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critical oversight
McCain: Cybersecurity Bill Ineffective Without NSA Monitoring the Net
18 hours ago
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national defense
Pentagon's Project 'Avatar': Like the Movie, but With Robots Instead of Aliens
21 hours ago
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Greatest Simpsons Cameos From First 500 Episodes
Blowback: Who’s your favorite Simpsons special guest of all time? Doh!-nate your favorite memories in the comments below.
02.17.12
Crab Nebula’s Pulsar May Be Fast Particle Accelerator
A "light cylinder" in the heart of the Crab Nebula may feed the mysterious, particle accelerator-like behavior of the nebula's rapidly spinning neutron star, or pulsar.
02.17.12
The Smallest of Vans Stands Alone
If you call yourself an auto enthusiast, you???ve got to have some love for Mazda. I don???t care if you take factory delivery of a new M3 every four years or have a Mustang logo tattooed on your bicep ??? when it comes to championing technology that nobody else will, the fifth-largest Japanese automaker can???t [...]
02.17.12
The HTML5 Time Element is Back and Better Than Ever
The time element was removed from HTML5 last year, but then after developers complained it was rescued and added back to the spec with a whole new set of capabilities.
02.17.12
Civilian Tilt Rotors and Pusher Helicopters Head for Production
Two different helicopter companies announced plans to sell two very different, but very fast, innovative aircraft this week. The first is a smaller, civilian version of the military’s V-22 Osprey tiltrotor. The second is a production version of Eurocopter’s X3 helicopter that featured a pair of propellers to push the rotor wing aircraft to very [...]
02.17.12
Fun Weekend Coding Marathon Benefits Charity
When I was studying engineering, I took a couple of introductory programming courses (Pascal – yikes!) that were required. For one of them, I have a fond memory of one particular assignment given by the instructor for extra credit — he broke those of us who wanted to try for it into teams of four [...]
02.17.12
6 Exploration Stories to Watch in 2012
In the spirit of the recent spate of ???what to look for in 2012??? lists ??? those all-important drivers of January magazine issues ??? I???ve assembled 6 exploration / astrobiology related items that should loom large in the coming year: 1.?? The Shifting Geopolitics of Manned Spaceflight The American manned space program is one of [...]
02.17.12
9 Things Parents Should Know About The Secret World of Arrietty
The latest from Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli is yet another enchanting tale for families to enjoy together.
02.17.12
Google’s New ‘Dart’ Language to Get a Starring Role in Chrome
Google has added support for Dart, the company's attempt to improve on JavaScript, to experimental builds of the Chromium web browser. Despite a cool reception from other browser makers, Google says it plans to eventually add Dart support to Chrome proper.
02.17.12
The GeekMoms Podcast #15 Feed the Monster and NEW GeekMom Book Club!
GeekMom Nicole Wakelin talks to Kristin Fitch, CEO and Co-Founder of ZiggityZoom.com??about how she started this family oriented website with her Mom.?? You’ll hear what got her started, some of the challenges of running the site, and about the wonderful things you can find there, including an adorable app for kids called Feed the Monster. [...]
02.17.12
Interview: Faith Erin Hicks on Friends With Boys
Faith Erin Hicks is a comic book artist in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her latest comic, Friends With Boys, is a semi-autobiographical tale of a ninth-grade girl entering public school for the first time (after being homeschooled). The comic has been serialized online ??? it’s nearly over ??? and the conclusion coincides with the publication of [...]
02.17.12
Review: Rory’s Story Cubes: Actions and Voyages
The original version of Rory’s Story Cubes, done by The Creativity Hub (home of Rory O’Connor and Anita Murphy), has been around for a while. I reviewed it a couple of years ago, along with the second set, Actions, which was then only available overseas. Now Rory’s Story Cubes: Actions is available in the United [...]
02.17.12
Shadowlaw: Action and Alternate History Melded Seamlessly
When I interviewed television and comic writer Brandon Easton in October about his upcoming graphic novel Shadowlaw, I was intrigued by his description of an alternate history where the Catholic Church has taken over control of the world, supposedly to bring everyone into the faith and protect it from evil. But all is not as [...]
02.17.12
A Wrecking Ball for Writer’s Block: The Storymatic Creates Stories
Ever wish you had something to write about when your brain goes dead???The Storymatic??is here to the rescue. Part writing prompt, part teaching tool, part parlor game, The Storymatic is a clever little box packed with 500+ cards. Open the lid and you open a nearly endless realm of possible plots, characters, situations, conundrums, and [...]
