another random user writes with news that Microsoft has sorted out the Windows Store guidelines such that games rated 'Mature' in the U.S. will be allowed. An earlier version of the guidelines took cues from the European PEGI rating system, which lumps pornographic content into the same rating as mainstream games that involve violence. In the U.S., they're split up into Adult (for porn) and Mature (for things like Skyrim, Call of Duty, and Assassin's Creed). Gamers and developers were worried that a large number of very popular games were going to be disallowed on the Windows Store. Microsoft hopes to have the situation fixed by December — not ideal, since Windows 8 is now out, but better than nothing.
zacharye writes "How bad is HTC's current tailspin? So bad it makes Nokia look like a growth company. HTC's handset volume declined by -43% in the autumn quarter vs. Nokia's -23% volume decline. This is very interesting because HTC is using Android, the world's most popular smartphone OS, that is powering 40% annualized growth among its vendors. Nokia is limping along with an unholy mix of the obsolete Symbian platform, the moribund S40 feature phone platform and a niche OS called Windows Phone."
itwbennett writes "From calcium in cameras and germanium in CPUs to selenium in solar cells. Here's a look at how every single element in the periodic table is used in common tech products. For example: Scandium is used in the bulbs in metal halide lamps, which produce a white light source with a high color rendering index that resembles natural sunlight. These lights are often appropriate for the taping of television shows. ... Yttrium helps CRT televisions produce a red color. When used in a compound, it collects energy and passes it to the phosphor. ... Niobium: Lithium niobate is used in mobile phone production, incorporated into surface acoustic wave filters that convert acoustic waves into electrical signals and make smartphone touchscreens work. SAW filters also provide cell signal enhancement, and are used to produce the Apple iPad 2."
whoever57 writes "The man who claimed ownership of 50% of Facebook has been arrested and charged with fraud in connection with his claims. The United States attorney in Manhattan said, 'Ceglia's alleged conduct not only constitutes a massive fraud attempt, but also an attempted corruption of our legal system through the manufacture of false evidence.' 'Dressing up a fraud as a lawsuit does not immunize you from prosecution.'"
New submitter Escape From NY writes "3.6 million Social Security numbers and 387,000 credit and debit card numbers were stolen from the SC Department of Revenue. Most of the credit and debit card numbers were encrypted — all but about 16,000. There were several different attacks, all of which originated outside the country. The first they're aware of happened on August 27, and four more happened in September. Officials first learned of the breach on October 10, and the security holes were closed on October 20. This is still a developing story, but anyone who filed a SC state tax return since 1998 my be at risk. Governor Nikki Haley today signed an executive order (PDF) to beef up the state's IT security."
New submitter seawall writes "Paul Allen just opened the Living Computer Museum in Seattle. The 'Living' means many of the computers are actually running. There's a Xerox Sigma 9, which was introduced in 1971 and is quite similar to the computer that sent the first signal over Arpanet. There's also Tops-10 on original DEC hardware, an operating TOAD-1 system, and a DEC PDP-7 that's one of only four in the world."
An anonymous reader writes "Iran and its nuclear program seem to be getting all the headlines. Yet, Iran has found a way to respond to western cyber attacks such as Stuxnet, drone surveillance and targeted assassinations; they've decided to respond in kind. Iran has launched its own cyber attacks on U.S. banks via denial-of-service attacks. Iranian drones recently were used to spy on Israeli nuclear facilities. Cyberweapons were also used against Saudi oil facilities. The goal: to make sure the west, specifically the United States, knows that Iran does have the tools to strike back. While Iran does not have a world-class military like the United States, it does have the capabilities to cause damage if it wants to. With Iran taking to cyberspace and drones, it shows such technology is not just under the control of the U.S. Iran has been careful, though, not to escalate the conflict. The risk: what if the plan backfires and goes beyond its intended scope?"
jfruh writes "It's an open secret that many high-profile users of social media networks pay to pad their fan counts. But what you do you get for your money? One blogger decided to shell out some cash to find out. Instead of the real human fans he was promised, he found himself followed by a motley collection of obvious fakes created by non-English speakers and accounts that seem to mainly exist to spam porn links."
An anonymous reader writes "TechCrunch has launched a project called CrunchGov, which aims to bring educated people together to work on tech-related government policy. 'It includes a political leaderboard that grades politicians based on how they vote on tech issues, a light legislative database of technology policy, and a public markup utility for crowdsourcing the best ideas on pending legislation.' They give politicians scores based on how their votes align with consensus on policy in the tech industry. 'A trial run of the public markup utility in Congress has already proven successful. When Rep. Issa opened his own alternative to SOPA for public markup, Project Madison participants came in droves with surprisingly specific legal suggestions. For instance, one savvy user noticed that current piracy legislation could mistakenly leave a person who owns a domain name legally responsible for the actions of the website administrator (the equivalent of holding a landlord responsible if his tenant was growing pot in the backyard). The suggestion was included in the updated bill before Congress, representing perhaps the first time that the public, en masse, could have a realistic shot at contributing to federal law purely based on the merit of their ideas.'"
