firehose

The NFL has declared war on fanny packs.

ABC News

Texas state Senate passes abortion restrictions Washington Post The Texas Senate voted 19-11 early Saturday to pass sweeping restrictions on abortions, the conclusion of a weeks-long standoff over reproductive rights in the state. Although the bill's passage was all but assured, opponents still turned out in droves. Texas Senate Vote Puts Bill Restricting Abortion Over Final HurdleNew York Times Texas Senate gives final passage to abortion billNBCNews.com Latest Texas news, sports, business and entertainmentKRGV Austin American-Statesman -STLtoday.com -Minneapolis Star Tribune all 1,344 news articles »

cold fjord writes "From the Examiner: '...the second-largest employer in America is Kelly Services, a temporary work provider. ... part-time jobs are at an all-time high, with 28 million Americans now working part-time. ... There are now a record number of Americans with temporary jobs. Approximately 2.7 million, in fact. And the trend has been growing. ... Temp jobs made up about 10 percent of the jobs lost during the Great Recession, but now make up a tenth of the jobs in the United States. In fact, nearly one-fifth of all jobs gained since the recession ended have been temporary.' The NYT has a chart detailing the problem."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In keeping with every Community-related story—in which any bit of good news is quickly tempered by not-so-great news—Vulture is reporting that the show’s fifth season featuring lots more Dan Harmon will also feature a lot less Donald Glover. Hints that Glover might not be committed to a full-blown return next year began surfacing in June, after the site suggested Glover wanted to devote more time to rapping as Childish Gambino to a crowd of people yelling, “Hey, how come you’re not on Community?” Now it looks as though that may be the reality, as Vulture says Glover will likely only appear in five of the upcoming 13 episodes—a compromise that will allow Sony to save money by not having to pay Glover for every episode. Indeed, with the cost cutting from that and not having to cover Chevy Chase’s salary anymore, Community could ...

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Clayton Seymour, a Navy vet, was outraged to discover that his Freedom of Information Act request to the NSA to see his file was rejected because telling him what information they'd gathered in secret would expose their secret information-gathering techniques. Obama's 2009 Executive Order 13526 requires all government agencies to make all records public, other than in exceptional circumstances. The NSA has effectively crammed all of its information into an exceptional circumstance because to disclose anything would lead to disclosure of its methods. This is the basis on which it is rejecting all FOIA requests.

snydeq writes "Changes in Microsoft's forthcoming upgrade to Windows 8 reveal the dark underbelly of Microsoft's evolving agenda, one that finds pieces of Windows 8 inexplicably disappearing and a new feature that allows Microsoft to track your local searches cropping up, InfoWorld's Woody Leonhard reports. 'As Windows 8.1 Milestone Preview testers push and prod their way into the dark corners of Windows 8.1 "Blue," they're finding a bunch of things that go bump in the night. From new and likely unwelcome features, to nudges into the Microsoft data tracking sphere, to entire lopped-off pieces of Windows 8, it looks like Microsoft is changing Windows to further its own agenda.'" A lot of the stuff the article gripes about are what Google has been doing for ages with Android: requiring a Microsoft account, funneling users to their services first, tracking your system usage, etc.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alex the dog seemingly “breakdances” by putting three of his paws together and spinning around with his fourth.

video via PETSAMI

via Cute Overload, Neatorama

Wow, this completely flew past my radar. I need to upgrade to a Hyperwave Decoder. So the team behind Massive Chalice, an upcoming tactical/RPG/strategy/game/thing, occasionally show off other games that inspired them while talking about their project in live streams. And in one of them they featured OpenXcom! Check it out! And check out their project too, it looks pretty cool.

Watch live video from doublefine on TwitchTV

(starts at 00:09:30)

judge puts temporary hold on Wisconsin abortion law Isthmus Daily Page Judge William Conley in a temporary restraining order issued Monday: "Plaintiffs are likely to succeed in demonstrating that the regulation poses an undue burden on women seeking abortions in Wisconsin because it will have the effect (if not also the ... and more »

First time accepted submitter Kingston writes "In a radical change to the English National Curriculum, Michael Gove, the Education Secretary has announced ambitious changes to the technology syllabus. Children will be introduced to programming and debugging from the age of 5. Secondary schools ( age 11 and up ) will be required to have a 3D printer and introduce children to laser cutters and robotics in the design and technology course. The much derided ICT ( Information and Communications Technology ) subject will be overhauled to teach 'several" programming languages to children so that they can 'design, use and evaluate computational abstractions that model the state and behavior of real-world problems and physical systems.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With three months now passed since the Boston Marathon bombing, the details of that day have, naturally, been lost to the ages, capable of being summoned by only the most dedicated scholars of history. But soon, as with so many events shrouded and distorted by misty memory, they will be brought to cinematic life, so that we may experience them again—and, arguably, for the first time: The Fighter screenwriters Eric Johnson and Paul Tamasy are hoping to return to that film’s milieu by optioning the feature rights to Boston Strong, Casey Sherman and Dave Wedge’s yet-to-be-published account of the bombing that so affected our long-ago ancestors of April.

