Captain Commando (Capcom - arcade - 1991)

Archisculpture 011 by Beomsik Won

Nope

heysassbutt:

I’ve been waiting for this gifset my entire life

A classic.

by ScorpiAS and Dennis

An anonymous reader writes "Search engines such as Google should do more to restrict access to online pornography, a government adviser on child internet safety has said. John Carr said increasing the number of sites automatically blocked by search engines would make it more difficult for paedophiles to get images of abuse. It comes after Mark Bridger was found guilty of the abduction and murder of five-year-old April Jones in Powys." It sounds like a continuation of the blocked-by-default porn white-listing plan that's been going around in the UK for a few years now.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Update: copied Alex’s summary of the changes to Raspbian from the comments into the post.

We’ve just posted updated Raspbian, Debian and Arch Linux images on the downloads page, all of which include our most recent firmware and kernel. Raspbian has the following significant changes:

• Updated Scratch image (significant performance improvements).
• Updated armv6-optimised Pixman library.
• Updated armv6-optimised memxxx() functions.
• Updated raspi-config with new layout, and new functionality (setting hostname and enabling camera support).
• Native mmap support in the bcm2835 ALSA driver, and numerous other firmware changes; see commits to github.com/raspberrypi/firmware.
• The boot partition now has the label “boot”.
• The Wayland/Weston preview from Collabra is installed and their apt repository is included as an apt source.

ccguy writes with this excerpt from a sad report on CNET: "Oculus Rift co-founder and lead engineer Andrew Reisse was hit in Santa Ana, where he was a resident, by a speeding car being pursued by police." Reisse was killed, says the report, when the car "slammed into two vehicles during the pursuit before hitting Reisse at Flower Street and MacArthur Boulevard."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

rachel shared this story from Boys Clubs.

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The entire applied math department at Harvard. (h/t @apithymaxim)

rachel shared this story from It's Okay To Be Smart.

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via brooklynmutt:

An amazing GIF of a volcano erupting on Jupiter’s moon - via @simonowens

This superb shot is Jupiter’s moon Io, showing the Tvashtar Paterae volcanic region, as captured by NASA’s New Horizons satellite.

Random fact: Volcanoes are named for the Roman god Vulcan, who was a son of Jupiter, and this moon orbits the planet of the same name … whooooooooa man. (Io, however, is part of Greek mythology, and was a lover of Zeus)

This is not to be confused with the equally gorgeous Saturnian moon Enceladus and its spouting geysers (below).

During the Great Recession, middle class Americans saw their personal wealth cut in half to a roughly 40-year low. So how are their finances faring now, all these years into the recovery?

They’ve barely recovered, at least judging by a recent report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. It finds that adjusted for inflation, average net worth—the value of what households own minus their debts—is still far below its pre-recession peak. Through the end of 2012, families had recouped less than half of what they lost, as shown by the teal line below.

But for most, the recovery has been even more anemic than the average suggests. As the Fed’s report notes, our roaring stock market has been responsible for 62 percent of all wealth gains since the recession—and stocks are overwhelmingly owned by rich. Middle class Americans, on the other hand, tend to store up most of their wealth in their homes. That’s why the housing bust was such a catastrophe for so much of the country.

Most households saw the one major asset they own plummet in value.

Some people would argue that wealth from rising home prices during the bubble was illusory to begin with. And in a sense they’d be right. But researchers now tend to agree that there’s a significant “wealth effect,” related to housing that’s important to the economy. When values go up, consumers spend more, in part because they can borrow against the rising value of their property. Economists Amir Sufi and Atif Mian calculate, for instance, that homeowners stripped $1.25 trillion out of their houses during the bubble. But when prices fall, families also cut back their spending rapidly. That’s one of the factors which likely exacerbated the recession.

It’s unclear whether a housing recovery will give the same spark to economy as it did during the boom years, in part because Americans have become less likely to use their houses as piggy banks. But it still seems reasonable to guess that until the middle class sees its finances return to something close to their former health—either through cutting down on debt or thanks to appreciating assets—our recovery will keep unfolding in slow motion.

Jordan Weissmann is an associate editor at The Atlantic. He has written for a number of publications, including The Washington Post and The National Law Journal.

