Today’s selection of articles from Kotaku’s reader run community: Dubs w/Dil: JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure (2012) • How Assassin’s Creed Made Me Appreciate Medieval Cities • Opinion: One Game Proves That Nintendo Switch Is A Successor To The 3DS
Source: Kotaku – Today’s selection of articles from Kotaku’s reader run community: Dubs w/Dil: JoJo’s Bizarre Adventu
Real Life Lore asks a question that I’ve never actually considered before: what if everybody in the entire world lived in just one building? How big would the building have to be to be able to fit all 7.4 billion of us? Surprisingly, not that big. That red cube up above would do the trick and it only takes up a few…
Source: Gizmodo – The Number of People You Can Fit in the World’s Biggest Buildings Is Staggering
We all loved Carrie Fisher. And while Carrie Fisher may not have loved each and every one of us back, she definitely loved her dog. That’s why Mondo is taking 10 percent of sales for its new Princess Leia portrait and donating it to animal welfare causes.
Source: io9 – When You Buy This Princess Leia Portrait, Proceeds Go to Animal Welfare
Source: Engadget – NASA will use Apollo 1 hatch to honor fallen crew
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Tesla CEO Elon Musk was already on President Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum, but the White House announced today that he will also be joining the administration’s new manufacturing council, a private sector group that advises the U.S. secretary of commerce. He headed a meeting on Monday at the White House. Musk was present along with several other industry leaders who are now also formally joining the manufacturing council. CNBC reports: “The group of business leaders includes Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk and chief executives of large American companies like Ford, Dow Chemical, General Electric, Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Richard Trumka, president of the labor federation AFL-CIO, will also give advice.” As we recently reported, while Musk’s mission to accelerate the advent of renewable energy might seem at odd with Trump’s plan to unlock fossil fuel reserve, but Musk is betting that job creation is more important to the new President than simply satisfying the oil industry. If Trump wants to be the champion of job creation and Tesla shows that renewables create a lot of jobs, then their interests are aligned. Tesla currently employs over 30,000 people, more than 25,000 of which are in the U.S. The company wants to add over 3,000 manufacturing jobs at its factory in Fremont, California, 1,000 at its solar panel factory in Buffalo, New York, and over to 6,500 at the Gigafactory in Nevada.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Tesla CEO Elon Musk Joins President Trump’s New Manufacturing Council
schwit1 writes: According to one think tank that studies corruption in government, 85% of the world lives under governments that are essentially corrupt. New Atlas reports: “‘Corruption’ is defined by Transparency International (TI) as ‘the abuse of entrusted power for private gain.’ Each year since 1995, TI has published a Corruption Perceptions Index that scores the world’s nations out of 100 for their public sector honesty and the just-released 2016 report paints the same bleak picture we’ve been seeing now for two decades except it’s getting worse. According to the data, despite the illusion of elected government in half the world’s countries, democracy is losing. Only two countries scored 90 out of 100 this year, and just 54 of the 176 countries (30%) assessed in the report scored better than 50. Fifty percent might have constituted a pass in a High School arithmetic test, but for an elected government to be so inept at carrying out the will of the electorate, it is a clear betrayal of the people. The average country score this year is a paltry 43, indicating endemic corruption in a country’s public sector is the norm. Even more damning is that more countries declined than improved in this year’s results. Our analysis of TI’s data shows 85 percent of human beings are governed by regimes that score 50 or less, indicating that the integrity of people in authority across the globe remains sadly lacking.” schwit1 notes: “Not surprisingly, the countries at the bottom of the list are almost all Middle Eastern nations, all of whom are the source of most of the world’s terrorism and Islamic madness. The few others are those trying to become communist paradises, Venezuela and North Korea.” New Atlas also mentions “the latest update of the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, released on the same day as the Transparency International report, reflects an almost identical perspective. The EIU Democracy Index measures the state of democracy in 167 countries and the average global score fell from 5.55 out of 10 in 2015 to 5.52 in 2016, with 72 countries recording a lower score versus 38 which showed an improvement. You can register for free and download the EIU report here.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – New Data Shows 85% of Humans Live Under a Corrupt Government
Tonight President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States” that suspends refugee admissions for 120 days and suspends admissions from Syria indefinitely — among many ot…
Source: Engadget – Mark Zuckerberg lightly criticizes Trump order on immigration
Watching Stranger Things, it was pretty obvious big things were in store for Millie Bobby Brown. But no one could have guessed it would be this big. Like, hundreds-of-stories big.
