Tag: amazon

Amazon’s Free Shipping Minimum Is Now $49

Even if you don’t have Prime, you can still get free shipping from Amazon if you reach a spending threshold. Up until recently, that threshold was $35, but Amazon just raised its free shipping minimum to $49. Read more…

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Amazon’s Free Shipping Minimum Is Now $49

Scan of original 1977 35mm print of Star Wars released online

A restored high-definition digital scan, taken from 35mm prints of the original, unmolested version of Star Wars, is now available online to those who are looking. May the celluloid will be with you. Always. While this isn’t the first time that attempts have been made to restore Star Wars to its original theatrical version—that’s the one without the much-maligned CGI effects and edits of later “special” editions—it is the first to have been based entirely on a single 35mm print of the film, rather than cut together from various sources. Here’s a post from the team who located prints and restored the film : Despite having access to the original source, and to all the cleaned footage as the project progressed, I was still completely blown away by the final version. I had no idea it could look so good! Honestly! Way back at the start I had created a comparison clip with the 2006 Bonus DVD on top and the raw scan of LPP on the bottom, in order to see which frames (if any) were missing from the print, and I remember being rather alarmed that it made the GOUT look good!: Creator George Lucas said, in disowning his original work, that all the copies of it were destroyed. “The only issue with Team Negative 1’s version of the film,” reports Mark Walton, “is that it isn’t exactly legal.” Here it is, compared to the official Blu-Ray: https://youtu.be/mo24gFFk7WM https://youtu.be/pFp9bSp-fro https://youtu.be/3Wjx01CuqDs

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Scan of original 1977 35mm print of Star Wars released online

Twisty fusion reactor goes online after 19 years of work

Germany just took fusion power one big, important step forward. The country’s Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics has just switched on Wendelstein 7-X , the first large fusion reactor based on a twisty stellarator design. It’s only producing hydrogen plasma at the moment and won’t actually generate energy, but power isn’t really the point. Instead, it’ll serve as proof that stellarators could provide energy while operating continuously, unlike current (tokamak-based) fusion reactors that operate in short pulses. They should be safer, too. The inaugural test phase will run through mid-March, after which point it’ll get an upgrade to let it run hotter and longer. Eventually, it should discharge for up to 30 minutes at a time, and muster a heating power of 20 megawatts. The machine comes at a high price in more ways than one. It took roughly 19 years to design and build Wendelstein 7-X at a staggering cost of €1.2 billion, or about $1.3 billion. That’s a lot of effort for a testbed device. However, it could pay off if it leads to a much more powerful (not to mention less dangerous ) alternative to nuclear fission energy. Via: Motherboard Source: Max Planck Institute

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Twisty fusion reactor goes online after 19 years of work

Amazon Will Open Over 300 Physical Bookstores Because Life is a Practical Joke Being Played On Us All

Amazon is working on plans to open hundreds of brick-and-mortar bookstores, according to a new report from CNBC . Yes, following in the steps of chains like Borders, Amazon apparently thinks that the future is in deadtrees. Read more…

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Amazon Will Open Over 300 Physical Bookstores Because Life is a Practical Joke Being Played On Us All

Uber Screwup Exposed Driver’s Social Security Number and Tax Info

Tax season already sucks for independent contractors, but some Uber drivers who logged on to the company’s Partners portal to receive their 1099s are complaining about an especially nasty surprise: Instead of their own information, drivers say they received the tax forms of other drivers. Read more…

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Uber Screwup Exposed Driver’s Social Security Number and Tax Info

