvalds didn't specify the SSD manufacturer in his blog, he did write in a 2008 blog that he'd purchased an 80GB Intel SSD — likely the X25, which has become something of an industry standard for SSD reliability. While they may have no mechanical parts, making them preferable for mobile use, there are many factors that go into an SSD being reliable. For example, a NAND die, the SSD controller, capacitors, or other passive components can — and do — slowly wear out or fail entirely. As an investigation into SSD reliability performed by Tom's Hardware noted: 'We know that SSDs still fail.... All it takes is 10 minutes of flipping through customer reviews on Newegg's listings.' Yet, according to IHS, client SSD annual failure rates under warranty tend to be around 1.5%, while HDDs are near 5%. So an SSDs not only outperforms, but on average outlast spinning disk."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Though Disney hasn't said much about the forthcoming group of "Star Wars" films, it appears likely they will focus on the back stories of major characters, including possibly Han Solo and Yoda.

Digia developers working on the Qt tool-kit have decided they will switch from using the WebKit browser engine to instead using Google's "Blink" engine fork for Chromium. The new Qt web rendering engine will be called Qt WebEngine...

Fifth Element director Luc Besson doesn't exactly want to make a sequel to his famous space opera — but another film, in the same vein and with the same ideas. Which he would direct.

Read more...

Anatomy of a bicycle

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Bill Snyder writes of Verizon's diabolical plan to to charge websites for carrying their packets — a strategy that, if it wins out, will be the end of the Internet as we know it. 'Think of all the things that tick you off about cable TV. Along with brainless programming and crummy customer service, the very worst aspect of it is forced bundling. ... Now, imagine that the Internet worked that way. You'd hate it, of course. But that's the direction that Verizon, with the support of many wired and wireless carriers, would like to push the Web. That's not hypothetical. The country's No. 1 carrier is fighting in court to end the Federal Communications Commission's policy of Net neutrality, a move that would open the gates to a whole new — and wholly bad — economic model on the Web.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sniffling:

an intense battle

The Occupy Wall Street protesters were kicked out of Portland's Plaza Blocks Park on October 6, 2011. But Jose Serrica never left, and he's still protesting.

Betabrand's "Socks of Catan" are coming in October, at $14 a pair.

When Sarah heard that Catan wanted to collaborate with Betabrand, she proposed that we create clothing immediately identifiable to all Catan fans, something they could wear any day of the week. And so the Socks of Catan were born — they're made of a cotton-poly blend and fit men's sizes 8-12 US. (Note: our BetaTesters have found that these socks fit a women's size 6 and up.)

Are these socks for you? Ask yourself:
* Are my current socks lacking hexagonal tiles?
* Do I want socks that friends would consider trading all their resource cards for?
* Do I have feet?

Socks of Catan (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

The limiting factor here is that Man of Steel, in this continuity, came first. Unfortunately. It's hard to to raise the game, conflict-wise, when you start from a point of demolished cities, millions of dead, and two invulnerable dudes punching each other through buildings.

So you don't make their conflict the center of the movie. Hell, they shouldn't even been on screen together until the final act. Batman, in costume, should be the shark from Jaws.

Instead, you make Lois Lane the center of the movie. After being Right About Superman she's been tasked with some interesting assignments, but nothing really has the same thrill as breaking the story that 1) alien life exists 2) it has visited Earth and 3) it has awesome abs. So she starts to slide, taking easy puff pieces to pass the time and keep the paychecks coming. One of these puffs is a series called 'The Other Most Powerful Men In The World' where she interviews major politicians and captains of industry and so on. Lex Luthor is obviously unhappy about the 'other' part of the title and turned down the interview until he found it was Lois doing it. He calls her up and is all like 'Meet me at Hotel X at Time Y if you want this to happen' and she ditches her scheduled interview to meet him.

The interview does not go well. Lex starts to menace Lois, not actually threatening her, but making it pretty clear that Bad Stuff will happen to her if she doesn't spill the beans about Supes. Goons abound, Lois gets all "Do you know who my boyfriend IS?" and Lex lays into her that she doesn't sound like the Lois of old, trying to hide behind the cape of some man and how that's the real evil of Superman - that soon everyone will just hide behind him, faded just like her.

