Colonel Sponsz's Shared Items

Original source

Formation flight Sunday. Lightnings

Original source

Original source

Original source

Formation flight Sunday. F7Us

Original source An anonymous reader writes “Here’s another story of a tech gadget that arrived before its time. Nokia created a web-ready tablet running EPOC (later to be renamed as Symbian) thirteen years ago. The tablet was set to go into full production, and they actually built a thousand units just before it was canceled. The tablet was scrubbed because market research showed there wasn’t demand for the device. The team got devices for themselves and the rest were destroyed. The team was then fired. The lesson: Don’t try to be pioneer if you’re relying on market research studies.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original source

This is a crazy overreaction:

A 19-year-old man was caught on camera urinating in a reservoir that holds Portland’s drinking water Wednesday, according to city officials. Now the city must drain 38 million gallons of water from Reservoir 5 at Mount Tabor Park in southeast Portland.

I understand the natural human disgust reaction, but do these people actually think that their normal drinking water is any more pure? That a single human is that much worse than all the normal birds and other animals? A Or that a few ounces distributed amongst 38 million gallons is negligible. Another story.

Original source Punching a Woman in the Face – Part 2 of Feminism as Self Protection         : calamityjon:

Recently, there’s been another outrage outburst in the comics community. A woman criticized a sorta shitty comic cover, and naturally, she was threatened with rape. It feels…

Ulisas Farinas has written a pair of impassioned articles about the normalization of depictions of violence against women in comics and, more recently, underlining the self-delusion inherent in the recent posturing made in response to the rape threats against Janelle Asselin, a comics culture writer who had the temerity to criticize a Teen Titans comic book cover for being dumb (heads up, True Believers, those comics are dumb!) It’s an undisciplined but honest pair of articles, and he makes some thoughtful points, like 

As an adult, I see men all around me, who write violence, who draw violence, who have never been infected (sic) by violence. Most women you know, have been victims of some sort of violence from a man. But where is Batman and the battered woman? Where is Captain America and the saddest conversation you can have with a girlfriend? Where is all the heartache, the pain, the disgust and the powerlessness?

And on the … well, christ, on the pointlessness of trying to shame bad behavior out of folks…

A man tells a woman he’ll rape her because its the only thing left where he can still have power. You ain’t gonna shame no dude into stop doing that. Shame is exactly why he does it. Dude knows exactly how offensive he is being. And if it offends his dude friends? They think, “That’s cause they’re little bitches too, so fuck them. I bet they can’t get laid, so they just pretend to be feminists to hang out with chicks.” … They don’t know what rape is, except from what they’ve learned from TV, comics and movies. They know that its extremely shocking, and so they can always rely on it to end the conversation.

As a reward for writing these articles, Ulisas been gifted with a lovely bouquet of “UNH ACTUALLY MEN GET RAPED TOO YOU KNOW!” responses, with such suddenness and ferocity that you’d think these guys were competing for the Gold in Missing the Point (I suppose I can inoculate myself against the same thing by adding: he never said they didn’t). He’s been given the greatest gift of all, being proven right by nimrods. You know that joke – a woman is crying because she’s just received word that her sister and nieces died in a boating accident, and a guy walking by interrupts her; “Uh, excuse me, but men drown too, you know.”

Original source SpankiMonki sends this news from The Guardian: “Children are arriving at nursery school able to ‘swipe a screen’ but lack the manipulative skills to play with building blocks, teachers have warned. They fear that children are being given tablets to use ‘as a replacement for contact time with the parent’ and say such habits are hindering progress at school. Addressing the Association of Teachers and Lecturers conference in Manchester on Tuesday, Colin Kinney said excessive use of technology damages concentration and causes behavioural problems such as irritability and a lack of control.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original source Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: “When Edward Snowden first emailed Glenn Greenwald, he insisted on using email encryption software called PGP for all communications. Now Klint Finley reports that Snowden also used The Amnesic Incognito Live System (Tails) to keep his communications out of the NSA’s prying eyes. Tails is a kind of computer-in-a-box using a version of the Linux operating system optimized for anonymity that you install on a DVD or USB drive, boot your computer from and you’re pretty close to anonymous on the internet. ‘Snowden, Greenwald and their collaborator, documentary film maker Laura Poitras, used it because, by design, Tails doesn’t store any data locally,’ writes Finley. ‘This makes it virtually immune to malicious software, and prevents someone from performing effective forensics on the computer after the fact. That protects both the journalists, and often more importantly, their sources.’ The developers of Tails are, appropriately, anonymous. They’re protecting their identities, in part, to help protect the code from government interference. ‘The NSA has been pressuring free software projects and developers in various ways,’ the group says. But since we don’t know who wrote Tails, how do we know it isn’t some government plot designed to snare activists or criminals? A couple of ways, actually. One of the Snowden leaks show the NSA complaining about Tails in a Power Point Slide; if it’s bad for the NSA, it’s safe to say it’s good for privacy. And all of the Tails code is open source, so it can be inspected by anyone worried about foul play. ‘With Tails,’ say the distro developers, ‘we provide a tongue and a pen protected by state-of-the-art cryptography to guarantee basic human rights and allow journalists worldwide to work and communicate freely and without fear of reprisal.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original source An anonymous reader writes “StarCraft II is popular among competitive gamers for having the depth necessary to reward differences in skill. A new study has found that your ability keep up with the game’s frantic pace starts to decline at age 24. This is relevant to more than just StarCraft II players: ‘While many high-performance athletes start to show age-related declines at a young age, those are often attributed to physical as opposed to brain aging. … While previous lab tests have shown faster reaction times for simple individual tasks, it was never clear how much relevance those had to complex, real-world tasks such as driving. Thompson noted that Starcraft is complex and quite similar to real-life tasks such as managing 911 calls at an emergency dispatch centre, so the findings may be directly relevant. However, game performance was much easier to analyze than many real-life situations because the game generates detailed logs of every move. In a way, Thompson said, the study is a good demonstration of what kinds of insights can be gleaned from the “cool data sets” generated by our digital lives.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.