Microsoft has released a new SkyDrive Pro client that offers users of Office 365 and SharePoint the chance to store files locally. The application is the heir to the My Site feature from previous incarnations of Office 365.…
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Yahoo!'s Australian outpost, a joint venture with the Seven Television Network dubbed Yahoo!7, has teamed with a local supermarket chain in a scheme that pays punters to use its search engine.…
AMD is showing off its latest round of APUs – accelerated processing units that combine compute and graphics cores on the same slice o' silicon – that it hopes will be reinforcements in its battle for the consumer market against its main competitor, Intel, especially at the low-power end of the market.…
Japanese Whatsapp-like service Line has come under uncomfortable scrutiny by international users after appearing to prepare self-censorship capabilities for its Chinese service Lian wo.…
Provider Ticket Zone is continuing a joint investigation with Brentford Football Club after it emerged that card details used to buy tickets for the League One playoff final last weekend were subsequently used for fraudulent purchases.…
Somebody leaked the video for Daft Punk's "Get Lucky!" (Thanks, Gabe Adiv!)
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
UPDATE: "Vimeo has removed or disabled access to the following material as a result of a third-party notification by The David Foster Wallace Literary Trust claiming that this material is infringing: THIS IS WATER - By David Foster Wallace."
Here's a beautifully made video accompaniment to "This is Water," an excerpt from a David Foster Wallace commencement address to Kenyon College in 2005, in which Wallace exhorts his listeners to empathize with the people around them, using examples and languages so beautifully chosen that they just about break your heart.
But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it. Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address - May 21, 2005 (via Lifehacker)
When is a phone PC? When it's a Fairphone, the smartphone “that puts social values first” and has a rather politically-correct (PC) attitude.…
AUSCERT 2013 First the good news: for all the known vulnerabilities that exist in the SCADA world, exploiting them in a way that can actually “shut down a power plant” is harder than most people (particularly including media) realise.…
The RIAA has submitted its latest Form 990 tax filing to the IRS, which details the organization's precipitous shelving off in budget and employees (though the execs gave themselves fat raises):
The drop in income can be solely attributed to lower membership dues from the major music labels. Over the past two years label contributions have dropped to $23.6 million, and over a three-year period the labels cut back a total of $30 million, which is more than the RIAA’s total income today.
The cutbacks are not immediately apparent from the salaries paid to the top executives. RIAA Chairman and CEO Cary Sherman, for example, earned $1.46 million compared to $1.37 million the year before. Senior Executive Vice President Mitch Glazier also saw a modest rise in income from $618,946 to $642,591.
...The reduction in legal costs is even more significant, going from to $6.4 million to $1.2 million in two years. In part, this reduction was accomplished by no longer targeting individual file-sharers in copyright infringement lawsuits, which is a losing exercise for the group.
Looking through other income we see that the RIAA received $196,378 in “anti-piracy restitution,” coming from the damages awarded in lawsuits against Limewire and such.
RIAA Makes Drastic Employee Cuts as Revenue Plummets [Ernesto/TorrentFreak]
The Atlantic's Hugo Schwyzer has a theory: that masturbation, as the most common sex act, is the heart of modernity's war between Christianity and secularism.
Many progressives were bewildered by Antonin Scalia's blistering 2003 dissent in Lawrence v Texas, in which he warned that state laws against evils such as "adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, and bestiality" might be invalidated as a result of the decision. Why, liberals wondered, was masturbation included on that list? The answer is simple: masturbation remains not only a grave sin in the eyes of the Catholic Church to which Scalia belongs, but its acceptance as benign and healthy is perhaps the foundational error of modern sexual culture.
VIDEO The European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory has beamed home pictures of two galaxies inexorably moving towards each other and boffins offered simulations of what happens next.…
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A small company in Austin, Texas, has received a $US125,000 grant from NASA to develop 3D printed food for astronauts.…
Canadian artist Howie Tsui redesigned a pinball machine to turn it into a crude simulation of a musket-ball rattling around a soldier's guts for a War of 1812-themed exhibition currently running at the Agnes Etherington Arts Centre at Queens University in Kingston. It's meant to demonstrate the way that repetition and concentration can inure you to the horrors of war:
The first part of his exhibition is a re-themed pinball machine, which now, having been Tsui-ed, is called Musketball! Tsui repainted the front glass panel and it now shows a British soldier reeling back as his guts explode from a musket shot (no rolling around inside for this one). The playing surface is painted with organs, tissue and bone, with the words “mangled viscera” at midfield. It would all be tame in a modern shooter video game, but it’s shockingly graphic on a vintage board.
I step up to the game and fire my first ball, which gets back in the gutter faster than I thought possible. I fire the second ball — which I note are gold, not silver, to which Tsui says, “I kind of blinged it up a little bit.” This ball stays in play just long enough to hit a few bumpers and set off sound effects of rifle shots and artillery blasts. I fire my remaining three balls, and my final score is slightly less than one-tenth of Tsui’s high score. “It’s your first time playing. I had to do a lot of testing,” Tsui says, showing he’s also talented in the art of diplomacy.
“After a while,” he says, “you sort of get hooked on the game, and the whole idea for me is that it distances the player from the idea of violence.”
Pinball, bones and animal skins: Howie Tsui’s wonderful horrors of the War of 1812 [Peter Simpson/Ottawa Citizen]
(via Kadrey)
China is responsible up to 80 per cent of US intellectual property theft, which a government report has estimated accounts for $300bn in lost exports, roughly the equivalent of the current American trade balance with Asia.…
