firehose

What goes on in the minds of people who spend their free time mounting online attacks against actresses they presumably like? Does knowing that they were responsible for the cruel violation of dozens of peoples’ privacy give them the confidence they need to make it through another day at Best Buy? Are they working up the nerve to someday harass women in real life? Are their keyboards even coated in Cheetos dust?

Or maybe trolls aren’t complex creatures at all. Maybe they are just driven by impulsive hatred, as seems to be the case with the person who went to great lengths just to spite Jennifer Lawrence on Wikipedia yesterday.

In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Lawrence made her first public statement since she was inducted into a club nobody wants to join (i.e., people whose private photos were stolen and posted on the Internet) last month ...

Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by a new movie coming out that week. This week: Prepare for Dracula Untold with some of the best of Dracula already told.

Nosferatu The Vampyre (1979)

Dracula has rarely been as inhumanly pitiful—and as mesmerizingly creepy—as in Nosferatu The Vampyre, Werner Herzog’s stylized remake of F.W. Murnau’s seminal 1922 Nosferatu. Shot in both English and German-language versions (the latter proving far superior), the film marked Herzog’s second of five collaborations with Klaus Kinski, who brings a feral strangeness to the character of Count Dracula, here envisioned as a pale, rat-like other. As per tradition, Kinski’s Count invites real estate agent Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz) to his Transylvanian castle, where he imprisons the man and then sets out to Germany, where his newly purchased property will put him in close proximity to Harker’s wife ...

Comcast has publicly apologized to the California man, Conal O’Rourke, who accused the company of getting him fired from his former position at PriceWaterhouseCoopers in the wake of a yearlong billing dispute. The apology comes less than 24 hours after Ars published an article detailing O’Rourke’s documented allegations.

"What happened with Mr. O’Rourke's service is completely unacceptable," Charlie Herrin, a company senior vice president, wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. "Despite our attempts to address Mr. O’Rourke’s issues, we simply dropped the ball and did not make things right. Mr. O’Rourke deserves another apology from us, and we’re making this one publicly. We also want to clarify that nobody at Comcast asked for him to be fired. We’re also determined to get to the bottom of exactly what happened with his service, figure out what went wrong at every point along the way, and fix any underlying issues."

Herrin is the same new Comcast executive who said late last month that improving customer service was his "number one priority."

The third Ghostbusters film is finally moving forward with a new, all-female squad, and the production is bringing on the writer behind another successful female-led comedy to create its script. Katie Dippold, who wrote The Heat and previously wrote for MadTV, is going to be creating the script to the rebooted Ghostbusters film alongside its director, Paul Feig. Feig too has had a lot of success with female-led comedies, having directed The Heat and the major hit Bridesmaids.

---

The creation of a third Ghostbusters film has a fairly notorious history, with production famously going nowhere for basically two decades. But now, it looks like it's really happening: rather than focus on the old cast, the third film is starting anew with a another crew, which means there aren't impossible production hurdles like trying to get Bill Murray on board, despite having sworn off the film time and again. We don't know much about it yet, but Feig tells us just about everything important in a tweet: "Yes," he writes, "it will star hilarious women."

https://twitter.com/letterman/status/519880621104308225

Tonight's show - Anderson Cooper, the star of some upcoming sitcom, and a Japanese hologram vocaloid pop star.

I feel like we officially live in the future. This is exactly the sort of random minor detail you'd notice in some near future sci fi dystopia filmed any time between say 1985 and 1999. And here we are.

Submitted by: (via Lab Humor)

Tagged: Chemistry , formaldehyde , funny , science , puns , g rated , School of FAIL

Share on Facebook

Margi Bradway noticed something peculiar when she went on a biking trip last year. Before her friends got on their bikes, they all pulled out smartphones. “Everyone was clicking on their Strava,” she recalls. Bradway, the active transportation policy lead at the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) at the time, had an idea. Could data collected by Strava, a popular GPS-powered app that lets cyclists and runners log workouts and commutes, make her home city of Portland a safer place for bike-riders?

Portland is already a better city than most for cyclists: Hawthorne Bridge, one of the city’s five bike-friendly bridges, averages 1.7 million bike trips a year, and the city boasts 300 miles of bike lanes. But Portland relies on a very rudimentary method for collecting data on cyclists and the trips they make: volunteers count riders at various intersections around the city. Without better information, it’s difficult to improve on what already exists.

More than 99 percent of Comcast shareholders today voted in favor of the company's $45.2 billion purchase of Time Warner Cable, Comcast announced.

The merger "is subject to various regulatory approvals and other customary conditions and also requires approval by Time Warner Cable shareholders," who are scheduled to vote tomorrow, Comcast said. If all goes well for Comcast, the merger will close in early 2015.Not many people attended the meeting in Philadelphia. "Five people spoke at a sparsely attended special shareholder meeting at the Kimmel Center on South Broad Street—three against the deal, and two for it," according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.

The real test for Comcast will be getting approval from the government. Consumer advocates have argued that the two largest cable companies in the country should not be allowed to merge, while Comcast points out that it doesn't compete against Time Warner Cable in any city or town.

