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OK, mom and dad, you met the president. Can we get ice cream now? Ugh.

As President Barack Obama met with a departing Secret Service Agent and his wife on June 23, their son decided to bide his time by plopping himself down — head first — into one of the couches in the Oval Office.

This boy, the epitome of child-like boredom itself, is now our new Internet mascot. May he forever yawn and sigh until his parents finally stop gabbing away with the other adults in the room. God speed, you tiny hero.

The amazing picture was uploaded to the White House Flickr stream. Read more...

More about Pics, Kids, Barack Obama, Humor, and Funny

Dilbert, the well-known comic strip by cartoonist Scott Adams about the office everyman and his crew of incompetent colleagues, was the first syndicated comic that focused primarily on the workplace when it launched in 1989. Five years later, it had become so successful that Adams quit his corporate career to work on it full-time.  

It wasn't a straight line to success. Early versions of the comic were rejected by several publications, including The New Yorker and Playboy. It wasn't until an editor at United Media saw it and recognized her own husband in the character that it finally got its start, says Adams in his upcoming book “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.” 

Ever since, the comic has explored topics like the inefficiency of meetings, the uselessness of management, and the absurdity of office politics. 

Exclusively for Business Insider, Adams looked through the archives and shared his 10 favorite Dilbert comics. Below, he explains why he chose each and counts them down to his absolute favorite of all-time.

10) Oct. 10, 2009: “Dream job” 

"This comic causes the reader to imagine a funny future in which Wally will only pretend to do the assignment. Humor sometimes works best when one suggests what is coming without showing it. People laugh harder when they need to use their imaginations to complete the joke. 

"I also like comics in which characters are unusually happy about something trivial, evil, or selfish. That juxtaposition is always funny to me.

"Another technique I often use involves characters saying things that should only be thought. That creates the inappropriateness that gives it an edge."

 

9) Sept. 24, 2009: “Opportunities”

"Management-by-slogan usually comes across to employees as ridiculous and condescending. That, in part, is what makes the staff in this comic so uncaring about the boss’s house burning down. The ordinary evil of regular people is always funny to me. It’s easy to relate to it."

  

8) Nov. 12, 2009: “Roll a donut in front of the cave”

"A common humor technique involves juxtaposing something of immense importance with something trivial. The pairing of things that don’t belong together makes your brain “sneeze” in the form of a laugh. In this comic, Wally is comparing his digestive system to Jesus rising from the dead. A dash of spiritual inappropriateness gives it some seasoning."

 

7) Dec. 3, 2009: “Reusable presentation”

"As I mentioned, I enjoy humor that highlights the selfish nature of people. We all relate to it. If you have a job, you probably spend some part of each day trying to disguise your selfish motives as win-win scenarios. And your attempts are probably as transparent as Wally’s. 

"I also like jokes that involve inappropriate solutions to problems. This one has both. When you can layer two humor triggers in the same comic it almost always works."

 

6) Dec. 9, 2009: “Catching up to competition”

"This one works because you never see the pointy-haired boss’s reaction, but you can imagine it vividly. 

"Keeping true to the major theme of Dilbert, this comic highlights the uselessness of management. If you’ve ever had a boss, this one probably hits home for you."

 

5) Jan. 7, 2010: “Synchronizing excuses”

"I very much enjoy mocking common sayings. Often those little nuggets of wisdom make no sense whatsoever, but we’ve heard them so often they feel as if they do. Good things might come to those who wait, but so does starvation.

"This comic is also an example of what I call an 'engineered solution.' Wally has cleverly synchronized his excuses to the thunderstorm. I find cleverness to be funny when it is in the service of selfishness."

 

4) April 13, 2010: “Asok’s snout”

"Here I’m juxtaposing an ordinary workplace lunch with the ridiculousness of Asok having a dog snout. Dilbert and Wally take it in stride. That’s the first humor level, but it wouldn’t be enough to make it work. 

"The second level is that we all know people who value form over function while being oblivious to how others view them. When you shine a light on irrational human behavior it usually triggers a laugh reflex."

 

3) Sept. 27, 2010: “Brain golfing”

"If you attend meetings, you probably spend a lot of time thinking your own thoughts while your coworkers drone on. This comic is funny to me because the boss is revealing his selfish thoughts, and also because 'brain golfing' is a funny combination of words. I figured most golfers could relate. I doubt I’m the only person who brain golfs."

 

2) Dec. 2, 2010: “Old Johannsen”

"Wally is the worst employee of all time, but he’s likeable in his own way, so we enjoy seeing him get a win at the expense of the pointy-haired boss. And I think everyone who has a boss also dreams of becoming indispensable. It’s easy to relate to Wally’s glee in the third panel."

 

1) Nov. 9, 1993: “Unix programmers” 

"This might be my all-time favorite Dilbert comic. When I was on the speaking circuit I always used it to end my talks to thunderous laughter. It’s naughty, clever, and it has a point of view. And it makes the reader imagine what happened before that moment shown in the comic and what might happen after. It’s rare to pack so many elements in one comic."

SEE ALSO: ‘Passion Is BS’ And Other Life Advice From Dilbert Creator Scott Adams

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SYDNEY — The future of power is just a step away

Australian scientists claim they are extremely close to having printable solar panels available for market.

Scientists from Australia's national science agency, known as CSIRO, along with two Australian universities, Melbourne and Monash, have been developing the power cells which are printed on plastic as part of the Victorian Organic Solar Cell Consortium since 2007.

The team of 50 researchers consists of chemists, physicists and engineers, who hope to see printed solar panels being used in low-power applications within the next few years.

More about Australia, Solar, Dev Design, Us World, and Climate

Here's the thing about breaking into a multi-billion-dollar company and stealing the credit card information of millions of customers: It's just not that hard.

Eight months after a security breach brought scorn on Target and resulted in the resignation of its CEO, Home Depot is now the victim of a nearly identical attack.

