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The Underworld movie franchise is getting a reboot. Because vampires doing flips in leather catsuits sell movie tickets, dammit.

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Babies are growing on trees in China. Little babies with tiny facial features, closed eyes and daintily crossed hands. These are not normal babies though, these are pear babies. That’s right. Pears that are shaped like babies, and they look oddly realistic. Fruit Mould Co, Ltd. is a company that […]

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BioShock is an absolutely classic video game, and anyone who likes action games should play it at some point in their life. Its "underwater Ayn Rand" premise is great, it contains one of the most memorable video game speeches of all time, and the combination of conventional weapons, psychokinetic powers, and hacking is open-ended without being too complicated. And as of today, you can purchase a version of the original BioShock, packed down to fit in a tiny 2GB package, for $15 on the App Store. It's an ambitious goal, and in the interest of pursuing the most mobile mobile experience out there, we skipped the iPad and played through the first level on an iPhone 5S.

Please, for the love of Andrew Ryan, don't try playing BioShock on the...

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Secret is a social networking app that allows users to share pictures and text anonymously. It's become the hot new thing in some circles, but not everyone is happy about it. A court case in Brazil has resulted in Judge Paulo Cesar de Carvalho issuing a preliminary injunction requiring Google to remove the app from the Play Store and remotely delete it from users' devices. Apple was hit with the same ruling.

Brazilian Court Orders Google To Remove 'Secret' App From The Play Store And Remotely Wipe It From Phones was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

I'm going to keep this short and sweet: Pressy is the worst product I've ever reviewed. I generally find some redeeming quality about even the worst products, but Pressy doesn't have one. It is, without question, complete garbage and a waste of money.

Four members of the Android Police team, myself included, backed Pressy on Kickstarter. Out of the four of us, roughly zero percent likes or uses it. In fact, in a recent poll conducted in the Android Police team chat, 100% of those who backed this project regret doing so.

Pressy Review: I Had No Clue Something Could Suck This Badly was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

We've seen a whole bunch of projection-mapping videos, but this demo raises the bar, training the projection to recognize a model's face and follow her as she moves it. The result is basically real-life CGI — a real-time layer of animated light that's inseparable from the object itself. People say this on the internet a lot, but this is actually the craziest thing I've ever seen. Here's a gif of the best part, courtesy of Prosthetic Knowledge:

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Finally, someone is cracking down on the rampant nudity on HBO's adaptation of Game of Thrones! Of course, I didn't expect it to be the Croatian government, but they are indeed trying to make sure one GoT actress keeps her clothes on. A season 5 spoiler ahead!

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A tradicional revista de entretenimento Empire divulgou uma lista com os 100 melhores jogos de todos os tempos. A partir da votação de milhares de leitores da publicação britânica, "The Last of Us", produção da Naughty Dog (Sony) para PS3 e recém remasterizado para...

Here is former president George W. Bush in a little skit that perfectly captures every possible feeling about the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, from "this is weird and undignified and just donating is better" to "having ice water poured on people is hilarious" to "revenge."

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An alternative to Google Glass costs just a fraction as much and has its own unique style. The Smart Cap was designed around the Raspberry Pi SBC, USB camera and LCD with an external microphone for voice commands.

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Acclaimed filmmaker Quentin Tarantino was none too thrilled when the script for his eighth film, The Hateful Eight, leaked onto the internet earlier this year. Nevertheless, the film is starting to come together in time for its scheduled release next year. We saw the film's first movie poster just last month, and now we're getting a taste of the film courtesy of a brief teaser trailer screened ahead of Sin City: A Dame to Kill For.

Unfortunately the trailer hasn't been officially posted online, but you can get a look via a cellphone-shot YouTube video. The teaser is graphical — it doesn't contain even a second of shot footage — but that's to be expected considering shooting has yet to begin. True to Tarantino's cinephile roots, the...

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With a disappointing $16 million in earnings during the opening weekend, the box-office premiere of The Expendables 3 turned into a big flop.

Many insiders blame the pre-release leak of the film for the disappointing numbers. Millions of people have downloaded pirated copies and skipped the box office, they argue.

Over the past several weeks Lionsgate has countered the leak by sending tens of thousands of takedown requests. The movie studio even went as far as suing the operators of six websites that allegedly failed to remove the infringing files – Limetorrents.com, Billionuploads.com, Hulkfile.eu, Played.to, Swankshare.com and Dotsemper.com.

This pressure resulted in drastic actions at several of these sites. Faced with a preliminary injunction, cloud hosting service Hulkfile shut down its website, for example, and Swankshare did the same. LimeTorrents remained online, but removed all expendables torrents, including the trailers.

TorrentFreak spoke with the operator of the torrent site who says he installed a filter that blocks everything related to the Expendables franchise. He hoped that this would be enough to appease the movie studio, but thus far Lionsgate has no plans to back down without compensation.

