WhiteCastle Wedding
This is a little video about a wedding held at a White Castle. The marriage ceremony was held on Valentine's day in 2009. It took place at the worlds largest White Castle restaurant in downtown Louisville
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
White Castle to Start Selling Alcohol
White Castle, the nation's favorite inexpensive post-hangover fast food chain that just keeps hanging in there, is going to start selling booze. The Chicago-based chain announced yesterday that they will start selling wines and beers - alas, not in the Chicago market. According to Convenience Store Decisions (yes, that's a real magazine), White Castle is hoping to get a much-needed boost in 2012 from the new drink options.
While this creates the potential for endless jokes about throwing up, we're more concerned with the precedent, especially considering Starbucks and Burger King have tried similar experiments this year. If this takes off, what's next? A McBrew or McRose?
The first restaurant to get the booze is in Indiana.
"The wine — a choice of two reds and two whites — comes in “a nice plastic cup, (with) the look of an elegant cocktail glass,” says White Castle spokesman Jamie Richardson."
Keep it classy, White Castle. We say if you're going to have plastic cups, just own it - and be sure to give us straws. They will also be selling beer (a "nice complement" to a double cheeseburger, according to Richardson). The wine is $4.50, and the beer is $3.00. No word yet on their vintage choices.
Credit card-sized Raspberry Pi computer will handle 1080p video for $25
next month
The Raspberry Pi Foundation's "ultra-low-cost" computer is the size of a credit card and will cost $25-$35, depending on how much RAM you specify. Frontier Developments' head David Braben is heading up the foundation and its drive to capture the imaginations of a generation not raised on the simple pleasures of the BBC Micro. We sat down with Braben to discuss the hardware, and why it's needed.
What's Raspberry Pi trying to rekindle?
There was a real enthusiasm for electronic devices when I was a kid. It wasn’t that it was geeky - it was actually quite trendy for a short period of time. But that’s not the point. The thing is that when the focus is on the device itself, that’s one thing, but what you can do with the device is a lot more interesting. [In Raspberry Pi] you’ve got quite a powerful, very cheap device that anyone can carry around, take to school, and hopefully do interesting things with that make it seem less like it's purely a school thing.
There was a real enthusiasm for electronic devices when I was a kid. It wasn’t that it was geeky - it was actually quite trendy for a short period of time. But that’s not the point. The thing is that when the focus is on the device itself, that’s one thing, but what you can do with the device is a lot more interesting. [In Raspberry Pi] you’ve got quite a powerful, very cheap device that anyone can carry around, take to school, and hopefully do interesting things with that make it seem less like it's purely a school thing.
We do realise that it’s only going to be a subset of people that will even get engaged with it, but it’s filling a gap where there isn’t actually a place for people to get engaged at the moment. There’s a huge gulf right now between [making UGC in] Halo Forge, Rollercoaster Tycoon or LittleBigPlanet, and things at the top end like XNA where you’ve got to know your bananas to get engaged in it. For me the BBC Micro crossed that gap. Actually, the bottom bit didn’t even exist back then, but it shows that there is a will to learn ‘programming Lego’.
At the moment, on a normal machine you’ve got to know quite a lot to be able to boot Linux, fire up a compiler and get anything to compile. Just to say your own name on the screen is a challenge. Whereas on the BBC, you’d see in every shop that someone had typed, ‘So-and-so is clever,’ or ‘So-and-so smells'. Line 20, Goto 10: that almost entered the vocabulary, it’s so straightforward. It's understandable even to someone who hasn’t done programming. It would be great if you could take that and wrap it in something where it’s easy to create something - websites, for instance - very easily. You can do it to an extent with things like Java, but it’s much harder to get into, and in terms of teaching it’s much harder as well.
So is it safe to assume there will be an analogue to BBC Basic on Raspberry Pi?
Well, we have BBC Basic. It’s not an analogue, it’s the BBC Basic. We’re just checking where we are with the rights to that. There may or may not be an issue with the magic three letters there. But the point is that BBC Basic was hand-optimized on machines that were hundreds and hundreds of times slower than this. So it’ll feel like the speed of Assembler, it’ll run like the wind. And I think that’s very exciting. A Java virtual machine is typically 80mb, often bigger still, which is ludicrous. Whereas my guess is that entirety of BBC Basic will fit easily in [Raspberry Pi's] primary cache. And that to me, in a perverse way, is very attractive. You could write something in Basic doing fancy graphics processing but where you could look at it and it’s really obvious what it’s doing. That’s great from a teaching point of view, and from a fun point of view.
