firehose

According to Chapelle, he never officially quit, he's just seven years late for work.

There’s no shortage of unsavory characters on "Orange Is the New Black"'s second season, but Yoda — the cockroach trained by the inmates to act as a courier — might be one of the least pleasant to watch on screen. 'OITNB' has never been known for its realism, but just how much of a stretch is it to imagine that prisoners could teach a roach to shuttle cigarettes and other trinkets back and forth between cells?

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A little goat in Nepal is enjoying a serene moment to himself. He’s just relaxing, calm as can be. And then a fly comes along…

(via Tim Miller)

Despite military downsizing, the White House has previously shielded science research at the Department of Defense from budget cuts. But this year, the administration requested a 6.9% reduction. That has universities worried since they receive 10% of their federal research funding — worth $1 billion — from the Pentagon.

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“The 10,000 Movie Project” by NonSequiturMedia features the first five minutes of 10,000 movies laid out on a grid fit into a single YouTube video. You can zoom into different parts of the video to get a better look at what makes up all of those flashing lights. There’s also a Google Doc detailing everything that made it into the fairly inclusive list.

via Boing Boing

Salesforce steps up consumerization pace with wearable push on ZDNet:

Salesforce’s move to launch a developer pack for wearable computing in the enterprise follows a well-worn playbook for the company, but also highlights how it is stepping up the innovation pace.

The explosion of interest in wearable computing is one of tech’s fastest rising trends. While big moves from Google, Apple, and Samsung will likely attract a lot of attention, we’re going to examine the broader potential that wearables hold for driving innovation in business.

The company on Tuesday launched Salesforce Wear and Wear Developer Pack, two efforts to get developers to create enterprise apps for wearables that can be contextually aware and cover everything from customer service to marketing and sales. ARM and Pebble are early partners.

What’s the takeaway here? For starters, Salesforce may be decidedly early to wearables relative to its other consumerization efforts. When Salesforce wanted to be the Facebook of the enterprise with Chatter, the usefulness of social media was well established. Salesforce wanted to enable enterprise mobile apps well after we all played Angry Birds and Candy Crush forever. And Salesforce hit a nice inflection point with enterprise cloud platforms, but others were there first.

Daniel Debow, senior vice president of emerging technologies at Salesforce, acknowledges that the developer pack is just the first step. “We’re going to open source the code, put it up on the Web site with support information and hit the road,” says Debow. Salesforce is planning hackathons and other stops to work with enterprise developers.

ultralaser:

majorlykira:

john green is at a wedding. 

rains of castamere starts playing.

jk rowling approaches and says “judy blume sends her regards”

#this post covers so many bases

submitted by jonjacobmoon [link] [45 comments]

New York Times

Strippers charged in scheme to drug, swindle, wealthy men Newsday When Dr. Zyad Younan was sued by the Manhattan strip club Scores for not paying his tab, he was flabbergasted and immediately had questions about the amount club officials said he owed -- $135,000. An indictment unsealed Wednesday in Manhattan ... NYC Strippers And Manager Arrested For Drugging, Stealing From Wealthy MenHeadlines & Global News all 233 news articles »

superopinionated:

mckelvie:

themadwhitaker:

youwillbelieveamancanfly:

6/11/14 Comics Pull

Nightcrawler #3

Notice how his chest is not visible. If this were a female character, the chances her boobs and butt would be visible would increase exponentially.

Not if I drew it, no. 

…Jamie, did you just “not all men” this? Cause I mean…I think the point in the commentary stands, given the overwhelming number of covers that historically prove the point the commenter was making. You don’t need to recenter this on whether you would or wouldn’t continue the harm; you can just acknowledge the practice is harmful.

You’re right, of course. I took it to mean if this specific cover was of a woman, ie drawn by me, but good call.

thislandislando:

1988 . 7. 16 TOKYO

"Curry Rice" -

The Misadventures of Tron Bonne (Capcom - PSX - 2000)

Japan has long killed whales for their meat, skirting global conservation measures by claiming that these hunts were for “scientific research” on Antarctic whale populations. But then Australia took Japan to the International Court of Justice to protest these claims, and in March of 2013, the ICJ called that Orwellian bluff, ruling that there were no legitimate scientific purposes behind Japan’s whale-killing program—and that Japan couldn’t hunt Antarctic whales anymore.

