firehose

Nerdfest writes "Bruce Schneier writes in The Atlantic: 'Bluntly: The government has commandeered the Internet. Most of the largest Internet companies provide information to the NSA, betraying their users. Some, as we've learned, fight and lose. Others cooperate, either out of patriotism or because they believe it's easier that way. I have one message to the executives of those companies: fight.'"

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WASHINGTON—A new study published Monday by the University of New Mexico confirmed that the name of the Washington Redskins is only offensive if you take any amount of time whatsoever to think about its actual meaning.

HOLLYWOOD—As pre-production continues on the third installment of the action franchise, sources confirmed Monday that the cast of Expendables 3 has asked to be paid solely in steroids and slabs of raw meat.

JERUSALEM—As part of their continuing efforts to bring peace to the conflict-stricken region, Israeli government officials announced today the construction of a new settlement on Palestinian lands where future peace talks can be held.

LOS ANGELES—To celebrate his contributions to television and remember the tragic circumstances that surrounded his death, the Teen Choice Awards posthumously honored Cory Monteith Sunday by giving him a surfboard.

By the end of 2013, most 35mm film distribution in the United States will cease, replaced by widespread digital projection. Aside from the consequences of visual fidelity and print circulation to small theaters throughout the country, one big side effect of the switch will be the potential loss of drive-in theaters. The 300-plus drive-ins across the country have already taken a huge hit in the past few decades, and now with the move to digital projection, only around 10% have made the costly projection switch that would keep them in business past the end of this year. As part of a tie-in for Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs 2, Honda is attempting to save at least five theaters with Project Drive-In, a campaign aimed at preserving a classic part of car culture.

“Cars and drive-in theaters go hand-in-hand, and it’s our mission to save this decades-old slice of ...

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San Francisco, 1938

Wired recently posted a gallery of rare vintage maps, including a Russian-produced map of the San Francisco Bay Area from the Cold War, and a 1959 Farsi-language map of America made for the U.S. government for propaganda purposes. The maps reside in the Prelinger Library, a small San Francisco library that houses some 75,000 books, maps, and other ephemera mostly from the United States.

United States, 1959

San Francisco, 1980

A very smart little dog in Kobe, Japan has figured out that he can play fetch with himself by simply bringing his ball upstream, dropping it into the water and then running downstream to catch it.

video via Ryan Faw

via reddit, Daily Pick and Flicks

While Canonical engineers keep raising discussions about swapping Mozilla Firefox for Google's Chromium as the default web-browser for Ubuntu Linux, the 13.10 release will continue using Firefox by default...

With the $5 billion INS Vikrant, India joins a select group of nations that have built their own aircraft carriers.

After 4½ days of deliberations, the jury decided he took part in 11 of those murders, along with nearly all the other crimes, as well as a laundry list of other counts, including possession of machine guns. One woman in the gallery taunted Bulger as he was being led away, apparently imitating machine-gun fire as she yelled: "Rat-a-tat-tat, Whitey!"

A man who shot the driver of a Metro bus on Monday also fired at police as he fled through downtown Seattle and was shot by officers after he boarded another bus, police said. The officers had to make a "life-and-death" decision whether to shoot the suspect on the second bus carrying about 15 passengers, Seattle Assistant Police Chief Paul McDonagh told reporters at the scene. "I believe they made the right choice," he said. The wounded, 67-year-old driver was in satisfactory condition at Harborview Medical Center, and the suspect was in critical condition, hospital spokeswoman Leila Gray said. Their names were not immediately released. Two officers and several passengers on the second bus suffered minor injuries. There were bullet holes in the windows, suggesting they might have been hit by flying glass.

jaded-mandarin:

Isabel de Borbón, reina de España, primera esposa de Felipe IV, 1620.

After more than a month of Vin Diesel stoking speculation that he would appear in a Marvel movie, we finally appear to have an answer to the question we weren’t really asking, because it didn’t involve a space raccoon. Over the weekend, Diesel posted a now-deleted photo of Guardians Of The Galaxy’s Groot, and Deadline has since confirmed Vin Diesel is indeed in negotiations to be a gnarled trunk of man who gurgles monosyllabically from a wooden larynx, but this time in space. Diesel has relevant experience voicing the title character in The Iron Giant, another extraterrestrial with limited vocabulary and a cannibalistic appetite. Here he’d also be getting paid handsomely to wring emotion out of a single line—specifically “I am Groot,” which his character says with different inflections, signifying everything from being Groot to being Groot. And as long as we’re taking ...

