Category: reader

Crowds (and Pirates) Flock To ‘The Interview’

Rambo Tribble writes: Many of the 300+ theaters showing The Interview on Christmas were rewarded with sell-out crowds. While reviews of the comedy have been mixed, many movie-goers expressed solidarity with the sentiment of professor Carlos Royal: “I wanted to support the U.S.” Despite sellout crowds, the movie’s limited release meant it only brought in about $1 million on opening day (compared to $10M+ for the highest-grossing films). Curiosity about the film seems high, since hundreds of thousands rushed to torrent the film, and others figured out an extremely easy way to bypass Sony’s DRM. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Crowds (and Pirates) Flock To ‘The Interview’

Worst Demolition Team Screws Up Same Explosion Twice

How hard can it be to blow up a building? My childhood experience with knocking over waist-high towers of cardboard blocks leads me to say “not hard, ” but this botched job by a demolition team in Sevastopol suggests otherwise. I mean, come on guys. Read more…

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Worst Demolition Team Screws Up Same Explosion Twice

​The First Tesla With Nearly A 400-Mile Range Is The Old Roadster

Tesla’s earliest adopters were promised an update to the Roadster before the end of the year and Elon Musk is delivering with less than a week to spare. Read more…

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​The First Tesla With Nearly A 400-Mile Range Is The Old Roadster

Toyota reportedly working on a flagship, hydrogen-fueled Lexus limousine

Toyota’s first hydrogen car hasn’t even gone on sale yet here in the US, and already we’re hearing rumors about a follow-up vehicle. According to the Australian website Motoring , the Japanese auto giant is planning on taking the same fuel cell system it used in its mid-range Mirai sedan, and putting it into a higher-end Lexus LS limousine. For the most part, then, the new vehicle will make use of the same technology, though Toyota will apparently have to do some retro-fitting in order to make it work inside the current Lexus LS. (Unlike the LS, the Mirai was built from scratch as a hydrogen car.) If Motoring ‘s report is correct, the new Lexus will have a fuel cell under the front seat, with the hydrogen tanks located behind the rear seat. Also, despite the fact that the LS wasn’t originally designed as a hydrogen vehicle, it will reportedly offer nearly the same range as Toyota’s existing FCEV: 239 miles, versus 300 on the Mirai. No word yet on price or whether this report is even true. And we suspect it could be a while before anyone sets the record straight — the hydrogen-fueled Lexus LS is rumored to launch “by 2017, ” up to two years from now. Filed under: Transportation Comments Via: Autoblog Source: Motoring

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Toyota reportedly working on a flagship, hydrogen-fueled Lexus limousine

Facebook facing class-action lawsuit over unauthorized message scanning

We know: Despite its best attempts at proving otherwise , Facebook and privacy have an oil/water reputation — the latest legal news regarding the company won’t help that any, either. A California judge recently ruled that The Social Network will face a class-action lawsuit following accusations that it peeked at users’ private messages without consent to deliver targeted advertising. Facebook tried to dismiss the claims, saying that it didn’t break any laws and that the alleged message scans were protected under an exception in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act , according to Reuters . Which one specifically? That these “interceptions” are lawful if they occur over the “ordinary course” of a service provider’s business. The presiding judge countered, saying that Zuckerberg and Co. failed to offer explanation of how the scans fell under the website’s ordinary course of business. As the lawsuit stands, it’d benefit any Facebook user that’d sent or received links via the site’s private message system in the past two years, as reported by Bloomberg . We’d be remiss if we left out the possible pay-out, though: “as much as” $10, 000 in damages for each user . Multiply that by Facebook’s billion-plus users, carry the one and you come out to a whole lot of money . In less exciting news, the plaintiffs also want the social giant to stop scanning messages moving forward. Sound familiar? Hopefully so, because Google is under similar ( but not class-action ) legal scrutiny for message scanning of its own. The results of both of these cases will almost assuredly have big effects for how we communicate on the web moving forward, and you can bet we’ll be following them closely in the coming year. Update : A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment on the suit. Filed under: Internet , Facebook Comments Source: Reuters , Bloomberg

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Facebook facing class-action lawsuit over unauthorized message scanning

Chaos ensues as armored truck spills $4.5 million on road

Dozens of Hong Kong motorists and pedestrians rushed to grab loads of money after an armored truck’s doors opened by accident on a busy road, spilling about $4.5 million dollars in HK$500 notes (US$65) on Christmas Eve, reports the South China Morning Post. Check out all those frantic bastards. Read more…

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Chaos ensues as armored truck spills $4.5 million on road

Rackspace Restored After DDOS Takes Out DNS

An anonymous reader sends word that Rackspace has recovered from a severe distributed denial of service attack. “Over on the company’s Google+ page Rackspace warned of ‘intermittent periods of latency, packet loss, or connectivity failures when attempting to reach rackspace.com or subdomains within rackspace.com.’ The company’s status report later confirmed it had ‘… identified a UDP DDoS attack targeting the DNS servers in our IAD, ORD, and LON data centers [North Virigina, Chicago and London]. As a result of this issue, authoritative DNS resolution for any new request to the DNS servers began to fail in the affected data centers. In order to stabilize the issue, our teams placed the impacted DNS infrastructure behind mitigation services. This service is designed to protect our infrastructure, however, due to the nature of the event, a portion of legitimate traffic to our DNS infrastructure may be inadvertently blocked. Our teams are actively working to mitigate the attack and provide service stability.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Rackspace Restored After DDOS Takes Out DNS

Linux 3.19 Kernel To Start 2015 With Many New Features

An anonymous reader writes Linux 3.18 was recently released, thus making Linux 3.19 the version under development as the year comes to a close. Linux 3.19 as the first big kernel update of 2015 is bringing in the new year with many new features: among them are AMDKFD HSA kernel driver, Intel “Skylake” graphics support, Radeon and NVIDIA driver improvements, RAID5/6 improvements for Btrfs, LZ4 compression for SquashFS, better multi-touch support, new input drivers, x86 laptop improvements, etc. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux 3.19 Kernel To Start 2015 With Many New Features

Human Eye’s Oscillation Rate Determines Smooth Frame Rate

jones_supa writes: It should be safe to conclude that humans can see frame rates greater than 24 fps. The next question is: why do movies at 48 fps look “video-y, ” and why do movies at 24 fps look “dreamy” and “cinematic.” Why are games more realistic at 60 fps than 30 fps? Simon Cooke from Microsoft (Xbox) Advanced Technology Group has an interesting theory to explain this all. Your eyes oscillate a tiny amount, ranging from 70 to 103 Hz (on average 83.68 Hz). So here’s the hypothesis: The ocular microtremors wiggle the retina, allowing it to sample at approximately 2x the resolution of the sensors. Showing someone pictures that vary at less than half the rate of the oscillation means we’re no longer receiving a signal that changes fast enough to allow the supersampling operation to happen. So we’re throwing away a lot of perceived-motion data, and a lot of detail as well. Some of the detail can be restored with temporal antialiasing and simulating real noise, but ideally Cooke suggests going with a high enough frame rate (over 43 fps) and if possible, a high resolution. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Human Eye’s Oscillation Rate Determines Smooth Frame Rate