Rexfeng

Otto reports that "Dutch firm Paul de Ruiter Architects has won the ARC13 architecture prize for their project Villa Kogelhof," which is a great excuse to feature this awesome floating house, masterfully photographed by Jeroen Musch.

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In Japan, wet umbrellas are a problem taken a little more seriously than in the rest of the world. Many of the country's stores offer disposable bags for you to pack your dripping umbrella into, and now some of its creative types have taken on the task of improving the basic design as well. Hiroshi Kajimoto's H Concept studio has come up with the Unbrella, whose design inverts the standard opening mechanism of the umbrella. The metallic frame is now on the outside when the canopy is open, allowing it to enclose the wet part of your brolly when closed.

The Unbrella's design is helpful in gathering all the moisture into one spot, making it easier to commute on those packed Tokyo trains without becoming a nuisance to the people around you....

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Famed film director Zhang Yimou is facing a 1 billion yuan ($164 million) lawsuit for violating China's one-child policy, according to a report published today in China Daily. Zhang last week admitted to fathering three children with his wife and one child with his ex-wife, following speculation that he had fathered up to seven children with several women. In a statement released last week, the director of House of Flying Daggers and Flowers of War expressed his "heartfelt apologies" for violating the law, saying he and his wife were willing to cooperate with an ongoing investigation into the matter.

The suit against Zhang was filed on Thursday by two lawyers in the eastern city of Wuxi. The lawyers are seeking 500 million yuan for...

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Remember those people who thought iOS 7 adoption would be slower than iOS 6’s last year because people would reject the new UI design? Didn’t happen.

Filed under: Convertible, Coupe, Performance, Bugatti, Luxury

When Bugatti first introduced the Veyron, production was limited to just 300 coupes (including the original 16.4 and the Super Sport). Those were followed by an additional 150 roadsters (both Grand Sport and Vitesse), of which 100 have now been sold, leaving just 50 examples left before the Veyron finally roars off into the sunset.

The 400th Veyron built was the third and final example of the Jean-Pierre Wimille edition pictured here. Based on the Vitesse roadster, the Wimille edition is the first in a series of six Legend specials that pay homage to the Alsatian marque's history. The second is dedicated to Jean Bugatti, and the third to racer and factory team manager Meo Costantini, with three more of these three-unit special editions to follow out of the remaining 50 cars to be built at Molsheim. We're expecting one of the remaining three to be named after Rembrandt Bugatti, designer of the company's elephant hood ornament.

Given that it has taken the company over eight years to build those 400 cars, it figures to take Bugatti another year or so to complete the final 50, by which point it'll hopefully have a successor in place. For more news on the landmark, see the official press release below.

Continue reading Just 50 to go as Bugatti sells its 400th Veyron

Just 50 to go as Bugatti sells its 400th Veyron originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 05 Dec 2013 13:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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1. Reasonable Doubt (Classic)
2. The Blueprint (Classic)
3. The Black Album (Classic)
4. Vol. 2 (Classic)
5. American Gangster (4 1/2, cohesive)
6. Magna Carta (Fuckwit, Tom Ford, Oceans, Beach, On the Run, Grail)
7. Vol. 1 (Sunshine kills this album…fuck… Streets, Where I’m from, You Must Love Me…)
8. BP3 (Sorry critics, it’s good. Empire (Gave Frank a run for his money))
9. Dynasty (Intro alone…)
10. Vol. 3 (Pimp C verse alone… oh, So Ghetto)
11. BP2 (Too many songs. Fucking Guru and Hip Hop, ha)
12. Kingdom Come (First game back, don’t shoot me)

Square Enix character designer Akihiko Yoshida is leaving the company, ending an 18-year tenure that saw him produce iconic designs for Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story, among other classics.

Yoshida announced his departure in The Art of Bravely, a Bravely Default art book released in Japan this week. Yoshida explained that he will continue to work with Square Enix on the upcoming Bravely Second, but will no longer be directly employed by the company.

Yoshida's distinct artwork defined games like Tactics Ogre, Final Fantasy XII and the 2006 Nintendo DS remake of Final Fantasy III. One of his most recent projects, Bravely Default, is due for a North American release in February.

