For 50 years, residents of the French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit have tried to understand the “cursed bread” incident, a moment of terrifying mass insanity and hallucinations that left at least five dead and dozens in asylums. Now the mystery is solved: the CIA secretly spiked the bread from the bakery with enormous quantities of LSD as part of its cold war mind-control experiments, at least according to recently uncovered documents.

via French village went insane after CIA spiked its bread with LSD – Boing Boing.

via YouTube – Jessica Alba The Stare Response on ibeatyou.

One reason why Apple’s touch sensor is so sensitive to light touch is that the company uses a 12-volt power source for the sensing lines in the touchscreen sensor, versus the 3- to 5-volt power source that most other component manufacturers have. That higher voltage drive takes a toll on the battery life because it uses up more power, but it also translates into more accurate sensing, which means a better touch experience, say researchers at Moto.

via Finger Fail: Why Most Touchscreens Miss the Point | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.

Claiming that ad blocking is harming sites is like the recording industry claiming that piracy (or home taping) is killing music. Or it’s like the newspaper industry claiming that aggregators are killing them. It’s passing the blame. If you run a company, it’s your responsibility to put together a business model that works. And if people are somehow figuring out ways to do what they want where you don’t get paid, then it means you’re doing something that needs to change. A good business model is one where everyone is happy with the transaction, not one where one party feels forced or coerced into accepting something they don’t want.

via Don’t Blame Your Community: Ad Blocking Is Not Killing Any Sites | Techdirt.

Ars Technica, in a somewhat unprecedented, left-field move, recently said that ad blocking was harming the sites that you love. I was this close to turning off my adblocker (or at least whitelisting Ars) for my primary browser, but you know what – this paragraph sums it up nicely.

Where does x264 fit in all this? H.264 is certainly not going away, not for quite a while. In most sane parts of the world, software patents are a non-issue. But in the end, none of it matters for x264: we will continue our quest to create the best video compression software on Earth. Unlike Adobe, we don’t sit complacent when we are the best; we keep trying to become better. We add new features, improve compression, support new platforms, improve performance, and there’s far more to come. We don’t care that many H.264 encoders are so bad that they can be beaten by Theora or Xvid. We don’t care if VP8 comes out; that’s just another encoder to beat. We are here to ensure that the best choice is always free software by constantly making free software better.

via Diary Of An x264 Developer » Flash, Google, VP8, and the future of internet video.

via YouTube – Transform Your Hoodie Into a Strap Bag.

Rumpus: You’ve previously mentioned a master password, which you no longer use.

Employee: I’m not sure when exactly it was deprecated, but we did have a master password at one point where you could type in any user’s user ID, and then the password. I’m not going to give you the exact password, but with upper and lower case, symbols, numbers, all of the above, it spelled out ‘Chuck Norris,’ more or less. It was pretty fantastic.

Rumpus: This was accessible by any Facebook employee?

Employee: Technically, yes. But it was pretty much limited to the original engineers, who were basically the only people who knew about it. It wasn’t as if random people in Human Resources were using this password to log into profiles. It was made and designed for engineering reasons. But it was there, and any employee could find it if they knew where to look.

I should also say that it was only available internally. If I were to log in from a high school or library, I couldn’t use it. You had to be in the Facebook office, using the Facebook ISP.

via Conversations About The Internet #5: Anonymous Facebook Employee – The Rumpus.net.

We pull out our cheat card instead – it lists things that may inspire hatred. Some of these are still too controversial, so we opt for the most agreeable one. We manage to agree that we both dislike it when people talk in the cinema. Although hate is too strong a word, and we can only bring ourselves to dislike the activity and not the people themselves. By Ruth’s definition this would probably make Clive and I compatible. Compatibly passive, argument averse, and showing a preference for resolving conflict through discussion.

via Can hate dating help you find love? | Life and style | guardian.co.uk.

Another brilliant night.

Notable highlights – was defending on the map with the lighthouse, chopper flew up above the treeline, I was sitting on the roof of some building, sniped the pilot, which brought the (full of people) chopper down again.

Did it once again not a minute later – same pilot.

Third highlight minutes after that was when a Medic and the pilot from the chopper incidents before landed the chopper on a hill and jumped out. I spotted them, took out the chopper pilot, reloaded while the Medic rezzed him, took out the pilot again, and again, and again, until they realised their plan wasn’t going anywhere fast, so they dropped down and that was that…

STOKED because it was the first time I had managed to snipe a pilot out of a moving chopper. Epic fluke shot, if I do say so myself

lolsauce, if you’re reading this, thanks for the points mate!

via Battlefield: Bad Company 2 – Page 132 – Overclockers Australia Forums.

Watch out for the full review coming up shortly. If I ever get bored of the multiplayer and actually finish the singleplayer, that is

Ive had my trusty Logitech V470 for a while now, and it’s seen a pretty harsh life so far. I’m always on a the lookout for a decent replacement that has at least as many features, but damn you, logitech. Damn you.

Had you made this mouse in a Bluetooth version, I might have actually considered it in my neverending search for a capable V470 replacement – as it stands, however, I’ll have to look elsewhere, even though this Anywhere Mouse has all the features I want…

Yes, Bluetooth is that important to me. If I’ve already got it inbuilt, why should I go out and buy something that requires an extra adapter (no matter how miniscule it is), that will take up an extra USB port on my already-constrained supply? (Yes, I realise that Macs suck because they “only” have two USB ports. Get over it, that’s why they made USB hubs for.)

And even though I have a USB hub at home with two ports free all the time, that’s still not the point, is it? I mean, sure – even I’ll struggle to fill all the available ports on any modern PC these days (it’s like 12 or some other stupid number), but on a laptop, portability is the key. Cutting the number of USB ports I have available just flies in the face of every common-sense rule that I’ve ever heard, and it’s just rediculous for a company of 25 (or however many years it is) years to not make a decent range of Bluetooth mice for laptops.

But you know what? I have other options. The thing that irks me is that there isn’t a middle click button on the Apple Magic Mouse – however, that can be resolved via a nice little third-party piece of software called MagicPrefs, or Better Touch Tool will also do it AFAIK. Unlike the Logitech, the Magic Mouse is also made from yummy multi-touch goodness, which means I can scoll with momentum as much as I want, but dammit – the Anywhere Mouse has the momentum scrolling AND ratchet (or tradition, notched) scrolling, as well. D’arvit!

So damn you, Logitech. Instead of making the decision easy for me to buy your stuff, now I actually have to go out and do some research before I can make a decision – but to you, you’ve pretty much lost the sale already, even if I do end up purchasing an Anywhere Mouse.

NB: next to this particular model of mouse there was also a mouse with an INCREDIBLE claim on battery life; up to 3 years, in fact, on a set of double AA cells. Now I’m usually not the most skeptical person in the world, but seriously – three years? Years? Three off them? Of course, the fine print stated testing was done under controlled conditions, and that it used some technology to save energy, but it had exactly the same receiver as the Anywhere mouse, so I’m not so sure…

Posted via email from Benny’s randomly-updated Posterous

via YouTube – Galactica: Sabotage.

via YouTube – BEASTIE BOYS – SABOTAGE – High Quality.

via i can read.

via The Daily What.

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Not sure how up-to-date this information is (then again, it does include Android data), but it certainly makes for interesting reading.