I Have No Pants And I Must Scream

NCAA Game Band Chant: 'Where's Your Green Card?' Player is From Puerto Rico

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 20:20:11 -0700

NCAA Game Band Chant: 'Where's Your Green Card?' Player is From Puerto Rico

via Crooks and Liars by Susie Madrak on 3/16/12

Remember when people were conscious enough not to say things like this out loud, knowing that most people would be disgusted? Gee, I wonder what changed? Via Buzzfeed:

When Kansas State's point guard Angel Rodriguez went to the line, a chant of “Where's your green card?” rang out through the crowd. (It can be heard at 2 and 17 seconds in the video.) Reporters on the scene identified it as having come from Southern Mississippi's band. Thankfully it was short lived.

Martha Saunders, president of the University of Southern Mississippi, issued this statement:

"We deeply regret the remarks made by a few students at today’s game. The words of these individuals do not represent the sentiments of our pep band, athletic department or university. We apologize to Mr. Rodriguez and will take quick and appropriate disciplinary action against the students involved in this isolated incident."

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Remington 870 vs. Mossberg 500

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 23:18:34 -0700

Remington 870 vs. Mossberg 500

via Vuurwapen Blog by Andrew Tuohy on 3/16/12

In this video, I cover my experiences with the Mossberg 500 and the Remington 870.

I also describe how I came to carry and use the Remington 870 from the age of 10. My experiences with the Mossberg are more recent.

I've been working on this video in my spare time for over a month - I'm not in love with it, but I'm fairly happy with it.

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SWAT Team Raids Occupy Miami Safehouse: This is What Democracy Looks Like?

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 03:04:38 -0700

SWAT Team Raids Occupy Miami Safehouse: This is What Democracy Looks Like?

via Crooks and Liars by Diane Sweet on 3/15/12

The Tuesday raid was the second on Occupy Miami in the past six weeks. On January 31, Miami-Dade cops evicted protesters from Government Center. This time it was City of Miami police officers that arrived in SWAT vans and emerged with their assault rifles drawn.

"They were pointing guns at children!" says Ramy Mahmoud, one of three Occupy Miami members taken in for questioning and then released without charges.

Mahmoud and other Occupy Miami members were preparing to travel downtown to protest the birthday of Chase Bank CEO Jaime Dimon when at least half a dozen police vehicles screeched to a halt in front of the building on NW Seventh Street.

A cop in a dress shirt and bullet-proof vest jumped out of an unmarked car, aimed his gun at them, and shouted, "Everyone on the ground," according to Occupy Miami members.

"I thought it was either a joke or he was robbing us," says an occupier who gave his name only as Cobra. "Then an ice-cream truck full of SWAT officers pulled up."

"They said that they had gotten a tip that we had "long guns" and were going to use them at our protest," Occupy member Thomas Parisi told Miami New Times. "But we are a peaceful movement and told them that we had no intention of doing anything like that."

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DOJ Asks Court To Keep Secret Google / NSA Partnership

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 18:29:53 -0700

DOJ Asks Court To Keep Secret Google / NSA Partnership

via Slashdot by timothy on 3/13/12

SonicSpike writes "The Justice Department is defending the government's refusal to discuss — or even acknowledge the existence of — any cooperative research and development agreement between Google and the National Security Agency. The Washington based advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center sued in federal district court here to obtain documents about any such agreement between the Internet search giant and the security agency. The NSA responded to the suit with a so-called 'Glomar' response in which the agency said it could neither confirm nor deny whether any responsive records exist. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington sided with the government last July."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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PirateBox

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 03:24:00 -0700

via wiki.daviddarts.com

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The Day we Stopped Dreaming About Tomorrow [Video]

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 08:51:50 -0700

The Day we Stopped Dreaming About Tomorrow [Video]

via Geeks are Sexy Technology News by Geeks are Sexy on 3/11/12

The intention of this project is to stress the importance of advancing the space frontier and is focused on igniting scientific curiosity in the general public.
[Scrunchthethird]
No related posts.

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Inventing on Principle

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 08:41:00 -0700

via vimeo.com

This has to be one of the most important videos I've seen. Is this the spark that gets me out of this sleep walking nightmare?

What's your guiding principle?

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Inventor Portrait: Ralph Baer (The Father of Video Games)

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 01:27:55 -0700

Inventor Portrait: Ralph Baer (The Father of Video Games)

via Geeks are Sexy Technology News by Geeks are Sexy on 3/10/12

Ralph Baer is often called the father of video games. His invention, the Magnavox Odyssey, was the first home console system. I photographed and interviewed him this summer as part of my ongoing series on inventors (the book and app for which will be out eventually I promise).
Since he turns 90 years old this week, and this year marks the 40th anniversary of the video game, I chose for this video some bits from our interview in which we talk about, among other things, why he’s still inventing at 90 years old.
[David Friedman]
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14-y-o Florida girl buys foreclosed house with money from Craigslist furnitu...

