Deciding whom to friend on Facebook, and when, can be stressful. Deciding this in the workplace is fraught on all kinds of levels. When does a co-worker earn Facebook friendship?
Rob Joyce, the White House cybersecurity czar, said on Tuesday that the government should end using the Social Security number as a national identification method.
"I believe the Social Security number has outlived its usefulness," said Joyce, while speaking at The Washington Post's Cybersecurity Summit. "Every time we use the Social Security number, you put it at risk."
One problem with the Social Security number, he said, is that a victim of identity theft cannot get it changed after it has been stolen.
When it comes to bench-racing electric vehicles, the kilowatt-hour is king. And over in Switzerland, there's an EV that will make Tesla's P100Ds look positively puny. But this is no carbon-fiber hypercar, and it's never going set any records for 0-60 times or the standing quarter. No, this is an altogether more practical creation that's meant to work for a living. It's a Komatsu quarry truck that's being modified by Kuhn Schweiz and Lithium Storage, weighing in at almost 50 tons (45 tonnes) and powered by a whopping 700kWh battery pack.
The e-Dumper has been in the works for a couple of years now, during which time its battery capacity has grown from the original 600kWh to what is now the equivalent of seven top-of-the-line Teslas. The cells in question are nickel-manganese-cobalt, 1,440 of them in total, weighing almost 10,000lbs (4.5 tonnes). And once the team has found space in the chassis for all of that energy storage, the idea is for the e-Dumper to spend the next decade trundling between a Swiss cement quarry and the Ciments Vigier works near Biel.
Here's the really cool part: each round trip actually generates electricity. Because the e-Dumper goes up the mountain empty and descends carrying 71 tons (65 tonnes) of rock, it captures 40kWh on the way to the cement works via regenerative braking. But climbing back up to the quarry only requires 30kWh, so every trip will feed an extra 10kWh into the local electricity grid. Not bad when you then consider that the e-Dumper will be doing that trip 20 times a day.
Nearly one year later, we're still not tired of using this image of Ars UK's Seb Anthony to illustrate Vive stories.
For nearly a year now, HTC's SteamVR-based Vive headset has remained stubbornly set at its launch price of $800. That will change for a single day on Wednesday, when HTC has announced it will lower the Vive's price to $700 in celebration of the headset's first anniversary (down from £689 to £589 in the UK).
The one-day sale comes a month after Oculus permanently lowered the price of its Rift headset from $600 to $500. While the pricier Vive package comes with a pair of hand-tracking controllers, Oculus also lowered the price of its own Touch controllers from $200 to $100 last month, making the Rift package significantly cheaper in an apples-to-apples basis.
Alongside the brief price drop, HTC will also be rolling out a new subscription-based software program on April 5. For $7/£7 a month, a Viveport subscription will let players "choose five titles from an ever-growing library of curated content," on HTC's Viveport platform (which is distinct from the SteamVR interface many Vive owners use). Viveport users can try a free one-month trial of the service and choose from among 50 different titles to start.
We’re going to be rolling out an exciting new program in The Old Reader over the next few weeks. As you know, The Old Reader has been entirely Ad free since it’s inception and we’ve been vocal about doing our best to protect our users from excessive online advertising. Our Premium accounts have been very successful, but we’re frankly still not where we need to be in terms of revenues in order to fund planned development and continue innovating this service. We have a small, dedicated, and talented team but our vision for The Old Reader is ambitious.
So we’re taking a cue from some publishers that we really admire (such as Daring Fireball) and introducing Sponsored Content. Premium users will never see sponsored content, but all other users will see up to 1 sponsored post per week in their RSS feeds. That’s it. It’s an exclusive program and we believe we’ll be able to make the program beneficial to both users and sponsors.
We’re also adding weekly site sponsors that would get a banner placement on the web interface. It’ll be an exclusive program and we’ll only accept sponsors that we believe are relevant and inoffensive. We will under no circumstances use any techniques such as tracking cookies or harvesting user data to advertise to our users. And again, premium users will never see any sponsored content.
We know some of you might have concerns and we’re happy to field any questions that you might have. If you are interested in signing up for the sponsor program, please visit out sponsorship page.
While the ubiquitous TI-83 still runs off an ancient Zilog Z80 processor, the newer TI-Nspire series of graphing calculators uses modern ARM devices. [Codinghobbit] managed to get Debian Linux running on a TI-Nspire calculator, and has written a guide explaining how it’s done.
The process uses Ndless, a jailbreak which allows code to run at a low level on the device. Ndless also includes a full SDK, emulator, and debugger for developing apps. In this case, Ndless is used to load the Linux kernel.
