mozidentity:

With Persona, you can log into web sites using the email address of your choice. The first time you use an email, our servers send you a confirmation link. By following that link, you confirm your identity to Persona, which then vouches for your ownership of that email address.

Of course, in the long term, Persona is meant to be distributed:alice@example.com should be verified and certified by the administrators ofexample.com. If example.com wants to use 2-digit passwords, they can. If they want to use retinal scans powered by your webcam, they can. It’s up to them. With each domain able to customize its authentication protocol with its users, the Web becomes more secure.

Did you know that Persona supports this today?

If you own a domain, you can claim your users without asking Mozilla. Just follow the Persona Identity Provider protocol as described in our Identity Provider Guide. You can also start with the code for eyedee.me, our example Identity Provider. Just connect this code to your user database and advertise your domain as a Persona Identity Provider.

THE first episode of "Doctor Who", a British science-fiction series, was broadcast the day after President Kennedy's assassination in November 1963 with your four-year-old correspondent watching nervously from the sofa. The show returns to British television screens on March 30th for its 50th anniversary season. The remarkable longevity of the Doctor parallels that of another British hero, James Bond, who celebrated 50 years in cinemas last year.

Both series have survived multiple changes in lead actor; indeed, in "Doctor Who", such changes are an integral part of the plot (the Doctor is a Time Lord whose body regenerates when under great stress). Both have survived wobbly periods in the 1980s when they seemed to lose their hold on public enthusiasm (the later Roger Moore Bond films were painful, as was Timothy Dalton's first outing; "Doctor Who" disappeared, apparently for good, in 1989 after years of cardboard scenery and dodgy acting). But both have had modern revivals which recall the golden age of the 1960s and 1970s. And both have a long fascination with gadgets—Bond has exploding pens and magnetic watches; the Doctor prefers a versatile sonic screwdriver and his spaceship, the Tardis, which not only travels through time but usefully translates all conversations into English.

And both are defiantly British. In the case of Bond, his Britishness has been exported as a global success, while "Doctor Who" remains a cult show outside the UK. Back in 1971, as Sean Connery confronted Blofeld at the end of "Diamonds Are Forever", the villain sardonically remarked: "I don't know why you're here, Bond. Your pathetic country hasn't even been threatened." In the most recent film, "Skyfall", a good deal of the action is on home turf—there was a small cheer in the cinema when Albert Finney, playing the part of a Bond-family retainer, blasted a baddie with a shotgun and proclaimed "Welcome to Scotland!"

The Bond series is really an exercise in wish fulfilment for British audiences; a throwback to the days when Britain still counted in the world and could be considered cool. Bond may get help from the CIA, in the form of Felix Leiter, but he is the only one who can actually save the day and get the girl. He recalls an earlier generation of British gentlemen heroes, such as Bulldog Drummond or Richard Hannay (from "The 39 Steps").

In contrast, the Doctor represents a different British tradition; the absent-minded professor. In his first incarnation, played by William Hartnell (and Peter Cushing in two 1960s film spin-offs), he was a grandfather from the Victorian age, a cranky and not always sympathetic figure. To give the audience someone to root for, he was given companions (initially, his granddaughter and two of her schoolteachers). The tradition of the assistant has been maintained and they are much more glamorous these days. The TARDIS is an old British police box, almost out of date in 1963 but now so iconic it is impossible to replace.

Whereas Bond will finish off his adversary with a gun or a gadget, the Doctor strives to avoid violence, preferring to use his brain to solve the problem. Admittedly, this often involves scientific gobbledegook such as "reversing the polarity", but it does give the show a moral dimension. In the early 1970s it even had an environmental slant, when Jon Pertwee battled to save alien species from extermination by the armed forces under Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart.

Just as everyone will have their favourite Bond (usually Sean Connery, although Daniel Craig, pictured above right, has his admirers), "Whovians" will have their favourite Doctors. Tom Baker, of the wild-eyed stare (he also played Rasputin on screen), curly locks and long scarf is probably the most recognisable of the early set; David Tennant, with a rockabilly quiff and Converse trainers is the best-loved modern version. Indeed, the characters are so established that one can view each new actor's version as a reincarnation. Mr Craig is a return to Mr Connery's grittiness, following the supersmooth Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan. The eccentricities of Matt Smith, the current Doctor, recall the kindly, flute-playing Patrick Troughton.

