firehose

Picture a creaking ship. Disgruntled sailors. Cheating merchants. Toss in a bit of gunpowder and boredom and you have yourself the beginnings of our modern-day alcohol “proof” system.

WASHINGTON—Shortly after turning in dissenting opinions in landmark federal rulings today that struck down the Defense of Marriage Act and conferred full federal benefits to married same-sex couples, Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence T...

Since Valve's Linux gaming announcements last year, many game modders have been looking for Source SDK to be supported under Linux. Valve today released Source SDK 2013 and it now supports Linux as well as OS X...

If McCarthy is put to death in Huntsville as planned, she would become the 500th person executed in Texas since the state resumed carrying out the death penalty in 1982. The 52-year-old also would be the first woman executed in the U.S. since 2010.

During a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month event at the Pentagon today, the highest-ranking openly gay member of the Defense Department described his experiences witnessing the evolution of the law that banned openly gay service members, from its implementation to its eventual repeal.

Acting Air Force Secretary Eric Fanning noted the significance of Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel kicking off the DOD’s pride celebration, as just two years ago, gay and lesbian service members could not openly serve in the military.

Absent an association like DOD Pride to lend support, Fanning described the difficulties and sense of isolation that he and others at the Pentagon endured as the repeal process ran its course. “There were no other open LGBT appointees, and anyone serving openly in uniform was surely in the process of being discharged,” he said.

Fanning began working in the Pentagon 20 years ago, a time he described as a personally painful experience as DOD began to implement the law that came to be known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

“It was a deeply conflicting time for me,” the Air Force’s top civilian official said. “I was launching a career with strong support from amazing bosses who knew about my personal life. … I was being given opportunities that were being denied to people just like me. I was working for an institution that discriminated -- against people just like me.”

He also recalled how during that time, people spoke about gays and lesbians in “blistering and emotional ways,” denigrating them for simply wanting the right to serve their country while being honest about who they were.

Still, Fanning said, the military underwent the difficult process of opening doors to those it previously denied or constrained: women, immigrants looking to prove their patriotism and earn their citizenship, and to gays and lesbians.

“At times, it seemed agonizingly slow, or even that we were losing ground,” Fanning said. “But never once did we doubt we were on the right path.”

Relying on the diverse talents of a broader pool of people who are willing and able to serve has fortified the military, Fanning explained. “We are stronger for looking more like the society we are charged with protecting, and we are today … the finest military the world has ever known,” he said.

In the two years leading up to the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” the debate had a remarkably different tone, due in great part to the support of the president and the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Navy Adm. Mike Mullen.

"I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens,” the admiral testified before Congress. “It comes down to integrity -- theirs as individuals and ours as an institution.”

Looking back to almost two decades earlier as a junior aide, Fanning said, he could never imagine having a chairman say things like Mullen did.

Fanning said most people had begun to accept the possibility of repeal long before it occurred, though he was fortunate enough to be present when the president signed the historic document.

Among the celebrations and congratulations, he said, many supporters asked what it was like to be in the Pentagon after the repeal.

“I answered honestly, and I think disappointingly, that … we went back to the building, and in my view, the building had already moved on past the decision and we talked about what we talk about every single day: the budget,” he said in a deadpan tone.

Fanning also said he’s received a bit of attention since he was nominated to be undersecretary of the Air Force -- not all of it welcome, some quite negative, and some that he described as “rather imaginative.”

“Many have speculated as to my agenda, what color I'll paint the planes, what designs I have on the uniforms,” he said. But like almost everyone else, he added, he remains focused on simply doing his job, and chiding comments are dwarfed by the outpouring of support he’s received in and out of the Pentagon.

“It reminds me that, as important as events like this are for our community, they're also important opportunities for our allies to identify themselves and to let us know they're right alongside us,” Fanning said. “Events like this give voice not just to us, but to those who support us.”
 

AirShowFan sez, "Insightful article about the protests in Brazil, which make clear that it's absurd for a government to spend billions in public funds for sports tournaments that (a) bring no clear benefits to the country and (b) violate citizens' rights. Boing Boing readers will be familiar with the many unreasonable demands made by the International Olympic Committee to their hosts, from restricted use of the word 'Olympic' to disallowing political speech. (The article recaps these issues by describing the trials of people who violated such rules during the recent World Cup in South Africa). Key take-away: If current trends continue, these games will soon only agree to be hosted by the (hopefully decreasing) number of nations with overly authoritative regimes."

In another development Thursday, police in Providence, R.I., said Hernandez was taunted in May by a man at a nightclub near the Brown University campus but walked away. The man followed Hernandez for three blocks and a crowd formed, held back by police while Hernandez got into his vehicle and left.