"They didn't actually do anything clever," said Andrew Avanessian, vice president of professional services at security firm Avecto.

Avanessian was speaking about the Target security breach, which compromised the information of millions of customers after malware infected the point-of-sale systems that process credit card swipes. Security reporter Brian Krebs reported that a similar piece of malware is to blame in the Home Depot attack, indicating that it could even be the same group responsible for the Target breach. Read more...

More about Security, Target, Identity Theft, Home Depot, and Data Theft

After Apple announced its biggest iPhones ever on Tuesday, CEO Tim Cook said the 4.7-inch iPhone 6 and the 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus will lead to "the mother of all upgrades." But even with all this hype around these mondo phones, tablet-size phones — or "phablets" — still comprise a generally small proportion of the world's active mobile devices.

According to global data from Flurry charted for us by Business Insider Intelligence, phablets — or phones with a screen size between 5.0 and 6.9 inches — only make up about 10% of active mobile devices, including tablets. At the same time, it's a massive leap from a year ago, when those huge phones only made up a 2% share of active mobile devices at that time. We'll see if Apple can push the phablet market even further when the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus launch on Sept. 19.

SEE ALSO: CHART: Apple Introduced The iPhone 6 In Record Time

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Google will reportedly acquire Lift Labs, the company that created a spoon to cancel out shakiness and make it easier for those with hand tremors to eat.

According to The New York Times, Google plans to announce the acquisition Wednesday. The Google Representative who spoke with NYT did not disclose how much the deal was worth.

The San Francisco-based company rolled out Liftware last December and has since been helping anyone with mild, medium, and severe tremors. The spoon is attached to a device that counters shakiness and balances out the spoon. The company claims to cancel 70% of tremors. 

Around 10 million Americans have Essential Tremor, which is a neurological condition that causes shakiness in the hands, head and voice. And more than 40% of them cannot cure their tremor with medication.

Lift Labs CEO Anupam Pathak says he decided to start with the spoon based on feedback from a patient support group he spoke with. But they plan to roll out fork and knife attachments as well.

"It really boils down to the impact, what I wanted to do. I was really working on technologies that had a lot of applications but I chose to pursue this one because it has such a direct impact on somebody's quality of life," Pathak told Business Insider. "I think it’s so much more meaningful to know that something you’ve created is helping somebody."

One liftware device costs $295 with each additional attachment priced at $19.95. Since this is pretty pricey, Pathak decided to start an Indiegogo page to crowdfund donations so anyone who couldn't afford to buy Liftware on their own would still benefit from the technology.

The Indiegogo campaign made it possible for Liftware to send 115 devices to those who couldn't afford it, charging just a small fee for shipping. Lift Labs partnered with the International Essential Tremor Foundation to distribute the devices. The Indiegogo campaign ended in March, but Lift Labs still features a donate button right next to the order button so that anyone can help deliver a Liftware spoon to those who need it.

Pathak says Liftware can be life-changing for someone with a tremor: "It's the difference between not being able to feed themselves and being embarrassed in public versus actually eating comfortably."

Pathak and some Lift Labs employees' will be joining Google in its Mountain View headquarters.

Watch this video to see what a difference Liftware can make:

SEE ALSO: A New Technology Lets The Disabled Control Their Phones Just By Nodding Their Heads

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 Twitter has announced Flight, a new developer conference focused on mobile. The conference will take place at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco on October 22, with a keynote from CEO Dick Costolo, followed by technical sessions aimed at helping mobile devs to build on Twitter’s platform. It’s not the first developer conference Twitter has held. Long-time… Read More

We recently looked at the most affluent towns in every U.S. state. Now we're turning our attention to educational achievement.

The American Community Survey is an annual survey run by the Census Bureau to allow the government, corporate and academic researchers, and anyone who is curious about demographics to better understand the population of the U.S. Among many other subjects, the ACS includes questions about respondents' education levels.

Using the 2008-2012 ACS estimates for places with at least 1,000 population, Business Insider made a map showing, for each state, the town with the highest percentage of adults over 25 who have at least a bachelor's degree:

As with the affluent places, a good number of the most educated towns are suburbs of big cities. Many towns showed up on both maps, having both very high median incomes and educational attainment, like Scarsdale, New York, and Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Some are college towns, like University Heights, Iowa, and Wellesley, Massachusetts. Indeed, for four states — California, Mississippi, New York, and Pennsylvania — the highest-ranking place was actually a college campus. Since we're focusing on towns, we removed the college campuses from our list.

There was a bit more of a population spread for the best-educated places than for the most affluent. Populations ranged from a little over 1,000 (our chosen lower cutoff) in Yarrow Point, Washington, all the way up to Fargo, North Dakota, a city of 106,000. 

Here are the 50 towns:

NOW WATCH: We Can Guess Your Name Based On What State You Live In

 

 

SEE ALSO: The 50 US State Economies Ranked From Worst To Best

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The U.S. economy is the largest economy in the world.

However, it wasn't always the largest.

And it's unlikely to remain the largest economy for much longer.

The chart above comes to us via Deutsche Bank's Jim Reid.

"As Alexander, Rome and Britain fell from their positions of absolute global dominance, so too has the US begun to slip," Reid writes. "America’s global economic dominance has been declining since 1998, well before the Global Financial Crisis. A large part of this decline has actually had little to do with the actions of the US but rather with the unraveling of a century’s long economic anomaly. China has begun to return to the position in the global economy it occupied for millenia before the industrial revolution."

One look at the chart, and it's pretty clear that it may not be very long before we start saying the U.S. is number 2.

"Based on current trends China’s economy will overtake America’s in purchasing power terms within the next few years," Reid continued. "The US is now no longer the world’s sole economic superpower and indeed its share of world output (on a PPP basis) has slipped below the 20% level which we have seen was a useful sign historically of a single dominant economic superpower. In economic terms we already live in a bi- polar world. Between them the US and China today control over a third of world output (on a PPP basis)."

Reid offered this prescient quote from Napoleon Bonaparte: "“Let China sleep, for when she awakes, she will shake the world."

SEE ALSO: Every Slide From Bond King Jeff Gundlach's Latest Presentation: 'Fixed Income Playbook'

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Every other college football team can go ahead and stop trying to be the most American, because the University of Maryland has unveiled a new set of helmets and uniforms that are pure America.

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Tablets are overwhelmingly used on Wi-Fi, not cell connections, meaning they are devices we turn to in home and office settings. Unlike smartphones, tablets are not carry-everywhere gadgets dependent on cell coverage and connections to be useful.

This fact, supported by data from a recent BI Intelligence survey on tablet ownership, usage, and purchase intent, is key to understanding the recent drop-off in tablet sales generally, and iPad sales in particular. Global tablet shipments will grow at just a 9% compound annual rate over the next five years, an unexpectedly quick deceleration from the triple-digit growth rates seen in the tablet market's early years. 

Access The Full Survey Results And Insights By Signing Up For A Free Trial Today >>

Here's how tablet usage breaks down and how that impacts the replacement cycle and sales:

• Tablets are Wi-Fi devices, period: An overwhelming majority of respondents to our survey (93%) told us they use their tablet primarily on Wi-Fi (this includes 20% of people who had cell access but still used their tablet mainly on Wi-Fi) (See chart above). 
• That translates to a lack of carrier support: The lack of cell usage means tablets are commonly sold "off the shelf," and outside of the carrier-controlled retail chain: without a two-year contract, subsidies, or support from carriers' armies of sales people. Carriers are only interested in pushing devices that they can collect data revenue from. 
• And less wear and tear: While a majority of respondents said they use their tablet daily, 93% told us they use their tablet primarily on Wi-Fi (this includes 20% of people who had cell access but still used their tablet mainly on Wi-Fi). 
• As a result, tablet owners are taking a long time to replace their aging devices with new ones: 44% of our respondents had bought their tablets in 2012, 2011, or 2010. But demand for replacement devices was soft, even for three- and four-year-old devices. People aren't eager to upgrade. 

The report is also full of charts and data that can be downloaded and put to use.

In full, the report: 

• Explains why phablets are also competing with tablets for consumer interest. 
• Gives detailed survey results including purchase intent/loyalty among iPad and iPad Mini owners. 
• Breaks down full numbers on tablet user stats including percentage who use cell plans with their tablets, percentage who share their tablets, frequency of usage, and interest in phablets. 
• Analyzes the tablet market's recent quarterly performance. 
• Discusses market share trends for tablet makers like Apple and Samsung.
• Forecasts annual global tablet shipments through 2019. 
• Correlates recent tablet market trends with recent consumer sentiment, revealed by the survey's results. 
• Discusses why Apple is still well-positioned in the tablet market

For full access to all BI Intelligence's charts, data, and analysis on the mobile industry, sign up for a free trial here.

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Specs and diagrams that supposedly depict the imminent Apple iWatch have appeared on Reddit. According to the information and images, the device will have a flexible touch display, be equipped with Siri and will be waterproof to more than 60 feet.

Reddit user OwenCarlyle posted the specs and CAD drawings of the device early Monday. The post is the only one the user has ever submitted, suggesting the name is probably an alias. The images have since been taken down, but have been reposted to other sites, including Cult of Mac.

The post says the iWatch will have a microphone and speaker, presumably for using voice command and getting feedback, but possibly to take phone calls as well. No less than eight(!) models will be introduced, in four colors and two sizes. The battery is said to last "over a day." Apple is supposedly scheduled to begin the iWatch production run in January. Read more...

More about Reddit, Apple, Iwatch, Tech, and Dev Design

Man, if there was evidence that cyclists are not really 'bout that life, this incredibly weak slapfest between Ivan Rovny and Gianluca Brambilla during the 16th stage of the Vuelta a España is it. Are they swatting at flies or trying to hit each other?

Read more...

Amazon is one of the most brutal  companies to compete against. 

With founder and CEO Jeff Bezos at the helm, Amazon forgoes profits, endures slim margins, and relentlessly prioritizes customers. Bezos snuffs out competition with low prices, and takes a hardline in negotiations companies that want to sell products on Amazon. This has led to Amazon taking vastly more ecommerce sales than anyone else. 

Amazon started as a site to buy books online, but today it sells everything. It's expected to do ~$91 billion in sales this year. 

In a 2013 blog post on competing with Amazon, Andreessen Horowitz investor Jeff Jordan included the following chart, noting, "Amazon is larger than the next dozen largest e-tailers—COMBINED!  Its resulting scale advantages are staggering."

Benedict Evans, an analyst at Andreessen Horowitz, recently wrote a big analysis of Amazon. In it, he included the following chart that shows Amazon's willingness to give up on profits.

Now, it's important to note that it's not like Amazon can't make money. It's that it chooses not to make money. As Evans puts it Amazon has someone at the company whose job it is to make sure that net income gets to zero. 

Amazon takes nearly every dollar of cash that it generates and pumps it right back into the company, which you can see represented here by the growth in capital expenditures:

Amazon's willingness to reinvest its money makes it an intimidating company. It's run like a startup, not a 20 year old mainstream company. 

"We won't invest in a company unless they can tell us why they won't get steamrolled by Amazon," Jordan once told Fast Company. 

But recently, it feels like something has changed. As Amazon expands into more verticals, its sheer number of competitors has exploded, and they're attacking Amazon in ways that are both big and small. Amazon remains a strong company, but it suddenly seems at risk of stretching itself too thin, exposing itself to too many competitors. 

The startups that could disrupt Amazon

For instance, Andreessen Horowitz just invested $44 million in Instacart, a grocery delivery service. Instacart hires people to drive their own cars to grocery stores to pick up stuff that users order through their smartphone. This is a direct competitor to AmazonFresh, which also delivers groceries, but in fewer markets around the country than Instacart does.

The Instacart example is telling, partly because the company exists almost entirely because of our smartphones and the desire for instant gratification.

Mobile apps are changing shopping (mobile commerce grew three times faster than e-commerce year-over-year overall in Q2). But, until its recent release of the Fire phone, Amazon had done hardly anything to make its mobile experience distinct from its desktop experience. It basically just ported its website into an app. With the Fire phone, Amazon went hard in the opposite direction. Part of the reason why the Fire phone hasn't done well, is that it feels like the phone exists mainly as a portal to the Amazon ecosystem.

Besides providing a better gateway to instant gratification, many e-commerce apps also offer a more personalized shopping experience. Amazon may be the "everything store," but it isn't great at pointing you towards things you weren't specifically looking for. 

As Kevin Roose put it in a recent New York Magazine piece, Amazon has issues with "discovery." Startups like Spring, Fancy, and One Kings Lane, to name a few, are all beautifying the e-commerce process while giving customers new ways to browse. 

 

Lee Hnetinka, founder and CEO of New York City-based startup WunWun thinks his company undercuts Amazon in several different ways. WunWun is a delivery service app that lets customers purchase goods from local stores and then delivers them within an hour for free, and Hnetinka says that operating without warehouses and inventory makes it much more nimble than Amazon.  

"We're also empowering merchants," Hnetinka told Business Insider "We're empowering them to compete with Amazon." Although he says that he doesn't "wake up everyday thinking about how [WunWun] can kill Amazon," he's not afraid of the competition. 

The other reason the Instacart story is important is that it only competes with Amazon because Amazon is doing everything now. If Apple is famous for its focus, Amazon should be famous for its lack of focus.

The "everything" store

In the last nine months, Amazon has made three new forays into hardware, with a TV streaming box, the Fire smartphone (which was largely seen as a bit of a flop), and its Square-killer, Local Register. Amazon also launched a local services marketplace, an unlimited e-book subscription service, Amazon Pantry for grocery delivery (and an accompanying barcode scanner), its own in-house delivery system for same-day and grocery services, and a music-streaming offering, while also continuing its experimentation with drones and pouring millions into its original video content.

Plus, it owns Zappos, Diapers.com, and IMDB. There's a lot more, that's just a taste. There are few, if any, other companies trying to do as much all at once as Amazon.

Another thing that makes this this period of competition different han the others is that Amazon itself has trained its newest competitors. 

For instance, Flipkart, an India-based e-commerce company built by two Amazon alumni, just raised $1 billion. After they announced their raise, Amazon said it would go spend $2 billion in India. 

Then there's Jet, a soon-to-be-launched e-commerce startup from Marc Lore. Lore knows Amazon's brutal tactics as well as anyone. Prior to starting Jet, he co-founded Quidsi, which was the parent company of Diapers.com. In 2010, BusinessWeek called Diapers.com "What Amazon Fears Most."

Diapers.com was shipping hundreds of millions of Diapers annually, making a dent in Amazon's business. To compete, Amazon went nuclear on Diapers.com, drastically lowering prices forcing Quidsi to sell to Amazon for  $540 million.

When he announced his new company, Lore said, "At Jet we will make use of the latest advancements in technology to create a new shopping experience that will empower customers like never before. Jet will bring unprecedented transparency and efficiencies to the overall e-commerce market, and as a result, will transform the customer experience in a way that, until now, has not been possible."

Lore raised $55 million for his new venture, and although he doesn't specifically call out Amazon, his ambitions are clearly big. 

The giant companies that want to disrupt Amazon

Amazon isn't under attack from just startups, though. There are big companies with deep pockets ready to challenge Amazon, too.

Chinese e-commerce giant, Alibaba is about to IPO. It's hoping to raise $21 billion in the biggest IPO in history, giving Alibaba billions in cash to try to crack into the U.S. market.  

Then, there's Google, which has ramped up its inclusion of paid product listings. These listings show products right in Google searches. Amazon-Google is one of the most underreported, but important, rivalries in tech. 

Google makes its money when people do commercial searches for products. As Amazon grows in power and ubiquity, consumers are going straight to Amazon.com to do searches for stuff instead of Google. To fight back, Google has tried to improve its shopping results. As these results improve, Amazon is hurt. 

The companies compete in many other ways. Amazon just launched a new mobile ad network that could threaten Google. Google is testing Shopping Express, a delivery service that goes right at the heart of Amazon's e-commerce business. Google partners with local stores, and if you order something through Google, it will deliver it that day. 

Google and Microsoft are both taking on Amazon Web Services, which is one of Amazon's biggest businesses (Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has even said that he expects AWS to eventually be Amazon's biggest business). From tiny startups, to big companies like Netflix, AWS powers a lot of the services you use on the web.

Google and Microsoft have slashed their own cloud computing prices to compete with Amazon's. Although the Amazon doesn't break out its AWS business in its earnings, you can parse through the report to see that the revenue growth of its "other" category — which is mainly AWS — slowed, from 60% growth year-over-year first quarter, to only 38% growth year-over-year in Q2.

Here's the chart Microsoft (Azure) and Google are trying hard to change:

"People still think of Amazon as a retailer," says SunTrust analyst Robert Peck, "But when you think about all of its investments, it has expanded into many new areas."

Whether it's expanding too much, spending too heavily, and losing its focus are a crucial questions. When Amazon revealed it expects to lose a whopping $410 to $810 million in Q3, investors panicked, and the stock tanked more than 10%. Overall this year, it's down nearly 20%. 

Scott Tilghman, from B. Riley & Co., said that although the firm is used to Amazon's slim profits or even losses, it downgraded its estimates because "we are finding no end to the company's spending this time around."

Amazon's view: This is only day one

Peck, however, believes that CEO Jeff Bezos and Amazon are making a series of well-calculated decisions, even if they don't "bat a thousand." In fact, he thinks that bold moves outside of are the strategy du jour. 

"There are four or five tech titans have expanded outside their core, and are now stepping into each others' core businesses and competing for the future, the new opportunities. It's a really unique time." he says. "I think where Amazon is going makes a ton of sense." 

Amazon's strategy has always been to focus on the long-term and make bold decisions and investments that it thinks will help it gain market leadership. 

"Some of these investments will pay off, others will not," Bezos wrote in his original letter to shareholders, "And we will have learned another valuable lesson in either case." 

SEE ALSO: More Evidence That Amazon's Fire Phone Is A Flop

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If you've been drinking wine out of a bottle all this time—well, quite frankly, you're a sucker.

Some might tell you they prefer wine from a box, but everyone knows that all drinks taste better from a can. It's mostly psychological, but it's true. 

Anyway, Portland, Ore.-based Union Wine Co. and agency Story Manufacturing Co. have made some wine in a can that mocks wine culture itself. For $24, you can get a four-pack of this canned vino, which comes in two varieties—pinot noir and pinot gris.

Below are a few ads that feature some of the more fermented archetypes in aged-grape society: a sommelier, a hipster and a couple who would rather be drinking than talking. 

Someone send these to Kathie Lee and Hoda. They're the only palates anyone should trust. 









CREDITS
Client: Union Wine Co.
Agency: Story Manufacturing Co., Portland, Ore.
Creative Directors: Michael Etter, Mattias Segerholt
Art Director: Michael Etter
Copywriters: Austin Howe, Andrew Dickson
Director of Photography: Eric Edwards
Producer: David Cress

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The biggest pot dealer in New York City's history was sentenced to 27 years in federal prison last month after a 5-year investigation sparked by an unsolicited tip from a disgruntled ex-girlfriend, according to a detailed account of his capture in The New York Times. 

34-year-old French Canadian Jimmy Cournoyer, who loved expensive cars and parties, ran a highly sophisticated marijuana sales operation unprecedented in scale. He was responsible for the smuggling of over $1 billion worth of narcotics and weapons, including more than 220,462 pounds of marijuana, over 182 pounds of cocaine and tens of thousands of MDMA pills. Since the investigation began in 2007, 100 defendants have pleaded guilty to trafficking charges related to his operation. 

Cournoyer was so careful to avoid capture that he didn't touch the drugs his subordinates handled and set aside $2 million to fund the murder of those who crossed him, according to The Times. Nevertheless, federal agents received their first lead in early 2007 from the disgruntled ex-girlfriend of one of Cournoyer's Queens dealers, who walked into a Drug Enforcement Administration office out of the blue and ratted him out.

Within a year, a task force supervised by federal prosecutor Steven L. Tiscione nabbed that dealer and turned him into an informant who told them Cournoyer's alias name, Cosmo. That led agents to begin a series of wiretaps and sting operations that gradually whittled away at Cournoyer's associates.

Among the many components of Cournoyer's operation were Hells Angels members and Native Americans on an upstate New York Indian reservation, who smuggled marijuana into the U.S. from growing locations in British Columbia, Canada. Money from the marijuana sales was flown to California and invested in cocaine from the Sinaloa Cartel. The Canadian Rizzuto crime family sold the cocaine on Canadian streets and completed the cycle by investing some of their profits back into Cournoyer's operation.

Agents eventually nabbed Native American trafficker Kenneth Cree and turned him into another informant. When Cournoyer gave Cree the phone number of a Los Angeles contact, undercover agents used it to track down Alessandro Taloni, another key player who managed Cournoyer's west coast operations. 

Agents caught a lucky break when a separate team of federal drug agents happened to be following a minor associate during the moment he delivered a cash shipment to a money launderer. The agents followed the launderer back to her Brooklyn apartment, where they found evidence of deals with Cournoyer's major New York distributor, Bonanno crime family member John Venizelos, leading to his arrest.

By January 2012, federal agents had enough evidence to convince a Brooklyn grand jury to indict Cournoyer. A month later, Cournoyer tried to flee to Mexico but was detained by Mexican authorities upon landing.

You can read the full New York Times story here.

SEE ALSO: How A 61-Year-Old Granddad Got Life In Prison For Selling Pot A Few Times

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Apple might be expanding the office it primarily uses to conduct research for the technology behind Siri, Scott Kirsner of BetaBoston reports.

Commercial realtors reportedly told Kirsner that Apple has leased more than half a floor at One Broadway at Kendall Square in Cambridge, Boston.

Kirsner notes that this is a significant expansion for Apple, which currently only has a small team that works on the building's fifth floor.

Apple's Cambridge-based team is highly focused on working on improving speech recognition for Siri. Team members in this office have previously worked for Nuance Communications, which partially powers the voice recognition tech behind Siri and the Dragon Assistant for computers.

Kirsner's report comes about two months after Wired said that Apple is hiring its own team of speech recognition experts, which range from managerial to research and team-leading roles.

If this is true, it would make sense that Apple is leasing extra space in its Cambridge-based office for its new hires. Kirsner also notes that Apple is looking to hire new speech researchers and developers based in its Boston office, as seen in a recent post on Apple's job board.

Now is better a time than ever for Apple to beef up its speech recognition team. Siri faces strong competition from both Google and Microsoft, which are both playing up voice recognition tech and virtual assistants in their new products.

Microsoft's Cortana virtual assistant for Windows Phone devices was among the biggest features to come with its most recent software update, Windows Phone 8.1. The company is billing Cortana as a personal virtual assistant that learns more about you the more you use it.

Google Now works similarly. It remembers your preferences and shows you relevant information when you need it. Android Wear, Google's new software platform for wearables, heavily relies on Google Now integration and voice commands.

