Once pro-choice, the leading Republican presidential candidate now thinks that women who terminate pregnancies should be punished. Donald Trump's going to ban it, but is not sure yet just what he's going to have done to women who disobey him. But he's thinking about it.
[Chris] Matthews then pressed him for a straight answer on what a ban on abortion would entail.
“Well, you go back to a position like they had where they would perhaps go to illegal places but we have to ban it,” Trump answered.
The former reality television star later added that “there has to be some form of punishment,” for women who get abortions after a ban is implemented, acknowledging the punishment would “have to be determined.”
He's unsure about how racist to be, but in no two minds at all about the women. Expect to hear a lot more sexist nastiness as the campaign goes on.
Update: He's changed his mind.
There's something amazing about how Trump just blurts out the right-wing positions he's discerned without realizing some of that stuff is supposed to stay implicit. He's like an AI chatbot who boils down his audience to its most vulgar principles, leaving that audience half-delighted and half-terrified at how completely exposed they are by his performance.
Read the rest
Here is a startlingly compelling implementation of the classic Windows Solitaire victory animation: simply click and win! The creator is Richard Cabello, who has perhaps played enough Windows Solitaire for one lifetime. Read the rest
I've been whining for months about the crap sandwich Apple and Google created by adopting USB-C for their new laptops without supporting the ecosystem: a writhing sea of dangerously low-quality third-party cables and adapters. Amazon is taking action, banning low-quality USB-C gadgetry from the store.
The crackdown is almost certainly in response to the glut of cheap USB Type-C cables that have flooded Amazon over the past year—and to at least one example of a dodgy cable frying a Google engineer's Chromebook Pixel. In that case, the third-party seller stated that it was a standards-compliant USB 3.1 Type-C cable with SuperSpeed. As it turned out, the cable was completely missing the extra wires needed for SuperSpeed and two of the other wires had been transposed. The miswired cable killed his laptop instantly.
Read the rest
With the release of more footage showing Donald Trump Campaign Manager Corey Lewandowski manhandling Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields, he's been charged with battery by Jupiter police. Lewandowski's lawyer turns out to be Kendall Coffey, a former U.S. Attorney who lost his job after biting a stripper.
In a statement, Trump and Coffey deny everything.
Lewandowski was charged with simple battery, defined under Florida law as intentionally touching or striking a person against their will. For a first offense, it is a misdemeanor in the first degree, which carries a maximum sentence of one year in prison or a fine of $1,000. A court date was set for May 4, according to the police report. Jupiter police said Lewandowski turned himself in to police, and he was issued a notice requiring him to appear in court and then released. He was not booked into the jail.
What's been fascinating about this is how Fields merely wanted an apology for being bruised, but Trump, Lewandowski and even her own employer publicly insinuated she was lying…
As a result, since then Trumpites have had to adjust their attacks on her to adapt to the emerging evidence against him. With each new angle, we've gone from "never touched her" to "didn't grab her" to "only lightly grabbed her" until all they're left with is admitting she was always telling the truth—but it's not like he beat her up or anything. Read the rest
A Philadelphia-area police department is warning locals about fake emails sent in its name to try and get people to install malware. The clever part: the emails contain accurate speeding data, targeting drivers whose GPS data is leaked to the scammers by shady apps.
It's suspected that the data is coming from an app with permission to track phone GPS data. That could either be a legitimate app that has been compromised, or a purpose-built malicious app that was uploaded online. As anyone who has used a GPS navigator knows, location data can be used to roughly calculate your travel speed. The emails ask for payment of the speeding ticket, but no apparatus is set up to receive such fines. Instead, a link that claims to lead to a photo of the user's license plate instead loads malware onto the user's device. This particular scam appears to be hyperlocal at the moment, however, it does show how these scams can progress. Like con artists, most of these scams rely on fooling users into thinking they're from a legitimate source.
An example email:
From: Speeding Citation
To: (Accurate Email Removed)
Date: 03/11/2016 03:08 PM
Subject: [External] Notification of excess speed
First Name: (Accurate Name removed)
Last Name: (Accurate Name removed)
Notification of excess speed
Route: (Accurate Local Township Road –removed)
Date: 8 March 2016
Time: 7:55 am
Speed Limit: 40
Detected Speed: 52
The Infraction Statement contains an image of your license plate and the citation which must be paid in 5 working days.
Read the rest
Benjamin Stark explains
how to make a Bowie knife. You'll need some AEB-L stainless steel, a bandsaw with metal cutting blades, a grinder with lots of rough belts, a drill, material for the handle, epoxy, clamps and finishing compounds.
