firehose

NFL Commissioner: 'Redskins' Is Positive Indian Country Today Media Network Ten members of Congress sent a letter May 13 to Daniel Snyder, owner of the NFL's Washington, D.C., franchise, urging him to change the club's name. Similar letters were sent to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, FedEx President and Chief Executive ... and more »

One of my favorite patterns in our industry is when the old and established are wiped out by disruption, irrelevance, or changing fashions. Like a forest fire, clearing out the old is very destructive and shouldn’t be taken lightly. But what’s left behind is a clean slate and immense opportunity.

I don’t think we’ve ever had such an opportunity en masse on iOS. After what we saw of iOS 7 yesterday, I believe this fall, we’ll get our chance.

The App Store is crowded: almost every common app type is well-served by at least one or two dominant players. They’ve been able to keep their leads by evolving alongside iOS: when the OS would add a new API or icon size, developers could just add them incrementally and be done with it. Established players only became more established.

iOS 7 is different. It isn’t just a new skin: it introduces entirely new navigational and structural standards far beyond the extent of any previous UI changes. Existing apps can support iOS 7 fairly easily without looking broken, but they’ll look and feel ancient. Their developers are in a tough position:

• Most can’t afford to drop support for iOS 6 yet. (Many apps still need to support iOS 5. Some unlucky souls even need to support 4.3.) So they need to design for backwards compatibility, which will be extremely limiting in iOS 7.
• Most can’t afford to write two separate interfaces. (It’s a terrible idea anyway.)
• Most have established features or designs that won’t fit well into a good iOS 7 design and will need to be redesigned or removed, which many existing customers (or the developers themselves) will resist.

I don’t think most developers of mature, non-trivial apps are going to have an easy time migrating them well to iOS 7. Even if they overcome the technical barriers, the resulting apps just won’t look and feel right. They won’t fool anyone.

This is great news.

Apple has set fire to iOS. Everything’s in flux. Those with the least to lose have the most to gain, because this fall, hundreds of millions of people will start demanding apps for a platform with thousands of old, stale players and not many new, nimble alternatives. If you want to enter a category that’s crowded on iOS 6, and you’re one of the few that exclusively targets iOS 7, your app can look better, work better, and be faster and cheaper to develop than most competing apps.

This big of an opportunity doesn’t come often — we’re lucky to see one every 3–5 years. Anyone can march right into an established category with a huge advantage if they have the audacity to be exclusively modern.

I’ll be invading one as soon as I can. Here’s hoping I’m right.

The-review

NYC woman helps track suspect in father's killing Wall Street Journal NEW YORK — An aspiring New York City actress has helped police track down a suspect in her father's 1986 slaying. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly on Tuesday applauded the efforts of Joselyn Martinez, whose online detective work helped ... NY woman helps track suspect in dad's 1986 killing - Quincy Herald-Whig ...Quincy Herald Whig NY woman helps track suspect in dad's 1986 killing - WRCBtv.com ...WRCB-TV NY woman helps track suspect in dad's 1986 killingKTVU San Francisco all 106 news articles »

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one Media Conglomerate to dissolve the political bands which have connected it with Ridiculousness, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. MTV, VH1, and CMT hold these truths to be self-evident: That Music Videos and Love And Hip-Hop are created equal, that Music is endowed by its Creators with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty from whines of “Why doesn’t anyone make Music Videos anymore?”, and the pursuit of Happiness—such as the Happiness granted to employees of Viacom Media Networks who get to take a long weekend because someone else is monitoring a 12-hour feed of music programming on July 4, 2013.

Therefore, the representatives of Music Television, Video Hits One, and Country Music Television, in General Congress, solemnly declare ...

Read more

iFixit has posted its teardown of the new 13-inch MacBook Air that was launched earlier this week at Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference.

image via iFixit

Thanks to the sustainable garden that is environmentally conscious hipster tropes, Portlandia will go on for at least two more seasons, the network announced today, keeping it on the cleaner air that everyone could have if they just biked more through early 2015. The renewal comes on the heels of Fred Armisen’s recent low-key exit from Saturday Night Live, and suggests an effort on IFC’s part to lock that shit down before he once again decides to slip off somewhere unannounced. It’s also obviously welcome news for Portland, guaranteeing a continued booming business for the city’s progressive stereotype manufacturing plants. “Our smokestacks will be happily belching forth mustache wax and artisanal soap carvings for many moons to come!” Portland’s industrial tycoons are saying right now. 

