In this clip from his exclusive interview with VladTV Battle Rap Journalist Michael Hughes, Bone Crusher shared his thoughts on the current state of Hip Hop and how various White rappers have managed to gain so much success recently.
Back in January, I saw my first 4K Samsung UHD TV on display in what some consider the most lavish shopping experience in the world—the Dubai Mall. Cool does not describe its curved, eye-popping wonder.
But, as I learned during my discussion with the exhibit attendant, the new television—which boasts more than 2,000 pixels (the top HD set has 1,080)—at that time faced the chicken and egg challenge of what comes first, the technology or the content. Nine months later, as UHD users are gaining in numbers, Netflix has chosen to raise the price of its monthly services for 4K (ultra high definition) users from $8.99 to $11.99. For 4K subscribers, Netflix offers all 62 episodes of Breaking Bad and House of Cards season two, NBC’s hit, The Blacklist, Smurfs 2, Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters 2, and the four-part Moving Art nature documentary series.
While Netflix does not report usage statistics, the company justified the price change—it has to increase the number of streams needed to send a 4K stream to the consumer. For $8.99, a consumer receives two separate streams that come together to produce a 1080 pixel picture; by doubling the number of streams required to offer a 4K stream, the company is only raising the fee $3 per month. The company will use some of that service upcharge to produce upcoming original series, such as Marco Polo, in 4K. Beyond Netflix, 4K programming options are spotty as disc-based video providers are having difficulty settling on a standard format for films and TV delivered to the home market.
Shipments of UHD TVs, manufactured by the likes of LG, Samsung, Sony, and Vizio, are taking off. According to research firm NPD, more 4K ultra HD TV sets were shipped in the second quarter of 2014 than in all of 2013. The company reports that 2.1 million sets were shipped in the second quarter, compared to 1.6 million in 2013. Looking at pricing from electronics retailer Best Buy, prices of 4K TVs range from $899 for a 40-inch Samsung up to $6,999 for a 79-inch LG.
There is another potentially gating factor for consumers just itching to watch Walter White whip up a batch in startling 4K; in order to receive a 4K streaming signal, a user must have Internet connectivity with a minimum of 25 MBpS bandwidth. For many ISPs, 25 MBpS is considered a high-priced premium service, and is one that the FCC says lacks competitors that would lead to fair pricing.
Before you shell out good money for a 4K TV, plan for fairly quick obsolescence. 8K sets from LG and Samsung were on display at the recent IFA Consumer Electronic Show in Berlin. No timetables were announced for these dazzling TVs, which have more than 4,000 pixels.
The Show is a 1995 documentary film about hip hop music. It was directed by Brian Robbins and featured interviews with some of hip hop's biggest names.
A man awake late at night accidentally injures himself, only to find mysterious letters at his door in a series of increasingly bizarre events linked to a creepy urban legend that may actually be real. An atmospheric short film that gives birth to a terrifying new urban legend.
By now, many of you are familiar with Big K.R.I.T.'s music, which includes both his work in the booth and on the boards—and he knows it. It's that knowledge that has fueled his departure out of his comfort zone and into the realm of his forthcoming album, Cadillactica.
How's this for easy money? Cybersecurity researchers warn a secret code can make any ATM start spitting out money without even needing to read a bank card.
Kaspersky Lab has reported that software containing a complex trojan virus is somehow being physically uploaded to ATM machines, allowing criminals to steal millions of dollars. Called Tyupkin, the malware allows a person to walk up to an infected machine, access a few hidden menus, input a secret passphrase, and hope they brought a big enough sack to carry off the loot.
Investigators found that Tyupkin was was capable of executing a number of sophisticated operations. Installed using a bootable CD, the trojan’s first order of business is to disable the McAfee antivirus software, often ATMs' only defense against such malicious code. It can also disable local network connections, preventing a bank, for instance, from discovering the security breach. And it's capable of entering a “standby mode,” activating itself only on certain nights, to help avoid detection.
