Obama hasn’t had a great time with all things technological recently: Healthcare.gov is still struggling , and he was embarrassingly forced into posing for a selfie with Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt last week. This Saturday Night Live video takes an amusing look at it all. Read more…
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Saturday Night Live Hilariously Riffs on Obama’s Recent Tech Troubles
An anonymous reader writes “Norway is the latest country to consider the legal implications of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Norway’s director general of taxation has come out and said ‘[Bitcoin] doesn’t fall under the usual definition of money, ‘ which means that it will be considered as assets and charged under capital gains laws. This sentiment was echoed last week by the European banking authority as well, where citizens were warned of using the cyrptocurrency.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Norway Rejects Bitcoin As Currency; Taxes As Asset, Instead
Unless you’re part of a select group of beta testers (or happen to be handy with Linux ), you’re probably reading this in a home without access to a Steam Machine. Wondering what you’re missing out on? A handful of Valve’s 300 beta testers are happy to rub their good fortune in your face and clue you in. The aptly named “SteamMachineBetaTester” Tumblr and Reddit user Colbehr have kindly documented their Steam Machine unboxings, revealing the same form factor we saw last month packed into a well padded wooden crate. Well, there is one change: Valve has drilled out a hole in each of the test units ventilation grates, marking the test device with a representative blemish on one of the vent’s 300 perforations. The complete kit comes with the beta hardware itself, a prototype Steam controller, HDMI, USB and power power cables, a USB Steam OS recovery thumbstick and a removable WiFi antenna module. True to Valve’s promise, the beta rig is serviceable too, with disassembly instructions helpfully spelled out in the device’s instruction manual. It’s hard not to be a little jealous, but at least you’ve got options: check out the tester’s galleries at the source links below or, you know, build your own . Filed under: Gaming Comments Source: Reddit , Colbehr , Tumblr
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Steam Machines beta testers start receiving hardware, teasing the less fortunate
News stories that are really big unfold over months or years, and tackling them can take almost constant media coverage. But all of that distilled information can start to feel overwhelming in itself, and that’s where the infographic recap comes in really handy. Read more…
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A Quick and Complete History of Bitcoin So You’re Not Totally Lost
SonicSpike writes “Light bulb manufacturers will cease making traditional 40 and 60-watt light bulbs — the most popular in the country — at the start of 2014. This comes after the controversial phasing out of incandescent 75 and 100-watt light bulbs at the beginning of 2013. In their place will be halogen bulbs, compact fluorescent bulbs, LED bulbs and high efficiency incandescents — which are just regular incandescents that have the filament wrapped in gas. All are significantly more expensive than traditional light bulbs, but offer significant energy and costs savings over the long run. (Some specialty incandescents — such as three-way bulbs — will still be available.) … The rules were signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2007. They are designed to address gross inefficiencies with old light bulbs — only 10% of the energy they use is converted into light, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, which has a handy fact sheet about the changes. The rest is wasted as heat. But the rules have drawn fire from a number of circles — mainly conservatives and libertarians who are unhappy about the government telling people what light bulbs they can use. They argue that if the new ones really are so good, people will buy them on their own without being forced to do so.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
After the successful soft landing of its carrier vessel on the surface of the moon, China’s Jade Rabbit lunar rover has begun beaming back photos of the lunar surface. From the BBC’s article, with links to video as well as several photos, comes this description: “Chang’e-3 is the third unmanned rover mission to touch down on the lunar surface, and the first to go there in more than 40 years. The last was an 840kg (1, 900lb) Soviet vehicle known as Lunokhod-2, which was kept warm by polonium-210. But the six-wheeled Chinese vehicle carries a more sophisticated payload, including ground-penetrating radar which will gather measurements of the lunar soil and crust. The 120kg (260lb) Jade Rabbit rover can reportedly climb slopes of up to 30 degrees and travel at 200m (660ft) per hour. … The rover and lander are powered by solar panels but some sources suggest they also carry radioisotope heating units (RHUs), containing plutonium-238 to keep them warm during the cold lunar night. According to Chinese space scientists, the mission is designed to test new technologies, gather scientific data and build intellectual expertise. It will also scout valuable mineral resources that could one day be mined.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Photos Stream Back From China’s Lunar Lander
Jeff Keacher wanted to get his Mac Plus, now well into its third decade, online. It had been on BBSes and text-only Lynx via dial-up back in the day, but Keacher wanted to go full TCP/IP. And it worked. He even loaded Gizmodo for us! Read more…
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You Can Actually Browse the Web on a 27-Year-Old Mac Plus
itwbennett writes “Two reports out this week, one a new ‘codex’ released by 451 Research and the other an updated survey into cloud IaaS pricing from Redmonk, show just how insane cloud pricing has become. If your job requires you to read these reports, good luck. For the rest of us, Redmonk’s Stephen O’Grady distilled the pricing trends down to this: ‘HP offers the best compute value and instance sizes for the dollar. Google offers the best value for memory, but to get there it appears to have sacrificed compute. AWS is king in value for disk and it appears no one else is even trying to come close. Microsoft is taking the ‘middle of the road, ‘ never offering the best or worst pricing.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Why Cloud Infrastructure Pricing Is Absurd
New submitter ghack writes “NuScale power, a small nuclear power company in Corvallis Oregon, has won a Department of Energy grant of up to $226 million dollars to enable deployment of their small modular reactor. The units would be factory built in the United States, and their small size enables a number of potential niche applications. NuScale argues that their design includes a number of unique passive safety features: ‘NuScale’s 45-megawatt reactor, which can be grouped with others to form a utility-scale plant, would sit in a 5 million-gallon pool of water underground. That means it needs no pumps to inject water to cool it in an emergency – an issue … highlighted by Japan’s crippled Fukushima plant.’ This was the second of two DOE small modular reactor grants; the first was awarded to Babcock and Wilcox, a stalwart in the nuclear industry.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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NuScale Power Awarded $226 Million To Deploy Small Nuclear Reactor Design
KentuckyFC writes “Optical engineers generally build imaging systems with the best possible resolving power. The basic idea is that an imaging system focuses light into a pattern known as a point spreading function. This consists of a central region of high intensity surrounded by a concentric lobe of lower intensity light. The trick to improving resolution is narrowing and intensifying this central region while suppressing the outer lobe. Now optical engineers have turned this approach on its head by suppressing the central region so that the field intensity here is zero while intensifying the lobe. The result is a three-dimensional beam of darkness that hides any object inside it. The engineers say this region can be huge — up to 8 orders of magnitude bigger than the wavelength of the imaging light. What’s more, the optics required to create it are simple and cheap: a lens consisting of concentric dielectric grooves. The team has even tested a prototype capable of hiding a 40-micrometre object in visible laser light.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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‘Darkness Ray’ Beams Invisibility From a Distance