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explodingdog:

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At Home With Onion Weekender Graphics Director Paul Tobin

I don't like stories about the personalities in the Snowden affair, because it detracts from the NSA and the policy issues. But I'm a sucker for operational security, and just have to post this detail from their first meeting in Hong Kong:

Snowden had instructed them that once they were in Hong Kong, they were to go at an appointed time to the Kowloon district and stand outside a restaurant that was in a mall connected to the Mira Hotel. There, they were to wait until they saw a man carrying a Rubik's Cube, then ask him when the restaurant would open. The man would answer their question, but then warn that the food was bad.

Actually, the whole article is interesting. The author is writing a book about surveillance and privacy, one of probably a half dozen about the Snowden affair that will come out this year.

Musician Janelle Monae gave a fantastic interview to Elle magazine about how science fiction has influenced her work, and why she identifies with androids.

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Good news for aspiring game developers, the Unity engine will officially support 2D development starting this fall with Unity 4.3. Of course, there are already lots of 2D games made with Unity (as the company's own website will attest), but the new update will add lots of tools specifically aimed at 2D development. Among those tools are a drag-and-drop sprite importing, a sprite animation editor and a dedicated 2D renderer.

Also coming in the 4.3 update will be support for developer-controlled in-game advertisements. Developers will be able to create points within their games that will trigger an advertisement. The ad system will allow developers to enable, disable or change ads using a web interface, which sounds pretty handy for self-promotion.

Finally, Unity's publishing arm, formerly known as Union, has been re-branded as Unity Games. The label will seek out promising Unity games, helping developers create and distribute the game, as well as offering QA support. The first two games to be published under the label will be Freeride SkiCross and Archangel (pictured). Interested developers can find more info on the Unity Games website.

Continue reading Unity getting official 2D support, ad functionality, Unity Games label created

Unity getting official 2D support, ad functionality, Unity Games label created originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 30 Aug 2013 15:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Look, I've put together lists of really unlikely and off-kilter casts so I know from personal experience that no matter how ridiculous you make your list, somebody is going to think that your joke casting actually really works. And I know that can be annoying. But I can't be the only person who would actually love to see Oprah put her HBIC face on and be the government lady the whole Justice League has to be careful around.

Artesia Daily Press

Dozens of Aftershocks Expected on Alaskan Island ABC News Dozens of noticeable aftershocks above magnitude 4.0 are expected in the remote Aleutian Island region off Alaska in the days and weeks following a major 7.0 earthquake, the Alaska state seismologist said Saturday. A dozen measurable aftershocks have ... Alaskan island area hit by big quake, aftershocksRapid City Journal Another strong quake recorded in Alaskan islandsSacramento Bee Earthquake rocks islands off AlaskaPress Herald all 180 news articles »

OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy

#publicsector

So, seems landlords have until tomorrow to register their apartments with the city (and pay $25 for each one). The city says, no probs, you can register them online, easy peasey, but the page on which landlords are supposed to do this has this warning:

Please use Internet Explorer on a Windows PC to complete Rental Inspection Registration online. Users have reported issues submitting applications from Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.

H/t Penny Cherubino.

Original Source

Notably, yesterday’s ruling also said that the IRS will not consider registered domestic partnerships, civil unions, and other similar formal relationships to be marriages. The IRS ruling allows—but does not require—same-sex couples to amend tax returns filed over the past three years, refiling as married couples. Some couples should not refile: they could incur a dreaded marriage penalty, but they may have to fill out a new return to get the bad news. Going forward, they won’t have any choice—they will have to file married returns. That decision is further complicated for couples in which one spouse has paid taxes on employer-paid health insurance premiums to cover the other spouse. Until now, those premiums counted as earnings and were subject to both income and payroll taxes. Premiums often totaled thousands of dollars each year and resulted in significantly bigger tax bills. The IRS now says that workers can amend tax returns to exclude that fringe benefit (and others) from taxable income. They can also recover any extra payroll taxes they incurred—as can their employers.