Hugh Pickens writes "According to Rebecca J. Rosen, it may seem impossible for an encyclopedia of everything to ever near completion, but at least for the major articles on topics like big wars, important historical figures, and central scientific concepts, the English-language Wikipedia is pretty well filled out. 'After an encyclopedia reaches 100,000 articles, the pool of good material shrinks. By the time one million articles are written, it must tax ingenuity to think of something new. Wikipedia,' writes historian and Wikipedia editor Richard Jensen, 'passed the four-million-article mark in summer 2012.' With the exciting work over, editors are losing interest. In the spring of 2012, 3,300 editors contributed more than 100 edits per month each — that's a 31 percent drop from spring of 2007, when that number was 4,800. For example, let's take the Wikipedia article for the War of 1812 which runs 14,000 words cobbled together by 3,000 editors. Today, the War of 1812 page has many more readers than it did in 2008 — 623,000 compared with 434,000 — but the number who make a change has dropped precipitously, from 256 to just 28. Of those original 256, just one remains active. The reason, Jensen believes, is that the article already has had so many edits, there is just not that much to do. Jensen says Wikipedia should now devote more resources toward getting editors access to higher-quality scholarship (in private databases like JSTOR), admission to military-history conferences, and maybe even training in the field of historiography, so that they could bring the articles up to a more polished, professional standard. 'Wikipedia is now a mature reference work with a stable organizational structure and a well-established reputation. The problem is that it is not mature in a scholarly sense (PDF).'"
We recently discussed news of a UK court ruling in which the judge decided Apple must publicly acknowledge that Samsung's Galaxy Tab did not infringe upon the iPad's design, both on the Apple website and in several publications. The acknowledgement has now been posted, and it's anything but apologetic. It states the court's ruling, helpfully referring to "Apple's registered design No. 000018607-0001," and quotes the judges words as an advertisement. The judge wrote, "The informed user's overall impression of each of the Samsung Galaxy Tablets is the following. From the front they belong to the family which includes the Apple design; but the Samsung products are very thin, almost insubstantial members of that family with unusual details on the back. They do not have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design. They are not as cool." They go on to mention German and U.S. cases which found in Apple's favor. Apple's statement concludes, "So while the U.K. court did not find Samsung guilty of infringement, other courts have recognized that in the course of creating its Galaxy tablet, Samsung willfully copied Apple's far more popular iPad."
the_newsbeagle writes "Bottom-dwelling fish that live near the wrecked Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant still show elevated radiation levels 19 months after the accident — and those radiation levels are not declining. Researcher Ken Buesseler says this indicates the seafloor sediments are contaminated (abstract), and will remain so for decades. He said, 'I was struck by how [the radiation levels] really haven’t changed over the last year. Since cesium doesn't bioaccumulate to a significant degree, and in fact is lost when fish move to a less contaminated area, this implies that the cesium source is still there'"
Jamin Barton is a soft-spoken musician with a quick laugh and a winning smile who tends bar under the nickname "Sudsy" at the 500 Club in San Francisco's Mission District. He was closing up after a slow Tuesday last month when he saw the phone."We find about 20 a week," he says with a shrug. ...
Finally. A beautiful video of some amazing airplanes ? all shot air-to-air ? and mercifully devoid of a cheesy soundtrack or lame commentary. Just a camera, a pair of NASA F-18s, the agency's 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft and the orbiter Endeavor.
For the first time, the Navy has fired missiles from a remote-controlled boat. The killer-robot fleet is now cutting across the waves of the sea, and here's video of it.
Internet Explorer 10 is here and it brings with it a completely re-imagined, touch-friendly interface for Windows 8 tablets. The desktop version is less inspired, but on Windows 8 tablets IE 10 shines.
Less than a month into their Kickstarter for a "friendly, affordable 3-D printer," Panda Robotics has canceled their seemingly on-track campaign for PandaBot.
Citigroup fired an analyst for leaking unpublished research to bloggers and a magazine writer.
The Supreme Court on Monday will hear arguments on whether it should halt a legal challenge to a once-secret warrantless surveillance program targeting Americans' communications that Congress eventually legalized in 2008. The hearing will mark the first time the Supreme Court has reviewed any case touching on the eavesdropping program that was secretly employed by the George W. Bush administration in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, and largely codified into law years later.
