When Google first announced Google Reader would be shut down, the news kick-started a very competitive race to create the best alternative. At least one service, however, did not welcome the change, and is now planning to close up shop next month: The Old Reader.
In fact, if you navigate to the service’s homepage now, you’ll be greeted by this sad message: Unfortunately we had to disable user registration at The Old Reader
. In two weeks, the public site will be shut down and a private one, available to a select few (accounts will be migrated automatically), will take its place — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Derpy, or Ditsy Doo as she may alternately be called, might have a relatively drab coat of gray compared to other more vividly colored ponies, but it is the sparkle in her eyes, the warmth of her smile and her carefree gait that makes her irresistibly adorable. The fact that her eyes might not necessarily focus well all the time is merely icing on a cake, or in her case, fresh blueberries on top of a muffin. In my case it’s a relief not to go through the painstaking task of perfectly synchronising their movement.
The stand and figure are carved out of Philippine mahogany while the gears and crank are made from Narra hardwood. The figure is hand painted with enamel and protected with clear flat lacquer. Derpy stands at 5 3/8″ to the tip of her wings and the whole piece measures at 7″ long, 4 3/4″ wide (wingspan) and 9 3/8″ high at her highest point. She took 100 1/2 hours to complete — via Youtube
The lovely set I made for myself. This set includes the massive necklace, fake gauges and a bracelet. It has a three part gradient from dark turquoise to light. It took a lot of time and patience and I love it. A lot of people at Fanime recognised me just by this necklace! It was a lot of fun to wear to the con — via deviantART
— via Pepper.ph
Researchers say a new cancer vaccine that appears to be helping dogs could soon be used in human trials.
The vaccine, developed by researchers at Sydney’s Kolling Institute, has been trialled on almost 30 dogs with advanced melanoma, bone cancer and liver cancer.
Early results found the vaccine not only slowed the growth of the original tumour but also helped to prevent more developing.
Dr Chris Weir, who developed the vaccine, said the anecdotal results are promising — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The Federal Parliament committee examining IT price hikes in Australia has published an extensive report recommending a raft of drastic measures to deal with current practices in the area, which, the report says, are seeing Australians unfairly slugged with price increases of up to 50 percent on key technology goods and services.
In mid-2012, spurred by the campaigning efforts of then-Labor backbencher Ed Husic, who has since been promoted to the dual roles of Parliamentary Secretary for Broadband and Parliamentary Secretary to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Infrastructure and Communications kicked off hearings into the Australian cost of popular technology goods and services, as well as some forms of content, with reference to the issue of unfair price increases by international vendors.
Late last week, the committee handed down its report on the issue to Parliament, and this morning it was made available in full on the committee’s website.
In the foreword to the report, Committee chair Nick Champion noted that the importance of IT products to every sector of Australian society can hardly be overstated
. IT products are woven into the fabric of our economy and society, and have driven rapid change in the way Australians communicate, the way we work, and the way we live,
the Labor MP noted.
However, Champion added, the committee hearings held over the past year had found that Australian consumers and businesses must often pay between 50 and 100 percent more than those residing in other countries for the same products — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A man has been arrested after a feminist campaigner was deluged on Twitter with abuse and threats of rape, Scotland Yard has confirmed.
The 21-year-old was detained earlier in the Manchester area on suspicion of harassment offences.
Caroline Criado-Perez faced abuse after successfully campaigning for a woman’s face to appear on UK banknotes.
Labour has complained to Twitter about what it says was an inadequate response
to the abuse.
Ms Criado-Perez, who had appeared in the media to campaign for women to feature on banknotes, said the abusive tweets began the day it was announced that author Jane Austen would appear on the newly designed £10 note.
She reported them to the police after receiving about 50 abusive tweets an hour for about 12 hours
and said she had stumbled into a nest of men who co-ordinate attacks on women
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
Until now, only pirates and welders have worn bandanas… but now, Cthulhu cultists can too! Featuring an original border design that incorporates Cthulhu, Nightgaunts, The Hounds of Tindalos, and more, these full size screen-printed bandanas are 22″ on a side and come in red, green, and black — via Arkham Bazaar
— via Redbubble
This morning there was a huge victory for common sense in the Ninth Circuit appeals court ruling in the Fox v Dish case over Dish’s AutoHopper technology. As you may recall, pretty much all the major broadcasters sued Dish a year ago, claiming that its AutoHopper technology with the PrimeTime Anytime feature — which would record the entire primetime lineup, and allow Dish customers to watch everything (starting the next day) while automatically skipping the commercials — was infringement (and breach of contract). As we noted at the time, the broadcasters’ arguments made very little sense. The basis of the argument was that skipping commercials is a form of copyright infringement. We couldn’t see how skipping commercials violated the copyright in any way at all, and while Fox pretended it won the initial ruling at the district court level, the reality was that Dish won big.
Fox immediately appealed, and Dish has won big yet again with this latest ruling, which is a huge victory for common sense. The court makes a number of important findings, nearly all of them good and sensible. To be specific, the nature of this ruling was over whether or not the broadcasters could get an injunction to block Dish from offering this technology while the case was ongoing, but the court rejected it, saying that the broadcasters did not demonstrate a likelihood of success
. This means the full trial can still go forward, but the technology can still be offered during that trial. However, the fact that both the district court and the appeals court have clearly stated that they don’t see a likelihood of the broadcasters succeeding shows that the broadcasters are likely to be wasting a lot of time and money only to lose.
