Mar 12, 2010

French village went insane after CIA spiked its bread with LSD

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.

Mar 12, 2010

Could you stare down Jessica Alba?

via YouTube – Jessica Alba The Stare Response on ibeatyou.

Mar 12, 2010

Why Most Touchscreens Miss the Point

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.

Mar 12, 2010

Ad Blocking Is Not Killing Any Sites

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.

Mar 12, 2010

Flash, Google, VP8, and the future of internet video

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.

Mar 12, 2010

Transform Your Hoodie Into a Strap Bag

via YouTube – Transform Your Hoodie Into a Strap Bag.

Mar 12, 2010

Conversations About The Internet #5: Anonymous Facebook Employee

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.

Mar 12, 2010

Can hate dating help you find love?

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.

Mar 12, 2010

In Bad Company

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 :D