DarendukesThis was in Austin.
YouTube stars Megan Turney and Gavin Free were forced to hide in their closet and call 911 last month after a fan armed with a handgun invaded their home and fired “at least one round inside the house”. He was then shot dead by police in the couple’s driveway.
Darendukesgood luck with that
House Bill 2686 and its accompanying Senate version would prohibit retailers (including those that operate online) from selling games that include "a system of further purchasing a randomized reward or rewards" to anyone under 21 years of age.
Many US retailers already prevent children under 17 from buying games rated "M for Mature" or "AO for Adults Only" by the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB). Those voluntary restrictions don't have the force of law, though, and a landmark 2011 Supreme court decision overturned state laws that attempted such content-based age restrictions on First Amendment grounds. That decision would likely not apply to the commerce-based restrictions in these bills, though.
Darendukeswow looks pretty good for mobile. be annoying as shit to play tho.
Wondering how Battlegrounds is supposed to look on smart devices? Today, a mobile version of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds was released for China.
DarendukesHow do people have time for this?
The Asus Nexus Player (with controller, pictured) was the closest we've ever gotten to a Google gaming device.
A wild report from The Information (subscription required) claims that Google is working on a subscription-based gaming streaming service, delivered either over Google's Chromecast devices or via a totally new Google-made gaming console.
The service is codenamed "Yeti," and it would be similar to streaming services like PlayStation Now—users would pay a subscription fee to access a collection of games, which are run on a remote device and streamed over the Internet. The Information notes that "an early version" of this service was designed to work over a Chromecast, which is interesting since it's unclear how a game controller would ever hook up to a Chromecast. More recently, Google has reportedly started experimenting with a Google-developed game console and controller. The project is being led by two Google hardware executives—Mario Queiroz, VP of product management, and Majd Bakar, VP of engineering—so if this ever sees the light of day, new hardware seems likely.
Game streaming removes the need to purchase expensive video game hardware, since all the game processing is done in the cloud. The tradeoff is that it puts a big strain on your Internet service and the provider's infrastructure, since every video frame and every button press has to be streamed over the Internet with minimal lag. If any company is good at building a speedy, robust Internet service, though, it's Google. It already has a massive content delivery infrastructure thanks to sites like YouTube, and the company currently has a small gaming footprint with the Android-focused Google Play Games service and YouTube Gaming, a Twitch competitor.
DarendukesInteresting if true.
Enlarge / Eating our way to world domination. (credit: Vince Smith / Flickr)
Last year, archaeologists in California made a startling announcement: they had discovered a 130,000 year-old prehistoric human campsite in the Golden State. According to currently accepted evidence, the first modern humans were just venturing out of Africa at that time, and no one would set foot in the Americas for about 115,000 years. Not surprisingly, the claim met with skepticism from other archaeologists, who said that the evidence at the site wasn’t enough to support rewriting the entire story of human migration.
That evidence is a collection of broken mastodon bones, rounded cobbles, and flat stones. These bits and pieces were unearthed during a 1992 highway construction project in San Diego and are now known as the Cerutti Mastodon Site. Archaeologist Steven R. Holen of the San Diego Natural History Museum and his colleagues say that early humans used the cobbles as hammers and the flat stones as anvils to crack open mastodon bones to get the marrow inside. They say the Cerutti site represents a very early wave of human migration into the Americas, perhaps one that didn’t last long enough to get a foothold. That explains why no other human campsites this old have turned up in the Americas.
There’s no question about the age of the site. Radiometric testing relying on uranium decay and several other methods put the bones at over 100,000 years old, and even critics agree that the dating is reliable. The debate centers on whether the items at Cerutti are really proof of human activity, and competing arguments have been published in today's issue of Nature.
DarendukesThe 90's were great.
90’s were the time when everyone went crazy for Tamagotchis, guys sported frosted tips, and denim ruled everyone’s wardrobes. It was also the time when Mulder and Scully’s duo from the popular TV show about UFOs, The X-Files, won the hearts of millions of viewers worldwide. Snarky dialogue and intriguing plot not only made the show into a cult-classic but also caused a surge of believers in the paranormal activities. The pictures of the two stars of the show that you see below should also be considered one of them as it looks completely out-of-this-world.
Iconic photographer David LaChapelle, who is well-known for his wacky photoshoots, immersed David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson into the world of his crazy imagination that even for that time was quite bold. Striking colors, odd set-ups, and wild hair and makeup is mixed together and crammed into photos that just scream of the 90’s.
We suggest filing these pictures under “supernatural activities related to time travel”, as they are gonna bring you back in time. Or, at least, make you wish that you could go back. Scroll down to see them for yourself.