Vagrant Story character designer Akihiko Yoshida departs Square Enix originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 05 Dec 2013 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Andy Beaumont, regarding his Tab Closed; Didn’t Read website:

What we’re witnessing here is the first wave of the second world pop-up war. Those of us who lived through the first one can only describe the horrors to our disbelieving children. This time though, the pop-ups are winning because we don’t yet have the tools to fight back. The web has seemingly evolved into something that actively antagonises people — why would anyone in their right mind hide the content that visitors are there to see?

In short, maybe they’re not in their right mind. This is what happens when analytics make decisions for you.

Whole piece is simply brilliant.

In celebration of his 44th birthday, Jay Z ranked his solo albums:

Here's the annotated list:

1. Reasonable Doubt (Classic)
2. The Blueprint (Classic)
3. The Black Album (Classic)
4. Vol. 2 (Classic)
5. American Gangster (4 1/2, cohesive)
6. Magna Carta (Fuckwit, Tom Ford, Oceans, Beach, On the Run, Grail)
7. Vol. 1 (Sunshine kills this album... fuck... Streets, Where I'm from, You Must Love Me...)
8. BP3 (Sorry critics, it's good. Empire (Gave Frank a run for his money))
9. Dynasty (Intro alone...)
10. Vol. 3 (Pimp C verse alone... oh, So Ghetto)
11. BP2 (Too many songs. Fucking Guru and Hip Hop, ha)
12. Kingdom Come (First game back, don't shoot me)

(via @anildash)

Tags: best of   Jay-Z   lists   music

Filed under: Motorsports

Several months typically pass between when the FIA releases the provisional calendar for the next year's Formula One World Championship and when it releases the final version. The gap is usually bridged by a fair share of back-and-forth speculation over which races will make the cut, but this year's has looked even more feverish than usual from where we sit, principally for one reason: namely, that the provisional calendar included a new race in New Jersey.

After much speculation, the FIA has released the final calendar for the 2014 Formula One World Championship (along with a number of other series it sanctions). While the provisional calendar had a whopping 22 races on it, the final version has been whittled down to 19. And as you might have guessed, Jersey didn't make the cut.

New races in Austria and Russia are included, but the proposed expansion race in Mexico joins Jersey's fate, along with the Korean Grand Prix, which has been held at Yeongam for the past four years but won't be held next year. F1 fans in North America needn't worry, though: those who might have enjoyed the Mexican Grand Prix won't have far to go to enjoy the United States Grand Prix (which is still on the calendar for November 2, 2014, in Austin, Texas) and those in the northeast can head up to Montreal for the Canadian Grand Prix on June 8.

You can view the full release below from the last meeting of the FIA's World Motor Sport Council this year to see the final calendar for F1 as well as the world championships for touring cars, endurance racing, rallycross, Formula E and Formula 3. But for North American racing fans, the parts you need to know about are the F1 races in Montreal and Austin, the 6 Hours of the Circuit of the Americas (also in Austin), the WTCC race in Sonoma, the new rallycross event in Trois-Rivieres, Quebec, and the Formula E races to take place in LA and Miami.

Continue reading New Jersey cut from final 2014 Formula One calendar

New Jersey cut from final 2014 Formula One calendar originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 05 Dec 2013 15:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The radioactive material hijacked in a Mexico truck heist has been recovered and, although the two gunmen remain on the run, officials believe they won't have long to live. The abandoned cobalt-60 was found removed from its casing about 25 miles from where it was stolen, according to The Washington Post, meaning that the men responsible will likely have been exposed to a material described by the International Atomic Energy Agency as "extremely dangerous."

"They will, without a doubt, die."

"The people who handled it will have severe problems with radiation," says Mardonio Jimenez of Mexico’s nuclear safety commission. "They will, without a doubt, die." The discovery of the truck and cobalt-60 brings to an end a two-day hunt across...

