by fidel

Blessed remarked that the BBC asked him to replace William Hartnell in the mid-'60s as the second Doctor, but he said no.

skidmoreowingsmerrill:

Turning Bridge-Building Sideways

In 1978, SOM architect Myron Goldsmith and engineer T.Y. Lin created a remarkable structure to span the challenging middle fork of California’s American River. Ruck-A-Chucky Bridge elegantly solves the problem of building a stable, economical structure across a wide, steep gorge by entirely rethinking the principles of bridge-building. A “hanging arc,” the bridge was to be suspended by 80 high-strength cables and balanced by tensile forces. Though unbuilt, Ruck-A-Chucky Bridge stands as a masterwork of innovative design and structural economy to this day. Learn more

djempirical

#yy1000ty (for the game in addition to the machine)

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AOL has spent the last decade—since the broadband era really took off—trying to build a business around online advertising. But its legacy dialup internet subscription business is still generating a big portion of its sales—and most of its profits.

At the end of June, AOL had 2.3 million subscribers, paying an average of $20.86 per month, it said today as part of its second-quarter earnings presentation (pdf). And after years of fast decline—as most Americans who could subscribe to broadband did so—the business has stabilized. AOL’s subscriber count is down just 245,000 from the same time last year, and 84,000 from the end of the first quarter. (Of course, it’s down 21 million from a decade ago.)

With most expenses long paid, it’s also creating an impressive amount of profit. AOL’s “membership” group—which includes the dialup access business—generated about one-third of the company’s $607 million in sales last quarter, but an oversized amount of its operating profit: $143 million of “adjusted OIBDA” (operating profit from its core business, before accounting adjustments), compared to $122 million total for the company.

Expect the subscriber base to continue to shrink, as wireless broadband continues to build. But much like Yahoo’s search business, for now AOL can enjoy its vintage cash machine.

I learn a lot of things on Twitter that titillate me but this morning's timeline scroll thrust me into hater mode before I had my first cup of hater-roasted coffee.

The twerp behind the misogynistic Twitter feed @MensHumor has purportedly been revealed. @HumorForMens tweeted a screenshot of the domain-name registration for MensHumor.com, an apparently related site. The man behind the account? Jonathan Standefer.

Standefer’s LinkedIn page, which is no longer publicly available but was cached by Google, shows that he’s an Austin-based “business operator” who cofounded Lamebook.com, or Facebook’s unofficial wall of lame, and GladPost. GladPost’s homepage displays the logos of MensHumor and WomensHumor’s Twitter accounts. He’s also as tall as a bottle of Smart Water, @HumorForMens hastened to point out.

Standefer not only practices misogyny, but he also dabbles in racism and ageism!

Yeah, I viciously whipped my cane at the woman-hating Twitter stylings of @MensHumor a few weeks ago, but adding a face to my @MensHumor-themed dartboard makes hitting the bullseye so much sweeter.

Standefer's Lamebook isn’t all that bad. I mean, it was mildly amusing when it came out in 2009 and there is nothing really offensive about it. Watching people make an ass out of themselves is a time-honored American tradition, thanks to America’s Funniest Home Videos.

There’s a big difference between Lamebook and Standefer's Twitter accounts. With Lamebook, he would let the masses fall on their faces and gleefully highlight it. But with @MensHumor, someone gave him the misguided idea that his twisted thoughts are actually funny and he should capitalize on them.

According to the domain search conducted by @HumorForMens, Standefer registered the MensHumor.com domain name and most likely tweets from the corresponding Twitter account. We used the Whois search tool on InterNIC's domain-name registry also, but it now comes up as private. But the date Standefer registered the website is the same in the screenshot: Aug. 15, 2011.

He also registered GhettoHikes.com, which has a Twitter account of the same name. @GhettoHikes is an offensive, racist account from “Cody” who leads hikes for “urban kids.” The tweets are essentially the 21st century version of the racist “blackface” films produced during the Jim Crow era.

@MCliches, another anti-@MensHumor Twitter watchdog, pointed out that Standefer’s abhorrently voiced Twitter accounts have spawned others that cross-promote each other, including @AmericanHumor and @OldManSearch. Sorry, there is no actual old guy named Norman searching for Regis Philbin’s black wife.

@MCliches also pointed that @MensHumor’s tweets extend beyond misogyny to plagiarism—like ripping this joke from the late comedian Mitch Hedburg.

“Menshumor is imploding in on itself. Its just a matter of time before people start mass-unfollowing. You can't tell bad jokes and survive,” tweeted @MCliches shortly after.

Indeed you can’t. As Rainn Wilson learned for the second time, there is only so many offensive jokes that people will tolerate. (Answer: zero!) It seems Standefer, along with his family of distasteful and schizophrenically voiced Twitter accounts, doesn’t know when to stop.

So, Standefer, keep chugging that Bud Light of yours and keep your thoughts to yourself. No one wants to hear them.

Original Source

Original Source

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAoZDKlbzTc

Original Source

I’ve been running these trials since the first beta, and this is the first time that Swift has performed better than Objective-C for every single algorithm, with standard optimizations. And not only is Swift faster, but it is faster by significant margins.

Now I’m listening.

