A user in a Russian forum says that he has hacked and uploaded almost 6.5 million LinkedIn passwords, according to The Verge. Though his claim has yet to be confirmed, Twitter users are already reporting that they've found their hashed LinkedIn passwords on the list, security expert Per Thorsheim said.

Gack. Fuck. I hate LinkedIn.

Been playing nothing but tower defense games lately...

1. iBomber Defense Pacific. It's WWII, the Japanese are coming - by land, by sea, by air - and you have to defend your HQ. There's a range of weaponry, mostly defensive: from simple machine gun nests, flamethrowers (which damage and slow approaching enemies), anti-aircraft guns, long-range cannon, and bombs. You need some of each, to beat all the various units the enemy will send your way. But, you have limited money with which to purchase these items, limited spots to place them, and little time to waste, since wave after wave of increasingly-strong enemy units are on their way, down predetermined paths, heading for your base. But all that is common to the genre. That's exactly what a tower defense game is. This one stands out because the simple but cute graphics, flat overhead 2D view, and dead simple interface make it easy to focus on getting through the many well-designed levels. It takes some real effort to get through the higher levels: lots of planning and careful management are needed to make sure you have maximum firepower in the right place at the right time. The "pause" is extremely handy, since you can work on your layout while the game is paused - none of the other games in this list allow that.
   A

2. Unstoppable Zorg Alien invaders are coming to take over earth, and you must defeat them! The whole thing is dressed up in high-camp 50's sci-fi style; grainy TV footage, spinning newspapers, low-budget special effects and sexy alien women keeping a narrative going between levels. The gameplay itself is set in space - in orbit, specifically. You have to defend your planet / space station against streams of aliens by placing your weapons into a limited number of spots in a handful of pre-selected orbits. The game gives you a large number of fun weapons to use, but you can only equip yourself with a small handful of types, at the start of each level. So you usually end up needing to play each level a few times, to figure out the correct mix of weapons for the level's mix of orbits and aliens. Fun.
   B+

3. Toy Soldiers This one is ostensibly set in a child's toybox, where WWI-era soldiers, tanks and planes face off. Everything is supposed to be a mechanical toy, so when you blow up a tank or shoot a soldier, springs and gears go flying. Cute. There is WWI-era music in the background, and the inter-level splash screens are of old toy boxes. Nicely done. You earn money by defeating enemy units, and that allows you to buy defensive batteries (guns, AA units and flamethrowers) to place at specified points around the battlefield. And the enemy sends waves of infantry, tanks and planes at you. The enemy units are somewhat intelligent and will change course to avoid weapons, or to attack your installations. You also get to fly planes and drive tanks - dropping a load of bombs from your canvas-winged bi-plane into a crowd of assembled infantry is immensely satisfying. This one is rendered in 3D and so the interface is a lot more complicated than iBomber, and takes a bit of getting used to. Still, it's a lot of fun.
   A

4. Gratuitous Tank Battles Enemy robots and tanks are coming to get you! Same basic idea as the rest: place your guns, stop the enemy. I never really got into this one. The stand-along campaign was pretty short - maybe a dozen levels - though, in a twist, you can play each level as defender or attacker. As I went through, the game seemed to be telling me that I was earning all kinds of new weapons and components to build my own weapons, but I could never figure out how to actually use these new weapons or to build anything - the UI was a bit tough to figure out; and since pulling up the help system crashed the game, I didn't do that twice. And I didn't really need to do any customization, since I finished the defensive side of the things with the default weapons (admittedly by dropping the difficulty to the lowest level at times). I started the offensive side, but found I wasn't interested, about five minutes in. The game crashed a half-dozen times on me, too.
   C

Does anyone else think this (libertarians trying to figure out why sexual harassment is wrong) sounds better in the voice of Sheldon Cooper ?

[S]exual harassment must be wrong either because a) proposing to pay for sex is wrong or b) radically changing a person’s job description from (e.g. from secretary to prostitute/maid/babysitter) is wrong. That is, the employer’s threat must be to do something that is independently wrong. My intuition is that something like (b) makes sexual harassment wrong. In these extreme cases employees do have the authority to decline certain tasks that employers demand. In this case the employee may say ‘you led me to believe that the job did not require prostitution, so I have been deceived.’ Because it is wrong to deceive people, it is wrong to radically change a person’s job description, and so threatening to fire someone for refusing to comply with an impermissible demand is also impermissible.

Wife and I were driving somewhere last Sunday afternoon, down a two lane road, on the edge of a little rainstorm which was drizzling through town. The sun was trying to come out, in back of us, and there was a rainbow in the sky ahead of us - a full one. Pretty cool. Then, we turned a slight curve in the road and the right end of the rainbow appeared in front of us, and stayed in front of us as we continued driving. But not only was it in front of us, it was between my car and the trees on the side of the road. So, 20-ish feet ahead of us. And it moved with us. We were literally looking at the end of a rainbow. Wild.

No pictures, since I was driving...

Philosoraptor

Paris syndrome

Doc has passed.

Watson said he wanted to be known for being a good man more than being a good guitar player.

18 anti-Beatles songs

Goo Mashups