Both series look set to survive and prosper. "Skyfall" took more than $1 billion at the box office and has cleverly rebooted the franchise, complete with a new M (Bond's boss), Q (gadget guru) and Moneypenny (female assistant). "Doctor Who's" audience has dipped under Matt Smith (pictured above left) but it is still a mainstay of Saturday-night TV. With Russell Davies and then Steven Moffat as lead writers it has benefited from a much bigger budget and some new villains (the Weeping Angels—statues that move when you close your eyes—are a particularly creepy addition). Old-timers like your correspondent may regret the overcomplicated plots and romantic sub-plots (pre-1989, the Doctor was determinedly asexual), but perhaps they are what a modern audience needs.

As long as the fundamentals remain, the Doctor will survive. An alien menace to mankind and a panicked population, an imperilled assistant and the Doctor, armed only with his wits and his screwdriver, taking a lonely march towards the danger. May his reincarnations never end.

"Doctor Who" Series 7 Part 2 begins on BBC One on March 30th 2013

In 1999, I wrote an article for the bOING bOING Digital site about the CONET Project, a multi-CD collection of mysterious "numbers stations" heard on shortwave. For decades, intelligence organizations have reportedly broadcast one-way messages to their agents in the field via shortwave, and the transmissions happen to sound weirder than any Stockhausen score or minimalist electronica you've ever heard -- a child's voice, or the obviously synthesized intonation on what's known as the "Lincolnshire Poacher" station, named for the folk song accompanying the numbers. Wilco's album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is named for, and samples, a numbers station. The CONET Project has been available for several years for free download from various places online, including Archive.org. Now, the original compilers, Irdial-Discs MMX, have re-released The Conet Project in a special CD edition that includes the four original discs plus a fifth CD containing recordings of very strange "noise stations."

"The CONET Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations / 1111"

"Spy vs. Spy: The Soundtrack" (bOING bOING Digital)

• CONET Project: spy "numbers stations" preserved at Archive.org ...
• Conet Project free online - Boing Boing
• Strange Russian "numbers station" - Boing Boing
• Who owns recordings of numbers stations?

Back in 2009, Sergey Chikuyonok wrote an article to present a new way of writing HTML and CSS code. This revolutionary plugin, called Zen Coding, has helped many developers through the years and has now reached a new level.

Emmet, previously known as Zen Coding, is the most productive and time-saving text-editor plugin you will ever see. By instantly expanding simple abbreviations into complex code snippets, Emmet can turn you into a more productive developer.

For those who prefer to watch instead of read, here is a summary of my favorite tricks.

How Does It Work?

Let’s face it: writing HTML code takes time, with all of those tags, attributes, quotes, braces, etc. Of course, most text editors have code completion, which helps a lot, but you still have to do a lot of typing. Emmet instantly expands simple abbreviations into complex code snippets.

HTML Abbreviations

Initializers

Getting started with a new HTML document takes less than a second now. Just type ! or html:5, hit “Tab,” and you’ll see an HTML5 doctype with a few tags to jumpstart your application.

• html:5 or !
  for an HTML5 doctype
• html:xt
  for an XHTML transitional doctype
• html:4s
  for an HTML4 strict doctype

Easily Add Classes, IDs, Text and Attributes

Because Emmet’s syntax for describing elements is similar to CSS selectors, getting used to it is very easy. Try mixing an element’s name (e.g. p) with an identifier (e.g. p#description).

Also, you can combine classes and IDs. For example, p.bar#foo will output this:

Now let’s see how to define content and attributes for your HTML elements. Curly brackets are used for content. So, h1{foo} will produce this:

foo

And square brackets are used for attributes. So, a[href=#] will generate this:

Nesting

By nesting abbreviations, you can build a whole page using just one line of code. First, the child operator, represented by >, allows you to nest elements. The sibling operator, represented by +, lets you place elements near each other, on the same level. Finally, the new climb-up operator, represented by ^, allows you to climb up one level in the tree.

Grouping

To effectively take advantage of nesting without turning them into a confusing mess of operators, you’ll need to group some pieces of code. It’s like math — you just need to use parentheses around certain pieces. For example, (.foo>h1)+(.bar>h2) will output this:

Implicit Tag Names

To declare a tag with a class, just type div.item, and then it will generate .

