firehose

“A proposal to buy the damaged homes of New Yorkers who want to relocate after Hurricane Sandy is finding few takers, as most residents opt to rebuild, state officials said on Friday.”

- New York’s Storm Recovery Plan Gets Federal Approval - NYTimes.com

kyulinear:

zoziebob:

i-w4lk-al0ne:

varyagst:

forsciencejohn:

omg she recognizes me on video chat

the third one

“human?”

“HUMAN?”

“HUMAN WHERE ARE YOU WHY ARE YOU TRAPPED IN HERE

“I WILL FREE YOU FROM THIS DEVIL MACHINE”

^^^

curtwoodward writes "Eric Schmidt came to Harvard this week to discuss his new book, but many students really wanted to know more about the implications for privacy and social interaction once Google Glass starts hitting the market. Schmidt cautioned against jumping to the worst conclusions, saying that society always tends to adapt to new technologies — and he's hoping for etiquette rather than government regulation. Of course, that's what you would say if you used to run a company that has been fined and paid settlements to regulators for the way it scoops up data and tracks users. But Schmidt also doesn't have much patience for critics: 'Criticisms are inevitably from people who are afraid of change, or who have not figured out that there will be an adaptation of society.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Drinking is bad, feelings are worse

by Vin

By John Walker on April 27th, 2013 at 12:00 pm.

Ever wanted to play poker with Claptrap, Sam & Max, Brock from The Venture Bros. and Ash from The Evil Dead, with GLaDOS as your dealer? It’s at the least an interesting prospect. But how does it pan out as a game? Telltale found out with Poker Night 2. Here’s wot I think:

I think the most important information to convey about Telltale’s sequel to their dreadful Poker Night At The Inventory is that I don’t hate it. Is it a good poker game? No, not at all. Does it fix the key issues of the original? Only a few. Does it suffer any less from endless repetition? Good grief no. But it’s calmer, less offensively bad, and I think this time fits the mould of a £4 comedy game.

But know this: it’s not Bruce Campbell.

The concept is exactly the same: a back-room game of poker (Hold Em or Omaha this time), with four cartoon characters. Except, oddly, this time they’re not from gaming, which did seem rather the point. But it’s hard to be too disappointed – at first – with the collection. Yes, there’s Claptrap from Borderlands, but it’s a self-effacing role and well performed. There’s Sam, with Max in tow, and Telltale know how to write those two. Then it gets a bit odd, with Brock Samson (Patrick Warburton, doing the voice he does in things) from The Venture Brothers – the Cartoon Network cartoon and not a videogame to the best of my knowledge. And most peculiar of all, Ash from The Evil Dead trilogy. While there have been (terrible) Evil Dead games, it’s such an out-there inclusion, and one that makes total sense when you think: Yes! I’m playing poker with Bruce Campbell! You’re playing poker with, er, Danny Webber (and not the foot-to-baller). And then it’s all being hosted by GLaDOS.

There’s not a lot to describe about what you do. It’s poker, except with really bad AI players who will go all-in on the flop with two undercards, or fold at a small increase on their on monster raise. It’s not quite as ridiculous as last time, but you do still wonder if the people making it really get the game they’re emulating. Obviously you’re not going to assume a £4 comedy game is going to give you a cutting edge poker simulation, but the reality is that once you’ve heard all their lines the first time (about two hours of play, by my count) there’s little reason to keep going without it.

The biggest oddity here is the setup of the games. The buy-in is $20,000, but the opening blinds are $400 and $800, so it’s always a crapshoot from the very start. Just that single decision ensures there’s never any sense of actually playing a proper game of poker, with all-ins almost inevitable in the first two hands, and lunatic raises throughout. Why you can’t just have a tiny bit of control, the option to change the blind levels for yourself, feels strange. But then of course the game would reveal just how little dialogue there is in there all the more quickly.