Tyupkin has been deployed primarily on Russian and Eastern European ATMs, but at least some machines in the U.S., Israel, China, France, India, and Malaysia have also fallen victim. "Although one can only dispense 40 banknotes per transaction, it’s possible to dispense any amount of money by simply performing the actions several times over," Kaspersky's Alex Savitsky wrote.
Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT) researchers warn that, while only certain ATM models are vulnerable now, if banks and manufacturers don’t take immediate action, the exploit is likely to spread to others.
BETHESDA, Md. -- As the federal government frantically works to combat the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and as it responds to a second diagnosis of the disease at home, one of the country's top health officials says a vaccine likely would have already been discovered were it not for budget cuts.
Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, said that a decade of stagnant spending has "slowed down" research on all items, including vaccinations for infectious diseases. As a result, he said, the international community has been left playing catch-up on a potentially avoidable humanitarian catastrophe.
"NIH has been working on Ebola vaccines since 2001. It's not like we suddenly woke up and thought, 'Oh my gosh, we should have something ready here,'" Collins told The Huffington Post on Friday. "Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would've gone through clinical trials and would have been ready."
It's not just the production of a vaccine that has been hampered by money shortfalls. Collins also said that some therapeutics to fight Ebola "were on a slower track than would've been ideal, or that would have happened if we had been on a stable research support trajectory."
"We would have been a year or two ahead of where we are, which would have made all the difference," he said.
Speaking from NIH's headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland, the typically upbeat Collins was somber when discussing efforts to control the Ebola epidemic. His days are now spent almost exclusively on the disease. But even after months of painstaking work, a breakthrough doesn't seem on the immediate horizon.
Money, or rather the lack of it, is a big part of the problem. NIH's purchasing power is down 23 percent from what it was a decade ago, and its budget has remained almost static. In fiscal year 2004, the agency's budget was $28.03 billion. In FY 2013, it was $29.31 billion -- barely a change, even before adjusting for inflation. The situation is even more pronounced at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a subdivision of NIH, where the budget has fallen from $4.30 billion in FY 2004 to $4.25 billion in FY 2013.
The growing severity of the Ebola crisis in West Africa and the fear of an outbreak in America haven't loosened the purse strings. NIH has not received any additional money. Instead, Collins and others have had to "take dollars that would've gone to something else" -- such as a universal influenza vaccine -- "and redirect them to this."
Collins said he'd like Congress to pass emergency supplemental appropriations to help with the work. But, he added, "nobody seems enthusiastic about that."
Several Democratic lawmakers have in fact introduced legislation that would increase NIH funds by up to $46.2 billion in 2021. But there is no indication that such a bill will move forward any time soon.
Under the existing budget, NIH officials have rushed to find a breakthrough. Though health officials were already "cutting corners" in an effort to produce an Ebola vaccine, Collins said that a best-case scenario would be for a clinical trial to start in December, and it would take until February or March to know if the drug worked.
"If we wait that long to solve this, we will have basically failed with the more traditional measures of contact-tracing to get this epidemic under control," said Collins.
An Ebola vaccine, in short, would be an insurance policy, worth pursuing if other means fail and for possible future epidemics. Currently, NIH is working on a fifth-generation Ebola vaccine that has had positive results. But the tests are being done on monkeys, not people. To set up a clinical trial for humans takes time and resources, and doubly so in a country whose social and political fabric is as frayed as Liberia's. Even so, limited trials have already begun.
A second vaccine is being designed in Canada, just weeks behind NIH's schedule. But recipients have exhibited fever symptoms, which could prove problematic because elevated temperature is also a symptom of Ebola.
Collins says his "dream" is to set up a trial using those two vaccines and involving 30,000 people. But even with the current heightened demand, he cautioned that such a dream couldn't be rushed.
"Sometimes vaccines not only don't work, they make things worse," Collins told HuffPost. "Look at the HIV step trial, where that vaccine not only did not protect HIV, it increased susceptibility because it did something to the immune system that made it more vulnerable. That could happen here too." (The private sector, it should be noted, hasn't developed an Ebola vaccine for a variety of reasons, primarily financial ones.)
