Hasta La Gadget!

If you’re anything like me, you get bored with cardio machines. And sometimes your gym may have its televisions set on something even more boring. In those cases, you whip out the smart phone and play something entertaining. The only problem is you don’t have any place to put the phone, so you have to hold on to it…that is, unless you have a ZHIP Stand.

Here’s a weird little corner of the internet for you to devour. YouTube user Crysknife007 is well-known for hours-long sci-fi marathons of idling starship engines or the silent ambience of Rick Deckard’s apartment . But this time, we get our favorite numbers-addicted Muppet counting Pi up to 10,000 decimal places.

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In order to put an end to scamming Steam has decided to change its game trading rules. The changes first became visible earlier this week and they now forbid users from trading games immediately that have been purchased as gifts. Steam says that this has been done to make trading gifts a better experience for those who are on the receiving end.

From now on all new games which are purchased as a gift and placed in the purchaser’s inventory will be untradable for 30 days. They gift can be gifted at any time, there’s no changes to that, the only change that has been made is to trading.

It wasn’t like that previously, when a game could be purchased and traded to another user immediately. However the users to which the game was traded could find access denied if payment from the original buyer was denied.

Steam writes on the official community forums that it hopes this change will lower the number of people who trade a game only to have it revoked later due to issues with the purchaser’s payment method.

The way people used this to scam others was by using bogus payment methods to purchase Steam keys which were them resold quickly to others. However when Valve couldn’t process the original payment those purchasers became unable to access the game.

Steam Changes Game Trading Rules

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Last week we reported about a massive hack at Sony Pictures by a group calling itself the Guardians of Peace. The hackers had posted their demands and threatened to release stolen data from the company’s computer systems, and they’ve followed up on those threats. DVD screener copies of some new Sony movies have been leaked online. The hackers are also believed to be in possession of sensitive corporate information.

As per a thread on Reddit, stolen documents may include visa and passport information of cast and crew working on various Sony projects, entire Outlook inboxes, documents related to accounting and research, apart from many other important documents.

Among the movies that have been leaked only one has been released officially in the U.S., the Brad Pitt starring Fury, which is now the second most downloaded movie among Pirate Bay users. DVD screener copies of Still Alice, Mr Turner and Annie have been leaked online and none of these movies have officially been released yet.

It is also believed that another movie, To Write Love on Her Arms, is going to appear online soon while its official release date for the U.S. is in March 2015. This is going to end up costing Sony which wouldn’t want people to see these movies before they can hit theaters to make money.

Sony Pictures is reportedly investigating a potential link of this attack with North Korea, which had threatened a “merciless” response if Sony released The Information. Its a movie about two journalists picked by the CIA for assassinating North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un.

Sony Movies Leaked Online Following Massive Hack

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Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is walking and talking a lot like he is running for President of the United States. The Wisconsin governor who famously told his cabinet that he was inspired by Ronald Reagan in his effort to kill Wisconsin unions is throwing his hat into the ring, and Walker is garnering kudos from good friends like government-slayer Grover Norquist.

Grover is banging the drum for a Walker presidency, writing rapturously about how Walker is much like Calvin Coolidge, who busted the police unions as governor of Massachusetts. He fails to note that Calvin’s minimalist approach to his presidency, between 1923 and 1929, helped bring about the Great Depression.

Here are five things that you need to know about the cheddarhead with Coolidge-like ambitions.

Walker Failed to Expand His Base: Walker won in 2010 with 52 percent of the vote. After $100 million spent by his campaign and outside interests to burnish his image, Walker won reelection in 2014 during a GOP wave with 52 percent of the vote. As John Nichols points out in The Nation, former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson won his first race with 52 percent, his second with 58 percent and his third with 67 percent. People can still name programs that Thompson started. What is Scott Walker’s signature achievement? Did he launch an impressive new initiative that sparked a job surge? Did he improve health care options for thousands of Wisconsinites? Have test scores in the state doubled? Not at all. Walker’s signature achievement was stripping public teachers, nurses and other state employees of their right to organize. To the public, he said the state was “broke” and local communities needed the “tools” to pay public workers less. To creepy billionaire donor Diane Hendricks eagerly asking him how Wisconsin could become “a completely red state,” he explained the strategy to make Wisconsin a Republican stronghold is to divide and conquer:” first go after the public-sector unions, then go after private sector ones. Walker would later call his presidential campaign book “Unintimidated,” a real “howler” of a title says Milwaukee historian John Gurda. “Walker threw the first punch, and the second, and the fifth; everyone else simply reacted.” Bullies do not make attractive presidential candidates.