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A judge ruled on Monday the New York Police Department's "stop-and-frisk" crime-fighting tactic unconstitutional, dealing a stinging rebuke to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who had argued the practice drove down the city's crime rate. U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin called it "indirect racial profiling" because it targeted racially defined groups, resulting in the disproportionate and discriminatory stopping of tens of thousands of blacks and Hispanics while the city highest officials "turned a blind eye," she said. "No one should live in fear of being stopped whenever he leaves his home to go about the activities of daily life," Scheindlin wrote in her opinion.

The Plan for Greater Baghdad was a project done by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright for a cultural center, opera house, and university on the outskirts of Baghdad, Iraq, in 1957-58. The most thoroughly developed aspects of the plan were the opera house, which would have been built on an island in the middle of the Tigris together with museums and a towering gilded statue of Harun al-Rashid, and the university. Due to the 1958 collapse of the Hashemite monarchy, development of the project stopped, and it was never built.

Jeff Mandel, the IT expert-turned-shoemaker, has a new home for his ExIT Shoes business, and it's pretty darn romantic: He is now ensconced on the second floor of Union Station.

There he's continuing to make handmade shoes—for cycling, in an early 20th century vintage style, as well as custom street footwear for men and women. His techniques are purist and traditional, from the Italian vegetable tanned leather he uses to the hand techniques he learned under the European masters of the art. If you want to check it out (or even if you've just never been onto the second floor of Portland's pretty vintage train station), he's having an open house in the new studio this Friday, August 16 from 5-8 pm (precise location: 800 NW 6th Ave., #207).

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Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by a new movie coming out that week. This week: The Texas outlaw saga Ain’t Them Bodies Saints has us thinking back on some of our favorite on-the-lam movies.

You Only Live Once (1937)

The cruel hand of fate conspires with the crueler hand of society to destroy Henry Fonda’s ex-con in You Only Live Once, an early 1937 film noir from Fritz Lang. Regardless of the hopeful plans of young lovers, there’s no escaping death in Lang’s tale, which begins with Fonda’s three-time-offender being released from prison into the arms of Sylvia Sidney—secretary to the public defender—who despite warnings from her boss, Barton MacLane, attempts to establish a normal married life with Fonda. Such domestic reveries, however, are torn asunder by Fonda’s inability to escape his past criminal reputation; slandered at every step ...

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Chris Brown’s team is blaming “nonstop negativity” for the singer’s reported seizure last week. Brown allegedly suffered the seizure Friday morning at around 1 a.m., prompting someone on staff at the Record Plant recording studio in Los Angeles to call 911. Brown refused treatment from EMTs when they arrived, and later tweeted that “they won’t love u until u r a memory…”—ostensibly referring to both his health scare and his recent threat that he would quit making music. 

Brown’s team is blaming not only that “nonstop negativity” for the non-epileptic seizure, but also Brown’s “intense fatigue and extreme emotional stress” due to the “continued onslaught of unfounded legal matters.” Brown spent a little time in an L.A. prison last week, over a probation violation stemming from a May hit-and-run incident. 

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Lots of sports stadiums have instituted Draconian new rules. Here are the rules for St. Louis Rams games:

Fans will be able to carry the following style and size bag, package, or container at stadium plaza areas, stadium gates, or when approaching queue lines of fans awaiting entry into the stadium:

• Bags that are clear plastic, vinyl or PVC and do not exceed 12” x 6” x 12.” (Official NFL team logo clear plastic tote bags are available through club merchandise outlets or at nflshop.com), or

• One-gallon clear plastic freezer bag (Ziploc bag or similar).

• Small clutch bags, approximately the size of a hand, with or without a handle or strap, may be carried into the stadium along with one of the clear bag options.

• An exception will be made for medically necessary items after proper inspection at a gate designated for this purpose.

Prohibited items include, but are not limited to: purses larger than a clutch bag, coolers, briefcases, backpacks, fanny packs, cinch bags, luggage of any kind, seat cushions, computer bags and camera bags or any bag larger than the permissible size.

Of course you're supposed to think this is about terrorism. My guess is that this is to help protect the security of the profits at the concession stands.

Achewood strip for Friday, August 9, 2013

laughingsquid:

Eye of Sauron Desk Lamp

Spotsetter is an iOS app created by Simple Rules Inc. that recommends places based on personalized reviews, photos, and comments from friends who have visited the location. The app is currently available to download from the iTunes App Store.

images via Spotsetter

This is Katharine Burr Blodgett, the first woman to get a PhD in physics from Cambridge in addition to being the first woman scientist to join the GE Research Laboratory. She's known widely as the inventor of "invisible glass." "But most glass is invisible anyway," I hear you say. "It's glass." Well you can back that assumption right up, because KBB here figured out how to make glass mostly non-reflective and therefore, yes, nearly invisible. Behind the cut you'll find another awesome lady hailing from GE's past. This one worked with jet engines. Jet engines, you guys.

