Star Wars is branching out more and more—not just with movies now, but with TV shows, too. One of the latest is a “Rise of the Empire”-era spy show starring Rogue One’s Cassian Andor. But it’s also the perfect opportunity to bring one of Star Wars’ most iconic, but so far unseen, aliens to life for the first time.
Source: io9 – The Cassian Andor Show Is the Perfect Time for Star Wars to Properly Introduce the Bothans
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and the good looking criminals of Firefly are finally going to be available for free online for anyone to revisit or watch for the first time. This should be a cause for celebration. But they’re coming back courtesy of Facebook Watch, and as much as I’d love for friends to finally see…
Source: Gizmodo – I Wanted to Stream Buffy, Angel, and Firefly for Free, But Not Like This
Blizzard has now announced all of the cards from Hearthstone’s upcoming Rastakhan’s Rumble expansion, and once again, it looks like the Hearthstone metagame is in for a huge shake-up once it drops next week.
Source: Kotaku – Everything You Need To Know About Hearthstone’s Next Expansion, Rastakhan’s Rumble
Clearly upset his slushie isn’t as free-flowing as he’d like it to be, this is a short video of a guy at a 7-11 in Taiwan who accidentally Hulks the entire nozzle off the front of the machine, then, thanks to his quick thinking, proceeds to catch the waterfall of frozen drink in his hand. Personally I would have just walked away and informed a store clerk that I spotted a vandal breaking their slushie machine, but clearly this man is a firm believer that you never know when you’re going to need a dripping handful of Orange Freezie.
Keep going for the whole video with a much more watchable framerate.
Source: Geekologie – Settle Down, Hulk: Guy Breaks Slow-Flowing Slushie Machine
We see a lot of deals around the web over on Kinja Deals, but these were our ten favorites today.
Source: Kotaku – The 10 Best Deals of November 30, 2018
An estimated 4 billion people in the world lack a physical address. Researchers at the MIT Media Lab and Facebook are now proposing a new way to address the unaddressed: with machine learning. From a report: The team first trained a deep-learning algorithm to extract the road pixels from satellite images. Another algorithm connected the pixels together into a road network. The system analyzed the density and shape of the roads to segment the network into different communities, and the densest cluster was labeled as the city center. The regions around the city center were divided into north, south, east, and west quadrants, and streets were numbered and lettered according to their orientation and distance from the center.
When they compared their final results with a random sample of unmapped regions whose streets had been labeled manually, their approach successfully addressed more than 80% of the populated areas, improving coverage compared with Google Maps or OpenStreetMaps. This isn’t the only way to automate the creation of addresses. The organization what3words generates a unique three-word combination for every 3-by-3-meter square on a global grid. The scheme has already been adopted in regions of South Africa, Turkey, and Mongolia by national package delivery services, local hospitals, and regional security teams. But Ilke Demir, a researcher at Facebook and one of the creators of the new system, says its main advantage is that it follows existing road topology and helps residents understand how two addresses relate to one another.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Researchers Are Proposing a New Way To Generate Street Addresses by Extracting Roads From Satellite Images
Rocksteady is not making a Superman game, as you may already know if you listen to Kotaku Splitscreen. The studio behind the critically acclaimed Arkham trilogy won’t be at The Game Awards next week either, according to director Sefton Hill.
Source: Kotaku – Rocksteady is not making a Superman game, as you may already know if you listen to Kotaku Splitscree
The Securities and Exchange Commission has settled charges against boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr. and music producer Khaled Khaled, known as DJ Khaled, for failing to disclose payments they received for promoting investments in Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). Floyd Mayweather Jr. received $100,000 from Centra Tech Inc. and DJ Khaled received $50,000. DJ Khaled described the ICO as a “Game changer” and Floyd Mayweather promoted the launch of the Centra ICO to his followers as “starts in a few hours. Get yours before they sell out, I got mine…” Floyd neglected to mention that he was compensated an additional $200,000 for two other ICO promotions as he bragged, “You can call me Floyd Crypto Mayweather from now on.” They were fined over $765,000 by the SEC and are currently banned from promoting securities in the near future.
Without admitting or denying the findings, Mayweather and Khaled agreed to pay disgorgement, penalties and interest. Mayweather agreed to pay $300,000 in disgorgement, a $300,000 penalty, and $14,775 in prejudgment interest. Khaled agreed to pay $50,000 in disgorgement, a $100,000 penalty, and $2,725 in prejudgment interest. In addition, Mayweather agreed not to promote any securities, digital or otherwise, for three years, and Khaled agreed to a similar ban for two years. Mayweather also agreed to continue to cooperate with the investigation.
“These cases highlight the importance of full disclosure to investors,” said Enforcement Division Co-Director Stephanie Avakian. “With no disclosure about the payments, Mayweather and Khaled’s ICO promotions may have appeared to be unbiased, rather than paid endorsements.” “Investors should be skeptical of investment advice posted to social media platforms, and should not make decisions based on celebrity endorsements,” said Enforcement Division Co-Director Steven Peikin.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – Celebrities to Pay Heavy Fines for Promoting ICOs Without Disclosing Payments
Tesla has achieved its production goal of making 1,000 cars per day. Elon Musk confirmed the numbers in an email to employees and reaffirmed the need to maintain the production efficiency and quality of Tesla vehicles. The next goal for Tesla is to lower the price of the Model 3 from $38,000 to $35,000 within 6 months. The long term production goal is to manufacture 10,000 Model 3 cars per week.