That’s the obvious and unavoidable frustration when playing. The banter between the characters is mostly decent enough, but obviously jokes only work the first time you hear them, and slightly less well the fifty-seventh. There are two types: the barks they give when calling, raising, folding, etc, and the conversations they have with each other while playing. The two interrupt each other constantly, but it nicely picks up conversations where they left off, usually with an, “Anyway…” as they resume. And that works nicely – again, the first time you hear them.

The barks grow pretty infuriating, pretty quickly. I lost count how many times I heard Claptrap say “Don’t stare at the money, or it will think you’re a creep,” or Ash comment that the money could fix the Oldsmobile in the six or seven rounds I played. I smiled the first time. I grimaced for most. And Max falling off his chair in the background when I went all in made me laugh… once. Every other time I go all in, not so much. And worse, they slow down the game, and there’s no way to skip dialogue. So while what you want is to not hear the same deliberation line before taking their move for the twentieth time, what you do is sit helplessly, stabbing at random keyboard keys in case maybe tilde or something might skip it.

The repetition of the longer conversations is just a bit wearying, especially when they painstakingly resume themselves a bunch of times even though you remember it from twenty minutes ago. I can only imagine this would grow to very bothersome degrees if you played enough for these to reach their fourth or fifth rendition.

Another rather problematic issue is just how badly GLaDOS is written. It’s hard to say how much of it is Telltale’s failure to quite get the character, how much is that it’s impossibly unfair to try to equal Wolpaw and Pinkerton’s writing, but her falling-flat lines do add a rather disappointing atmosphere to proceedings. GLaDOS’s evil is pernicious, not overt, and her teasing is under-the-skin cruel, not mildly insulting. Having her butt in to criticise you for calling and not raising your opponent’s all-in is not only bemusing in context, but also just a bit weird when she’s saying if she were you she’d commit suicide by jumping off a building.

There’s certainly too much of a temptation to write for the character’s known catchphrases, throwing in references rather than focusing on original material that works in their individual contexts. Sam and Max are much better in this regard, presumably because Telltale feels confident enough with them after fifteen episodes to know what to do with them. But Ash’s endless references to the car reek of desperation. Let alone that all the lines are delivered through the uncanny aural valley of a decent but not-quite impression.

Sorry to go on about this, but really, why include a character from an iconic movie – so far removed from the context of the game – if you can’t book the guy who played him? Having Campbell camp up the lines would have been such a treat, rather than Webber’s oddly genteel approach – never more obviously not the real thing than when he so disappointingly mumbles “groovy”.

The chances are you’ll persist in playing Poker Night 2 for the TF2 and Borderlands 2 items, won by completing set challenges within games, and then winning a game when one is up for grabs. Although getting all of them would require hearing Sam say “Don’t be afraid of the chips, don’t be afraid of the chips” over eighty-nine billion times.

But for the first couple of hours, you can milk it for what it offers – an okay poker game albeit one that doesn’t reward decent play, and a bunch of mostly funny lines until the looping becomes too much. And at £4, well, that seems fair.

marielikestodraw:

sketchlock:

its-tuesday-again:

thanks, ireland

you’ve nailed it again

B E S T

I LOVE THESE GUYS.

Let’s not go to Dublin. It is a silly place. :)

It’s a stretch to call this one a hack, but USB thumb drives are around us constantly and we always assumed that the boards inside were machine populated (like with a pick and place machine). [Bunnie] tells us otherwise. He recently had the chance to tour a factory where USB flash drives are made.

The image above shows a worker populating a set of boards with the flash memory dies. The waffle-grid to the right holds the dies. Each is a tiny glint of a component. The worker is not in a clean room, and is using a bamboo tool to pick up the pieces. [Bunnie] explains that he’s seen the tools before but doesn’t fully comprehend how they work. He figures that the hand-cut manipulator has just the right amount of grab to pick up the die, but will also release it when it touches down on the dot of glue applied to the landing zone on the board.

If you’re into this sort of thing you should check out the PCB factory tour we saw a couple of years back. The article link is dead but the embedded tour video still works.