02.17.12
Nanoscience Is at Work in The Secret World of Arrietty
In the early days of Disney hand-drawn animation, the term “special effects” was used very differently than it is in modern filmmaking. In a live-action movie, making Pinocchio’s nose grow or setting Dumbo the elephant soaring above the circus audience would be considered a special effect — but in an animated film, they were business [...]
02.17.12
Help Kickstart JammerUp, the Roller Derby Board Game
Overview: JammerUp puts you in the shoes ??? er, skates ??? of a roller derby team, setting up blocks and getting your jammer ahead of the pack to score. The game, designed by a mom who’s also a roller derby ref, is currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, with just over a week left to go. [...]
02.17.12
Ancient Galaxy Collision Created Enormous Stellar Swirls
New simulations suggest that the enormous swirls of stars surrounding a distant galaxy formed when two equal-sized galaxies collided.
02.17.12
Houston to NASA Mainframe: You’re Through!
First the Space Shuttle, now the mainframe. It seems like NASA is doing away with the last vestiges of its swinging '70s heyday, when TV astronauts were played by stars such as Farrah Fawcette. NASA pulled the plug on its last mainframe computer this month, an IBM Z9 mainframe at the Marshall Space Flight Center, NASA's giant research facility near Huntsville, Alabama.
02.17.12
Feb. 17, 1864: We’re Sunk
The first successful submarine attack in history is only a partial success: The sub is lost, too.
02.17.12
U.S. Commandos in Afghanistan Face a New Battlefield: The Courtroom
U.S. Special Forces bust a bomb-smuggling kingpin, and haul him to an Afghan jail. But can the local -- and very dysfunctional -- legal system deliver justice? David Axe reports from Afghanistan.
02.17.12
Photographing Life and Death in Juarez
NSFW: Some photos in this gallery depict graphic scenes of death. Juarez, Mexico is a war zone. The war is being waged by two rival drug cartels, the Juarez and the Sinoloa, block by block for control of the city and its trafficking routes. The result is extreme levels of violence, corruption and intimidation. And [...]
02.17.12
The Borrowers, Inspiration Behind The Secret World of Arrietty
One of Diana Stanley’s Illustrations for the 1952 British Editions of The Borrowers by Mary Norton The English language version of the Studio Ghibli film The Secret World of Arrietty arrives in theaters today (check out Matt Blum’s review and Kathy Ceceri’s perspective on the film’s science). The book which inspired Miyazaki’s film??was written by [...]
02.17.12
Must-Complete Projects for Every Hardcore Tech Geek
Hardcore tech geeks make things, break things, and DIY things to the hilt. It???s what nerds do best, and if you want to consider yourself a hardcore geek of the highest order, you???ll need to cross off every project in this list.
02.17.12
To Convert or Not to Convert? 3-D Arms Race Heats Up
When prepping to film Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor put themselves through a hellacious fact-finding mission. The daredevil directors tried out nearly every 3-D camera rig on the market, at one point becoming convinced they would need to build custom hardware, bolt by bolt, to capture the type of [...]
02.17.12
Dell Joins Microsoft, Yahoo for Riverside Data-Center Party
Dell has joined the data center party in Quincy, Washington. Quincy is home to data centers run by Microsoft, Yahoo and Intuit, and this week, Dell announced that it too has opened a facility in the tiny town on the Columbia river. Dams along the Columbia river, you see, provide relatively expensive hydropower for these massive computing facilities. But perhaps more importantly, the state of Washington has provided tax breaks for tech giants building data centers in the region.
02.17.12
Free Code Friday: Win Pushmo for the Nintendo 3DS
As we at last break free from the post-holiday video game doldrums and soldier on into the year’s bumper crop of amazing new releases — I’m looking at you, Mass Effect 3 — we at GeekDad are pleased to offer a lucky few readers the chance to score some diminutive downloadable goodies that you may [...]
02.17.12
A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Feb. 17
Google's daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.
02.17.12
Free OpenStack Time: What Gives?
How does free cloud compute time on a virtual machine with an available 156 cores, 1040GB memory and 59.1 TB of disk storage running the latest OpenStack release, Del PowerEdge C6100 and C6105 servers and libvirt/KVM sound? You guessed it: There's a catch.