And besides, he smarms, Superman is in Fiji saving people from a tsunami. It's just you, me, and my bagman, John Corben. Lois manages to get away from the pair of them through fierceness and guile, but Lex calls in the rest of the goon squad as Lois flees the hotel.

Where she gets picked up by her originally scheduled interviewee, Bruce Wayne, the scion of Old Money who is Making A Difference. He's doing his whole 'well meaning playboy' schtick but is more than happy to follow her orders to get away from Corben and his goons. Once free, they fail the Bechtel Test by gabbing about Superman. Turns out Bruce has some similar thoughts about Superman as Lex - he's worried about people living in the shadow of a Superman, that Supes doesn't seem to understand what he symbolizes by his very existence, and also how his lack of training/focus left so many people dead. "My Father made one bad decision going down an alley late at night and two people died. He made enough bad choices to kill millions." (Of course, he's speaking from guilt - I'm of the BatB version where it was Bruce's fault the family went to the movies in the first place cuz he threw a snit about a Xmas gift).

Lois starts to have second thoughts about Superman. This is part of Lex and Bruce's plan. Oh, did I mention they're in cahoots? I should have. Kingdom Come and all that. They know they cannot defeat Superman physically, but they can take away the reasons he has for sticking around Earth. Bruce keeps negging Supes, while Lex's Star Labs contacts keep releasing more information about "More Kryptonians out there, perhaps with entire civilizations, entire worlds". LexCorp and Wayne Industries are also sharing research info from recovered Kryptonian artifacts. Of course, Lex is focused on weapons and such, but Bruce is interested in the medical technology and miniaturization tech recovered from the crashed Ark. This is the seeds of their future suits - Lex's is pretty much Zod's armor re-purposed, while Bruce's is a low tech version with better armor plating or something (he actually ends up throwing it together at the last minute when he sees what Lex is swanning around in). This is where cracks show in their partnership - Bruce is all like "You don't like the man, but you love his toys." and Lex is all "Sometimes you need to stand on the shoulders of giants in order to gouge their eyes out."

Of course, Lex takes things too far and makes his play to get rid of Lois too soon (maybe he thinks he has a shot once Corben gets a shiny metal powersuit/body?) and Bruce has to start to save her behind the scenes, but she catches him in the act and is all like "You're no better than him, thinking you know what's best for me, for all of us!" and that's how Superman finds out that Bruce and Lex were working together and he starts to get all neck snappy but Lois stops him, telling him that if he's better than human than he needs to start acting the part. Lex is going nuts and threatening the world at this point, so Bruce and Supes need to put aside their differences in the last act to work together to bring him down. Snyder-punching ensues and the heroes win, but they don't like each other much.

They each try to patch things up with Lois, but she tells them each off, pretty much inspiring their methodologies ("You need to think about the little people, Bruce. How many more kids in Gotham became orphans while you were palling around with Luthor?" - "Read this issue of Spider-Man, Superman, and look closely at the Power/Responsibility line."). The dudes take her message to heart and try to act the parts they should. She keeps telling them "nice start, but you need to do X, Y, and Z. And also you two should try to play nice with each other. Go have a meal together and meet me back here in the hotel bar afterwards." They do, it doesn't go well, but they at least get some stuff of their chest and nobody gets punched (conflicts CAN be resolved by talking about it!). They report back to Lois and she's like "Nice start, but..." and they get all sulky and slink out.

"Ungh," says Lois, finishing her drink. "Men."

"Tell me about it," says the six foot tall Greek beauty sitting next to her at the bar. The two women clink their glasses.

Original Source

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BarBot 2013.75, a celebration of cocktail-making robots, takes place October 25 and 26, 2013 at the Odd Fellows Building in San Francisco. Cocktail robot makers can register here. The event is organized by Simone Davalos and David Calkins.

Join your favorite robot enthusiasts and bring your drinking liver for another round of BarBot: the cocktail robot festival. Innovators from far and near will show off beloved works both new and old, all of them being robots that engage in some aspect of cocktail culture. Marvel, appreciate, and toss a few back for the sake of SCIENCE.

via Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories