A man tried to dazzle pilots with a laser beam as they were landing at a Paris airport.
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He argues that the Big Bang was inevitable due to the law of gravity
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Cammie King Conlon, who played the ill-fated Bonnie Blue Butler in "Gone With the Wind," used to joke "that I peaked at age 5."
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Xeni posted a great NASA image of the 2010 Hurricane Earl earlier this afternoon, which got me hunting around for some information on Hurricane Earls past. After all, this is not the first Earl. There've been three others, as well as some lesser Tropical Storms of the same name. The naming lists for these things are used again every seven years, and individual names are only retired after they've been attached to a particularly damaging storm. Earl, so far, has not. When the names do get retired, replacing them isn't easy. According to Time magazine, there's a whole list of types of names that aren't allowed. Over the years, the meteorologists in charge of naming have resorted to flipping through the weirder end of baby name books and adding friends' names to the list. Time: How are hurricanes and tropical storms named? Above: Hurricanes Earl and Danielle in their 1998 incarnations....


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After a week mostly focused on Iraq and Mideast diplomacy, it's back to the economy for President Barack Obama, who will deliver remarks Friday on the August unemployment numbers.
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Even as Hurricane Earl weakened Thursday, East Coast residents scrambled to ready themselves ahead of its arrival. Earl is now a strong Category 2 storm.
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A fire on an oil and gas production platform in the Gulf of Mexico is out and there is no indication of an oil sheen, the Coast Guard said. There were no serious injuries.
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Roman racer Gaius Appuleius Diocles, an illiterate charioteer, earned the modern equal of $15 billion.
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Photo: Rebecca A. Pyles Scientists studying a species of Australian lizard called the yellow-bellied three-toed skink discovered that they’re seeing evolution in action: the lizard lays eggs on coasts but birth babies in mountains. Evolutionary records shows that nearly a hundred reptile lineages have independently made the transition from egg-laying to live birth in the past, and [...]
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Another oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded today. All crew members survived. Right now, nobody knows whether or not the explosion caused a leak in any of the seven wells that the rig collects from. There have been reports of an oil slick on the water near the fire, but that could just as easily be from the finite amount of oil stored on the rig—which would still a spill, but a significantly less problematic one. Other than that, there's not really much information out about this right now. If anybody's learned anything from Deepwater Horizon it seems to be that you're better off, PR-wise, if you don't have to correct everything you say two days later. To give you something to chew over in the meantime, though, Deep Sea News has been doing a really interesting series on the science (such as it is) of oil dispersants. It's interesting, not just because of the basic facts, but also because it gets into the details of why we don't know more. Dispersants must be applied successfully and have a high effectiveness once in ocean waters. This sounds easy, in principle--once you've perfected your Corexit formula in the lab, just spray it from a helicopter, and voila! Except there are a lot of factors which you also have to take into account: the composition of the oil spilled, sea energy, whether the oil has been subjected to weathering at all, exact type of dispersant used and the amount which you sprayed, and ocean temperature/salinity. Thank goodness for all those lab tests over the years which figured all this stuff out, you say. Um, well actually it seems like even designing simulation experiments is difficult, and different tests can report different effectiveness scores for the same dispersant. It is difficult to accurately scale up lab tests in order to predict dispersant action on real spills. Older studies used methods and analyses which have since been discredited. Wave-tank tests can probably provide upper limits on dispersant effectiveness, but there are SEVENTEEN (!!) critical factors that require strict control for accurate results (Fingas 2002). Field tests in open ecosystems are even worse for measuring the fate of oil and controlling variables. In terms of measuring dispersant effectiveness, tank tests, field tests, and lab tests all disagree. Awesome. Part 1: How effective are dispersants on real oil spills? Part 2: How toxic are dispersants? Part 3: Do dispersants really promote degradation of oil? Image of a random oil rig: Some rights reserved by kenhodge13...


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Mary Robinette Kowal sez, "Preschoolers in Richmond, California are being handed RFID jerseys when they get to school. The ACLU points out that in addition to the privacy concerns, these are not secure tags. It has the potential to make kidnapping and stalking very easy." The editors of Scientific American said it well back in May 2005: "Tagging ... kids becomes a form of indoctrination into an emerging surveillance society that young minds should be learning to question." Don't Let Schools Chip Your Kids (Thanks, Mary, via Submitterator!) Video of a guy implanting an RFID chip into his hand How to hack RFID-enabled credit cards for $8 TV Credit-card companies killed Mythbusters segment on RFID ... RFID Rube Goldberg device Britain will make foreigners carry RFID identity cards and will ... HOWTO kill/block an RFID Disney kills its spy-on-your-kids phones...


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Thad Allen, the government's point man on the oil disaster, said crews are expected to begin efforts Thursday to remove the blowout preventer on BP's ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico.
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Just 50 percent of respondents said their managers are competent or very competent.
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Survey of asteroids near Earth finds a much wider variety of the space rocks than previously thought.
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A group of miners in Chile have been trapped underground since August 5. Rescue workers are doing their best to dig them out. The story has attracted a lot of publicity and as a result, the wife and mistress of trapped miner Yonni Barrios met each other: Yonni Barrios’ wife, Marta Salinas, and Barrios’ [...]
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NASA is developing an ambitious new mission to plunge a car-sized probe directly into the sun's atmosphere.
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devjj writes "For the past year or so I have been trying (and failing) to figure out a reasonable solution for bringing my large media library to my living room. All of my media lives on an Ubuntu server that sits on my network. It's been very reliable and it's fast enough for streaming purposes. My content is exposed via SMB. It's the living room side where I keep running into problems. I am currently using Windows 7 and XBMC, but the case is too big and noisy, I don't particularly care for Windows, and the whole thing just seems overkill. What I want is a device that can present a decent UI that the non-Slashdot crowd would be able to use, but that is still powerful enough to stream full-fidelity 1080p. I dream of a small box that can transcode video over a network, but that's probably a pipe dream. The new Apple TV would be great if it could connect to network shares. What say you, Slashdot? Is what I'm looking for possible, or should I just give in to the iTunes/Amazon/whatever juggernauts?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Direct peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians will start Thursday as President Barack Obama urged both sides to come up with a peaceful solution to the long running Mideast conflict.
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Juergen of Random Good Stuff posted a few neat photos of an elevator that looks like it was taken straight out of The Jetsons. Here’s the Globen Sky View in Stockholm, Sweden: The Sky view globe elevators run outside the Ericsson Globe which is currently the largest hemispherical building in the world and took two and [...]
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Curator and artist Aunia Kahn selected a group of 23 lowbrow/pop surrealist artists to interpret one card each of the Major Arcana of the Tarot deck. Hi-Fructose has a sneak preview of 14 of the cards, which will debut October 1 with a full show at Los Angeles's La Luz de Jesus Gallery, a book, and of course a deck of cards. Above left, card back by Daniel Martin Diaz; right, The Devil by Chet Zar The LowBrow Tarot Card Project preview (Hi-Fructose) LOWBROW + TAROT + PROJECT UPDATE: You can see the entire show at the La Luz de Jesus site here....


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Space agency hopes to send a spacecraft into the solar atmosphere by 2018.
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I can't stop looking at this photo of talented cartoonist Pete Emslie posing with my favorite Catwoman, the beautiful Julie Newmar. Pete Emslie at Fan Expo 2010 Julie Newmar as April Conquest More of Pete Emslie's doodles on newspapers Thoughts on doodling...


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A few days after AT&T said its push toward "paid prioritization" of network traffic is backed by technical standards, the Internet's primary standards body disagrees.
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Film's producers subpoena Qwest Communications for Denver man's records, apparently overcoming legal challenges in their pursuit of alleged file sharers.
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How astronauts see Hurricane Earl. This image acquired by NASA two days ago: The relatively placid view from the International Space Station belied the potent forces at work in Hurricane Earl as it hovered over the tropical Atlantic Ocean on August 30. With maximum sustained winds of 135 miles (215 kilometers) per hour, the storm was classified as a category 4 on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale as it passed north of the Virgin Islands....


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dh003i writes "Canon has developed a 8 x 8 inch CMOS digital sensor. It will be able to capture an image with 1/100th the light intensity required by a DSLR and will be able to record video at 60 fps in lighting half the intensity of moonlight. There are already many excellent quality lenses designed to cover 8 x 10 inches, although Canon may develop some of their own designed specifically for their requirements."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Love geeky toons? Then check out this list of 16 of the best sci-fi cartoons ever made over at our pal Geeks Are Sexy. 16. Exosquad Exosquad was an absolutely amazing cartoon, if you could look past the really, really dodgy moral basis for the series. In its favor, the characters were multidimensional, there were long [...]
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A phone-hacking scheme involving British royals and reporters working for one of Rupert Murdoch's tabloid newspapers went far beyond what was previously disclosed and prosecuted. The British Prime Minister's current media adviser is accused of having encouraged the hacking.

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An Ohio death row inmate who has repeatedly claimed his innocence was spared execution, after the state's governor Thursday noted "legitimate questions" about evidence used to convict the man.
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Marin County voted to stop an ongoing SAP project, implicitly accepting that it wasted over $30 million on software and related implementation services from Deloitte Consulting.
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Facebook said it will add one central control to log out other devices. This feature, which will appear in the security section under "Account Security," is rolling out "gradually."
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In this guest editorial, security research professional Michal Zalewski argues that the government should stay away from compulsory certification and licensing in the security industry.
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Yesterday, while flipping through my Minneapolis Continuing Education fall catalog, I noticed a class on the Great Mysteries of Science, which turned out to be lake monsters, Sasquatch and UFOs. The class was to be taught by a retired University of Minnesota professor who has since participated in an expedition to study said Sasquatch. Now, this surprised me, because I had previously pegged Bigfoot as one of those coastal elites, who spent all his time in the Pacific Northwest and shunned the forests here in flyover country. But, apparently, Sasquatch is a Real American after all. In fact, sightings are common enough in northern Minnesota that the Bigfoot Field Research Organization recently organized a Sasquatch search party up there. Forty-two people went along, including my friend, travel journalist Frank Bures, who wrote about the experience of "'squatch hunting" for Minnesota Monthly magazine. We'd been split into 15 camps, and we were carrying an armament of investigative equipment: night-vision scopes, walkie-talkies, GPS, infrared cameras, thermal-recording devices, video and audio recorders, and more. Someone handed me a thermal imager, which would show bright heat signatures of the living things in the forest. I scanned the area around us but saw nothing except a few warm rocks and something that may have been a raccoon. "We've got some activity here," came another report across the radio. "They're walking around our site." Whenever the group laughed, apparently, there was a rustling in the woods. When they laughed really hard, there was even more rustling. Those lucky bastards!...


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Rob say: "I spent way too much time making a solid-ice beer tray, but I still feel it was worth the effort. To be truly complete, I should have test floated it in a pool or hot tub, but the bottle opener kept short-circuiting my experiments." The Quest for a Solid Ice Beer Tray...


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Fluid Forms is a 3D printing and laser-cutting company that produces a wide range of objects based on maps, satellite images, and other photos. They started off with topographical maps of physical places printed in sterling silver with pinbacks, and now they've expanded their repertoire. The new offerings include necklaces with steel charms based on your photos, or maps (inexplicably, these are marketed as "necklaces for men," though I can't imagine why they're not unisex -- the same charms are also available as earrings) and acrylic/wood clocks with finely cut lines reproducing streetmaps. I love the idea of using "emotionally significant" places as motifs for jewelry and other decorative items. On the 3D printing side, it's a clever way of giving everyone a ready-made, personally important 3D mesh to use as the basis for an object. 3D printed silver brooches featuring your favorite landscapes ... Laser cut Poe in stainless steel...


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Here's video of the triumphant success of an elaborate kids' Rube Goldberg machine, created at an "informal Rube Goldberg summer camp for kids ages 3-8." I know nothing about this summer-camp, but it seems like one of the great Good Things of our era -- especially judging from the awesome elation of the kids after the successful run! How to Get a Beach Ball Into a Galvanized Bucket (the Hard Way) OK Go's Rube Goldberg music video Rube Goldberg rat-run sends a neutral balloon through dozens of ... RFID Rube Goldberg device Rube Goldberg Machine animation from Sesame Street Rube Goldberg Cream Egg killer Ideal toy commercials from 1963...


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If it's September, it's football season — which also means it's time for millions of fantasy football drafts around the world to commence. Maximize your in-season points while dealing with the setbacks that are bound to occur by following our guide.

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The video site's ever-evolving terms of service drive an observer mad in this arty clip by Carlo Zanni. No charge for the 1984 references.

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Hugh Pickens writes "Ryan Lawler writes on GigaOm that although many have touted the availability of Flash on Android devices as a competitive advantage over Apple's mobile devices, while trying to watch videos from ABC.com, Fox.com and Metacafe using Flash 10.1 on a Nexus One over a local Wi-Fi network connected to a 25-Mbps Verizon FiOS broadband connection, mobile expert Kevin Tofel found that videos were slow to load, if they loaded at all, leading to an overall very inconsistent experience while using his Android device for video. "While in theory Flash video might be a competitive advantage for Android users, in practice it's difficult to imagine anyone actually trying to watch non-optimized web video on an Android handset," writes Lawler. "All of which makes one believe that maybe Steve Jobs was right to eschew Flash in lieu of HTML5 on the iPhone and iPad.""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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A white tiger cub born at the Vandalur zoo in Chennai, India is turning black. From The Telegraph: Biologists believe a large presence of melanin, the dark skin pigment, is the likely reason for its unusual colouring. Tigers' skin colour is determined by the presence of black and yellow pigments. In most tigers, the colour yellow dominates over black to give them their characteristic colouring. "In this cub, the reverse has happened — black is the dominant colour," senior zoo biologist Dr Manimozhi told The Times of India. "It is the dominance of yellow pigment that enables tigers to survive in the wild," he added. "In fact, this is the reason why most white tigers are found only in zoos and not in the wild," Dr Manimozhi said. "White tiger cub in Indian zoo turns black"...


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The Mariner oil platform explosion off the Louisiana coast created a mile-long oil sheen into the Gulf of Mexico and forced 13 crew members to jump into the water wearing protective Gumby suits.
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Consumer Watchdog produced two cartoony ads slamming Google CEO Eric Schmidt as part of an effort to build support for a "do not track" list.
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The computers can overheat at the notebook's plug-in to the AC adapter, posing a burn hazard.
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JenG sez, "NBC4 offers a few great pictures of Columbus College of Art & Design students playing with this interactive 8-bit mural. The mural depicts classic moments from Super Mario Bros., positioned without Mario or Luigi so passers-by can hop into level 1-1." CCAD Students Create Interactive Mural (Thanks, Jen G!) (Image: Ken Aschliman) Four-storey Mario mural made from Post-Its Gamer/anime mural Painstakingly painted Megaman 2 bedroom walls Super Mario Bros theme performed by an RC car on a row of liquid ... Custom Mario levels used as rhythm section for anime theme medley ... Mario and Luigi: warrior plumbers tee Profane Super Mario ranter plays hardest level ever Violinist plays Mario soundtrack in real time Stop-motion Super Mario made out of sticky notes Super Mario cardies...


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Quiznos's food photographers and stylists are apparently some kind of latter-day sorcerers, judging from the ad-versus-reality photos of their "Baja Chicken Sandwich" product, as snapped by Sarah, a Consumerist reader. Fast Food Advertising Vs. Reality: Quiznos Baja Chicken Sandwich Ridiculous gut-busting food-ads lampooned Photos of fast food in ads and in real life Study suggests fast food logos make us more hasty and impatient ... Fast-food toxicity comparison chart The Perfect Turkey Doesn't Really Exist Baconator: fantasy vs reality Obedience To Authority at fast food joints Sugar Information explains how sugar won't make you fat...


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One of the most aggressive forms of breast cancer has different origins than scientists previously thought.
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Our friends at Biomega designed this cool-looking cargo bike for Puma. PUMA Mopion is rock steady for the daily grind. It mixes city bike features, and cargo bike features, making it a sturdy companion. It comes with a super-size innovative front carrier for heavy duty transport of your groceries or other needs. Developed for city dwellers, Mopion features a light aluminum frame, making it a one-of-a-kind lightweight cargo bike weighing only 22 kilos. The geometry holds the body in a slightly inclined, but still heads-up position for navigational ease and exceptional balancing. PUMA Mopion...


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A new study gives scientists a clearer picture of how the omega-3 fatty acids in fish oil work.
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Mad Men's Ken Cosgrove and Harry Crane stumble upon a MacBook Pro about 40 years before its time. What did the web look like in 1965? From a terrific Rolling Stone gallery of behind-the-scenes Mad Men photos by James Minchin III. Inside 'Mad Men': On Set and Behind the Scenes...


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Consumerist reader SteveDave has dug up a pair of 1990s-vintage Wendy's training videos explaining how to serve beverages. They're masterpieces of shitty, squirm-worthy industrial video, especially the insincerely rapped "cold beverages" short (they should have just licensed the kick ass G Love and Special Sauce song). Looking at the Submitterator queue, I see that Cassandra found this one last week, too -- thanks, Cassandra! The Coolest & Hottest Wendy's Training Videos Ever...


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Cranky Geeks -- Episode #234
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AP - THE DEAL: Under a new five-year agreement, Google Inc. will continue to provide the search results on AOL Inc.'s websites. The companies signed the deal this week.
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Here's a mesmerizing three-minute tutorial on cutting erratic "organic" gears that spin freely despite their odd shapes. After watching it, I was left wondering how you'd make a third (and fourth, and fifth) gear that could mesh with the system without repeating the earlier gear forms, to create an enormous, improbable Rube Goldberg display. How-To: Make Organically-Shaped Gears Motor attached to series of reduction gears - final gear fixed in ... Mount geartooth Papercraft heart of rotating gears The clock of a thousand gears... well, okay, fifty ... Video: Gear's heart Gadgets...


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A German TV programme showed hackers from the Chaos Computer Club using off-the-shelf equipment to extract personal information from the government's new "secure" ID card, which stores scans of fingerprints and a six-digit PIN that can be used to sign official documents and declarations. In an interview with the show, Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said he saw no immediate reason to act on the alleged security issue. Meanwhile on Tuesday the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) rejected the Plusminus' criticism of the new ID card. The agency's personal identification expert Jens Bender said the card was secure and called the combination of an integrated chip with a PIN number a "significant security improvement compared to today's standard process of user name and password." But a classic Trojan horse program that logs keystrokes remained a threat, he admitted, because users must use keyboards in addition to the scanners. New government ID cards easily hacked (via /.) UK MPs call for ID cards and surveillance, but demand privacy for ... Australia dumps national ID card Mule-driver TSA ID card contest is off and running Britain will make foreigners carry RFID identity cards and will ... Weird blank wallet ID card...


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John Young says: Boing Boing has mentioned us at the West Chester Guerilla Drive-In a couple of times now (here and here). We show 16-millimeter movies at secret locations that match the film, projected from the sidecar of my 1977 BMW motorcycle. In order to find out where and when the movies will be, folks must find the MacGuffin -- an AM transmitter hidden in a waterproof Pelican case. This year, we raised the bar on the quest. The MacGuffin is hidden in public. In order to finish the quest, folks must memorize and recite Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias", the most metal poem ever written. Some of the folks present will know what is going on, but they will not let on that they know until the recitation is complete. And the reciter can't half-ass it, either. Unless they chew the scenery, unless they really SELL the bombastic majesty of the lone and level sands, the judges won't reveal themselves, and you won't even be sure that you're reciting in the right place. To demonstrate a proper recitation, I asked Hunter Davis to do a reading. Hunter is the fellow who did the "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" in the voice of Sir Ian McKellen. Here's the result, setting the bar for all our MacGuffin quest-ers. You must be at least THIS METAL when reciting the poem! MacGuffin quest on the Guerilla Drive-In site...


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NewsFactor - When Microsoft launched its Bing decision engine in 2009, it may have held out hope for an alliance with AOL. In fact, there were even rumors that Microsoft would buy out the struggling Internet service provider. But AOL has shunned Bing in favor of Microsoft's online nemesis, Google.
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If you think that modern athletes make a lot of money, they’ve got nothing on the ancients. Peter Struck, a classics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, states that a particular Roman chariot driver far exceeded the earnings of today’s top athletes: The very best paid of these—in fact, the best paid athlete of all [...]
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PC World - Ping is Apple's music-centric social network that is integrated into iTunes 10. From a privacy standpoint, it's pretty straightforward--as opposed to Facebook's multitude of privacy settings--but then again, Ping is also very limited as to what services it offers. In either case, here's a quick run-down of the privacy features present in Ping.
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AP - Google Inc. will continue to provide the search results on AOL Inc.'s websites under a new, five-year deal the companies signed this week.

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From Arbroath: Student who electrocuted his nipples sues teacher and school for not warning him it was dangerous...


