During Nintendo's E3 press conference, Eiji Aonuma revealed a new entry in the fan-favorite Legend of Zelda series. Scant information was offered, but we were shown an attractive vignette, featuring Link riding his trusty steed Epona away from what...

The players, who go by the handles SUNSfan and Sajedene online, were at home in in Tempe, Arizona early Monday morning when their apartment was broken into by two armed robbers. The break-in was documented in real time since Sajedene was streaming a game of Dota 2 on Twitch when she first heard a knock at her door.

The CAD data they get from car companies is usually pretty unusable for the making in-game cars. And, even more telling, Forza developers never trust the manufacturer specs for HP, weight, etc. They do all their own dyno testing, and part-weighing. So turn on your Xbox One for accurate car specs.

iguanamouth:

thankyoucorndog:

iguanamouth:

birds dont exist 

if this is truee, how is it that i, a bird, am using laptop?

checkamte

shit 

hammer brothers - Segagaga (Sega - Dreamcast - 2001)

lanyon:

Lanyon is a simple web server, which reads directories of markdown files and converts them to HTML and serves.

Purin the Super Beagle practices her elaborate soccer moves, along with a bit of showboating, in celebration of the 2014 FIFA World Cup.

via Tastefully Offensive

Peter Capaldi was asked to share his own school report card but felt a fictional one might be a lot more fun. We think he was right. According to the Radio Times who got this lovely sneak peek, the Doctor Who actor produced this work of art for the educational charity Cecily's Fund. It will go up for auction, along with others, on Cecily's Fund's Ebay on June 24. We think Capaldi was fairly honest in his assessment of the Doctor but perhaps a bit too harsh overall. What do you think? Previously in Doctor Who

In this cute video from 2009, loving Canadian father Nunzio Raso climbs into a crib to comfort his crying baby daughter Michela. Nunzio then quickly realizes that there is no way that he is getting back out anytime soon.

This is a video of my daughter Michela who for several months just can’t get to sleep without waking up every 2 hours.

via Viral Viral Videos

Your moment of (edible) Zen

Journey to the center of the Earth

It's not news that typefaces have distinct personalities. But until recently, the implications have been poorly understood. The latest evidence suggests that typefaces convey their own meanings and elicit their own emotions independent of the words they spell out.

 

The worst-kept secret in global business is that Sprint is about to buy T-Mobile US in a deal people expect to be worth around $50 billion. Yet there are widespread concerns that a deal between the third- and fourth-placed carriers could reduce competition in America’s wireless market.

Over the past year or so,  T-Mobile US, which is spearheaded by the unorthodox CEO John Legere, and Sprint with its “framily” packages,  have been competing aggressively to win market share away from the big two carriers, Verizon and AT&T. Their competitive plans have led to soaring data usage by customers of both companies, as the above chart from Macquarie Capital shows.

Sprint and T-Mobile are expected to argue that by uniting they will be able to provide sterner and more sustainable competition for Verizon and AT&T. They will likely have to make concessions—and Sprint may have to lower prices to match T-Mobile’s. Mayosho Son, the ambitious chief of Softbank, which owns most of Sprint, has already pledged a “massive price war.”

For the record, Macquarie predicts that the deal, if and when it is formally announced, will likely be allowed: Its analysts say that there is a 70% chance of approval by regulators.

maptacular:

This 19th Century Map Could Have Transformed the WestToo bad Congress didn’t listen

“n the decades after the Civil War, Americans rushed headlong into the west. By 1890 Kansas and Nebraska had over a million inhabitants, and over six million lived in the seventeen states and territories that made up the region. It was a moment of palpable excitement about the region’s promise.

In that moment of supreme confidence, however, one voice reminded Americans that these outsized expectations could never be realized given that west of the 100th meridian—from the Dakotas down through east Texas—there was insufficient rainfall to sustain agriculture. That voice was John Wesley Powell, a hero of the Civil War who lost an arm fighting the rebels at Shiloh before leading equally heroic expeditions in the remotest areas of the west, most notably down the Colorado River. These expeditions convinced him that the scarcity of water would become the single most important influence in western development. Outside the Pacific Northwest, the arid lands of the west could not be farmed without irrigation.”

Learn more at The New Republic

omgthatdress:

Can with concealed umbrella

1880s

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Link

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After seeing his campaign materials, Hershey Co. has sued Maryland State Senator Stephen Hershey because look at it.

Did the Las Vegas Shooting Suspects Obtain Their Guns on Facebook? Mother Jones This meme shared on Facebook by Las Vegas shooting suspect Amanda Miller reads, "Best coffee table ever?" A month before a married couple allegedly gunned down two police officers and a bystander in Las Vegas, suspect Jerad Miller went on Facebook ... and more »

CNN

Police: Shooters had radical views Chron.com Murder suspects Jerad Miller, left, and wife Amanda Miller. Two LVMPD police officers, Alyn Beck, 42, and Igor Soldo, 31 were shot and killed by two assailants at a pizza restaurant on June 8, 2014 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The two suspects, married couple ... Nevada cop killers told to leave Bundy ranch due to 'aggressive nature'Reuters all 1,039 news articles »

The Seahawks corner says EA Sports won't put his secondary mates on the cover with him.

When Madden NFL 15 drops in stores later this summer, it will feature Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman on the cover. If he has his way, the rest of the Legion of Boom will be joining him.

The All-Pro defender told Seahawks.com that he's been lobbying the creators of the football video game series to allow his secondary mates, Earl Thomas, Kam Chancellor and Byron Maxwell, to appear on the cover with him.