In an email the movie studio’s lawyer notes that the preliminary injunction stays in place. Interestingly, however, the torrent site operator is invited to discuss a potential settlement.

“Thanks for the email. As you know the court has entered a preliminary injunction, and the lawsuit is going to continue unless we can reach a settlement. I think it would be helpful to set up a time to talk by phone,” Lionsgate’s lawyer writes.

Whether Lionsgate is serious about settling or whether it merely wants to know more about the identity of Limetorrents’ operator remains anyone’s guess. It’s very unlikely that the movie studio will settle for anything short of a few million dollars in damages, something the torrent site owner can’t afford.

So for now, this means that the lawsuit is destined to drag on.

Yesterday LimeTorrents’ domain registrar eNom had to hand over any information it has on the site’s owner. With the domain name at risk LimeTorrents has decided to move its website to a new .CC domain name, where it will continue serving torrents, minus the Expendables.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Whether you're an avid player who's been in the game for years, or curious to see what Dungeons & Dragons is all about, Wizards of the Coast is offering everything you need to start playing for free.

At the Wizards of the Coast blog you can download the Player's Basic Rules and the Dungeon Master's Basic Rules in PDF and printer friendly format. In the Player's Basic Rule Book, you get everything you need to play: including four classes—Cleric, Fighter, Rogue, and Wizard—as well as four races—Dwarves, Elves, Halflings, and Humans—and printable character sheets. The Player's Basic Rules comes in at around 115 pages and the Dungeon Master's Guide at around 61 pages, so there's plenty of content to start you off.

This is all for the upcoming 5th edition, and is literally all you need to get some friends together and play—except maybe some dice. What you won't get in these PDFs is the fantastic art that is normally in the printed books, any additional races and classes, or the new 5th edition pre-made campaign. Which is fine, because it's more beneficial for you to run your own custom game anyway.

Before you go printing everything, keep in mind that they will continue to update both of the books through December. At that point the release of the three complete, printed core books will be released. So if you want to start playing sooner rather than later, or you're just curious about what's to come, download the books at the link below.

Basic Rules for Dungeons & Dragons | Wizards of the Coast via How-To Geek

Photo by Will Merydith.

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Julian Assange plans to leave the Ecuadorian Embassy in the near future, he told a press conference at the embassy's London compound, where he's been holed up for two years. The WikiLeaks founder gave no further details.
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A council of elders in Russia’s Altay Region voted to bury the mummy of a woman who lived in the region in the 5th century BC. Altay locals believe that her excavation from her tomb back in 1993 angered her spirit and causes natural disasters.
Read Full Article at RT.com

Your smartphone may be far less secure than you think. A group of computer scientists say they’ve found a way to hack into six out of seven popular apps like Gmail on Android, Windows and iOS platforms, with a success rate of up to 92 percent.
Read Full Article at RT.com

A piece of history lost, buried, or possibly stolen: German officials admitted they cannot locate Berlin’s famous statue of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin. Some claim the inability to find the monument is politicized – others boast having a “treasure map.”
Read Full Article at RT.com

The Goblin Shark (above), the Frilled Shark, and the Megamouth Shark are the shark equivalent of that cousin you don't see that much, but is always brought up at family dinners. Like, "I don't even know about Mary. Her mother says she grew to 20 feet and can unhinge her jaw." Read more about these sharks below.

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Paris-based illustrator Nicolas Delort creates mysterious black and white scratchboard illustrations. Using nothing but black ink and sharp tools, Delort etches his elaborate drawings into the surface of a clayboard. Despite the monochromatic palette, his works carry out a sense of colorfulness through their dynamic and wondrous scenarios.

Because of his scratchboard technique, Delort‘s works are focusing more on the negative space and its function in the art world. His high-contrast illustrations are full of apocalyptic dynamism, accentuated by the eccentric compositions, intrinsic etching and attention to every minuscule detail. Despite that, artist says his workflow is pretty chaotic.

“Up until the final inking stage, my work is mostly improvisation, because I’m basically never happy with my stuff until it’s finished <…> I start out with a bunch of thumbnails and when I find one that I like open it up in Photoshop and move stuff around until I’m satisfied. I make a final sketch, transfer it on to the scratchboard and scratch away till my wrist hurts.“

While some of Delort‘s narratives might be utterly unknown, others illustrate scenes from literary works such as Harry Potter, American Gods, or are designated movie posters. Although modern in content, Delort‘s works remind us of such artists as Gustav Doré and even Albrecht Dürer who‘ve been advocating the noteworthy art of etching years past. (via Lost At E Minor; Hypocrite Design)

The post Artist Creates Elaborate Black And White Scratchboard Illustrations By Etching Into The Black Ink appeared first on Beautiful/Decay Artist & Design.