As MarketWatch columnist Elizabeth O’Brien has noted in her coverage this year, the ACA’s health-insurance exchanges and subsidies are designed to lower prices for this older crowd—people who are too young to qualify for Medicare but often find it prohibitively expensive to buy coverage in the private sector. Under the law, insurers are still allowed to charge older people more than younger people, but the extent to which they can do so is limited, and they can’t increase premiums or exclude people from coverage based on pre-existing health conditions. What’s more, all customers whose income falls below 400% of the federal poverty level – currently, about $46,000 for an individual or $62,000 for a couple – are eligible for subsidies. According to the Journal’s analysis, these subsidies are potential game-changers for middle- and lower-income boomers. (The Journal offers an elegant calculator tool that walks readers through the subsidy math.) A 60-year-old nonsmoker in Toledo would pay $420 a month for a basic insurance policy next year if he earned too much to get subsidies; if his income was $25,000 a year, however, his share of the premium would drop to $48 a month. Weaver and Radnofsky offer anecdotal examples of folks whose savings would be even more dramatic: One 62-year-old laid-off salesman, currently paying $1,328 a month for insurance for himself and his wife through his former employer, could see his monthly bill drop to $21.

The text is called Bugei no jo, which means "Introduction to Martial Arts" and is dated to the 15th year of Tenpo (1844). Written for samurai students about to learn Takenouchi-ryu, a martial arts system, it would have prepared students for the challenges awaiting them.

Paradise lost

I want to leave

Thank God it’s Frida

The man who fell to Earth

Back in 1953 the BBC made a time-lapse of a train trip between London and Brighton. They recreated the film 30 years later, in 1983. Fast forward 30 years to 2013 and they’ve done it again. You can see all three time-lapses—spanning 60 years—in this side by side video.

via BBC, PetaPixel

Citing property destruction, harassment, and the fallout of Mayor Charlie Hales' push to sweep campers from the sidewalks outside city hall, Portland's parks bureau is planning to fence off Chapman Square "sometime this weekend" according to a memo sent this morning from Commissioner Amanda Fritz's office.

The email first went out from Fritz's chief of staff, Tom Bizeau, to his counterparts in each of the other commissioner's offices. It was then sent out to other staffers. It says parks officials need to be able to make repairs without, it claims, having workers get into scraps with campers and protesters. The claims echo the city's comments during the eviction of Occupy Portland in 2011.

The memo says the decision is coming from Fritz (who's currently in talks to move Right 2 Dream Too from Old Town into a legal location on city land in the Pearl). It also promises some kind of additional enforcement proposals that would come before the city council "in the following weeks" so that the city can have "better tools to manage the situation once the fences are removed." It's unclear, right now, what those changes might entail.

Fencing would come days after fences came down at Terry D. Schrunk Plaza, which had been closed for landscaping after campers set up there during the day. Campers had moved back to Chapman Square while the fences were up across SW Madison. It's unclear if or why the city has stopped the sweeps it used to roust campers from Chapman Square late last month and earlier this month. It's also unclear how campers will react.

We'll update as this develops.

Here's the email (emphasis on any particular phrase is all mine):

All,

As discussed at our weekly executive meeting there are obvious problems occurring in Chapman Park as a result of recent moves to push homeless sidewalk users away from City Hall. Some of the issues that have arisen are:

destruction of parks property (bathrooms, irrigation system, trees, grass),
abusive behavior to staff and pedestrians,
Inability of Parks Staff to maintain the park without being accosted
presence of weapons (batons, pepper spray, knives),
drug use,
aggressive and out of control dogs,
a consequent inability to properly enforce Camping on Sidewalks,
Fighting and
Several Arrests

Because of these constant issues and lack of compliance by the homeless to maintain the Park and Sidewalk in a peaceful and lawful manner for all users of the Park, the Commissioner has decided to close off the park and sidewalks surrounding the park to all users in order to make repairs, perform needed maintenance and maintain and deescalate the situation. To that end, a fence surrounding the park similar to that which was up around Terry Schrunk Plaza will be erected sometime this weekend. This strategy may be repeated in other Parks if necessary in the future. We are hoping that this inconvenience to the public will be limited in duration. We are also hoping to bring some additional enforcement changes to Council in the following weeks to provide the City with better tools to manage the situation once the fences are removed.

If you have any questions, feel free to call.