Image credits: David LaChapelle
Image credits: David LaChapelle
Image credits: David LaChapelle
Image credits: David LaChapelle
Image credits: David LaChapelle
Image credits: David LaChapelle
Image credits: David LaChapelle
Image credits: David LaChapelle
Image credits: David LaChapelle
DarendukesNeat
Enlarge (credit: Ranja Andriantsoa)
It's possible to infer many species' origins from things like fossils and DNA sequences. But for one creature, we have a specific date: 1995. That's when the first marbled crayfish appeared in a pet shop in Germany, mixed in with similar-looking animals that had originally come from streams in the US South.
When it came to selling pets, the marbled crayfish had a big advantage over its relatives: it doesn't need males to reproduce. Instead, females are able to produce genetic copies of themselves, allowing any fish tank to become a factory for an army of crayfish clones. Now, researchers have confirmed that these clones have spread throughout Europe, gotten as far as Japan, and begun invading the streams of Madagascar.
Ostensibly, the publication that describes these results is about the completion of the genome for the marbled crayfish. And the genome is what has allowed researchers to confirm that crayfish from around the world are essentially clones. But the real story in Nature Ecology and Evolution is the evolution and global spread of an entirely new species in less than 25 years.
DarendukesSinkhole!
Yesterday, in Augusta, Georgia, a man and his motorcycle were felled by a sinkhole that opened up outside of a shopping center. This is just the latest sinkhole for the city, according to The Augusta Chronicle, which also saw one swallow a garbage truck last May.
DarendukesHa! You gotta read this shit!
Star Trek: The Next Generation was one of those shows that only got better over the years—well, until now. Predictive keyboards have stepped in to continue the saga of the USS Enterprise, with unpredictable results. And of course, Q is along for the ride, because only a god could orchestrate such madness.
Darendukes100x $2 bills? Did they think there was a strip club up there?
It’s inevitable that one day humanity is going to need to live somewhere other than Earth, and our first step towards intergalactic colonization will probably be the moon. The only problem? We’ve only visited it 12 times, and already there’s over 400,000 pounds of garbage up there.
DarendukesWill someone please explain to me why he made a flamethrower? I just don't understand this. You can already buy flamethrowers online.
Enlarge (credit: Boring Company)
Over the last 15 years, Elon Musk's companies have had a big impact on the rocket, electric car, and battery markets. This weekend, Musk entered yet another new market: flamethrowers. Musk's Boring Company began selling branded novelty flamethrowers for $500 apiece.
"Obviously, a flamethrower is a super terrible idea," Musk tweeted on Saturday evening. "Definitely don't buy one."
By Monday afternoon, customers had reserved 10,000 of the 20,000 units the company planned to produce.
DarendukesNeat.
Since its discovery over a hundred years ago, the 240-page Voynich manuscript, filled with seemingly coded language and inscrutable illustrations, of has confounded linguists and cryptographers. Using artificial intelligence, Canadian researchers have taken a huge step forward in unraveling the document’s hidden…
DarendukesBut would it still dump everyone on the same plane? Wouldn't that defeat the purpose?
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is shaking things up. But why improve a formula that's already helped it nab 25 million PC players and over three million Xbox One players? Well, the problem lies with its pre-match meet-ups, which spawn players in the same area causing strain on its servers. Bluehole's solution is to plop groups of players in different starting locations on both its maps, according to a Steam community post. Anything that solves the game's rocky performance issues should be welcomed by fans.
Source: Steam
DarendukesSaw this movie last weekend. Its good.
It’s pretty rare when the film leading all nominees at the Academy Awards is a genre movie, but that happened this year. Guillermo del Toro’s beautiful movie, The Shape of Water, got 13 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, and it’s cause for celebration.
Darendukesinteresting
Most of your time in Subnautica is spent deciding whether to listen to your curiosity or your terror. It’s a tough choice.
Enlarge (credit: JD Hancock / Flickr)
A jury found body broker Arthur Rathburn guilty on Monday of illegally renting out diseased human body parts and heads to unwitting doctors. He faces up to 20 years in prison for eight crimes, including wire fraud and illegally transporting hazardous materials.
Federal prosecutors alleged that from January 2007 to December 2013, Rathburn, 63, and his wife Elizabeth ran a corrupt body brokering company called International Biological, Inc (IBI). For the grisly scheme, Rathburn dismembered cadavers with a chainsaw, band saw, and reciprocating saw. He haphazardly piled parts and heads—flesh on flesh—amid pools of blood and shipped them wrapped in trash bags in camping coolers.
Elizabeth, meanwhile, managed rental orders from clients who used the heads and parts for medical and dental training. All the while, the pair hid the fact that they often bought diseased bodies at bargain rates and made thousands renting individual parts that they knew to be contaminated with HIV, hepatitis, and other diseases.
DarendukesHoly shit his bands name is Drug Restaurant! That's awesome.
Jung Joon Young isn’t only a regular on South Korean TV, but he’s also the lead singer of the rock group Drug Restaurant. He’s just added a new gig to his large resume: Esports pro.
DarendukesNew map??
