firehose

Ender’s Game might be a good movie. But I won’t watch it.

I can’t get past Orson Scott Card’s nuttiness. Here he is on how Obama could install Michelle Obama as his successor — via the use of brown shirts:

Where will he get his “national police”? The NaPo will be recruited from “young out-of-work urban men” and it will be hailed as a cure for the economic malaise of the inner cities.

In other words, Obama will put a thin veneer of training and military structure on urban gangs, and send them out to channel their violence against Obama's enemies.

Instead of doing drive-by shootings in their own neighborhoods, these young thugs will do beatings and murders of people “trying to escape” — people who all seem to be leaders and members of groups that oppose Obama.

I don’t want to do anything that might benefit Card.

He makes sure to say that he’s just kidding and it’s all fiction. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t feeding racism and the paranoid style — he is.

A group of researchers from MIT and the University of Ireland has presented a paper (PDF) showing that one of the most important assumptions behind cryptographic security is wrong. As a result, certain encryption-breaking methods will work better than previously thought. "The problem, Médard explains, is that information-theoretic analyses of secure systems have generally used the wrong notion of entropy. They relied on so-called Shannon entropy, named after the founder of information theory, Claude Shannon, who taught at MIT from 1956 to 1978. Shannon entropy is based on the average probability that a given string of bits will occur in a particular type of digital file. In a general-purpose communications system, that’s the right type of entropy to use, because the characteristics of the data traffic will quickly converge to the statistical averages. ... But in cryptography, the real concern isn't with the average case but with the worst case. A codebreaker needs only one reliable correlation between the encrypted and unencrypted versions of a file in order to begin to deduce further correlations. ... In the years since Shannon’s paper, information theorists have developed other notions of entropy, some of which give greater weight to improbable outcomes. Those, it turns out, offer a more accurate picture of the problem of codebreaking. When Médard, Duffy and their students used these alternate measures of entropy, they found that slight deviations from perfect uniformity in source files, which seemed trivial in the light of Shannon entropy, suddenly loomed much larger. The upshot is that a computer turned loose to simply guess correlations between the encrypted and unencrypted versions of a file would make headway much faster than previously expected. 'It’s still exponentially hard, but it’s exponentially easier than we thought,' Duffy says."

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LOS ANGELES—ESPN programming executives announced Wednesday the debut of a new show called The Pulse that will air afternoons on ESPN and evenings on ESPN2 and which will consist of an attractive blonde host reading tweets and Facebook ...

Beep beep

pants -

Daito Giken Koushiki Pachi-slot Simulator (Paon Corporation - DS - 2007)

Rene Ritchie:

People — developers — aren’t just numbers. They have tastes. They have biases. If they didn’t, then all the great iPhone apps of 2008 would have already been written for Symbian, PalmOS, BlackBerry (J2ME), and Windows Mobile years earlier. If they didn’t, then all the great Mac apps would have been migrated to Windows a decade ago.

Mobile isn’t desktop, and 2014 won’t be 2008, but it’s hard to imagine at least some of the same forces that applied to desktop and the early days of mobile won’t also apply now and into the future.

Bingo.

This is also why companies that try to beat developers over the head or pay little bonuses to write for their platform don’t understand developers and won’t attract the best ones.

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After weeks of protesting the ousting of Morsi (forming encampments in Cairo during that time), the Egyptian security forces forcibly broke up the protesters' camps early this morning. Things quickly turned violent, leaving around one hundred people dead, including at least two journalists. The interim President has also declared an indefinite state of emergency, "allowing security forces to arrest and detain civilians indefinitely without charge." The AP reports that clashes are not isolated to Cairo: "Dozens of people have been killed across Egypt Wednesday in clashes between security forces and supporters of Morsi."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Downtown's new food/retail indoor/outdoor mini mall (can I call it that?), Union Way, is rapidly announcing the operational status of a stream of new arrivals: Steven Alan led the way on the retail front, joining fancy candy store Quin, and quickly followed by San Francisco-based denim specialists Self Edge, Spruce Apothecary (from the curatorial forces who brought you Canoe!), and a downtown outpost for Danner.

They also just announced on Friday that Little T is opening a bakery in the complex, Boxer Ramen appears well on its way to completion, and it appears that Eugene-based Will Leather Goods might not be too far behind. I do believe this qualifies as an "explosion."

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With the advent of DC Comics’ New 52, de facto head writer (and DC Entertainment chief creative officer) Geoff Johns took on the unenviable task of reinvigorating DC’s underwater superhero Aquaman. After nearly two years, Johns and his various collaborators have done so with aplomb, and it looks like with November’s landmark 25th issue they’re [...]