In 1938, poor Miss Mary V. Ford of Searcy, Arkansas received this rejection letter from Walt Disney Productions letting her know that women have no chance of working in the creative area of their Inking and Painting Department and only a smidgen of a chance of tracing and filling in celluloids, “the only work open to women.” The letter, ironically signed by a different woman named “Mary,” was discovered by Ms. Ford’s grandson Kevin Burg after she died. A few years after this letter was sent, a woman by the name of Retta Scott joined Disney and became their first female animator. Her first project was creating art for the 1942 film Bambi.

image via Kevin Burg

via Business Insider, HRLori

Windows 8.1 will be the first OS to support 3-D printing natively on desktops and tablets. “Our thinking was, let’s make this as easy as writing and printing a Word document,” says Shanen Boettcher, general manager at Microsoft’s Startup Business Group.

The Supreme Court said it may continue to bar gay marriages even beyond the 25-day period if proponents of Proposition 8, the state's gay marriage ban, ask for a rehearing.

"Her shows got replaced by my shows, so we have a lot of people not happy with me right now, as if I had anything to do with it."

Confirming anew that you should never choose a title for your TV show that can be used against you ironically, MTV has canceled Zach Stone Is Gonna Be Famous after one season, effectively declaring that, no, no he is not. The freshman series starred comedian Bo Burnham as a teen who graduates high school and eschews college for a stab at reality TV stardom, hiring a camera crew to follow him around in his quest to become an overnight celebrity, despite a complete lack of merit. “After careful consideration of many factors, we have ultimately decided not to move forward with an additional season of the series,” the network said in a statement, with one of those “factors” presumably being the rapidly dawning realization that, hey, talentless, self-absorbed teens looking for stardom at whatever cost is sort of their business model.

Still, another factor would be its ratings, as Zach ...

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Quinns has again been published on gaming enormo-blog Kotaku, talking about a wonder of the board game world! This month he discusses how, unlike video games, it doesn't matter how good you are at boardgames. The article starts like this:

I remember a colleague taking a 5 minute break, away from the jittery job of reviewing Battlefield 2. “It’s fun when you win,” he said, exhausted. “And boring when you lose. Haven’t we moved past that yet?”

No, we haven’t. For a medium that’s evolved from play, video games have an overwhelmingly binary view of success and failure, one so crippling that if we settle into a single player game and make no progress, or lose every multiplayer match in one night, our lives will have been worsened. And we never ask why games are like this. After all, how else could it be?

Board games have the answer.

...and continues vigorously until it stops. Quinns would point you towards the article himself, but he's currently in hiding from furious gamer-gangs, who cry his name on every street corner. Go read! Don't let his sacrifice be in vain.

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Hey! It's finally drunky-boomstick-meat-and-patriotism season in America! Check out the calendar!

For some people (mainly hillbillies and pyromaniacs), that means it's time for the annual pilgrimage to Vancouver and its plentiful pop-up fireworks emporiums, where arch-hillbillies huckster you to death on dirt roads and under dusty skies.

For everyone else, aside from the illicit joys of an illegal neighborhood light-and-sound show on the night of July 4 itself (and only that night), it's a recipe for weeks of noise and nuisance, especially for veterans and pet owners and parents of light-sleeping babies (same difference).

And, so, Portland's fire and police chiefs have drawn from the city's social-media budget to remind you that all the cool fireworks are illegal in Oregon and also to beg you not to buy them and/or light them on fire.

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New submitter sobolwolf writes "It has been apparent for some time that many developers (mainly theme designers) are split-licensing PHP-based GPL distributions, releasing proprietary files alongside GPL files with the excuse that CSS, JavaScript and Images are 'immunized' from the GPL because they run in the browser and not on the server. This is almost always done to limit the distribution of the entire release, not just the proprietary items (most extensions will not function in any meaningful way without the accompanying CSS, Images and JavaScript). Some of the more popular PHP-based GPL projects, like WordPress, have gone as far as to apply sanctions to developers distributing split-licensed themes/plugins. Others, such as Joomla, have openly embraced the split-licensed model, even changing their extension directory submission rules to cater specifically to split-licensed distributions. In light of all this, I would like to ask the following question: While it seems to be legal to offer split-licensed GPL distributions, is it in the spirit of the GPL for a project such as Joomla (whose governing body has the motto 'Open Source Matters') to openly embrace such a practice when they can easily require that all CSS, Images and JavaScript be GPL (or GPL-compatible) for extensions that are listed on the Joomla Extensions Directory?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

1. Denial
“Marriage was created by the hand of God. No man, not even a Supreme Court, can undo what a holy God has instituted,” Michele Bachmann said in a statement to the press.

…

5. Acceptance
Rand Paul: "I would tell people who are for traditional marriage: the battle is lost at the federal level; concentrate on your state."

Gay-marriage foes going through stages of grief

Okay, technically not the first, since a Russian version of this went up a few places yesterday before Fox pulled it, but that was okay, because, you know. Russian. Now it's in English! I can't wait for this thing because it's written by Cormac McCarthy, who has never let me down, and only moderately concerned about it because it's directed by Ridley Scott, who... eh, let's just say he has let some people down. With McCarthy's first original screenplay and a cast like this, though, I'm guessing it's gonna be pretty hard for anyone to screw this thing up.