02.16.12
Feds Propose Limits for In-Car Dialing, Texting, Surfing
Federal regulators, concerned that increasing connectivity will have drivers doing everything but drive, urge automakers to begin sharply curtailing the functionality of infotainment systems.
02.16.12
Alamo Drafthouse Plans to Bring Its Special Sauce to San Francisco
The Alamo Drafthouse is expanding its geek-friendly movie empire to San Francisco, where the Texas outfit plans to renovate a Mission District theater. “We were planning on making a formal announcement of our intentions to embark on a massive historic renovation of the New Mission Theater when more of the advance legwork is done,” wrote [...]
02.16.12
Why Facebook Is Missing From Apple’s New Desktop OS
Facebook is the dominant player in social media, but its direct integration is nowhere to be found in Apple's desktop and mobile operating systems. It's a glaring omission considering Facebook updates are a simple drop-down menu choice in Android and Windows Phone.
02.16.12
McCain: Cybersecurity Bill Ineffective Without NSA Monitoring the Net
After three years of haggling to produce bipartisan cybersecurity legislation that addresses the security of the nation's critical infrastructure systems, the Senate finally got a bill this week that seemed destined to actually pass.
02.16.12
HP’s Whitman Slags Android to Pump WebOS
On Wednesday, at a meeting of the company's channel partners in Las Vegas, HP CEO Meg Whitman talked up Open WebOS, the company's newly open sourced mobile operating system. But she also took a moment to stir up a batch of fear, uncertainty, and doubt about Google???s Android. The mobile operating system ???may end up being a closed system with their purchase of Motorola," she said. Whitman also described Android as "remarkably fragmented."
02.16.12
Dirt-Cheap iPhone Trick Captures Great Ape Close-Ups
Using an ingenious “gorilla cam” made with an iPhone and a cheap mirror, a NASA engineer with a DIY streak captured captivating close-up video of primates in a zoo. The video was made by part-time viral video prankster and full-time rocket scientist Mark B. Rober, who noticed during zoo visits that apes don’t like being [...]
02.16.12
Mountain Lion vs. Windows 8: Two Paths to Platform Convergence
Now that Apple's offered a sneak preview of OS X Mountain Lion, we can begin to compare it with Windows 8. Both OSes draw inspiration from, and aim to integrate with, mobile devices. Each OS faces the same basic challenge, but approaches the problem with different strategies.
02.16.12
Secret Service Seizes JotForm.com, Nuking Millions of Online Forms (Updated)
Jotform.com, the domain name of a business providing hosting for online forms, has been seized by the Secret Service, essentially gutting the company???s business.
02.16.12
Pentagon’s Project ‘Avatar’: Same as the Movie, but With Robots Instead of Aliens
Soldiers practically inhabiting the mechanical bodies of androids, who will take the humans' place on the battlefield. Or sophisticated tech that spots a powerful laser ray, then stops it from obliterating its target. If you've got Danger Room's taste in movies, you've probably seen both ideas on the big screen. Now Darpa, the Pentagon's far-out research arm, wants to bring 'em into the real world.
02.16.12
Video: Behind the Scenes at Giant Keck Telescopes
A behind-the-scenes look at how one telescope, the W. M. Keck Observatory, produces its superb space images.
02.16.12
Decoding a Contagious Devil-Killing Cancer
In the wilds of Tasmania and in labs in England, researchers are making some encouraging advances in their attempt to decode what may be a ticking bomb: an ugly, lethal cancer ??? a contagious one, a potential nightmare ??? that has been spreading among Tasmanian devils. As Ewen Callaway reports????today at Nature: The first cases [...]
02.16.12
Researchers Fight Toxic Waste With Google PageRank
According to a paper published in Journal of Computational Chemistry, the same math used to determine the relevance of webpages on Google's search engine can also be used to determine crucial information about a water molecule's position in a solution of charged chemicals -- particularly toxic chemicals. For chemists, the finding is more than just a curiosity. It's a crucial step in determining the best ways to remove nuclear waste and other toxic chemicals from the world's water supply.
02.16.12
Hands-On With iMessage Beta on the Desktop: A Good Start, With Beta Bugs
iMessage on the desktop went from a wish to (beta) reality in just four months. It's now on the Mac OS X desktop as part of Apple's Mountain Lion update, and our friends at Ars Technica have taken it for a spin.
