At this point in time, you’ve already hung your tinsel and decorated your tree with blinking lights. Maybe there’s even a glowing Santa statue on your lawn. But did you ever step back and think about where all of these holiday decorations come from? A factory in China is the easy answer. An entire town of factories specializing in Christmas cheer is the correct answer . Read more…
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A Single Chinese Town Makes Most of the World’s Christmas Decorations
sciencehabit writes About 1% of the light that strikes plants is re-emitted as a faint, fluorescent glow—a measure of photosynthetic activity. Today, scientists released a map of this glow as measured by the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2, a NASA satellite launched in July with the goal of mapping the net amount of carbon in the atmosphere. The map reveals that tropical rainforests near the equator are actively sucking up carbon, while the Corn Belt in the eastern United States, near the end of its growing season, is also a sink. Higher resolution fluorescence mapping could one day be used to help assess crop yields and how they respond to drought and heat in a changing climate. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Back in March, Pandora raised its prices and did away with annual subscriptions . The price hike was one thing, but the end of yearly subscriptions ticked off a number of people. Now, the service is bringing them back, due to popular demand. Read more…
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Pandora Brings Back Annual Subscriptions For Pandora One, at $55/yr
Despite the FBI saying just a few days ago that there was “no attribution to North Korea at this point, ” ABC News is reporting that federal cyber-security sources “close to the investigation” have indeed confirmed that the FBI does have reason to believe that North Korea may be involved in some capacity after all. Read more…
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Report: North Korea May Be Behind Sony Pictures Hack After All
Setting up encryption on your wireless router is one of the most important things you can do for your network security , but your router probably offers various different options—WPA2-PSK (TKIP), WPA2-PSK (AES), and WPA2-PSK (TKIP/AES) among the alphabet soup. How-To Geek explains which one to choose for a faster, more secure home network. Read more…
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The Difference Between Wi-Fi Security Protocols: WPA2-AES vs WPA2-TKIP
The life of most migrant workers in Qatar is bleak—so bleak, it’s a human rights violation . The latest report from Doha reveals a new twist in the sad story. When they’re not toiling away at building stadiums for the 2022 World Cup, many workers are being paid impossibly small wages to be fake sports fans . It doesn’t sound fun, either. Read more…
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Qatar Pays Migrant Workers $1 an Hour To Be Fake Sports Fans
Microsoft boss Satya Nadella loves cloud computing , and a new, rumored Microsoft service could be putting all that computing power to better use than every. A project codenamed “Arcadia” (yes, another Halo reference) could soon stream games and apps to Windows devices, phones and tablets and computers alike. Read more…
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Microsoft "Arcadia" Could Stream All Kinds of Games and Apps to Windows
Molly McHugh writes: What better way to sell telepresence technologies than having the store employees themselves appear via robot? At the Beam store in Palo Alto, Calif., no human salespeople physically appear, only robots. Users appear on the 17-inch display and control the robot via keyboard, mouse, or Xbox controller. Beam can roll as fast as two miles per hour. People behind the screen control the Beam through their computers, and two wide-angle cameras attached to the top of the bot lets them see everything happening around the store. It’s a bit eerie, watching floating heads tool around and talk to people in this video, and the customers’ react to the Beam with confusion and wonder. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Nature abhors a vacuum. Aristotle said that. Of course, he was talking about how nature has a tendency to fill empty spaces with stuff. In a way, the internet also abhors a vacuum, and the “downfall” of The Pirate Bay is just the latest example. Read more…
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The Pirate Bay Shutdown Hasn’t Slowed Piracy At All
The Millennium Falcon is the king of cool when it comes to classic sci-fi spaceships. The vessel is a kitbashed masterpiece and bold image that screams Star Wars. It’s also a “piece of junk, ” a “bucket of bolts, ” and constant headache for Han Solo and company, but hey, she’s got it where it counts. Read more…
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How Sound Engineers Made the Millennium Falcon’s Most Iconic Noise