firehose

Courtney shared this story from Eliza Gauger.

---

thinksquad:

A photo of police forcing an off-duty firefighter to the ground has gained national attention after it was revealed that the police action was taken after the man waved to the officers.
George Madison Jr., an African American firefighter and youth pastor in Evansville, Indiana was threatened with a taser by police when he committed no crime.
Madison says that he was riding his bike when he saw a police car approaching the same intersection.
Through his work on the local fire department, he is familiar with a number of the police officers in Evansville and he thought he recognized one of the men in the car so he waved.
That is not how the police interpreted it, however, as they claim that they thought he was flicking them off.
The officers stopped Madison, and, according to Madison, they were getting confrontational.
He then took out his phone and went to call the police chief, Billy Bolin, who he is friends with. The officers told him to hang up the phone and get on the ground.
When he hesitated before listening to their order, The Courier Press reports that the officer took out his taser.

'It was literally maybe inches from my face. I immediately threw my hands in the air. What he asked me to do I was more than willing to do,' Madison told the paper.
‘I said “Please don’t hurt me.” The next thing I know I’m laying down the ground and they cuffed me.’
The officers only began to back off after they learned that Madison was a firefighter and youth pastor.
‘Once they found out I was a fireman their attitude changed,’ he said.
Now there is an internal investigation underway within the police department and Madison’s friend Chief Bolin is involved.
‘I know (Madison), I like him. I know the officers involved, I like the officers involved. So, my job is to try to figure out the truth no matter who you like,’ he told local 14 News.
‘Just because somebody says something, we can’t automatically assume it’s the truth. I’m not saying I’m doubting anything that George has said. We have to hear both sides and get to the bottom of it.’
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2395250/George-Madison-The-moment-African-American-firefighter-pastor-handcuffed-waved-police.html#ixzz2cBQmbJM8

reminder that flipping off a pig is protected speech and was ruled an insufficient reason for detainment or arrest: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/03/flip-off-police_n_2403563.html

Not a joke, not a mock-up: Nintendo 2DS ⊟

Coming out in North America this October 12 (alongside Pokemon X/Y) for $129.99, available in Red and Blue. It’s meant to be a cheaper, non-3D alternative to the 3DS and 3DS XL, while still playing games from their libraries. The system will be compatible with all 3DS and DS games, and will still be able to take and share 3D photos.

To get that cheap price, Nintendo made noticeable concessions in the system design, like having only a single speaker (you can still get stereo sound if you plug in headphones). Oddly, the 2DS uses a single display — it looks like two due to how they’re framed by the casing — so it’s one big touchscreen, though it only supports touch on the bottom display at the moment.

This model also won’t fold — it has a fixed, slate-type form factor, and a slider for putting it in sleep mode. Nintendo will put out Red and Blue cases for $12.99 each, since your old cases won’t work with this somewhat square design. Credits to USGamer and Kotaku for additional details.

The 2DS is also coming to Europe, but there are no announced plans for a Japanese release. Watch an intro video for the Nintendo 2DS here.

BUY Nintendo 3DS and 3DS XL consoles, upcoming games

Soft & Cuddly (The Power House - ZX Spectrum - 1987)

vgjunk:

More horrifying scenes of pixel gore from the Soft & Cuddly article.

Gus, New York's Most Famous Polar Bear, Dies at 27 New York Times (blog) His appetite was off. He was having trouble chewing his food. When the medical professionals took a look, they found an inoperable tumor. And so it was that Gus, New York's most famous polar bear, had to be euthanized on Tuesday. Long the celebrated ... and more »

hodad

Library earplug dispenser, UC Santa Barbara #wallbros #soundstudies #share @gws710gws @nhennies @notedhermit

Original Source

Add this to the annals of internet history: Facebook’s presentation for potential advertisers in April 2004, just two months after the nascent social network launched at Harvard University.