A little background on myself: I'm 17 and have been making knives for about a year and a half. I learned how to make them simply by watching a lot of youtube videos and finding tutorials online. I started with under $300 worth of tools and made and sold a few knives to be able to afford the more expensive equipment. The knives don't turn out quite as nicely with such minimal tools but you would be able to make a fully functional knife if you are resourceful.
When a customer told me he wanted a bowie knife, I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to show the process behind making one.
Read the rest
Landsat imagery of the Ucayali river in Peru shows it meandering over a period of several years; an oxbow lake forms, islands grow and fade in the channel, and a smaller river is "eaten" at the top left. [Hindered Settling, via]
P.S. Looks like it might be a bad idea to build houses on flood plains. Read the rest
Married moments earlier in New Zealand, Sarah and Matthew Oke were posing for photos at Lucy's Gully when they ran into the Maori and Polynesian Black Power gang, who were paying their respects to dead members. So they all posed for this shot, which has gone viral.
Photographer Rebecca Inns writes: "The rain had just cleared and we were enjoying a lovely sunny wedding shoot. As we headed back, we came across a very full car-park and the guys who were there as part of a hikoi. We asked if it would be okay to include them in a wedding photo and they were really accommodating. This is the result. … "They all offered their congratulations to the couple and were so kind. They also told the bride how beautiful she looked." Read the rest
A bizarre glitch in Super Mario World, and an incredible amount of patience, and the SNES classic is transformed into Flappy Bird.
It's incredible to watch SethBling in action. Once the glitch (triggered by giving Mario too many power-ups) is active, machine code can be arbitrary rewritten in memory by carefully moving Mario around. This code can, ultimately, be executed. The process takes an hour of careful pixel-perfect actions in the game world, which becomes stranger and more nightmarish as Mario's universe-editing rituals proceed.
Welcome to the weirdest, most painful, most existentially-nightmarish IDE—and a reminder that our own reality is probably an abandoned simulation waiting for someone to take too many power-ups and turn it all into a sadistic casual game.
Read the rest
Jo Edkins' online
design a tessellation widget makes it easy to create tessellating patterns in a style similar to that of M.C. Escher… albeit without the fastidious pencilwork. There's also a simpler
grid tessellation widget and one for
triangles too.
Read the rest
Linify Me accepts JPG uploads and redraws the images using only straight lines. The effect is ghostly yet technical, resembling something human-drawn but not enough to be confused as such. Watching the picture emerge over time is strangely meditative. Unless you've uploaded a picture of Trump, that is, in which case it's just another example of something slowly going wrong on a computer.
Read the rest
Jack Hughes created
The Color Clock, whose background color is always a hexadecimal RGB representation of the current time. You can download screensaver versions too.
Read the rest
The above clip from a U.K. television show compiles dashcam footage of turkeys attacking police officers. It continues below:
The following video of a terrified reporter being pursued by a turkey is even better.
Read the rest
I feel well-informed and educated by Chris Wheatley of Hot Tub University and will therefore not be purchasing a 12-person hot tub from Costco after all. Read the rest
Where are our petabyte drives? Brian Hayes takes us through the reasons storage is "stuck" in the low terabytes. The tl;dr is that we got such exceptional capacity growth in the late 90s and early 00s we don't need much more right now, so the focus since then has been on SSDs, networking, interfaces, etc, which address performance bottlenecks. A great line: "Maybe in a decade or two the spinning disk will make a comeback, the way vinyl LPs and vacuum tube amplifiers have. Data that comes off a mechanical disk has a subtle warmth and presence that no solid-state drive can match."
Odd memory: my first story at Wired involved interviewing Mark Kryder. Read the rest
The Republican presidential campaign just got even weirder. After a pro-Ted Cruz group ran a nasty ad about Donald Trump's wife, Trump said something nasty about Cruz's wife, and a too-timely story appeared in the Trump-friendly National Enquirer about the Cruzes' private life. All nasty stuff. In his denial today, however, Cruz was talking about about Roger Stone, Trump's political advisor, when he went off on a rather bizarre tangent.
"Stone is a man for whom a term was coined for copulating with a rodent. Let me be clear. Donald Trump may be a rat, but I have no desire to copulate with him."
Ooookaaaay, Ted. Read the rest
The BBC reports on
China's use of a "digital camo"—a pixelated look believed to offer superior concealment than traditional patterns—so exaggerated it resembles the video game Minecraft. (The United States deployed
a less aggressive digital camo, but is
phasing it out.)
Read the rest