Like the book, the film will focus on the city’s reaction in the immediate aftermath, and the Boston police’s ensuing manhunt for the perpetrators using the limited means of their early 2013 technology. No directors or Wahlbergs ...

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chicksdaddy writes with news of a Proof-of-Concept exploit for the recent Android APK signature vulnerability. From the article: "Pau Oliva Fora, a security researcher for the firm Via Forensics, published a small, proof of concept module on GitHub that exploits the flaw in the way Android verifies the authenticity of signed mobile applications. The flaw was first disclosed last week by Jeff Forristal, the Chief Technology Officer at Bluebox Security, ahead of a presentation at the Black Hat Briefings in August. ... The simple program leverages APKTool, an open source tool for reverse engineering Android applications — decompiling and then recompiling their contents. His script allows a user to select and then decompile a legitimate Android application and then recompile it, creating an altered, 'malicious' APK that will have the same, cryptographic signature as the original file. In an e-mail statement, Google said that a patch for Forristal's vulnerability was provided to Google's OEM and carrier partners in March, and that some (Samsung) have already shipping a patched version of Android to customers. However, that response hasn't been universal — a reflection of Android's fragmented install base."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

atexbigs05:

 You are what you choose to be. You choose. Choose.

tamamuratamao:

when people who support ‘gay rights’ say that a girl is faking her bisexuality

when people who support ‘gay rights’ are transphobic as fuck

when people who support ‘gay rights’ don’t believe asexuality exists

LGBTQA isn’t just the G and sometimes the L

Involved with the rave scene since the 1980s, Matthew Johnson has started the Rave Flyer and Poster Preservation Project as a way to curate and safely store original rave (and disco) flyers and posters in a “climate controlled environment.” All the flyers and posters are also scanned at a high resolution and shared online. Donations to the collection are being taken.

Thanks M!

If you love the look of plants on your desk, but have a nasty habit of killing them through neglect, consider this faux greenery as an alternative. What look like tall blades of grass are actually unfortunately-named Pooleaf pens with long wisps of silicone coming off the end.

They’re just $5 each, which isn’t too shabby, until you realize you’ll actually have to spend well over $100 to fill a pot to recreate the beautiful lawn effect. On the plus side, it will be incredibly obvious if someone steals one of your pens. [via Gizmodo]

Everyone knows that beer is God's drink of choice, but not everyone knows that God's beer of choice is a Boston lager named after puritanical founding father Samuel Adams. The Boston Beer Company, which owns Sam Adams, was recently forced to address a glaring error in their Fourth of July-themed advertisement: the ad omits any mention to God (or rather "their Creator").

Read more...

Situated in the western reaches of Tokyo, the Okutama Ropeway has been abandoned for nearly half a century.

Opened in 1962, the plan was presumably to tap into the massive population located a relatively short journey away, but the visitors never materialised. Or certainly not in the required numbers. The ropeway’s short, 600 metre, 6 minute hop from one seemingly random spot on a reservoir to another, clearly not enough to draw the crowds. And so, just 4 years later, it closed, leaving the two cable cars to sit where they were left on that very last day — silent and forever passenger-less.

Beautiful.

Strangely peaceful objects.

Objects that in their secluded, now very natural settings, make for lovely sights. And despite the massive financial losses the project must have suffered. Not to mention the disintegration of at least one persons dream. They are, unlike many haikyo/abandoned places, genuinely nice spots to visit.

[championkid]

On Aug. 1, 2010, Alexander was working for a payroll software company. She was estranged from her husband, Rico Gray, and had a restraining order against him, even though they'd had a baby together just nine days before. Thinking he was gone, she went to their former home to retrieve the rest of her clothes, family members said.

An argument ensued, and Alexander said she feared for her life when she went out to her vehicle and retrieved the gun she legally owned. She came back inside and ended up firing a shot into the wall, which ricocheted into the ceiling.

Gray testified that he saw Alexander point the gun at him and looked away before she fired the shot. He claims she was the aggressor, and he had begged her to put away the weapon.