Digiday earlier today published a similar slide deck from October 2004, which led us to this one from half a year prior. Mike Grynbaum, now at the New York Times, dug it up from his reporting back in college. Facebook, then still known as thefacebook.com, said at the time that it just needed enough revenue to cover costs like additional servers as the site grew from Harvard to other campuses. This was its first attempt to sell ads.

“We’re not out there to make money from advertising,” Chris Hughes—then Facebook’s spokesman and now, among other things, the publisher of the New Republic—told Grynbaum in May 2004. (Facebook, now a public company, made $1.6 billion from advertising in the second quarter of this year.)

The April 2004 ad sales effort was led by Eduardo Saverin, who would later sue Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to retain a stake in the company. In the presentation, Saverin describes himself as the chief financial officer and lists an on-campus address in Harvard’s Eliot House. Listed ad rates were as low as $1 per 1,000 impressions.

Here’s the entire presentation:

popular shared this story .

---

Red Cross volunteers gave Boordy and Luongo emergency funds for food, clothing and shoes, and comfort kits – which include toiletries. Luongo was worried about his Siamese Fighting fish, which he's had for three years. But he and Boordy agreed that the cause of the fire was less important than everyone getting out OK.

As firefighters extinguished the blaze, they tried to lighten the mood. Much of their possessions were already in boxes in preparation for separate moves, Boordy to Hudson and Luongo to Medford. Luongo joked that he'd be moving with his girlfriend sooner than expected.

And any possessions they lost were just things, Luongo said.

"I had a Playstation 3 -- the Playstation 4 comes out in November, I'd buy a new one anyway," he said.

Original Source

Baltimore Comic-Con, being held Sept. 7-8, sports an impressive guest list of comic book creators. This year it welcomes Joe Hill, Neal Adams, Mark Waid, Chris Samnee, Brian Bolland, Amanda Conner, David Petersen, George Perez, Walt Simonson, Louise Simonson, Mike Mignola, Keith Giffen, David Finch, Adam Hughes and many more. One guest is particularly notable: [...]

Mr888Funny888 has created a compilation video of cats and kittens saying “yum yum” and “nom nom nom” as they eat. Some of the cats are a little grumpy and others are just plain adorable.

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

mythsandfabrications:

My daughter wanted to dress up her hamster in dolly clothes, I told her that wasn’t really going to work…but if we cut holes in a box and make some of those seaside type pictures you stick your head through, only hamster sized, perhaps we could make him look like he dressed up!

OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy

I’LL BET IT IS

(this is work-related)

The Wiener Library is open to the public five days a week free of charge.  

Original Source

Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The Nintendo 2DS is a new handheld in the DS family due out on October 12 for $130, in red and blue. As its name suggests, the 2DS plays all 3DS and DS games, but in 2D. It's a solid piece of hardware, no hinges, with dual screens the same size as 3DS screens, one circle pad, a camera, a single speaker and standard DS face buttons. Nintendo calls the 2DS "an entry-level dedicated portable gaming system."

Nintendo describes the 2DS as follows: "The system features a distinctive fixed, slate-type form factor .... Nintendo 2DS maintains many of the same hardware features as Nintendo 3DS: dual screens, game-play controls and touch-screen features. The system also has backward compatibility with the existing library of more than 2,000 Nintendo DS games, as well as access to wireless connectivity features like multiplayer online game play, fun Nintendo Video content and great digitally delivered games in the Nintendo eShop."

No, this is not a joke.

For a better look at the size of the 2DS, check out this screencap of a young boy holding it in one hand (and smudging the screen). Optional carrying cases, also in red and blue, are due out at launch for $13. October 12 also marks the release of Pokemon X and Y.

Continue reading Nintendo 2DS out Oct. 12 for $130, plays all 3DS, DS games

Nintendo 2DS out Oct. 12 for $130, plays all 3DS, DS games originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 28 Aug 2013 11:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Last month I published benchmarks showing Windows 8 beating Ubuntu Linux when it came to the Intel OpenGL performance for the latest generation Intel "Haswell" desktop processors. Since then there's been lots of commits to Mesa and continued improvements to the Linux kernel and for some tests the open-source Linux driver is in better standing. For the testing today is a comparison of Windows 8 Pro against the latest Ubuntu 13.10 development packages when using a System76 Gazelle Professional laptop with Core i7 4900MQ CPU.