Well, we have BBC Basic. It’s not an analogue, it’s the BBC Basic. We’re just checking where we are with the rights to that. There may or may not be an issue with the magic three letters there. But the point is that BBC Basic was hand-optimized on machines that were hundreds and hundreds of times slower than this. So it’ll feel like the speed of Assembler, it’ll run like the wind. And I think that’s very exciting. A Java virtual machine is typically 80mb, often bigger still, which is ludicrous. Whereas my guess is that entirety of BBC Basic will fit easily in [Raspberry Pi's] primary cache. And that to me, in a perverse way, is very attractive. You could write something in Basic doing fancy graphics processing but where you could look at it and it’s really obvious what it’s doing. That’s great from a teaching point of view, and from a fun point of view.
The problem with the PC, when you start compiling programs, is that you find it isn’t quite the same from one PC to the next. And you’ll find you’ve got the wrong version of Windows, or the wrong graphics drivers. We have that every day writing PC software, and what we have is one version for every permutation on the disc. But if we can say with Raspberry Pi that it’s not the device we’re getting excited about but the things you can do with it, that can be a lot more inclusive. We can hopefully get a much better male to female ratio. Because what we’re doing can be quite simple, and that’s what I’d like to see from this.
Is the lack of a case a deliberate aesthetic choice?
Yes. It’s a practical thing as well, because this is a developer board - it’s not a consumer device. The plan is to do that next year. But yes, in a sense it’s embracing our roots as well. It’s not being ashamed of what we’re doing, and trying to make things look nice and antiseptic. Which we may do down the line, but that [would be aimed at] a different group of people. I suspect that a lot of Edge readers would go, ‘Oh, that’s cool. You can see exactly what’s on the board.’ The sort of people who do take the lid off their computer and see what’s inside. So I think there’s no shame in what’s there.
Yes. It’s a practical thing as well, because this is a developer board - it’s not a consumer device. The plan is to do that next year. But yes, in a sense it’s embracing our roots as well. It’s not being ashamed of what we’re doing, and trying to make things look nice and antiseptic. Which we may do down the line, but that [would be aimed at] a different group of people. I suspect that a lot of Edge readers would go, ‘Oh, that’s cool. You can see exactly what’s on the board.’ The sort of people who do take the lid off their computer and see what’s inside. So I think there’s no shame in what’s there.
We’ve made it extremely public what is there. So if other people want to make it I’d actually challenge them to build it for the same price. Never mind retail it for the same price. I think that’s the point, at $25 - $35 we’ve managed to keep the price astonishingly low.
And it’s a small PC. There’s nothing really you can’t do with this that you couldn’t do with a PC from way back. We can run things like OpenOffice, Twitter, browse the web, Facebook etc
How about graphics performance?
I think it would be fair to say that it's quite a way beyond [Quake III Arena] in terms of what it can do. It will be able to do things that you'd consider a lot more contemporary, but these are the things available freely that we can show running easily. At the moment we're appealing to techy people because we want people to give their time for free, writing software and improving things, porting them from other places, and putting them into the public domain, essentially, so we can use them for education.
I think it would be fair to say that it's quite a way beyond [Quake III Arena] in terms of what it can do. It will be able to do things that you'd consider a lot more contemporary, but these are the things available freely that we can show running easily. At the moment we're appealing to techy people because we want people to give their time for free, writing software and improving things, porting them from other places, and putting them into the public domain, essentially, so we can use them for education.
What are your plans for distribution?
There are things we haven't announced that are very exciting, but the intitial 10,000 will be distributed through the Raspberry Pi website. Initially it's the UK, but we already have them outside the country. [About 50 alpha boards out in the wild.] It's a very wide range of different people, from education to technology companies to well-meaning individuals who have great pieces of software it'd be good to have. It should be a global thing.
There are things we haven't announced that are very exciting, but the intitial 10,000 will be distributed through the Raspberry Pi website. Initially it's the UK, but we already have them outside the country. [About 50 alpha boards out in the wild.] It's a very wide range of different people, from education to technology companies to well-meaning individuals who have great pieces of software it'd be good to have. It should be a global thing.
`Fatwa` issued on Veena Malik by Indian Muslim body
Fatwa Issued Against Pakistani Actress Veena Malik For “Revolting Against The Tenets of Islam And Prophet Mohammed”…
Pakistani starlet Veena Malik, who has stirred a storm in Pakistan by posing nude for a magazine cover, is now facing the whip of Indian Muslim bodies as well.
