Rexfeng

President Obama bowed Thursday night to mounting criticism that he misled the American people by not ensuring that the law did not force people out of insurance that they like.

The Office of Management and Budget released a new report today surveying the economic damage from the federal government shutdown last month — and the news is grim. All told, OMB estimates the 16-day shutdown cost the country as much as $6 billion, taking between 0.2 and 0.6 percentage points off fourth-quarter GDP growth. OMB also notes that the shutdown stands as the longest in US history when measured in furloughed employee-hours.

Continue reading…

Because China lives in a world where they can build anything by yesterday, we often get to see a lot of architectural miscues and all around building hilariousness. This isn't one of them. This one's actually awesome.

Read more...

I don't wear cologne (or colon) or really care for the smell of perfume, but I love reading about perfume and scent. Roja Dove is an independent perfumer who creates bespoke scents for well-heeled clientele.

His custom-made leather Dunhill case holds small eyedropper bottles with the 238 tinctures, resinoids, absolutes and essential oils that comprise the "building blocks of every single fragrance that you can think of." It also folds neatly into a piece of hand luggage should a client require him to pay a flying visit.

"Most of my formulas are quite short, normally between 20 and 50 ingredients," he says. "It's like painting; if you use too many colors, all you get is a dirty gray."

Tags: perfume   Roja Dove   smell

Lonnie Johnson's having a good week. The former NASA engineer just won $73 million in a royalties dispute with the toymaker Hasbro for inventing the Super Soaker, the coolest toy you ever had growing up. The lawsuit also covered royalties for Nerf which Johnson also masterminded because he is awesome.

Read more...

The Carne Asada taco looks damn good.

Another taqueria opens in the East Village today, but this one's taking on the challenge of making masa blends in-house and serving fresh-made corn tortillas. The menu, with only five types of tacos, looks basic, but that's a good thing. Los Angeles expat Otto Cedeno, a former tech-start-up exec, strives to perfect traditional recipes: Fillings include shrimp with a serrano-based crema and pork shoulder that's immersed in a beer broth, slow-cooked for hours, and then grilled on a plancha. He's also making his own salsas and marinades. Otto's (at 141 Second Avenue) is set up like a grab-and-go taqueria — just make sure you don't leave without a side of masa fries.

Read more posts by Sierra Tishgart

Filed Under: openings, east village, masa, new york, otto's tacos, tacos

While New York and San Francisco are undeniably huge tech centers in the US, Boston has some impressive credentials of its own. The city is well-known for its academic institutes, a growing tech start-up scene — and massive companies like Microsoft, Twitter, and Google have a presence in the area as well. Now, Facebook's officially joining that list: the company just announced the creation of a new Boston engineering team. This marks the fifth formal engineering center for Facebook, joining others in Menlo Park, Seattle, London, and New York.

Facebook actually has had a presence in the city for some two and a half years — in a blog post, team leader Ryan Mack recounts how a small remote team in Boston worked on major projects like...

Continue reading…

Building a galactic empire takes a lot of money, and Star Wars: Tiny Death Star is all about raking in those sweet, sweet credits. Much like the Angry Birds Star Wars series, Tiny Death Star simply takes an existing mobile hit and adds some flavor from a galaxy far, far away — in this case it's based on Nimblebit's devilishly addictive Tiny Tower. And the two games play largely the same. On the left side of the screen is an elevator where a regular stream of citizens will come into your Death Star looking for somewhere to live or a place to spend some money, and on the right is your actual tower, which you can fill with apartments and all kinds of businesses.

People will come and go even if you're not playing, but you'll need to...

Continue reading…

Marvel is creating four live-action superhero series and an Avengers-style special event that will all air exclusively on Netflix, beginning in 2015. The first of the TV series will focus on Daredevil, while the following series will star Jessica Jones, Iron Fist, and Luke Cage. At least 13 episodes of each series will be produced, and — like all good Marvel series — they'll eventually come together for a special event. For Netflix, that event will be a mini-series called The Defenders, though there's no word on just how long it'll run.

"This serialized epic expands the narrative possibilities of on-demand television and gives fans the flexibility to immerse themselves how and when they want in what's sure to be a thrilling and...

Continue reading…

We may have the first administration official to take a fall for the disastrous launch of federal insurance marketplace Healthcare.gov. Tony Trenkle, the chief information officer for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the health department agency that oversaw the website's development, is stepping down.

