While the Nest would beat it in a beauty contest, this Sensi thermostat has most of the same smart features in a more traditional body, and it’s a hell of a lot cheaper.
One of the most notable of those smart features is Alexa support; if there’s an Amazon Echo in range, you can change your home’s temperature with nothing but your voice. For a limited time, you can get the Sensi and an Echo Dot for just $108, which is $71 less than buying them separately, and somewhat incredibly, $21 less than buying the thermostat by itself.
Blizzard is taking StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty‘s campaign free to play. As Polygon reports, come November 14th, you’ll have access to the entire narrative and if you already own that, you’ll get the Protoss-themed Heart of the Swarm campaign for free. The other narratives will run you $15 each. Unlike StarCraft II: Starter Edition that included free multiplayer, the adversarial mode that comes in tow here will feature ranked play — not just casual, unranked matches.
It’s a smart move, and free access to ranked multiplayer could be a boon for the StarCraft eSports scene. After all, Dota 2 and League of Legends are both free-to-play (as is Blizzard’s own Heroes of the Storm), and those are doing pretty well for themselves. Valve saw a sizable uptick in players — and money — after making the aging Team Fortress 2 free-to-play, as well.
“Darkness rises, and the Light to meet it.” A new clip for The Last Jedi brings Luke Skywalker back to the ship that started it all, but that’s not the only place we see the Millennium Falcon.
The new clip gives us plenty of new glimpses at the upcoming film, including a few surprises. We get a better look at Snoke’s throne room, as well as Finn joining in the Battle on Crait. And look, the Falcon is there too! The Last Jedi arrives December 15, and tickets are currently on sale.
Ohio State University President Michael Drake is up for his third raise and maximum bonus in as many years on the job, with trustees citing financial performance and a more hands-on role with the Wexner Medical Center following the departure of its CEO.
Trustees will vote Friday on a 2 percent raise, equal to that for faculty and staff, and the maximum 25 percent bonus of $208,000. The raise would bring his base salary to $849,000, up from $800,000 when he started in 2014.
The committee overseeing…
Ohio’s highest-paid state employees overwhelmingly are psychiatrists at the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services. The agency that oversees the state’s mental health hospitals touts a Monday-through-Friday work week and competitive pay on its website for job applicants, but psychiatrists can work overtime if they choose. That’s the case for all but one of the top 18 state-employed earners in 2016, who made an average of $99,202 in overtime pay each last year.
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The most important thing to remember about caring for a climbing harness is if the construction of the harness fails, your entire safety system can fail. So take care of it. What, exactly, does that entail? Your harness’ biggest enemies are wear-and-tear and chemicals. Regularly inspect your harnesses tie-in points and belay loop, and when you notice fraying on the outside of the webbing, it’s time to buy a new harness. At not much more than $50, investing in a new harness every couple years is more than worth the money when it comes to safety. As for chemicals, don’t toss your harness into the back of a car or a pickup bed where something might have been leaking (e.g., car battery acid or gasoline), or even onto the tarmac in a parking lot. Just keep your harness clean and in a backpack whenever you’re carrying it to and from climbing, and you should be fine.
Stan Against Evil’s first season was enjoyable, but it suffered due to its undeniable similarities to Ash vs. Evil Dead.With Ash’s next season still AWOL, Stan stands alone in the cranky-old-dude-fighting-demons zone—and happily, IFC’s horror comedy has finally found its footing in season two.
I watched all of season two and I won’t spoil anything here, but all of the show’s marketing makes it very clear—as if there was ever any doubt to begin with—that Willard’s Mill Sheriff Evie Barret (Janet Varney) escapes the 17th-century clutches of evil Constable Eccles (Randall Newsome) and returns to the present day, with help from former Sheriff Stan Miller (John C. McGinley). But the cliffhanger resolution doesn’t happen right away, and the rescue plot introduces a couple of big themes for the season: time travel and alternate realities, which the show played with in last season’s time-looping finale; and Stan’s continuing grief over the loss of his wife, Claire (Susan Williams), a demon slayer who stealthily kept her husband safe in a town where every sheriff is marked for death. In learning how to rescue Evie, Stan also discovers a way he can go back in time one year to prevent his wife’s death. (It involves a pair of eyeballs plucked from a wraith… plucked-out eyeballs are another theme this season.)