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donniebaseball23 writes "EA's Medal of Honor reboot doesn't ship until October 12, but it's already seen a fair amount of controversy thanks to the publisher's decision to allow people to play as Taliban in multiplayer. The controversy just got escalated another notch, reports IndustryGamers, as the world's biggest games retailer GameStop has decided it won't sell the title at its stores located on US military bases. The new Medal of Honor won't be advertised at these stores either. GameStop noted that they came to this decision 'out of respect for our past and present men and women in uniform.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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donniebaseball23 writes "EA's Medal of Honor reboot doesn't ship until October 12, but it's already seen a fair amount of controversy thanks to the publisher's decision to allow people to play as Taliban in multiplayer. The controversy just got escalated another notch, reports IndustryGamers, as the world's biggest games retailer GameStop has decided it won't sell the title at its stores located on US military bases. The new Medal of Honor won't be advertised at these stores either. GameStop noted that they came to this decision 'out of respect for our past and present men and women in uniform.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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My latest Locus Magazine column, "Proprietary Interest," talks about the way that our instinctive ownership claims over the stuff we find and post to the Internet do more harm than good. When we claim that public domain images, interesting links, or other net-fodder are "ours," we invite a muddle in which others make even more compelling ownership claims. For example, if the old public-domain Lysol ad you scan is "yours," then why shouldn't it be Lysol's?. This is a world in which we spend all our time arguing about whose interest is most legitimate, instead of sharing, discussing, criticizing and enjoying the world around us. Any ethical claim to ownership over a scan of a public domain work should be treated with utmost suspicion, not least because of all the people with stronger claims than the scanner! To be consistent with the ethical principle that one should never use another's work without permission (regardless of the law or the public domain), every scanner would have a duty to ask, at the very least, the corporations whose products are advertised in these old chestnuts (the very best of them are for brands that persist to today, since these vividly illustrate the way that our world has changed - for example, see the very frank Lysol douche ad). For if scanning a work confers an ownership interest, then surely paying for the ad's production offers an even more compelling claim! And the publishers of the magazines and the newspapers - to scan is one thing, but what about the firm that paid to physically print the edition that we make the scan from? And then there are the copywriters and illustrators and their heirs - if scanning an ad confers a proprietary interest, then surely creating the ad should give rise to an even greater claim? We do acknowledge these claims, at least a little. A good archivist notes the source. A good critic notes the creator. But that is the extent of the claim's legitimacy. If we afford descendants and publishers and printers and commissioners their own little pocket of customary right-of-refusal over their works, we would eliminate the ability to keep these works alive in our culture. For these owed courtesies multiply geometrically - think of the challenge of getting all of Dickens' or Twains' far-flung heirs to grant permission to do anything with their ancestors' works. What a lopsided world it would be if ten seconds' scanner work with the public domain demanded 100 hours' correspondence and permission-begging to be ''polite!'' Proprietary Interest...


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This week’s big Apple announcement featured one big disappointment: Apple TV’s relative lack of, well, TV. Out of all of the hundreds of channels available on cable and satellite, only ABC and Fox agreed to offer their programs for rent on Apple TV. The fact that Steve Jobs is the largest single shareholder in, and on the board of, Disney — owner of ABC — perfectly illustrates this digital divide.

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TipEx (a Commonwealth analogue for Wite-Out and other correction-tape products) has an ingenious and engaging YouTube marketing campaign: a video called "NSFW: A hunter shoots a bear," branches off into a kind of video-text-adventure, where you are invited to type verbs into a box and see what the bear and the hunter do with one another (you can get funny results out of "fuck," of course, and also "gets high with" and "dances" -- I'm sure there's more). It's a kind of next-generation Subservient Chicken, and the (no doubt blisteringly expensive) creative reworking of YouTube's familiar user-interface makes it even more click-trancey than its forebears. This is how to use YouTube to sell a product. (Thanks, Copyranter!) Subservient Chicken's X-Rated Bits Exposed by Code Food Porn -- Burger King Subservient Chicken HPOA (HOPA?) girl "Jenny Whiteboard" is obvious troll LULZ - Boing ... Lego boulder threatens civilization. Update: ugh, "stealth" viral ... Motorola, could you please tell your viral marketer to get out of ... Cellphone popcorn hoax revealed as viral marketing scam - Boing ......


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It turns out there are more free tickets available for the special Boing Boing screening of CATFISH in Los Angeles on Wednesday, September 8. Grab one while you can! Read the announcement here. Reserve tickets here....


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Rebecca Crane matched the geography of US states with planets in Star Wars to create a composite map of the United States. Texas is Kessel, Oregon is Endor, and Maine is Naboo. Crane writes: Planets were assigned based on partial terrain, landmarks that correlate with the planet and state, types of people in the [...]
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Maya Pedal is a Guatemalan NGO that works with international volunteers and local experts to remanufacture old bicycles to serve as "people-powered farm machines." The dozens of "Bicimaquina" designs include bike-powered washing machines, blenders, grain mills, water irrigation devices and animal-feed mills. Up to ten volunteers from around the world take up residency in San Andreas Itzapas each year for several weeks at a time. Based on bicycle parts contributed by their partner organizations around the world, they work with Mr. Marroquin and his staff to produce between five and ten bicimaquinas a month, and up to fifty over the course of a year. Roughly half the working time at Maya Pedal is devoted building these machines, and the remainder is directed to an extensive bicycle maintenance program for the residents of the city. The bicimaquinas are sold locally for the cost of manufacturing. Several family-run businesses have developed from the bicimaquinas program including a shop that grinds different grains for customers, and a building contractor that uses a bicycle-powered concrete compaction machine at construction sites in the region. Maya Pedal (Thanks, Hughadam, via Submitterator!) Guatemala: First, volcanic eruption; then, devastating tropical ... Project Einstein: rural kids in Guatemala photograph their lives ... Guatemala Snapshot: Birdies, Corn, Papaya, Plantain (at Sabe Rico ... TV: Guatemala Archives Remember the sinkhole? Guatemala still reeling from Agatha, here's ... Adoption and corruption: human trafficking busts in Guatemala ... Guatemala: Christmas Day video and audio snapshots Guatemalan Twitter User Arrested for "Inciting Financial Panic ... Pedal power laptop charger turns foot tapping into battery charge ... Pedal powered electricity generator Pedal power: Trailcart ATV and Rail Runner Gadgets Crossing the Atlantic in a pedal-powered submarine ... Pedal-powered Porsche A selection of pedal-powered things, including a couple of ......


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Unlike infectious disease and information, behavior change spreads faster through online networks that have many close connections instead of many distant ties. Redundancy is key, as people are more likely to engage in a behavior if they see many others doing it. "There has been a lot of theory about the difference between information and behavior spreading," said economic sociologist Damon Centola of MIT and author of the study published Sept. 3 in Science. "We've assumed that they are the same, but you can imagine that behavior is not really like that, that you need to be convinced."

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The U.S. has plans for a manned visit to Mars by the mid-2030s. The ESA and Russia have sketched out a similar joint mission, and it is claimed that China's space program has the same objective. Apart from their destination, all these plans share something in common: extraordinary danger for the explorers. What happens if someone dies out there, months away from Earth?