[Thanks pl]

Filed under: misc hacks

By Gary Kelly

A recent book on the essayist William Hazlitt calls him the ‘first modern man’. If he was, perhaps Mary Wollstonecraft was the first modern woman. By ‘modern’ I mean someone with ideas on how to cope with what sociologist Anthony Giddens calls ‘the consequences of modernity’. These include frighteningly accelerated, seemingly uncontrollable change; heightened risk of all kinds, from food supply through epidemics to weapons of mass destruction and ecological catastrophe; increased dependence on ‘abstract systems’ of unknowable complexity, from banking to government, medical science to the economy; greater migration, voluntary and involuntary, across countries and continents, classes and cultures; and, in meeting these challenges, increased dependence on ‘pure’, supposedly unselfish relationships in private and social life and on a flexible yet stable, self-reflexive and adaptable personal identity.

Wollstonecraft lived through the onset of modernity as Giddens defines it. She observed personally, analyzed incisively, and looked beyond one of modernity’s major initial crises, what many then saw as the greatest social and political cataclysm in history. She saw the blood of the guillotine on the Paris pavements and protested, at her peril. More, she understood this cataclysm from the situation of her sex, what she called ‘the wrongs of woman’, and protested, despite the peril.

Wollstonecraft certainly opposed unmodernity — the ‘Old Order’, the ancien régime — and promoted modernisation, but like her daughter Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, she understood its costs, especially to the marginalized and powerless. Among other things, Frankenstein gave powerful mythic form to a vision of modernity as human catastrophe. Wollstonecraft tried to envisage a modernity that would benefit all, from which women and other marginalized groups would not be excluded and by which they would not be victimized.

To this end, as a self-educated, militantly independent young woman, she set out to become what she called the ‘first of a new genus’, a ‘female philosopher’. Many at the time would have derided this phrase as an oxymoron, but by it she meant a comprehensive social, cultural, and political critic, what we now call a public intellectual, representing women in particular and thereby all of the exploited and oppressed.

As a ‘female philosopher’ Wollstonecraft communicated her vision of modernity, responding to the prolonged crisis of her time, in a wide range of writing including education manuals, novels, criticism and essays, political and social polemic, historiography of the present, and political travelogue. Part of this political and cultural work required both modernizing these forms, reinventing them better to serve her vision of modernity, and inventing a new form of discourse, that of the ‘female philosopher’ rather than of the intellectual woman as some kind of ‘honorary man’. So radical was her invention, so modern, that still today many find it confused and confusing rather than ahead of its time, and perhaps ahead of ours.

Hazlitt knew Wollstonecraft’s circle of radical reformers, intellectuals, artists, writers, and publishers and what they tried to achieve. He circulated among such a circle of his own, one that included Byron, Keats, Leigh Hunt, and Percy and Mary Shelley, as well as artists and intellectuals, modernizers of all kinds, in contending interests. Hazlitt’s liberal views, increasingly celebrated in recent years, owed much to those of Wollstonecraft’s circle, with their zeal for social justice, modernization of institutions, political reform, democratic access to the arts, and concern for human value in all aspects of life, of all forms of life.

Notoriously, however, Hazlitt did not attend to Wollstonecraft’s feminism; in fact, many today see him as a misogynist. Yet I think Hazlitt’s distinctive, celebrated, and modern-seeming style, with its sharp declarations, vivid illustrations, sudden turns, personal tone and reference, lyrical passages, sarcasm and satire, owed much to Wollstonecraft’s. At the least, it was a later correlative to hers.

Wollstonecraft, much more than Hazlitt, was relegated after her death to the margins of literature and public discourse, perhaps for similar reasons; perhaps the first modern woman and man were too ‘strong’ for what became an influential Victorian and early twentieth-century consensus. Wollstonecraft was rediscovered by successive feminist movements, most recently in the 1970s; Hazlitt has received renewed attention in the past decade as a public intellectual for what Giddens calls ‘late’ modernity, and others ‘post-modernity’, our age of crisis, of ‘recession’, and ‘austerity’, and worse. In this we need all the help we can get. We could do worse than renew a conversation with the first modern woman.

