Google continues to edge out Microsoft it what could be the latter’s remaining bastion. With a batch of announcements about Google Drive, the search giant is offering more reasons for users to switch to its cloud and to ditch the once-popular Office suite, whether for personal use or for the enterprise. First up is something for Android users and soon … Continue reading
Hotels have been slowly shifting to accommodate our mobile world — CitizenM is a prime example — and with the Hotel Tonight app, Android users are poised to gain two exceptionally handy features: the ability to skip in-person check-ins, and to use one’s smartphone as a room key, avoiding those pesky magnetized cards altogether. Hotel Tonight is a mobile service … Continue reading
Android users are probably familiar with Google Now. For those who aren’t, it’s essentially like a voice assistant feature for Android phones where users will be able to command it to find locations, set reminders, and so on, much like Siri for iOS and Cortana for Windows Phone. Now the good news for those who speak multiple languages is that Google has made some updates to Google Now that will make it a true multi-language tool.
As it stands, Google Now recognizes more than 50 languages, but with the update, Google will be allowing users to switch between 7 different languages at any given moment, and Google Now will be able to understand you. All the user has to do is preselect the desired languages and they’d be good to go.
Prior to this, Google Now was pretty much only available via the home screen, so it’s not as convenient as the Moto X where it’d be always listening to you. However with the update, Google has made it so that Google Now can now be launched from any screen, even from the lock screen as long as the display is on.
Oddly enough it seems that it can even be used to bypass the lock screen even if there’s a PIN code on it, so we’re not sure if that could end up being a security risk. In any case the update should be rolling out users soon, so if you haven’t received the notification yet, it should be on its way. In the meantime what do you guys think? Are you excited about the changes Google has made to Google Now?
Google Now To Gain True Multi Language Support, Can Be Activated In Any Screen , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
While Destiny will be launching across multiple platforms, so far it seems that the folks at Bungie have been favoring the PlayStation platform. Not only will PlayStation gamers get exclusive content, but it seems that they will be given earlier access to the game’s beta. Now the good news is that Xbox gamers won’t have to wait too long.
According to Bungie, it seems that the beta for Destiny will be making its way onto both the Xbox 360 and the Xbox One late July. It will be available for Xbox gamers 1-2 weeks after PlayStation gamers have access to it, or at least that’s what the trailer for the game seems to suggest, as you can see from the screenshot above.
The beta for Destiny on the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 will begin on the 17th of July, so based on this it seems that Xbox gamers can only expect it either in the third or fourth week of the month. Gamers who are interested in participating in the beta will have to pre-order the game register using a code supplied by retailers.
Recently Bungie opened up the game’s alpha to PlayStation gamers. The alpha proved to be a huge success as over 6 million gamers were created during the time it was made available. Bungie expects Destiny to be a hit and it seems that Activision does too, having invested $500 million into the game.
Destiny Beta For Xbox To Begin Late July , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
Prior to the release of Mario Kart 8, Nintendo’s Wii U console wasn’t exactly selling like hotcakes. However after the release of the game, reports revealed that there was a surge in the sales of the console. Prior to the game’s release, it was reported that the console managed to sell a little over 8,000 units a week in Japan, but post-Mario Kart 8, those numbers shot to over 19,000 units.
However it looks like perhaps the hype and excitement over Mario Kart 8 has begun to subside because according to a report from Famitsu, it has been revealed that Wii U sales in Japan are back to “normal” levels. According to their recent numbers ending on the 22nd of June, it was revealed that 8,373 units of the Wii U were sold in Japan that week.
In fact that number is even lower than what Wii U sales were prior to Mario Kart 8’s release, which was set at 8,858 the week before. The report also goes on to state that Wii U sales have been declining after peaking at 19,000 units, dropping to 12,000, and then to 10,000, and now we guess we’re back in the 8,000 range and hopefully it won’t drop any lower.
Mario Kart 8 also lost its number 1 spot in Japan where it was replaced Pokemon Art Academy. This probably isn’t good news for Nintendo, although to be fair it did seem like a stretch to expect Wii U sales to be maintained just for one game. However with new games like Zelda for the Wii U and Super Smash Bros., hopefully those games will help reignite Wii U sales once again.
Wii U Sales In Japan Go Back To “Normal” Post-Mario Kart 8 , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
Friday on PBS, I chat with Charles “Lil Buck” Riley, a dancer who’s been called the Baryshnikov of jookin’. He’s taken the freestyle-based street dance, involving intensive footwork, to the world stage.
In the following clip, Lil Buck recounts how his collaboration with famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma came to be.