The report comes just before Apple is set to unveil its next-generation iPhone and presumably its first wearable device. With new products and software updates coming, it wouldn't be surprising to see Apple expand its research efforts for Siri. 

SEE ALSO: 12 Ways To Make Your iPhone Run Faster

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Last week Twitter unveiled a brand new bug bounty program that pays security researchers (or hackers) to report vulnerabilities on its platform.

We decided to reach out to HackerOne, the company behind the bounty program to learn more about how tech companies communicate with independent hackers to better protect their products and services. HackerOne's platform helps companies of any size — including big ones like Twitter and Yahoo — streamline their bug reporting programs, with or without a cash reward bounty.

The platform, which launched publicly in 2013, "streamlines the exchange between a researcher and the response team," HackerOne CPO Katie Moussouris told Business Insider.

Before moving to HackerOne, Moussouris worked for Microsoft as a security strategist and helped them build up an in-house vulnerability team.

"I saw a lot of the manual labor that a large company could afford to do," she said.

For smaller startups that may not have the time and/or manpower to deal with bug reporting, HackerOne offers a helping hand. For instance, it'll recognize if multiple hackers report the same bug so the security team doesn't need to deal with tons of emails. This frees up their time to work on more serious coding issues.

Twitter definitely has the time and money to work on security issues in-house — they've got talent like former NSA employer Charlie Miller — but HackerOne gives them some extra padding, just in case Miller can't find everything out there.

"Twitter is a great example of a company who brings in-house some of the great talent, but you can’t hire everybody," Moussouris told us. "So for that, you want to have an outward-facing program that brings in anyone — a researcher, customer, partner, it could be anybody."

While Twitter (via HackerOne) now offers cash rewards for discovering exploits, not all its programs necessarily include bounties. Moussouris told us that even Twitter tried HackerOne's service for a few months without a cash reward before adding that extra incentive.

But according to Moussouris, a cash reward is just one part of the motivation for hackers. They're in it for the recognition. If they can say that they noticed a huge security problem on Twitter, that's a big deal. And it can also potentially help them further their career as a security researcher, maybe leading to a full-time position at a company.

Many of these hackers are also teaching themselves and need to get experience under their belts. So a few hundred dollars is a nice prize, but they're also focusing on building a strong C.V.

HackerOne also offers its "Hall of Fame" to recognize those researchers and hackers, but the thrill of taking on a challenge is also often enough to drive these individuals to help with bug hunting.

"It's really intellectual curiosity, or the pursuit of intellectual happiness," Moussouris said. "They want to see if they can."

Apparently the curiosity is paying off. According to HackerOne's site, it has led to 3,776 bugs being fixed, $1.18 million in bounties paid, and 820 hackers being "thanked," all for 66 different public programs.

"If anybody has software out there, there are good guys and bad guys looking at it," Moussouris said. "If you’ve got anything worth protecting, data for users, financial information, somebody is going after it."

SEE ALSO: Twitter Just Created A Program To Pay People For Finding Security Vulnerabilities

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Many consumers don't think twice when they swipe for a morning coffee with their trusty credit card. 

But a recent Bankrate survey reveals that millennials are increasingly forgoing plastic.

Almost two-thirds of millennials — a "whopping" 63% — don't own a single credit card. Only 23% own one credit card, and 6% own two.

Contrastingly, 65% of adults over the age of 30 own at least one.

From a short term perspective, millennials might be making the smart decision by steering clear of credit cards. Bankrate's survey "found that millennials who do have credit cards aren't as good at paying down their bills as other demographic groups." Only 40% of millennials "pay off their balances in full each month", while 53% of those 30 and over do.

However, forgoing credit cards could have negative implications in the long run because credit cards are one of the best ways for building a good credit score.

And a good credit score is imperative for getting a good price on things like insurance. It's also extremely difficult to secure financing for homes and cars if your credit score is low or worse, non-existent.

As a result, millennials who aren't using credit cards —even if they're just trying to save money or control spending — end up having a hard time getting loans because they haven't built up enough credit to qualify.

Plus the survey adds that "according to Experian, the average VantageScore for millennials is 628, which lenders largely consider subprime." As a comparison, Baby Boomers have an average Vantage Score of 700, and Generation Xers have 653.

Millennials' credit card aversion is attributed to all the usual financial worries of the past five years. They grew up during the Great Recession, and now they're facing "bloated" student loans.

"'It's not so much (that millennials are) anti-credit card, but it's more the risk of debt' that they fear," Eric Lindeen, director of marketing at Zoot Enterprises, told Bankrate.

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From the 1940s through the 1970s, the United States was a nation of smokers. Since then though, the turnaround has been gradual but decisive:

Today, only about 18% of American adults are smokers. Here's what that trend has done for cigarette sales: A GIF map created by @MetricMaps shows this decline on a state-by-state level:

In 1970, the vast majority of states had sales of more than 100 packs of cigarettes per capita:

By 2012, only two states (West Virginia and Kentucky) did:

The map data comes from The Tax Burden on Tobacco, 2012, an industry compendium first published in 1949. The report is currently produced "with the financial support of Altria Client Services, the Lorillard Tobacco Company, and Reynolds American Services Company."

SEE ALSO: The New Anti-Smoking Ads Are Surprisingly Powerful

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theodp writes Over at Khan Academy, Salman Khan explains Why I'm Cautious About Telling My Son He's Smart. "Recently," writes Khan, "I put into practice research I had been reading about for the past few years: I decided to praise my son not when he succeeded at things he was already good at, but when he persevered with things that he found difficult. I stressed to him that by struggling, your brain grows. Between the deep body of research on the field of learning mindsets and this personal experience with my son, I am more convinced than ever that mindsets toward learning could matter more than anything else we teach." According to Dr. Carol Dweck, who Khan cites, the secret to raising smart kids is not telling kids that they are. A focus on effort — not on intelligence or ability — says Dweck, is key to success in school and in life.