Floating Bonsai trees are better than floating speakers

Floating things on magnets makes most things cooler. Bonsai trees are certainly no exception. Kickstarter project ” Air Bonsai ” combines together magnetic levitation, wee plants and traditional Japanese “monozukuri” (craftsmanship). Using the same magnetic floating trick we’ve seen in speakers , everything that the tree — or plant of your choosing — needs is contained within the floating ball. The team has already passed its goal of $80, 000 but you can still add to the money pot, with $200 enough to land you a basic starter kit. Because of the import issues of sending plants between countries, US-based backers will be receiving locally-sourced, tiny pine trees, but there’s nothing to stop you floating different tiny plants for your own bizarre anime dream. Depending on your aesthetic tastes, you can upgrade the “little star” floating orb, with a particularly attractive lava-stone pot at the top of our shopping list. There’s four designs for the “energy base” that maintains the magnetic field: all of which look classier than the chintzy speakers we’ve seen at tech trade shows. And if you’re feeling classy to the extent of $10, 000 , then you can get an exclusive handmade cushion, base and Bonsai “star”, as well as a tour of both a Bonsai garden and the workshop behind the project. Source: Kickstarter

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Floating Bonsai trees are better than floating speakers

Yahoo releases massive 13.5TB web-browsing data set to researchers

Yahoo’s business may be struggling , but millions of people still visit its site to read the news every day. That gives the company unique insights into browsing and reading habits, and today the company has released a huge swath of that data. The “Yahoo News Feed dataset” incorporates anonymous browsing habits of 20 million users between February and May of 2015 across a variety of Yahoo properties, including its home page, main news site, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Movies and Yahoo Real Estate. All told, the data set is a whopping 13.5TB and covers 110 billion unique interaction “events.” Yahoo calls it the “largest machine learning dataset” ever publicly released, and we’re inclined to believe them — there aren’t very many companies who could accumulate this much browsing data. It’s a huge amount of data, but fortunately you don’t need to worry about advertisers mining it to make more targeted ads. Yahoo is specifically releasing it only to the academic research community to help people build more effective recommendation algorithms. As noted by the MIT Technology Review , the data set includes includes headlines that Yahoo’s personalization algorithms show to visitors, a summary of the article, and which specific articles people click. There’s also some demographic data for about 7 million users that includes age, gender and location — but it’s all been anonymized. Improving recommendation algorithms is particularly relevant right now, as some of the biggest web properties rely on good recommendation engines to engage with their user. Netflix, Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook (just to name a few) all rely on serving their users relevant recommendations to keep them engaged with their products and services. Yes, it’s a way for those companies to make more money, but it also generally makes for a better user experience — as long as those recommendations are good. Yahoo’s huge data release will probably go a long way towards meeting that goal. [Image credit: Noah Berger/Bloomberg via Getty Images] Source: Yahoo (Businesswire)

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Yahoo releases massive 13.5TB web-browsing data set to researchers

How an obsessive jailhouse lawyer revealed the existence of Stingray surveillance devices

Daniel Rigmaiden was a prolific and talented fraudster who made more than a million dollars filing tax-returns for dead people, using ninja forgery skills and super-tight operational security to avoid arrest for years. (more…)

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How an obsessive jailhouse lawyer revealed the existence of Stingray surveillance devices

Scientists find a way to make concrete on Mars

If humans are ever going to have a long-term presence on Mars , they’ll need to make their own buildings — they can’t count on timely shipments from Earth. But how do they do that when the resources they have will share little in common with what they knew back home? Northwestern University researchers have an idea. They’ve developed a concrete that uses Mars’ native materials. You only have to heat sulphur until it melts, mix it with an equal part of Martian soil and let it cool. The finished concrete is very strong, easy to work with and recyclable — you just have to reheat it to get some building supplies back. Any need for Martian concrete is years away at best , but the discovery is still crucial. It suggests that explorers won’t have much trouble transitioning from short-term shelters to more permanent structures. Also, any would-be settlers can afford to pack light. Rather than carry every possible building they might want, they could bring just the essentials and build more once they’re established on the Red Planet’s surface. [Image credit: Getty Images] Via: MIT Technology Review , Inhabitate Source: ArXiv.org

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Scientists find a way to make concrete on Mars