Rexfeng

A growing number of primary care doctors and specialists in private practice are becoming employees of hospitals, though experts caution that the change may not yield better or cheaper care for patients.

President Obama announced a push for a $1 billion “climate resilience” program, as well as several million dollars in drought aid for the state’s farmers.

Did you win the Titanfall beta lottery? No, you're just pretending to build a crazy kill-death ratio from the innards of a Titan? Well, it's your lucky day - Major Nelson has announced that Titanfall's Xbox One beta will begin opening to the public...

Ben Thompson:

So to summarize, Office is not available everywhere, and probably won’t be anytime soon, because Microsoft has a devices business to prop up. Oh, and Microsoft’s business needs are a priority over user needs. Tell me, Frank, how is that a safe bet?

If there was one disappointment about Nike's awesome Back to the Future II Air Mag, it's that the shoes didn't have Marty's power laces (and that they only made 1,500 and neither you nor I own a pair). But Nike designer Tinker Hatfield says that's about to change—power laces are coming in 2015. The future is here!

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Twitch Plays Pokemon looks like an average Twitch game stream at first. In fact, it is a game in itself, as viewers are able to control the hero of Pokemon Red and Blue by inputting commands in the streaming platform's chat window. As of this...

This is fucking great and crazy...when the snow hit NYC yesterday, Casey Neistat grabbed his snowboard and went snowboarding behind a Jeep in the East Village.

Tags: Casey   Neistat   NYC   snowboarding   sports   weather

Shopping in a supermarket can be visually overwhelming. Designer Mehmet Gozetlik took the packaging of some well-known brands and simplified them (part two). It's interesting how some of these work and some don't. Duracell works really well because the batteries themselves still carry most of the branding:

The simplified branding of Guinness and Evian works pretty well too...the packaging is itself iconic and distinctive enough to carry them. The Pringles and Red Bull are missing something, but in almost all cases, I like one of the simplified options more than the original. (via @dunstan)

Tags: design   Mehmet Gozetlik

Military researchers believe they're close to reaching one of the most sought-after rations ever: a pizza that can be left out for years without spoiling. The AP reports that food scientists at the US Army Natick Soldier Research, Development, and Engineering Center in Massachusetts are testing a prototype pizza to include in military meals ready to eat, or MREs. Pizza is frequently requested by soldiers, but the combination of sauce, cheese, and dough quickly becomes a breeding ground for bacteria as moisture from other ingredients turns the crust soggy. The solution was twofold: keep the water in place, and make the whole pie hostile to bacteria.

To stop the dough from going soft, scientists used a type of preservative known as...

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Michael Copps, who served as an FCC commissioner from 2001 until 2011, has put out a call to journalists everywhere encouraging them to "generate a national discussion on the future of the internet."

"For more than a decade I occupied a front-row seat watching government policy undermine your profession and our democracy," Copps says in a letter posted at Columbia Journalism Review. "Since I stepped down two years ago, the situation has only gotten worse." He's now extremely wary of Comcast's planned $45 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable, a merger Copps claims would "run roughshod over consumers in the end."

"The internet is still an adolescent."

And Copps speaks from experience; he joined the FCC in 2001 in an era when the...

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Earlier this month, there was yet another lengthy public debate about Upworthy, the two-year-old publisher that has become one of the most popular sites on Facebook due to its knack for overselling its bite-size content with "curiosity gap" headlines like, "Why Is Bill Nye Acting Like A Lunatic? Because He Doesn't Want To Get Blown Up, That's Why."

In the midst of the Twitter argument, Tony Haile, CEO of Chartbeat, which measures real-time traffic for sites like Upworthy, dropped a bomb: "We've found effectively no correlation between social shares and people actually reading," he wrote.

If you work in media, or have a blog, or are the sort of person who pays any attention to things like how many tweets an article has, this statement...

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Somewhere between the dirt cheap eats and budget-busting blowouts there's a sweet spot where the quality and quantity of the food match the amount of money you're spending. It's the place where $2.50 gets you plump, meaty dumplings but also where an $88 prix fixe meal offers the best value at the confluence of price and quality. That's where you get the most bang for your buck, so to speak, or where you're getting the most for your money. [ more › ]

Being a Pokémon master takes time and patience—beating a game in the franchise usually takes at least a couple dozen of hours. Now imagine trying to beat a Pokémon game while thousands of other people also control your avatar.

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Gearbox boss and former Kotaku guest-writer Randy Pitchford knows people would like a Borderlands 3 someday. He would, too. But the time is not right for Borderlands 3. It's so not the right time for the inevitable mega-sequel that Pitchford's studio isn't even making the game. He swears!

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Fast-food workers routinely deal with people like Stephanie Winkler and Mark Applebaum, who are not stupid teenagers, but instead a 22-year-old woman and 26-year-old man, respectively. On Sunday, the boyfriend and girlfriend allegedly fired a Nerf dart from a gun at a worker in the drive-through window at a St. Louis-area Lion's Choice, KMOV reports. It's not at all clear why they did this, but the couple didn't order anything beforehand, and even though the worker was not injured, Winkler and Applebaum now face third-degree assault charges, meaning they may go to jail for up to fifteen days as well as each pay a $300 fine.

"The surveillance video shows a female worker doing her job and not expecting to be shot with a Nerf gun," the newscaster says, and although it's a bit grainy, the video really does show that. Straight ahead, a compelling case for fast-food workers getting a wage hike across the board.