Collins was more bullish about the prospects of developing a therapy, as opposed to a vaccine, because it would be possible to conduct a test trial among people already in treatment units, rather than among the uninfected.
So far, much of the focus has been on an experimental cocktail of three monoclonal antibodies known as ZMapp. But the current stockpile is not nearly great enough. Collins, a touch exasperated, said it would be all but impossible to have significant doses available by the end of the calendar year -- with a lack of funding once again playing a disruptive role.
"Had it not been for other shortages, we might very well by now know that it works and have a large stock of it," he said.
There are other potential therapies. Brincidofovir has been used on an Ebola patient brought to Nebraska and on the late Thomas Eric Duncan, who was diagnosed with the disease after traveling to Dallas from his native Liberia. Unlike ZMapp, there is a large stockpile of Brincidofovir available, and the doses required are small. "So you could imagine you have enough drug now to treat 16,000 people," said Collins. But, again, a clinical trial is needed in Liberia.
With more than 4,000 people having died from Ebola -- the majority of them in West Africa -- the clock is already ticking fast for the biomedical research community. On Sunday morning, it sped up even more as news broke that a second patient in the United States had tested positive for the disease. The patient, a nurse who had treated Duncan, is the first person to contract the disease on U.S. soil. Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) say they're looking into how it happened. Though the patient, who works at the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, had been wearing protective gear during her encounters with Duncan, officials indicated that a procedural lapse likely caused the transmission.
Speaking two days before that second diagnosis, Collins urged for calm when contemplating the possibility of an outbreak. Ebola is a disease that is highly lethal. But it is also only transmitted through direct contact with bodily fluids or objects contaminated with the virus.
"Certainly there's been a lot of fear [in the] response from people who are probably at essentially zero risk, that this might somehow take over our country, which is really not going to happen," said Collins. "And despite all the assurances [...] it still hasn't quite sunk in. There's still the cable news people who are whipping this up, and frankly sometimes using it for political purposes to sort of shoot at the government."
Collins didn't downplay the severity of the disease, noting that its rapid spread in Africa, and the humanitarian disaster it has left in its wake, should rattle people. He also agreed with the comparison made by Tom Frieden, head of the CDC, who recently said the current Ebola crisis is the worst epidemic since the outbreak of AIDS. But, Collins added, perspective was still needed.
"More people will die today of AIDS than have died so far in the entire Ebola epidemic," said Collins. "We've somehow gotten used to that, and it doesn't seem to be so threatening or frightening. Certainly in the United States, another 50,000 people will get infected with HIV this year, because that's been sort of the steady number."
"How many more people will get infected with Ebola this year in the U.S.?" he went on. "I would guess you could count among the fingers of two hands, depending on what contacts of the guy in Dallas actually turned out to get infected."
Witness the rebirth of a legend in this spine-tingling descent into true terror. When a vacationing family is brutally murdered, an intrepid attorney, Kate Moore (A.J. Cook), is assigned to defend Talan (Brian Scott O’Connor), the main suspect and mysterious loner with a strange medical condition. As she delves into his shadowy past and runs scientific tests to prove his innocence, Talan’s darker instincts soon surface with unparalled violence. As Talan slashes and shreds his way to freedom, Kate must stop the atrocity she’s unleashed before the city is torn apart limb by bloody limb.
A satire that follows the stories of four black students at an Ivy League college where a riot breaks out over a popular 'African American' themed party thrown by white students.
An intimate and heart-warming look at the man behind the legend - as we've never seen Ali before. I AM ALI is told through exclusive, unprecedented access to Ali's personal archive of 'audio journals' combined with touching interviews and testimonials from his inner circle of family and friends, including his daughters, sons, ex-wife and brother, plus legends of the boxing community including Mike Tyson, George Foreman and Gene Kilroy. Experience Ali's extrodinary story, as a fighter, lover, brother, and father - told from the inside for the very first time.