The monolith of Gen Con just keeps growing. In 2012, the games convention attracted more than 41,000 attendees to Indianapolis for a four-day weekend, which was a record—at least until the 2013 Con was attended by 49,000 people earlier this month. Attendees come to play board games, video games, role-playing games, and family games. They dress up in elaborate game-inspired costumes; they run through live-action combat simulators. They build elaborate towers of Magic cards and knock them down with coins that get donated to charity.

And they examine games, toys, books, miniatures, dice, costumes, and tons of other paraphernalia in the immense dealers’ room. Some companies use the dealers’ room to playtest upcoming games to see whether they work in the field. There’s also the First Exposure Hall, which this year featured 55 different pre-release games, rotating through two-hour playtest slots from 8 a.m. to ...

Read more

PBS is furnishing a new weekly webseries called Game/Show, produced by Kornhaber Brown and focusing specifically on video games. The first episode attempts to analyze the popularity and staying power of three gaming icons: Mario of the brothers Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog and Link, wielder of the Triforce.

Will we still be playing games starring Mario in 2577? What makes these characters so endearing? Brown suggests it's the shared monomyth themes. Monomyth, a term coined by Joseph Campbell, involves a basic hero's journey where an everyman protagonist is thrust into an extraordinary situation, overcomes all odds and returns home to bestow goods and favor upon their friends and family. Yup, we have plenty of that going on in games.

PBS introduces 'Game/Show,' new webseries analyzing video games originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 28 Aug 2013 02:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

MiamiHerald.com

Detroit man pleads guilty in theft of dad's body The Detroit News Detroit — A man accused of stealing his father's body from a cemetery in the city with the hope of bringing him back to life has pleaded guilty in exchange for avoiding prison. Vincent Bright pleaded guilty Monday to a charge of disinterring a body. He faces ... Man steals corpse in hopes of resurrecting itNew York Daily News Grave Situation: Man Digs Up Father's Corpse Hoping for ResurrectionTIME Detroit man pleads guilty to stealing father's dead bodyUPI.com Detroit Free Press all 39 news articles »

thelookyouredoingthelookagain:

Go, go, go read the reviews of Sherlock Series 3 on Amazon. They are fucking brilliant. Made me laugh aloud.

Quinns: Almost forgot about this! Board game publisher Days of Wonder last month declared that Ticket to Ride, their family train game, had overtaken Settlers of Catan in monthly sales. There's a new biggest board game in town! I set up a phone interview to see what DoW do differently, then loaded it all into my monthly Kotaku column, slipping fact after fact into that hot gaming skillet.

“Part of our brand,” explains the sonorous French voice on the phone, “is coming from the fact we do very few things. Porsche is the most successful car company in the world from the business standpoint, but they do very few models... we take the same approach in the board game business.”

Founder Eric Hautemont also talked about vinyl records, the role of mobile devices in boardgaming and how his company works the exact opposite way from America's other big publisher, Fantasy Flight. Really interesting stuff. Go read!

Read More

ingridmatthews:

Cat inspired yarn!  

Jordan Mechner's 1997 adventure game classic, The Last Express, arrived on Google Play for Android devices this morning. The game is also available on PC and pulled into the iDevice station last September.

The Last Express is set in 1914 on the Orient Express, where people had very little else to do for several days, so they passed the time by getting involved in romance, murder and intrigue. The Last Express is 20 percent off during the game's launch period, so buy a ticket for $3.99.

The Last Express now on Google Play originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 28 Aug 2013 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Simon Pegg and Nick Frost made an appearance on 95.8 Capital FM in London last month to help promote the UK premiere of their film The World’s End. During the visit to the radio station, both Simon and Nick performed a hilarious cover of Daft Punk’s song “Get Lucky.”