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Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell said Thursday the state will order an independent review of its information technology outage that stretched on for a week and shelved key agencies. Northrop...
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Ultimate Ears and Capitol Studios have teamed up to produce their new In-Ear Reference Monitors. But with this one's price tags, only professionals in the music industry need apply.
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Bill Detwiler shows you how to make the Windows 7 "Solve PC Issues" notifications a little less annoying or disable them all together.
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Important information for Toshiba Satellite T135, T135D and Satellite Pro T130 owners - The US Consumer Product Safety Commission and Health Canada announced a recall following over 100 cases of...
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If you ever watched the later seasons of 24, you'll recall that Jack and his buddies at the Counter Terrorist Unit were always using Cisco Telepresence for video-conferencing. That was no...
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Tsar Egg Cups – $25.95 You don’t need to be the Tsar of Russia to eat your eggs like one! Designer Andrea Kezdi created these gorgeous egg holders inspired by the Fabergé eggs. The Tsar Egg Cups over at the NeatoShop make for a wonderful gift at a surprisingly affordable price: Link | More Fun and [...]
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However, the utility's customer service is faulty, according to an independent review of the controversial yet pioneering smart-meter program.
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Facebook users who log in from multiple devices will soon have a way to make sure they are only logged in on the computer they are currently using.
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Fastest-growing PC company of the last few years stumbles during the second quarter. Observers say it has to do with Acer's reliance on notebook sales as desktops gain.
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New research out of the University of Haifa shows a clear link between light at night and cancer in mice, with the suppression of melatonin playing a key role.
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A new batch of sharp Martian close-ups from NASA's HiRISE camera were released, and we've gathered some of the best in the gallery.

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eldavojohn writes "A new paper up for prepublication from the controversial solid-state physicist Godfrey Louis claims that the cells Louis collected from a Keralan red rain incident divide and produce daughter cells at 121 degrees Celsius. While unusual, this is not unheard of as the paper recalls cells cultivated from hydrothermal vents are known to reproduce at 121 C as well. Of course, caution is exercised when dealing with the possible explanation surrounding the theory of panspermia but the MIT Technology Review says researchers 'examined the way these fluoresce when bombarded with light and say it is remarkably similar to various unexplained emission spectra seen in various parts of the galaxy. One such place is the Red Rectangle, a cloud of dust and gas around a young star in the Monocerous constellation.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The atmosphere of a young exoplanet didn't fit any of our existing models for what gas giants should look like. But when astronomers added huge dust clouds, it was a perfect fit, perhaps revealing a larger truth about gas giants.

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Production rig in Gulf of Mexico explodes.
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Case Study: LSD, a PSA produced by Lockheed Aircraft (!) in 1969....


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The Consumer Product Safety Commission says 129 cases of Toshiba Satellite laptops melting from overheating have been reported, but no major injuries.
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State budgets are being squeezed by unprecedented amounts for the third year in a row as legislators are forced to close gaps of up to 50 percent of state spending.
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A scanty selection of artists to follow and missed opportunities to encourage user interaction are among the early problems.
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At the huge IFA consumer electronics show, the big names in tech show off their newest wares, including an Android-based tablet from Samsung and a cloud-based music service from Sony.
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Magnetic minerals in 15-million-year-old rocks appear to preserve a moment when the magnetic north pole was rapidly on its way to becoming the south pole, and vice versa.

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Development Seed is engineering tools to create custom maps that work in a wider variety of situations such as natural disasters and in the developing world.

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crimeandpunishment writes "The top man in telecommunications at the United Nations is weighing in on the Blackberry battle ... and he says share the data. The UN's telecom chief says governments have legitimate security concerns, and Research in Motion should give them access to its customer data. In an interview with the Associated Press, Hamadoun Toure said 'There is a need for cooperation between governments and the private sector on security issues.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Futurama has delivered some hilarious episodes lately, and tonight it celebrates its 100th ep (and season finale) with a glorious guest appearance ...

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Macworld.com - Looking to catch the most recent season of Lost, but don’t want to succumb the baggage of having to buy a bunch of episodes that you’ll only watch once? Relax, friend, because if you’re an iTunes 10 user, you can now rent TV shows from the comfort of your very own…computer.
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Here's the trailer for the AMC series based on the fantastic, long-running comic book series about a zombie apocalypse, The Walking Dead. It premieres on Halloween night!...


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Artist Sarah Calvillo made a steampunk version of Mr. Potato Head. Calvillo works in a wide variety of media, so she also made a vintage-looking wanted poster, offering a reward for the capture of this ungentlemanly spud. At the link, you can view photos of it, as well process photos for the figurine. Link [...]
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IFA 2010 is well under way in Berlin with a slew of new gadgets out and about, including this new Samsung HMX-T10 HD camcorder, which features a unique 20-degree slanted lens.
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Philips and O'Neill have partnered up to design a quartet of headphones that blend durability and comfort, with a splash of style for good measure.
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Earlier this year, the SD Association announced the new UHS-I specification. Now, Panasonic has answered the call and rolled out its own 8GB and 16GB UHS-I SDHC memory cards.
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Should Web developers target Internet Explorer 9 or Silverlight when creating new Web and mobile applications? One Microsoft exec takes a new stab at an answer.
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The Google Chrome 6.0, available in stable and beta channels for Windows, Mac, and Linux, patches a total of 15 documented security vunerabilities.
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These are choices in the market. Coverage for your health, or catastrophic coverage. They are not the same thing.
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Asus has handpicked Amimon to work on its upcoming WiCast EW2000 kit that will connect PCs to TVs via USB and HDMI.
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AMD has announced that it is planning to roll out a budget-conscious DisplayPort-to-DVI adapter that should make using ATI Eyefinity technology more affordable.
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A reinterpretation of the fossil record suggests a new answer to one of evolution's existential questions: whether global mass extinctions are just short-term diversions in life's preordained course, or send life careening down wholly new paths.

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The official Twitter app for iPad is finally here, and star developer Loren Brichter has polished yet another gem. Twitter for iPad sports a really elegant interface that's significantly faster and more intuitive than competing Twitter clients we've tested (such as Twitterific and Tweetdeck).

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…on a lumpy leg.  It is, rather, a guilloche pattern, typically seen on banknotes but also incorporated into other works of art and design.  In the past such patterns might have been generated by a geometric lathe, but nowadays they can be created mathematically.   The one above is generated by: Found at The Ministry of Type, [...]
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pickens writes "David Pogue writes in the NY Times that when you buy a new Windows PC, it comes festooned with stickers on the palm rests: one for Windows, one for Skype, one for Intel, one for the laptop company, maybe an Energy Star sticker and so on. 'It's like buying a new, luxury car — and discovering that it comes with non-removable bumper stickers that promote the motor oil, the floor mat maker, the windshield-fluid company and the pine tree air freshener you have no intention of ever using,' writes Pogue. But the worst thing is that when you peel them off, they shred, leaving adhesive crud behind. 'When you've just spent big bucks on a laptop, should you really be obligated to spend the first 20 minutes trying to dissolve away the sticker goop with WD40?' But AMD has a solution. Starting next year, AMD will switch to new stickers that peel off easily, leaving no residue; after that, it's considering eliminating the sticker program altogether."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Political discussions about Iran's nuclear aspirations were benched Thursday when the United States' and Iran's national basketball teams went head-to-head at the FIBA World Championships in Istanbul, Turkey.
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Fujitsu's scanner is your new (albeit bulky) buddy if you want high-quality images. The sturdy document feeder gets pages in straight, so you get them out right.