“It’s important to bear in mind that the cost of the car is made up of about 10,000 unique parts and processes. depending on how you count it, the current cost of a standard range Model 3 would be around $38,000, so each part or process step only costs around $3.80. That means finding cost efficiencies is a game of pennies, even though it might not seem so.”
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – Tesla Achieves Production Goal of 1,000 Model 3 Cars per Day
I’ve been having a lot of fun playing Valve’s new card game, Artifact, since it launched on Wednesday. It is surprisingly easy to learn and is an interesting take that borrows from Hearthstone and Magic: The Gathering while doing something new. The game also treats its digital cards unusually, letting people buy and…
Source: Kotaku – Artifact’s Controversial Cards-For-Money System Has Been Good So Far
The Pew Research Center has already given us a look into teens’ social media and smartphone use, and in a new survey it’s sharing some of the more positive effects of social media, as experienced by teens. While these younger social media users noted…
Source: Engadget – Survey says teens find some benefit from social media
Of all the reactions thus far to the “jaw-dropping” Marriott hotel-chain data breach, the strongest unsurprisingly came from the U.S. Senate’s leading privacy advocate, Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon.
Source: Gizmodo – Only Jail-Time and Stiff Fines Will Stop This, Say Senators After Marriott Breach
President Donald Trump’s immigration authorities are moving to enact broad changes to a visa that allows American companies to bring international workers to the country. From a report: On Friday, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Department of Homeland Security released a proposed rule that takes the first steps toward overhauling the H-1B visa. The new rule would prioritize applications for workers with advanced degrees from American universities. The policy would also change the application process companies go through when they want to secure H-1B visas for foreign talent. Instead of completing a petition for the new employee, companies would register for free online to enter what’s been described as the “H-1B lottery.” Immigration law caps the number of regular H-1B visas that can be awarded each year at 65,000. An additional 20,000 may be awarded to workers with master’s degrees and PhDs. Under the new system, USCIS would review all applications, including those for workers with advanced degrees, during a registration period before the actual petitions are filed.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Trump Admin Takes First Steps To Overhaul H-1B Visa That Tech Companies Use To Hire Internationally
No matter how much it’s changed our lives, WiFi can be endlessly annoying because of how spotty and unreliable it often is, even for those of us in small homes. It can prove a bigger headache still for companies that need reliable connections for the…
Source: Engadget – Some companies are considering ditching WiFi for private 5G
This is Shrek Retold, a full-length scene-by-scene remake of Shrek as animated and acted out by over 200 different artists (trailer previously posted HERE). It is everything I hoped for and more. Now I’m not saying watching this is going to be a new holiday tradition for my family, but I did just feed my girlfriend’s entire Christmas movie DVD collection to the garbage disposal, which means it’s 24 nights of Shrek Retold from here till Christmas! “Wait — you did what?” Nothing dear! “Why aren’t Love Actually and The Holiday in their cases?!” Beats me, you probably let someone borrow them. “Well you better hope I let someone borrow all the knives in the knife drawer too.” I was going to buy you all the Blu-Rays for Christmas, I swear!
Keep going for the whole movie.
Source: Geekologie – That Freaky, Full-Length Scene-By-Scene Remake Of Shrek By Over 200 Different Artists Is Out
Following a lawsuit and allegations of domestic violence against Black Lightning showrunner and executive producer Salim Akil, Warner Bros. has reportedly launched an investigation of its own into his conduct.
Source: io9 – Warner Bros. Is Looking Into Black Lightning Showrunner Salim Akil Amid Allegations of Abuse
Despite an avalanche of over-the-line jokes and gaffes that cost him deals and a show, as well as an ever-changing YouTube landscape, Felix “Pewdiepie” Kjellberg remains the king of YouTube mountain. For now, anyway: An Indian music production company called T-Series has been fast on his heels for a while and—with…
Source: Kotaku – Guy Hacks Printers Around The World To Tell People To Subscribe To Pewdiepie
It’s well-worn advice at this point that one of the highest-impact ways to eat more healthily, and also spend less money, is to get it together and prepare your own food. Which is fine, because it’s true!
Source: LifeHacker – The Real Key to Meal Prep Is Freezing Everything
It is just so quiet and comfortable.
Source: TreeHugger – Passivhaus may well become the new standard of luxury for tourism
Enlarge / A pick-up truck makes its way out of the Mountain Pass open pit mine in California in 2009. (credit: Photo by Jacob Kepler/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
President Trump’s tariffs on rare-earth metals from China should have been a boon to the only US rare-earth minerals mine in California. But a recent Wall Street Journal article illustrates that, given the complex nature of the global economy, those tariffs have actually put the Mountain Pass mine in a tough place.
A hedge fund recently bought Mountain Pass out of bankruptcy after several companies attempted to turn a profit from it. Six months later, the WSJ wrote, Trump announced tariffs that should have helped the mine supply more domestic rare-earths at a higher price.
However, most of the world’s rare-earth processing facilities are in China, which also produces more than 90 percent of the world’s rare-earth minerals. To develop its metals as cheaply as possible, Mountain Pass has first been shipping its ore to China, where the processed metals are then sold on the world market to makers of smartphones, laptops, and magnets that go into electric car motors and giant wind turbines.
Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – Tariffs on Chinese rare-earth minerals create a sticky problem for US competitors