Woman, boyfriend charged after local fast-food worker shot with Nerf dart [KMOV]

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: miscreants, crime, drive-throughs, fast-food, lion's choice, nerf, video feed

As if it didn't appear perilous enough already, the Arecibo Observatory's telescope — famously known as the setting to GoldenEye's final fight — is now hanging by one fewer sturdy support after an earthquake last month seriously damaged one of its cables. According to Universe Today, the iconic telescope's receiver is suspended 450 feet above its dish by 18 cables. One of those 18 cables was apparently known to be problematic due to its rigidity, and it was that cable that was damaged after a 6.4 magnitude earthquake began in Puerto Rico just 37 miles away.

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Last year Nintendo revealed that it was testing the free-to-play market with a sequel to its 3DS game Steel Diver, and today the game is finally launching. Dubbed Steel Diver: Sub Wars, the Nintendo 3DS game is free to download, but you'll only get a small amount of content if you don't splurge on the premium version. The initial download only comes with two subs to play as, for instance, while the premium version lets you use 18. You'll also get more missions and customization options by purchasing the full game — the free version essentially serves as a demo for the complete game, and there don't appear to be additional in-game purchases. Nintendo describes the game as a "tactical FPS" that features eight player underwater battles...

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So what if you don't know jack? As long as you know words - and how to spell them - you'll do fine in Jackbox Games' new puzzler, Word Puttz. The free-to-play game, now available on iOS and Android, puts a spin on classic word games such as Scrabble...

Sometimes, people come together to do wonderful things. And sometimes, people come together to do terrible, silly things. When it comes to Steam's new tagging system—which is currently in beta—it's a mix of both.

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South Side-bound.

The city's most enigmatic, also "skeevy, trashy, dangerous, and just unpleasant" fast-food restaurant pretending to be an actual Burger King reopens today as a bona fide Burger King. TOMS King, which owns more than 58 other outlets, announced the move yesterday, putting a swift end to a dark, brief period in which customers were able to order from official menu boards from workers wearing genuine Burger King uniforms, but were handed mystery-meat sandwiches in brown paper bags and were otherwise denied all dipping sauces except for ketchup. In addition to announcing the end of the South Side restaurant's dark days, the franchisee said the location will undergo a "full remodel" in the upcoming months. [Earlier]

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: pittsburgers, burger king, fake burger king, flame embroiled, video feed

This is way more fun that regular Flappy Bird.

Would love to see a realtime graph of the distribution of scores for the last 1000 players or so. (My current high: 3 4! [Also, the second I put this post up, the server went down. :( ] I'm the guy repeatedly dying at the first pipe.)

Tags: Flappy Bird   video games

Almost two thirds of New York City listings on Airbnb are illegal, according to an in-depth report released today by the travel blog Skift, a perennial Airbnb ankle-biter. That's worse than Skift's previous, less technical estimate, which said roughly 50 percent of listings violate the law.

The New York attorney general subpoenaed Airbnb for host data back in October. The company refused to hand it over, saying the request was too burdensome, so Skift decided to do it for them. The blog commissioned Connotate, a data extraction and monitoring firm, to comb through the site's listings over the course of a month.

The result basically confirms what most New Yorkers with experience with Airbnb would have guessed. Most users would rather...

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A Hitman... turn-based strategy game? That's the tablet/smartphone game that Square Enix just announced. It's called Hitman GO and you can read more about it right here.

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The infamous Goatse.cx domain, once home to a shock site with a picture of a man stretching his anus to a seemingly-impossible diameter, has endorsed the virtual currency Dogecoin. Users brave enough to navigate to the site today will be greeted by a video of a man who introduces himself as "Kirk Johnson" — the name of the man pictured on the original Goatse — and launches into an infomercial-style pitch.

"I told [Goatse's owner] to align Goatse.cx with the most powerful financial force on the internet, Dogecoin," the man, who claims to be Goatse's owner's attorney, says in the video. "Dogecoin is an online currency like Bitcoin that can give you everything you've ever dreamed of: money, houses, girls, the good life."

The man, who...

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Comcast will announce a deal to acquire Time Warner Cable in an all-stock deal that will unite the first- and second-largest cable television operators in the country, according to people briefed on the matter.

Flappy Bird may have flown the coop, but indie developers are banding together in support of the dangerously addictive app with Flappy Jam, an open-invitation challenge to design difficult, avian-themed games in the vein of Flappy Bird. One popular...

Nothing lasts forever.

Tastes stronger than usual.

An Irish man named Kieran Hughes is on trial with seven drivers for allegedly trying to illegally bring some $3.3 million worth of vodka into the U.K. disguised as Evian water bottles in 2011 and 2012. Customs officials caught the drivers in the act every time they tried to enter the country because of their shoddy, "cut and pasted" manifests claiming the trucks were actually carrying water or vinegar. The paperwork was faked so badly, apparently, that prosecutors are expected to ask Hughes if he knew that Evian is "naive" spelled backwards. [Belfast Telegraph]

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Filed Under: crime, bottled water, evian, kieran hughes

Titanfall could be the most important game in years. It’s Microsoft’s first Xbox One exclusive stab at the first-person shooter, the most popular game genre there is. On March 11th, it could become the next Halo, the next Gears of War, at a time when neither of those beloved Microsoft franchises have stepped up. The title has the potential to be the killer app, the system-seller; this one game could potentially give Microsoft the lead in the latest console war.

That’s not just hype....

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Don't breathe. That's the first step to surviving if you fall through ice into near-freezing water.

(via mr)

Tags: how to