firehose

In the trailer for season five of Portlandia—which is set to return to IFC on January 8 for a 10-episode run—changes abound for Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein’s now-classic characters. The press release promises that the origin story of the feminist bookstore (which is closing in real life) will be explained, while other characters played by Armisen and Brownstein will face new challenges in the utopian Oregon city. But what the trailer seems to hype the most, between its constant jump cuts and its constantly swelling score, is action. There are tense stand-offs, characters diving in front of others, and wigs constantly finding themselves in peril as they are flung every which way. Can the wigs stay intact? Will the caps beneath them maintain their grasp on the actors’ heads? What’s under Jeff Goldblum ...

Brian Gaid

A bill is moving forward in the Utah State Legislature that aims to eventually shut down water to the National Security Agency’s (NSA) new massive data storage facility at Bluffdale, just south of Salt Lake City.

On Wednesday, the Public Utilities and Technology Interim Committee discussed the bill that "prohibits cooperation between a federal agency that collects electronic data and any political subdivisions of the state."

Rep. Marc Roberts, the bill’s author, did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment. As currently drafted, the bill would let the Bluffdale contract with the NSA continue until it runs out.

I'm a Microwave with legs, a force of true chaos. I have catapulted myself across the map and into a town full of evil sheep warriors who are running around on fire. (They weren't on fire before I got there, but in my defense, they attacked first.) Looking at my inventory, I have an apple, a chair, and the person who gave me my first quest. As I try to jump into the second floor of a house, a sheep headbutts me and I fall through the entire map. For a few seconds, I'm a ragdoll trapped in a glitch between worlds. And then I'm back where I started, at the bottom of a conveyer belt standing over innumerable lifeless goat bodies.

But then something truly weird happens. A goat magician asks me to join his guild. And then the text request disappears. It was right there in the ever-present bottom-left chat window. And now it’s gone, lost to a list of fake messages. I’m honestly not sure if I imagined it anymore.

Thing is, I know Goat MMO Simulator isn't an actual MMO (word order, in this case, is very important). Coffee Stain Studios's free add-on to its surprising breakout hit Goat Simulator (over 1.1 million sales and counting) is itself a surprisingly smart send-off to the massively successful online role-playing genre. Released today for PC, Mac, and Linux — just one week after World of Warcraft's fifth expansion, it takes everything that people loved about Goat Simulator — its sandbox world of over-the-top physics and bombastic humor — and gives it a sense of purpose. There are ridiculous quests to do, things to fight, and secrets to stumble upon. And again, it's free — if you've already bought into the idea of Goat Simulator, this is just icing on a (probably explosive) cake.

I had questions, though, so we reached out to Goat Simulator's game designer Armin Ibrisagic.

In Thursday blog post titled "Your time is valuable; we don't want to waste it," Comcast customer service chief Charlie Herrin detailed a new service that will give customers alerts 30 minutes before a technician shows up.

Comcast reduced its four-hour technician arrival windows to two hours a few years ago, and it promises $20 credits or a free premium channel for three months if they arrive late. Comcast also promises to call customers before they arrive at their home. To make the alert process more efficient, Comcast developed a feature "that enables our customers to track our technicians' arrival in real time," Herrin wrote. "This new feature, which will be available for free through our MyAccount app, begins trialing outside Boston this week."

"This is how it works," he continued. "Customers with scheduled appointments will be alerted through our App when our technician is about 30 minutes away from arriving at their house, and will be able to track this technician’s progress on a map. We’re hoping this will prevent our customers from just needing to sit at home and wait. They can check the app from the office, or wherever they are, and head home when they see we’re on our way. If we are running late, which can happen if our tech gets tied up at someone else’s house, we will let folks know that too, and provide real-time status updates so they can plan accordingly."

Since it launched its Register app two and a half years ago, Square has noticed adoption all around the world. But until today, people using it outside the US had to find a way to access the US app store to get it. They also had to use the app in dollars and convert it to their local currency manually. Even with all that, the company saw thousands of merchants adopting Register. So they decided to expand it reach, announcing today that Register will be available worldwide in four languages and 130 currencies.

"Even before today's announcement, we've seen thousands of downloads of our Register app by sellers around the world to track their sales, manage their inventory and access meaningful insights about their business through our rich analytics. Even if it was inconvenient, and not optimized for their language or currency, many sellers have clearly found our software effective.I talked with a woman in Zambia who was using Register, because she preferred it to the Excel spreadsheets that she was using before," says Catherine Ferdon, a Square spokeswoman. "She wanted to know if we would ever provide the ability to use it with her native currency, the kwacha. Today we're making that possible."