Here is the original music video for “Get Lucky“:

videos via 95.8 Capital FM London and Daft Punk

via Nerdist

popular shared this story from Coding Horror.

---

What would you do, if you could do anything?

I don't mean in a fantasy superhero way, but in terms of resources. If someone told you that you now had the resources to attempt to make one thing happen in the world, one real thing, what would that be?

If you're Elon Musk, the patron saint of Hacker News, then you create an electric car and rocket ships. And then propose a hyperloop. Not bad. Not bad at all.

My dream is more modest. I decided to create a keyboard.

I've talked about keyboards here for years, but The CODE Keyboard is the only simple, clean, beautiful backlit mechanical keyboard I've ever found. Because we built it that way.

The name is of course a homage to one of my favorite books.

That's what I've always loved about programming, the thrill of discovering that communicating with other human beings in their code is the true secret to success in writing code for computers. It's all just … code.

CODE
/kōd/
A system of words, letters, figures, or other symbols used to represent others

The projects I've worked on for the last eight years are first and foremost systems for efficiently communicating with other human beings, not computers. Both Stack Exchange and Discourse are deeply concerned with people and words and the code they use to talk to each other. The only way those words arrive on your screen is because someone, somewhere typed them. Now, I've grown to begrudgingly accept the fact that touchscreen keyboards are here to stay, largely because the average person just doesn't need to produce much written communication in a given day. So the on-screen keyboard, along with a generous dollop of autocomplete and autofix, suffices.

But I'm not an average person. You aren't an average person. We aren't average people. We know how to use the most powerful tool on the web – words. Strip away the images and gradients and vectors from even the fanciest web page, and you'll find that the web is mostly words. If you believe, as I do, in the power of words, then keyboards have to be one of the most amazing tools mankind has ever created. Nothing lets you get your thoughts out of your brain and into words faster and more efficiently than a well made keyboard. It's the most subversive thing we've invented since the pen and the printing press, and probably will remain so until we perfect direct brain interfaces.

I was indoctrinated into the keyboard cult when I bought my first computer. But I didn't appreciate it. Few do. The world is awash in terrible, crappy, no name how-cheap-can-we-make-it keyboards. There are a few dozen better mechanical keyboard options out there. I've owned and used at least six different expensive mechanical keyboards, but I wasn't satisfied with any of them, either: they didn't have backlighting, were ugly, had terrible design, or were missing basic functions like media keys.

That's why I originally contacted Weyman Kwong of WASD Keyboards way back in early 2012.* I told him that the state of keyboards was unacceptable to me as a geek, and I proposed a partnership wherein I was willing to work with him to do whatever it takes to produce a truly great mechanical keyboard. Weyman is a hard core keyboard nut who absolutely knows his stuff – I mean, he runs a whole company that sells custom high end mechanical keyboards – but I don't think he had ever met anyone like me before, a guy who was willing to do a no strings attached deal just for the love of an idealized keyboard. At one point over a lunch meeting, he paused, thought a bit, and said:

So … you're like … some kind of geek humanitarian?

I don't know about that.

But I'm not here to sell you a keyboard. Buy, don't buy. It doesn't matter. I'm just happy to live in a world where the first truly great mechanical keyboard finally exists now, in exactly the form it needed to, with every detail just so, and I can type this very post on it. As glorious as that may be, I'm here to sell you on something much more dangerous: the power of words. So whether you decide to use the CODE Keyboard, or any keyboard at all, I'm glad you're thinking about writing words with us.

* Yep, we software guys are spoiled – hardware takes forever.

[advertisement] How are you showing off your awesome? Create a Stack Overflow Careers profile and show off all of your hard work from Stack Overflow, Github, and virtually every other coding site. Who knows, you might even get recruited for a great new position!

Writes our submitter in Philadelphia: “We do not have air-conditioned hallways in my building, so there’s been an ongoing debate on my floor about how open the hallway windows need to be for maximum airflow.” Suddenly…SCIENCE!

related: A/C, windows, and Kelvin’s law of thermodynamics