Nerval's Lobster writes "For most businesses, data analytics presents an opportunity. But for DARPA, the military agency responsible for developing new technology, so-called 'Big Data' could represent a big threat. DARPA is apparently looking to fund researchers who can 'investigate the national security threat posed by public data available either for purchase or through open sources.' That means developing tools that can evaluate whether a particular public dataset will have a significant impact on national security, as well as blunt the force of that impact if necessary. 'The threat of active data spills and breaches of corporate and government information systems are being addressed by many private, commercial, and government organizations,' reads DARPA's posting on the matter. 'The purpose of this research is to investigate data sources that are readily available for any individual to purchase, mine, and exploit.' As Foreign Policy points out, there's a certain amount of irony in the government soliciting ways to reduce its vulnerability to data exploitation. 'At the time government officials are assuring Americans they have nothing to fear from the National Security Agency poring through their personal records,' the publication wrote, 'the military is worried that Russia or al Qaeda is going to wreak nationwide havoc after combing through people's personal records.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Klein earlier this year told The Oregonian that he and his wife, Melissa, turn down requests to bake cakes for same-sex marriages because that goes against their Christian faith and cited their freedom of religious opinion. He has denied disparaging the couple. Melissa Klein said the complaint was delivered to the bakery Tuesday. She said she and her husband had expected it because the same-sex couple had initially made an inquiry to the state attorney general's office. "It's definitely not discrimination at all. We don't have anything against lesbians or homosexuals," she said. "It has to do with our morals and beliefs. It's so frustrating because we went through all of this in January, when it all came out."

At least once per year, I fly to Las Vegas and completely blow my tubes out for forty eight hours. Alternative realities give you new perspectives on things, so I justify it as personal development.

After uncounted hours of punishment at a craps table, I was in no mood to be placated with complimentary cocktails.  My friend Gabe and I left the casino, willing to pay for our own drinks, if only just to pay the rent for a quiet hour of liquor.

There was a nearby bar that served Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve Bourbon Whiskey, the best Bourbon in the world. The place was quiet and empty - just the environment I wanted at the time - so we sat and ordered our drinks.

As we drank, we chatted with Max, the bartender. This is a man who is truly at the top of the game in barcraft. Pappy Van Winkle Bourbon is incredibly rare, and he taught us about its lineage; we learned that several distilleries acquired casks of the stuff through some odd business transactions and sell it under a different brand name.

Max showed us his specialty cocktail list, things that he’s invented but are off the menu. One of the drinks listed smoke as an ingredient, not liquid smoke flavoring, but actual smoke. Watching Max prepare this drink was almost as amazing as the drink itself - he fired a piece of charcoal - charcoal from the inside of a bourbon cask - with a propane torch and covered it with the glass as it smoked, some of the residue remaining on the inside of the glass.

More people are filtering into the bar now, and as we’re enjoying Max’s expertise, a Bro, sunglasses-on-indoors, hat-sideways, popped-collar and all, comes up to the bar and, entirely unprompted by the bartender, orders his drink.

LEMME GET A CAPTAIN AND COKE BRAH.

Max turns to him and smiles, "sure, coming right up".

And we watched as Max made the hell out of that Captain and Coke. The Bro paid and strutted off to his crew.

We asked Max how he felt about making a Captain and Coke, considering how talented a bartender he is, and how the customer was even kind of a dick.

His response was the personal developmental lesson I took from this Vegas trip.

"No, it doesn’t bother me. If the customer orders Pappy and can talk about fine whiskey, I’ll pour Pappy and talk about fine whiskey. But if the customer orders a Captain and Coke, I’ll make the best Captain and Coke I can."

This guy is truly a master of his craft. He know all the technical details of the domain, and is creative enough to invent fantastic drinks. But beyond all that, most importantly, he knows that barcraft is fundamentally about giving the customer what they want. My friends and I wanted to talk about high end bourbon. Brody McBroderson wanted to get hammered.

The true master obliges both.

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I’ve mastered the Python language, and very nearly mastered PostgreSQL’s every in, out, and what-have-you. Since being acquired by eBay, I’ve been pushing to write all new code in Python, pushing to get PostgreSQL officially supported, pushing in every direction, so long as it was away from Java.

That has been a mistake.

I know Java well enough, so I haven’t been resisting because of my skill set, I resisted Java because it’s enterprisey. Because I thought it was an inferior technology. Because I had a chip on my shoulder about technical superiority.

That’s not mastery, that’s just being a prick, and I’m done with it.

For the last week, I’ve given up Emacs, and am writing Java code in eBay’s modified version of Eclipse, and I don’t hate it. Sure, it has its warts, but it’s not that bad. It’s just different. And I’ve actually been quite productive because there’s so much infrastructure already set up around Java at eBay.