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I’ve spent years “managing” my money using Mint.com — creating budgets, renaming transactions, tracking spending month over month, and using precision labels like “Alcohol / Bars” to see how much I’m boozing. But I couldn’t put a finger on why I was doing all of this: I felt a little safer being able to see a dashboard of all my money on the screen in front of me, but I hardly ever took action based on the results I saw. Only once I tried Level, a new app for iPhone, did I realize that the question I truly cared about was this: how much money can I spend today, or this week, or this month?

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Foursquare is receiving a big design overhaul today on the iPhone. In Foursquare 7.0, the app dives much deeper into iOS 7 style, taking advantage of thin fonts and broad swaths of solid colors. Foursquare says the updated app is a lot faster, and it's trying to make exploring locations quicker too by displaying details on nearby places as soon as you open it. Other features of the app are now easier to get to as well, such as the to-do list, which was previously buried but is now just a swipe away in the sidebar. Longtime users are likely familiar with Foursquare's tendency to continually iterate its look and feel, and though today's update doesn't create a big shift, it makes the app both better looking and easier to use.

Alongside...

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Denizens of San Francisco may soon be able to add fresh produce to their Amazon orders as part of an expansion to the company's AmazonFresh program. That $299 a year service delivers grocery items overnight to customers, though is currently limited to Seattle and Los Angeles. San Francisco is the next city on that list, says All Things D, which adds that some of the company's signature green trucks have already been spotted around the city. The company refused to comment on the report, saying it had "nothing to share."

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Getting colder.

For better or for worse, it looks like the chain is finally making good on its summer of 2012 promise to open "three or four stores" in New York. Dairy Queen's Staten Island Ferry Street George Terminal location — the first in NYC — opened last summer after a lengthy renovations process and Hurricane Sandy–related setbacks. The Union Square–area DQ will occupy 2,500 square feet at 54 West 14th Street "on the ground and mezzanine" of the former Fabco Shoes, which sounds like a pretty large footprint to blanket with Blizzards. [NYP, Earlier, Earlier]

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Filed Under: coming soon, dairy queen, the chain gang

In further proof that everything is, indeed, coming up Milhouse, somebody has finally made some groin-grabbingly great The Simpsons t-shirts, just in time for the holidays (wink wink, nudge nudge). Threadless received 843 submissions for designs from different artists, and ended up picking 29 for their brand spanking new t-shirt collection. Check out the full collection here. [ more › ]

First reported in a story on OnGamers, if you're signed up to take place in League of Legends' League Championship Series, your contract bans you from streaming any game that can even remotely be seen as competition for Riot's online juggernaut.

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It may have taken decades longer than it probably should have, but official Simpsons LEGO is on the way. And while the Danish toy giant has yet to release its own promotional images of the line, which is due in early 2014, pics of some minifigs have begun leaking out a little early.

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The National Security Agency is tracking the location and movements of cellphones outside the United States in an effort to find suspicious travel patterns or activities by intelligence targets, according to documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden.

Today, Valleywag got its hands on leaked screenshots of Uber’s dashboard, along with a series of numbers from two weeks ago that show raw revenue, signups, active clients and ride request/completion ratios.  TechCrunch has verified with a source that this is Uber’s official dashboard.

TechCrunch also contacted Uber, who said that they would ‘take action’ against the leaker. They did not deny the authenticity of the screenshots and numbers.

The numbers span a period of between mid-October and mid-November of 2013 and allow us to form a picture, though incomplete, of Uber’s income and user statistics over the period. According to our calculations based on the information laid out in the dashboard screenshots — and assuming some similarity in numbers for the rest of the year — the car service should be pulling in over $1B a year in gross bookings. At a rough 20% cut, a figure Valleywag notes Kalanick has alluded to, that would place Uber’s slice of the revenue around $213M a year.

The five week period also showed over 11% in revenue growth, with over 398,000 new signups in aggregate at just under 80k each week. Uber is also clocking around 1M requests every week and completing around 800k each week. The data points to a healthy business which maintains a strong ratio of continuing users to new signups and big ‘conversion’ rates between people who look at the app and people who actually use it.