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But Stan knows its strengths, and wisely devotes most of its energy to ridiculously silly monster-of-the-week episodes, which kick off with amusing glimpses into the horrible history of Willard’s Mill and then offer up mysteries guided by various monsters. This season, they include a were-pony, a demonic baby, and a smarmy game-show host. The show’s real raison d’être, of course, is the delight in watching McGinley’s salty curmudgeon react not just to random supernatural creatures, but to the world around him. Upon entering an abandoned house with mystical powers: “What the hell is this dump? Smells like an armpit’s asshole.” Directed at an old lady using a walker: “What are you looking at, punk?” An observation that only vaguely relates to his desire to visit the past: “This country ain’t been the same since Evel Knievel died.” You get the sense that McGinley and Stan creator Dana Gould have the best time ever creating Stan’s lines. They are hilarious and weird and off-putting in delightful ways, and do a lot to distract you from what appears to be the show’s biggest problem: Stan Against Evil really, really doesn’t want you to focus too much on its greater mythology.
As fans of season one will recall, the show’s whole premise starts with sinister Constable Eccles, whose witch-burning reign of terror back in the 1690s is the reason every sheriff in Willard’s Mill is destined to die a gruesome death. It makes sense—a legacy of supernatural payback aimed at the top cop, launched by witches with 400 years of built-up bad attitudes. But, Stan did a switcheroo late in season one, revealing that Eccles was the only true witch in town, and he was actually burning innocent people (mostly women) “to add to his coven,” and bolstering his eventual plan to open a portal between the land of the living and the land of the dead.
So what’s the real deal with the curse on the sheriffs? I went back and re-watched parts of season one to try and piece it together; the conclusion I came to is that Stan Against Evil doesn’t want you to scratch your head too much about this stuff. It especially doesn’t want you to wonder why a show with such a breakneck pace (season two has eight episodes that run just over 20 minutes each) would introduce such a complicated backstory in the first place, then barely explore it. The show wants you to have a good goddamn time, and on that front, it delivers with great gusto.
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And fortunately, the insane creatures and the zingy one-liners are even enough to distract nitpicky viewers (like me) from being too frustrated. Stan’s other characters get to reveal a few more layers this season—especially Evie, whose status as a divorced single mom gets addressed a lot this season, and not just by Stan the jolly sexist. (When we meet her blowhard ex-husband, Stan takes an immediate liking to him, of course.) We also see some other surprising developments, including Evie’s genuine friendship with Stan’s, ah, uniquely weird daughter Denise (Deborah Baker, Jr.), and Denise’s budding relationship with gravedigger Kevin (Gould). There’s also a new character (played by Denise Boutte) who provides an important link to Claire and her secret life as a supernatural enforcer. It’s still very much all about Stan, but at least most everyone else has things to do other than just react to his antics. There are also some very entertaining guest stars this season, including horror greats Patty McCormack (The Bad Seed herself) and Jeffrey Combs (Re-Animator).
Even with all the story strides made in season two—especially the time-and-dimension traveling stuff, a clever way to expand the boundaries of a show that clearly has a pretty teeny budget—there are still a lot of similarities to Ash vs. Evil Dead, a show that has its whole backstory already locked down in a movie trilogy, as well as more money to spend on gallons of stage blood. But if Stan’s acid-tongued antihero is not yet ready to be lifted into the pantheon of horror greats alongside Ash Williams, at least he’s very nearly as fun to watch. And you should watch! Without revealing specifics, season two ends with a hell of a set-up for a potential season three.
Stan Against Evil season two kicks off today, November 1, on IFC.
Question of the Day: If You Trust God Why Do You Need a Gun?
I’m not much of a believer. My father lost his faith in the Holocaust labor camps, my mother hers when she was orphaned at an early age. So I don’t quote scripture when I debate the morality of armed self-defense. As far as I’m concerned, the right to keep and bear arms is the right not to be killed (void when posing an imminent, credible threat of grievous bodily harm or death to innocent life). But our man at God Family Guns below makes an excellent case for a biblical basis for ballistic readiness. How do you deal with people who think religious folks support gun control?