02.16.12
See the Most Complete, Unofficial Avengers Trailer Yet
This new The Avengers mashup is not an official trailer for the highly anticipated Marvel movie — but it’s made from official trailers! And it’s pretty much two-and-a-half minutes of ass-kicking awesomeness. Composed of clips from the individual movies featuring members of the Earth-saving team — Thor, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, Iron Man 2 [...]
02.16.12
Lawmaker Demands DHS Cease Monitoring of Blogs, Social Media
Rep. Jackie Speier (D-California) said Thursday she wants the Department of Homeland Security to cease its social-media and news-monitoring operation.
02.16.12
Ubisoft To Release Assassin’s Creed III On October 30
Ubisoft will release Assassin’s Creed III on October 30, it said during a call with investors on Wednesday. Arriving less than one year after the release of Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, Assassin’s Creed III is expected to star an all-new protagonist in an experience Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said will be “the biggest launch in Ubisoft [...]
02.16.12
OS X Mountain Lion: 5 Most Exciting New Features
Today, Apple unveiled a developer preview of its newest Mac OS, Mountain Lion. The OS introduces more than 100 new features to OS X, and we've teased out five of the most important, most innovative aspects of Cupertino's latest release.
02.16.12
Eagle Cam Returns: New Chicks Coming Soon
The Decorah Bald Eagle Cam, last year's runaway internet sensation, is back! And mom's about to lay her eggs.
02.16.12
Apple Plant Conditions Better Than Others, Auditor Says
The Fair Labor Association commented on Apple manufacturing partners’ labor practices on Thursday, recognizing their standards as “way above average of the norm.” “The facilities are first-class,” FLA president Auret van Heerden told Reuters after visiting partner manufacturer Foxconn in Shenzen, China. “The physical conditions are way, way above average of the norm.” FLA’s recent [...]
02.16.12
Honda’s Going Electric-Motorcycle Racing
The motorcycle manufacturer will compete by proxy when its partner Mugen enters the Isle of Man TT Zero.
02.16.12
Guidestones Web Series Explores Mystery Behind Georgia Landmark
Guidestones, a new interactive web series, launched earlier this week. The fictional narrative plans on delving into the very real mystery of the Georgia Guidestones over the course of 50 episodes. Viewers can explore the clues embedded in the episodes to discover hidden storylines and additional content.
02.16.12
Watch 12 Trippy Minutes of Creepy Cult Film Sound of My Voice
The first 12 minutes of Sound of My Voice, released online Wednesday in a cool interactive format, will bend your mind on two levels. First, it’s a stark and mesmerizing intro to life in a cult led by a supposed time traveler. Second, it’s a trippy experience that reveals the story behind the film’s narrative. [...]
02.16.12
First Look: Mozilla’s Boot2Gecko Mobile Platform and Gaia UI
Sneak a peek at Mozilla's Boot2Gecko project, which aims to develop an entirely new mobile operating system based on the tools that power Firefox.
02.16.12
Rackspace Buys SharePoint911: A Game-Changer?
Boasting, "The game just changed," the cloud giant Rackspace Hosting today announced it has bought SharePoint911. Why? Think serious SharePoint cred with Microsoft SharePoint users. But is it a game-changer?
02.16.12
Java: Some of the Most Volcanically Active Real Estate on the Planet
One shot from space, 18 potentially active volcanoes. This shot is only part of the island of Java in Indonesia and the dozen-and-a-half volcanoes seen are only a portion of all the volcanoes on the island – the Global Volcanism Program lists no less than 39 potentially active volcanoes across the island. This represents only [...]
02.16.12
Quantifying Alien Encounters: The Rio Scale
If there's any alleged evidence of aliens, the brains behind SETI -- the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence -- have a scale ready to assess its value. Mathematician and Social Dimensions blogger Samuel Arbesman explains.
02.16.12
Red Hat Cloud Boss Blasts VMware Over Openness
Scott Crenshaw, Vice President and General Manager of Red Hat???s Cloud Business Unit, during a Webcast today called VMware???s claims of openness for its cloud solutions bogus.