Whether by natural causes, murder or suicide, the one thing you can count on is death. The unlucky ones die without family or friends surrounding them, alone. Inevitably even these forgotten corpses are noticed. The police arrive, then the coroner. Eventually the body is taken away. To find out what happens next, Wired followed Steri-Clean, a company that specializes in bio-remediation, including cleaning up after dead bodies have been removed from a scene.
From digital photo frames to calendars to refrigerator magnets, it seems there is no shortage of ways to print and share your favorite Instagram photos. Now, thanks to U.K.-based Firebox, you can add chocolate bars to the list.
Owners of Apple's third-generation might be tempted to upgrade to the new fourth iPad when it goes on pre-order at midnight. But the buyer's remorse is in vein.
With plenty of orcs, elves and epic action, the proof-of-concept pilot will stand out in a sea of sitcoms and reality shows if it gets picked up for broadcast.
Opponents of the Georgia Aquarium's controversial plan to move 18 wild beluga whales into captivity say their capture wasn't just inhumane, but potentially destructive to a beluga clan, perhaps even a culture.
A problem with the Google App Engine that has impacted several popular services has led to outage outrage, reports said on Friday.
When Gregor Blanco of the San Francisco Giants hit a line drive over center field last night in Game Two of the World Series, he almost certain hit the "sweet spot," the part of the bat where the best hits usually come from. But missing the sweet spot can send a lot of vibration into the batters hands and arms, so bat companies have been scratching their heads for decades, trying to take the sting out of the swing.
Some people complain that the age of exploration is over. But for the past 50 years we have made it our mission to explore far and wide in the solar system, sending robotic probes to every nook and cranny we can find.
Google is giving its Maps service a visual refresh with some new features that showcase the natural world. New terrain shading and labels in Google Maps highlight forests, deserts, and mountain ranges around the world.
Transforming transfixing genre fiction into memorable cinema is no simple task. These are some of the most successful literary-cinematic crossovers of all time.
The Pentagon's secretive drone and commando base in the Horn of Africa is getting a lot bigger and a lot busier as the U.S. doubles down on its shadowy campaign of air strikes, robot surveillance and Special Operation Forces raids in the terror havens of Yemen and Somalia.
The Apache Software Foundation is best known for its web server software, which is not only the most popular web server in world but also the most popular piece of open source software. But the not-for-profit foundation houses nearly 150 other open source projects, and in recent years, it has stewarded several of the most important projects of the cloud computing age, including the "NoSQL" databases CouchDB and Cassandra and the widely popular number-crunching platform Hadoop.
How hard did that ball hit Tigers pitcher Doug Fister in the head last night? Physicst Rhett Allain does the analysis.
A New York man claiming to own half of Facebook was arrested from his rural New York home Friday and charged with a multi-billion dollar scheme to defraud the social-networking site and its chief executive and founder, Mark Zuckerberg.
Microsoft may have retired Clippy five years ago, but yesterday, the annoying Office icon popped up -- unwanted of course -- at the company's Palo Alto, California retail store.
Dinosaurs still walk?and fly?among us: We call them birds. Most paleontologists think birds descended from a group of winged dinosaurs, and thus dinos never went completely extinct. But where did the wings come from? New discoveries from Canada suggest that both wings and feathers arose earlier in dinosaur evolution than previously thought, possibly to attract members of the opposite sex or to protect hatching baby dinos.
World Series nose-picking attendees beware. MLB has contracted photographers to shoot hugely hi-res gigapan photos of every MLB post-season game this year, and you could be caught in the act.
You may have been led to believe that the future of Microsoft hinged upon Steve Ballmer?s performance in New York Thursday. That somehow the software giant?s financial success depended upon its CEO?s repertoire of ticks and growls. It didn?t, nor does it rely solely on the immediate success of Windows 8.
Doping in professional sports?is back in the news, as the overwhelming evidence against Lance Armstrong led to his being stripped of his seven Tour de France titles and more. But instead of focusing on the issues of performance-enhancing?drugs and whether professional athletes be allowed to take them,?I'd like to talk about the security and economic ...
Three directors, three reviewers. A nonlinear take on the sprawling movie adaptation of David Mitchell's time-hopping novel.
Whether videos of someone get you rolling on the floor laughing, there is plenty of humor on the internet to go around. Tired of digging through all the sites and video channels to find the few things that make him chuckle, Daniel Altmann built a humor recommendation engine, akin to Pandora's musical organization system.
Like many online media outlets, Buzzfeed is moving toward the so-called "sponsored stories" advertising model -- a blending of advertising and editorial content placed smack dab in the content stream. But 6-year-old Buzzfeed, whose motto is to capture the viral web in realtime, has been cutting corners with its sponsored stories that it creates for its clients -- and has been lifting images from the internet without permission or proper attribution.