There’s just one problem: Japan didn’t see it that way.

On Monday, prime minister Shinzo Abe said Japan aims to resume whale-hunting “in order to obtain scientific information indispensable to the management of the whale resources.” Yesterday, Joji Morishita, Japan’s delegate to the International Whaling Commission, went further, asserting that the ICJ decision supported Japan’s position on whaling for “scientific research,” and that his country would relaunch research whaling in the 2015/2016 season, with the aim of achieving “sustainable whaling.”

The whaling commission allows countries to hunt whales for research purposes only, though the whale meat that is a byproduct of this research can legally be sold. Japan says it will submit a new plan to the commission to explain its scientific justifications.

The thing is, despite a long Japanese tradition of eating whale, there is no longer much—if any—demand for whale meat in Japan, as you can see from the chart below, from the animal protection advocacy group International Fund for Animal Welfare. Still, the government tries to convince its citizens to eat the stuff, even sponsoring awareness campaigns to drum up demand, such as the “Whale Week” currently underway:

Japan says the whale species it targets are abundant enough to hunt, maintaining that it must do so to gather “whale sampling data“—for whale population research.

But despite all that “research,” reliable population data for the species Japan targets are hard to come by. Blue whales, for instance, are classified as “endangered,” their populations reduced by 3% to 11% compared with the pre-whaling era. The population of other species, like the bowhead whale, is thought to be approaching pre-whaling size. So scarce is data on minke whales in the southern hemisphere that no one really knows what their population is. What is known is that Japan killed 3,600 of them in the last nine years alone.

This enterprise doesn’t come cheap, and the revenue from the sale of the whale meat doesn’t cover the cost of the hunts. The already heavily indebted Japanese government has to subsidize the program, to the tune of a projected $5 billion yen ($49 million) this fiscal year:

So why continue the hunts, if their scientific basis is questionable, they are a financial burden, and the Japanese no longer crave the meat? As Abe said on Monday, the program is also designed to preserve Japanese culture (i.e. the traditional whale-fishing culture that began in the early 20th century in a small region of Japan). And the renewed emphasis may or may not have something to do with the recent World Trade Organization ruling in favor of protecting European cultural rights in a dispute with Canada over the seal-product trade.

While Antarctic whales are safe from the harpoons of Japanese scientists—for now—those in the Pacific Northwest aren’t. Since the ICJ decision halted Antarctic operations, the Japanese government has continued to launch its Pacific hunt, which killed 319 whales last season, compared with 103 in the Antarctic.

Our jobs have a profound influence on our mental health. A new study shows the extent to which certain industries give rise to clinical depression.

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Crowds retrieve 100,000 books dumped in skip

Almost 100,000 new books were dumped into a skip outside a Derry bookshop today after the receiver ordered that the contents of the shop, which closed two years ago, should be disposed of.

…The books, valued at £60,000 (€74,253), were all new.

…As word quickly spread crowds descended on Bishop Street to avail of the book bonanza. Many motorists double parked causing temporary traffic jams as they helped themselves to dozens of the books.

Looking on as the skip was filled and re-filled with the books was Peter MacKenzie, the former joint owner of the Bookworm bookshop.

“I opened the book shop in 1978 and it was my life’s work until I was declared bankrupt in 2012.

“The books were my assets which were seized. The building was also seized and now it has been for sale for the last two years with an asking price of £375,000.

“Four years ago the same building was valued at just over £2 million.

“It’s heartbreaking to see what was once my life’s work being dumped into a skip but at least the books are being grabbed by members of the public and fair play to them”, he said.

I mean, yes, he wanted to be Speaker of the House one day, but you actually have win your primary elections to do that, and Eric Cantor didn’t. So, a-lobbying he will go, almost certainly.