Gary Kelly is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. He has edited Mary Wollstonecraft’s Mary and The Wrongs of Woman for Oxford World’s Classics, and published a book on her radically innovative style of thinking and writing, Revolutionary Feminism. He is General Editor of the ongoing multi-volume Oxford History of Popular Print Culture.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: Portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The post Mary Wollstonecraft: The first modern woman? appeared first on OUPblog.

Vegan Smythe is a vegan singer/songwriter. It’s common for musicians, artists, and literati to renounce eating meat for social, environmental, or health reasons. But Vegan Smythe only has one thing on his mind, and it’s the word “vegan.”

The lyrics to his song “Groovy Vegan Song” go “Vegan vegan vegan vegan vegan vegan vegan vegan vegan.” Nine times in a row. Listen to it, unless you don’t like bad things, in which case you’re not really in the right place to begin with.

U.S. News & World Report

Ricin Suspect Appears in Court Wall Street Journal OXFORD, Miss.—A federal judge on Monday ordered a Mississippi man held without bond following his arrest on charges of mailing ricin-laced letters to President Barack Obama and other officials. J. Everett Dutschke is "a flight risk and a danger to the ... Ricin suspect Everett Dutschke appears in courtBBC News Feds confident they have man who sent poison ricin letters to Obama, othersFox News Ricin suspect held without bondKPLC-TV Reuters -Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal -New York Times all 268 news articles »

With the NBA Playoffs in full swing, what better time to highlight Denver Nuggets star Wilson Chandler's absolutely incredible full-back tattoo featuring the Juggernaut showing off his own basketball skills?

A conversation with the mother of the Tsarnaevs.

By Megan Farokhmanesh on Apr 27, 2013 at 11:00a

Canadian indie game studio Combit will "work closely" with River City Ransom EX developer Million to create a River City Ransom sequel, the company announced via its website.

Combit will launch a crowd-funding effort to support the game over the summer. According to the post, River City Ransom 2 is already in development.

"We have started development on an official, worldwide follow-up to River City Ransom," the post reads. "With strong followings in North America and Japan, we will work closely with Million to ensure it is the best game it can be for fans on both continents."

River City Ransom was originally developed by Technos Japan, and the game has been ported to several different systems, including the Wii's Virtual Console. A follow-up to the popular title was announced for WiiWare and Windows PC in 2011 by Japanese developer Miracle Kidz. In 2012, however, Miracle Kidz announced that the game had been put on indefinite hold while the developer worked on a new title.

River City Ransom 2 is currently set for an August 2014 release on Windows PC, "with additional platforms under consideration."

Ling Ling, a Siamese in the American sitcom Bewitched. Ling Ling had a minor role in the series but was mostly remembered for being featured in the episode Ling Ling.

Link

Fantastic Ace Attorney 5 trailer

Man the animation is so good. SO GOOD. And that includes the 2D stuff in the trailer that won’t be used in the game, and the real 3D stuff. I’d pay for-real American dollars for a Phoenix Wright anime, of course.

SMH at the pre-order bonus costume DLC, though.

BUY Ace Attorney games, upcoming releases

By Megan Farokhmanesh on Apr 27, 2013 at 12:00p

There are "a number of chasms to get through" to create an African American figure in gaming with the same household recognition as Spike Lee, video game educator and entrepreneur Joseph Saulter told Fast Company.

Speaking with the publication during a recent interview, Saulter said the biggest challenge for boosting a mainstream name is finances.

"Spike Lee used his own money, he used credit cards, to get his first movie to come out," Saulter said. "It costs a lot of money [to make a game]. People talk about coming out of a garage. But you can come out of a garage much easier with music than you can with game design."

Saulter is also a co-founder of Urban Video Game Academy in Atlanta, Ga., a initiative focused on teaching high school students the fundamentals of video game design and development. According to the educator, there is "a lack of information [and] understanding" about game making. Kids in the program are often adept at audio tools, skills similar to those needed for game making.