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 20:28:52 -0700

14-y-o Florida girl buys foreclosed house with money from Craigslist furniture-selling hobby

via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow on 3/9/12

NPR's Planet Money profiles Willow Tufano, a 14-year-old Florida girl who saved thousands of dollars by harvesting furniture from foreclosed houses and selling it on eBay. She's just bought half interest in a house that went for $100,000 at the peak of the bubble. Her mom owns the other half, and the house went for $12,000. They rent it out for $700 a month now. Chana Joffe-Walt writes,

One day, Willow's mom, Shannon, saw a two-bedroom, concrete-block home on auction for $12,000 — down from $100,000 at the peak of the bubble. Shannon was telling her husband about the house, when Willow piped up.
"I was like, 'What if I bought a house? That would be crazy,' " Willow says...
As I was working on this story, I kept thinking that when a 14-year-old kid can buy a house, the market must have hit bottom. I kept saying this to Willow, and she'd sort of vaguely nod.
But it's hard for Willow to see herself as symbolic of anything. To a 14-year-old kid in Florida, the housing collapse is basically the only world she's known. It's the landscape. It's a Craigslist hobby.

This 14-Year-Old Girl Just Bought A House In Florida (via MeFi)
(Image: Chana Joffe-Walt)

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Right Click Tweaker Adds "Move To", "Encrypt", and Lots of Other Useful Feat...

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 02:41:43 -0700

Right Click Tweaker Adds "Move To", "Encrypt", and Lots of Other Useful Features to Windows' Right-Click Menu [Context Menu]

via Lifehacker by Whitson Gordon on 3/9/12

Windows: We've shared countless ways to clean up Windows' context menu, but you can actually add some pretty neat stuff too. Free app Right Click Tweaker adds up to 14 useful features with just a few clicks of your mouse.

Right Click Tweaker doesn't require much explanation. Just start up the portable app, check the boxes next to the functions you want to add. and press Apply Tweaks. You'll see those options in Windows' right-click menu from there on out. The menu items it can add range from handy shortcuts to really useful functions, including:

Copy To Folder

Move To Folder

Open in Notepad

Administrator Command Prompt

Encrypt

Create File List

Print File List

Search and Replace

Copy Content To Clipboard

God Mode

Problem Steps Recorder

Take Ownership

System Configuration Utility

Control Panel

Right Click Tweaker is a free download for Windows only. For more info on what each function does, check out their homepage below.

Right Click Tweaker | via AddictiveTips

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Helmet cam video of scary downhill bike race on the streets of Valparaiso, C...

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 01:10:28 -0700

Helmet cam video of scary downhill bike race on the streets of Valparaiso, Chile

via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder on 3/9/12

[Video Link] As I watched this, I kept tilting my head up to see what was coming down the road, but it didn't work. (Thanks, Felipe Li!)

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Your tax dollars at work: Afghan Air Force used as "flying drug mules"

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 02:55:57 -0700

Your tax dollars at work: Afghan Air Force used as "flying drug mules"

via Boing Boing by Xeni Jardin on 3/8/12

Spencer Ackerman at Danger Room on reports (utterly shocking reports!) that Afghanistan’s military uses its US-bought aircraft to transport drugs throughout the country.

At a cost of nearly $2 billion for two years’ worth of building the Afghan Air Force, the U.S. inadvertently purchased a more convenient mechanism for trafficking opium and weapons than Afghanistan’s drug lords were previously using. But it actually gets worse than that. The aerial trade in guns and drugs through the Afghan Air Force appears to be financing the rearmament of private militias hedging against the country’s implosion after the U.S. leaves.

Read more: Afghan Air Force: Flying Drug Mules That Fuel Civil War | Danger Room | Wired.com.
Related item at the Wall Street Journal, requires subscription.

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Monthly Bandwidth Usage

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 23:52:28 -0800

Out of curiosity, I went and looked up at my stats and here is what I found.

See the full gallery on Posterous

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We Are All Made of Stars

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 18:02:22 -0800

We Are All Made of Stars

via The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper by Eli Sanders on 3/6/12

Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, in response to the question: "What is the most astounding fact you can share with us about the Universe?"