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Google is celebrating the second birthday of its Chrome web browser with the release of Chrome 6. Among the new features are an updated user interface, auto-fill for web forms, extension syncing, increased speed and numerous bug fixes.

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PC World - Microsoft on Thursday started featuring a small advertisement on its Bing home page for Internet Explorer 8 in an apparent effort to encourage more people to migrate to the latest version of its browser.
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On Wednesday, Apple said users of its music social network could find friends via Facebook. But the feature has vanished, apparently over a tiff between the companies.
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Bad news: Facebook simultaneously became sentient and figured out that zombies are popular. Would you like to become a Fan of Facebook devouring your brains? Via Josh Helfferich...


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People in Silicon Valley have focused on the set-top box as the lever to attack the cable industry. Cable boxes blow, but that's a losing battle. So why is Apple TV different? Because Steve Jobs has not just created a new set top box. He's actually created a whole new media ecosystem built around the mobile phone.

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It looks like a motorcycle, it performs like a Lotus and it's racing around the world.

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Mashable - Late last evening, Apple released iTunes 10 and its new Ping social network to the public. Assuming you were able to access the service, you may have noticed the ability to add friends via Facebook Connect, a feature we mentioned in our first-impressions post last night.
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(Image Credit: Bakerytruck LA) Not only is the food to go, but so are the kitchens.  And the kitchens in many of today’s food trucks are stainless steel beauties serving up five star gourmet meals.  So popular have these trucks become, they have masses of Twitter followers, food truck festivals, and blogs dedicated to them. New York [...]
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String theory has finally made a prediction that can be tested with experiments — but in a completely unexpected realm of physics: quantum entanglement.

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AFP - Google released an improved version of Chrome on Thursday as the Internet titan's Web browser turned two years old.

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AIDS sufferer Vinny, about whom Lisa recently wrote a feature here at BB, died this morning at 8:35 a.m....


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wiedzmin writes "Public broadcaster ARD's show 'Plusminus' teamed up with the known hacker organization 'Chaos Computer Club' (CCC) to find out how secure the controversial new radio-frequency (RFID) chips were. The report shows how they used the basic new home scanners that will go along with the cards (for use with home computers to process the personal data for official government business) to demonstrate that scammers would have few problems extracting personal information. This includes two fingerprint scans and a new six-digit PIN meant to be used as a digital signature for official government business and beyond." That was quick. Earlier this year, CCC hackers demonstrated vulnerabilities in German airport IDs, too.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Outlook add-in maker Xobni finds Americans and Britons are having trouble getting away from the workplace because of the reach e-mail has into their lives.
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Samsung has just introduced its sleek-looking, portable PC line-up for fall 2010, and it includes four laptops and a netbook.
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AFP - Mexico will change from analog to digital television by 2015 to promote competition and help convergence with telephone and Internet services, President Felipe Calderon said Thursday.

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Car will take its battery pack temperature, then automatically cool or warm it to optimal temperature range before charging or engaging the battery.
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Chemical analysis of the bones of an ancient Sudanese Nubians who lived nearly 2,000 years ago shows they were ingesting the antibiotic tetracycline on a regular basis — likely from a special brew of beer. The find is the strongest yet to support that antibiotics were previously discovered by humans before Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928.

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Coulomb Technologies installs free public electric-charging station in downtown Detroit as part of ChargePoint America program to encourage EV adoption.
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AFP - Hot microblogging service Twitter launched an application for the Apple iPad on Thursday to rave reviews from technology blogs.

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Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is making its way into the public consciousness. The film Salt has an interrogation scene where a spy spills some secrets while a scientist looks at his brain scan. After a quick glance, the scientist casually says with absolute certainty, "He's telling the truth." As with any new technology, there's a lot of potential for good, but there's also a lot of potential for pseudoscience and bad science. Remember those kooky Canadians who've used "fruit machines" and peter meters to catch people lying about being gay and what-not? Now they are moving north of the groin and firing up fMRIs. They're already making questionable claims and writing grant proposals based on what parts of the brain "light up" when people view certain stimuli. Lies, thoughtcrimes, and precrime (offense prevention) are all on the list of things they claim fMRI will divulge if taxpayers will just fund their research. It's the same concept behind privately-held ventures like No Lie MRI in San Diego, which, for a cool $5,000, will administer a "truth-verification" session. Though this Orwellian evidence has so far been successfully deemed inadmissible in US courts under the Daubert Standard, people are still trying to use it. Reporter Mark Harris got tested to see if he is a liar and presented his troubling experiences in the most recent IEEE Spectrum. MRI Lie Detectors [IEEE Spectrum]...


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Notices of winning the lottery and requests from Russian women who want to know you better are also up there on Panda Security's ranking of decade's top Net swindles.
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Macworld.com - Apple has mentioned Facebook Connect support for new social network Ping in Wednesday’s keynote, the iTunes 10 how-to video, on the Ping Website, and even in a conversation with All Things D. So why is the feature apparently no longer available?
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Samsung has announced the launch of a tablet that could become the first major Android-powered challenger to the Apple iPad.

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I come from a small-ish town in Oklahoma where we've never met a vegetable we couldn't fry and the only things more super-sized than our portions are the huge church complexes that alternate with fast-food restaurants along our roads.
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The uncharacteristically snowy weather that hit Northern Europe and North America in the winter of 2009 to 2010 was caused by a rare combination of two separate weather oscillations in the Atlantic and Pacific, claim meteorologists.

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Superman is a surly noob searching for reality in the digital age in J. Michael Straczynski and Shane Davis' update of the superhero's origin story. Who knew the Man of Steel would miss the musty Daily Planet more than the rest of us?

