Netflix responds to Verizon’s cease & desist letter. Somehow I doubt that Verizon will bite on your offer to work together to increase network transparency Netflix. Nice suggestion though.
More than 90% of Americans believe that the US government is unduly influenced by money, and the Mayday.US super PAC is raising $5M to fund the election campaigns of politicians who’ll pledge to dismantle super PACs and enact other campaign finance reforms. They raised more than $1M in 30 days last month, and this month, the goal is $5M. It’s the brainchild of Lawrence Lessig, who’s going to run prototype the project by running five electoral campaigns in 2014, and use the lessons of those projects to win enough anti-corruption seats in 2016 to effect real change.
Again, I’m not able to contribute to Mayday.US, because I’m a Canadian and Briton. But I ask my American friends to put in $10, and promise that I’ll put CAD1000 into any comparable Canadian effort and/or £1000 into a comparable UK effort. We all win when countries embrace evidence-based policy guided by doing what’s best for its citizens, rather than lining the pockets of corrupting multinationals.
Please reblog!
A high-profile fork: one year of Blink and Webkit
Some stats and analysis at a very high level of the Blink fork from Webkit.
MotherJones - Meet the people behind the Wayback Machine, one of our favorite things about the internet
Nieman Journalism Lab - Who’s behind that tweet? Here’s how 7 news orgs manage their Twitter and Facebook accounts
Kickstarter - Bring Reading Rainbow Back for Every Child, Everywhere.
Guardian - Secrets, lies and Snowden’s email: why I was forced to shut down Lavabit
"For the first time, the founder of an encrypted email startup that was supposed to insure privacy for all reveals how the FBI and the US legal system made sure we don’t have the right to much privacy in the first place"
A reminder that those Doritos you love are trash:
Shortly after Disneyland opened in 1955, the founder of Frito-Lay got permission from Walt Disney to open a restaurant in Frontierland with a Mexican-ish theme. “Casa de Fritos” was, unsurprisingly, all about the Fritos. Customers got free Fritos, and Fritos were incorporated into many of the dishes. Fritos were dispensed by an animatronic vending machine that featured the terrifying “Frito Kid”asking his assistant “Klondike” to bring the bag up from a mineshaft. I guess the conceit is that Fritos were mined by Forty-Niners?
Casa de Fritos contracted their tortilla production to a company called Alex Foods. One of the salesmen from Alex Foods, making a delivery to Casa de Fritos, noticed stale tortillas in the garbage and gave the cook a little tip: fry them and sell them as chips instead of throwing them away. Casa de Fritos began making these fried, seasoned chips to enormous success, but didn’t report this new menu item to the Frito-Lay company.
Eventually Frito-Lay found out what they were doing with the chips, packaged them, and sold them by the truckload. See, dumpster diving works out sometimes!
Internet Archive lets you play one of the earliest computer games Space War! emulated in JavaScript in the browser.
This entry covers the historical context of Space War!, and instructions for working with our in-browser emulator. The system doesn’t require installed plugins (although a more powerful machine and recent browser version is suggested).
The JSMESS emulator (a conversion of the larger MESS project) also contains a real-time portrayal of the lights and switches of a Digital PDP-1, as well as links to documentation and manuals for this $800,000 (2014 dollars) minicomputer.
Matt & David on Chris Hardwick’s Comic Con Blunder (x)
requested by tennanttardistime
Bonus Chris Hardwick in costume:
The Dollar-And-Cents Case Against Hollywood’s Exclusion of Women - Applying the Bechdel Test to movies over the past 40 years.
Uhh has anyone notice Garry Marshall’s Wikipedia page?
Hahaha
Wiki user ‘Gillian Marshal’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Garry_Marshall&diff=prev&oldid=596787114) updated his page yesterday. Nice and subtle only editing the summary section on the right.
After much deliberation, the winners of the Grand C++ Error Explosion Competition are finally selected. There are two different award categories. The winners of the first category are those submissions that produced the largest error with the smallest amount of source code. These entries contain a…
Victorian Trolling: How Con Artists Spammed in a Time Before Email
The main difference between 21st-century scams and those of centuries past is one of delivery method.Read more. [Image: Wikimedia Commons/Benjamin Breen]