[ Comment on this story ]

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Anonymous, Decentralized and Uncensored File-Sharing Is Booming

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 03:31:25 -0800

Anonymous, Decentralized and Uncensored File-Sharing Is Booming

via Slashdot by Soulskill on 3/4/12

PatPending writes with this excerpt from TorrentFreak: "The RetroShare network allows people to create a private and encrypted file-sharing network. Users add friends by exchanging PGP certificates with people they trust. All the communication is encrypted using OpenSSL and files that are downloaded from strangers always go through a trusted friend. In other words, it's a true Darknet and virtually impossible to monitor by outsiders. RetroShare founder DrBob told us that while the software has been around since 2006, all of a sudden there's been a surge in downloads. 'The interest in RetroShare has massively shot up over the last two months,' he said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Seattle to Create Nation's Largest Public Food Forest

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 14:00:21 -0800

Seattle to Create Nation's Largest Public Food Forest

via Latest Items from TreeHugger by Stephen Messenger on 2/28/12

Soon, residents of Seattle, Washington will get the chance to grab a bite the old-fashioned way -- thanks to a brand new food forest being planted in the heart of their city.

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Schneier: government, big data pose bigger 'Net threat than criminals

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 03:07:12 -0800

Schneier: government, big data pose bigger 'Net threat than criminals

via Ars Technica by dan.goodin@arstechnica.com (Dan Goodin) on 2/23/12

As Bruce Schneier spent the past decade watching the growing rash of phishers, malware attacks, and identity theft, a new Internet threat has emerged that poses even greater risks, the security expert said.

Unlike the security risks posed by criminals, the threat from government regulation and data hoarders such as Apple and Google are more insidious because they threaten to alter the fabric of the Internet itself. They're also different from traditional Internet threats because the perpetrators are shielded in a cloak of legitimacy. As a result, many people don't recognize that their personal information or fortunes are more susceptible to these new forces than they ever were to the Russian Business Network or other Internet gangsters.

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High-Capacity Street Rail Recommended For Ballard, U-District, and Queen Anne

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 03:00:22 -0700

High-Capacity Street Rail Recommended For Ballard, U-District, and Queen Anne

via The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper by Cienna Madrid on 7/26/11

Courtesy of SDOT, click to enlarge.
Three popular transit corridors connecting Ballard, the University District, and Queen Anne to downtown Seattle have been singled out as good candidates for high-capacity street rail (i.e., we're talking about something akin to the South Lake Union Trolley instead of Sound Transit's light rail, which operates in its own dedicated right-of-way).

Seattle Department of Transportation planning manager Tony Mazzella and Tom Brennan of Nelson/Nygaard presented the recommendations to the Seattle City Council's transportation committee this morning (.pdf). The routes are among 15 high-priority corridors previously singled out by the Seattle Department of Transportation and transportation consulting group Nelson/Nygaard for light rail and rapid bus service investments in the city's ongoing Transit Master Plan update. Once completed, the plan will provide the city with a 20-year template for future transit investments.

So why were these north-and-city-centric corridors selected for street rail above others—like, say, a high-capacity service to West Seattle?

Mazzella says that the routes were chosen using a variety of quantitative and qualitative factors—including social equity, current and future transit demand, alignment with Sound Transit routes, neighborhood zoning, and topography (you'll notice that on the above map a fourth high-priority route stretching from Coleman dock up Madison Street was earmarked for Bus Rapid Transit—which is essentially a bus route with fewer stops—due to its steep grade).

And when 12,000 people were surveyed about Seattle's transit system last fall, "people said speed and reliability were their highest needs," explained Brennan. "We didn’t hear a lot about transit coverage."

Plus, "we felt [street rail] was heavily weighed towards serving commuters," explained Mazzella. "And serving the areas of greatest growth means serving urban centers." Nevertheless, council members seemed cautious of the plan, if not downright skeptical of investing in street rail over buses.

"We're on the verge of building the Capitol Hill street car and there are suggestions that we should've done it differently or should be doing it differently," says council member Tim Burgess, who didn't elaborate on what the hell he was talking about.

"Are the investments we're making in South Lake Union and the First Hill street car ones that are good long term investments?" echoed committee chair Tom Rasmussen. "Are we making mistakes now that we'll regret later?"

I'm not sure what the fuck, exactly, they're getting at.

But here's a quick stab in the dark: Obviously, street rail is the most expensive option to build along these corridors—SDOT estimates that street rail would cost $47 million per mile to extend a rail line to Ballard, as opposed to $16 million per mile for BRT—and these capital costs would be shouldered by the city, not King County Metro. And the city is currently broker than a Greece.

But there are three points to consider, here:

1) The Transit Master Plan is a 20-year plan (and beyond). It would be foolish not to plan for street rail, which Brennan estimates is a seven-year planning-to-construction process. And the plan doesn't prioritize street rail above other, cheaper transit improvement projects—like bus rapid transit, or smaller investments in bus bulbs, boarding islands, off-board fare payment, or raised bus boarding platforms.

2) While capital costs are higher for building street rail, operating costs will likely be higher for operating multiple buses (paying for more drivers, maintenance on more buses) to accommodate the city's growing demand. The city could apply for federal assistance to help cover its capital costs (but not operating costs).