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Daft Punk has released a ten-minute remix of their popular single “Get Lucky” from their album Random Access Memories. The track is currently streaming on Spotify.

image by Daft Punk via Spotify

Thanks Brad Jennings!

According to reports from friends, colleagues, and former bandmates, drummer Alan Myers has died. Myers, Devo’s “human metronome” during the band’s commercial and creative peak, had been battling cancer.

Appearing on every Devo LP released between the band’s full-length debut, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, and 1984’s Shout, Myers was recruited to join the band following the departure of its second drummer, Jim Mothersbaugh. Eschewing the motorik-inspired patterns of the band’s new-wave and post-punk peers, Myers’ playing on early Devo releases is alternately straightforward and slyly complex, an analog cog within an increasingly digital machine. Though Devo’s focus on the visual complements to their music could make the band seem like a detached art-school prank (which, to be fair, it was at times), Myers smuggled a hint of swing into herky jerky anthems like “The Day My Baby Gave Me ...

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Australia's first woman prime minister was subjected to vituperative, ugly, blatant sexism from the start of her tumultuous tenure

Three years almost to the day the Australian Labor party sharpened its collective knives, ousted Kevin Rudd as leader and installed Julia Gillard as the nation's 27th – and first woman — prime minister. At 7pm on Wednesday, in an equally spectacular and bloody knifing, Rudd returned the political favour, wresting the leadership from his nemesis by a decisive 57 votes to 45.

The poll, held behind closed doors, ends one of the most tumultuous prime ministerial tenures in the nation's modern history, and ensures that, if nothing else, the word "brutal" will become the default adjective to describe Labor politics, Aussie style.

Gillard's demise, viewed from afar, seems as surreal and extraordinary as her election on 24 June 2010. Then Australia – a nation still so defined by its predominantly male icons, from Ned Kelly to the muscle-bound lifesavers of Bondi beach – seemed ready to embrace a woman at the helm: a tough, unabashedly childless, "what you see is what you get" woman leader to boot.

And yet in retrospect, signs that female leadership of an Australian government would attract this unprecedented level of public opprobrium dished out to Gillard were already there in spades.

Just five years before her elevation to the leadership, Gillard, then deputy PM, endured an extraordinary savaging at the hands of the media when a series of photographs taken in the kitchen of her home led to widespread condemnation. Implicit in the criticism was an unsightly workaholism and ambition: that if her kitchen benches were so clean and tidy they could not be truly used. Not long afterwards, an MP from the conservative Liberal benches alleged she was "deliberately barren", apparently suggesting this meant she lacked proper qualifications to lead a nation. Incredibly, these were not one-off gaffes.

Since then, every aspect of Gillard the woman – from her voice and proudly broad Australian accent to her clothing (just last week a female newspaper reporter criticised her modest neckline for revealing "too much cleavage" for the parliament), and even the sexuality of her long-time partner – has been subject to public comment.

And not just comment but vituperative, ugly, blatant sexism of a kind that culminated two weeks ago, in a Liberal party fundraising dinner menu offering "Julia Gillard Kentucky Fried Quail – Small Breasts, Huge Thighs & A Big Red Box." Those responsible ducked for cover while the stunt made headlines the world over.

And this week, indeed just 24 hours before her dramatic loss to Rudd, Gillard was once again in the news, not for a policy announcement but for a photo shoot in a women's magazine. It was apparently the idea of her spin doctors, desperate to build bridges with a demographic of conservative, older women deemed to have been alienated by the prime minister's robust discussion of feminism – but Gillard was pilloried for being snapped knitting.

In most scenarios Gillard's tenacity and courage in the face of a kind of scrutiny and ugly voyeurism no male leader ever had to endure should have played well with at least half the electorate. Instead, faced with a hostile media and leading a minority government, she seems to have been utterly unable to communicate her legislative achievements, seemingly drowned out by the maelstrom of attention to her gender – and the never-ending destabilising conjecture about her rival's ambitions. Wave after wave of opinion polls has suggested that Labor, under Gillard, would face catastrophic defeat in the September general election.

And so it is that on Wednesday night, a spooked Labor party allowed Kevin Rudd to wreak his karmic revenge.

Of course, few will remember that in 2007, as Labor celebrations roared into the night after Rudd toppled John Howard, the long serving Liberal prime minister, a Rudd insider was quoted as saying: "He will be a nightmare but he was the only chance of winning the election." Today, six years later, that prescient observation has been played out, and Rudd is once again Labor's only chance.

Meanwhile, Australia has shown the world that it is not yet ready for a woman leader.

Wired

End of a Dark Era? NIH to Retire Most Research Chimps Wired Some of the fine print remains to be translated, but the writing is on the wall for invasive, government-supported chimpanzee research in the United States: At long last, it's coming to an end. The National Institutes of Health today announced that 310 captive ... Most research chimpanzees to be retired from government studiesCBS News NIH to retire most chimps from medical researchExponent-telegram all 100 news articles »