Blizzard is dropping a ton of new skins and a new map for Overwatch today, but D.va’s new cat-themed skin has already captured the internet’s heart.
DarendukesThis sentence: "The software, which is used to evaluate a defendant's chance of committing further crimes, turned out to produce different results when evaluating black people and Caucasians."
Is there a checkbox for that?
(credit: Adam Jones, Ph.D.)
In 2016, ProPublica caused a stir when it evaluated the performance of software that's used in criminal justice proceedings. The software, which is used to evaluate a defendant's chance of committing further crimes, turned out to produce different results when evaluating black people and Caucasians.
The significance of that discrepancy is still the subject of some debate, but two Dartmouth College researchers have asked a more fundamental question: is the software any good? The answer they came up with is "not especially," as its performance could be matched by recruiting people on Mechanical Turk or performing a simple analysis that only took two factors into account.
The software in question is called COMPAS, for Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions. It takes into account a wide variety of factors about defendants and uses them to evaluate whether those individuals are likely to commit additional crimes and helps identify intervention options. COMPAS is heavily integrated into the judicial process (see this document from the California Department of Corrections for a sense of its importance). Perhaps most significantly, however, it is sometimes influential in determining sentencing, which can be based on the idea that people who are likely to commit additional crimes should be incarcerated longer.
Yakko, Wakko, and Dot’s “pay-or-play contracts” have been renewed! The much-loved Warner Bros. animated series Animaniacs is being brought to Hulu with all-new seasons. And yes, executive producer Steven Spielberg is along for the ride.
Darendukesok it starts at like 17 seconds and is terrifying
It’s well known that patients struggle to clearly communicate their end-of-life wishes to those calling the shots at critical moments—generally doctors and family members. But, in case anyone was wondering, tattooing your wishes onto your body does not clear things up.
Emergency medicine doctors in Florida struggled to figure out how to respectfully care for an unconscious 70-year-old man with a chest tattoo that read “Do Not Resuscitate” followed by what appeared to be his signature.
In a case report published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine, the doctors recounted:
Darendukesdat title
While preserving an 18th century wooden statue of Jesus, a team of Spanish restorers was surprised to discover a time capsule hidden within the hollowed-out ass portion of the carving. Written by a Catholic chaplain, the detailed document contains economic, political, and cultural information about the time period.
Darendukesomg i fuckin love these
Brian Kesinger (previously here) is a visual artist who has worked for Walt Disney Studios for over 16 years, but his work outside of the movie business gets fans going just as much as his animation. This time he has created a magical mashup universe, putting a Calvin And Hobbes twist on everybody’s favorite Star Wars: The Force Awakens characters, and it works perfectly.
“Being a kid in the ’80s I was raised on a steady diet of Disney, Star Wars, and comic books, so being able to work on so many amazing films and projects has really been a dream come true,” Brian told The Verge. Kesinger admitted admiring Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin & Hobbes deeply. “I was always amazed at how he could draw anything from cute stuffed tigers to ferocious dinosaurs piloting fighter jets. His inking style seemed so casual and loose and yet the drawings were so solid.”
“I’m not the first to mash-up Calvin & Hobbes with pop culture,” the artist who has worked on Wreck-It Ralph, Tangled, and Tarzan said. “[but] I think the difference here is that I went a little deeper with the idea. Once I really made the comparison that Kylo Ren was probably a difficult child much like Calvin, it really resonated with people. The metaphor was solidified when I made Darth Vader Kylo’s imaginary friend.”
More info: Etsy | Instagram | Twitter
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
Image credits: Brian Kesinger
DarendukesPretty damn impressive that they still function perfectly after 37 years.
Enlarge / The Voyager team is able to use a set of four backup thrusters, dormant since 1980. They are located on the back side of the spacecraft in this orientation. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
At present, the Voyager 1 spacecraft is 21 billion kilometers from Earth, or about 141 times the distance between the Earth and Sun. It has, in fact, moved beyond our Solar System into interstellar space. However, we can still communicate with Voyager across that distance.
This week, the scientists and engineers on the Voyager team did something very special. They commanded the spacecraft to fire a set of four trajectory thrusters for the first time in 37 years to determine their ability to orient the spacecraft using 10-millisecond pulses.
After sending the commands on Tuesday, it took 19 hours and 35 minutes for the signal to reach Voyager. Then, the Earth-bound spacecraft team had to wait another 19 hours and 35 minutes to see if the spacecraft responded. It did. After nearly four decades of dormancy, the Aerojet Rocketdyne manufactured thrusters fired perfectly.
Darendukesthats hawt
A few years back, there was a funny Super Nintendo joke. In 2017 it has been brought back and perfected, thanks to a masterful console paintjob by zoki64.
Darendukeslol
Traveling during the holidays is already a nightmare, but for people flying American Airlines during the last two weeks in December, things may have just gotten a whole lot worse.