02.16.12
Apple Announces OS X Mountain Lion for Mac Desktops
Apple has announced its latest version of OS X for Macs ??? and like all iterations of its desktop operating system, the latest version is named after a big cat. It???s called Mountain Lion, and it will be more like iOS than ever, as Apple integrates various mobile services and moves to yearly OS updates across all its devices.
02.16.12
Your Habits Give You Away ??? As Companies Damn Well Know
There are, however, some brief periods in a person???s life when old routines fall apart and buying habits are suddenly in flux. One of those moments ??? the moment, really ??? is right around the birth of a child, when parents are exhausted and overwhelmed and their shopping patterns and brand loyalties are up for [...]
02.16.12
Covers of AD&D Reprint Rulebooks Released
As previously reported by GeekDad’s MJ Harnish,??Wizards of the Coast??announced last month??that, as a fundraiser for the??Gygax Memorial Fund,??they’d be releasing reprints of the original??Advanced Dungeons & Dragons??(AD&D) Players Handbook, Dungeon Masters Guide, and Monster Manual. They’re coming out in April, with guts that are, Wizards says, exact reproductions of the originals. You remember that [...]
02.16.12
Reminder: Time to Run For Your Lives: Zombie 5K Obstacle Run
On March 3rd, Atlanta-area runners will gather for the Run For Your Lives Zombie 5K. If you’re interested in participating, the event has extended the deadline to register until Friday, February 17 at 11:59pm EDT. They’ve also announced that actor IronE Singleton from The Walking Dead will be on hand to sign autographs and participate [...]
02.16.12
George Clooney Robs A Bank With a Lie & A Smile, and Other Scenes In Media Res
Elmore Leonard likes to start scenes right in the middle of the scene, as he does, more or less, in the scene above from Steven Soderbergh’s “Out of Sight,” adapted from Leonard’s novel of the same title. ??At??too many Daves, David Quigg considers the virtue of starting an entire book in its middle: I turned [...]
02.16.12
Highest Rates Ever Recorded of Multi-Drug-Resistant TB
News from the World Health Organization isn't good. Drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis are at the highest rates ever recorded. Superbug blogger Maryn McKenna reports.
02.16.12
Dork Tower Thursday
Read all the Dork Towers that have run on GeekDad. Find the Dork Tower webcomic archives, DT printed collections, more cool comics, awesome games and a whole lot more at the Dork Tower Website.
02.16.12
Icon Aircraft Receives First-Ever Spin-Resistance Seal of Approval
Icon Aircraft's forthcoming A5 light sport aircraft could practically eliminate the risk of spin/stall, a major cause of general aviation accidents.
02.16.12
iPad Photo Frame Is Hit and Miss
We don’t record video of our family all that often, but we do take pictures — a lot of pictures. The problem is that, as with many people, they are locked away on the computer and rarely seen. I’d been planning to buy an electronic picture frame for some time but it wasn’t until I [...]
02.16.12
Would the Stratos Space Jump Be Similar to Reentry?
A man plans to skydive from the edge of space. Won't he need some sort of heat shield like the Space Shuttle did in reentry? Dot Physics blogger Rhett Allain uses physics to furnish an answer.
02.16.12
Review: Hex-A-Gon Is Great Fun
Overview: Hex-A-Gon from Catalyst Game Labs is an abstract strategy game which is one part Checkers and one part Peg Game. Players: 1 to 5 Age: ??13 and up (more like 10 and up) Retail: $39.99 Rating: Wunderbar!??An enjoyable and straightforward??strategy game, with great wooden pieces and quick play. Who Will like it? ??This is [...]
02.16.12
Lego Minecraft Now Available for Pre-Order
The turnaround has been rapid: The first Lego Minecraft sets will be available this summer! The news just announced by Lego and Mojang in joint press conference in Denmark is that you can pre-order your sets beginning today. Lego Minecraft was the first proposal on Lego Cuusoo, Lego’s idea crowd-sourcing site, to gain over 10,000 [...]
02.16.12
QuickPay Makes Your Smartphone a Parking Attendant
A service that allows drivers to pay for parking from their smartphones hopes to expand the service to private garages, city streets and even valet services.
02.16.12
Speck Cases Have You (and Your iPhone 4S) Covered
I have what I can only describe as an unhealthy obsession with device cases. Where most see a necessary evil required to keep the demons of grime and accidental breakage at bay, I see??? clothes for my phone. Case in point ??? see what I did there? ??? in the months before I actually purchased [...]