Read more

Gorilla Skull, Irving Penn

Watcha want

Let them rest in peace

Ignore the sensationalist headline. This article is a good summary of the need for trust in IT, and provides some ideas for how to enable more of it.

Virtually everything we work with on a day-to-day basis is built by someone else. Avoiding insanity requires trusting those who designed, developed and manufactured the instruments of our daily existence.

All these other industries we rely on have evolved codes of conduct, regulations, and ultimately laws to ensure minimum quality, reliability and trust. In this light, I find the modern technosphere's complete disdain for obtaining and retaining trust baffling, arrogant and at times enraging.

Chinese bloggers got on the wrong side of censors this week when they likened an image of Presidents Xi and Obama at the Sunnylands estate in California to a picture of the popular children’s cartoon characters Winnie the Pooh and Tigger. The image was swiftly deleted from the micro-blogging site Sina Weibo, almost as quickly as a photoshopped picture of Chinese leaders doing Gangnam Style.

As the South China Morning Post pointed out, if China’s social media censors had a little more of a sense of humor, perhaps Xi-the-Pooh would have done much to endear China’s serious leader to his populace, while helping to repair the world’s largely negative image of China.

image by @dtsomp

WTSP 10 News

Missing Pa. Mom Who Was Found in Fla.... ABC News A mother who disappeared from her central Pennsylvania home in 2002 and was later declared legally dead before resurfacing in Florida has been sent to jail on a probation violation. The Pensacola News Journal reports ( http://on.pnj.com/11eQTdg ) that ... Brenda Heist, who disappeared from Lititz home 11 years ago, sentenced to jailLancaster Newspapers all 13 news articles »

Houston Chronicle

Southern Baptists condemn Boy Scouts over admission of gays Fox News HOUSTON – The nation's largest Protestant denomination stopped short of calling for its member churches to boycott the Boy Scouts, but voiced strong opposition to acceptance of gay scouts - with a top church leader predicting at the annual gathering of ... Southern Baptists officially oppose gay Scout ruleMiamiHerald.com Southern Baptists condemn gay Scouts policy but won't force a boycottReligion News Service 7 from 7: Stories for your Wednesday afternoonKLTV KUT News -Chicago Tribune -Houston Chronicle all 252 news articles »

Props to this guy.

I bought a fake tombstone from Rite-Aid to use in our funeral service for Google Reader. :(

By ANDREW JACOBS | Published: June 11, 2013

MASANJIA, China — The cry for help, a neatly folded letter stuffed inside a package of Halloween decorations sold at Kmart, traveled 5,000 miles from China into the hands of a mother of two in Oregon.

Scrawling in wobbly English on a sheet of onionskin paper, the writer said he was imprisoned at a labor camp in this northeastern Chinese town, where he said inmates toiled seven days a week, their 15-hour days haunted by sadistic guards.

“Sir: If you occasionally buy this product, please kindly resend this letter to the World Human Right Organization,” said the note, which was tucked between two ersatz tombstones and fell out when the woman, Julie Keith, opened the box in her living room last October. “Thousands people here who are under the persicution of the Chinese Communist Party Government will thank and remember you forever.”

The letter drew international news media coverage and widespread attention to China’s opaque system of “re-education through labor,” a collection of penal colonies where petty criminals, religious offenders and critics of the government can be given up to four-year sentences by the police without trial.

But the letter writer remained a mystery, the subject of speculation over whether he or she was a real inmate or a creative activist simply trying to draw attention to the issue.

Last month, though, during an interview to discuss China’s labor camps, a 47-year-old former inmate at the Masanjia camp said he was the letter’s author. The man, a Beijing resident and adherent of Falun Gong, the outlawed spiritual practice, said it was one of 20 such letters he secretly wrote over the course of two years. He then stashed them inside products whose English-language packaging, he said, made it likely they were destined for the West.

“For a long time I would fantasize about some of the letters being discovered overseas, but over time I just gave up hope and forgot about them,” said the man, who asked that only his surname, Zhang, be published for fear of reprisal.

He knew well the practices of the camp in question, which was corroborated by other inmates, and he spoke as other inmates did of their work preparing mock tombstones. His handwriting and modest knowledge of English matched those of the letter, although it was impossible to know for sure whether there were perhaps other letter writers, one of whose messages might have reached Oregon.

If Mr. Zhang’s account truly explains the letter’s origin, the feat represents one of the more successful campaigns by a follower of the Falun Gong movement, which is known for its high-profile attempts to embarrass the Chinese government after being labeled a cult and outlawed in 1999.

Emboldened by an unusually open public debate in China that has broken out here in recent months over the future of re-education through labor, scores of former inmates have come forward to tell their stories. In interviews with more than a dozen people who were imprisoned at Masanjia and other camps around the country, they described a catalog of horrific abuse, including frequent beatings, days of sleep deprivation and prisoners chained up in painful positions for weeks on end.

Several former inmates recounted the death of a fellow inmate, either from suicide or an illness that went untreated by prison officials.

“Sometimes the guards would drag me around by my hair or apply electric batons to my skin for so long, the smell of burning flesh would fill the room,” said Chen Shenchun, 55, who was given a two-year sentence for refusing to give up a petition campaign aimed at recovering unpaid wages from her accounting job at a state-owned factory.

According to former inmates, roughly half of Masanjia’s population is made up of Falun Gong practitioners or members of underground churches, with the rest a smattering of prostitutes, drug addicts and petitioners whose efforts to seek redress for perceived injustices had become an embarrassment for their hometown officials.

All agreed that the worst abuse was directed at Falun Gong members who refused to renounce their faith. In addition to the electric shocks, they said, guards would tie their limbs to four beds, and gradually kick the beds farther apart. Some inmates would be left that way for days, unfed and lying in their own excrement.

“I still can’t forget the pleas and howling,” said Liu Hua, 51, a petitioner who was imprisoned at Masanjia on three separate occasions. “That place is a living hell.”

Even if they found the work exhausting, many inmates described the time spent in Masanjia’s workshops as a respite from mistreatment or the hours of “re-education classes” that often entailed an endless recitation of camp rules or the singing of patriotic songs while standing in the broiling sun.

Much of the work involved producing clothing for the domestic market or uniforms for the People’s Armed Police. But inmates say they also assembled Christmas wreaths bound for South Korea, coat linings stuffed with duck feathers that were labeled “Made in Italy” and silk flowers that guards insisted would be sold in the United States. “Whenever we were making goods for export, they would say, ‘You better take extra care with these,' ” said Jia Yahui, 44, a former inmate who now lives in New York.

Corinna-Barbara Francis, China researcher at Amnesty International, said that given the abundant money-making opportunities, abolishing or significantly reforming the system would prove daunting. In addition to the profits earned from the inmate labor, prison employees often solicit bribes for early release, or for better treatment, from the families of those incarcerated. “Given the serious money being made in these places, the economic incentive to keep the system going is really powerful,” she said.

During labor shortages, inmates say Masanjia officials simply buy small-time offenders from other cities on a sliding scale that begins at 800 renminbi, or about $130, for six months of labor. They include people like Zhang Ling, a 25-year-old from the eastern coastal city of Dalian who said she was among a group of 50 young women rounded up by the police last May during a crackdown on illegal pyramid sales schemes and then sold to Masanjia. While there, she sewed buttons on military uniforms but was released 10 months early after a brother paid for her release.

Masanjia officials did not respond to faxes and phone calls requesting an interview. Approached one recent afternoon, a half-dozen guards on a cigarette break outside the women’s work camp refused to answer any questions. One guard, however, made a point of correcting the way a question was phrased. “There are no prisoners here,” she said sternly. “They are all students.”

Sears Holdings, the owner of Kmart, declined to make an executive available for an interview. But in a brief statement, a company spokesman, Howard Riefs, said an internal investigation prompted by the discovery of the letter uncovered no violations of company rules that bar the use of forced labor. He declined to provide the name of the Chinese factory that produced the item, a $29.99 set of Halloween decorations called “Totally Ghoul” that include plastic spiders, synthetic cobwebs and a “bloody cloth.”

Although he was released from Masanjia in 2010, Mr. Zhang, the man who said he wrote the letter, has vivid memories of producing the plastic foam headstones, which were made to look old by painting them with a sponge. “It was an especially difficult task,” he said. “If the results were not to the liking of the guards, they would make us do them again.” He estimated that inmates produced at least 1,000 headstones during the year he worked on them.

His letter-writing subterfuge was complicated and risky. Barred from having pens and paper, Mr. Zhang said he stole a set from a desk one day while cleaning a prison office. He worked while his cellmates slept, he said, taking care not to wake those inmates — often drug addicts or convicted thieves — whose job it was to keep the others in line. He would roll up the letter and hide it inside the hollow steel bars of his bunk bed, he said.

There it would remain, sometimes for weeks, until a product designated for export was ready for packing. “Too early and it could fall out, too late and there would be no way to get it inside the box,” said Mr. Zhang, a technology professional who studied English in college.His account of life in the camp matched those of other inmates who said they produced the same Halloween-themed items.

