TheGift73 sends this excerpt from TorrentFreak:
“Despite the widespread availability of pirated releases, The Avengers just scored a record-breaking $200 million opening weekend at the box office. While some are baffled to see that piracy failed to crush the movie’s profits, it’s really not that surprising. Claiming a camcorded copy of a movie seriously impacts box office attendance is the same as arguing that concert bootlegs stop people from seeing artists on stage. … Of all the people who downloaded a pirate copy of the film about 20% came from the U.S. This means that roughly 100,000 Americans have downloaded a copy online through BitTorrent. Now, IF all these people bought a movie ticket instead then box office revenue would be just 0.5% higher. Not much of an impact, and even less when you consider that these ‘pirates’ do not all count as a lost sale.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The Avengers: Why Pirates Failed To Prevent a Box Office Record

Qedward writes “Chief operating officer Kevin Turner says Microsoft will be ‘carbon neutral across all our direct operations including data centers, software development labs, air travel, and office buildings’ from July 1, the start of the 2012 fiscal year. Turner added: ‘We are hopeful that our decision will encourage other companies, large and small, to look at what they can do to address this important issue.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft Makes Ambitious Carbon Neutral Pledge

Mark Zuckerberg. Grand overlord of everyone’s internet. He won’t be happy until he has a part to play in every single godforsaken aspect of your miserable lives. More »

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Mark Zuckerberg Will Determine Whether You Get Wasted Tonight, Kiddies [Facebook]

The attackers chose their moment well. More »

Taken from:
Everyone Has Been Hacked. Now What? [Hacking]

If you bring your broken black iPhone 4 to the Apple Store, you might get a fresh iPhone 4S as your replacement phone. What?! Yep, because of supply constraints, many Apple Stores don’t have any black iPhone 4 units (16GB/32GB) in stock so they have been instructed by Apple to give customers an iPhone 4S instead. More »

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Apple Might Replace Your Broken iPhone 4 with an iPhone 4S [Apple]

Those of you looking for a fresh, Ivy Bridge-powered gaming rig may want to look ASUS‘ way. The Taiwanese outfit just welcomed a trifecta of new ROG TYTAN machines to its lineup, which include the CG8580, CG8270 and CM6870 — all sporting similar aesthetics as that CG8490 we showed you a while back. For starters, the higher-end CG8580 packs a quad-core, 4.6GHz Core i7-3770k CPU alongside a single-touch Turbo Gear button for overclocking, a twin 128GB SSD and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX680 graphics card. As for the CG8270 and CM6870, you can choose between Intel’s third-gen Core i5 or i7 for processing power, up to 16GB of RAM and, of course, a DVD or Blu-ray player. ASUS hasn’t given official pricing yet, but we’re sure that’s going to depend heavily on how souped-up you want your future gaming beast to be.

ASUS intros three new ROG TYTAN gaming desktops, Ivy Bridge on board originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 08 May 2012 13:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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ASUS intros three new ROG TYTAN gaming desktops, Ivy Bridge on board

On Monday, the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles approved Google’s license application to test autonomous vehicles on the state’s roads. The state had approved such laws back in February, and has now begun issuing licenses based on those regulations.

The state previously outlined that companies that want to test such vehicles will need an insurance bond of $1 million and must provide detailed outlines of where they plan to test it and under what conditions. Further, the car must have two people in it at all times, with one behind the wheel who can take control of the vehicle if needed.

The Autonomous Review Committee of the Nevada DMV is supervising the first licensing procedure and has now approved corresponding plates to go with it, complete with a red background and infinity symbol.

“I felt using the infinity symbol was the best way to represent the ‘car of the future,’” Nevada DMV Director Bruce Breslow said in a statement.

“The unique red plate will be easily recognized by the public and law enforcement and will be used only for licensed autonomous test vehicles. When there comes a time that vehicle manufacturers market autonomous vehicles to the public, that infinity symbol will appear on a green license plate.”

Eagle-eyed Ars readers: if you spot this car in Nevada, snap a pic and let us know!

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Google gets license to test drive autonomous cars on Nevada roads

Twitter just announced an update to its mobile site that is meant to bring it up to par with the new version of Twitter the company introduced in December. According to Twitter, the idea behind this update is to “give every person on the planet a consistent Twitter experience.” Because of this, the company says, the new version of the mobile site now uses one-third less bandwidth than the previous iteration and should work significantly better on feature phones, older browsers and low-bandwidth connections.