For more of our conversation, be sure to tune in to Tavis Smiley on PBS tomorrow. Check out our website for your local TV listings: http://www.pbs.org/tavis.
WASHINGTON (AP) — When John Maguire was a CIA officer in Beirut in the late 1980s during that country’s bloody civil war, he spent weeks living in safe houses far from the U.S. Embassy, dodging militants who wanted to kidnap and kill Americans.
“We moved all over the city, and we would not sleep in the same place two nights in a row,” Maguire said. In Iraq in 2014, by contrast, CIA officers have been largely hunkered down in their heavily fortified Baghdad compound since U.S. troops left the country in 2011, current and former officials say, allowing a once-rich network of intelligence sources to wither. Maguire and other current and former U.S. officials say the intelligence pullback is a big reason the U.S. was caught flat-footed by the recent offensive by a Sunni-backed al-Qaida-inspired group that has seized a large swath of Iraq.
Iraq is emblematic, they say, of how a security-conscious CIA is finding it difficult to spy aggressively in dangerous environments without military protection. Intelligence blind spots have left the U.S. behind the curve on fast-moving world events, they say, whether it’s disintegration in Iraq, Russia’s move into Crimea or the collapse of several governments during the Arab Spring.
“This is a glaring example of the erosion of our street craft and our tradecraft and our capability to operate in a hard place,” said Maguire, who helped run CIA operations in Iraq in 2004. “The U.S. taxpayer is not getting their money’s worth.”
Without directly addressing the CIA’s posture in Iraq, agency spokesman Dean Boyd noted that 40 agency officers have died in the line of duty since September 2001. He called “offensive” any suggestion that “CIA officers are sitting behind desks, hiding out in green zones or otherwise taking it easy back at the embassy.”
Boyd said the intelligence community provided plenty of warning to the Obama administration that the insurgent Islamic State in Iraq and Levant, known as ISIL, could move on Iraqi cities.
“Anyone who has had access to and actually read the full extent of CIA intelligence products on ISIL and Iraq should not have been surprised by the current situation,” he said.
Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, agreed.
“This was not an intelligence failure,” he said. “This was a policy failure.”
However, while U.S. intelligence officials predicted that ISIL would attempt to seize territory in Iraq this year, they did not appear to anticipate ISIL’s offensive on June 10 to seize Mosul, which created momentum that led to other successes. Officials also expressed surprise at how quickly the Iraqi army collapsed. And military leaders contemplating quick airstrikes said there was not enough intelligence to know what to hit.
A senior U.S. intelligence official who briefed reporters this week acknowledged that “a lot of the (intelligence) collection that we were receiving diminished significantly following the U.S. withdrawal in Iraq in 2011, when we lost some of the ‘boots on the ground’ view of what was going on.” Under rules for such briefings, the official spoke on condition that her name not be used.
In the same briefing, the official disclosed that U.S. intelligence did not know who controlled Iraq’s largest oil refinery. And she suggested that one of the biggest sources of intelligence for American analysts is Facebook and Twitter postings.
The U.S. spent nearly $72 billion on intelligence-gathering in 2013, and the CIA station in Baghdad remains one of the world’s largest. But the agency has been unwilling to risk sending Americans out regularly to recruit and meet informants.
It was telling that President Barack Obama sent 300 special operations troops “to help us gain more intelligence and more information about what ISIL is doing and how they’re doing it,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said in an implicit admission that American intelligence-gathering about ISIL has been insufficient.
No one suggests that the CIA carries all the blame. After American troops left Iraq, the State Department abandoned plans for a huge diplomatic staff at a network of facilities.
Kevin Carroll, a former CIA operations officer with Middle East experience, said it’s unreasonable to expect the agency to collect “from a fortified war zone embassy the breadth and depth of information collected when U.S. military bases and troops throughout Iraq helped support CIA operations.”
But for Maguire and other former intelligence officials, it’s clear the CIA has allowed its espionage muscles to atrophy.
CIA officers lived in well-guarded bases all over Iraq during the U.S. occupation, and met frequently with Iraqis. But even then, it wasn’t traditional spying. Often, agency operatives would travel to meet sources in highly visible armed convoys. They knew the U.S. military was somewhere over the horizon if things went wrong. And security concerns often left case officers confined to their bases, several former CIA officers said.
The agency operates the same way in Afghanistan, where it is also closing a series of remote bases as the U.S. troop presence there draws down. Intelligence collection there is expected to suffer as well.
The CIA’s approach is designed, current and former officials say, to prevent the sort of thing that happened in 1984, when Beirut station chief William Buckley was kidnapped from his apartment by Hezbollah and tortured to death. But bases can also be attacked, as in 2012 in Benghazi, Libya, when two CIA contractors were among four dead Americans.