The All India Muslim Tyohar (Festivals) Committee in Bhopal issued a fatwa on Wednesday against the actress for showing disrepcet towards the sacred institution of “Nikaah” (marriage) by singing a contract with a channel for a wedding on National TV. Her nude photographs too have outraged the community that forced her father back home to disown her for shaming him.
Majlis-e-Shura , 70-member supreme body of the All India Muslim Tyohar Committee, in Bhopal was receiving complaints from all corners and was urged to take stringent action against her.
“The complaints said that there were offensive photographs of this woman all over the internet and that she was going to have a Swayamvar on television. Islam has a certain procedure for a Nikaah. We do not have Swayamvar,” he added.
The members of the body sat for over two days to take a call on Veena Malik. At the end, a unanimous call was taken and a “fatwa” was issued on her, which means that she will be socially boycotted.
Calling her a disgrace to Islam, Khurram said, “The extreme step has been taken because the woman has openly revolted against the tenets of Islam and Prophet Mohammad. You are a Muslim only if you follow the rules of the religion. She has made a laughing stock of the community. The social boycott became necessary to stop our community girls from following her example.”
Sunday, December 25, 2011
'Anonymous' Stratfor Hack Reportedly Start Of Week long Assault
Hackers Target Stratfor, Other Sites
Hackers on Sunday claimed to have stolen 200 GB of e-mails and credit card data from United States security think tank Stratfor, promising a weeklong Christmas-inspired assault on a long list of targets.
Members of the loose hacking movement known as "Anonymous" posted a link on Twitter to what it said was Stratfor's secret client list — including the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force, Goldman Sachs and MF Global.
"Not so private and secret anymore?," the group taunted in a message on the microblogging site.
Anonymous said it was able to get credit details, in part, because Stratfor didn't bother encrypting them — an easy-to-avoid blunder which — if true — would be a major embarrassment for any security company.
The group's claims could not immediately be verified, although Stratfor's website was down. A banner read "site is currently undergoing maintenance please come back soon."
Wishing everyone a "Merry LulzXMas" — a reference to Anonymous spinoff and fellow troublemakers Lulz Security — it also posted a link to a site containing the email, phone number and credit number of a U.S. Homeland Security employee.
The employee, Cody Sultenfuss, said he had no warning before his details were posted.
"They took money I did not have," he told The Associated Press in an email. "I think why me? I am not rich."
Anonymous warned it has "enough targets lined up to extend the fun fun fun of LulzXmas through the entire next week."
The group has previously claimed responsibility for attacks on companies such as Visa, MasterCard and PayPal, as well as others in the music industry and the Church of Scientology.
Subject: Important Announcement from STRATFOR
Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 19:49:58 -0500
From: STRATFOR <mail[at]response.stratfor.com>
Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 19:49:58 -0500
From: STRATFOR <mail[at]response.stratfor.com>
Dear Stratfor Member,
We have learned that Stratfor's web site was hacked by an unauthorized party. As a result of this incident the operation of Stratfor's servers and email have been suspended.
We have reason to believe that the names of our corporate subscribers have been posed on other web sites. We are diligently investigating the extent to which subscriber information may have been obtained.
Stratfor and I take this incident very seriously. Stratfor's relationship with its members and, in particular, the confidentiality of their subscriber information, are very important to Stratfor and me. We are working closely with law enforcement in their investigation and will assist them with the identification of the individual(s) who are responsible.
Although we are still learning more and the law enforcement investigation is active and ongoing, we wanted to provide you with notice of this incident as quickly as possible. We will keep you updated regarding these matters.
Sincerely,
George Friedman
STRATFOR
221 W. 6th Street, Suite 400
Austin, TX 78701 US
www.stratfor.com
221 W. 6th Street, Suite 400
Austin, TX 78701 US
www.stratfor.com
Related:
Hackers apparently donating other people's money to charity
The hacking movement known as "Anonymous" may be looking to make some donations to charity -- with other people's money.
The hackers say they've stolen thousands of credit card numbers and other personal information belonging to clients of a U.S.-based security think tank.
One hacker says the goal is to take money from people's accounts, and give it away as Christmas donations. And some victims confirm unauthorized transactions to charities.
The group has posted a link on Twitter to what it says is the company's tightly-guarded, confidential client list. Among those on the list are the U.S. Army and Air Force, and the Miami Police Department.
There are also banks, defense contractors and technology firms like Apple and Microsoft.
Anonymous says it was able to get the credit details partly because Stratfor hadn't encrypted them. If that's true, it would be a major embarrassment for any security-related company.
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