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karenfelloutofbedagain:

catsymaxxie:

"John William Keedy explores themes of anxiety and varied neuroses in his photography."

I’ve never seen anxiety so accurately translated into art before…

In the far, far future of Earth, the Ninth World is built on the technological bones of countless fallen civilizations. There are mutants, aliens, and stranger things slipping between the dimensions, and the unfathomable tech of ages past looks an awful lot like magic. We talked to designer Monte Cook and editor Shanna Germain about the world of Numenera.

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Dawn Kawamoto writes "Sometimes, making more money is not enough. Just ask Salesforce.com. The SaaS company announced it would cut 200 jobs, during its second quarter earnings call. The cuts are coming, despite the company raising its revenue forecast for its fiscal year. Salesforce.com says it's initiating the cuts to reduce overlapping roles and to (you guessed it) gain 'synergy', following its effort to meld its cloud marketing platform company ExactTarget with its social media market suite Marketing Cloud. And apparently this isn't the first time Salesforce has tried to squeeze out those nebulous 'synergies.' It reportedly cut 100 jobs in October, when it merged its social media platform companies Radian6 and Buddy Media."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Link

accordingtodevin:

Pretty sure that’s how it went down. There’s no other explanation to why there are so many of them.

Bringing up the rear of the cultural commentary parade around Miley Cyrus’s VMA performance was the announcement that Oxford Dictionaries Online has added the word twerk.

Twerk, of course, rhymes with bezerk, and that is what reliably happens every time a dictionary offers up another “look what we added!” press release. A few pop-culture words are publicized as new additions to the “the dictionary” and anyone who’s ever internalized the Oxford comma rules or used the word bathetic correctly in a sentence complains that THIS TIME, the dictionary has gone too far, English is ruined forever, and from now on they will only be writing in unspoiled languages, such as French and Inuit (they have all those words for snow, dontcha know…).

Following the initial uproar come the voices of reason: Ben Zimmer of Visual Thesaurus, Oxford’s Katherine Connor Martin, and John E. McIntyre of the Baltimore Sun step in and try to soothe the mob. These words have existed for a long time (20 years, in the case of twerk) without the language crumbling into dust; dictionaries merely report the language; nobody’s forcing you to write srsly instead of seriously and so on and so forth. As a bonus, include grumpy lexicographers explaining (for roughly the one gazillionth time) that Oxford Dictionaries Online (or ODO) is not the same as the Oxford English Dictionary (or OED).

I’m all in favor of bringing people’s attention to new and lesser-known words; the endless creativity of English speakers and writers brings me considerable joy and is one of the reasons that I became a lexicographer in the first place. But the framing that’s been brought to these new-word announcements isn’t one of scientific discovery—we don’t approach these new words in wide-eyed wonder at the marvels of our age; instead, it’s all condemnation of the kids today, ruining the language with their selfies and their squee.

As with Miley’s performance itself, there’s a strong and dismaying undercurrent of appropriation and exploitation in the words that are featured. It’s worth stopping to think about how these words from marginalized groups are used to give even more power and authority to an institution that has historically been employed to justify the belittling of the language of those same groups.

Just contrast the recent discovery of a new mammal the olinguito (pronounced oh lin GHEE toe) whose name was not added to the Oxford Dictionaries Online in this latest batch. Nobody questioned whether or not the olinguito is a “real” carnivore or responded to the coverage with the declaration that the chordates are completely ruined and that the scientists just let anyone into the class Mammalia these days. Nobody said that sure, the olinguito is cute and all, but since you probably shouldn’t eat one, it’s not really an animal. The existence (or non-) of words is a fact, just as the existence of animals or plants is a fact; a fact that is entirely separate from the judgment of a word’s aesthetic value.

This cycle of lexicographical announcement and peever outrage (which has repeated at regular intervals since at least the publication of Webster’s Third New International in 1961) has increased in both frequency and fervidity in the two decades that I’ve worked as a lexicographer, but it can’t go on forever. With these “new words” announcements, lexicographers take advantage of the general perception of dictionaries as arbiters of language (where being “in” is the sign of a “real word” and being out, is, well, outré). If dictionaries were truly descriptive, they would be more like search engines—less of a “who’s who” and more of a “what’s what.” But with every back-and-forth—adding sensationalistic new words and then backtracking with a “but we just record the language” the exercise loses its attention-grabbing power. Perhaps the new-words announcement needs to join “does she or doesn’t she?” and the Burma Shave signs in the confraternity of marketing tropes that have outlived their cultural relevance.