A recent filing uncovered by Kara Swisher at All Things D put Uber’s valuation at $3.5B, and sources had pegged revenue for 2013 at around $125M. Going by that, Uber is doing significantly better than estimated.

We contacted Uber CEO Travis Kalanick about the leak, and he did not deny that the numbers were accurate. He also had a few things to say about how the story was reported by Valleywag.

“The surprising part is that Valleywag knowingly outed their own source. Valleywag actually knew the screenshot had identifying information of the individual leaker prior to them publishing this story,” Kalanick told TechCrunch in a statement. “We told Nitasha Tiku from Valleywag that we would protect her source from legal ramifications if they did not publish the document. Nitasha and Valleywag decided to publish anyways. We obviously take the dissemination of our proprietary information seriously and we will be looking to take action against the individual leaker and Valleywag source in short order.”

TechCrunch then reached out to Gawker about the details of how the piece was reported. Editor John Cook told us that the screenshots did not, in fact, have any identifying information.

“We didn’t publish any identifying information about the source of the screengrab,” Cook says. “We don’t know who sent us that shot, and neither does Uber. As you know from reading the piece, the person who sent us the information got it after an unidentified Uber employee logged into an Uber administrative console from a computer that our source had access to,” Cook wrote.

“When we reached out to Uber last night, CEO Travis Kalanick helpfully confirmed the veracity of the information by threatening to claim we “outed” our source by failing to redact the timestamp information displayed in the screengrab. What he fails to understand–or is lying about in an effort to smear a critical reporter–is the fact that the person who provided us that screengrab is not the person who logged into Uber’s administrative console. If Kalanick retaliates against that employee, he will be not be punishing our source.”

Regardless of the details of how they were leaked, it seems clear that these are indeed screenshots of Uber’s internal dashboard. And the vehemence of the response by Uber also appears to indicate that the information on the dashboard is revealing.

Note, of course, that the interpretation of the data is not confirmed, and we’re only working off of leaked information here. The math is rough, to say the least and whatever this is, it’s likely not a complete snapshot of Uber as a company. If the readings by Valleywag, and our own crunching, are correct though, Uber is in fantastic shape.

Article Title updated to refer to revenue, rather than profit.

As long as you're cool with a little extra bulk on your device, it looks like Honda has created a smartphone case like the one Jeff Bezoz was dreaming of. It virtually guarantees your device will survive any fall—and possibly even a head-on collision with a truck. Overkill? Not when you have to wait two more years to get a subsidized replacement because of your contract. [YouTube via Autoblog]

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What a year it has been. So much drama, so many exciting happenings, so many games. You'd need at least an hour just to cover it all… right?

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Not content with invading our already well-established burger scene, the California-based group behind Umami Burger announced they're going to dip their toes into our magical pizza wonderland as well. The 800 Degrees chain is already well-established in Los Angeles, with further expansion plans already in motion on the West Coast. But everyone who's anyone knows that for ultimate pizza domination, you must conquer the discerning palates of New Yorkers, who've been known to start wars over their precious pies. [ more › ]

One of the greatest mysteries of the Pokémon universe has to do with Pokeballs, the devices used to capture and store your personal pocket monsters. You can't help but wonder: just what in the world does a Pokemon experience while inside a Pokeball?

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I don't know about you guys but I don't have much self control when it comes to awesome things that deserve to be purchased. Even if they don't do anything I can't help myself. See awesome, buy awesome. I assume the entire world operates like that too. So now I'm thinking about how many people are going to put together money to grab this fantastic Batman Tumbler golf cart that's available on eBay. How could anyone resist?

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The iPhone 5S may have a fancy new dual-LED flash, but ultimately, it doesn't make that much difference. Low-light pictures continue to the bane of the phone photographer's existence, and every blurry, noisy, and/or blown-out shot from a dimly lit bar is a painful reminder. This new case from Brick and Pixel called the Lightstrap might just change that.

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Everything I own, everything I will buy, every fiber of my body, everything in this world should be dipped into water paint. The hydrocoating process is popular in weapons and helmets but really deserves to be shmeared all over the world. We might have to come up with better designs but I never want to use a paint brush to paint again.

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