Square began as a merchant services company, focused on serving small sellers who couldn't afford a traditional point of sale system. With a cheap card reader and an iPhone, anyone could use Square to handle credit and debit transactions. Since then the company has tried their hand at a few consumer offerings, with mixed success. It killed off its wallet app, but has been making headway with Square cash, a simple way for users to exchange funds. That service was recently integrated into Snapchat, an avenue that may finally work to bring lots of consumers onboard Square's network.

Uber has hired an outside auditor to review its current privacy policies amid growing concerns around how its customers' personal data is being used. Uber announced that it would have Harriet Pearson, IBM's former privacy chief, conduct the review and make recommendations for improvement. There's no guaranteeing that Uber will act on those recommendations, however, and it's unlikely that Uber will publish results of the audit — unless they are, somehow, surprisingly glowing. Nonetheless, it's likely that Uber is hoping this move will quiet its critics for now, and there's a good chance that we'll hear about whatever recommendations it decides to put into place later.

"We must treat [trip history] carefully and with respect."

The move comes following a few days of seriously bad press for Uber. First, one of its executives was heard suggesting that the company spend $1 million hiring researchers to dig up dirt on journalists who write negative artcles about the company. Then, Uber's use of its internal ride-tracking tool came into question as reports began circulating that it is widely accessible and has been used as a novelty, with users' information being viewed without permission. Senator Al Franken has since put pressure on Uber to answer questions around this.

"Our business depends on the trust of the millions of riders and drivers who use Uber," Uber writes in a blog post. "The trip history of our riders is important information and we understand that we must treat it carefully and with respect, protecting it from unauthorized access."

This will be a key area for Pearson to address: travel data can be deeply revealing — it could show what kind of doctors a person is going to, for instance — and that's not something that people in the company should be able to access on a whim. Uber has previously stated that this data was only accessed for "legitimate business purposes."

For six years, a group of robots lived in three houses on a street in Campbell Creek, Tennessee. No humans resided there with them. The house was solely occupied by robots, fake sweat machines, and a bunch of electronic appliances, which turned on every day — right on schedule.

The robots were used to study energy efficiency

The Tennessee Valley Authority put the robots in these homes back in 2009 to study energy efficiency, reports Popular Science. The homes themselves were set up to mimic typical suburban households. They were equipped with TVs, dishwashers, and washing machines — all of which turned on and off throughout the day. But the appliances themselves varied from house to house. One home was programmed to be extremely energy efficient, whereas another was only slightly more energy-efficient than the control home, which replicated the habits of an average family. The robots were there because the researchers wanted to be able to open fridge doors on a set schedule. Using a real family would have made that impossible.

"The reason for the robotics was that, to have an apples to apples comparison of performance data across the houses," Patrick Hughes, director of the Building Technologies Research and Integration Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratories, told Popular Science, "you wanted the occupant effect on energy use to be identical."

Machines leaked moisture to mimic human sweat

But the lack of humans also posed a few obstacles to the experiment. For instance, the moisture levels didn’t match those that you would typical encounter in a normal household. So, the Tennessee Valley Authority ended up installing "Human Body Emulation Systems," which slowly released heat and water in an attempt to recreate human sweat and breath.

In October, the robots were removed from the three homes. As expected, the most-energy efficient house had an overall utility bill that was four times smaller than that of the control house. Now, the houses are up for sale, and the experiment paid off: the energy efficiency measures that the TVA experimented with have been incorporated in the area’s building codes.

Good news for anyone with access to $8 million, an abiding love of movie memorabilia, and poor impulse control: The world’s largest collection of movie posters and lobby cards is going up for sale. Morris Everett, Jr., who began collecting film posters, stills, and original artwork as a college undergrad in 1961, is teaming up with movie memorabilia dealer Profiles in History to sell his entire collection, which dates back to 1907, at auction. A pre-auction estimate valued the collection at between $6 million and $8 million, though Daniel Strebin, the independent consultant who did the appraising, told the Associated Press its true value is considerably higher.

Everett told the AP that he is selling the whole lot because, at 74, he is concerned his family would not “do it the way I want them to do it” if left to them, but also because he wants “the pleasure ...