firehose

San Francisco Chronicle

Nonconservative Groups Say IRS Scrutinized Them, Too WBUR Outgoing acting Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Steve Miller (right) and Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George are sworn before a full House Ways and Means Committee hearing Friday. (AFP/Getty Images). The IRS ... IRS Wrote Lawyer's Question That Prompted Scandal ReleaseBloomberg Democrat Baucus warns: More to come out on IRS scandalWashington Examiner The Real Scandal and Systemic Abuse of Power - Wall Street PitWall Street Pit FOX43.com -The Fiscal Times (blog) all 119 news articles »

I was reminded today that my friend Chris Thursten made a chart of gaem jurnalism.

You can visit Chris’ runoff blog here but he’s mostly writing clearly and eloquently about games over at some little-known publication called PC Gamer.

Cbs228 writes "During last week's Google I/O conference, the company announced a replacement for its aging Talk instant messenger: Google Hangouts. Hangouts, which is only available for Android, iOS, and Chrome, offers closer integration with Google+. Unfortunately, the new product drops support for the XMPP instant messaging protocol, which has been an integral part of Talk for over ten years. XMPP delivers instant messages to desktop clients, like Pidgin, and enables communication between users on different instant messaging networks. Hangouts users attempting to communicate with contacts on non-Google servers, such as jabber.org, have found that all communications have been suddenly and inexplicably severed. A Google account is now required to communicate with Hangouts users. Google Hangouts joins the ranks of an already-crowded ecosystem of closed, incompatible chat products like Skype." Interesting, because Google Wave was based on XMPP and Google was integral to the creation of the Jingle extension that enabled video chatting over XMPP. Note that no end date has been set for Talk yet, but the end must surely be nigh given Google's recent history of axing products like Reader and CalDAV support from their calendar app without much notice.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

	rachel shared this story from The Daily Otter:
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Thanks, kashiwaya920!

hypnosec writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has started accepting donations in the form of Bitcoins again after a two year hiatus, stating that the legal uncertainty hovering over the digital currency has all but disappeared. On their blog the EFF noted that a report from U.S. Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), in addition to their own findings, 'have confirmed that, as a user of Bitcoin or any virtual currency, EFF itself is likely not subject to regulation.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a statement first posted on The Doors’ official Facebook fan page, founding member Ray Manzarek has died after a lengthy battle with bile duct cancer. Manzarek was 74. 

Manzarek co-founded The Doors with Jim Morrison after a chance encounter on Venice Beach, not long after the two had parted ways at USC film school. Manzarek, a classically trained keyboardist who’d been kicking around in local bands, and Morrison, already a nascent form of the preening poet he'd become, conceptualized the band on the spot, based on Morrison’s grand assertions that he’d already been writing a concert in his head, and Manzarek’s genuine interest in hearing it. That iconic, oft-imagined moment—in which Morrison sang a few bars of “Moonlight Drive” to Manzarek, blowing his mind—marked the beginning of what would become decades of Morrison mythmaking, much of it propagated by Manzarek himself ...

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New York officials have determined that a man who rented out part of his apartment on Airbnb should pay $2,400 for violating the city's illegal hotel law, despite Airbnb stepping in on the host's behalf.

Rad Super Mario Land graphics patch

No need to spend another night’s prayer on wishing for a Super Mario All-Stars-style graphical overhaul for Super Mario Land — Arne Niklas Jansson created one and released the patch! It reminds me a lot of Minitroid, which isn’t a bad thing at all.

BUY Super Mario 3D Land ($30), upcoming games

YouTube kicked off its Comedy Week by commissioning one of today's funniest musical humorists to create a viral cover of one of the Internet's unintentionally funniest videos. Van Halen aficionado and Comedy Bang Bang co-host Reggie Watts re-created Rick Astley's video for "Never Gonna Give You Up," only with his own version of the song attached. Watch for special guest Jordan Peele as the red-suspendered bartender. [via Splitsider]

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…at least, so far as this excellent hand-drawn map of the early text-based computer dungeon-crawl Zork is concerned. In fact, the map appears to capture Zork during the brief period in which it was known as Dungeon, before a cease-and-desist letter forced it back to its original name. Drawn by one Steven Roy (about whom I can find no other information), the map (which I originally spotted here) appeared in the December 1982 issue of The Dec Professional, and can be found in the University of Western Ontario’s excellent archive devoted to Infocom, the company founded by the game’s creators.

The map represents one of the earliest instances of community-generated content around an electronic game, a practice that has since grown to encompass vast player-generated wikis full of valuable information. Still, I feel compelled to point out that’s not quite here that “it all” starts, as far as electronic dungeon-crawls are concerned. Zork was heavily inspired by the grand-daddy of all RPGs and nearly everything else computer-game, for that matter: the 1976 Colossal Cave Adventure, a formative experience in my own history. Regardless, Roy’s map stands as a great example of the lengths players will go to to understand the imaginary spaces they inhabit. It must’ve been great to be a Dec Professional subscriber and see that map show up in your mailbox back in 1982.

huntingtonlibrary:

William Sharp, one of the first chromolithographic printers in the U.S., created these extraordinary illustrations for the large folio Victoria Regia (1854) by John Fisk Allen. Allen, a well-known horticulturalist, cultivated a specimen of the rare, huge (up to 8 feet in diameter), fast-growing (up to an inch an hour!) water lily, native to the Amazon. After months of careful tending, the plant—named in honor of the recently-crowned Queen Victoria—blossomed on the evening of July 21, 1853. Sharp’s depictions of this exotic wonder—in various stages of bloom—were masterpieces and elevated the then-nascent art of chromolithography to spectacular new heights.

image captions: All images are from a copy of Victoria Regia in our collections. Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

Smelly farts on airplanes: we've all been there, either as the producer or the consumer (or often both). Unfortunately, little attention has been paid in the literature to this all-too-common phenomenon...until now. We can't tell whether these authors are being totally serious or not, but either way, we think their suggestion for how to deal with the issue of smelly farts on airplanes is a pretty good one. Flatulence on airplanes: just let it go. "Flatus is natural and an invariable co

From Simon King:

I am pleased to announce that the English section of this year's Blizzard Challenge listening test is now live. Please help us out by taking part, and encouraging your colleagues, students, friends, contacts, etc. to take part too. It's your chance to hear a range of speech synthesisers, including some really good ones. Please circulate this message widely - for example, on mailing lists, forums and using social media - we need to reach as many people as possible in the coming month or so.

In order to participate, sign up here and follow the instructions.

After kicking Scott Weiland to the Vaseline-covered curb earlier this year, Stone Temple Pilots have enlisted Linkin Park singer Chester Bennington as a replacement. Bennington joined STP on stage at KROQ’s Weenie Roast this weekend to perform an eight-song set—including one new tune, “Out Of Time,” you can listen to below.

While it’s not explicitly clear whether Bennington will be using his yarling talents with STP full-time, it certainly seems like he’s in the group for the long haul. He told KROQ’s Kevin And Bean that it was a “no-brainer” joining the group, and that they’re “going to go out and make more money and go play more shows and have some fun.” So take that, Scott Weiland.

Weiland and his own group, the Wildabouts, are currently in the middle of their “Purple At The Core” tour, with some West Coast dates starting next ...

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Jeff Hiller

Baguette-me-nots is a Tumblr blog created by Tim Bierbaum and John Milhiser of Serious Lunch that features hilarious and bizarre photographs of famous actors and comedians using baguettes in place of everyday objects.

George Takei

Will Hines

Paul Welsh

Josh Simpson

Greg & Lou

images via Baguette-me-nots

via Beautiful Decay

Still scratching your head over the random underwear scene with Alice Eve in Star Trek Into Darkness? Head producer and writer Damon Lindelof has finally "copped" to the fact that the nudity was completely gratuitous.

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seventhsons:

where the fuck is she i am like balls deep in aliens right now

felixinclusis:

sevier: 1001 Statues of Kannon by Lost in Japan (Miguel Michán)

Following this morning's acquisition of Tumblr, Yahoo today hosted an event in New York City to detail changes to its popular photo sharing site Flickr. Flickr on the web has been given a major design overhaul, with a focus on full resolution pictures.

In addition to eliminating much of the white space on the site, Flickr is now displaying in-line photo streams that encompass the majority of the screen and detailed photo-centric profile pages. Flickr has also implemented a slideshow mode to allow its users to flip through photos hands-free.


With the redesign, Flickr is encouraging its users to upload high resolution photos by giving every Flickr user 1TB of storage space for free. That is a marked increase from its former photo storage policy, which limited users' monthly upload bandwidth and allowed only 200 photos to be visible. Flickr will allow up to 3 minutes of 1080p video as well.

At Flickr, we believe you should share all your images in full resolution, so life's moments can be relived in their original quality. No limited pixels, no cramped formats, no memories that fall flat. We're giving your photos room to breathe, and you the space to upload a dizzying number of photos and videos, for free. Just how big is a terabyte? Well, you could take a photo every hour for forty years without filling one.

And yep, you heard us. It's free.

Flickr has upped the price of its ad-free accounts, charging $49.99 per year for an ad-free browsing experience, along with introducing a new "Doublr" account, which offers 2TB of storage space for $499 per year.

During the announcement, Flickr also revealed that its redesigned iOS app, which was released last December, grew total Flickr uploads by 25 percent. Flickr's iOS app can be downloaded from the App Store for free. [Direct Link]

colinneagle writes "Scripps News reporters discovered 170,000 records online of customers of Lifeline, a government program offering affordable phone service for low-income citizens, that contained everything needed for identity theft . Last year, the FCC 'tightened' the rules for the program by requiring Lifeline phone carriers to document applicants' eligibility, which led to collecting more sensitive information from citizens. A Scripps News investigative team claims it 'Googled' the phone companies TerraCom Inc. and YourTel America Inc. to discover all of the files. A Scripps reporter asked for an on-camera interview with the COO of TerraCom and YourTel after explaining the files were freely available online. That did not happen, but shortly thereafter the customer records disappeared from the internet. Then, the blame-the-messenger hacker accusations and mudslinging began. Although the Scripps reporters videotaped the process showing how they found the documents, attorney Jonathon Lee for both telecoms threatened the 'Scripps Hackers' with violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Panayotis Vryonis has a nice post about moving out of iPhoto into Dropbox. Dropbox has done a lot recently to make that easier and there are a number of good apps for iOS photo management with Dropbox.

I highly recommend Seth Brown's post about naming files and adding searchable meta data to photos.

bestlols: