Tadeu

Today, a Japanese e-commerce giant called Rakuten bought a messaging app called Viber for $900 million. It's one of several apps for smartphones that provide free texting and even voice calls, including WhatsApp and Line.

In the U.S. it might not seem clear why any of them could be worth $900 million. But they're huge in countries like China, where one called WeChat dominates. 

Julie Ask, principal analyst at Forrester Research, explains why: They’re awesome.

"I would say to anyone who wants to understand what the craze is all about: Go download something like WeChat," she says. "Get four or five of your friends to do it, and play with it for a week. You’ll be totally hooked. The feature set is so much richer than messaging on a mobile phone. There’s so much more you can do with it."

Sending videos, pictures, cute little stickers—anything you can imagine, to anyone you want, most of it for free. It basically replaces your voice plan, your texting plan, and half of Facebook.

The apps have e-commerce sites, too. With apps built on top of WeChat, in China you can use it to order dinner. Or a taxi.

"These apps aren’t apps," Ask says. "They’re platforms."

It makes sense for a retailer like Rakuten to want in on that business, says Adib Ghubril, research director at the tech consulting firm Gartner.

"Retailers want to understand their customers better," he says, "and part of understanding them better is to get them talking."

In other words: What if Amazon knew you as well as Facebook does? 

Viber has 300 million users, so that’s a big head start. Altimeter Group founder Charlene Li thinks Rakuten just picked up a major asset.

"They instantly bought access to 300 million people," she says. 

That’s not as many as Facebook, but it’s growing fast. And Facebook couldn’t be purchased for $900 million. 

I don’t even know.

This didn’t take me all week to make, I’ve just been sick.

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Good beer comes in bottles, so why shouldn’t good wine come in a can? The Union Wine Companybased in Tualatin, Oregon has answered that question by producing their highly praised Underwood Pinot Gris and Pinot Noir in a convenient 12 ounce aluminum can.

Pre-orders are currently being taken for delivery in Spring 2014.

For the past two months, environment artist Robert Briscoe has been working to make Dear Esther run in Unity, rather than Valve's Source Engine, and he has some pretty gifs to show for it. He's bringing the entire game to Unity, six years after it...

If the Crystal Head Vodka bottles were modeled on a real skull, what would the person have looked like when he or she was alive? A forensic artist has used facial reconstruction techniques to sculpt a face that could belong to the vodka bottle.

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The hour of South Park: The Stick of Truth‘s arrival is nearly upon us – you know, after being nearly upon us, like, three different times before delays rudely shoved it out of the limelight. But now it’s (probably) happening for real this time, and Ubisoft has gameplay to prove it. 13 minutes of gameplay, to be precise. Why, that’s the entire… er, tutorial. OK, so maybe it’s not the most exciting bit, but there are still some hearty chuckles to be had. Well, if you think Cartman is the almighty wizard god emperor of humor, anyway.

… [visit site to read more]

The only Doctor Who character who was only in one episode and has his own fandom.

it8bit:

MODERN DAY CLASSICS GONE CLASSIC

OTLgaming: DeviantART user Bunnelle has a vision for the future of gaming that doesn’t include HD graphics and surround sound, but instead features a bountiful harvest of 8bit goodness.

Or, she simply had the idea of taking modern day games and re-envisioning them in the style of classic Atari cartridge art. It’s definitely one of the two.

Harleys Chase Jokers (SDCC 2012) x

From Einstein to John Lennon, these photos are believed to be the last photos of some of the most famous people of the last century, taken right before they passed away.

Click for expanded version

We might imagine that David Foster Wallace worked out his neuroses primarily in his voluminous fictional and critical output, but as we see from a fax above to Harper’s editor Joel Lovell, the painful self-consciousness that drove his writing manifested in even the most mundane of documents. Wallace submitted the faxed letter with a short essay on Kafka that appeared in Harper’s in 1998. The essay itself—an account of the difficulties of teaching the arch Czech author to American undergraduates—slices through commonplaces, arriving at the conclusion that “the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.” Reassuring stuff this ain’t, but then, neither is Kafka. Even amidst all of its elaborate defensive strategies, Wallace’s writing also exposes the unheimlichkeit of human embodiment, and in the Kafka essay, it’s a point he wanted to make in a very particular way, unmediated by any editorial intervention.

His faxed letter to Lovell anticipates and resists criticism and alternates between dismissive, self-effacing, and mock-threatening in his expressed desire that the Harper’s staff “not copyedit this like a freshman essay.” He explains the conversational style of the piece as an effort to “protect me from people’s ire.” The body of the letter finishes with Wallace’s footnoted promise to “find a way to harm you or cause you suffering* if you fuck with the mechanics of this piece.” It’s classic DFW: completely idiosyncratic, a prose style induced by his “horrific struggle” to establish an authentic self. Read a transcript below, courtesy of Letters of Note. All, of course, sic.

ATTEMPTED FAX COVER SHEET

From: David Wallace

To: Joel Lovell, Harper’s [redacted] (Office [redacted])

This is pretty much the best I can do, I think. I feel shitty sticking a lot of what you wanted in FN’s, but I didn’t see any work to work it into the main text w/o having to rewrite whole ¶s and throw the thing’s Styrofoamish weight off.

The deal is this. You’re welcome to this for READINGS if you wish. What I’d ask is that you (or Ms. Rosenbush, whom I respect but fear) not copyedit this like a freshman essay. Idiosyncracies of ital, punctuation, and syntax (“stuff,” “lightbulb” as one word, “i.e.”/”e.g.” without commas after, the colon 4 words after ellipses at the end, etc.) need to be stetted. (A big reason for this is that I want to preserve an oralish, out-loud feel to the remarks so as to protect me from people’s ire at stuff that isn’t expanded on more; for you, the big reason is that I’m not especially psyched to have this run at all, much less to take a blue-skyed 75-degree afternoon futzing with it to bring it into line with your specs, and you should feel obliged and borderline guilty, and I will find a way to harm you or cause you suffering* if you fuck with the mechanics of this piece.

Let Me Know,

Dave Wallace

* (It may take years for the oportunity to arise. I’m very patient. Think of me as a spider with a phenomenal emotional memory. Ask Charis.)

via F yeah, manuscripts!

Related Content:

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David Foster Wallace’s 1994 Syllabus: How to Teach Serious Literature with Lightweight Books

David Foster Wallace Creates Lists of His Favorite Words: “Maugre,” “Tarantism,” “Ruck,” “Primapara” & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

David Foster Wallace’s Sharp Letter to His Editor: “Don’t F with the Mechanics of My Piece” is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture by signing up for our Daily Email. That is the most reliable and convenient option. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.

When I was young, I decided that I would learn how to pick locks. If countless intrepid TV heroes could dismantle a pair of handcuffs with nothing but a hastily swiped paperclip, why couldn’t I? The process, it turns out, was quite easy: I practiced on an old, lockable diskette cabinet, and quickly figured out how to crack the lock’s mechanism using two paperclip halves. This allowed me to proclaim that I was an expert lock picker to my friends, and that, really, the whole thing was an elementary procedure.

Although, as the astute reader would surmise, I knew next to nothing about lock picking, I was right on one count: it’s easy. Or, at least, so notes the MIT Guide to Lock Picking, written by the mysterious Ted The Tool. This primer was first published in 1987 and has been floating around various websites for the past two decades. And it’s still considered an essential introduction to the art of picking locks. It begins by outlining lock terminology:

The key is inserted into the keyway of the plug. The protrusions on the side of the keyway are called wards. Wards restrict the set of keys that can be inserted into the plug. The plug is a cylinder which can rotate when the proper key is fully inserted. The non-rotating part of the lock is called the hull. The first pin touched by the key is called pin one. The remaining pins are numbered increasingly toward the rear of the lock. 

The proper key lifts each pin pair until the gap between the key pin and the driver pin reaches the sheer line. When all the pins are in this position, the plug can rotate and the lock can be opened. An incorrect key will leave some of the pins protruding between the hull and the plug, and these pins will prevent the plug from rotating.

Over its 50 pages, the guide explains the flatland and pin column lock models, and lays out the theory behind opening them. It also includes guidelines on making lock picking tools, legal information, and numerous pieces of practical advice. Most useful? It contains numerous exercises, and stresses the importance of doing your lock picking homework:

“Anyone can learn how to open desk and filing cabinet locks, but the ability to open most locks in under thirty seconds is a skill that requires practice.”

lia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.

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The Enigma Machine: How Alan Turing Helped Break the Unbreakable Nazi Code

Learn To Pick Locks, With The MIT Guide To Lock Picking (1991) is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture by signing up for our Daily Email. That is the most reliable and convenient option. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.

Dr. Owen Churches of Flinders University in Australia has learned that we are now reacting to emoticons in the same way that we would to a human face. In a study published in the Social Neuroscience Journal, it was found that when presented with images of humans, random strings of characters, and emoticons, participants' occipitotemporal cortex had the same response with both human faces and emoticons. This brain development has only taken 32 years to occur, as the first documented use of emoticon was in 1982 by Professor Scott Fahlman, pictured above.

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Segundo informações, nenhum ferimento grave foi registrado nos acidentes. São apenas imagens de um dia comum na Russia.  rsrs

firehose shared this story from Digg Top Stories.

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Banks were given a green light Friday to offer services to the legal marijuana industry, but must continue to report any suspicious activity specific to that industry to federal authorities.

firehose shared this story from A.V. Club.

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just follow this One Weird Tip

Willy E. Coyote in real life. (via)

One day in 1880 John Muir set out to explore a glacier in southeastern Alaska, accompanied by Stickeen, the dog belonging to his traveling companion. The day went well, but on their way back to camp they found their way blocked by an immense 50-foot crevasse crossed diagonally by a narrow fin of ice. After long deliberation Muir cut his way down to the fin, straddled it and worked his way perilously across, but Stickeen, who had shown dauntless courage throughout the day, could not be convinced to follow. He sought desperately for some other route, gazing fearfully into the gulf and “moaning and wailing as if in the bitterness of death.” Muir called to him, pretended to march off, and finally ordered him sternly to cross the bridge. Miserably the dog inched down to the farther end and, “lifting his feet with the regularity and slowness of the vibrations of a seconds pendulum,” crept across the abyss and scrambled up to Muir’s side.

And now came a scene! ‘Well done, well done, little boy! Brave boy!’ I cried, trying to catch and caress him; but he would not be caught. Never before or since have I seen anything like so passionate a revulsion from the depths of despair to exultant, triumphant, uncontrollable joy. He flashed and darted hither and thither as if fairly demented, screaming and shouting, swirling round and round in giddy loops and circles like a leaf in a whirlwind, lying down, and rolling over and over, sidewise and heels over head, and pouring forth a tumultuous flood of hysterical cries and sobs and gasping mutterings. When I ran up to him to shake him, fearing he might die of joy, he flashed off two or three hundred yards, his feet in a mist of motion; then, turning suddenly, came back in a wild rush and launched himself at my face, almost knocking me down, all the while screeching and screaming and shouting as if saying, ‘Saved! saved! saved!’ Then away again, dropping suddenly at times with his feet in the air, trembling and fairly sobbing. Such passionate emotion was enough to kill him. Moses’ stately song of triumph after escaping the Egyptians and the Red Sea was nothing to it. Who could have guessed the capacity of the dull, enduring little fellow for all that most stirs this mortal frame? Nobody could have helped crying with him!

Thereafter, Muir wrote, “Stickeen was a changed dog. During the rest of the trip, instead of holding aloof, he always lay by my side, tried to keep me constantly in sight, and would hardly accept a morsel of food, however tempting, from any hand but mine. At night, when all was quiet about the camp-fire, he would come to me and rest his head on my knee with a look of devotion as if I were his god. And often as he caught my eye he seemed to be trying to say, ‘Wasn’t that an awful time we had together on the glacier?’”

Two tanks and one van

fuckyeahwarriorwomen:

animatedamerican:

mildlyamused:

Another day, another kick ass woman from history who is sadly lacking her own movie franchise.

Source

but nah, women never did anything interesting or exciting in the Old Days

She was known as the Lioness of Brittany.

Holy fuck balls!

Hey geeks with kids! My friends at EvoS are doing a kickstarter for a kids' book about evolution:

Nooossaaaa o Oompa-Loompa me deu até medo!

kittykoti:

CHELSEA PERETTI KILLIN IT ON TWITTER