In the past, you could omit the tag name for a div; so, you just had to type .item and it would generate . Now Emmet is more intelligent. It looks at the parent tag name every time you expand the abbreviation with an implicit name. So, if you declare .item inside of a

width: 100px;

height: 10%;
margin: 5em;

@font-face {
  font-family:;
  src:url();
}

@font-face {
  font-family: 'FontName';
  src: url('FileName.eot');
  src: url('FileName.eot?#iefix') format('embedded-opentype'),
     url('FileName.woff') format('woff'),
     url('FileName.ttf') format('truetype'),
     url('FileName.svg#FontName') format('svg');
  font-style: normal;
  font-weight: normal;
}

overflow: hidden;

-webkit-transform: ;
-moz-transform: ;
-ms-transform: ;
-o-transform: ;
transform: ;

-webkit-super-foo: ;
-moz-super-foo: ;
-ms-super-foo: ;
-o-super-foo: ;
super-foo: ;

-webkit-transform: ;
-moz-transform: ;
transform: ;

background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0 0, 100% 0, color-stop(0.5, #fff), to(#000));
background-image: -webkit-linear-gradient(left, #fff 50%, #000);
background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(left, #fff 50%, #000);
background-image: -o-linear-gradient(left, #fff 50%, #000);
background-image: linear-gradient(left, #fff 50%, #000);

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit. Libero delectus.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
Voluptates esse aliquam asperiores sunt.
Fugiat eaque laudantium explicabo omnis!

With today's technology, would it be possible to launch an unmanned mission to retrieve Voyager I?

—Elliott Bennett

Voyager I is farther from Earth than any other manmade object. After getting a pair of gravitational kicks from Jupiter and Saturn, it’s headed out of the Solar System at a pretty high speed, and nothing else we’ve built is on track to pass it.

Strangely, as of the day I’m writing this, Voyager is actually getting closer to us, because Earth is in a part of its orbit where it’s approaching Voyager faster than Voyager is fleeing. But in a few months, we’ll swing around the Sun and Voyager will again be getting farther away.

It has a 35-year head start, so it would be hard to catch. But catching up isn’t the problem.

New Horizons, the spacecraft currently headed out of the Solar System by way of Pluto, is never going to catch up to Voyager—it’s not moving fast enough and it’s headed in the wrong direction. But it could have.

The reason Voyager is moving so fast is that it got gravitational assists from Jupiter and Saturn, while New Horizons only got one from Jupiter.

Gravity assists aren’t paradoxical magic. It’s just like bouncing a tennis ball off a passing truck. Gyroscopes, on the other hand, ARE magic.

If New Horizons had ditched the Pluto objective and waited for the right planetary alignment (the 2030s look promising), it could have swung by Jupiter and Saturn, then caught up to Voyager in as little as a century or two! (Assuming we could manage to hit Voyager from that far away. But I bet we could; our rocket scientists are pretty good at rocket science.)

Of course, getting there’s the easy part. The hard part is getting back.

Voyager weighs a little less than a ton and is moving away at 17 kilometers per second (if it were in the atmosphere, that would be Mach 50). And since it’s out in interstellar space, there are no speeding Jupiters to grab on to. Stopping Voyager is going to take a lot of fuel.

It’s what engineers call the tyranny of the rocket equation: As the amount that you want to change your speed (“delta-v”) goes up, the fuel required increases exponentially. The equation tells us that to turn the 720-kilogram Voyager around, we’re going to need at least 30 tons of fuel.

But to get that fuel out there, we need even more fuel. And to get that fuel, we need even more fuel. (This is where the tyrannical rocket equation gets its exponential term.) In fact, to rescue Voyager, we’d have to launch a fleet of—at minimum—60 New Horizons-sized spacecraft loaded with nothing but fuel.

Could we do it? Sure. There are a couple plausible ways. Instead of building five to ten dozen fuel-laden Titan IIIEs, we could just build a fleet of ten or fifteen Saturn Vs, and do the whole thing with fewer launches. But however we did it, it would be a massive and expensive operation similar in scale to the Apollo program.

The difference between the launch vehicle we’d used to get Voyager out of the Solar System and the fleet we’d need for a round trip is striking:

Fortunately, there’s one way around the tyranny of the rocket equation: Ditch the rockets.

Ion engines—which use electric fields to accelerate exhaust gas to high speeds—are far more efficient than chemical rockets, and they make accelerating to high speeds much more plausible.

The reason we’re not using them for everything is that they produce very little thrust, so it takes a long time to get up to speed. It’s like if you had a car that gets amazing mileage but has a one-horsepower engine. (Actually, are you sure that’s not just a horse?) Ion engines are great; the current ones just take forever to get you moving.