"The same zeroes and ones that give the ability to create sounds are the same zeroes and ones that could make 3D animation," Saulter said.

You can read the full interview over at Fast Company.

• Image Source
• Joseph Saulter

CSBG's collection of old comic book bits that are hilarious in hindsight, includes a story exemplifying Squirrel Girl as a short-lived character Marvel was trying to avoid with their 1993 Annuals.

Google Fiber has certainly raised awareness — and interest in — gigabit internet access, and several companies beyond the search provider are working on spreading the high-speed networks across the US. Vermont Telephone Co. (known as VTel) is one of those: it's now offering a gigabit internet service for $35. The telephone company has been working on building out a fiber network direct to its customers' homes since it won a $81 million grant from the USDA as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2010. The company plans to replace all of its current customers' DSL connections with fiber service by the end of the year for no extra cost — hence the $35-per-month price tag.

The company serves 17,500 Vermont homes, according to The Wall Street Journal, and 600 have signed up so far. VTel's grant from the USDA is also being used to build out an LTE network to serve parts of the state that aren't wired — it expects to have that ready by the end of the year as well. FCC chairman Julius Genachoski has called for gigabit service in every state by the end of 2015, and other than Google's plans for Kansas City, Austin, and Utah, other companies have plan to bring gigabit service to cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and more.

• Source The Wall Street Journal
• Image Credit Image of Vermont Sign from Shutterstock
• Related Items internet vermont fiber gigabit vtel vermont telephone co usda american recovery and reinvestment act

lumos5000:

Read the article here : [x]

A new report from Polygon reveals that, much like Sony, Microsoft aims to make sharing a major element of its next-generation console. The Xbox 360's successor is said to include a "share" button on its controller that will upload your gaming highlights to YouTube and USTREAM. Users will also be able to post these clips to Facebook and other social sites, according to the report. Microsoft's rumored approach essentially mirrors that of Sony, which outlined its plans during February's PlayStation 4 event.

Polygon also has more details on the controversial "always-on" connection that the next-gen Xbox is said to require. Will the situation be as dire as many gamers fear? It sounds like that decision will be left to individual publishers, who will make the final call on what type of connection is required to play their titles. The new Xbox can either perform a one-time authentication check — presumably allowing offline gameplay thereafter — or demand an active connection at all times. Polygon caveats that Microsoft's current guidelines for the security measure could still change ahead of next month's unveiling and the console's expected fall release.

Publishers decide if you need 24 / 7 internet to play a game

Changes to the popular achievements system are also en route, with Microsoft granting publishers the ability to add permission to a game after it's shipped. This was already possible to an extent on the Xbox 360, but new achievements could only be included alongside downloadable content like new levels and characters. Developers will no longer be handcuffed by such restrictions, a move that should see achievements become more flexible and spontaneous in nature. And gamers who've hit Xbox Live's current friend cap will be glad to hear that no such limit will exist on the upcoming console. Head over to Polygon for the full details.

• Source Polygon
• Related Items drm copyright xbox live Microsoft Home consoles

By Samit Sarkar on Apr 26, 2013 at 5:05p

Actor Pierce Brosnan, who played super-spy James Bond in four films from 1995-2002, said in an interview with The Sun that he believes violent media such as movies and especially video games have negative influences on consumers.

"I do think the movies [have] influence, I hate to say it, on our societies. And the games, which deal with killing, which our kids play these days have a strong, twisted effect," said Brosnan. The actor has three sons, two of whom are teenagers. He doesn't let violent games in his home, but said that his children play them at friends' houses.

"We are a violent race without question and now what we can do with computer graphics is terrifying," Brosnan added.

As for his own roles in violent films — according to The Sun, Brosnan killed 135 people over four films as James Bond, a higher average than any other Bond actor — Brosnan downplayed the violence.

"The kill ratio in movies is overwhelming and I never really took the violence in the Bond movies too seriously," he said. "The plot was not so real."