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A campaign to support Darren Wilson, the officer who shot six bullets into unarmed Ferguson resident Mike Brown and killed him, has collected nearly a quarter-million dollars in just four days' worth of online donations — and that money will go to Wilson and his family, according to the creators of a controversial fundraising page on the website GoFundMe.

"These funds will be used to cover potential legal fees, relocation and living expenses of both Officer Darren Wilson and his immediate family," say the administrators of the "Support Darren Wilson" Facebook page, which started the GoFundMe campaign on Monday. It received 5,902 donations, the largest in the amount of $5,000 Read more...

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On May 14th of this year, a regular guy named Chris Scott sent a tweet out to his one thousand or so followers.

"Oh hi Becky who refused to kiss me during spin the bottle in 6th grade & now wants to play FarmVille, looks like tables have f*cking turned," the tweet read, referring to the Facebook-based game that encourages its players to relentlessly invite their friends to play along with them.

The tweet was retweeted and faved a handful of times, as many funny tweets are, and then, Scott said, he kind of forgot about it.

Just a few months later, the tweet has been retweeted over 18,000 times, plagiarized by dozens, and Scott, 30, was even accused by a widely-followed comedian of stealing the joke from an MTV show called "Guy Code," a program Scott had never heard of or seen.

Oh hi Becky who refused to kiss me during spin the bottle in 6th grade & now wants to play FarmVille, looks like tables have fucking turned

— Chris Scott (@iamchrisscott) May 15, 2014

The 30-year-old Boston resident is not a famous comedian. He, like so many other active Twitter users, utilizes the social network to access news and culture in real time. 

So what happened to this tweet? Scott gave Business Insider some insight on what he saw when his harmless, funny joke, went massively viral.

"I know it'll be over within a day, but I'll enjoy it while it lasts."

Like wine, good tweets get better over time (this is not true, I just made this up.) In the case of what will now be called "the Becky tweet," it wasn't until 30 days after Scott hit send that its popularity began to climb. 

On June 18th, Scott came back from his lunch break to an overflowing inbox and push notifications from Twitter. The Becky tweet had been given a breath of new life, but Scott couldn't figure out how.

After some quick scrolling, Scott figured out that popular Twitter comedian Mary Charlene (@IAmEnidColeslaw) had retweeted the Becky tweet out to her 160,000 followers. This tweet is a user responding to both Charlene and Scott with praise:

"I was happy people liked it," Scott told Business Insider, "I remember thinking, I know it'll be over within a day, but I'll enjoy it while it lasts."

But 24 hours later, the tweet had been retweeted over 3,000 times and showed no sign of stopping. Scott had also gained about 600 new followers in that time period.

"One new follower let me know that he’s following me only because the tweet made him laugh and I better not let him down. That was a strange thing to say, but alright," Scott laughed.

At the end of the week, the tweet had over 5,000 retweets.

"I do a search for 'oh hi Becky' and sure enough, dozens of people have stolen it verbatim."

In an email to Business Insider, Scott explains what happened next:

On June 24th, A follower tells me that a screengrab has been posted on Imgur lending to a lot of the tweet’s virality. I didn’t realize this was something people did!

Meanwhile, the tweet keeps getting retweeted and faved. It occurs to me that I’ve seen people steal jokes before on Twitter and the inevitable public dust-ups that happen as a result. I do a twitter search of “Oh hi Becky.” Sure enough, dozens of people have stolen it verbatim or slightly tweaked it. I know this kind of thing happens but it’s so fascinating to see it for myself. 

Scott said he called out one of the plagiarists "to be snarky," but immediately regretted it. The Becky tweet now had 7,500 retweets and still showed no signs of slowing down.

"Oh hi, this is never going to stop."

A few days later, as the tweet is climbing towards 10,000 retweets, someone tells Scott that the same screenshot that was posted to Imgur has now been posted to Tumblr with over 100,000 'notes' (shares/likes.)

"My Twitter notifications are nothing but this tweet, which hilariously begins with “Oh hi” as though it’s greeting me every other minute it pops up," Scott explains to Business Insider. " 'Oh hi, here I am again.' 'Oh hi, this is never going to stop.'"

At the end of June, a friend's husband texted Scott to let him know he saw the tweet on Reddit. If you do a Google search for "Oh hi Becky," you see the tweet everywhere, like this random radio station that listed the joke as a "great moment in Facebook history" with no credit to Scott.

Or this Facebook page called "Hakuna Matata":

If you run a twitter search of “kiss tables turned” instead of “Oh hi Becky," you'll see lots of folks that swapped in different names like Lisa, Travis, Jill, Mike. People change 6th grade to 5th or 7th. Change Farmville to Candy Crush.

 

"I said this joke on the first season of 'Guy Code' on MTV."

By the end of June, Scott has watched the Becky tweet make its way to Spain, Germany, South Africa, and South America, as well as England, Ireland, Scotland and London.

With 12,000 retweets, the Becky tweet has made some pretty wide rounds across the world. Again, there are no signs of slowing down.

At the end very end of June, Scott sees a verified user named Jordan Carlos tweet the following at him:

 

Carlos, with roughly 60,000 followers, is a comedian who has appeared on The Colbert Report and now for MTV's show "Guy Code," which Scott tells Business Insider he has never seen. 

After a little back-and-forth, Carlos told Scott he will be "reviewing the tapes at MTV and will get back to him." Some of Carlos' followers began harassing Scott on Twitter.

"I legitimately began to worry that I did at some point, somewhere hear this joke on his show," Scott admitted. "Like, maybe the episode was on a TV at a party I was at, and I didn’t register it but subconsciously kept it with me, then tweeted his joke without realizing it."