Yesterday, for the first time since its creator headed for the hills, we heard an official peep from Google+. Daniel Besbris, who replaced Vic Gundotra as Google’s head of social media, gave an interview to Recode in which he discussed the future of his company’s moribund social network. Over 1,600 words, Besbris does his best to say nothing of note. "We’re actually very happy with the progress of Google+," he says, presumably straight-faced. And there are some valid reasons for the company’s happiness: Google+ gave its hundreds of millions of users a unified login across all of its products, making those relationships easier to manage (and monetize).

---

But almost since the day it launched, Google+ has struggled to overcome the perception that it was dead on arrival. Nearly three and a half years after opening its doors the public, you would be hard pressed to name a single person who ever became famous because of a following they built on Google+; to name a news story that broke there first; or to identify a way that it meaningfully differentiated itself from the glut of social products on the market. I think there are lots of people who use Google+, if only in passing; I think there are vanishingly few of them who love it.

Frontiers. Avenues. Location.

Asked about what areas Google+ could improve in, Besbris avoided the question. "We can never have enough energy or focus on mobile," he said — the tech-world equivalent of telling a prospective employer that perfectionism is your biggest weakness. "I’m really happy with what we have but I think it opens up new avenues and new frontiers, stuff we can do with location that we’ve never been able to do before." So this is what’s coming to Google+, I guess — avenues. Frontiers. Location.

As it so happens, there are a number of things Google could do to improve its social-media standing more or less overnight. (I wanted to share them with Besbris myself, but Google declined to put him on the phone.) Here are three off the top of my head.

Photos are buried inside the Google+ interface

Give Google+ Photos its own app, and drop the G+ branding. Google’s photo product is a complete gem: unlimited photo backup, with incredible search, and some spectacular "auto awesome" features that turn your photos into delightful little GIFs, among other things. Earlier this year, the company unveiled "automatically when you get back from a trip, turning them into exquisite little digital scrapbooks. Unfortunately, photos are buried inside the Google+ interface, both on mobile and the web. It’s high time to give Google’s photo products the app it deserves, untainted by the G+ branding.

Kill the Circles. Like many other social networks, Google+ thought it could differentiate itself from Facebook by prioritizing privacy. Its solution: forcing users to divide everyone they had ever met into groups, and develop their own internal cognitive models for which content should be shared with which groups. "Our users love Circles," Besbris told Recode. "They love that Google+ has privacy built in as a feature from the very beginning." The company notes with pride that other networks, including Facebook, have since added (barely used) features letting you divvy up your friends into buckets. It might look nice on a whiteboard, but in practice the Circles model is a nightmare. No one can remember who they put in which circle, or which circle is supposed to see which stuff, and before you know it the user has abandoned Google+ entirely for Facebook, because at least our friends are there. Facebook literally ran mind experiments on us this year — to make us sad — and we still reload that news feed a dozen times a day. As long as you persist with the fiction that Circles are a magical innovation beloved by all users, you will be walking down the exact same privacy-paved road to hell as Path. Do you really want to be on the same road as Path? Adopt a simplified follower/following model, retain some private sharing options, and I'll stop trying to make me remember the difference between "friend" and "acquaintance."

Do you want to be on the same road as Path?

Let your team build weird new stuff. Gundotra’s nickname at Google+ was The Victator. He had a more or less impossible job, and I can understand why he wanted his team to focus on a few strict priorities. But it’s late 2014, and the game is lost. Maybe it’s time to try something new? Two of your former employees, David Byttow and Chrys Bader, quit their jobs at Google+ so they could do just this. A few months later they built and released a novel social app called Secret, which immediately became the most buzzed-about app in Silicon Valley. There is tons of talent on the Google+ team, and you have them doing … what, exactly? Facebook craps out doomed experiments all the time, and the only consequence seems to be that it’s a more appealing place for designers and engineers to work. Do you want to be building the next Slingshot or Hyperlapse, or do you want to re-engineer the back end on the Google+ Communities page?

I’m not trying to suggest any of this is easy. Frankly, it would be a surprise if Google was the most dominant player in social media in 2014. The company started too late, and its product had the look and feel of an also-ran. But Besbris’ whistling past the graveyard won’t do Google+ any favors. Its moment came and went, and the time to change is now.

On Tuesday, a JetBlue passenger took to Twitter to publicly complain about an hours-long delay to her flight, and she accused JetBlue of delaying her return home even longer by not letting her reboard the flight.

Boston resident Lisa Carter-Knight used Twitter to report her flight's delay, using a #JetBlue hashtag to announce to her followers—as of press time, roughly 300—that the "pilot accuses passengers of accusing him of being intoxicated demands all passengers back." As she told Philadelphia's ABC affiliate WPVI, "We had been waiting an hour, so there was a joke by another passenger—it had been a long night and he hoped there was a fully stocked bar on the airplane. The pilot ran out and said, 'That's it, everybody out by the gate. I've been accused of being intoxicated."

The pilot reportedly ordered all passengers off the flight so he could take a sobriety test as mandated by law. At that point, Carter-Knight posted six tweets about the delay, commenting on an "unruly pilot" and "false accusations" of his sobriety being questioned. When she attempted to reboard hours later, she was not allowed to do so.