A judge threw out Alexander's "stand your ground" self-defense claim, noting that she could have run out of the house to escape her husband but instead got the gun and went back inside. Alexander rejected a plea deal that would have resulted in a three-year prison sentence and chose to go to trial. A jury deliberated 12 minutes before convicting her.

Original Source

For Slacktory, Bryan Menegus has made a supercut video of all the pie and coffee scenes in David Lynch’s early 1990s television series Twin Peaks. Slacktory also created a pie chart (get it?) of the frequency of on-screen coffee sips taken by each Twin Peaks character.

image and video via Slacktory

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy

#soundstudies !!!

Pushing a small wooden train around a track with one pudgy toddler hand, the sound of a steam engine choo-choo-ing from your mouth. Winding up a music box and holding it to your ear as a mysterious apparatus within plucks a recognizable series of chords from a steel comb. Whether of the Chugga Chugga Express or of a tiny mechanical orchestra, both a music box and a toy train set cast children in the role of a conductor. But what if these different types of conducting could be merged into a single educational experience?

That’s the idea behind the Sound Track, a mash-up that aims to teach kids how music works while it simultaneously teaches them motor skills. A wooden train set with a music box’s revolving cylinder for an engine, the Sound Track is a fantastic example of a great design that sat on the shelf for years until the right company came along to make it a reality.

The concept of the Sound Track was born back in 2009, when Ricardo Seola, a Brazilian student taking an industrial design course at Scuolda Politecnica di Design, in Milan, was asked to create a toy for children as his final project.

As a musician, Seola knew from the beginning that he wanted to make a toy that promoted the same fascination with music he himself had felt from an early age. "One of the most important aspects of my childhood was playing with musical toys," Seola remembers. "I wanted to come up with an intuitive toy, where every action made while playing it produced a clear musical reaction."

All sorts of companies contacted me looking to sell the Sound Track. But none of them wanted to develop it.

To a kid, making music can seem very mysterious, but the fundamental love of playing around with different sounds and listening to how they sound when strung fluidly together is something every musician and composer discovers first in childhood. "I wanted a toy that allowed children to discover for themselves how music was actually made."

At first, Seola chose a train as the vehicle for his concept for symbolic reasons: iI’s a classic kid’s toy with a popular musical heritage in children’s songs. But a train noisily going down a railroad made up of a diverse series of tracks is a satisfying metaphor for the way music itself is played. The concept coalesced itself around the train as a symbol.

Seola’s original design envisioned a wooden train with its cowcatcher replaced with the tuned teeth of a music box. Whereas a music box plays songs by passing these teeth over a revolving cylinder speckled with upraised notes, Seola wanted his train tracks to accomplish the same task.

His concept completed, Seola uploaded a crude video of what he called "The Original Sound Track" to YouTube, which soon after went viral on Twitter and various design sites.

Soon offers started pouring in to make the Seola a reality. There was only one problem.

"All sorts of companies contacted me looking to sell the Sound Track," Seola says. "But none of them wanted to develop it, and for a toy like this, engineering is crucial. It started as a design concept, not a mass-market product. If I could make it myself, I would have."

The Internet is full of concept designs that touch the popular imagination for a few days, only to have that imagination go unharvested. After a couple of years of quickening obscurity, Seola’s musical train seemed like it was on track for just that fate.

As one last try to get the Sound Track off the ground, the designer decided to submit the idea to Quirky, a New York–based company that socially develops interesting concepts with the goal of making invention accessible to everyone. Within six months of uploading the project, the Sound Track was on its way to becoming a reality.

"Quirky perfected the Sound Track," Seola says. "They took my concept and made it commercial without compromising what I was trying to create."

Improving upon Seola’s design, Quirky’s product engineers repositioned the Sound Track’s music-making comb and added a killer feature Seola had never thought of: the ability for kids to “reprogram” the train set’s tracks with any song they wanted, just by shifting pegs into different positions. Kids can either set the Sound Track to play classic nursery rhymes like "Mary Had a Little Lamb," or they can write songs of their own, which the train will then play back for them as they push it along the track.

"Kids love to see things happen right in front of their eyes, and hear things happen with their ears," Seola says. "Music is so important for kids: it helps them develop important self-expression skills and improves their self-esteem. Since 2009, I’ve gotten emails from parents around the world asking where they can buy the Sound Track for their kids. And now, thanks to Quirky, I’m finally able to answer them."

The Sound Track should be available for purchase from Quirky later this year.

Original Source

It’s no secret that the world of high-tech, more so than other parts of the American workforce, is plagued by a gender gap. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

New York magazine gave the actor a bunch of things to read on camera, including tweets by Ryan Lochte, a list of porn titles, and some lines of James Franco's from Spring Breakers.

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