Today, the CIA released a trove of files obtained from Osama bin Laden’s compound when he was killed by US forces in 2011. We knew that bin Laden had some unexpected things on his computer, but we now have a better look at some of the files.
“Today’s release of recovered al-Qa‘ida letters, videos, audio files and other materials provides the opportunity for the American people to gain further insights into the plans and workings of this terrorist organization,” CIA Director Pompeo said in a statement.
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“CIA will continue to seek opportunities to share information with the American people consistent with our obligation to protect national security,” Pompeo continued.
Osama bin Laden’s computer had a strange mix of everything from Tom and Jerry animated cartoons and crochet instructional videos to IED and beheading films. For instance, he had one video of the beheading of Jack Hensley, who was a 49-year-old American beheaded in Iraq in 2004. Needless to say, I don’t suggest you Google it.
Bin Laden even had Hollywood movies like Antz, Cars, Heroes of Tomorrow, Chicken Little, Resident Evil, and the 2009 Dreamworks animated 13-minute short, B.O.B.’s Big Break. Is it possible that kids were watching some of these movies in the compound? For sure. But I’d prefer to imagine that one of the worst terrorists of the century actually just had a soft spot for western cartoons.
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And if you’re wondering, yes, that first video appears to be the viral classic “Charlie Bit My Finger.”
We have a short list of some of the strangest titles below. You can search the entire list of videos here, and check out the other files that the US found on the agency’s main page.
So if you’ve followed the debate over net neutrality for much of the last decade, you probably remember images like these, purporting to show what the internet might look like if we let broadband duopolies like AT&T or Comcast dictate internet access pricing structure:
And while these mock ups were tongue in cheek, large ISPs have given every indication that this idea of freedom costing extra isn’t too far from their ideal. And abusing a lack of broadband competition to force users to shell out additional funds to access to the content and services of their choice isn’t too far off of what has already happened, whether we’re talking about AT&T’s decision to block Facetime from working unless users shelled out for more expensive plans, or Verizon’s recent decision to charge users $10 more just to avoid arbitrary video throttling.
In Portugal however, there are no net neutrality rules. And ISPs there have already started taking advantage of it in a way that eerily echoes the warnings net neutrality advocates have been making for years. Lisbon-based mobile and fixed broadband provider MEO has been selling broadband service tiers for some time that cap your internet data usage, after which they’re happy to sell you additional buckets of data depending on which types of services you traditionally use:
In Portugal, with no net neutrality, internet providers are starting to split the net into packages. http://pic.twitter.com/TlLYGezmv6
It’s important to note that capping usage then doling out additional data based on types of content isn’t the same idea as blocking users from accessing parts of the internet unless they pay up, but it’s still detrimental to the health of the internet. As we saw with T-Mobile’s Binge On, these plans are designed to create the illusion of a bargain. But these types of plans not only raise questions about ISP power to dictate which companies and services are whitelisted, but they’re based on a fundamentally incorrect premise that these restrictions are necessary in the first place.
Usage caps and overage fees aren’t based on network or economic realities. They aren’t useful to manage congestion. Their entire function is to creatively drive up costs via arbitrary barriers to entry, after which ISPs convince consumers they’re somehow getting a deal by providing additional data "for free" or "at a discount." ISPs have often falsely tried to equate this as the same thing as 1-800 numbers or free shipping, which is bullshit. All that’s really happening is that internet access is being artificially limited, and users are being forced to pay more money to access the internet as intended.
While people often like to focus on the threat of ISPs blocking access to content, ISPs know that’s a surefire way to earn public scorn. That’s why ISPs have developed a myriad of more creative ways to (ab)use the lack of competition in the space to ill effect, whether that’s imposing arbitrary and unnecessary usage caps and overage fees, exempting an ISPs own services from said caps, or hamstringing competitors elsewhere in the network, as we saw when ISPs began intentionally clogging peering points to drive up costs for streaming competitors and transit operators (interconnection).
With the Trump administration rushing forward with its plan to kill net neutrality here in the States, and a rise in cable’s monopoly over fixed-line broadband, you can expect a whole lot more U.S. broadband pricing and package "creativity" in the not so distant future. That may not involve outright blocking your access to content, but it’s more than likely to involve entirely arbitrary, uncompetitive and harmful limits you’ll be told are somehow necessary and for your own good.