I’m still trying to master the craft, but giving up language bigotry is a huge part of it. I’m not working to make the most efficiently coded, concise solution, I’m working to deliver business value in context. And I’ve found that the vast majority of that work is simply understanding the context.

Now, this may seem obvious. “If you’re working inside a company that’s all Java, of course you should code in Java!” But there’s a more subtle point here:

If you’ve coded in Ruby, Python, or any modern framework language, would you take a job at a Java shop?

I suspect that a lot of people wouldn’t, because of programming language bigotry. I would take a job at a Java shop (I did, in fact, even though I resisted it for two years) because I feel orders of magnitude more useful delivering business value than I feel delivering code.

I’m not there yet, but a software master delivers value, the code is just part of the way there.

Members of Agalloch, YOB, Ludicra, and Hammers of Misfortune form VHÖL. by Ben Salmon

AS SUPERGROUPS GO, the members of VHÖL aren't exactly household names. Which is good, because the West Coast metal quartet isn't interested in being a supergroup.

"We've really tried to keep out of that whole thing and [the idea that] these people are coming together and making this one-off record," drummer Aesop Dekker says in a recent telephone interview. "It's a band. We're rehearsing and we're constantly writing and we're gonna make records until none of us want to do it anymore.

"It's not like a one-off or a side project," Dekker continues, "but VHÖL definitely has to take a backburner to bands that we've all been working on longer and have more of a commitment to. Bands that, in some strange way, pay the bills."

Let's get this out of the way: VHÖL is made up of Dekker, guitarist John Cobbett, bassist Sigrid Sheie, and vocalist Mike Scheidt, each a veteran presence in the metal scene. Dekker also drums in Worm Ouroboros and Portland dark-metal lords Agalloch, and he kept time for the late, great black-metal band Ludicra. Cobbett and Sheie both play in Hammers of Misfortune; Cobbett is also ex-Ludicra. Scheidt is the frontman of Eugene-based doom titans YOB.

VHÖL's parts are so impressive, it's hard to imagine that its whole could measure up. But that didn't stop metal geeks from hotly anticipating the band's self-titled debut, released by Profound Lore Records in April. "I think people had expectations and we knew they couldn't really guess what it was going to sound like," Dekker says. "In a sense, John and I didn't know."

Dekker and Cobbett started VHÖL out of a desire to continue making music together after the dissolution of Ludicra. The initial plan was to make one record and call it good—no touring, no pressure of a follow-up.

"We didn't talk too much about what we wanted it to sound like," Dekker says. "We were more interested in playing really fast than being purely heavy. I think maybe the only thing we ever really talked about was that we wanted to be really fast [and] angular."

Fast is one word for the album. Ferocious is another. VHÖL is a bracing collection of songs that owe as much to old-school hardcore, thrash, and D-beat as any strain of metal the band's members have practiced elsewhere. It's a throwback to an early '80s punk aesthetic powered by 21st-century metal chops. You can practically hear VHÖL melting the crust and grime off the walls.

And while the band itself is brutally tight, Scheidt—who's "one of the best singers in metal," Dekker says—might be the center of this circle pit. His vocals are astounding, rising from burly, blackened growl to classic metal falsetto with ease.

Dekker reiterates that VHÖL will always take a backseat to its members' other bands, but he acknowledges the quartet is already deep into writing its second album. "When John was like, 'Let's make a record and call it quits,' I think in the back of our mind we knew that wasn't really in our nature to do that," says Dekker. "We've always been really careful not to shove a square peg into a round hole, and to just let things happen.

"It's a great way to work," he adds. "It's a little more fluid and it can kind of just be poured into the cracks."

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South Korea’s highly unionized labor force is holding its car makers to ransom, yet again. Workers for the country’s top automaker, Hyundai Motor, and its affiliate Kia Motors have voted to strike, after talks with the management over increased pay and better benefits collapsed. The unions and management now have to enter a mandatory 10-day mediation process involving the country’s labor relations commission.

The Hyundai union’s long list of demands would make auto workers around the world green with envy. Key demands include:

• 130,500 won ($120) increase in basic monthly salary.
• An bonus of eight months’ pay for meeting production targets. (The current bonus is five months.)
• One-off payment equivalent to 30% of Hyundai’s $8.17 billion 2012 profit.
• A 56.25 gram gold medal (worth about $2,400) and a bonus of two months salary for those with over 40 years of service.
• 10 million won for each worker whose children opt not to attend college. (Hyundai pays college tuition fees for workers’ children.)
• Full reimbursement of medical expenses if workers are diagnosed with cancer.

