You probably remember those tantalizing tech predictions from the 1990s. The world wide web was going to become a paradise for access to information and civil discourse. The internet would allow people of different cultures to come together and learn from each other. The information superhighway was supposed to make…
Source: Gizmodo – Tech Nerds Who Predicted an Internet Utopia Are Sorry For Being So Wrong
Japanese scientists are hard at work trying to create the only kind of robot that matters in this hopeless hellworld: one capable of pulling off an inspirational training montage, glistening robo-muscles and all. Their latest efforts have been detailed in a paper published in Science Robotics earlier this month,…
Source: Gizmodo – Japanese Scientists Made a Sweating Robot That Can Finally Pull Off a Sweet Training Montage
Off-white humor blog McSweeney’s has a guide to asking questions at public events, formatted by writer and teacher Meriah Crawford as a final exam. Questions include “How long should my questions be?” and “Is this a good opportunity to explain how the speaker is wrong?” and answers include “Sit your ass back down” and…
Source: LifeHacker – How to Ask Questions at a Q&A, Courtesy of McSweeney’s
In 2010, the Library of Congress started archiving every single public tweet that was published on Twitter, but that practice will end next year. Going forward, the LOC will only archive tweets that are considered significant.
Effective Jan. 1, 2018, the Library will acquire tweets on a selective basis — similar to our collections of web sites. The Library regularly reviews its collections practices to account for environmental shifts, diversity of collections and topics, cost effectiveness, use of collections and other factors. This change results from such a review.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – The Library of Congress Will No Longer Archive Every Tweet
The Great Lakes region is sending the year out with a bang. Wave after wave of lake effect snow has pummeled the region, making for a record-setting white Christmas and a shoveling project that could take until New Year’s Eve to complete.
Source: Gizmodo – Why a Small City in Pennsylvania Just Shattered a Snowfall Record
Philip Beesley’s Astrocyte aims to show that architecture can be more than just ornamental. Built from acrylic, mylar, sensors, custom glasswork, 3D-printed lights and using AI, chemistry and a responsive soundscape, it not only invokes emotional rea…
Source: Engadget – ‘Astrocyte’ explores how architecture can interact with humans
Last week we reported on Ubuntu maker Canonical’s financial performance for FY2017 with a $122M turnover and nearly 600 employees after spotting the latest data. For those wondering how that compares to previous years, here is more of the past year’s performance…
Source: Phoronix – A Look At Canonical’s Financial Performance From 2009 To 2017
Traveling the skies by jet lifts us far from the hustle and bustle of the world below. From a report: But many flyers don’t know that soaring miles above Earth also takes us out of a vital protective cocoon — and a little closer to a place where our cells can be pummeled by radiation from colliding stars, black holes, and more. You can’t see these high-energy charged particles, but at any given moment, tens of thousands of them are soaring through space and slamming into Earth’s atmosphere from all directions. Also called cosmic rays or cosmic ionizing radiation, the particles are the cores of atoms, such as iron and nickel, moving at nearly light-speed. They can travel for millions of years through space before randomly hitting Earth. These rays don’t pose much of a risk to humans on Earth’s surface, since the planet’s atmosphere and magnetic field shield us from most of the threat.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Flying in Airplanes Exposes People To More Radiation Than Standing Next To a Nuclear Reactor
This weekend, a security consultant detailed what he believed were serious vulnerabilities in Uber’s software—and his disbelief that the company’s bug bounty program refused to pay him for his research. Unfortunately, it’s a story without heroes.
Source: Gizmodo – No One Looks Good in Uber’s Bug Bounty Fight
If there was any doubt that what Elon Musk called a “Nuclear alien UFO from North Korea” was actually just one of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets flying over California, remember that this photographer knew it was coming and had time to position several cameras to catch a stunning timelapse of the event.
Source: Gizmodo – Timelapse of Elon Musk’s ‘Nuclear Alien UFO’ Shows That the Truth Is Out There
Stem cell clinics selling bogus, unregulated therapies to treat serious problems like cancer are a major problem in the US, and in November the Food and Drug Administration at long-last announced that such “unscrupulous” critics would bear the wrath of the federal government.
Source: Gizmodo – Shady Stem Cell Clinic Twists FDA Quote to Peddle Unregulated Treatment
NVIDIA is allegedly preparing a new variant of GTX 1060 that is aimed at Internet cafes. This version of the card will feature slightly lower VRAM and a cut-down memory bus, while retaining the same number of cores as the 6GB variant.