This originally appeared at The Atlantic. More from our sister site:

Europe’s scary youth unemployment just got even scarier

4 jarring signs of Turkey’s Islamization

Exercise: You’re doing it wrong

theodp writes "In The Unexotic Underclass, C.Z. Nnaemeka argues that too many smart people are chasing too many dumb ideas. 'What is shameful,' writes Nnaemeka, 'is that in a country with so many problems, with such a heaving underclass, we find the so-called 'best and brightest,' the 20-and 30-somethings who emerge from the top American graduate and undergraduate programs, abandoning their former hangout, Wall Street, to pile into anti-problem entrepreneurship.' Nnaemeka adds, 'It just looks like we've shifted the malpractice from feeding the money machine to making inane, self-centric apps. Worse, is that the power players, institutional and individual — the highflying VCs, the entrepreneurship incubators, the top-ranked MBA programs, the accelerators, the universities, the business plan competitions have been complicit in this nonsense.' And while it may not get you invited to the White House, Nnaemeka advises entrepreneurs looking for ideas to 'consider looking beyond the city-centric, navel-gazing, youth-obsessed mainstream' and instead focus on some groups that no one else is helping."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Is Yahoo looking to revisit the terms of its deal with China’s largest e-commerce company, Alibaba Group? During the JP Morgan technology conference in May, Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman seemed to hint that it could. He complained about the US taxes Yahoo had to pay on the $7.6 billion sale of half of its 40% stake in Alibaba. And he’s not crazy about Yahoo getting another big tax bill when it sells its remaining Alibaba shares.

“I hate paying taxes. I think if we can find something that is more tax efficient, that would be good,” said Goldman, who added that Yahoo had paid more than $2 billion in taxes on the Alibaba sale (Yahoo had a net profit of about $4.5 billion). “We are going to see ways that we can perhaps work together.”

Yahoo acquired its stake in Alibaba in 2005, and together with another non-Chinese firm, Japan’s Softbank, owned about 75% of the company. But the relationship between Yahoo and Alibaba’s leaders was strained, and the companies spent three years in lengthy negotiations to reduce Yahoo’s stake.

Yahoo wanted to do it in a way that would allow it to avoid paying taxes on the sale. But that structure, known as a cash-rich split-off, proved too complicated, leading Yahoo and Alibaba to agree to a more straightforward sale that came with a hefty tax bill for Yahoo. The agreement also allows Alibaba, which is gearing up for its IPO, to buy back the remaining 20% that Yahoo still owns in Alibaba by the end of 2015. But Yahoo would get taxed again.

Those years of negotiation were marked by turmoil for Yahoo.  It went through a few CEOs in rapid succession. Yahoo’s board saw co-founder Jerry Yang and longtime board chairman Roy Bostock depart. Activist investor Dan Loeb, who pushed for changes at Yahoo, and other, new directors joined the board. As a result, few current executives and directors were there during the negotiations. And neither Goldman, the current CFO, nor Marissa Mayer, the current CEO, were there when the Yahoo-Alibaba deal was done.

At the JP Morgan conference, Goldman called the Alibaba deal “unfortunate.” He said it was agreed to when Yahoo was unstable. That and his other comments seem to hint that he might revisit the agreement, and try again to find a tax-free way for Yahoo to divest itself of its remaining Alibaba stake. (Yahoo declined to expand on Goldman’s statements when we asked for comment.)

Yahoo has to be careful if it wants to go down this road again. The reduction of Yahoo’s stake helped pave the way for Alibaba’s upcoming IPO by making Chinese authorities comfortable with Alibaba’s ownership structure. And Alibaba’s IPO  is one reason for the recent rise in Yahoo’s stock price. While some think the company could be valued at $100 billion, a $65 billion to $70 billion is probably more realistic, according to analysts. Either way, it’ll be a windfall for Yahoo. Companies always like to pay less tax, but Yahoo needs to make sure it doesn’t go down a rabbit hole again, and eliminate the benefits it’s already received from the Alibaba deal.

Thanks to the great State of New York, now you can re-enact your favorite crime drama from the comfort of your own home.

Haswell is here, Haswell is here, Haswell is here!!! After talking for months about the Linux kernel and driver development for Intel's Ivy Bridge successor, the heatsink can be lifted today on talking about Intel's Haswell processor. For the past few weeks I have been running and benchmarking an Intel Core i7 4770K "Haswell" processor on Linux to mixed success. While the Haswell improvements are terrific, the Linux experience now is awaiting improvements.