02.16.12
Developer Profile: INKids Offers Collaborative Screen Play
INKids’s latest release Futaba Classroom Games for Kids offers a fantastic open-ended, multiplayer educational game for kids that demonstrates an ability to respond to the requests of educators and parents, and joins developers like Toca Boca and LaunchPad Toys in exploring how to use touch technology to facilitate engagement between children, parents and educators through [...]
02.16.12
YouTube’s Nerdy Fiddlers Strike a Chord With Geeks
Instead of concertos by Beethoven or Bach, fleet-fingered young violinists are finding fame with a new repertoire — awesomely geeky performances of videogame themes and other nerd classics, uploaded to YouTube and viewed by millions. “Violin and piano are generally associated with classical music,” says the young Australian musician known on YouTube as lara6683, who [...]
02.16.12
Racing Shovels See Serious Speed
Shovel racing returns to its roots in New Mexico, with one person, one shovel and a top speed of almost 74 mph.
02.16.12
Nanosecond Trading Could Make Markets Go Haywire
The afternoon of May 6, 2010 was among the strangest in economic history. Starting at 2:42 p.m. EDT, the Dow Jones stock index fell 600 points in just 6 minutes. Its nadir represented the deepest single-day decline in that market’s 114-year history. By 3:07 p.m., the index had rebounded. The “flash crash,” as it came [...]
02.16.12
Feb. 16, 2005: Matter of Protocol
The Kyoto Protocol goes into effect. But without the participation of the United States, it's not very effective.
02.16.12
Peer-to-Peer Pioneer Warns India About Road Infrastructure
Limewire founder Mark Gorton hates cars and campaigns aggressively to discourage their use. Now he's preaching his gospel in car-crazy India, where, he says, cities are courting disaster by catering to them.
02.16.12
Can These Commandos Salvage the Afghan War?
U.S. Special Forces are desperately trying to get Afghan cops ready to secure their country. But during their first big firefight, half those cops lose control. "Somebody tackle his ass," barks one sergeant, "before he shoots us all." David Axe reports from Afghanistan.
02.16.12
TSA Denies it Targets Attractive Female Passengers for Body Scans
Responding to complaints from female airline passengers that they were singled out for body scans by airport security agents for their looks, the Transportation Security Administration has denied that its agents target women who are attractive. In a blog post published late Wednesday, a TSA worker known as “Blogger Bob,” said that all milimeter wave [...]
02.15.12
Add it Up: Crunching Numbers for Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Jeremy Lin
What do Netflix, Amazon Prime, iPhone sales, and Jeremy Lin all have in common? They're all up against the law of large numbers.
02.15.12
MP3 Reseller Accuses Capitol Records of Sabotage
A one-of-a-kind startup enabling the online sale of pre-owned digital-music files is accusing Capitol Records of trying to sabotage its business, records obtained by Wired show.
02.15.12
The Future of Reading, From Avant-Garde Poetry to Sportscenter
We're reading everywhere, not just in books and magazines or on e-readers and tablets.
02.15.12
Video: A Xombie Flies for NASA
Masten Space Systems and Draper Laboratory successfully tested an autonomous lander designed to test guidance systems for future unmanned spacecraft.
02.15.12
Air Force Buys Fewer Drones — But Ups Drone Flights
The drones are busy in the skies over Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and they're just getting busier. The Pentagon plans to increase the flight rates of the deadly robots. So why's the Air Force saying it's going to buy fewer of them? One answer: It doesn't have enough humans.
02.15.12
Brilliant Video Star App Shoots a Music Video for Any Song on Your iPhone
Here???s one for the "How on Earth did nobody think of this before?" files. The Video Star app for iOS facilitates the creation of homespun music videos to go along with any song on your device.
02.15.12
Faster Controls Mean Tougher Zombies in Resident Evil 6
As the Resident Evil series’ control schemes have evolved to allow the player to react more quickly, so has the legion of undead evolved. Resident Evil 6 will allow players to move and shoot at the same time, something that Resident Evil 5 did not. Capcom said this week that the zombies in Resident Evil [...]
02.15.12
Apple Says Grabbing Address Book Data Is an iOS Policy Violation
Last week, it came to light that Path, a social media app for iOS, was storing user address-book data without first requesting permission. Today, Apple announced the app's actions were against policy.