As first reported by The New York Times, Trenkle sent out an email today announcing his resignation effective November 15th. Trenkle will be retiring to take a job in the private sector, the email reportedly said. Nothing was mentioned about the healthcare website.

Healthcare.gov was so plagued with technical issues that only six people were able to sign up in its initial 24 hours. Government officials have been...

Continue reading…

Unnaturally Naked.

After a slew of lawsuits, major food brands are finally starting to drop the "natural" claims from their products' labels. Why? Well, people are onto them and realize that the word is more or less meaningless: The vague term has defied standardization, and where at first food companies took this as an opportunity to slap the healthful-sounding term on everything, that effort has apparently backfired, leading to a series of false-advertising claims that are getting expensive. Now, The Wall Street Journal notes, "natural" labels are coming off the packaging of Campbell's Pepperidge Farm Goldfish, a host of Frito Lay snacks, and PepsiCo's Naked Juice, which recently settled one of those pesky lawsuits. And while the labels are quietly disappearing, the actual products are staying more or less the same.

So, why not just regulate the term? The FDA dodges the question of what is natural, stating on its website that "it is difficult to define a food product that is 'natural' because the food has probably been processed and is no longer the product of the earth."

Food companies are writing off the quiet changes as merely part of the process of "constantly updating'' labels, as a Frito Lay spokesperson tells the WSJ. But it seems the reality is simply that consumers are getting savvier, and any wholesomeness that this kind of slippery health-washing lends a product or its packaging is more trouble than it's worth.

Some Food Companies Ditch 'Natural' Label [WSJ]
Earlier: Naked Juice Settles ‘Freshest and Purest’ Class-Action Lawsuit
Earlier: Food Companies Tricking Customers by Making Processed Products Look More Natural and Wholesome

Read more posts by Belle Cushing

Filed Under: all natural, fda, food news, frito lay, gmo foods, goldfish, health, labels, naked

Last year NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory revealed a Spiderman-inspired grippy claw that would let spacecraft easily grab onto passing asteroids and comets. Since then the technology has been further refined and now integrated into a rock-climbing robot called the LEMUR IIB that could put Sir Edmund Hillary to shame.

Read more...

Sergey Dolya took some incredible photos in an expedition to the North Pole on board a Russian Arktika-class nuclear ice breaker. In the words of Buzz Aldrin, "Beautiful, beautiful. Magnificent desolation." By the way, did you know that you can get a cabin on board these and other industrial ships?

Read more...

It's a near-guarantee that you haven't been to a Blockbuster this year, or possibly this decade. And after today's announcement that the company is shutting down its 300 remaining stores, you likely never will again. But that doesn't mean that video stores have outlived their usefulness—or, especially, that streaming is anywhere near ready to replace it.

Read more...

Interesting information, and glad to see Apple publishing it. Looks like they reject many requests for customer information.

This bit jumped out to me on the first page:

Perhaps most important, our business does not depend on collecting personal data. We have no interest in amassing personal information about our customers. We protect personal conversations by providing end-to-end encryption over iMessage and FaceTime. We do not store location data, Maps searches, or Siri requests in any identifiable form.

Also interesting: the U.S. government only permits Apple to report account-based requests in increments of 1000. Update: And here’s Apple’s amicus brief with the U.S. FISA court, arguing to allow the disclosure of the exact aggregate number of national security requests. A rare dispute these days where Apple, Microsoft, and Google are all on the same side.

Update 2: Another interesting nugget: “Apple has never received an order under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. We would expect to challenge such an order if served on us.” The ACLU has a good rundown on the odious nature of Section 215. If Apple had been served with an order under Section 215, they would not be permitted even to say that they’d received it. So the clever bit here is that if such a statement (that Apple has not received any orders under Section 215) does not appear in a future version of this report from the company, we can assume that they have been served with such an order.

Just shameless. For chrissake even the name is a rip-off. If they wanted to do something interesting, they should have tried ripping off the superior quality of a chain like Five Guys or In-N-Out. (Via Farhad Manjoo.)

Researchers at the University of Tokyo have managed to teach a quadcopter some impressive new tricks that vastly expand its capabilities past flying. Their Multi-field Universal Wheel for Air-land Vehicle—or MUWA for short—features variable pitch propellers so the thrust can be directed in opposite directions, allowing it to balance on edge like an autonomous bike wheel.