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rexjoec writes "Cisco is making a bid for Skype. The deal, if successful, would derail a planned initial public offering from Skype and redraw the battle lines in the lucrative market of video communications." The rumored price is $5B.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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PC World - Google and AOL have renewed a long-term partnership that gives AOL Web properties access to Google search and advertising services.
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PC World - It's official. iOS 4.1 is "coming soon" for iPhone and iPod Touch users. While the Apple Web site devoted to announcing the update focuses on new bells and whistles, the importance of iOS 4.1 is that it will hopefully resolve the remaining issues that make the iPhone 4 dysfunctional for many.
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India plans to ask the three companies to set up local servers in the country so that security agencies can monitor customer communications.
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Samsung isn't alone in introducing a new tablet today. Toshiba's Folio 100 made its debut today as well at IFA 2010 in Berlin.
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Philips has taken its Cinema 21:9 Platinum TV and gone 3D, making this display the "world's first cinema proportion 3D TV."
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This month's version of my Microsoft Codename Tracker includes a number of brand-new entries in the high-end server space -- including MFx, Dryad, Nectar, Orleans, Quincy and TidyFS -- plus lots,...
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A few readers have noted that another gulf oil rig has exploded. This one is off the coast of Lousiana. So far all the workers are accounted for, but they are in immersion suits waiting for rescue.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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tlhIngan writes "Despite all the lawsuits and injunctions by Sony to keep the PS3 Jailbreak out of modder's hands, it appears that a third party has made a clone. The best part is, it only requires a cheap (approximately $40) development board by Atmel, and the requisite software is open-source. Get the Atmel code from GitHub and apply a small patch which will enable backup play (the code by itself only lets you run unsigned code, the patch allows for BD backups). The code is GPLv3. It would be highly ironic if someone ported this to Linux USB Gadgets, then you could use a Linux device to jailbreak your PS3, to which Sony removed Linux functionality. An Android phone would be suitable."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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PC World - Despite all the hardware Apple introduced at its press event Wednesday, the most radical news was Ping, a social network for music that's launching as a feature of iTunes 10. I've taken a brief test drive of Ping to see what it's about, but even before updating iTunes, I knew Apple's new social network was not for me. Here are five reasons I won't be using Ping:
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AFP - A Malaysian journalist was charged Thursday over a satirical blog which made fun of the state power firm Tenaga, and faces a year's jail if convicted.

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AFP - Agence France-Presse, one of the world's top news agencies, aims to stream its news direct to web users via hand-held devices and direct-access Internet content, not solely via its media clients, its chief executive Emmanuel Hoog said in comments published Thursday.

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On Monday we discussed how we heard Pop reader Shana S. (bananashan) get a shout-out during the Emmys telecast. She was one of the fans who tweeted ...

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AFP - Google will power Internet search across AOL properties and AOL video will appear on YouTube under an agreement reached on Thursday between the Web companies.

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A new streaming Apple TV arrives with Netflix as predicted, iOS 4.1 comes with HDR photography and GameCenter, and new iPod Nanos drop the iconic clickwheel.
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Meringue dog
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Let’s celebrate with a little 90210 quiz, shall we? While there’s some debate as to whether there were eight or nine original stars on BH 90210, there’s no question that some of the actors weren’t even close to the age of the characters they played. Suspension of disbelief is a glorious thing, and [...]
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eldavojohn writes "A Michigan judge removed a juror after a Facebook comment and also fined her $250 and required her to write a five page paper about the constitutional right to a fair trial. The juror was 'very sorry' and the judge chastised her saying, 'You violated your oath. You had decided she was already guilty without hearing the other side.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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eldavojohn writes "A Michigan judge removed a juror after a Facebook comment and also fined her $250 and required her to write a five-page paper about the constitutional right to a fair trial. The juror was 'very sorry' and the judge chastised her, saying, 'You violated your oath. You had decided she was already guilty without hearing the other side.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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NEW YORK (AP) – A New York City man who plunged 40 stories from the rooftop of an apartment building has survived after crashing onto a parked car.

Witnesses and police say 22-year-old Thomas Magill jumped from the high-rise at West 63rd Street on Tuesday. He landed in the backseat area of a Dodge Charger after crashing through the windshield. He suffered broken legs. Police say he’s in critical condition.

The car’s owner, Guy McCormack, of Old Bridge, N.J., told the Daily News he’s convinced that rosary beads he kept inside the Dodge saved Magill’s life. Police are investigating why Magill jumped from the building.

Magill isn’t the only New Yorker to survive a high-rise fall. Window washer Alcides Moreno fell 47 stories from the roof of a skyscraper in December 2007, and doctors expected him to walk again.

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Company creates a way to make GPS directions far more understandable to the average driver.
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If you know what this is and where it's located, you could win a prize in the CNET Road Trip Picture of the Week challenge.
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As someone who enjoys wearing the same pants every day, I don't pretend to know a lot about style. But I do appreciate others' efforts to educate, ...

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Ascension Island, a British overseas territory in the south Atlantic, was originally a nearly-lifeless, uninhabited rock. It had no freshwater except for rainfall which quickly evaporated. But in an experiment, Charles Darwin and his friend Joseph Hooker introduced non-native plants that they hoped would encourage water retention. The result is that today [...]
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(Video Link) If you go into some Japanese stores, the clerks have fist-sized orange balls behind the counter. No, the are not for sale. They’re balls of paint that clerks throw at robbers so that police can more easily identify them: The orange orbs you observed are called bohan yo kara boru (anticrime color balls). [...]
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rsmiller510 writes "Could Apple's announcement about Ping, a music-based social network be Apple's social networking trojan horse? Facebook might want to be concerned." Of course it is. Update: 09/02 19:26 GMT by T : Jamie points out this post on Daring Fireball, according to which Steve Jobs blames the non-integration on "onerous terms" suggested by Facebook.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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PC Magazine - Apple wants the new iTunes social network to be the Facebook of music.
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PC World - Apple's big overhaul of iTunes, announced Wednesday, turns the media management software into a fledgling social network thanks to a newly introduced feature called Ping. I would have expected more from Apple with this first attempt at building a community around iTunes. It's not all bad, but if Ping doesn't improve soon this music-oriented social network will bomb faster than an American Idol wannabe.
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cgriffin21 writes "Samsung is making no bones about it: Google Android is its future. And with the revealing of the Samsung Galaxy Tab, the company is showing that it's all in when it comes to Android. At the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin, Samsung finally pulled the curtain of the long rumored and teased Galaxy Tab, the electronics maker's touch-screen tablet and answer to the Apple iPad."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Reuters - AOL Inc said on Thursday it has renewed a search agreement with Google Inc, further cementing a decade-long partnership as AOL tries to turn around its business.

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An anonymous reader writes "It appears that Cincinnati Bengals cheerleader Sarah Jones and her lawyer were so upset by a comment on the site TheDirty.com that they missed the 'y' at the end of the name. Instead, they sued the owner of TheDirt.com, whose owner didn't respond to the lawsuit. The end result was a judge awarding $11 million, in part because of the failure to respond. Now, both the owners of TheDirty.com and TheDirt.com are complaining that they're being wrongfully written about in the press — one for not having had any content about Sarah Jones but being told it needs to pay $11 million, and the other for having the content and having the press say it lost a lawsuit, even though no lawsuit was ever actually filed against it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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I could watch Werner Herzog videos all day.