The root filesystem is built on a PC using debootstrap and the QEMU ARM emulator. This allows you to install whatever packages are needed via apt, before transitioning to the calculator itself.
With the root filesystem on a USB flash drive, Ndless runs the Linux loader, which starts the kernel, mounts the root filesystem, and boots in to a Debian system in about two minutes. As the video after the break demonstrates, this leaves you with a shell on the calculator. We’re not exactly sure what to do with Linux on a graphing calculator, but it is a neat demonstration.
Last night we introduced another new feature called Send To. Like Starred items, this has been a frequently requested addition and something we’ve been itching to get into the application. Send To allows you to share posts from The Old Reader to external services such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Evernote, Google+, or email. By default, email, Facebook, and Twitter are available in your Send To list but you can add others or configure custom options in Settings under the Social tab. We’ve put together a short page with some common services you might want to add to your Share To list here. Email us with any you think would be a good fit for this list.
Also, there’s another small feature that went out last night. We added pubsubhubbub to the user’s profile RSS feed (http://theoldreader.com/profile/[USERNAME].rss), so profile RSS feeds now provide near real time updating. Small, but it might be worthy of mention.
We hope you like these new features as much as we do.
NOOOO!!!! This makes me so sad! I love Winamp and it has integration with so many other programs on my computer. I will be sad to see it go, but I will keep using it for quite a while!
It's been a good 15 years, but Winamp, our go-to desktop media player, is shutting down on December 20th.
Photographer Bela Borsodi fastidiously manipulated household items in the photograph below to create an image that looks like 4 photographs. Created as an album cover for the band VLP, I can confirm it's possible to stare at this picture for many minutes.
Father’s Day weekend was busy like whoa for us this year. We hosted Andrew’s fifth birthday party on Saturday (more about that next week), and Sunday we spent the day at a lovely party celebrating Ben’s grandparents’ 65th wedding anniversary where I was the unofficial official photographer. So yes, lots of fun but overall exhausting. The kids and I gave Ben a few gifts but I didn’t get to cook or bake him any special Father’s Day treats. I made up for it though, by making him this peanut butter smoothie. Why is this smoothie worthy of a Father’s Day gift, you might ask?
Oh, this smoothie. It all started back in April when we took a short little jaunt up to Chicago for an incredible dinner at Next, the second restaurant created by Grant Achatz (remember Alinea?) along with Chef Dave Beran. We experienced their menu for The Hunt and the meal was truly amazing beyond description (hence why I haven’t written anything else about it.) We experienced several new-to-us foods that evening, many of which would make most people squeamish…but per the usual of the talented staff they employ, every single bite was an enjoyable adventure. When discussing it later, Ben and I agreed that we couldn’t even determine a least favorite course because we had loved them all. What does this have to do with the smoothie? The morning after The Hunt, we visited a lovely restaurant for brunch recommended by our favorite traveling and eating buddies, Ryan and his wife Andrea. Ben ordered a peanut butter smoothie and I’m telling you, I haven’t heard the end of it since. Despite our incredible experience at Next, this smoothie was all Ben could talk about. He has been asking me to recreate it at home ever since. Well, it took me a couple of months to get around to it and a few rounds of tweaks, but we finally got result we were hoping for. Creamy, thick, and very peanut buttery. Add the drizzle of chocolate syrup and/or whipped cream for extra indulgence. Ben says: two thumbs up!
Recipe: Peanut Butter Smoothie
Yield: about 2 servings
Ingredients:
1 cup low-fat greek yogurt 6 tbsp. creamy peanut butter ½ peeled banana, frozen* ½ cup old-fashioned oats 1 cup ice 2 tsp. vanilla extract 1 tbsp. honey Chocolate syrup, for serving (optional)
Directions:
Combine all ingredients in a blender or food processor. Blend until completely smooth and well mixed. Serve with a drizzle of chocolate syrup, if desired.
*Add up to 1 whole frozen banana if you like. We felt this made the banana flavor too prominent when we were hoping for a more pure peanut butter taste.
Photographer Darren Pearson (previously) has been perfecting his long-exposure light painting techniques over the last few months. While I really enjoy his dinosaurs you can see lots more in his recent California Soul series that explores Californian culture through surfing, skateboarding and skeletons.
Father’s Day weekend was busy like whoa for us this year. We hosted Andrew’s fifth birthday party on Saturday (more about that next week), and Sunday we spent the day at a lovely party celebrating Ben’s grandparents’ 65th wedding anniversary where I was the unofficial official photographer. So yes, lots of fun but overall exhausting. The kids and I gave Ben a few gifts but I didn’t get to cook or bake him any special Father’s Day treats. I made up for it though, by making him this peanut butter smoothie. Why is this smoothie worthy of a Father’s Day gift, you might ask?
