Mahmoud

One aspect of corporate power today is that the managers are never responsible for anything they do wrong. They can always say the system is so complex that nobody could possibly monitor it.

Part of the motive for treaty-imposed globalization of business was to make things so complex that businesses could use this excuse. Thus, cancelling those treaties (needed to restore democracy) would also help with that.

PSN newsletter - When images aren’t loaded the Autobot logo shows up in a newsletter about a exclusive Transformers: Fall of Cybertron offer in the PlayStation store.

/via Reddit

Sky Deutschland to broadcast adverts directly into train passengers' heads

Passengers leaning their head against the window will "hear" adverts "coming from inside the user's head", urging them to download the Sky Go app. The proposal involves using bone conduction technology, which is used in hearing aids, headphones and Google's Glass headset, to pass sound to the inner ear via vibrations through the skull.

A video for the Talking Window campaign released by Sky Deutschland and ad agency BBDO Germany states: "Tired commuters often rest their heads against windows. Suddenly a voice inside their head is talking to them. No one else can hear this message."

The voice comes from a Sky-branded transmitter made by Audiva that is attached to the train window.

BBDO spokesman Ulf Brychcy told the BBC: "If our customer Sky Deutschland agrees, we will start with the new medium as quickly as possible.

Previously, previously.

MANILA (Reuters) - A shepherd-mix who lost her snout saving two girls returned on Sunday to her owner's home in the southern Philippines after eight months of veterinary treatment in the United States, earning a new title as "dog ambassador of goodwill".

LONDON (Reuters) - Forget abandoning carbohydrates or detoxing. The new dieting craze sweeping Britain and taking off in the United States lets people eat whatever they like - but only five days a week.

ericcolossal:

My horse is named Angel Crusher and I am the Horse Master. Based on Horse Master by @TomMcHenry

Words fail.

Why do kids love the comedy of completely serious comics?

 

Because they have problems in their lives

Nearly 1.5 miles beneath Earth's surface, scientists have found pockets of water that have been isolated from the outside world for 1 billion to 2.6 billion years.

What is very, very old water like?

What jumps out at you first is the saltiness. Because of the reactions between the water and the rock, it is extremely salty. It is more viscous than tap water. It has the consistency of a very light maple syrup. It doesn't have color when it comes out, but as soon as it comes into contact with oxygen it turns an orangy color because the minerals in it begin to form -- especially the iron.

So you've tasted it?

I have to admit I have tasted it from time to time. It tastes terrible. It is much saltier than seawater. You would definitely not want to drink this stuff.

We are interested in the saltiest waters because they are the oldest, and tasting is the quick-and-dirty way to find which are the most salty. I don't let the students do it, though.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Health

via Kurt White

A reader by the name of Ed brought up an interesting topic recently – there are some old folk tales you can read about in the Canalave Library in Pokemon Diamond/Pearl & Platinum, and one touches briefly on humans and the origin of Pokemon:

Japanese release	English release

So the question I was asked was: Is that what the original Japanese version says? People say it was changed in the English localization… was it?

Well, here’s a look at the text side-by-side!

Japanese Text	Literal Translation	Official English Release
「シンオウ　むかしばなし　その３」	“Sinnoh Folk Story 3″	“Sinnoh Folk Story 3″
ひとと　けっこんした　ポケモンがいた	There once were Pokémon that married people.	There once were Pokémon that became very close to humans.
ポケモンと　けっこんした　ひとがいた	There once were people who married Pokémon.	There once were humans and Pokémon that ate together at the same table.
むかしは　ひとも　ポケモンも おなじだったから　ふつうのことだった	This was a normal thing because long ago people and Pokémon were the same.	It was a time when there existed no differences to distinguish the two.

So there was definitely a localization change there – the English version takes out the idea that Pokemon and humans used to marry each other. The last line of the translation also sort of deflects the idea that it was a normal occurence because they used to be the same.

Some fans think this may have been changed so as not to conflict with conservative views in America concerning marriage and human evolution and all that. I suppose that’s possible, but since evolution is such a major aspect of the Pokemon franchise I’m not sure about that part so much.

I’m not nearly as knowledgeable about Pokemon as a lot of other people, so I can’t really speculate much on this much – but if you have any thoughts or extra insight though, please let me know in the comments!

Also, if there are any specific lines in other games you’d like me to take a look at sometime, let me know in the comments too or contact me!

You give bus tours of the homes of ordinary, everyday folks who live in your town. You’ve been doing it for years, and the same shtick rolls off your tongue day after day. You can pretty much recite it in your sleep.

This two-story house is where Craig and Nina Olsen have lived out the majority of their lives together. Craig is well-known on the block for his grilling expertise. Nina is an insurance claims adjuster. Their son moved to New York City to study dance.

The people take their snapshots and cross the house off their maps. They’re satisfied that they know the lives of the Olsens now, they know what it means to be Craig and Nina, to live in their home and watch their son head off to find his rhythm. And then you roll them on to another one.

Melanie Llanerch, a widow of 15 years after her husband Mario died on the floor of the plant in a mishap. Melanie’s annual Christmas party has been the source for quite a few local rumors, but it’s all in good fun. She’s very active in the neighborhood decorating committee, and there’s a long line of ladies who’d like to find a way into her book club.

Is that it? Is that all there is to say about Melanie? What are you doing, whoring these people’s homes out to be gawked at by paying strangers? You don’t know them. You make a living summarizing the existence of human beings. This isn’t where you wanted to end up.

Here we are at Pamela and Arthur Reed’s house. I could tell you all that Pamela works in finance and Arthur is a school teacher, but does that tell you even the slightest bit about them? If we want to know who these people are, what kind of lives they’re living, we’ll just have to go into their homes and watch them live it. Who’s with me?

You run out the door of the bus and the passengers follow you as you sprint across the lawn to Pamela and Arthur Reed’s doorstep. The door is locked. You throw your weight against it. Once, twice, a third time. The door flies off its hinges. Pamela Reed has a handgun. She aims at your heart. You die instantly. Two more shots are fired. One hits one of your passengers in the arm. The other hits the wood of the door frame. The rest of the passengers run for their lives. Your murder is ruled self-defense. Pamela had the right to defend herself from an intruder into her home. She had the right to keep you from knowing how she lives.

Happy A Guided Tour Of The Homes Of Ordinary People Day!

Bobby has a deep appreciation for the joy of cooking. Why just last week he made his famous Fish Stick Giraffe! (That’s fish sticks arranged in the shape of a giraffe)

If you haven’t been following along on the Robbie and Bobby facebook page, you may have missed the reader suggested comics I’ve been drawing. You can now see them all here.

Also, I’ve been drawing fan art for some of my friend’s wonderful webcomics, on tumblr!

Léo Caillard:

Comic URL: http://www.lefthandedtoons.com/1448/

It's been a great week for the relentless march toward dystopia!

U.S. intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track one target or trace a whole network of associates, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post. [...]

Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document: "Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple."

PRISM was launched from the ashes of President George W. Bush's secret program of warrantless domestic surveillance in 2007, after news media disclosures, lawsuits and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court forced the president to look for new authority. [...]

Government officials and the document itself made clear that the NSA regarded the identities of its private partners as PRISM's most sensitive secret, fearing that they would withdraw from the program if exposed. "98 percent of PRISM production is based on Yahoo, Google and Microsoft; we need to make sure we don't harm these sources," the briefing's author wrote in his speaker's notes.

Everyone denies it, but:

Kurt Opsahl, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation says that these denials may not be very significant.

"Whether they know the code name PRISM, they probably don't," he told Ars. "[Code names are] not routinely shared outside the agency. Saying they've never heard of PRISM doesn't mean much. Generally what we've seen when there have been revelations is something like: 'we can't comment on matters of national security.' The tech companies responses are unusual in that they're not saying 'we can't comment.' They're designed to give the impression that they're not participating in this."

NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk -- regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

NSA phone sweeping has been going on since 2007

The leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday said senators were informed of the administration's sweeping surveillance practices, which they said have been going on since 2007.

"Everyone's been aware of it for years, every member of the Senate," said Sen. Saxby Chambliss (Ga.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

DHS on border laptop searches: we can't tell you why this is legal, and we won't limit searches to reasonable suspicion

The DHS has responded to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the ACLU asking when and how it decides whose laptop to search at the border. It explained its legal rationale for conducting these searches with a blank page:

On Page 18 of the 52-page document under the section entitled "First Amendment," several paragraphs are completely blacked out. They simply end with the sentence: "The laptop border searches in the [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and [Customs and Border Protection] do not violate travelers' First Amendment rights as defined by the courts."

More excellence from "the most transparent administration in American history." Also, the DHS rejected claims that it should limit searches to situations where it had reasonable grounds for suspicion, because then they would have to explain their suspicion:

First, commonplace decisions to search electronic devices might be opened to litigation challenging the reasons for the search. In addition to interfering with a carefully constructed border security system, the litigation could directly undermine national security by requiring the government to produce sensitive investigative and national security information to justify some of the most critical searches. Even a policy change entirely unenforceable by courts might be problematic; we have been presented with some noteworthy CBP and ICE success stories based on hard-to-articulate intuitions or hunches based on officer experience and judgment. Under a reasonable suspicion requirement, officers might hesitate to search an individual's device without the presence of articulable factors capable of being formally defended, despite having an intuition or hunch based on experience that justified a search.

A Junk Decision on Warrantless DNA Collection

You lost some important Fourth Amendment protection when the Supreme Court ruled yesterday in Maryland v. King that the police can take a DNA sample from an arrestee without a search warrant for purposes of general law enforcement rummaging. [...]

Ultimately, in Maryland v. King, the Supreme Court effectively killed Fourth Amendment protections for the most vulnerable members of society. King's DNA could have been collected after his conviction on the assault charge, as every state and the federal government also collects DNA from convicted felons. But by authorizing warrantless DNA collection from arrestees, as Justice Scalia noted the majority managed to "to burden uniquely the sole group for whom the Fourth Amendment's protections ought to be most jealously guarded: people who are innocent of the State's accusations."

Justice Scalia and the Genetic Panopticon

The majority reasoned that the state has a significant interest in positively identifying suspects and the intrusion required, "a gentle rub along the inside of the cheek," is minimal. Basically, the majority held, this is no different than photographing or fingerprinting subjects.

Which is nonsense, because DNA has the potential to reveal far more about a person than his or her identity. According to the majority, though, the particular test at issue can't do that, or at least that is "open to dispute." Plus, it continued, the officers are not using it for that purpose, and there is even a state law saying they can't. "The Court need not speculate about the risks posed" by a system that doesn't have such protections, said the majority. Right, because information, once gathered, is never illegally misused. Hey, Justice Kennedy, how about the risks posed by a system that does have such protections but in which those protections are continually ignored or maybe pushed aside by constant invocations of "national security"? Could you speculate about that?

Justice Scalia, joined by the liberals except for Breyer, who surprisingly voted with the conservative majority, was willing to "speculate" about the risks involved:

Today's judgment will, to be sure, have the beneficial effect of solving more crimes; then again, so would the taking of DNA samples from anyone who flies on an airplane (surely the Transportation Security Administration needs to know the "identity" of the flying public), applies for a driver's license, or attends a public school. Perhaps the construction of such a genetic panopticon is wise. But I doubt that the proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties would have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection. I therefore dissent, and hope that today's incursion upon the Fourth Amendment, like an earlier one,6 will some day be repudiated.

He was talking about the "all-seeing" aspect of the Panopticon there, of course, but we should also remember that the "essence" of the idea, according to Bentham, was not just the watching but that the watched population would control itself in the first instance because of the fear of being watched by an invisible keeper.

Texas Says It's OK to Shoot an Escort If She Won't Have Sex With You

A jury in Bexar County, Texas just acquitted Ezekiel Gilbert of charges that he murdered a 23-year-old Craigslist escort -- agreeing that because he was attempting to retrieve the $150 he'd paid to Lenora Ivie Frago, who wouldn't have sex with him, his actions were justified.

Gilbert had admitted to shooting Frago in the neck on Christmas Eve 2009, when she accepted $150 from Gilbert and left his home without having sex with him. Frago, who was paralyzed by the shooting, died several months later.

Gilbert's defense argued that the shooting wasn't meant to kill, and that Gilbert's actions were justified, because he believed that sex was included as part of the fee. Texas law allows people "to use deadly force to recover property during a nighttime theft."

The 30-year-old hugged his defense attorneys after the "not guilty" verdict was read by the judge. If convicted, he could have faced life in prison. He thanked God, his lawyers, and the jury for being able to "see what wasn't the truth."

New York Senate makes it a felony to annoy a police officer

The New York Senate has passed a bill making it illegal to "harass" a police officer by "any type of physical action" -- even action that does not otherwise constitute interference, obstruction or assault. Given that "obstruction" and "interference" are famously broad, it's hard to imagine what conduct the police and the NY Senate believe they need to control by statute, though there's a clue in the statutory language, which makes it a felony to "harass, annoy, or threaten a police officer while on duty."

In other words, if you cause any physical contact with a police officer, even unintentionally, even if the contact does not rise to the level of assault or obstruction or interference, you can be convicted of a felony and imprisoned if the officer can show that your conduct "annoyed" him. This is the kind of statute that seems calculated to allow the police and prosecutors to put people in jail for very long stretches (remember that 97% of people indicted for felonies in the USA plead guilty under threat of decades of prison should they fight and lose) just because they don't like them very much.

I'm reminded of Toronto's notorious "Officer Bubbles", Adam Josephs, who told a G20 protester that if any soap bubbles were to touch him, he could consider it assault (and who violently arrested the protester on that basis). The world laughed (albeit with some weary cynicism) at the idea that a large, armed man could call incidental contact with a soap-bubble "assault." But the New York Senate has effectively given police the power to literally treat mere annoyances as felonious conduct.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

BADASS


Vote News 6-4-13
I DON'T KNOW WHY THIS NEWS THING IS HERE I USUALLY JUST TYPE LETTERS
-JohnnySmash
JohnnySmash@gmail.com

5-29-13
THIS IS THE 400TH COMIC JK
-JohnnySmash
JohnnySmash@gmail.com

5-15-13
THIS IS THE 400TH COMIC
-JohnnySmash
JohnnySmash@gmail.com

New Fan Art

(No new fan art.)

We were making ads in my class and when we did one for Rolos, my teacher suggested that I make an ad in Flash. At first I didn’t want to do it, but then I realized I could make a music video to Rolo Tony Brown Town.

Submitted by friend of the blog utentagen. Great job, chippy!

New Government Documents Show the Sean Parker Wedding Is the Perfect Parable for Silicon Valley Excess

Hey, if a billionaire couple wants to spend $10 million on their wedding, it's neither all that surprising nor interesting, as far as I'm concerned. So, when news and statistics started to trickle out about Sean Parker's wedding here in California -- namely that it'd cost millions of dollars to create Kardashian-level over-the-topness -- I was ready to chalk it up to the standard excesses of crazy rich people.

But that was before I read the California Coastal Commission's report on the Parker wedding's destructive, unpermitted buildout in a redwood grove in Big Sur. Parker and Neraida, the LLC he created to run his wedding, ended up paying $2.5 million in penalties for ignoring regulations. (Move fast. Break things.)

[...]

I'm not a purist: Landscapes can get more beautiful with human intervention sometimes. Most landscapes we know have already been immeasurably altered by human behavior over the centuries. What's rough about this particular situation is how wantonly Parker steamrolled structures, human and not human, legal and aesthetic.

To his credit, Parker paid up for the damage and said in a statement that he and his wife "always dreamed of getting married in Big Sur, one of the most magical places on Earth." And weddings are great and I'm sure it was a good party.

But, of course, that's also part of the new Silicon Valley parable: dream big, privatize the previously public, pay no attention to the rules, build recklessly, enjoy shamelessly, invoke magic, and then pay everybody off.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

“Eugene Jarvis, the developer of Defender (Williams Electronics, 1980), commented in the Chicago Tribune that the explosion of the player’s ship in Defender is the biggest because “no one wants to play a game where they slip and hit their head in their driveway and die”.”

- Entropy « Electron Dance

there’s room for a lot of experiences in there, i would think

"This is a poem we found on the internet."

Kim Dotcom becomes a patent aggressor, with a rather absurd patent.

Octopus clamps on to dolphin's genitals, possibly to avoid being eaten.

"Europe's Sensational Wild Animal Trainer, Fearless Daughter of Russia's Mad Monk."

I learned about this existence of this wonderful artifact and wonderful kook from Bess Lovejoy's Atlas Obscura talk at DNA Lounge last week, which you should surely attend in the future.

She also later co-authored a cookbook, which includes recipes for jellied fish heads and her father's favorite, cod soup. She also worked as a cabaret dancer in Bucharest, Romania, and then found work as a circus performer for Ringling Brothers Circus. During the 1930s she toured Europe and America as a lion tamer, billing herself as "the daughter of the famous mad monk whose feats in Russia astonished the world." She was mauled by a bear in Peru, Indiana, but stayed with the circus until it reached Miami, Florida, where she quit and began work as a riveter in a defense shipyard during World War II.