Read more...

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The dense clouds of smog that sometimes blanket cities in China have myriad ramifications: they close businesses and schools, force residents indoors for days at a time, and are a notorious health hazard. They're reportedly also, as the Chinese government is now acutely aware, a danger to national security.

Continue reading…

It's certainly not the first, but Apple is the latest major consumer tech company to release a report outlining the requests it receives from governments around the world seeking information on its users. Apple's document includes requests from all countries and covers a period ranging from January 1st to June 30th of this year.

"We believe that our customers have a right to understand how their personal information is handled, and we consider it our responsibility to provide them with the best privacy protections available," reads the introduction to the report. Like other companies, Apple can only list requests from the US government in broad ranges — inquiries from the NSA and other intelligence agencies are lumped into this sum....

Continue reading…

If all the glaciers and snow and ice in the world melted, the sea level would rise 216 feet and, as this National Geographic map of the world shows, things would look a little different.

There are more than five million cubic miles of ice on Earth, and some scientists say it would take more than 5,000 years to melt it all. If we continue adding carbon to the atmosphere, we'll very likely create an ice-free planet, with an average temperature of perhaps 80 degrees Fahrenheit instead of the current 58.

See also Flood Maps.

Tags: global warming   maps

Acer chairman and CEO J.T. Wang is announcing his resignation from the PC maker today following further disappointing financial results. Wang, an outspoken critic of Microsoft’s Surface tablet, will step down as Acer CEO on January 1st, but will retain his chairman position until the second quarter of 2014 to assist with existing commitments. Acer president Jim Wong will take over as CEO in January in a clear effort to address the struggles the company is facing.

Acer is still the fourth-largest PC manufacturer in the world, but the company’s revenues have taken a hit recently as PC sales have slowed across the industry. The company reported a net loss of $446 million in Q3, and it now plans to cut its staff headcount by 7...

Continue reading…

You don’t see many tweets from the Banh Mi Cart at Hanover Sq. & Pearl St., but when they do take to Twitter, it’s for something important. Yesterday they announced that beef noodle soup (aka, pho) at the cart starting today. I’ve never had noodle soup from a cart, let along pho, so it will [...]

After Hurricane Sandy decimated the subway system last year, officials pledged to install new devices to help halt the rising tides—including flood gates and, more intriguingly, a device called a "tunnel plug."

Read more...

Brian Krebs:

A hacker break in at a U.S. company that brokers reservations for limousine and Town Car services nationwide has exposed the personal and financial information on more than 850,000 well-heeled customers, including Fortune 500 CEOs, lawmakers, and A-list celebrities.

For the sufficiently skilled front-end loader driver, doing a front wheelie with a 20-ton machine is a piece of cake.

Got this from Modern Farmer's selection of "Jaw-Dropping Russian Tractor Videos"; the other one I liked from the list is this guy who souped up his tractor with a car engine and then does donuts in his field.

Tags: Russia   video

[Photo by Layla Khabiri]
Hybird, Questlove's Chelsea Market fried chicken stand, has shuttered after less than six months in business. The Roots drummer opened the stand with mega restaurateur Stephen Starr back in May, selling $4 drumsticks and $41 chicken buckets, plus biscuits, dumplings, slushies, and "Questolicious" cupcakes.

A tipster writes in that Hybird closed yesterday, and employees were told the closure was due to poor sales. The stall is already emptied out and papered over with signs calling for pop-up chefs to fill the space in 2014. Questlove has not yet commented on the closing of his restaurant.
· All Coverage of Hybird [~ENY~]

Here in New York, shady brokers have long been known to sell the same apartment to multiple gullible buyers. In China, however, real estate scammers have gone to the next level: Buyers are being “taken hostage” by developers who fail to mention that the apartments they’re selling are totally illegal.

Read more...

It may be the always incredible aerial photography by our friend Jason Hawkes or the combination of The Shard, the glowing Tower Bridge, the City buildings, and the beautiful dusk, but London is starting to look like a proper city from the future. I just thought I could add a couple of spaceships taking to complete the illusion.

Read more...

Starfish are dying off in startling numbers along the West Coast of the United States and Canada. And they're doing it in a rather gnarly manner: the sea creatures are coming down with a syndrome that sees them disintegrate into piles of white goop.

Continue reading…