Talynebear

How exactly does HD Voice work? And is it just marketing hype, or will our smartphones finally excel at actually making calls?

The President Barack Obama administration is informing a federal judge that if it's forced to disclose a secret court opinion about the government illegally spying on Americans, the likely result could be "exceptionally grave and serious damage to the national security."

Comic by: master2.0100

Tagged: link , trolling , futurama , zelda Share on Facebook

This is only part of the cycle.

source: .//projectTiGER

I don't know about Defiance... I played in a sneak preview weekend thing, and I ended up shutting it off after like twenty minutes and uninstalling. I felt like the entire presentation was so mediocre. It felt, as I guess you'd expect, like a game that was being slapped together and pushed out the door to coincide with a TV show. The whole "movie franchise video game tie-in" phenomenon, except on a larger more committed scale, in that this is a game they hope people will continue to play for a duration.

However the concept, I have to admit, is intriguing. The show hasn't started airing yet, but there's a factor that may end up playing into consideration, and that's "What if the show is so enjoyable that it elevates the game above 'meh'?" What I mean is, if Battlestar Galactica (another SyFy series and one that I really enjoyed) had launched with an ongoing video game tie-in that would share and receive influence with the show... I might have played it despite any shortcomings. My enjoyment of the show might have made me excited enough to overlook issues with the game, just to be a part of the world for a while.

I haven't seen Defiance: The Show. It doesn't air for another couple of weeks, so it's far too early to tell if it will be good, let alone stick around for multiple seasons/develop a large fanbase. But I'll certainly check it out.

I tried the game probably a couple of months ago. I was clearly not impressed. I have, however, received a lot of feedback from readers that have played it more recently that thought it was pretty good. Could it have changed enough in a couple of months to turn my opinion from "meh" to "pretty decent"? I suppose so.

I'm going to end up checking it out this week regardless, since Gamestop refused to cancel my online pre-order. It will be showing up at my doorstep despite my best efforts, so I figure I'll just give it another chance to make an impression.

I'd like it to suddenly be engaging and interesting... I'd also like the show to be really solid... I'm rooting for the whole project, really. But I wouldn't bet any money on it.

Here is the original that started it all!

Follow Mike on Twitter! http://twitter.com/TheOnlyMikeJ

Title card by: http://goku-no-baka.deviantart.com/

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Jason Rohrer is well-known in indie gaming circles for his experimental "art games" like Passage and Sleep is Death, but his latest creation is something that may not be played by anyone alive today. Rohrer's latest creation, a board game titled A Game for Someone, is currently buried somewhere in a Nevada desert where Rohrer intends it to stay for the next 2,700 years.

"I wanted to make a game that is not for right now, that I will never play," said Rohrer onstage at this year's Game Developers Conference, "and nobody now living would ever play."

Polygon reports that the game was created as a (very literal) response to a "humanity's last game" themed challenge at GDC. Rohrer created the rules for the game and playtested it with a computer to account for balance issues, and then set about building it using materials that would last for a few thousand years—the board and its pieces are crafted from titanium, and the rules are written on acid-free paper stored in a hermetically sealed glass tube.

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Gotcha! Keck Institute for Space Studies

Aviation Week is carrying the news that NASA's FY2014 budget will include a $100 million line item to start planning a robotic mission to snatch an asteroid and relocate it to near the Moon, where it could be studied up-close by NASA—and possibly even visited by astronauts (hat-tip to the Houston Chronicle's SciGuy blog for the news).

The idea is based on a report by the Keck Institute for Space Studies, which outlines an entire robotic mission to locate and retrieve an NEA—a Near Earth Asteroid—of about 500,000kg in mass and a diameter of about 7 meters. Such an asteroid would be a C-type or carbonaceous asteroid, and would have the consistency of "a dried mudball." The asteroid would be hauled back via a robotic probe and positioned in an orbit above the far side of the Moon at the second Earth-Moon Lagrange Point, where the vagaries of gravity and inertia would keep the asteroid in a roughly consistent location. Once positioned there, the asteroid would—at least in theory—be within the range of a manned visit.

To go out and grab the asteroid in the first place, the report recommends a probe weighing about 18,000 kg, which could be lofted into space using an existing launch vehicle (such as an Atlas V). Shifting 500,000 kg of mass with conventional rockets would require a tremendous amount of propellant to be carried along with the probe so, rather than chemical rockets, the probe would be equipped with a "~40-kW solar electric propulsion system with a specific impulse of 3,000 s."

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Check out Bennett's Twitter here

Check out more at http://www.benthesage.com

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First time accepted submitter CanadianRealist writes "Electrolysis of water to produce hydrogen is very inefficient without the use of a catalyst. Unfortunately catalysts are currently made of crystals containing rare, expensive toxic metals such as ruthenium and iridium. Two chemists from the University of Calgary have invented a process to make a catalyst using relatively non-toxic metal compounds such as iron oxide, for 1/1000 the cost of currently used catalysts. It is suggested this would make it more feasible to use electrolysis of water to create hydrogen as a method of storing energy from variable green power sources such as wind and solar."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I see what you did there. So does that mean Jynx is Mr. Popo’s daughter? And if so, does that also mean he shoved her into a pokéball? Sounds like my kind of parenting.

source: YouTube

Right now in the North America, the Supreme Court of the United States is discussing the matter of same sex marriage. All over the social media networks, people are showing their support for gay marriage by changing their avatars to a pink equal symbol on a red background which symbolizes equality. And what about me? Well, I just made a whole bunch of gaming versions of the avatars because I thought it would be fun. Enjoy.

