firehose

Sgt. Stubby, the most decorated war dog of WW I, fought in 17 battles on the Western Front. (Thanks @da_ravioliii)

by Steffen

In an economically depressed Maine county, Bill Sheldon is the kingpin of a $40 million baby-eel industry that may be doomed to extinction. Find out what happens when a community full of armed fishermen and elver dealers stop being polite and start getting real.

I will not watch Downton Abbey this season. I will not watch Downton Abbey this season. I will not watch Downton Abbey this season. Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?

Brisbane Times

Radiation levels at Fukushima '18 times higher than previously thought' The Independent Radiation levels at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant are 18 times higher than previously thought, according to officials. The news follows last week's announcement that 300 tonnes of toxic water had seeped into the ground from one of the site's 1,000 giant ... Tepco reports leaking pipe, four hot spotsThe Japan Times Radiation Spike Seen At FukushimaRadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty Radiation Levels Spike at FukushimaVoice of America New York Times (blog) -gulfnews.com -Wall Street Journal all 245 news articles »

cute-overload:

No cute title, just my cats.
http://cute-overload.tumblr.com

pretzel-the-hognose:

[X]

Pretzel loves investigating socks, but this one he just didn’t want to leave!  After much pestering, he did stick his head out to give me a sulky look, but promptly returned to his cosy snuggling place afterwards.

Snakes in socks. What more could one ask for on a Sunday morning…

SFGate has the story of Aaron Bannert, creator of a San Francisco transit app called Smart Ride. The app was developed to provide arrival times for the city's bus system. Smart Ride was supported by ads, and Bannert had not yet turned a profit on it when he received a legal threat from a company claiming patent infringement. "It was from a company with ties to Martin Kelly Jones, who holds a series of patents claiming ownership of technologies for tracking vehicles and providing users with electronic updates. A handful of affiliated companies, including ArrivalStar and Melvino Technologies, have threatened or sued hundreds of organizations in recent years, from small entrepreneurs like Bannert to large corporations like American Airlines. ... ArrivalStar filed more than half the patent lawsuits in South Florida federal courts last year, according to the South Florida Business Journal. ... ArrivalStar will demand as much as $200,000 for a license, according to reports in other publications." The cost to the patent troll for filing a lawsuit is around $500, but Bannert was forced to spend over $10,000 on a legal defense and delay the launch of a new version for months. He's unable to provide details on the outcome of the case. "As high as the legal expenses were for Bannert, he thinks the bigger toll from patent trolling is the indirect cost to society, the products and innovation that don't make it off the drawing board."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Christian Science Monitor

White House explainer-in-chief Bill Clinton talks Obamacare as rollout nears (+ ... Christian Science Monitor Dubbed “Secretary of Explaining Stuff” by President Obama last year, former President Bill Clinton Wednesday ran down the benefits of the Affordable Care Act, remarked on its problems, and reminded the law's sworn enemies – House Republicans among ... Clinton Urges Americans to Sign Up for Health Care ExchangesNew York Times Kroger insurance move may be model for futureCincinnati.com Clinton Urges Lawmakers to Focus on 'Revising' instead of 'Defunding' ObamacareNational Journal KUOW News and Information -CBS News -San Francisco Examiner all 427 news articles »

There are a lot of historical photo blogs out there, but I just think The Black History Album curates some of the best.  People you want to meet.  Shots that feel like you are there.  That sort of thing.  Highly recommended! Just click the photo to go through and follow.

President Barack Obama was ready to order a military strike against Syria, with or without Congress' blessing. But on Friday night, he suddenly changed his mind.

The number of young Americans in unions is declining at twice the rate of all other workers.

Union members ages 16 to 24 fell 26% from 2002 to 2012, compared to an 11% overall decline in union membership, according to US Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

How to reconcile these statistics with the seemingly youthful look of protest movements, such as the recent fast-food strikes and Occupy Wall Street?

One reason, of course, has been the tough economy, which forced younger workers to take jobs as baristas or go to graduate school or leap into self-employment and startups. “Unfortunately young people have been hit really hard by the struggling economy and are still unemployed in large numbers and creating good jobs for them is a key part of the strategy,” says Amaya Tune-Smith, a spokeswoman for the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in the US.

Indeed, the federation has been trying to recruit younger workers, such as targeting younger workers who work as teaching assistants or for retailers including H&M. Plus the organization is working with  worker groups to raise the minimum wage for servers and bartenders, Tune-Smith said.

But the sectors that are most likely to be unionized—government workers, teachers and library jobs—may not appeal to 20-somethings. Young workers are more likely to land a job in technology or with a smaller company or in retail and restaurants, none of which has many unions, says Michelle Kaminski, an associate professor at Michigan State University who teaches labor courses.

Many of her undergraduate students are “young, bright and ambitious,” and expect their future employers will treat them well, she said. They see no reason they’d need a union, though that perspective could change after they experience workplace issues or unfair treatment, she added.

“Young workers move around from job to job a lot,” and don’t see themselves as connected to their job or employer, Kaminski said. The bottom line: Last year, only 4.2 % of the youngest workers were union members, compared to 11.3% of all US workers and almost 15% of workers ages 55 to 64.

While young people appear to be backing away from US unions, Latinos are embracing them. Union members of Hispanic descent grew by almost 21%, to 2 million members, from 2002 to 2012. Nurses and car wash workers in California and janitors and casino crew in other states have embraced unions, with a big bump in union membership in California last year.

Blacks are still more likely to be union members than other racial groups, but their numbers fell as state and local governments and school districts cut millions of jobs. The only other group with a gain in union membership was Asian Americans, with a 4% gain to 668,000 members in 2012.