The key point in this case: skipping commercials is not copyright infringement. For years, Hollywood has tried to claim that skipping commercials is a form of copyright infringement. All the way back in 2002, a TV exec claimed that skipping commercials was a theft (even merely going to the bathroom during a commercial). A couple years later they even tried to get Congress to pass a law explicitly banning commercial skipping (sponsored by Orrin Hatch, of course). Without that, they’ve just been pretending that commercial skipping must be illegal. In court, the TV networks have argued that anything that hurts their business model must be illegal — via redwolf.newsvine.com
David Cronenberg on the set of Naked Lunch — via Steve Niles Tumblr
It was only a matter of time after news came out that UK internet service providers (ISPs) would begin filtering internet services of adult content by default before the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) would again ask for Australia’s internet to be filtered.
The political lobby group [consisting of three obnoxious, bigoted and racist white men], which claims to represent the Christians in Australia [they don’t] and says it has approximately 10,000 supporters [names culled from the obituary columns don’t count], has often called for freedom of speech in regards to religious groups being able to speak out against homosexuality. However, it has long backed broad censoring of the internet since 2007, when the Rudd and Gillard governments had planned on introducing a mandatory ISP-level internet filter into Australia.
In 2008, then-ACL managing director Jim Wallace described the filter as vital
to protect society’s most vulnerable
.
Obviously, the internet industry is going to continue to fight this important initiative, but the interests of children must be placed first,
he said.
Claims the government will impose China-style curbing of free speech are ridiculous, given Australia’s robust parliamentary democracy, something China does not have,
Wallace said in another release.
The ACL didn’t want consumers to be able to make a choice on whether the filter should be on or off, as is the case with the UK scheme. In 2010, on the question of whether a software-based filter would be better, the organisation said that ISP-level filtering would be more effective for protecting the community as a whole — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Today, Gibson is lanky and somewhat shy, avuncular and slow to speak — more what you would expect from the lapsed science-fiction enthusiast he was in 1972 than the genre-vanquishing hero he has become since the publication of his first novel, the hallucinatory hacker thriller Neuromancer, in 1984. Gibson resists being called a visionary, yet his nine novels constitute as subtle and clarifying a meditation on the transformation of culture by technology as has been written since the beginning of what we now know to call the information age. Neuromancer, famously, gave us the term cyberspace and the vision of the Internet as a lawless, spellbinding realm. And, with its two sequels, Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), it helped establish the cultural figure of the computer hacker as cowboy hero. In his Bridge series — Virtual Light (1993), Idoru (1996), and All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999), each of which unfolds in a Bay Bridge shantytown improvised after a devastating Pacific earthquake transforms much of San Francisco — he planted potted futures of celebrity journalism, reality television, and nanotechnology, each prescient and persuasive and altogether weird.
Neuromancer and its two sequels were set in distant decades and contrived to dazzle the reader with strangeness, but the Bridge novels are set in the near future — so near they read like alternate history, Gibson says, with evident pride. With his next books, he began to write about the present-day, or more precisely, the recent past: each of the three novels in the series is set in the year before it was written. He started with 11 September 2001.
Pattern Recognition was the first of that series. It has been called an eerie vision of our time
by The New Yorker, one of the first authentic and vital novels of the twenty-first century
, by The Washington Post Book World, and, by The Economist, probably the best exploration yet of the function and power of product branding and advertising in the age of globalisation
. The Pattern Recognition books are also the first since Mona Lisa Overdrive in which Gibson’s characters speak of cyberspace, and they speak of it elegiacally. I saw it go from the yellow legal pad to the Oxford English Dictionary,
he tells me. But cyberspace is everywhere now, having everted and colonised the world. It starts to sound kind of ridiculous to speak of cyberspace as being somewhere else
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
The Einstein Tower in Potsdam, Germany, designed by the German architect Erich Mendelsohn, is one of the best-known examples of German expressionist architecture. Designed as an amorphic structure of reinforced concrete, Mendelsohn wanted the tower to represent as well as facilitate the study of Einstein’s radical theory of relativity — a groundbreaking theorem of motion, light and space — via ArchDaily
Dave Mottram — via PLANET-PULP
The process was routine. LA County Sheriff’s homicide investigator Kevin Lloyd was flipping through snapshots of tattooed gang members.
Then one caught his attention.
Inked on the pudgy chest of a young Pico Rivera gangster who had been picked up and released on a minor offence was the scene of a 2004 liquor store slaying that had stumped Lloyd for more than four years.
Each key detail was right there: the Christmas lights that lined the roof of the liquor store where 23-year-old John Juarez was gunned down, the direction his body fell, the bowed street lamp across the way and the street sign — all under the chilling banner of RIVERA KILLS, a reference to the gang Rivera-13.
As if to seal the deal, below the collarbone of the gang member known by the alias Chopper
was a miniature helicopter raining down bullets on the scene.
Lloyd’s discovery of the tattoo in 2008 launched a bizarre investigation that soon led to Anthony Garcia’s arrest for the shooting. Then sheriff’s detectives, posing as gang members, began talking to Garcia, 25, in his holding cell. They got a confession that this week led to a first-degree murder conviction in a killing investigators had once all but given up hope of solving — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Bar at Vivid Light Festival, originally uploaded by Bill Mac.
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