Update: The avatars are now 240 x 240 so they are more widely accepted by social media sites.

header: Reddit
avatars: Dueling Analogs

It’s not the size of your warp pipe that matters, it’s how you use it.

source: YouTube
via: Halolz

I’ve watched and enjoyed this video too many times to not finally share it. Here’s some of Terry Crews’ unaltered Old Spice commercials for you’re viewing pleasure as well:

source: YouTube

skade88 writes "The New York Times is reporting that the United States has started flying B-2 stealth bomber runs over South Korea as a show of force to North Korea. The bombers flew 6,500 miles to bomb a South Korean island with mock explosives. Earlier this month the US Military ran mock B-52 bombing runs over the same South Korean island. The U.S. military says it shows that it can execute precision bombing runs at will with little notice needed. The U.S. also reaffirmed their commitment to protecting it's allies in the region. The North Koreans have been making threats to turn South Korea into a sea of fire. North Korea has also made threats claiming they will nuke the United States' main land."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of these actors has signed up to be in this film. Guess which one. 20th Century Fox

Cinephiles, rejoice: director Roland Emmerich has announced details on his long-anticipated sequel to 1996's summer blockbuster Independence Day. Sequels, actually: according to Entertainment Weekly, Emmerich and co-writer Dean Devlin have penned two full scripts for the follow-up, which will be set twenty years after the events in the first movie and will again feature the return of Independence Day's IT-challenged squid-headed monster antagonists.

"The humans knew that one day the aliens would come back," Emmerich explained to EW. The invading tentacular horde from the first movie managed to send out a distress signal before being implausibly hacked by Jeff Goldblum's PowerBook and... actually, you know what? I'd probably better just stop using words like "implausibly" right now, because otherwise this article is never going to get written.

Twenty years after the first movie, Earth is a changed place: glowy-blue organic alien technology from the vast ships implausibly knocked out of the sky by plucky human resistance fighters...damn it, there I go again. Um, alien tech has been incorporated into the everyday lives of the people of Earth, but not without difficulty: the technology can be scavenged and used, but not recreated from scratch. "We don’t know how to duplicate it because it’s organically grown technology, but we know how to take an antigravity device and put it in a human airplane," explained Emmerich. Emphasis added by me, because in a fascinating twist, Emmerich has created a future where portable electronics actually represent a legitimate threat to commercial aviation.

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iDuck writes "Damien George, of Cambridge University, has created a 3D visualization of the latest data from the Planck mission. Using WebGL, it lets you spin and zoom a 3D model of the Cosmic Microwave Background, and select different wavelength bands."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Square Enix expects to report an "extraordinary" loss of about $138 million for 2013. The game publisher's president has already stepped down. What's next for the console game industry?

The lead-up to the first Wolverine trailer included not only a 20-second teaser, but also a six-second Vine "tweaser." Yes, really.

Stephen Hawkings was right!

source: YouTube

Filed under: Fantasy, Final Fantasy XI, Culture, Opinion, Jukebox Heroes, Music

Hey you! Want a good way to die a horrible, painful death? Enter into any geek domain and put down the music of the Final Fantasy series. Do it. I double-dog dare you. Even scrubs who couldn't identify a single other composer or notable video game soundtrack will leap to the defense of One-Winged Angel.

While I generally do like the Final Fantasy tunes, especially the earlier 8-bit era stuff and Final Fantasy IX, I haven't seen it as an infallible series in regard to its music. I think along the way Nobuo Uematsu's become this person who can Do No Wrong in the gaming community, which has stifled an honest look at both the highs and lows of his soundtracks.

I don't want to be all about hero worship or mindless bashing today; I want to examine a fairly good but not perfect soundtrack that represented Final Fantasy's first foray into MMOs. Along with Uematsu, Naoshi Mizuta and Kumi Tanioka shared composing duties on this project. There's some terrific stuff here that you'll listen to after the jump, but there are a lot more completely forgettable (and sometimes annoying!) tracks that have been shoehorned into FFXI's expansive game. So let's come down to earth and see what Final Fantasy XI has in store for us.

Continue reading Jukebox Heroes: Final Fantasy XI's soundtrack

Jukebox Heroes: Final Fantasy XI's soundtrack originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 26 Mar 2013 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I’ve checked over this infographic a few times and still cannot find where they give the number of people who complained about how it ended. My bet is that its more than the amount of people who actually finished it. Just saying…

source: Twitter

Comic by: Stinkybut11

Tagged: well that escalated quickly , bioshock , bad puns , Will Ferrell Share on Facebook

Aurich Lawson

At the beginning of a sunny Monday morning earlier this month, I had never cracked a password. By the end of the day, I had cracked 8,000. Even though I knew password cracking was easy, I didn't know it was ridiculously easy—well, ridiculously easy once I overcame the urge to bash my laptop with a sledgehammer and finally figured out what I was doing.

My journey into the Dark-ish Side began during a chat with our security editor, Dan Goodin, who remarked in an offhand fashion that cracking passwords was approaching entry-level "script kiddie stuff." This got me thinking, because—though I understand password cracking conceptually—I can't hack my way out of the proverbial paper bag. I'm the very definition of a "script kiddie," someone who needs the simplified and automated tools created by others to mount attacks that he couldn't manage if left to his own devices. Sure, in a moment of poor decision-making in college, I once logged into port 25 of our school's unguarded e-mail server and faked a prank message to another student—but that was the extent of my black hat activities. If cracking passwords were truly a script kiddie activity, I was perfectly placed to test that assertion.

It sounded like an interesting challenge. Could I, using only free tools and the resources of the Internet, successfully:

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