Despite renewed activism—the fast food strikes keep growing, though some say they are doomed—the union movement is still not moving many 20-somethings. Even when a young person gets hired into a unionized workplace, they are less likely to sign up as members. According to BLS data, around 84% join and pay their union dues, compared to 90% or more of workers over 25.

Follow writer-entrepreneur Vickie Elmer on Twitter @WorkingKind. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

odditiesoflife:

Jules Verne’s Amazing Tombstone, Amiens, France

Jules Verne (1828-1905) was one of the most innovative and visionary writers of the 19th century. He was a pioneer of both the science fiction and fantasy/adventure genres of writing. He wrote such famed novels as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in 80 Days, Journey to the Center of the Earth and many more. His books are better known from the many films they inspired. The famed author passed away from complications of diabetes at the age of 77 in Amiens, France, where he was buried in the Cimetière de la Madeleine.

Two years after his death in 1907, a sculpture entitled “Vers l’Immortalité et l’Eternelle Jeunesse” (“Towards immortality and Eternal Youth”) was erected atop his tombstone. Designed by sculptor Albert Roze, and using the actual death mask of the writer, the statue depicts the shrouded figure of Jules Verne breaking out of his own tombstone, emerging from the grave and reaching up towards the heavens.

An illustration of Jules Verne’s tombstone monument was featured on the May 1934 (Vol 9, No 1.) cover of the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories.

sources 1, 2, 3, 4

Em Adespoton writes "Before the VirnetX case, nearly all FaceTime calls were done through a system of direct communication. Essentially, Apple would verify that both parties had valid FaceTime accounts and then allow their two devices to speak directly to each other over the Internet, without any intermediary or 'relay' servers. However, a small number of calls—5 to 10 percent, according to an Apple engineer who testified at trial—were routed through 'relay servers.' At the August 15 hearing, a VirnetX lawyer stated that Apple had logged 'over half a million calls' complaining about the quality of FaceTime [since disabling direct connections]."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Independent games will not have to adhere to a set pricing structure on the Xbox One. During an interview with Joystiq at PAX Prime, Microsoft's portfolio director for digital games Chris Charla said the ID@Xbox program, an initiative that will allow independent developers to eventually self-publish on Xbox One, will enable "every business model that any other game on Xbox One has." So ID@Xbox games support free-to-play, micro-transactions and premium pricing.

"On Xbox One, games that come through ID@Xbox are no different than any other game," Charla said. "They have full Gamerscore, full Achievements, can take advantage of SmartGlass, Kinect - if you can do it with an Xbox One game, you can do it with anything that comes through the ID@Xbox program. That's like a fundamental tenet of the program."

The ID@Xbox program, an effort that will allow independent developers to use retail Xbox One consoles as developer kits, was first announced last week. Developers will not be able to self-publish on Xbox One at launch later this year, though Microsoft has said the functionality will be rolled out an unspecified later date.

ID@Xbox program supports all payment models on Xbox One originally appeared on Joystiq on Sun, 01 Sep 2013 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Pa. lawsuit: Renters fear eviction over 911 calls San Francisco Chronicle PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A suburban Philadelphia woman is challenging a local law that allows tenants to be evicted if they call 911 three times within four months. The ordinance in Norristown is designed to promote safe, peaceful neighborhoods. Similar laws ... and more »

The Last Apostle Puppet Show (Home Data - arcade -1989)

romdivr:

CLICK FOR BIG

popular shared this story from Marginal Revolution.

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From Christopher Glazek:

…the figures that suggest that violence has been disappearing in the United States contain a blind spot so large that to cite them uncritically, as the major papers do, is to collude in an epic con. Uncounted in the official tallies are the hundreds of thousands of crimes that take place in the country’s prison system, a vast and growing residential network whose forsaken tenants increasingly bear the brunt of America’s propensity for anger and violence.

Crime has not fallen in the United States—it’s been shifted. Just as Wall Street connived with regulators to transfer financial risk from spendthrift banks to careless home buyers, so have federal, state, and local legislatures succeeded in rerouting criminal risk away from urban centers and concentrating it in a proliferating web of hyperhells. The statistics touting the country’s crime-reduction miracle, when juxtaposed with those documenting the quantity of rape and assault that takes place each year within the correctional system, are exposed as not merely a lie, or even a damn lie—but as the single most shameful lie in American life.

From 1980 to 2007, the number of prisoners held in the United States quadrupled to 2.3 million, with an additional 5 million on probation or parole.

Here is one detail:

…the Justice Department finally released an estimate of the prevalence of sexual abuse in penitentiaries. The reliance on filed complaints appeared to understate the problem. For 2008, for example, the government had previously tallied 935 confirmed instances of sexual abuse. After asking around, and performing some calculations, the Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That’s 216,000 victims, not instances. These victims are often assaulted multiple times over the course of the year. The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women.

Here is more, via Eli Dourado.

divafierce:

rare footage of Taylor Swift, Perez Hilton and Jennifer Lawrence admitting to be satanists and a part of the Illuminati

Tumblr user Yitzus came across this amazing find:

LOOK WHAT I FOUND! A TABLETOP LIBRARIAN GAME! WHO NEEDS DUNGEONS AND/OR DRAGONS WHEN YOU COULD BE FILLING OUT BUDGET SHEETS, DEALING WITH DRUNKEN PATRONS, AND FILING FOR GOVERNMENT AID!

What is this thing? Well, I logged into the library database WorldCat and did a search. This is a game published by the consulting firm Harwell Associates in 1977. It's designed to simulate the experience of a library director.

It's fun! I'm already a third-level cataloger/mage. The encumbrance rules are a pain, but we are talking about 70s-era data storage.

Link -via Breda Fallacy

CARVE THEM - ANTICHRISTIAN PORTRAIT: WORSHIP OF THE BLACK GOAT 666