The truth is, these days, anyone with an internet connection and even the most remedial search skills can find out what words “mean” in a few milliseconds. What a dictionary should provide is more context, more nuance, more space for discussion. (Disclosure: in 2008 I founded a new online dictionary, Wordnik.com, dedicated to doing just this.) Dictionaries should be thinking about what it is that they bring to readers and writers today—what needs do they serve? How are they relevant? What are the questions that people have about English words, and how can a dictionary answer them? Putting together a list of buzzworthy new additions to a dictionary is necessary, but certainly not sufficient.

You can follow Erin on Twitter at @emckean. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com. 

As marketing stunts go, this one is impressive. AdBlock is a free piece of software you can add to your web browser to, well, block ads. Its creator, Michael Gundlach, says it is used by 20 million people. But he wants more.

And—in a twist—Gundlach apparently believes the best way to tell people about a product is still to advertise it. Or to do something noteworthy enough for journalists to write about it. Gundlach has done both. His idea was to launch a crowdfunding campaign to fund an ad campaign.

It seems to be working. The campaign opened to the public at large on Aug 26, and shot past the first goal of $25,000 in a couple of days. That initial sum of money will be used get the campaign started online. At the time of writing, with 24 days to go, the campaign has hit over $47,000. (It went up by $400 just as this piece was being written.)

That’s approaching the $50,000 goal that Gundlach says will buy a billboard at Times Square. Those don’t come cheap. Assuming a $25,000 budget for the billboard, AdBlock will probably get a small property for a fleeting amount of time. The third goal, for which the target is $150,000, is a full-page ad in the New York Times. That could cost less than $100,000 if AdBlock is willing to haggle a bit and be flexible about when it appears.

The final goal is advertising taken to the extreme. “If people collectively contribute $4.2 million, we can get the word out to an absolutely huge audience during the Super Bowl, and make a difference in a whole lot of people’s lives,” says Gundlach, who also disagrees that there is any irony to be found in his campaign.

But why would other people pay to grow Gundlach’s business? “I’ve been thanked by blind people who can read the web better without the distraction of advertisements; epileptic users who have fewer seizures when using AdBlock; ADHD students who can focus better on their work with AdBlock’s help; parents and pastors who love how much safer the web is for children when AdBlock is enabled,” Gundlach suggests.

More likely is that donators don’t see it as a business. Noble sentiment is at the heart of AdBlock’s campaign. Watch the video above and it’s all about “making a difference” and “changing the world.” Indeed, the software is free but users can choose to pay.

“I haven’t looked at the numbers lately, but historically it’s been less than 1% [who] decide to voluntarily support it,” Gundlach says. Assuming a bare minimum of 200,000 people who each paid $10 (the lowest amount one can tip without manually entering a smaller number), that’s not a bad return on investment for Gundlach, who quit his job to run AdBlock.  Several million more users who sign up thanks to an entirely free (for AdBlock) ad campaign and a few who donate as well would certainly make a difference—both to AdBlock’s bottom line and to the many other firms and companies that rely on advertising for their supper.

Thousands of visitors roll into New Orleans this week for Southern Decadence: five days of celebration of gay culture in a city now being promoted by tourism officials as a honeymoon site for same-sex newlyweds — despite the state's constitutional ban on gay marriage. "It just shows the dichotomy between what business knows in the state and what our political leaders think," said gay rights activist John Hill. "Obviously, the business community in New Orleans knows that the gay travel market, the honeymoon destination, is a big market." Southern Decadence runs through the Labor Day weekend and helps fill hotel rooms — an estimated 37,000 in New Orleans and its suburbs — at a typically slow time in the tourist season. This year's festival follows the Supreme Court's overturning of key parts of the federal Defense of Marriage Act and coincides with a social media campaign by the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau targeting 13 states where same-sex marriage is legal.