Comprar na DealExtreme significa perder a conta do tempo de entrega e, às vezes, ser taxado pelos Correios com até 100% do valor do produto. Em breve, isto pode mudar. A loja situada em Hong Kong, na China, vai abrir um depósito em Curitiba, capital paranaense, de acordo com um m...

Lançado originalmente em 2007 para PC e consoles, o primeiro "BioShock" agora será também  lançado para dispositivos iOS (iPhone e iPad) no final de setembro. A conversão do clássico da Irrational Games está sendo feita pela filial chinesa da 2K.{end} O port, e...

Could you like, blow something up with the power of your mind?

via O Comic Con!

Hold on to your hats, because this is a good one. It’s a tale of disregarding the laws of physics, cancelled crowdfunding campaigns, and a menagerie of blogs who take press releases at face value.

Meet Silent Power (Google translation). It’s a remarkably small and fairly powerful miniature gaming computer being put together by a team in Germany. The specs are pretty good for a completely custom computer: an i7 4785T, GTX 760, 8GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD. Not a terrible machine for something that will eventually sell for about $930 USD, but what really puts this project in the limelight is the innovative cooling system and small size. The entire machine is only 16x10x7 cm, accented with a very interesting “copper foam” heat sink on top. Sounds pretty cool, huh? It does, until you start to think about the implementation a bit. Then it’s a descent into madness and a dark pit of despair.

There are a lot of things that are completely wrong with this project, and in true Hackaday fashion, we’re going to tear this one apart, figuring out why this project will never exist.

The Hardware

The specs for this machine are pretty good; it’s not a slouch by any means. The CPU is an Intel i7 4785T. A pretty good chip, but one with the lowest thermal design power of its generation – 35 Watts – not surprising given that the team behind Silent Power is going for a completely passively cooled product.

The graphics card, however, is not a low power part. The Nvidia GTX 760 is a 170 Watt card, and most certainly not the best choice for a passively cooled system. A better choice would be the GTX 750 Ti: they would get reasonably similar performance with a 60 Watt card. saving them from having to get rid of 110 Watts of heat. If you’ve ever touched a hot 100 Watt light bulb, that’s about how much heat the small performance increase from the GTX 760 to the GTX 750 Ti produces. That’s also the amount of extra heat the innovative copper foam heat sink needs to get rid of because of this one design decision.

Chip choices and component selection notwithstanding, a much more interesting aspect of this hardware is the form factor. It’s a pretty small enclosure, only 16x10x7 cm. The smallest commonly available motherboard size, Mini-ITX is 17 cm square and obviously wouldn’t fit in the enclosure. Maybe they’re going with a newer, smaller form factor like the Intel NUC? Nope. They’re designing their own integrated system, mounting the GPU and CPU on one board, and the RAM and the Flash chips that make up the SSD on another. There are supposedly a total of three boards in this computer, all separated by expensive, high-speed interconnects.

Just about every graphics card and motherboard you can buy isn’t designed from scratch. Instead, chip companies like Intel, AMD, and Nvidia produce what are called reference designs, which are produced by companies like Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, and EVGA. Yes, there are a few differences in peripheral support, thermal design, and layout, but the basic fact that there are only a handful of designs out there for a specific class of GPU or CPU holds true.

The team at Silent Power is creating a completely new design for their specific choice of CPU and GPU. That’s a tremendous undertaking and something that costs chip manufacturers millions of dollars to produce. The Silent Power team is willing to do all of this for $60,000 USD with a team of three.

Copper Foam

With the hardware design thoroughly debunked, we can move on to the most interesting feature of the Silent Power PC: the heatsink. It’s made of a material called copper foam, an open cell matrix of copper. At first glance, this looks like a decent choice for a heat sink. Copper is extremely thermally conductive, and the huge amount of surface area means there’s a lot of area for heat to radiate out of.

The reality is that this copper foam is a more effective insulator than a conductor of heat.

Heat sink design is no simple matter, and simply by observation of stock heatsinks, a few generalities can be observed. Most heat sinks are made from aluminum, and while the most common explanation for this is the price of copper versus the price of aluminum, that’s not the whole picture. All heat sinks have a property called emissivity, or the effectiveness of a material in emitting thermal radiation. When it comes to the emissivity of heat sinks and radiators, color is important. The radiator in your car is painted black, and the heatsink on your CPU is most likely black anodized aluminum. Copper cannot be anodized and short of artificially oxidizing their copper foam, the Silent Power team can do nothing to improve the efficiency of their chosen material.

Another consideration in the design of heat sinks is the area of the fins. The fins on every heat sink have something called a ‘boundary layer,’ or an area where heat is transferred from the metal to the air. A lot of time and resources have been dedicated towards calculating the ideal size, shape, and spacing of fins in a heat sink to optimize heat transfer with this boundary layer in mind. A copper foam is not an ideal heat sink. The boundary layer for all the cells in the foam quickly reaches capacity; after that, radiating any more heat is impossible.