This new version will start rolling out today.

According to Twitter’s VP of Product Satya Patel, the company aims to “make Twitter the most accessible way to connect with the world, even with the weakest signals and the simplest devices.”

Given that feature phones still represent the majority of mobile phones in use today, it makes sense for the company to try to reach more of this market by optimizing its mobile site for these devices.

The updated version of the mobile site, says Patel, should feel just like a native app and gives users access to all the standard Twitter features, including @mentions in the Connect tab, direct messages and trending stories in the Discover tab.

See more here:
Twitter’s Mobile Site Now Uses One-Third Less Bandwidth

This morning, Google officially rolled out Google+ Hangouts On Air to all users worldwide, following the feature’s limited introduction back in September. At the time of its initial release, this live broadcasting feature allowed top Google+ users (like celebs) to stream live video feeds directly to their Google+ fan base. The service kicked off with a Google+ Hangouts stream from will.i.am, but soon saw a number of notable participants, even including the President of the United States, Barack Obama, at one point.

The worldwide rollout of Hangouts On Air, announced today via the official Google Blog, represents an interesting shift for the feature, which before was more about public figures and other types of broadcasters, like news orgs, reaching a large audience of viewers via the social platform. Now, anyone can be a live broadcaster. It’s the same promise made by services like Ustream, Livestream, and and Justin.tv, for example. It’s now also the promise of Google’s own livestreaming property, YouTube.com/live – a property which just opened up to all. Well, all who have a Google+ account, that is.

According to the Google blog post, users can broadcast their live hangout to their Google+ stream…but also to their YouTube channel or their website. It’s those last two items, and primarily the option to broadcast live to YouTube as well as Google+, that makes the general availability of Hangouts on Air so interesting.

Today, YouTube.com/live’s help documentation says that the service is still not broadly available to all of YouTube’s video creators:

We’re slowly rolling out live streaming to our partners with accounts in good standing over time. You can check to see whether live streaming is already enabled on your account by logging in and visiting your Channel page. Look for a promotional message at the top.

Plus, in April, when YouTube Live was celebrating its first anniversary, YouTube’s partner product manager Varun Talwar noted that, while the team had developed new features like pay-per-view and real-time analytics for its broadcasters “with the expectation many more of you will eventually use YouTube Live” (hint, hint?), he also said that, unfortunately, “this process takes time to roll out broadly.”

Well, forget waiting, because it appears that live YouTube streaming is here…for anyone with a Google+ account. Clever, Google. Very clever.

Per the Google+ Hangouts on Air documentation, using Hangouts On Air means you also get to broadcast live on YouTube. It reads:

Broadcast a hangout: Invite circles or individual people to join you in a hangout, then broadcast it to the world. A live player of your hangout will be posted to your Google+ Home page and YouTube channel.

The change is an important one for Google’s growth. Today, Google+ adoption appears to be less organic, and comes from the large number of integrations with other Google properties. Google, too, has been slightly vague with regards to its Google+ numbers, refusing to detail the number of visitors who hit up the plus.google.com directly. Instead, it talks of its “170 million+ users,” with “100 million 30-day actives,” but has so far refused to define “active,” or detail how many are “upgrading to Google+” outside of Google+ proper.

That being said, no one can argue YouTube’s numbers. Its audience of hundreds of millions upload 60 hours of video per minute to the service. And now they can all be live broadcasters, too, via the Google+ funnel? Any guess on how long it will be before we see another announcement regarding Google+’s amazing jump in user numbers?

We’ve reached out to Google to confirm all its Help documentation is correct and current (you never know). We’ll update if need be, if/when Google confirms.

Update: Google wants to point out that, basically, Hangouts are the social counterpart to YouTube Live. Says a company spokesperson:

“Hangouts On Air uses a combination of Google+ and YouTube Live to let you engage with even more people, while YouTube Live focuses more on broadcasting an event to your audience. For example, you’d watch your favorite band play on YouTube Live, but then engage with them backstage in a Hangout On Air.”

Original post:
Want To Broadcast Live On YouTube? You’ll Need A Google+ Account For That