02.15.12
Video: Robotic Arm Shoots Hoops, Darts
Cornell University's "universal jamming gripper" has better aim than we do.
02.15.12
Video: South Park Theme Remade With Kazoos, Jew’s Harp
If South Park‘s herky-jerky theme song isn’t quite weird enough for you, check out this new version by multi-instrumentalist Adam Ben Ezra. He used kazoos, Jew’s harp, string bass, clarinet and other noisemakers to create his buzzy version of the twisted show opener, which was originally recorded by Primus. The video, directed by Guy Dayan, [...]
02.15.12
The Tester Season 3, Episode 2: Tears of a Clown
In case you missed it, some indeterminate number of contestants are still involved in Sony’s PlayStation Network reality show The Tester, in which the winner will receive a job as a “production associate” at the Santa Monica game development studio. Last week, contestant Ashichan went home early, way before Death Panelist Brent Gocke learned to [...]
02.15.12
Pentagon: Future of Homemade Bombs Is High-Tech
The homemade bombs that insurgents use in Iraq and Afghanistan are low-tech efforts, making them hard to find and stop, and cheap enough to spread world wide. But the Pentagon's bomb squad doesn't see that lasting. Its four-year plan envisions fighting improvised explosive devices that are much more sophisticated, using "flexible electronics," "microbial fuel cells," and "highly energetic and molecular materials."
02.15.12
Zynga Gives Amazon Cloud the Slip
The web game giant Zynga, which revealed in an earnings call this week it reached 240 million active users, also let slip it has shifted dramatically away from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to its in-house Z Cloud to deliver its popular -Ville games and others.
02.15.12
Food Project Proposes Matrix-Style Vertical Chicken Farms
Architecture student Andr?? Ford has proposed a new system for the mass production of chicken that removes the birds??? cerebral cortex so that they don???t experience the horrors of being packed together tightly in vertical farms.
02.15.12
Odd Black Hole Is Last Survivor of Its Galaxy
The Hubble space telescope has spotted a supermassive black hole floating on the outskirts of a large galaxy. The location is odd since black holes of this size generally form in the centers of galaxies, not their edges. This suggests that the black hole is the lone survivor of a now-disintegrated dwarf galaxy.
02.15.12
Cisco Wraps Microsoft Skype Deal in Red Tape
Just when it looked like things were all sewn up for Microsoft's $8.5 billion Skype acquisition, Cisco has launched a last-minute appeal, asking the European Commission to step in and do what it does best: regulate.
02.15.12
SunGard Availability Services, Amazon Partner On Cloud Backup
SunGard Availability Services today announced it will offer cloud backup to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and SunGard cloud customers by tapping Amazon???s Direct Connect.
02.15.12
Video: Inventing on Principle
A former Apple designer's take on how to live your life, finding a guiding principle and how that helped him produce demos of some of the best web development tools we've ever seen.
02.15.12
Repost: Doing the Haplomastodon Breakdown
African elephants are sturdy beasts. They don???t break down easily. After death, elephant bodies become temporary islands of intense activity ??? providing nourishment to scavengers from hyenas to beetles. The same was true of prehistoric elephants. At ??guas de Arax??, Brazil, a resort hotel sits on top of an ancient elephant graveyard. Construction workers found [...]
02.15.12
What Jeremy Lin Teaches Us About Talent
Professional basketball player Jeremy Lin has taken the sports world by storm, but he was once a bench-warming outcast. How many more Jeremy Lins are out there? The evidence suggests teams are terrible at identifying talent, and Frontal Cortex blogger Jonah Lehrer explains why.
02.15.12
See for Yourself: The Pentagon’s $51 Billion ‘Black’ Budget
Their names are obscured by code words, or simply listed as "classified programs." But with a little digging, we can get a (limited) sense of how much money is being spent on the U.S. government's most secret military projects. In fact, you can take a look for yourself.
02.15.12
Beware the Hazardous Materials Lurking in Your Car
An environmental advocacy group has published its latest list of the toxic and hazardous materials lurking within new vehicles.
02.15.12
Karateka Remake Marks Jordan Mechner’s Return to Games
Nearly a decade since his last videogame, Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner is returning to his roots with a remake of the celebrated hit that launched his career: Karateka. Mechner told Wired.com that he would release the Karateka reboot as a downloadable game for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 later this year. He designed [...]
02.15.12
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