Are you donating to one of America’s worst charities?

The Tampa Bay Times has done some excellent investigative reporting on the 50 worst charities in America — organizations that took in more than $1 billion over the past 10 years, and gave almost all of that money to their own staffs and professional solicitors. The series explains how charities like this operate and skirt the regulatory system. But if you’re feeling TLDR, there’s also a PDF that can help you quickly figure out if you’re donating to one of these scams . A large portion of the 50 worst is made up of charities devoted to cancer and veterans’ issues.        

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Are you donating to one of America’s worst charities?

Partially-Undersea Water Discus Hotel To Be Built In the Maldives

Zothecula writes “Polish architectural and deep-sea engineering company Deep Ocean Technology has inked a deal with Ridgewood Hotels and Suites Pvt. Ltd. to build its futuristic part-underwater Water Discus Hotel just off the shore of Kuredhivaru Island in the Maldives. ‘The luminous hotel features two large disc-shaped lounges seven-meters above the water, housing a luxury restaurant and spa. The lounges are connected to a glass tunnel plunging 30-meters below the water, leading to 21 opulent bedrooms. Not only does the hotel look like a spaceship — it actually moves like one, with the largest underwater saucer-shaped room able to slide to the surface in emergencies. ‘If you need to replace a window for example, it’s very difficult underwater,’ explained Podwojewski. ‘So we wanted to build a building that can surface any time for maintenance or safety.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Partially-Undersea Water Discus Hotel To Be Built In the Maldives

Yahoo is set to release inactive mail accounts this August.

Yahoo is set to release inactive mail accounts this August. Any account that’s been inactive for at least a year and hasn’t been accessed by July 15th will be released back into the wild, the company announced today. [ AP ] Read more…        

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Yahoo is set to release inactive mail accounts this August.

The Prettiest Way to Find Out What iOS 7 Features Your iPhone Won’t Get

iOS 7 looks lovely, but it’s not all about appearances; the new operating system is bringing some nice new features as well. But even if you get the upgrade, you might not get all the fun stuff that comes with it . Read more…        

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The Prettiest Way to Find Out What iOS 7 Features Your iPhone Won’t Get

Facebook adds clickable hashtag support to your News Feed

Facebook wants to help you make your conversations just a little more discoverable (if you so desire), and it’s decided to finally include a long-missing feature — clickable hashtags — to the News Feed. If you’ve ever enjoyed hashtag searches on Twitter, Instagram or other social networks (some of our friends enjoy them a little too much, if you ask us), you’ll now have the same feeling of exhilaration on Zuckerberg’s service as you are now able to click on each one. Up until today, any hashtags from imported tweets or Instagram posts just showed up as regular text, with no backlink to accompany them. When it comes to the visibility of your own hashtags, Facebook won’t allow any unintended audiences to see your private updates, so you remain in control of your desired privacy. The company also plans to roll out trending hashtags and other related features in the coming months, but this is a good start for now. The company’s official blog post can be found below. Filed under: Facebook Comments Source: Facebook

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Facebook adds clickable hashtag support to your News Feed

Why Pandora Just Bought an FM Radio Station in South Dakota

Late in the day on Tuesday, news emerged that Pandora had acquired an FM radio station in South Dakota for an undisclosed sum. Yes, you read that right. The world’s largest internet radio station is getting into the terrestrial radio business, and it’s not because Pandora’s trying to build out its antique antenna collection. Either Pandora’s trying to save money on licensing fees in order to improve its service, which is way the company says it’s doing, or Pandora’s staging some weird internet-meets-Earth publicity stunt, which is what it seems like the company is doing. Read more…        

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Why Pandora Just Bought an FM Radio Station in South Dakota

Bing Maps adds 270TB worth of Bird’s Eye imagery, its largest update yet

If you thought the 215TB of satellite imagery Bing Maps added last year was hefty, think again. In what is the largest installment of Bird’s Eye shots yet, the mapping folks in Redmond piled on a whopping 270TB of high-res flyover images to their database yesterday. Some of the more notable (read: gorgeous) additions include overviews of Rome and Milan in Italy, Stavanger in Norway and Kaanapali in Hawaii. Aside from the new visuals, Bing also added a couple of improvements to its Venue Maps with an expanded points of interest list and a new “Report a problem” system so users can inform Bing if a location is marked incorrectly. So go on, head over to the source, select any of the amazing locales and take a little free trip to the other side of the world. Comments Source: Bing Maps blog

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Bing Maps adds 270TB worth of Bird’s Eye imagery, its largest update yet

Quantic Dream’s 12-minute PS4 tech demo is ready for your viewing pleasure (video)

Now that the dust has settled from Sony’s E3 press conference , Quantic Dream’s posted the entirety of its PS4 tech demo, The Dark Sorcerer . Over on the PlayStation Blog , the studio’s director, David Cage, laid out the finer points of their experience with performance capturing and going from flexing the PS3’s graphical muscle to working with the next-gen powerhouse. When it comes to technical details, the Heavy Rain developer’s comedic sketch was rendered at 1080p in real-time (lighting and all), includes one million polygons for the set and just shy of a million for every on-screen character, which each boast 350MB of textures and roughly 40 different shaders. Impressed with what you see? Cage says it’s bound to get better. As it stands, the engine used for the demonstration is in its first iteration, and is missing features that are scheduled for the final version. “We can feel that we are closing in little by little on the kind of graphic quality we find in CG films,” Cage notes. Venture past the break for the video or hit the bordering source link for more background. Filed under: Gaming , Sony Comments Source: PlayStation Blog , PlayStation (YouTube)

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Quantic Dream’s 12-minute PS4 tech demo is ready for your viewing pleasure (video)