Kia’s union has presented similar proposals. These demands come on top of wages that are already among the highest in the world for the industry. Since 2002, Hyundai workers’ average annual salary has more than doubled to 94 million won. In 2012, the hourly labor costs in Hyundai’s South Korean factories were estimated to be 24,778 won per worker, higher even than in its plants in the US.

Yet despite Korean auto workers’ lavish conditions, strife is a regular feature in the country’s automobile industry. Unions have enjoyed the persistent support and admiration of the public, due to their role in protesting Japanese colonial rule and South Korean dictatorships during the Cold War. Hyundai has faced strikes in all but four of the past 26 years. In 2012,  it had its costliest ever work stoppage when a strike halted production of more than 82,000 cars and led to losses of 1.7 trillion won ($1.5 billion). Hyundai executives admit they contributed to the problem by giving in to most of workers’ demands in the early years, when the carmaker was gunning to become a top-five global manufacturer.

The continued strikes have forced Hyundai to shift more of its production overseas. Hyundai already makes more cars at its overseas plants in places like China, the US, India, and Russia than it does in its three assembly plants at home. It has already opened a third plant in China, which takes its production capacity in the country from 600,000 to 1 million units a year (paywall).

Hyundai is not alone in trying to find a way out of the labor mess in South Korea. This week, senior General Motors executives told Reuters that the company is rethinking its reliance on the island nation as an exports hub. One fifth of GM’s global production is based out of South Korea and nearly 80% of the output is exported. GM too faced protests and walkouts this year over contentious wage negotiations.

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I just posted up a new project: it’s a bot that makes animated GIFs from TV shows and posts them to tumblr. The way it works is pretty simple: I have a video of The Wire and its corresponding subtitle file, which provides dialogue with timestamps. The bot finds some dialogue at random, looks up the timestamps, clips the video, gifs it, and uploads to tumblr.

You can see the tumblr here: http://wirescenes.tumblr.com/

You should know going in that Fading Gigolo is the kind of movie in which an uptown lesbian couple, played by Sharon Stone and Sofia Vergara, pay a guy who looks like John Turturro to have a three-way. And if you can suspend disbelief enough to get through that, you might be ready to accept that Woody Allen plays Turturro’s pimp. Turturro wrote and directed this less-believable, but more charmingly art-house version of HBO's Hung, in which he also plays a cash-strapped florist who finds himself in the unenviable position of having to sleep with a clientele of gorgeous, thirty-and-forty-something actresses and models like Vanessa Paradis and Aurélie Claudel. The inclusion of Allen in a supporting role seems appropriate, as this feels like it could be one of the director’s more modest comedy efforts if it only included a little Dixieland jazz and some Windsor typeface. 

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Call of Duty: Ghosts will include playable female soldiers in the multiplayer campaign, a video in Activision's multiplayer livestream event revealed. Developer Infinity Ward confirmed the addition with a tweet, "Yep, that was a female soldier #GhostsMP."

Infinity Ward's Mark Rubin mentioned the inclusion later on in the event: "And as you saw in the trailer, you can also play as a female soldier."

This is the first time female soldiers are a playable option in multiplayer Call of Duty history.

Call of Duty: Ghosts features female soldiers in multiplayer originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 14 Aug 2013 13:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Aimee Ault from deviantART discovered that some of their stylesheets would fail to load for some users. Turns out those users were

accessing the site from computers with overly sensitive system-wide profanity filters installed. These users' browsers likely stopped parsing the stylesheet entirely upon reaching the word in the stylesheet, leading to a fairly ugly and/or broken page.

Ideally you have a build system that compresses CSS and removes comments, but if for whatever reason you ship CSS with comments in it, don't swear.

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Don’t Swear in Your Stylesheets is a post from CSS-Tricks

Pet cat’s DNA helps convict owner who killed his friend after an argument - Crime - UK - The Independent:

A killer who stabbed his friend after an argument has been jailed for life after he was identified by the hairs of his own pet cat which were found on the victim’s dismembered body.

The conviction of David Hilder – with the help of eight hairs from Tinker the cat – was the first time that a new DNA database had been used in a homicide case.

(via Relish Class Unlocks the Secrets of Canning | The Somerville Beat)

Our guide into the world of canning was Sam Musher (pictured above), food preservationist extraordinaire. Musher, a teacher, spends her summers preserving a bounty of fresh food so she can enjoy local produce year-round. She has years of experience canning and preserving food and put everyone at ease that it was highly unlikely we would sicken ourselves or others when canning jams, pickles and other food.

Marvel senior vice president of publishing Tom Brevoort confirmed exclusively to CBR that Matt Fraction is scaling back his duties on "Fantastic Four" and "FF" due to the scheduling demands of "Inhumanity."