One of the most difficult struggles of my thirties has been my attempts to come to terms with the way punks try so hard to keep each other down.  Needless to say, when you see a guy and he’s 40 and he’s still rocking his alterna-style (the dreadhawk is the punk rock equivalent of the comb-over) it’s just sad.  It’s okay to drink away your 20s and party hearty and be a wastoid on your parents’ money, but at a certain point you gotta stop taking and start giving to the world; to say that the system sucks and it’s no use trying is a low-down cop-out.  It’s moral immaturity.  The world has always sucked, people have always been shitty, now what are you going to do about it?  If nobody ever tried to bring some goodness to the world, it would be a lot shittier than it is now.  If you think that’s impossible, you’re one pampered son of a bitch.

So the party looks a lot better on Saturday night than on Sunday morning, and the same goes with being a punk in your 30’s, but here’s what really gets me:  As soon as anybody becomes successful with their art or activisim or DIY idea, all their “friends” who are do-nothing wastoids gang up to shit on them and try to drag them back down into do-nothingness.  How many bands have you seen practice and get better and draw a crowd and finally hit the big time and what does everybody say?  “They sold out”.  Like the only way you can remain true to your punk roots is to be bad at what you do, never improve, make shitty music, and have nobody come to your show.

What goes for music goes for activism too.  I spent more than ten years going to collective meetings and grassroots protests and passing the talking stick and you know what?  Nothing ever got accomplished.  I heard a bunch of whiny wanna-be worldchangers speak their mind and nothing got done.  People thought only in terms of black and white, consensus without vestment is the worst possible way to make a decision, and there was more witch-hunting and attempted mission derailment than work or activism.

I used to volunteer for a bicycle cooperative.  They made decisions based on consensus, but didn’t require any vestment. Well you already know that people make more considered decision when their ass is on the line.  Otherwise, somebody who is completely uninformed can walk in off the street and filibuster any decision by refusing to consent.

This group wanted to send a volunteer to their recipient charity in Africa.  The idea was that they could get a better sense of what was needed over there. I raised the funds and spent six months in the jungle.  When I came back and gave my report, it was completely disregarded.  Instead, one of the major players wanted the bike coop to have a film festival (his own particular wagon to hitch to that pony) and the group ended up yanking funding from the recipient because the guy who ran it also owned a gas station, and to bike activists gas=bad, no matter what, and I guess the guy was just supposed to be broke or something.  So a bunch of first-world white people denied thousands of bikes to needy Africans because the guy handing them out owned a gas station. Great job, folks.

I used to work for a large-scale public street-puppetry company, and part of their funding came from Boeing.  So I took Boeing’s money, made it into magic, and gave the magic for free to kids of all colors on the streets of Chicago.  SELLOUT!

I also did an episode of a TV show for National Geographic where they paid me to build something I always wanted to try, a clockwork motorcycle.  SELLOUT!  Listen, as a gizmologist, it would have been supremely stupid of me to turn down that opportunity.  Other people would kill for it, and if I didn’t do it on the basis of some principle I would be a moron.  Besides, it ain’t Monsanto, it’s the National Fucking Geographic.  Probably the most environmental force in the world that doesn’t just preach to the choir, a pro-earth magazine with a conservative reader base.  Boy did the couch-sitting punks come out of the woodwork to accuse me of selling out on that one.  Folks who couldn’t ever imagine having to make that decision, because nobody was ever going to offer them that chance, because they never had an idea.

What these kids don’t understand, as they elaborately remove their cell phone batteries because the Feds are surely listening in to thwart their banner drop, is that there are millions of dollars in grant money out there from organizations that do legitimate, worldwide good and they’re dying to give the money to someone passionate with a cause.  Your banner drop does nothing.  A straw that filters water does something.  A cheap pair of eyeglasses that can be dialed in by the wearer does something.  A shipping container of bicycles does something.  Can you believe I even took shit for shipping bikes to Africa because I used fossil fuel to do it?  Never mind that a supercontainer ship produces the same carbon footprint shipping a container to Africa as you do walking around and breathing for two weeks.  Massive efficiencies to be had there.  You wanna help, kill yourself, you do-nothing shitwig trustafarian hippie-crit.

Acknowledging that there is a system in place, even if it is flawed, and learning to navigate that system is part of being a grown-up.

"I take the subway when I can — fast, cheap, and easy. And when I do, I am always working. In fact, en-route to and from the Planetarium, I take less-crowded trains and routes, even if longer, assuring a seat for me to get work done. The universe can be quite demanding of my time."

Verdicts have been reached in the federal racketeering and conspiracy trial of James (Whitey) Bulger.