Source: io9 – Stranger Things’ Millie Bobby Brown to Star in Godzilla 2
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Today, Twitter joined the ranks of Yahoo, Cloudflare and Google by announcing it had received two national security letters, one in 2015 and one in 2016. The NSLs came with gag orders that prevented Twitter from telling the public or the targeted users about the government’s demands. The FBI recently lifted these gag orders, allowing Twitter to acknowledge the NSLs for the first time. In the newly-published NSLs, the FBI asked Twitter to turn over “the name, address, length of service, and electronic communications transactional records” of two users. Twitter associate general counsel Elizabeth Banker said that the company provided a “very limited set of data” in response to the requests, but did not make clear exactly what kind of data Twitter provided. “Twitter remains unsatisfied with restrictions on our right to speak more freely about national security requests we may receive,” Banker wrote in a blog post. “We would like a meaningful opportunity to challenge government restrictions when ‘classification’ prevents speech on issues of public importance.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Twitter Releases National Security Letters
In a call with analysts on Thursday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the consumer PC market is finally stabilizing after being in a long decline. His statement echoes a recent report by International Data Corporation in which the market research firm said it was optimistic that the PC market would rebound this year after five years of contraction as people switched to mobile devices. Fortune reports: Nadella, however, did not cite specific numbers showing that the consumer PC market was rallying. He merely said that video gamers seem to be buying high-end computers loaded with Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating system, raising hope of an overall recovery in the PC market. Additionally, Nadella said that businesses are increasingly upgrading to Windows 10, which is noteworthy because several other third-party research firms said in November that Windows 10 adoption numbers seemed low. “I think the overall adoption cycle of Windows 10 in the enterprise is perhaps the best we have seen for any new release of Windows,” Nadella said. Still, Microsoft’s personal computing business unit that includes Windows 10 dropped 5% year-over-year in the latest quarter to $11.8 billion. Still, the unit’s revenue was better than what the company had originally projected because of an unexpected uptick in Windows 10 sales, said chief financial officer Amy Hood. Microsoft said that the money it collects from sales of Windows by other PC makers rose 5% in the latest quarter, which Nadella said highlights an “improving commercial PC market and enterprise demand.” Nadella said that computer manufacturers that use Windows are seeing an uptick in sales of high-end PCs. He took credit for the rise by saying that the Surface blazed the trail for other manufacturers to create similar devices, which are selling well. “The enterprise adoption of these new devices is driving the all around excitement of Windows 10,” Nadella said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Says PC Market Is Finally Stabilizing
Today Gears of War 4 has enabled Cross Play between the XBOX One and Windows 10 PCs for a special Quick Play playlist. Positive comments from previous testing influenced the decision to pursue more testing over the coming months. The intentions of the developer, The Coalition, is to eventually make it permanent. Console and PC players have benefited greatly with the increased player count during the testing phase. Hopefully this trickles down to other XBOX Play Anywhere titles that have a PC player base. Forza anyone?
The last time the PC and console communities were pitted against each other, the console players were routed in a embarrassing, horrific bloodbath. Wonder what will happen this time when the full PC crowd is unleashed against our console brethren? Let the bodies hit the floor!
As such, beginning today, Social Quickplay will now be a Cross-play playlist! This step is planned to be a permanent move for the future of Social Quickplay, with the first few months being a ‘trial period’ in order to monitor player feedback alongside data to ensure the Test Weekend was representative.
Core and Competitive will remain platform independent, only matching Xbox players with each other and Windows 10 players with each other. Despite the closely matched performance between users on both platforms seen in our cross-play Test Weekend, we always want to ensure our Ranked experiences are as closely matched and competitive as possible. Due to the major popularity of Social Quickplay on Windows 10, we will be looking at introducing new Core and Competitive solutions for Windows 10 players in the future to provide more focused offerings to experience the more competitive ranked play of Gears of War 4.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – Gears of War 4 Introduces Versus Social Cross-Play Between XBone and Win 10 PCs
If your table tennis smash is a little too powerful, or your beer pong game has gotten out of hand, here’s a quick fix for those dented ping pong balls.
