May 2013
Sergeant Accused of Secretly Filming Female Cadets →
shortformblog:
A sergeant first class on the staff of the United States Military Academy at West Point faces charges for allegedly videotaping female cadets without their consent, sometimes when they were in the shower, according to Army officials.
The Army is contacting a dozen women to alert them that their privacy may have been violated and to offer support or counseling as required,...
“Dear God, take down the site! Take it down! Hackers can sweep right in, right...”
– (via clientsfromhell)
5 tags
A tornado survivor, pressed by Wolf Blitzer to... →
“We are here, and I don’t blame anyone for thanking the Lord.” /via @lauraolin
5 tags
The immigration reform bill has made it out of... →
It’s mostly intact but an amendment that it should recognize same-sex couples for the purposes of immigration has been thrown under the bus, a move that I am TOTALLY OKAY with as long as SCOTUS gets its shit together in June.
3 tags
Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper and first... →
He analogizes to YouTube, which Google bought as a late-stage company in need of monetization, and I think that’s a good analogy — Yahoo will give Tumblr the runway it needs to monetize without the desperation moves that would drive users away. (His repeated comparisons of Karp to Steve Jobs seem premature, but what do I know?)
Exclamation: Tumblr. + Yahoo! = !! →
yahoo:
I’m delighted to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Tumblr! We promise not to screw it up.
3 tags
The Syrian government is paying al Qaeda, with... →
The EU raised sanctions on Syrian oil in an effort to fund the moderate rebels, but instead Jabhat al-Nusra, the local al Qaeda affiliate, gained control of the oil fields and is refining oil in open trenches, polluting the environment and funding itself while the Syrian government — with whom they are nominally at war — pays them via a middleman so that the government can retain its...
Saroff's Place: On Yahoo & Tumblr: “We have... →
Saroff writes persuasively about why the Tumblr acquisition is not a good move for Yahoo, but I disagree:
The growth of Tumblr is going to be enormous, and Yahoo has the people and infrastructure they need to scale cheaply.
Give them time and they will figure out native ads. Twitter did without needing to slap banners on everything.
Tumblr isn’t a “blogging platform”,...
2 tags
According to TechCrunch's source, Tumblr has "only... →
We already know why Yahoo is interested in acquiring Tumblr; now we have a clue why Tumblr is interested in being acquired. I’ve previously incorrectly said here that Tumblr made $13m in profit last year; that figure was only their revenue — they are expecting to be profitable in 2013, but evidently don’t have the capital to get there.
Anonymous asked: Tumblr runs fine, is managed nearly invisibly, and there is little user complaint about its usability. There is nothing present or impending to save tumblr from. It doesn’t even crash any more. So where is the comparison between flickr, which needed saving, and tumblr, which already functions properly and requires little change?
To the people complaining that "Yahoo will ruin...
I am super bored of hearing this.
Could Yahoo have done a better job of managing Flickr? Absolutely.
In retrospect, if they’d been patient and poured money into it like Facebook did with their own photo-sharing features, Flickr might have been a lot bigger. (Facebook is by far the world’s biggest photo-sharing site, and tagged photos was key to its early growth, something Flickr...
Yahoo Board to Meet Sunday to Consider $1.1B,... →
I for one welcome our new Yahoo overlords.
4 tags
Since 2004, Americans have been driving less →
Ending six decades of nearly-continuous increases, this is good news for everybody.
2 tags
The CW is re-making The Tomorrow People, one of my... →
There was a 1970s version and also a 1990s version that was on Nickelodeon; it will be interesting to see which the new version is closest to.
6 tags
The New Yorker is the first publisher to implement... →
DeadDrop was nearly ready to launch when Aaron committed suicide, which understandably delayed things.
3 tags
The official trailer for Marvel's "Agents of... →
If anyone can pull of a science fiction TV show that will be awesome for one season and then get cancelled, it’s Joss Whedon.
4 tags
The answer to "how much would you pay to have... →
I can’t imagine what possible ROI one would expect on spending this amount of money, unless it was to get a lot of attention from the bidding process itself — and the winner is currently anonymous.
6 tags
Angelina Jolie had a preventative double... →
She carries a defect in the BRCA1 gene that gave her an 87% risk of breast cancer, which claimed her mother at age 56. This is an astonishingly frank and personal piece for the ordinarily very private Jolie to have written.
3 tags
The US government has obtained the phone records... →
This is a bizarre and worrying development.
2 tags
How are there 1.3 million users of a to-do list... →
How hard is it to maintain a fucking list?
1 tag
Most data isn’t “big,” and businesses are wasting... →
2 tags
xkcd: Birds and Dinosaurs →
This, this, a thousand times this. Birds are just dinosaurs waiting for the weather to change.
5 tags
This cover of Space Oddity by Chris Hadfield is... →
2 tags
I am morally obligated to share the Arrested... →
The wordplay! Please god let the wordplay be as good as it was!
5 tags
The biggest customer on the black market for... →
The new online cold war continues.
4 tags
Carbon dioxide levels in the global atmosphere are... →
That’s higher than it’s been since the Pliocene, between 3 and 5 million years ago. In the Pliocene, sea levels were more than a hundred feet higher. (Question: if carbon dioxide levels are really 25% higher than they were in the 1950s, should we be seeing plants do especially well?)
4 tags
The State Department has asked the makers of the... →
Exporting information on the manufacture of firearms is a regulated activity, and providing blueprints for 3D printing firearms appears to fall under that heading. That seems like a sensible but ultimately futile step, since the information will now spread underground instead. We will be hearing a lot, lot more about 3D printed weapons in the next few years; this is going to get ugly.
3 tags
GeoGuessr shows you the Street View of a location... →
/via @tomcoates
3 tags
George Barnett's cover of "Get Lucky" is... →
/via @kyleve
2 tags
OpenCoin is doing the interesting parts of Bitcoin... →
They want to be “HTTP for money” and cut Visa and Mastercard out of the transaction business using the same verifiable, computation-based mechanism central to Bitcoin. Unlike Bitcoin, they want you to use whatever currency you’re already using, and have no utopian ideals about breaking government control of fiat currencies. This is the good parts of that idea, so pay attention to...
2 tags
Did you know Barnes and Noble sells erotic fiction... →
It’s called HEDGING HIS BETS. This book is an actual thing that you can buy.
4 tags
3D printed guns are going to be a big deal and a... →
Come on, guys. You could have 3D printed water filters, pacemakers, eyeglasses, a billion useful things. Instead: guns.
2 tags
Trailers - Thor: The Dark World →
I don’t know if they can pull this off but the first Thor was surprisingly not terrible.
2 tags
Trailers - The Internship →
I cannot be clear enough how terrible a Vince Vaughn/Owen Wilson vehicle about Google is going to be.
2 tags
Trailers - Pacific Rim →
Sometimes it’s clear that a movie is being made solely to launch a much more profitable games franchise.