"I've been trying to get the Legion of Boom on the cover, and EA (Sports) has been fighting me," Sherman said. "So if everybody wants to start a petition to get the Legion of Boom on the cover, here it is, here's an open invitation."

The most likely reason for EA's refusal is that it means it would have to pay four front men instead of one. Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk offered the following solution:

If Sherman really wants to do it, here's how to make it happen. First, he should persuade the members of the Legion of Boom to accept as compensation for being on the cover 1/4th of what Sherman will receive. Second, he should tell EA that whatever he's getting paid will be divided equally among himself, Thomas, Chancellor, and Maxwell.

EA has put multiple athletes on the same cover before -- both Troy Polamalu and Larry Fitzgerald were featured on Madden NFL 10. But those were players on different teams and brought different fan markets to the table. Forking up money for players with the same general fan group doesn't add much to marketability.

submitted by CosmicGame [link] [comment]

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by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)

Astroturfing in the broadband space is big business. You may recall last summer when we uncovered evidence of significant astroturfing in the Amazon reviews to Susan Crawford's Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age, a book that seriously challenges many of the big broadband players' key talking points. It seemed fairly obvious from what we presented that someone had gone out and faked a bunch of negative reviews (and not made much of an effort to hide it).

Of course, astroturfing takes on many forms, and the folks over at Vice have done an excellent job highlighting how a bunch of "consumer groups" that seem to repeat big broadband talking points on net neutrality are, of course, not actual consumer groups, but mostly funded by the big broadband players themselves. And some of them have fairly massive budgets. Having at least some familiarity with the budgets of actual consumer rights/public interest organizations, there's a lot of money being dumped into the astroturfing groups which are often fighting against consumer interests, but always seem to have names that are exactly the opposite of their true position, with these two being the most prominent:

• Broadband for America seems to be pretty focused on making sure that broadband only comes from the oligopolists.
• American Consumer Institute may be the most amusing, since it's controlled and funded by lobbyists for the mobile operators.

This isn't a huge surprise. Last time there was a big net neutrality fight, there was a front group called "Hands Off the Internet", funded by the big telcos, which conveniently ignored all of the subsidies and tax-breaks the government gave them to install their networks in the first place. They had no problem with government "hands on the internet" when it saved them money (at the expense of taxpayers), but suddenly pretended that it would somehow magically be different if net neutrality rules were put on them.

And of course, the big broadband players have long histories with astroturfing, even for something as pointless as what channels will be included in TV bundles. On other things, such as fights over munibroadband, Comcast has been known to flood money into so-called "consumer" activist groups, only to watch them disappear the day after key votes happen. Verizon just successfully astroturfed New Jersey officials, to get out of fiber deployment promises. AT&T, of course, is also no stranger to astroturf efforts as well -- going back decades, including hilarious attempts to "fill seats" at public hearings with employees (this still happens today).

It was 1976, and a House subcommittee was considering a bill called the Consumer Communications Reform Act. The proposed law, heavily backed by AT&T, would have made the then monopoly even more of one by effectively declaring its long distance system America's "official" service. The bill clearly targeted a competitor: MCI's new microwave tower network, just being rolled out across the country. For days, Capitol Hill had been deluged by workers, priests, police chiefs, mayors, and anybody else Ma Bell could round up to support the legislation.

Then Representative Tim Wirth of Colorado walked into the hearing room. He saw that it was packed with people. Wirth asked the first panelist, an AT&T executive, to identify his colleagues. Five minutes later the man was still reading out names.

"Will everyone associated with AT&T just stand up?" an exasperated Wirth finally asked. The entire room rose. Everyone started laughing.

So, really, take with a serious grain of salt any claims you see from groups you've never heard from before that have names like the two listed above. As Vice's article points out, while it's not always easy, a little digging will show you who's really involved:

Take this opinion column by former Republican Senator John Sununu and former Democratic Congressman Harold Ford in the San Francisco Chronicle. The pair argues that reclassification would lead to "chronic underinvestment" in broadband services while threatening job loss. The disclaimer running under their byline says they are honorary co-chairs of Broadband for America, which the paper describes as "a coalition of 300 internet consumer advocates, content providers, and engineers."

A disclosure obtained by VICE from the National Cable and Telecom Association (NCTA), a trade group for ISPs, shows that the bulk of Broadband for America's recent $3.5 million budget is funded through a $2 million donation from NCTA. Last month, Broadband for America wrote a letter to the FCC bluntly demanding that the agency “categorically reject” any effort toward designating broadband as a public utility. It wasn't signed by any internet consumer advocates, as the Sununu-Ford letter suggests. The signatures on the letter reads like a who's who of ISP industry presidents and CEOs, including AT&T's Randall Stephenson, Cox Communications' Patrick Esser, NCTA president (and former FCC commissioner) Michael Powell, Verizon's Lowell McAdam, and Comcast's Brian Roberts.

[....]

Another group leading the charge is the American Consumer Institute. The organization recently filed a letter with the FCC opposing reclassification, and argues that ISPs should be left alone. "The fact is that the broadband market is competitive and becoming more so," wrote ACI, which claims that consumers currently enjoy "increased choice." In January, ACI called the Verizon lawsuit that struck down the original FCC net-neutrality guidelines, "a victory for consumers."

Why would a self-professed consumer advocacy group not only oppose moving toward net neutrality but claim that America's broadband market—one of the slowest, most expensive in the industrialized world with fewer than three choices in many parts of the country—is so great?

Perhaps because ACI, like Broadband for America, is financed by an ISP lobby group. Annual tax returns show that a foundation controlled by lobbyists from the cell phone industry, called MyWireless.org, has contributed to ACI since 2010.

Apparently, "consumers" means something rather different to this group.

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