∞ Permalink

An anonymous reader writes with the news that Hackaday published an article on the poor security of the add-on modules that Tektronix sells as expensive add-ons to unlock features in certain of its oscilloscopes. The reader writes: "It has come to attention of Tek's legal eagles and they now want the article to be taken down. Perhaps they can ask Google to forget that page?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Craft Beer Market is Overcrowded [Link] Related to the previous post, Joshua Bernstein writes about the increasingly crowded craft beer market: I’m onboard with America abandoning middle-of-the-road beer and exploring flavorful new directions. The highway, however, is getting mighty crowded. Hundreds of different beers debut weekly, creating a scrum of session IPAs, spiced witbiers, and barrel-aged stouts scuffling for shelf space. For consumers, the situation is doubly confusing. How can you pick a pint on a 100-brew tap list? Moreover, beer shops are chockablock with pale this and imperial that, each one boasting a different hop pun. When buying beer, I can’t count how many times I’ve assisted overwhelmed shoppers, playing the benevolent Sherpa in the wilds of modern brewing. This is actually a good thing. There needs to be churn and invention so that new and better ideas bubble to the top. In fact, Joshua gives a great example: Yes, last year, craft beer accounted for just 7.8 percent of the market, but consumers are fickle. When I was in high school, Red Wolf and Pete’s Wicked Ale were the rage. Remember them? Probably not. I do remember Pete's Wicked Ale. It's still around and making a bunch of beer, but craft beer today is generally better and more complex than Pete's. Cheers to overcrowding.

submitted by scrodd [link] [47 comments]

 Margaret Atwood writing The Handmaid’s Tale in Berlin, 1984.

(These days, her desk looks like this)

durrymuncher:

we have three distinct races in this fantasy story: white people, dwarves: who are sort of like… short white people, and elves: slightly taller-than-average white people with pointy ears

tumblr staff: hey guys we've just added this new feature to the site, isn't it great?
xkit guy: here's the extension to get rid of this one

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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“When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg reflects on the Supreme Court’s recent rulings, she sees an inconsistency.

In its gay rights rulings, she told a law school audience last week, the court uses the soaring language of “equal dignity” and has endorsed the fundamental values of “liberty and equality.” Indeed, a court that just three decades ago allowed criminal prosecutions for gay sex now speaks with sympathy for gay families and seems on the cusp of embracing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

But in cases involving gender, she said, the court has never fully embraced “the ability of women to decide for themselves what their destiny will be.” She said the court’s five-justice conservative majority, all men, did not understand the challenges women face in achieving authentic equality.”

- Adam Liptak, As Gays Prevail in Supreme Court, Women See Setbacks, The New York Times (Aug. 4, 2014).

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Advocatus Diaboli (1627651) writes For the last two years, the FBI has been quietly experimenting with drive-by hacks as a solution to one of law enforcement's knottiest Internet problems: how to identify and prosecute users of criminal websites hiding behind the powerful Tor anonymity system. The approach has borne fruit—over a dozen alleged users of Tor-based child porn sites are now headed for trial as a result. But it's also engendering controversy, with charges that the Justice Department has glossed over the bulk-hacking technique when describing it to judges, while concealing its use from defendants.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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submitted by t_h_p7 [link] [2 comments]

submitted by Broadband- [link] [1 comment]

The American hero behind Running Drawing is San Franciscan Claire Wyckoff. To be fair, some of Wykoff's Nike+ drawings are not dicks — she recently made an Atari Space Invaders character and an extended middle finger, for example — but most of them are. Dicks of all sizes. Fat dicks, skinny dicks. Dicks who climb on rocks. Over at Uproxx, Stacey Ritzen is pretty jazzed (jizzed? Oh, god. I'm sorry) about what Wykoff's been up to, and thinks it could have beautiful ramifications for future road race course designs.

The federal government has concluded there's a new leaker exposing national security documents in the aftermath of surveillance disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, U.S. officials tell CNN. Proof of the newest leak comes from national security documents that formed the basis of a news story published Tuesday by the Intercept, the news site launched by Glenn Greenwald, who also published Snowden's leaks.

A gunman believed to be an Afghan soldier opened fire at a training facility in Kabul and killed an American general -- carnage that a Pentagon spokesman said marked the death of one of the highest-ranked U.S. military service members since 9/11.

Like News Corp and Time Warner before it, Gannett, the publisher of USA Today, announced plans today to separate its print businesses from its digital and broadcast operations.

The company explained that in doing so it would create “more targeted investment opportunities” for its shareholders. In other words, the fast growth of its digital operations might no longer be clouded by the ongoing decline of its publishing business, which is easily the company’s biggest revenue contributor but not as profitable as the broadcast operations.

Also, separating the two businesses could also allow each company to pursue “value-enhancing acquisitions…with fewer regulatory obstacles,” Gannett said. (The US currently limits the ability of companies to own both newspapers and television stations.)

Gannett’s share price has been doing exceptionally well since in the depths of the last financial crisis. The separation is designed to unlock even more value for shareholders. Yet the experience of recent media companies that have done so is mixed. Both News Corp and its now separate 21st Century Fox have both lagged the market since their split in June last year. Time Warner and Time Inc. have both surged since their split, but that’s arguably more a function of both companies being potential targets for acquisitions.