This is, quite literally, one of the worst possible heat sinks imaginable.

Previously Found On Indiegogo

While being a crowdfunded project, Silent Power can’t be found on any of the regular sites like Kickstarter or Indiegogo. They’re doing the crowdfunding by themselves, asking everyone to contribute towards production via Paypal. The plan is simple: send some money to them via PayPal, and when they receive €45,000, they’ll start production. If they don’t receive the funds necessary, they’ll refund all of the potential buyers, minus PayPal fees.

Read that last paragraph again and tell me if that’s a reasonable deal. There are things called, ‘investors’ and ‘loans’ that might also work in this situation, doubly so if you’re running a business.

It’s certainly an unorthodox way of raising money for a project, and with a little bit of googling, you quickly find the reason why. Here’s the link to their previous Indiegogo campaign. That campaign was pulled down by the Indiegogo, “‘without warning and justification,” according to the team. If anyone can find a cache of that campaign somewhere, I’ll gladly link to it.

Yesterday, the Silent Power team hit a bit of a snag. Paypal froze their account. Yes, this means all the funds to be used in the development of this project are now locked away, and yes, this means the team has no funds to develop the project further.

That doesn’t mean the Silent Power team is calling it quits just yet: they’re still accepting payments and pre-orders to a frozen Paypal account, ready to start production when their account is unfrozen. The mind reels.

Wrap Up

This is only a cursory assessment of this project, and far from a complete look at the failings of the Silent Power PC. There’s much, much more to talk about here but really only one word that can describe the totality of this project: insane.

I would like to take a few words to point out that this is a critical assessment that comments on the engineering and design of the Silent Power PC, something the rest of the tech blogosphere didn’t seem to manage. In no particular order, here is a list of blogs that have taken an uncritical look at the Silent Power PC, without taking the effort to determine if it is real or not:

• The Verge
• Gizmodo
• Gismag
• PC World, with the quote, “That’s not to say Silent Power isn’t legit—far from it…”
• Techspot
• Ubergizmo
• Stuff.tv

There is really nothing more for me to say, but there are still dozens of reasons why this project will never see the light of day. Comments welcome below.

Filed under: Crowd Funding, Featured

As one of the largest online retailers, Amazon is the go-to store for many people.

Amazon became big by selling books and in recent years eBooks have become some of the fastest selling items. However, pirates are now directly targeting the company’s successful business model.

With a new Chrome extension pirates are entering Amazon, effectively transforming it into a pirate ‘store.’

When the LibGen extension is installed, it adds a new row on top of the Amazon product page of books that are also available through unauthorized sources.

The plugin uses data from the Libgen.org search engine which lists over a million books. Below is a screenshot of an Amazon book page, with a new row on the top linking to pirated downloads of the same title.

LibGen, short for Library Genesis, lists a wide variety of pirate sources for most books, including direct downloads, torrents and magnet links. It appears to work well, although there are occasional mismatches where links to books with similar titles are listed.

Needless to say book publishers are not going to be pleased with Amazon’s unofficial feature. Whether Amazon plans to take any action to stop the extension has yet to be seen.

The idea to transform Amazon into a pirate site is not entirely new. A few years ago a Firefox plugin integrated Pirate Bay download links into the site, which also worked for music and movies. This plugin was quickly taken offline quickly after the news was picked up by the mainstream media.

There are still other extensions floating around with the same functionality. Torrent This, for example, enhances Amazon with links to Pirate Bay download pages for all sorts of media, much like the “Pirates of the Amazon” plugin did.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

A exclusão de clubes e jogadores do Campeonato Brasileiro em FIFA 15, confirmada pela EA Sports nesta semana, ainda está dando o que falar. Não foram apenas os gamers brasileiros que ficaram surpresos ao saber que não poderiam mais jogar com seus times de coração no gam...

A giraffe being transported in South Africa died after hitting its head on an overpass. Two of the tall animals were inside an open-topped truck container traveling on Pretoria’s N1 highway. Their route was highlighted by on social media by other drivers.
Read Full Article at RT.com

Ever the controversial figure, Frank Miller is nevertheless one of the greats. As one of many notable comics creators who shot to prominence in the 1980s and ‘90s, Miller’s work on such characters as Batman and Daredevil helped define a generation of comic readers. But he’s seen his share of deserved criticism over the course of his career — graphic novels like Sin City and 300, while stylish and influential, have been derided for their treatment of women and people of color, and the more recent Holy Terror was shellacked by readers and comic writers alike for its unabashedly propagandistic attack on Islam.

Miller presses on, critics be damned. He’s a bit of a crank, after all, and will proudly call himself "a prick" in front of an...

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