firehose

Two weeks ago, the Guardian published two new Snowden documents. These outline how the NSA's data-collection procedures allow it to collect lots of data on Americans, and how the FISA court fails to provide oversight over these procedures.

The documents are complicated, but I strongly recommend that people read both the Guardian analysis and the EFF analysis -- and possibly the USA Today story.

Frustratingly, this has not become a major news story. It isn't being widely reported in the media, and most people don't know about it. At this point, the only aspect of the Snowden story that is in the news is the personal story. The press seems to have had its fill of the far more important policy issues.

I don't know what there is that can be done about this, but it's how we all lose.

Hot on the heels of both their first new song in forever and the departure of longtime bassist Kim Deal, The Pixies announced today that they've got a new bass player—Kim Shattuck of The Pandoras and, later, The Muffs, who were kinda great—and a bunch of new tour dates, and even some new songs. The dates are only in Europe so far (see below), but the press release says the tour will "give them the opportunity to do something they haven't been able to do in two decades: premiere brand new Pixies songs, the first collection of new material since 1991's Trompe Le Monde." There's nothing more than that on this "collection of new material," but it surely hints that there will be a new album. (And also gives credence to the notion that Deal was the one who didn't want to make ...

Trashcanland

Oh, Canada

After nearly two decades of public trading, ownership of Steinway Musical Instruments will once again be a solo performance.

The legendary maker of Steinway pianos said it has accepted a $438 million offer from Kohlberg & Co., a private equity firm. The offer represents a 15% premium over the company’s market capitalization at the end of trading on Friday.

The company, which, in addition to pianos, makes orchestral instruments such as French horns and saxophones, has struggled to recover from the recession.

In a statement, Kohlberg said it plans to expand Steinway outside the United States. The company’s sales are mostly in the US and Germany, where the first pianos were made by the company’s founder, Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg.

Libble Rabble (Namco - FM Towns Marty - 1983)

denymetanol:

Libble Rabble and Micomsoft’s Dual Pad (Tomada con Instagram)

Mention item_lookup in the README.

Nancy wonders:

What is the proper etiquette when encountering someone on the train with an Aaron Hernandez jersey? Ignore? Eye roll? Smdh?

Original Source

Release Date: 18 November 1995, Japan

Sometime in the “near future,” a cybernetic assault team who works for a mysterious government agency called Section 9 is hot on the trail of a hacker known as the Puppet Master. Their lead officer, Motoko Kusanagi, leads the team to chase down a garbage man who has had contact with the Puppet Master. Unfortunately after the garbage man is captured, they learn his memories have been erased.

Elsewhere, a facility is hacked to produce a robotic female body, a gynoid. A consciousness is downloaded into the gynoid “shell” and it escapes the facility. When it is accidentally run down by a truck, Section 9 recovers the gynoid to learn if it contains the Puppet Master. Before they can do so, a competing agency called Section 6 storms in and takes it, explaining they had the shell made to lure the Puppet Master in. Section 6 agents load the gynoid into a car and speed away.

Suspicious, Section 9 investigates, only to discover that the Puppet Master is not a person but an artificial intelligence created by Section 6 to conduct illegal activities across the internet, including “ghost-hacking” into people’s minds. Kusanagi follows the Section 6 car to a hangar, where she confronts a powerful R-3000 “spider tank” guardian. She is almost killed, but survives to face the Puppet Master via a brain-to-brain link. In conversation with the Puppet Master, Kusanagi learns that it envies human mortality and the ability to reproduce, and that it wants to merge with her to create a new being. As they begin the process, Section 6 assaults the hangar, killing most everyone inside. One of Kusanagi’s team, Batou, manages to survive, rescue Kusanagi’s severed head, and escape, later attaching the head to a new robotic body, that of a female child. In the final scene, Kusanagi tells Batou that she has become, in fact, a blend of her former self and the Puppet Master AI.

NOTE: In the book Make It So the authors had deliberately eschewed reviewing hand-drawn interfaces for reasons that are explained in the first chapter. Though a full-scale foray into anime is not yet planned, this is a first step towards branching out from live-action and 3D-animated sci-fi to include more of it here in the online database.

06/26/13 the usa of pizza

Original Source

Making payment arrangements with Tom Nook

Notice how Lyle turns away as the punchline is delivered, like “Oh shhhhhh-". S/O to TheKyyubi. Keep bangin’.

BUY Animal Crossing: New Leaf, AC:NL guide, upcoming games

It was a lot easier than I imagined it would be to add a chronologic home page to Kim's blog.

Like everyone else, I looked at Kyle's blog for an example.

• The trick everyone uses that most newbies probably don't know, goes like this.
• Choose Open by name in the File menu in Fargo.
• Enter kyle, click OK.
• Now you're looking at the Fargo source of his blog.

How it works

• You can tell Trex how to render the home page without there actually being a headline for the home page. This was the key idea.
• Just put the following # directive at the top level:
• #type "blogHome"
• You can also set the text of this fictitious headline.
• #text "Kim Parker's blog"
• And you can say how many items there should be on the home page.
• #bloghomeItemCount "10"

That's it, that's all I had to do to make the home page of Kim's blog into a reverse-chronologic list of blog posts with full text. Pretty cooool! :-)

More than 14 million Egyptians flooded the streets of Cairo this weekend in protest against President Mohamed Morsi.

Yes, we all love portal guns and crowbars, but there’s one piece of video game paraphernalia that could conceivably be a useful piece of hardware for the modern technologist. It’s the Pip-Boy 3000, the wrist-wearable computer from Fallout, and now you can print on on your 3D printer.

All the pieces for this Pip-Boy are available over on Thingiverse. Included in those files are a dozen plastic parts that, when assembled, come together to form a wrist-mounted computer. You could, of course, print out a static image of a Pip-Boy screen for this build, but [dragonator] made a little addition to his model – he put in a space for a smartphone, so all your environmental sensors and inventory management also work with this 3D printed model.

This is far from the first wearable Pip-Boy we’ve seen, but it is the first that’s able to be fabricated on a 3D printer, and comes with the nice bonus of being the best phone case ever. It’s still a lot of work to put this together, but we’re going to say the results are fantastic.

You can check out the demo video of the Pip-Boy below.

Mach Rider (Nintendo - NES - 1985)

theofmoviestills:

Django Unchained | Quentin Tarantino | 2012