Catholic apologists answer the Protestant claims by noting that “Vicarius Filii Dei” is not an official Papal title.^[15] They also argue that even if it was a Papal title, that wouldn’t be sufficient to associate the Pope with the number of the Beast, as, for example, the name of Ellen Gould White can also be similarly manipulated to get the same number (ELLen GoVLD VVhIte 50+50+5+50+500+5+5+1=666).^[15][16] Likewise, a similar construction involving Barney the CVte pVrpLe DInosaVr is a staple of anti-Barney humor.^[17] They answer the claims that “Vicarius Filii Dei” is written on Papal Tiara by stating that there is no evidence of any Papal Tiara having such inscription.

Link

Now my bugs can get ignored for months and then hastily and unhelpfully closed in a much nicer-looking interface.

∞ Permalink

The view from Silicon Valley is that a lot of the U.S. talent, while bountiful in number, just doesn't stack up.

Anyone who longs for the days when The Perry Bible Fellowship updated regularly would do well to check out Jasper Rietman's TRI/P. Much like Nicholas Gurewitch, Rietman plays with a classic newspaper strip style to create comics that defy our expectations, forcing us to shift our perspectives as we contemplate them.

Read more...

Portal Room with the lights on…

Oklahoma-based accountant, painter and gamer Lauren Jennings (aka “BlondeChell“) has created an incredible Portal-themed bedroom. The room is painted and decorated from top to bottom with an abundance of Portal artwork, props and mirrors that light up orange and blue to resemble actual portals from the video game. Her friend and engineer, Steve Gilbertson, helped out with designing and building the mirror portals. Lauren explains each step of her bedroom design process and shows off more great photos on The Portal Bedroom blog.

I looked all over the internet to see if anybody else had designed a Portal-themed bedroom yet that I could get some inspiration from. I found a few rooms, and some of them were pretty cool, but I just couldn’t find one that I absolutely loved. So I issued myself a challenge: To design from scratch a Portal-themed bedroom that while obviously Portal, would also be aesthetically-pleasing enough that any non-gamer could still look at it and go “Hey, that’s a really neat looking room!” rather than “what’s up with all the weird stuff on the walls?”

…and with the lights off!

images via The Portal Bedroom, ljraider17

via reddit, Gamefreaks

The Advent of the Raspberry Pi has seen an explosion in the market for ARM dev boards, sometimes even with pinouts for Arduino shields. The UDOO, though, takes those boards and ramps up the processing power for some very, very interesting builds.

The UDOO comes equipped with a dual or quad-core ARM CPU running at 1GHz with 1 GB of RAM. Also on board is the Atmel SAM3X8E – the same chip in the new Arduino DUE - and has pinouts for all those Arduino shields you have lying around.

In addition to serving your next project as a souped-up Raspberry Pi, UDOO also includes 78 (!) GPIO pins, Gigabit Ethernet, a camera connector, one SATA port (on the quad-core version), and an LVDS header for attaching LCD monitors. Basically, the UDOO is the motherboard of an ARM-powered laptop with the pinouts to handle Arduino shields. It’s just like [Bunnie]‘s laptop, only this time you can actually buy it.

The UDOO doesn’t come cheap, though: on the UDOO Kickstarter, the dual-core version is going for $150 while the quad-core is priced at $170. Still, if you need the power to run a pair of Kinects or want to build an awesome torrent box, you’d be hard pressed to find a more powerful board.

Filed under: ARM, hardware

elle-emeno-pee:

martinekenblog:

“Into the Clouds” Light Installation

FriendsWithYou is honored to bring this sacred character to life in the form of a light installation, entitled “Into the Clouds”. Commissioned by Fox’s new animation programming ADHD, the clouds are 2.5 feet wide, and hang inside the studio’s 26 foot high ceiling.

The idea begins as you enter the space and ascend the staircase, where you are happily greeted and in constant dialogue with a joyous living being- the cloud. The Native Americans believed that the clouds were the Gods who watched over them and their livelihoods. Bringing this installation to life invokes a continuation into the proliferation of healing art objects. Combining the light with the symbol of a cloud is our way of making everyone who enters the space instantly happy on a day-to-day basis.

YES!!