The GTX 1060 is an exclusive model for the Chinese market, where the popularity of Internet cafes is booming. These cards are to be sold in bigger quantities, hence no fancy packaging is to be expected (so in that regard, it would be similar to P106-100 mining series). Expreview has confirmed that GTX 1060 5GB will use 1280 CUDA cores. This should be enough for solid 1080p gaming at higher settings.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – NVIDIA to Launch GeForce GTX 1060 with 5GB Memory
Customers who use assistive technologies can currently upgrade to Windows 10 at no cost, but that loophole is ending very soon. Starting Monday, January 1, all users who wish to install the operating system on a new machine will have to pay $119.99 for Windows 10 Home or $199.99 for Windows 10 Pro.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – PSA: This Week Might Be Your Last Chance to Get Windows 10 for Free
It seems that modern computers are so complex that there are just some things they can’t do quickly. Dan Luu (a hardware/software engineer at Microsoft) had a nagging feeling that the computers of today felt slower than those he used as a kid and decided to document the latency of an assortment of devices from 1977 to present.
Almost every computer and mobile device that people buy today is slower than common models of computers from the 70s and 80s. Low-latency gaming desktops and the iPad pro can get into the same range as quick machines from thirty to forty years ago, but most off-the-shelf devices aren’t even close.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – Latency: Why Typing on Old Computers Just Feels Better
If you want to believe that wayward Alliance paladin Leeroy Jenkins really did wipe his World of Warcraft guild more than 12 years ago, that’s fine, but a new video has been released to prove what should have been, as described by Ben “Anfrony” Vinson, “obvious satire.” Vinson, who was responsible for recording the iconic 2005 video, is still stupefied that anyone fell for it.
I am releasing this never-before-seen first take/dry run of the Leeroy Jenkins video in hopes of raising awareness about Net Neutrality. I’ve been holding onto this for over a decade waiting for the “right” moment to make it public, and then last week Ajit Pai created his awful/condescending video and it riled me up so much that I decided it was finally time to unleash this gem of Internet history on the world to do my part to help out.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – “Leeroy Jenkins” Was Staged, but It Still Lives On in Our Hearts
We tested the plastic butt straw. We figured out how to avoid the diaper-change urine stream. We learned Snapchat. Parenting is hard work, but we tried to make it a little bit easier. Here are our best parenting stories of 2017.
Source: LifeHacker – The Best Parenting Stories of 2017
A few weeks ago, I tested almost every one of Apple’s wired charging solutions to find out which one was best. Job done, right? Well not quite, because this year’s crop of iPhone’s are Apple’s first handsets to have built-in wireless charging too! Then, to make things even more confusing, Apple’s most recent software…
Source: Gizmodo – We Tested 5 Wireless Chargers for the iPhone and This is the Best
An anonymous reader shares a report: Internet users are complaining more about net neutrality-related issues since the FCC voted to repeal the existing net neutrality rules earlier this month, according to the FCC’s consumer complaint data. The FCC allows consumers to submit complaints about a variety of telecom-related problems, from receiving unwanted phone calls to billing fraud. After adopting net neutrality rules in 2015, the FCC added net neutrality to the list of possible gripes, such as slowed-down internet service or content being blocked. The FCC can use those complaints to spot trends or even launch investigations. According to the data (via the FCC’s Consumer Complaint Center), people appear to file more net neutrality complaints when the topic is in the news and people are paying more attention to their internet performance.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Net Neutrality Complaints Rise Amid FCC Repeal
According to The Japan Times, the organizers of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics plan to use expansive face recognition software at the games, scanning and tracking the faces of hundreds of thousands of athletes, journalists, and officials. Sources close to Olympic officials told the newspaper that the technology won’t be used…
Source: Gizmodo – Olympic Planners Want to Scan the Faces of Hundreds of Thousands at the 2020 Tokyo Games
Holy crap was there a lot of television this year. While we’ve already covered our best and worst shows of the year, there were many specific moments in these series, as well as memorable highlights from shows that didn’t make it into our Top 10 list, that we’d be remiss to not highlight—or remind you of how awful…
Source: Gizmodo – The Best and Worst Television Moments of 2017