Courtesy of SDOT
3) As you can see, the net operating costs to accommodate new riders are lowest for street rail. SDOT's presentation states could support up to 190 more riders per trip than BRT. Or, put another way, street cars could accommodate up to 26,000 riders a day in 2030 versus 21,000 riders on BRT.

It seems like we'll have months yet to argue about this. SDOT is planning on submitting its final version of the Transit Master Plan to Mayor Mike McGinn in September. After that, the plan will likely go through several rounds of public comment before being submitted to the council for consideration early next year.

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The Unix revolution—thank you, Uncle Sam?

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 22:38:12 -0700

The Unix revolution—thank you, Uncle Sam?

via Ars Technica by matthew.lasar@arstechnica.com (Matthew Lasar) on 7/19/11

This November, the Unix community has another notable anniversary to celebrate: the 40th birthday of the first edition of Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie's Unix Programmers Manual, released in November 1971. Producing the document was no easy task, because at that point the Unix operating system grew by the week; budding aficionados added new commands and features to the system on a regular basis.

"The rate of change of the system is so great that a dismayingly large number of early sections [of the text] had to be modified while the rest were being written," Thompson and Ritchie noted in their introduction. "The unbounded effort required to stay up-to-date is best indicated by the fact that several of the programs described were written specifically to aid in preparation of this manual!"

That's why Unix timelines are fun to read—they give a sense of how quickly the system collaboratively evolved. But some of them either skip or mention without explanation a government decision that, in retrospect, paved the way not only for Unix, but perhaps for the open source movement as well: the 1956 Consent Decree between the United States Department of Justice and AT&T.

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One City's Radical Offer: Trade in Your Car for a Lifetime of Free Public Tr...

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 03:37:06 -0700

One City's Radical Offer: Trade in Your Car for a Lifetime of Free Public Transit

via TreeHugger on 7/12/11

Photo credit: Mejor en Tranvia How's this for a radical plan for relieving congestion in a traffic-choked city? Officials in Murcia, Spain have made anyone who's tired of suffering through a grinding commute an offer they can't refuse: Trade in your car for an unlimited pass for the shiny new public transit system. How does this work? Why, this 10-second video will explain: ...Read the full story on TreeHugger

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I Have No Pants And I Must Scream

NCAA Game Band Chant: 'Where's Your Green Card?' Player is From Puerto Rico

Remington 870 vs. Mossberg 500

SWAT Team Raids Occupy Miami Safehouse: This is What Democracy Looks Like?

DOJ Asks Court To Keep Secret Google / NSA Partnership

PirateBox

The Day we Stopped Dreaming About Tomorrow [Video]

Inventing on Principle

Inventor Portrait: Ralph Baer (The Father of Video Games)

14-y-o Florida girl buys foreclosed house with money from Craigslist furnitu...

Right Click Tweaker Adds "Move To", "Encrypt", and Lots of Other Useful Feat...

Helmet cam video of scary downhill bike race on the streets of Valparaiso, C...

Helmet cam video of scary downhill bike race on the streets of Valparaiso, Chile via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder on 3/9/12 [Video Link] As I watched this, I kept tilting my head up to see what was coming down the road, but it didn't work. (Thanks, Felipe Li!)

Your tax dollars at work: Afghan Air Force used as "flying drug mules"

Monthly Bandwidth Usage

We Are All Made of Stars

We Are All Made of Stars via The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper by Eli Sanders on 3/6/12 Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, in response to the question: "What is the most astounding fact you can share with us about the Universe?" [ Comment on this story ] [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Anonymous, Decentralized and Uncensored File-Sharing Is Booming

Seattle to Create Nation's Largest Public Food Forest

Seattle to Create Nation's Largest Public Food Forest via Latest Items from TreeHugger by Stephen Messenger on 2/28/12 Soon, residents of Seattle, Washington will get the chance to grab a bite the old-fashioned way -- thanks to a brand new food forest being planted in the heart of their city.

Schneier: government, big data pose bigger 'Net threat than criminals

High-Capacity Street Rail Recommended For Ballard, U-District, and Queen Anne

The Unix revolution—thank you, Uncle Sam?

One City's Radical Offer: Trade in Your Car for a Lifetime of Free Public Tr...

Helmet cam video of scary downhill bike race on the streets of Valparaiso, Chile

via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder on 3/9/12

[Video Link] As I watched this, I kept tilting my head up to see what was coming down the road, but it didn't work. (Thanks, Felipe Li!)

We Are All Made of Stars

via The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper by Eli Sanders on 3/6/12

Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, in response to the question: "What is the most astounding fact you can share with us about the Universe?"

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Seattle to Create Nation's Largest Public Food Forest

via Latest Items from TreeHugger by Stephen Messenger on 2/28/12

Soon, residents of Seattle, Washington will get the chance to grab a bite the old-fashioned way -- thanks to a brand new food forest being planted in the heart of their city.