Other people and organizations that have blamed real-life violence on media include Sen. Lamar Alexander and the National Rifle Association, which, shortly after the Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, Conn., last December, called out video games for "selling violence" to children. Many experts and politicians disagree, including Rep. Nancy Pelosi, but when President Obama introduced a package of proposals to combat gun violence in January, they included a call for research into the link between "media images" and real-life acts of violence.

A look into the health issues related to the consumption of red meat and why you should reconsider your bovine-dining habits.

By Michael McWhertor on Apr 26, 2013 at 9:23p

CCP Games, the developer behind Eve Online and Dust 514, has created a first-person, multiplayer dogfighting game set in the Eve universe and designed for the Oculus Rift VR headset. Attendees at CCP's Eve Fanfest in Reykjavik, Iceland are some of the first to get their hands-on the game dubbed EVR.

The arcade-style multiplayer space shooter was built in Unity and developed during CCP developers' personal time, according to a report from PC Gamer. The experimental VR project, created in about seven weeks, reportedly uses some existing Eve Online assets, but does not connect to CCP's complex space simulation game. At least, not yet.

"6v6 instanced combat isn't what Eve — with the whole single shard thing — is about," Eve Online executive producer John Lander told PC Gamer. "Is there a way to work this in? We've got some really interesting questions to look at now."

"God knows what we'll do with this."

EVR uses a combination of gamepad controls and head tracking, according to hands-on impressions posted by Penny Arcade Report.

The game is reportedly far from finished, but for a peek at what EVR looks like, sans virtual reality, check out video of the proof of concept game from CCP's livestream from Fanfest.

• Source
• PC Gamer
• Penny Arcade Report
• YouTube

Tinkerers have only had their hands on the Google Glass "Explorer Edition" for a few days, but they've already found a way to achieve root on Google's much-ballyhooed face-computer, granting full access to the device's Android operating system.

The hack comes courtesy of legendary iOS jailbreaker Jay Freeman, aka Saurik, who tells Forbes that he cracked the device using a known exploit used to get root on Android 4.0, first discovered by another hacker named B1nary. Freeman says it was a simple task, accomplished in a matter of hours by fooling the device into thinking it's actually an emulation instead of the real hardware. Since emulations are used for testing, all permissions are granted and root is achieved.

Freeman is not the first to crack Glass, though: just yesterday, another developer, Liam McLoughlin, also got root on his device. Although both jailbreaks were successful on the current Explorer Edition of Glass, it's not clear whether those holes will still be available in the consumer edition. But it's potentially a boon for those concerned about the fact that Google can remotely deactivate the device it you attempt to sell it — or anyone not fond of the fact that Google will be pre-screening all the apps that go on device, unlike its more open app ecosystem on Google Play.

• Source Forbes
• Related Items google glass jay freeman saurik jailbreak root

By Michael McWhertor on Apr 26, 2013 at 10:10p

Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick made more than $64.9 million last year, according to a proxy statement filed with the SEC today. According to Reuters, that makes Kotick one of the highest paid CEOs in the United States.

Kotick's actual salary last year was a little more than $2 million, double his salary from 2011. He was also compensated $2.5 million in bonuses and $4.4 million in 2012 as part of Activision Blizzard's corporate annual incentive plan. The majority of Kotick's total compensation came from stock awards worth more than $55.9 million.

In 2011, when he was awarded no stock, Kotick's compensation as president and CEO was $8.3 million.

For the year 2012, Activision Blizzard's annual net revenue was $4.856 billion and its net income was $1.149 billion, both up from the year before.

Activision Blizzard chief financial officer Dennis Durkin's compensation for the year totaled $13.4 million, while Mike Morhaime, president and CEO of Blizzard Entertainment, made more than $9 million.

• Source
• Activision
• Reuters

• Image Source
• Bobby Kotick on Flickr

theartofanimation:

Park Jong Won

roxa:

NO STOP IT WHYYY