firehose

The winner of last month's $590 million Powerball jackpot is an 84-year-old woman from Zephyrhills, Fla.

anglosexualsunited:

i like where this man’s priorities lie

noface ilu

tonyarceus777:

Sooo booored… ;_; No one’s online that wants to talk to me, it seems. XD I’m just trying to figure out how to pass the time as of now. c:

Kara Swisher of AllThingsD has just made a convincing case that Yahoo is at least thinking about acquiring Foursquare, the location-based social network. Swisher has her own reasons for believing a deal could at least be on the table—including the fact that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is such a big fan of Foursquare that she tried to acquire it when she was at Google.

If a deal is ever announced, we’re unlikely to know Mayer’s logic until 20 years hence, when her autobiography is climbing the charts of Google-Glass-based vooks. But say you could be a fly on the wall of Yahoo’s boardroom. Here’s what Mayer’s personal checklist for whether or not to acquire a company might look like.

1. Millennials? Check

The stereotypical Foursquare user is a tech-forward 20-something who wants to retake his or her crown as “mayor” (i.e., most frequent visitor) of the local artisanal coffee shop. At least one analysis pegs Foursquare’s biggest fans as, instead, women between the age of 35 and 44—but whatever, it’s perception that counts.

2. Makes no money? Check

Foursquare is not public about its financials, but it appears that, like Yahoo’s most recent acquisition, Tumblr, it basically doesn’t make money.

3. Mobile focus? Check

Like every other web service on the planet, Yahoo is going mobile. Acquisitions completed in the past year include mobile gaming studio Loki and to-do app Astrid, and Tumblr has been doing well enough on mobile devices that the site introduced mobile ads just before Yahoo’s acquisition. Foursquare is even better: it wouldn’t exist without mobile phones that can work out where they are on a map.

4. Nerdy, twee, hoodie-wearing male founder? Check

Sure, this is true of most tech startups, but just look at these two.

5. Could the company actually make money under Yahoo? Check

Like Tumblr’s rabid fan base, Foursquare has something going for it that makes it uniquely valuable. That’s its location data, which it shares with companies like Instagram and sells to various advertisers. While Yahoo’s approach to making Tumblr pay for itself is to load the site up with ads, the approach would probably be different with Foursquare, which only has 33 million users. Yahoo could use Foursquare’s technology and data to beef up its web search, by offering people search results based on where they are. Or maybe Yahoo could just make Foursquare profitable through ads, since Yahoo, being bigger, can more easily negotiate deals with advertisers.

Using this checklist, it should be possible to figure out some other companies Yahoo might acquire. Social question-answering service Quora is another site that makes no money and has suitably twee founders, and it’s been at least two years since they declared that the site is not for sale. The difference, of course, is that Foursquare has taken on more than $112 million in funding including $41 million of debt, and without significant revenue in sight, needs to find an exit. (Quora has taken on $61 million in funding but, being a younger company, doesn’t appear to be experiencing the same pressures as Foursquare—yet.) Considering Yahoo’s acquisition spree, Swisher is justified in speculating that it could be the buyer.

LOS ANGELES—In just the latest in a series of whirlwind romances, sources confirmed today that singer-songwriter Taylor Swift entered an alternate universe parallel to our own earlier this week and stepped out with famed English powerlifter George H...

9 MUST-FOLLOW Al-Qaeda Leaders On Twitter

Etherwalk writes "Huang Chengqing, China's top internet security official, alleged that cyberattacks on China from people in the U.S. are as serious as those from China on the U.S. 'We have mountains of data, if we wanted to accuse the U.S., but it's not helpful in solving the problem.' Huang, however, does not necessarily attribute them to the U.S. government just because they came from U.S. soil, and he thinks Washington should extend the same courtesy. 'They advocated cases that they never let us know about. Some cases can be addressed if they had talked to us, why not let us know? It is not a constructive train of thought to solve problems.' In response to the recent theft of U.S. military designs, he replied with an observation whose obviousness is worthy of Captain Hammer: 'Even following the general principle of secret-keeping, it should not have been linked to the Internet.'" A few experts think China's more cooperative attitude has come about precisely because the U.S. government has gone public with hacking allegations.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A husky overdramatically plays dead, howling before it falls to the ground in this video uploaded by The Slightly Warped. This dog deserves an Oscar.

via reddit, Daily Picks and Flicks

ST. LOUIS—Having earlier in the day set his Gchat status to “invisible,” local man Jeff Young, 29, reportedly spent his Wednesday afternoon monitoring the comings and goings of his various online contacts as a silent and unknowable obser...