Much is being written about the meaning of Cantor’s defeat at the hands of an unheralded primary challenger, but to the extent that I know anything about this particular election — which means what I’ve read since roughly nine pm last night — it appears that Cantor’s challenger David Brat won without a lot of money or indeed any real help from any group at all. Which suggests that Brat won the old fashioned way, i.e., by being the candidate the voters who went to the polls actually and natively preferred (or at least preferred over Cantor). Conversely, it seems that Cantor was so busy planning for his next job that he was forgetting to do his current job, at least to the pleasure of his primary voters.

If that’s indeed the case, then what we have here is a vote decided on job performance, where money and outside influence was not a hugely mitigating factor. In which case, party on, Republican primary voters of Virginia’s 7th district. You did what you were supposed to do.

Mind you, I’m not personally deeply thrilled with their choice of Mr. Brat, whose positions as I’ve read them seem primarily tuned for conservative populist stupidity. But then, I wasn’t deeply thrilled with Mr. Cantor’s positions and actions, either, which were also tuned for conservative populist stupidity, with a saucy soupçon of grasping, amoral personal opportunism thrown in for flavoring. But I’m not in the Virginia 7th, so literally, my vote doesn’t count. I suppose I could get worked up about the House and the GOP moving ever so marginally further to the right because of this, presuming Mr. Brat wins the general election (which seems a reasonable bet to me), but given that that for the past four years the House GOP’s strategy has been “oppose everything, do nothing,” from a practical point of view I’m not sure there will be that much of a difference in how things work in that wing of Congress. So.

Anyway, don’t cry for Cantor. K Street awaits. He’ll be fine.

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At Apple's recent WWDC event besides announcing a new 3D graphics API, Apple also announced Swift, a new programming. However, Apple developers don't yet know -- or can't admit -- whether Swift will ultimately be open-source or made to be cross-platform...

HI YOUR CULTURE IS FUCKED MT @CNET bulletproof blanket to shield kids during school shootings http://t.co/IFc9xn1YtX pic.twitter.com/BelF68Hagd

— Lauren G (@geeoharee) June 9, 2014

Jeffrey Brown, writer of the fantastic Darth Vader and Son and Vader's Little Princess, is about to release another Star Wars title from Chronicle Books. This one is called Goodnight Vader and is a riff on the classic Goodnight Moon. I feel like they missed an opportunity to title it Goodnight That's No Moon but that's neither here nor there. I'm sure it will be wonderful. It's set to hit stores this Fall. Previously in Star Wars

submitted by green_and_yellow [link] [43 comments]

2:04am PST – Criminals are attacking feedly with a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). The attacker is trying to extort us money to make it stop. We refused to give in and are working with our network providers to mitigate the attack as best as we can.

We are working in parallel with other victims of the same group and with law enforcement.

We want to apologize for the inconvenience. Please know that you data is safe and you will be able to re-access your feedly as soon as the attack is neutralized.

We will update this blog post as soon as we have more information:

Thank you for your understanding,

/Oliv, Seb and Edwin

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WAVE #1 – June 11th – NEUTRALIZED.

6:25am PST: We’re making some changes to our infrastructure that will allow us to bring feedly back online. However, these things take some time to put into place and it may still be a few more hours before service is restored. Thank you so much for your patience and for sticking with us. Remember, none of your data was compromised or lost in this attack.

15:07pm PST: We have neutralized DDoS attack that began at 2:04am PST last night. You should now be able to access your feedly from both feedly.com, mobile apps and third party applications. Our ops team is closely monitoring the situation in case the attacks resume. It might take a few hours for 40 million feeds we poll to get fully updated. We would like to re-iterate that none of your data was compromised by this attack. I would like to thank the ops team for working through the night to resume the service as quickly as possible. I would also like to thank the community for your amazing support! Note: If you are not able to access feedly.com it is most likely due to the fact that your ISP or computer is caching an old DNS entry. Please refresh your DNS cache or wait for it to expire.

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WAVE #2 – June 12th – NEUTRALIZED

7:26am PST: We are currently being targeted by a second DDoS attack and are working with our service providers to mitigate the issue.