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Make held a weird gadget contest, and Rick Prescott’s modified Nerf Vulcan EBF-25TM machine gun came in first place. It uses heat sensors to track the movement of warm-bodied intruders and fire at them: An idea sparked in my mind one day while walking the toy gun isle in a store with my kid and [...]
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Hugh Pickens writes "The Guardian reports that in his new book, The Grand Design, Professor Stephen Hawking argues that the Big Bang, rather than occurring following the intervention of a divine being, was inevitable due to the law of gravity. 'Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist,' Hawking writes. 'It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.' Hawking had previously appeared to accept the role of God in the creation of the universe. Writing in his bestseller A Brief History Of Time in 1988, Hawking wrote: 'If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The Pop Five is a series of Pop Candy readers' top five lists. Today's contribution comes from Mike M.:

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The Encline Designs team has created this cool steampunk model of Optimus Prime, the Autobot leader in the Transformers universe, which transforms from robot to steam train. The model features functional lights and wheels that roll, and a detachable trailer that Optimus uses as a secondary weapon, similar to the trailer in his well-known firetruck mode. Link
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HELP! For the HELP! photo shoot, photographer Robert Freeman warmed up by shooting publicity stills of the band playing around in the Austrian snow. In the process, he realized that their arm motions reminded him of semaphore, a system of emergency naval communications using waving flags. Because the album title was conveniently four characters long, the [...]
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Morning, all! I hope you had a great night's sleep and are ready to roll. Last night I saw Easy A, the teen flick starring Emma Stone. It's cute, ...

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adeelarshad82 writes "IBM revealed details of its 5.2-GHz chip, the fastest microprocessor ever announced. Costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, IBM described the z196, which will power its Z-series of mainframes. The z196 contains 1.4 billion transistors on a chip measuring 512 square millimeters fabricated on 45-nm PD SOI technology. It contains a 64KB L1 instruction cache, a 128KB L1 data cache, a 1.5MB private L2 cache per core, plus a pair of co-processors used for cryptographic operations. IBM is set to ship the chip in September."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Two psychiatric experts think the way to treat troops returning home with PTSD: Have them undergo intensive psychotherapy while they're rolling on ecstasy.

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Six weeks after landing men on the moon, Americans take another giant leap for mankind with the nation’s first cash-spewing, automated teller machine.

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Video calls aren't for people to see you — they're for people to see what you see.

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Blazing fast (four minutes and nine seconds!), streamlined and full of highlights, Cuisinart's PerfecTemp puts its kettle competition to shame.

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A Q&A with Jeff Ma, the former leader of the infamous MIT Blackjack Team that took Vegas for millions in the mid-'90s. Now a successful entrepreneur and author, Ma talks about his love of fantasy sports, selling his company Citizen Sports to Yahoo (and why he didn't join them), and how young statgeeks can make their way in a sports industry dominated by traditionalists.

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Buffalo55 writes "For the most part, classic games manage to reappear on different systems. Just look at Nintendo. The publisher has done an excellent job bringing NES, SNES, Genesis and even old school Neo Geo titles to the Wii's Virtual Console, while Microsoft's Game Room brings the best of Atari's 2600 into the living room. Of course, not every console was a success. The '90s, in particular, saw quite a few flops from companies like Panasonic, Sega and Atari. Just because a system is a failure, though, doesn't mean all of its games suck. On the contrary, most of these machines have a few gems that fell between the cracks once the console croaked." What overlooked game on a failed platform would you like to see revived?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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aarondubrow writes "Three years ago, researchers from Caltech and The University of Texas at Austin came together to create a computational tool that could model the Earth and answer the most pressing questions in geophysics: What controls the speed of plates? How do microplates interact? How much energy do the plates generate and how does it dissipate? Using a new geodynamics software package they developed, the researchers have modeled plate motion with greater accuracy than ever before. The project is also a finalist for the Gordon Bell Prize — high performance computing's Oscar — at this year's SC10 conference."

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We recently discussed a man who sued NCsoft for making Lineage II "too addictive" after he spent 20,000 hours over five years playing it. Now, several readers have pointed out that the lawsuit has progressed past its first major hurdle: the EULA. Quoting: "NC Interactive has responded the way most software companies and online services have for more than a decade: it argued that the claims are barred by its end-user license agreement, which in this case capped the company's liability to the amount Smallwood paid in fees over six months prior to his filing his complaint (or thereabouts). One portion of the EULA specifically stated that lawsuits could only be brought in Texas state court in Travis County, where NC Interactive is located. ... But the judge in this case, US District Judge Alan C. Kay, noted that both Texas and Hawaii law bar contract provisions that waive in advance the ability to make gross-negligence claims. He also declined to dismiss Smallwood's claims for negligence, defamation, and negligent infliction of emotional distress."

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Julie188 writes "Target will begin selling Facebook's virtual currency as gift cards on September 5, becoming the first brick-and-mortar retailer to do so. Facebook Credit gift cards will be available in $15, $25 and $50 denominations at the retailer's 1,750 stores. That's right, you can now spend real dollars to get fake ones so you can buy imaginary items for games like FarmVille, Bejeweled and 150 other FB games or apps. If that interests you, please contact me. I have some swamp land in Florida I'd like to show you."

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angry tapir writes "Late last week an Australian court issued an injunction against a handful of retailers selling or importing hardware — commonly known as 'mod chips' — that allows unauthorized software to run on Sony's PlayStation 3. The court also required that the four parties that were the subject of the injunction actually hand over to Sony any PlayStation modchips they have. Sony's PlayStation 3 mod chip lawsuit could be just the first of many such cases in Australia, according to a lawyer who defended a client against Nintendo in a similar case earlier this year."

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Little Black Dress Apron – $29.95 Every woman needs a little black dress. With this Little Black Dress Apron from the NeatoShop, you can look chic and stylish, even when you’re washing the dishes or slaving over a hot stove in the kitchen: Link | More Fun and Unusual Aprons | Fun Kitchen Stuff
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beschra writes "BBC writes of 'terra-forming' Ascension Island, one of the islands Charles Darwin visited. He and a friend encouraged the Royal Navy to import boat loads of trees and plants in an attempt to capture the little bit of water that fell on the island. They were quite successful. The island even has a cloud forest now. From the article: '[British ecologist] Wilkinson thinks that the principles that emerge from that experiment could be used to transform future colonies on Mars. In other words, rather than trying to improve an environment by force, the best approach might be to work with life to help it "find its own way."'"

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In 1983 Nintendo released the Famicon console. Now 26 years later we tear it apart to see what makes it tick.

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There's a sign of hope for frustrated Google Apps users who feel left out of getting all the cool toys regular Google users get: Google is inviting select users this week to test out Apps with all the bells and whistles.

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Researchers in Germany examined what news stories older people like to read. They found that grandma and grandpa tend to prefer stories that cast younger people in a negative light: “Living in a youth centered culture, they may appreciate a boost in self-esteem. That’s why they prefer the negative stories about younger people, who are [...]
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This year’s Web 2.0 Summit, a conference for web bigwigs, has a pretty neat topic: Points of Control, The Battle for the Network Economy. What got my attention was the nifty presentation of various segments of the Internet as a battlefield map. One could envision a smoke-filled backroom where Internet honchos (I’m looking at you, [...]
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Photo: Renegade Pictures From Nat Geo Wild’s new TV series Lion Ranger: Trouble in the Pride, comes this photo of self-taught animal behaviorist Kevin Richardson lying on a bed of lion. Or would you prefer catnapping on big cats? Sorry, can’t resist that. It’s been a long day. Perhaps you can do better? Thanks Minjae!
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