Apple has been keeping a tight leash on the third generation of their Apple TV hardware. Not only has it stood up to every attempt at a Jailbreak, but they don’t allow 3rd party applications through the app store like the other iOS hardware does. The second generation hardware was a popular platform for XBMC. It required a jailbreak to load the home media software which is why it can’t be done on the newest box. But here’s an alternative. This hack uses DNS redirects to make Apple TV 3 a Plex frontend.

Instead of putting new software on the Apple TV this uses a separate computer to intercept its web traffic. You aim your Apple TV DNS at the computer running the script, then use the native Movie Trailer app, which will be populated with movies and TV shows from your Plex backend. All other functionality will be retained, making for a near-perfect solution. For more info on the system check out this forum.

[via Gigaom via Reddit]

Filed under: home entertainment hacks

Silicon Valley is so over land.

Why did the Nazis believe that their Aryan ancestors once lived in the Bolivian Andes? Matt Gildner explains with a tale of racial science, nationalism, and the occult in the shadow of Tiwanaku, one of South America’s greatest archaeological ruins.

Willow (Capcom - NES - 1989)

note this is a completely different game than the arcade Willow

Lars Christensen has a theory of airport security:

…my theory is that if you meet an unfriendly bureaucrat at the security check in the airport then it is also very likely it will be hard to start a business in that country. Therefore, I tend to think of airport security as an indicator of the level of government regulation of the country’s economy. This is something that makes me terribly bearish on the US’ long-term growth perspectives every time I encounter a TSA official in an US airport – and makes me terribly depressed about the prospects for Ukraine and it gives me an understanding of why the Scandinavian countries ‘works’ well despite excessively large public sectors.

It was therefore a pleasure today to meet friendly and efficient people at the security check in Chopin airport (Poland). And if my theory has any value this is an indication that Poland has “matured” and the level of regulation is luckily getting lighter. That is good news. So now I am thinking of raising my long-run growth forecasts for Poland…

I recently asked my young son whether he thought he could travel by himself to visit his grandmother in Victoria, Canada. He said that he could navigate the airports fine and getting into Canada was no problem but he was afraid of the security people coming back into the United States. Bear in mind that my son is American.

“yes.. he is always like that….”

The left-hand one perfectly evokes the Monty Python “Upper-Class Twit Of The Year” skit.

Word on the Street

Points is a smart sign that displays online information on rotating LED directional arrows. The sign can pull data from a variety of online sources including Twitter, Foursquare, and RSS. It can use the data to direct people to nearby events, businesses, and transit, or provide general information like weather and news. Points will be available for rent starting July 1, 2013. It was created by Brooklyn-based studio Breakfast.

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

Skull and Crossbones sugar cubes

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This week we’re taking another departure from the ordinarily campy videos featured in the Retrotechtacular section. This time around the video is only two years old, but the subject matter is from the early 1980′s. [David Crane], designer of Pitfall for the Atari 2600 gave a talk at the 2011 Game Developer’s Conference. His 38-minute presentation rounds up to a full hour with the Q&A afterwards. It’s a bit dry to start, but he hits his stride about half way through and it’s chock-full of juicy morsels about the way things used to be.

[David] wrote the game for Activision, a company that was started after game designers left Atari having been told they were no more important  than assembly line workers that assembled the actual cartridges. We wonder if any heads rolled at Atari once Pitfall had spent 64-weeks as the number one worldwide selling game?

This was a developer’s panel so you can bet the video below digs deep into coding challenges. Frame buffer? No way! The 2600 could only pump out 160 pixels at once; a single TV scan line. The programs were hopelessly synced with the TV refresh rate, and were even limited on how many things could be drawn within a single scan line. For us the most interesting part is near the end when [David] describes how the set of game screens are nothing more than a pseudo-random number generator with a carefully chosen seed. But then again, the recollection of hand optimizating the code to fit a 6k game on a 4k ROM is equally compelling.

If you like this you should take a look at an effort to fix coding glitches in Atari games.

[via Reddit]

Filed under: Software Development, software hacks

ABC News

Paris Jackson now in all-too-familiar spotlight Detroit Free Press LOS ANGELES — Until he died in 2009, Michael Jackson was fiercely protective of his children (save for that one balcony-dangling incident). He covered their faces when they went out with him so they might enjoy the kind of normal childhood he missed out ... Attorney: Paris Jackson hospitalized but OKBoston.com Paris Jackson Called Suicide HotlineDaily Beast Paris Jackson's suicide attempt followed bipolar behavior : sourcesChicago Sun-Times Guardian Express -TMZ.com all 599 news articles »

The powerful and beautiful vocals of David Bowie and Freddie Mercury have been pulled out a-capella-style in their now-classic song from 1981, “Under Pressure.” The full track can be found on Queen’s Hot Space album which was first released in 1982. Open Culture has the full story.

Here’s the original version:

video 1 by MisteRhapsody, image via Illogical Contraption

via That Eric Alper, Open Culture, UPROXX