Walker Failed to Fix State Budget Problems: After demonizing state workers, slashing education funding, dividing the state and sparking mass protests, all in the name of balancing the budget, Walker has failed to do just that. In 2010 the state had a $2.3 billion dollar budget shortfall. Today, the state has a — wait for it — $2.2 billion dollar project budget shortfall. After crushing the unions, after an historic $900 million in cuts to Wisconsin’s educational system, and after kicking tens of thousands off of Medicare, Wisconsin is still deep in the hole. Why? Because Walker was not actually serious about getting Wisconsin’s fiscal house in order. If he was he would not have given away over $760 million in tax breaks and other special interest perks to corporations and wealthy individuals, worsening the state’s budget woes. The state now may be forced to pass another “budget repair bill” and implement more painful cuts in state programs. These cuts have real consequences for real people. According to a new report out of Georgetown, approximately 61,000 kids in Wisconsin were uninsured in 2013.

Walker’s Job Rate Falls Far Behind National Average: After the 2008 financial crisis, Wisconsin lost 168,000 jobs. Walker was elected to office in 2010 as a friend of the working man. He carried his lunch in a brown bag and promised to create 250,000 jobs in four years. He fell 150,000 short. Walker likes to tout Wisconsin’s low overall unemployment rate which is 5.6 percent, but the facts are that the state’s economy is stagnating. During Walker’s tenure federal statistics have regularly ranked Wisconsin among the worst in the nation and the upper midwest in new job creation, putting Wisconsin at 33 in September. Forbes ranks Wisconsin a dismal 32 for business climate. Walker’s privatized, flagship economic development agency the Wisconsin Economic Development Authority (WEDC) has been plagued by law breaking and incompetence. While the authority has been touting big numbers in its official reports (60,00 jobs “impacted” in FYs 2012, 2013), CMD’s analysis of the same period found only 5,840 actual jobs reported by companies receiving state aid. WEDC is so full of incompetence and bad news, its two top officials Reed Hall and Ryan Murray recently announced their departures, the second shake up in as many years. No doubt, Walker is trying to clean house before the national press corps gets a hard look at WEDC. Serious reporters, like NBC’s Chuck Todd, point out that if Wisconsin had only kept up with the national average in wages and job growth it would be doing much better.

Walker Is at the Center of a Long Running Criminal Investigation: Walker is at the center of a long running criminal investigation of illegal campaign coordination with outside independent expenditure groups. During the recall elections that followed Walker’s bill to kill off public sector unions, millions of dollars flooded the state from outside groups with little disclosure. Wisconsin’s nonpartisan elections board, which is run by a group of retired judges appointed by the governor, joined with a bipartisan group of five district attorneys to launch an investigation of potentially illegal campaign coordination during the recalls. Long standing law at the state and federal level, upheld by state courts and U.S. Supreme Court, holds that issues ads and independent expenditures must be in fact “independent” and not coordinated with campaigns. If the expenditures are coordinated, they would constitute a campaign contribution that needed to be disclosed. In Wisconsin, Walker raised millions for Wisconsin Club for Growth run by his top campaign aide RJ Johnson and ally Eric O’Keefe. CMD was the first to disclose that Wisconsin Club for Growth funneled that money to dozens of groups who cut ads for Walker and others up for recall. Wisconsin Club for Growth has challenged every aspect of the investigation in court before finding a friendly federal judge (the only Wisconsin judge to regularly attend Koch-junkets) to take the unusual step of intervening in a state criminal case. This year, the case will end up before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. If the Club’s theory is allowed to prevail, unlimited undisclosed money will flow into Wisconsin elections — fully coordinated with campaigns — completely destroying Wisconsin’s post-Watergate clean elections laws.

Walker Succeeded in Becoming Completely Beholden to Out-fo-State Special Interests: Scott Walker is an alumni of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) where he first encountered an array of deep pocketed special interests. Walker was an ALEC member in his early days in the state legislature, pushing ALEC’s “Truth in Sentencing” and other punitive measures. After becoming Governor, Walker signed 19 ALEC bills into law including anti-consumer “tort reform” bills, voter ID, castle doctrine, charter schools, virtual schools, concealed carry and more. That kind of agenda wins you some pretty important far-right friends on the national scene. Since becoming governor, Scott Walker has taken more money from out-of-state donors than any other politician in Wisconsin history. The Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity group spent some $10 million in the 2012 recall race, according to its leader Tim Phillips, double what was spent by Walker’s Democratic challenger Tom Barrett. In 2014, AFP told the public it was spending another $900,000 in support of Walker, but the Koch total could have gone higher. Other big donors include a who’s who of the far right including: school privatizer Dick DeVos, Texas builder Bob Perry, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. If elected, Walker may not be the first friend of David Koch’s in the oval office, but he would be America’s first ALEC president.