Other intelligence services accept more risk. In Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, most case officers operate outside of embassies, posing as civilians under what the U.S. calls “nonofficial cover,” said Ronen Bergman, who covers intelligence affairs for Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth and is working on a history of the Mossad.
In countries such as Iran where Israel does not have an embassy, the Mossad sends deep cover operatives to live and gather intelligence, knowing they could be executed if discovered, Bergman said.
But Israel can call upon a large population of native Arabic speakers whose appearance allows them to blend in. U.S. intelligence leaders have been talking for years about the need to recruit people who look like they could blend in and train them in difficult languages, but current and former officials say it just hasn’t happened at the level anticipated after 9/11.
The intelligence budget document leaked last year by Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, shows that after 11 years of war in Afghanistan, just 88 people in civilian U.S. intelligence agencies got bonuses for speaking Pashto, the language of the Taliban and its allies.
Gary Oldman made something of an ass of himself. In an obscenity-laced interview with Playboy he whined about Alec Baldwin and Mel Gibson being victims of “political correctness.”
Oldman started by misrepresenting the facts in both cases:
Alec calling someone an F-A-G in the street while he’s pissed off coming out of his building because they won’t leave him alone. I don’t blame him. So they persecute. Mel Gibson is in a town that’s run by Jews and he said the wrong thing because he’s actually bitten the hand that I guess has fed him–and doesn’t need to feed him anymore because he’s got enough dough. He’s like an outcast, a leper, you know? But some Jewish guy in his office somewhere hasn’t turned and said, “That fucking kraut” or “Fuck those Germans,” whatever it is? We all hide and try to be so politically correct.
The Mel Gibson incident was actually a reiteration of the claim that Jews have started all the wars in the world. He didn’t just say “fucking Jews,” he took a page right out of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Given that Gibson’s father, Hutton, is closely associated with anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi views, such rants by Mel may indicate far more sympathy than he feels comfortable admitting. In vino veritas.
In emphasis, Oldman said,
Bill Maher could call someone a fag and get away with it. He said to Seth MacFarlane this year, “I thought you were going to do the Oscars again. Instead they got a lesbian.” He can say something like that. Is that more or less offensive than Alec Baldwin saying to someone in the street, “You fag”? I don’t get it.
Of course, saying “they got a lesbian” is not meant with the same vitriol as “you fag.” The intentionality of the remark is quite different and will be taken differently, with good reason. Baldwin’s problem was that he had made similar remarks numerous times, and always as insults. It was a case of once too often.
Oldman hilariously tries to claim he’s a libertarian, but says that Bill Maher, who has used a similar label, “would fail the test.” This in the same interview where he says that not even pot should be legal. Talk about failing the test!
Oldman sounded far more conservative than libertarian, but ever since the Bush administration a number of conservatives have taken to claiming they are libertarians–if only out of sheer embarrassment.
Oldham doesn’t just misunderstand libertarianism; he is clueless about free speech. Ayn Rand, whose libertarian credentials are a tad bit stronger than Oldman’s, noted that freedom of speech does not mean one is entitled to escape consequences.
In her column for the Los Angeles Times, Dec. 2, 1962, she wrote: “Every man is free to advocate his views, but he must bear the responsibility for them and the consequences, including disagreement with others, opposition and unpopularity.” Others, she wrote, have the right to “refuse to listen or refuse to aid, abet, finance or support it in any way–which is their inalienable right.”
Every choice has consequences, only the most irrational believe life is cost free–that there are no trade offs. Mr. Oldman thinks bigoted remarks should come without consequences. But, he does not understand what is, and what is not “free speech.”
It is not a violation of free speech if I refuse to shake your hand because you are a bigot. You have no right to my friendship.
It is not a violation of free speech if I refuse to buy products from you, even if it is greasy chicken. You have no right to my patronage.
It is not a violation of free speech if I refuse to hire you as my organization’s spokesman, or I end an existing contract with you because of your bigotry. You have no right to work for me without my consent.
It is not a violation of free speech if I refuse to buy your book, publish it, or distribute it. You have no right to my resources or efforts.
It is not even a violation of free speech if I condemn you, ridicule you, make jokes about you, or refuse to take you seriously. You have no right to either my accolades or my respect.
It is a violation of free speech if someone uses force, privately or governmentally, to take from you your right to speak or publish with your own resources and property, or those made freely available to you by others.
If we ban a bookstore from stocking a book it is a violation of free speech. If the bookstore refuses to stock it, it is not. It violates free speech to burn the books others own, it is not a violation to refuse to publish or purchase them.