But since catching Voyager is going to take a long time anyway, ion engines are fine. We could launch a probe (like this one), send it out to Voyager, latch on, turn everything around, and let it spend a few decades slowing Voyager down.

Once Voyager had lost nearly all its speed, the Sun’s gravity would take over, and the probe would begin a long slow slide toward the inner Solar System. This would take about 200 years, and with some extremely careful nudges, we could make sure it falls in an Earth-crossing orbit.

Two centuries later, Voyager would reach Earth and, with no way to slow down, burn up in our atmosphere, because we didn’t think to send out an aerobraking shell with the rescue craft. So that was a waste of a few centuries of work and billions upon billions of dollars.

Maybe a better idea would be to borrow a salvage vessel and set sail for the coast of New South Wales, Australia. There, in the waters off Jervis Bay, the Australian Royal Navy ship Voyager sank in 1964 after an accidental collision.

That one’s probably easier to retrieve.

After years of frustratingly vague promises and false starts, the Arrested Development movie is finally getting made—as a plotline on the Arrested Development TV show. Talking to TV Guide’s Will Keck in an affable voice that pushes the plot along, Ron Howard says the upcoming fourth season will make good on the last episode’s final lines of dialogue, when Howard, playing himself, says, “I don’t see it as a series. Maybe a movie,” kicking off seven years of anticipation for a film he’s finally ready to pretend to make. “In the new season, we create a heightened version of Imagine Entertainment,” Howard says of his real-life production company with Brian Grazer, who added, “We talk about what could be our new Da Vinci Code”—a nod to how the Arrested Development movie has involved its own complex series of clues and a certain amount of ...

Don Payne, a writer who penned both Thor movies, as well as many episodes of The Simpsons, has died. His longtime Simpsons associate Mike Scully broke the news on Twitter.

After working for many years on sitcoms such as Veronica's Closet and Men Behaving Badly, Payne, a longtime comics fan, co-wrote the screenplays for three comic-book movies—Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer, Thor, and the upcoming Thor: The Dark World—as well as the superhero comedy, My Super Ex-Girlfriend. He also penned 16 episodes of The Simpsons, including “Thursdays With Abie,” “Love, Springfieldian Style,” and “Simpsons Christmas Stories.” In 2005, Payne received a Writers Guild Award for his work on the episode "Fraudcast News." He served as a producer on the show since 2000, winning four Emmys for his work in that capacity.

Most recently, Payne had been working on the screenplay for Maximum Ride, the first ...

Doomed to yawn

Final Fantasy V out on iOS in New Zealand today originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 27 Mar 2013 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Mark, Todd and Stasia from The Key of Awesome sing while calculating the value of product placement in hip hop songs for their “Hip Hop Shopping Spree,” the latest music video by cdza. The song performed in this music video is available to purchase online.

Since 1965, there has been a tradition of Republicans keeping a desk full of candy in the Senate Chamber. It is currently located at the back area of the Senate’s Republican side, close to its busiest entrance. Senator George Murphy (R-CA) began filling the ‘Candy Desk’ with sweets in the late 1960s and over the years several senators have made sure this popular piece of furniture is kept well-stocked. Most recently, Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL) volunteered to fill it and to help promote the Illinois candy trade, he stocks it with candy made in that state such as Mars, Milky Way and Snickers bars. Kirk, a junior senator, also sits at the historic desk. Read more about the Candy Desk and its fascinating history (including info about a version of the desk that the Democrats keep) at Wikipedia.

The “Candy Desk” tradition continued after Senator Murphy left the Senate in 1971. In the ensuing years, Senators fulfilled this roll including Paul Fannin (R-AZ), Harrison Schmitt (R-NM), Roger Jepsen (R-IA), Steve Symms (R-ID), Slade Gorton (R-WA), John McCain (R-AZ), Jim Jeffords (R-VT), Bob Bennett (R-UT), Rick Santorum (R-PA), Craig Thomas (R-ID), George Voinovich (R-OH), Mel Martinez (R-FL) and George LeMieux (R-FL).

The Candy Desk is currently located at #95, in yellow.

via Digg

“when the homeless own smartphones, there are no excuses”

“Spare Any Change?” is a skit written and directed by John Elerick that imagines a savvy panhandler begging for change and being able to take credit cards on his smartphone via a Square device. It stars Elerick and Ricky Carmona.

via Viral Viral Videos

Photographer Bertrand Kulik captured some stunning photos of a horizontal rainbow over the skyline of Paris, France on March 17th, 2013, which just happens to be St. Patrick’s Day. Kulik told Daily Mail, “I have never seen a rainbow like that before. This light phenomenon looked like a rising aurora over Paris. [...] I was very impressed by this beauty and I knew that I could not miss it.”

images via Bertrand Kulik

via Astronomy Picture of the Day

actegratuit:

these still make me laugh..