Source: LifeHacker – Fix a Dented Ping Pong Ball With Boiling Water
Enlarge / President Trump has tagged Defense Secretary James Mattis to lead the charge to fix all the cyber things and smash the cyber adversaries. (credit: Getty | Sara D. Davis )
Today, the Washington Post published what appears to be a draft of an executive order to be signed by President Donald Trump. The order, entitled “Strengthening US Cyber Security and Capabilities,” puts flesh on the bones of the “cyber review” promised by Trump during the campaign. It spells out who will conduct the review and what its specific goals are. The order also sets a brisk pace for the review, calling for initial recommendations for the security of “national security systems” and critical infrastructure within 60 days. The review also has a 60-day deadline to provide the president with a list of “principal cyber adversaries.”
This is not the first 60-day cyber fix-it order from the White House. After the breach at the Office of Personnel Management in 2015, the Obama administration ordered a “cyber sprint” across the Federal government to get systems into compliance with security best practices. Results were mixed. The chief information officers of OPM and the Department of Education resigned under pressure from the House Government Oversight Committee after they failed to complete a majority of the mandated tasks.
The new order’s language indicates that the Trump administration will see private network infrastructure as being the federal government’s turf to defend—but that the administration will lean heavily on the private sector to figure out how to defend it. “Federal Government has a responsibility to defend America from cyber attacks that could threaten US national interests or cause significant damage to Americans’ personal or economic security,” the draft order states. “That responsibility extends to protecting both privately and publicly operated critical networks and infrastructure. At the same time, the need for dynamism, flexibility, and innovation in cyber security demands that the government exercise its responsibility in close cooperation with private sector entities.”
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Source: Ars Technica – Draft Cyber Executive Order calls for immediate 60-day cyber miracle
Source: Engadget – ‘Pillars of Eternity II’ breaks crowdfunding goal in 24 hours
One of the new features to look forward to in the still work-in-progress Creators Update for Windows 10 is a “Game Mode.” It’s designed to eke out a little more performance when playing games and has just been added to the latest preview build of Windows.
Source: LifeHacker – Remains of the Day: Windows 10 ‘Game Mode’ Is Now Available in Beta
Team Rocket has had a rough career. Giovanni, their leader, doesn’t always appreciate them. They’re usually broke. And they usually lose. Well, not this time.
Source: Kotaku – For The First Time In Almost 20 Years, Team Rocket Beat Ash In The Pokémon Anime
It’s been said that the pterosaur, which can only be described as a bird-reptile-dinosaur-esque-thing, was the largest flying animal. This giant beast—which roamed the Earth during the Cretaceous period roughly 66.5 million years ago—was a reptile but not actually a dinosaur. Despite being winged, it wasn’t bird,…
Source: Gizmodo – Flying Cretaceous Monster Ate Dinosaurs For Breakfast
John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China has become a cult favorite for many reasons—its goofy mix of humor, action, and quotable lines; Kurt Russell’s Kurt Russell-ness—but the film’s visual style is also quite distinctive. The new book The Official Art of Big Trouble in Little China is devoted to collecting and…
Source: io9 – The Art That Helped Make Big Trouble in Little China a Cult Classic Masterpiece
Immi, a free online program, seeks to educate immigrants, people on visas, and green card holders on their legal status, as well as explain options for staying in or leaving the country. The tool also makes finding help from nonprofit legal experts easy.
Source: LifeHacker – Immi Helps Immigrants Determine Their Legal Status, Find Resources to Help
There are plenty of sketchy games on Steam, but some are so fishy that the stink even causes Valve’s eyes to water. Platformica was one such game, and now it’s off Steam. Somewhat surprisingly, the game’s developer has admitted that, yeah, he screwed up.
Source: Kotaku – Developer Admits He ‘Deserved’ To Have Game Removed From Steam After Fake Reviews