A few days go by and Carlos has said nothing, so Scott tweeted him to ask. As it turns out, Carlos never made the Becky joke, and agrees to delete the tweet accusing Scott of plagiarism. 

YouTube Celebrity Tyler Oakley had posted the tweet to his Facebook page, blacking out Scott's name

The tweet was still being retweeted, hitting close to 16,000 around the 4th of July. And when Scott thought it couldn't get anymore bizarre — being accused of plagiarizing his own joke was surely the strangest thing that could happen — someone pointed out that YouTube celebrity Tyler Oakley was a fan of the joke as well.

But Oakley had posted the screengrab of the tweet to his Facebook, and blacked out Scott's handle.

In fact, the only credit Oakley gives is to himself and his Tumblr page. With 1.6 million fans on Facebook, Oakley cheats Scott out of the small fame and glory he would have had from having his name attached to his joke in this particular situation.

 Then Toronto Blue Jays player Frank Viola lifts the tweet:

Scott's original tweet, as of July 14th, is hovering around 18,000 retweets and 27,000 favorites. The experience, Scott says, has been funny, but also enlightening about the ways people use social media.

In a concluding email to Business Insider, Scott told us:

It's a genuinely fascinating and foreign concept to me, to see something that you connect with on some level and then decide "Well, that's mine now." My hunch is there's a sizable chunk of people who don't really grasp what plagiarism is or why it's wrong, and they kind of regard Twitter and social media as this giant free-for-all where everybody's just constantly taking and posting whatever they want from whoever they want.

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On Monday night, tech journalist Ryan Block posted a recording of his long and grueling conversation with a Comcast representative as he tried to cancel his subscription.

The representative demanded to know why Block wanted to cancel his service, and wouldn't move forward with the process until he recieved an answer.

This type of behavior is typical for representatives at Comcast, a former employee told Business Insider. The source, who claims to have worked at Comcast for more than two years in the company's retention department, asked to remain anonymous. 

"They make you do that," our source said. "You have to follow a certain path. And if you don't follow it, you can be written up. They'll make up something like, 'You didn't ask this question,' or 'You should have done that.' That was an average retention representative he was on the phone with," our source said in reference to the call.

This is just one source, so treat it with some skepticism. We've reached out to Comcast to talk about what this person said, but Comcast didn't respond.

The source described Block's conversation as a "typical call at Comcast." The company reportedly uses tactics that make it difficult for customers to understand the situation to keep customers paying higher bills, according to our source.

A rep could be incentivized to agitate customers into ending the call, our source said. If the conversation ends, a customer can't cancel his or her service. Often times, a customer will get annoyed, hang up, and just pay the bill even if he or she believes it's inaccurate to make the situation disappear, the former employee tells Business Insider. 

A representative will sometimes hang up the phone just to make it so the customer can't cancel, says our source.

"I'm surprised that the rep didn't actually hang up on the customer," our source said. "Because inside that company, it if it was between the dates of the 22nd [of the previous month] and the 21st, [that's] the commission period. If it's closer to the 21, that means it's going to affect his numbers if he hangs up. And 9 times out of 10, that call happens around that time. Because he was pushing him not to disconnect [his service]. That's how money works inside of Comcast."

Again, this is one person talking about Comcast, so it's possible this is what one person heard, not everyone at the company.

Yesterday, Comcast issued a statement in response to the way Block's call was handled. Comcast said it was "embarrassed" and is currently investigating the situation. Here's the full statement:

We are very embarrassed by the way our employee spoke with Mr. Block and are contacting him to personally apologize.  The way in which our representative communicated with him is unacceptable and not consistent with how we train our customer service representatives. We are investigating this situation and will take quick action.  While the overwhelming majority of our employees work very hard to do the right thing every day, we are using this very unfortunate experience to reinforce how important it is to always treat our customers with the utmost respect

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A newly discovered wasp has been keeping a gruesome secret: It stuffs ant corpses into the walls of its home.

As far as scientists know, the behavior is unique in the animal kingdom. The new creature has been named Deuteragenia ossarium, or the "bone-house wasp," after the historical ossuaries piled high with human skeletons found in monasteries or graveyards.

"It was a totally unexpected discovery," said Michael Staab, a researcher at the University of Freiburg in Germany.

Skeletons in the closet

Staab had been studying the homemaking habits of cavity-nesting wasps in eastern China, and he and his colleagues had set up trap nests in the Gutianshan National Nature Reserve, a subtropical evergreen forest in the Yangtze River Basin that's home to steep cliffs and animals like clouded leopards and Asian black bears. Read more...

More about China, Nature, Us World, World, and Insects

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Your ground-level view of exploding fireworks on July 4 is nothing compared to the stunning airborne spectacle one Florida man captured using a flying drone

Equipped with a GoPro Hero 3 Silver camera mounted on a DJI Phantom 2 quadcopter drone, Jos Stiglingh filmed an eye-level view of a fireworks show in West Palm Beach, Florida, and paired the footage with tenor Andrea Bocelli's "Con Te Partiro."

The video, which he uploaded in May, is now going viral because of July 4 festivities. And it won't be the only drone footage of fireworks that surfaces this week, as owners of consumer drones will likely share their Fourth of July videos, such as this one from Nashville: Read more...

More about Viral Videos, Videos, Fireworks, July 4, and Fourth Of July

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sciencehabit writes "How much do we hate being alone with our own thoughts? Enough to give ourselves an electric shock. In a new study, researchers recruited hundreds of people and made them sit in an empty room and just think for about 15 minutes. About half of the volunteers hated the experience. In a separate experiment, 67% of men and 25% of women chose to push a button and shock themselves rather than just sit there quietly and think. One of the study authors suggests that the results may be due to boredom and the trouble that we have controlling our thoughts. "I think [our] mind is built to engage in the world," he says. "So when we don't give it anything to focus on, it's kind of hard to know what to do."

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