Just because there are negative consequences to saying offensive, stupid or bigoted things, it doesn’t mean First Amendment rights are under threat. It just means you can’t have your cake and eat it too.
I, for one, am sick unto death with this endless chant of “political correctness,” a term almost utterly devoid of meaning, which is meant, not to defend free speech, but to shut up critics of bigotry and intolerance. It is inherently guilty of the very thing it says it pretends to oppose.
It’s been about a year since Yotam Ottolenghi’s latest cookbook, Jerusalem, was the talk of the town. Every food media outlet touted its high graces for a long while after its release — and with good reason. This cookbook is a masterpiece. It appeals to everyone — meat lovers, vegetarians and those looking to explore new flavors in their home cooking — and it promises excellent meals every time. Jerusalem is one of those cookbooks that will surely stand the test of time.
Here we are over a year later, and we’re still in love with this cookbook. As good as Plenty was — Ottolenghi’s first big splash — Jerusalem is that much better. But as we found ourselves leafing through the tome yet another time, we realized that there were (not surprisingly) a lot of exotic ingredients that many of us don’t keep stocked in our pantry. And, quite possibly, a good amount of those which many home cooks have likely never even heard of.
To ensure that all of you out there who own and love Jerusalem are getting the most of your treasured cookbook, we’ve put together a quick glossary defining some of the lesser-known, yet incredibly important ingredients that make a frequent appearance in the book. We wouldn’t want you to miss out on the shakshuka just because you have no idea what labneh is. Let’s get to it.
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If there’s one thing HuffPost Taste editors know about our readers, it’s that you’re kind of obsessed with s’mores. You’re willing to go to ridiculous lengths to make them, you’ll eat the graham/chocolate/marshmallow flavor combination in just about any form, and you almost broke the Internet when we wrote about a s’mores-stuffed chocolate chip cookie. Because of all this, we decided to give you a gift. The gift of more s’mores.
We’ve eaten them at bonfires, campfires, in kitchens perched over gas stoves, and in our sad little living rooms with the aid of microwaves, but for all the hundreds of s’mores we’ve consumed in our lives, no one has ever made us one with anything but the classic milk chocolate Hershey’s bar. Don’t get us wrong, it’s the perfectly engineered chocolate bar for a s’more. But we started to wonder: Are we missing out on something great?
First we wondered what a s’more would be like with a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup inside it, and our heads exploded (not literally, because then it’d be really hard to eat s’mores). Then we wondered about dissected Snickers bars, and whether or not they’d melt under the heat of the roasted marshmallow. Then, one of us suggested a York Peppermint Patty — there was controversy. We knew there was only one thing to do: Test them all.
And so we did. Below, you’ll find our assessment of each, with beautiful GIFs to accompany each magical s’more. Don’t be jealous. Just go make one for yourself instead.
[GIFs and photos shot by Damon Dahlen/The Huffington Post]
Consider the thickness of the classic Hershey’s chocolate bar, and aim to achieve that same thickness, no matter which type of candy you use. For something inherently chunky like a Snickers or a Milky Way, dissect the bar in half with a sharp chef’s knife, like this:
We had reservations about whether the peanuts would disrupt the texture of the s’mores, but we were being ridiculous. The milk chocolate, caramel and nougat didn’t melt like a traditional Hershey’s bar would, but they softened enough to preserve that classic s’mores feel.
Same as the Snickers bar, minus the crunch.
Though the peanut butter filling may never melt the way you wish it would (you can thank preservatives for that), that’s the only fault we could find with this god of all s’mores. The thin milk chocolate shell eventually softens under the pillowy marshmallow, giving way to a velvety bite of happiness that you’ll gladly punch someone in the face over if they try to wrestle it away from your sticky fingers.
If you’re a fan of ice cream sundaes made with mint chocolate chip and hot fudge, you will LOVE this (otherwise, you might hate this). The hot marshmallow instantly melts the thin chocolate shell, which coats your tongue with what you’ll convince yourself is hot fudge sauce.
Since the Krackel bar is composed of the same basic milk fat percentage as the classic Hershey’s bar, the result is a true-to-classic-s’mores melt factor, plus the light crunch of puffed rice (which is, surprisingly, still detectable above the crunch of the graham cracker).
I’ve been trying to convince my mom for years that dark chocolate is just NOT meant for s’mores. It’s the brattiest of all chocolate bars, refusing to melt. As seen in the GIF above, in which it cracks the freaking graham cracker in its refusal to give, I can now say I am absolutely correct. (Sorry mom, I still love you, and dark chocolate too.)
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