10:17am PST: The criminals have launched their second wave of DDoS attacks this morning. The ops team has reviewed the attacks and is working on building a second line of defense to neutralize this new attack. To make breaching those defenses harder, we can not communicate as frequently as we would like on the status of our infrastructure changes. But this second wave, although stronger, should be neutralized faster than the first one. We apologize for the inconvenience. Thank you for your support and understanding as we work our way through these waves of attacks.

11:30am PST: The second line of defense is up and wave #2 has been neutralized. You should be able to access feedly via feedly.com, feedly mobile apps and third party apps. These criminals are determined to try to extort some money and we are determined to say no to extortion and focus on building a stronger feedly instead. Thanks again for your overwhelmingly positive support throughout the last 2 days.

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WAVE #3 – June 13th – NEUTRALIZED

3:30am PST The criminals have launched their third wave this morning. We are looking into it.

4:15am PST: Partially neutralized. You can access feedly from the US. We are working on enabling access from the rest of the world. The pollers are running a bit behind.

10:15am PST: The dev team is looking at options to work around the transatlantic issue. We will try to give you more details in 2 hours.

11:45pm PST: Pollers are back at full speed. There will be no gap in the content that gets delivered to you. The content of all the feeds should be back on schedule within the next 2 hours.

13:06am PST: Wave #3 fully neutralized. Everything is back to normal. You should be able to access your feedly on the web, via feedly mobile and via third party applications.

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June 16th – ISSUE CLOSED

The service has been up and fully functional since Friday, June 13th at 13:06am PST. I would like to thanks the devops team for working really hard to build the lines of defense necessary to shield us from these DDoS attacks, I would like to thank the feedly community for sharing our determination to say no to extortion – your support was amazing. I would like to thank the Cloudflare team for working very closely with the devops team to help neutralize the attacks – your level of responsiveness was key to feedly getting back up so quickly.

Note: if you are not able to access feedly, please restart your machine/device to make sure that you have the latest DNS information regarding feedly.com.

 

From Breitbart, Daily Caller, Twitchy, Truth Revolt, The Blaze, and Gateway Pundit.

Shonda Rhimes gave a powerful commencement speech at Dartmouth on Sunday, offering some advice to the dreamers of the world.

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tarrloks-butt:

snarkengaged:

(NEWSER) – What wolfs down 9-foot great white shark like a steak dinner?

That’s what plagued researchers who had tagged a great white in Australia and found the tag washed up on a nearby beach four months later, Australia’s News Network reports. Tag data showed a sudden 1,902-foot plunge and a quick increase in temperature, the latter indicating time spent in an animal’s digestive system.

giant squid?  exceptionally badass whale?

“Regarding single issue sales: they are incredibly important to a lot of Image creators. On Rocket Girl, it’s by far the biggest chunk (of course, we don’t have a tpb yet). And every reader counts. A few thousand copies can make or break a series. If Rocket Girl dips into the 8000s, we’ll start thinking about when to wrap it up. If it stays above 12,000 we can do it forever. At 12,000 copies I can make as much writing Rocket Girl as Hulk; Amy Reeder can make as much penciling/inking/coloring as she would on Batwoman. 8000 vs 12,000 is a significant difference in percentage, but it’s not a huge amount of readers. A lot of Image creators are in the same boat, albeit their individual line might be a bit higher or lower. Certainly collected editions and digital and ancillary media/merchandise contribute as well. But a lot of making creator-owned work is down to financing: and single issues have the biggest impact on cash flow–and the only impact on cash flow for almost a full year when you take into account early production to ‘get ahead’ as well as solicitation. Also: your comment forgets artists, who are forgotten way to much nowadays. A writer can maybe juggle 4 simultaneous projects, but an artist can do just one book at a time. It is much harder for an artist to make the plunge into creator-owned–so consider that when choosing what to support.”

-

Brandon Montclare in comments at The Beat

Reblogging because the economics of creator-owned comics are of interest to me, and because this is the kind of thing I should probably take into account when it comes to who gets their comic pre-ordered, who gets shelf picked, and who gets trade-waited.

(via knitmeapony)

…some of my casual wisdom…

(via bmontclare)