Last December, Ms. Keith, the woman who bought the product in 2011 but did not open it until the following year, sent the letter she found to the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, which said it would look into the matter. An agency spokesman, citing protocol, said that he could not confirm whether an investigation was under way, but that such cases generally took a long time to pursue.

For Ms. Keith, a manager at Goodwill Industries, the experience has been sobering. She said she previously knew little about China, except that most of the household goods she bought were made there. “When that note popped out and my daughter picked it up, I was skeptical that it was real,” she said. “But then I Googled Masanjia and realized, ‘Whoa, this is not a good place.' ”

Shi Da contributed research.

Original Source

They are lowest on the totem pole, lack any kind of job security and assigned work no one else wants to do. But for almost $6,000 per month, who cares?

What if I got a hammock?

Item no: 8332066 | 886237004253

$49.99

 

4.7

(14 reviews)

Original Source

You’ll soon be able to send messages into outer space — but some experts are worried about who’s listening, and what they’ll do when they hear you.

They’re not a 2600, but the Atari 400, 800 and 1200 are awesome computers in their own right. With only BASIC built in to the ROM, they’re not especially useful or fun, as [Jeroen] found out when he acquired an 800 with a broken tape drive. There are options that allow you to load emulator files from a PC, but [Jeroen] wanted something more compact. He came up with a way to load games and apps off an SD card using a simple microcontroller.

The 400, 800, and 1200 each have a port that allows the computer to talk to printers, modems, disk drives, and load games. There are already a few circuits around that connect the SIO port to a computer so games can be loaded, but [Jeroen] wanted a more compact and portable solution for his 800.

What he came up with is actually pretty simple; just an Arduino, SD card, and an LCD display that allows him to browse the directory on the SD card and load it into the 800′s memory.

A lot of folks over on the Atariage forums are really impressed with [Jeroen]‘s work, and would like to get their hands on one of these boards themselves. The project isn’t done just yet – [Jeroen] still needs to make a case for his device – but hopefully he’ll be spinning a few boards up in the coming months.

You can see a pair of videos of the device in action below.

Filed under: Arduino Hacks

Jony Ive redesigns Apple Logo

Earlier this week at Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference, the company unveiled its new mobile operating system iOS 7, which has been completely rebuilt by Apple lead designer Jony Ive with a flatter, less skeumorphic design and a pastel color palette. The response to the redesign has been mixed, and graphic designer Sasha Agapov has created a humorous Tumblr blog that shows what it would look like if Jony Ive redesigned other things like logos, games, buildings, and music albums. Head over to Jony Ive Redesigns Things for more hilarious examples.

Jony Ive redesigns America

Jony Ive redesigns Breaking Bad

Jony Ive redesigns Dollar Bill

Jony Ive redesigns Google

Jony Ive redesigns Tetris

images via Jony Ive Redesigns Things

via Animal New York

ObsessiveMathsFreak writes "Ireland's own SOPA Act has finally struck home. Today, the Irish High Court ordered all ISPs to begin censoring the The Pirate Bay. After earlier attempts were struck down, this case was brought by EMI, Sony, Warner Music and Universal music under new copyright laws brought in last year. This follows the largest ISP Eircom already having voluntarily blocked the Pirate Bay after previous legal action. Despite some early indications that some ISPs would appeal the decision, it now appears that like Eircom, they have quietly given up. Pity; IT was one of the few industries Ireland was getting right."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“Save lives. Be seen, be safe!”

San Francisco-based design entrepreneur and HALO Belt Company founder Vincent Pilot Ng has created the HALO Mini, an illuminated series of collars designed to help keep you pets safe from harm. The neon red, blue or green collar comes in either a small and large size, has a 75 hour battery life and can be recharged in approximately 2 hours. Vincent has started a fundraising campaign on Kickstarter to help make the safety collar a reality.

What is HALO MINI?

HALO MINI is an ULTRA HIGH QUALITY illuminated pet collar. LED pet collars have been on the market for years, however, most of them are made using cheap nylon materials with LEDs that are just as bad. We have re-designed and created an ultra high quality illuminating collar using our custom patented illumination system. Just like our HALO BELT, each HALO MINI is designed to illuminate in bright neon colors. The purpose of the HALO MINI is to keep our loved ones safe when outside at night… looking awesome is a bonus!

Here is a video of a cute Husky dog singing while wearing his blue HALO Mini:

HALO Mini (blue – large)

HALO Mini – (green – small)

HALO Mini (red and green – small)

images and videos via HALO Mini – Illuminated Pet Collars

via The Gadget Flow