It can be tough explaining what Markdown is to a normal human being. I've struggled with describing the expanse that is MultiMarkdown. What's a header when you don't know what HTML is? No more explaining.

Introducing the Markdown Field Guide by Eddie Smith and David Sparks.

This is a wonderful tour of Markdown. It guides the reader from the basics up through the sophistication of MultiMarkdown. It is well organized, simple and beautiful.

Nicole of Baking Bites has put together a sweet tutorial on how to make marshmallow Peeps-infused vodka. It involves using a big jar to drown about 30 candy Peeps in inexpensive (but not terrible) vodka and letting it steep for a while. She’ll be posting Peeps-infused vodka cocktail recipes soon.

You can use this vodka in just about any cocktail, and it actually makes a fun centerpiece for an Easter party. Peeps come in a variety of colors, but they all taste just about the same. The classic Yellow peeps are my personal favorite and I chose them to infuse my vodka. Feel free to work with blue, purple or pink Peeps, but I don’t recommend mixing and matching the colors because it will result in a less-than-pleasant-looking finished product as the colors mix. The yellow turn out a vodka with an almost limoncello color to it, which is easy to incorporate into drinks.

Thanks WindupKitty!

“I don’t understand what the problem is, I thought we were all feeling this vibe. You were so into it at the train station.”

“Paperman Threesome” is a parody by CollegeHumor of Disney’s Oscar-winning animated black and white short, Paperman. It humorously imagines an awkward ending where a third party wants an unexpected three-way with the film’s couple. The parody was written by Kevin Corrigan and Owen Parsons and directed by Sam Reich.

Frank Miller + Batman + sound effects = Master class

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

doktorgun:

guseri:

becdecorbin:

quirkytagalong-art:

crispysandwiches:

myampgoesto11:

Giant anatomy gummy candy by Giant Gummy Bears

YEEESSSSS

omg

dear god…….

It’d be neat if a Jake cosplayer could get one of the green skulls…40 bucks though, ouch.

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite color, of most excellent flavor.

I like the brains one. That’ll give you something nice to hold and chomp on the next time you’re out zombiewalking (as one does).

Vita game Metrico uses infographics as landscapes originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 26 Mar 2013 18:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Emin Gün Sirer:

Let’s leave aside three unrelated factoids, namely, the Summly founder is only 17 years old, the company was in existence for only 18 months and Yahoo reportedly paid $30M for it. …

I want to first focus on this from a technologist’s perspective, and there is only one germane fact: the company developed no Natural Language Processing technology of its own.

They licensed the core engine from another company.

A lot of geeks have been yelling today about the Summly acquisition, which is really a textbook acqui-hire: a startup that appeared to be missing its growth targets was acquired for a fairly modest price and immediately shut down by a big tech company in need of good talent.

I don’t know if Emin’s assertion about the tech is correct. We barely know anything about Summly because the press has utterly failed at telling us anything useful about it.

All we really know is that Nick D’Aloisio is young. He started the company when he was 15. Did I mention he’s young? And he started a company. And he was only 15!

Now he’s a millionaire, and he’s only 17! Can you believe that? A tech millionaire! He’s only 17! And he must be smart. After all, he started the company when he was only 15. Young, smart, and now rich! What will his girlfriend think? (Really. Shameful.)

All we know about Summly itself is that it summarized web articles into three bullet points that occasionally made sense. And I only know that because I tried it while D’Aloisio was barraging me with manipulative, fake-“URGENT” emails much like these in late 2011. The summaries weren’t good enough for me to try more than a few times. But the press never talked about the actual product in their vapid articles about Nick D’Aloisio’s youth.

In the early days of Tumblr, David Karp didn’t tell anyone his age. He hired me when he was 19, and I worked for him for over a year before I learned that — and even then, I only knew because he let it slip in an interview. He wanted to keep it quiet for as long as he could because he knew that as soon as it got out, every story about Tumblr would just be about David’s youth.

He was right. After that, he’d give hours-long interviews with big newspaper and magazine writers, trying to tell them all about the product, and the article would come out as a vapid fluff piece about how young he was. It took years for Tumblr to (mostly) get out from under that image in the press.

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