Fatbob

Conventional wisdom says that if you're trying to replicate a part of the human body with robotics, it should look and function like the real thing. But the creators of this prosthesis have taken a different approach, simplifying the human hand to just three digits.

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The dead have risen. You've found cans of tuna and old Mosin-Nagant ammunition. That's wonderful news!

. . . or it would be, if you had can opener.

Now what? Well, YouTube user CrazyRussianHacker has a trick that will let you open those vital consumables. All you need is a block of concrete. Rub the top of the can against the concrete until you've abraded away the top rim. Then squeeze on the sides. The lid will pop off.

-via Ace of Spades HQ

People have been working on video and explorable environments for the Oculus Rift, but Condition One, the immersive videography group, is upping the ante with a complete 20-30 minute movie all in 3D.

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You know what they say: The Xbox doesn't fall too far from the tree.

Are you old school or cutting edge? Green or blue? A lone wolf or a social butterfly? It turns out your game console could say more about you than you think. Just like pets look like their owners, your console reflects just a little bit of the type of gamer you are.

We took an introspective look at each console, and it turns out where you loyalties lie says a lot about you — or not. Regardless, here's a pretty infographic.

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More about Gaming, Xbox 360, Nintendo, Playstation 3, and Atari

 A man is in bed with his wife when there is a rat-a-tat-tat on the door. He rolls over and looks at his clock, and it’s half past three in the morning. “I’m not getting out of bed at this time,” he thinks, and rolls over. Then, a louder knock follows.

“Aren’t you going to answer that?” says his wife. So he drags himself out of bed and goes downstairs. He opens the door and there is a man standing at the door. It didn’t take the homeowner long to realize the man was drunk.

“Hi there,” slurs the stranger. “Can you give me a push?”

 ”No, get lost. It’s half past three. I was in bed,” says the man and slams the door. He goes back up to bed and tells his wife what happened and she says, “Dave, that wasn’t very nice of you. Remember that night we broke down in the pouring rain on the way to pick the kids up from the baby sitter and you had to knock on that man’s house to get us started again? What would have happened if he’d told us to get lost??”

“But the guy was drunk,” says the husband.

“It doesn’t matter,” says the wife. “He needs our help and it would be the right thing to help him.”

So the husband gets out of bed again, gets dressed and goes downstairs. He opens the door, and not being able to see the stranger anywhere he shouts, “Hey, do you still want a push?”

And he hears a voice cry out, “Yeah, please.”

So, still being unable to see the stranger he shouts, “Where are you?”

And the stranger replies, “I’m around in the back yard, on your swing set.”

Thanks AH

 

SEGA Mega Drive/Genesis: Collected Works, an officially licensed 25th anniversary commemorative compilation of artwork, development sketches, hardware manufacturing plans, and interviews from Sega's golden years looks to be the definitive book for long time fans. 

The hard backed book, at the time of this article has nearly doubled, its Kickstarter goal. It's slated to contain over 20 interviews from Sega team members that include the likes of Yuji Naka (Sonic the Hedgehog), Yu Suzuki (Shenmue and Virtua Fighter), and Yuzo Koshiro (Streets of Rage). Additionally, the approximately 300 page book will also feature a foreword from Earthworm Jim creator Dave Perry.

I practically grew up a Sega kind in the 90s and I have to say I'm itching to pledge my share for copy of this book. The collection of design docs and hand-drawn sketches from some of my all-time favorite games makes this something destined for my coffee table. Hopefully the interviews contain just as many memorable facts, that have yet to be shared, to truly make this book something special.  

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The problem with lithium ion batteries is that the more discharge cycles you put them through, the less efficient the negative electrode becomes at holding electrons. This just won't do in our mobile future, so researchers at Stanford University have developed a battery that actually heals itself. It's nearly alive.

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With Minute Physics videos we pretty much expect to have the universe explained to us in . . . a minute. Or maybe a few minutes. But this rundown of temperature and how to achieve "negative temperature" only takes 10 seconds. Impressive.

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Rambo Tribble writes "Reuters is reporting that the FBI has issued a warning to several U.S. Government agencies that the Anonymous collective has hacked their systems. Included in the list of compromised agencies are the U.S. Army, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, and potentially many more agencies. The avenue of attack: Adobe Cold Fusion."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

HELSINKI — Elementary school students in Finland could be adding coding and programming to their nightly homework routine in the near future.

Potentially following in the footsteps of neighboring country Estonia, Alexander Stubb — the Finnish Minister of European Affairs and Foreign Trade — told Mashable that teaching basic programming skills to young kids in the classroom is on the country's radar

“It would be a great idea to have coding as a voluntary or otherwise subject in school,” Stubb says. “Kids today are growing up as natives to technology, and the sooner they get going, the better. It starts with games and familiarizing themselves with gadgets, and coding is a big part of that." Read more...

More about Finland, Software, Startups, Education, and Programming

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In Taiwan, you can really go out with a bang, or at least with a marching band. There are many more such funeral march videos in this YouTube channel, which may be from the company that provide this service. -via Arbroath

All of a sudden, it's the 23rd Century. The UK's government innovation board has just approved funding to begin implementing an all-in-one train/bus/subway/airline pass in 2014. And yes, they actually named it MultiPass after the thing from the Bruce Willis movie.

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More bad news from the FDA. Turns out frying, baking or roasting certain foods causes the formation of acrylamide, a carcinogen found in cigarette smoke. Why does death always have to taste so good?

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How do you stop a 400-lb running back rushing at you? The answer is simple: you don't.

Meet Tony Picard, a White Swan High School senior from Yakima, Washington, who may just be the biggest running back in the history of football. Picard, who at 6'4" and 400-lb is even bigger than famous football player William "Refrigerator" Perry of the Chicago Bears, started out as a lineman, but he was faster than one expected.

White Swan coach Andrew Bush once saw Picard play basketball and realized that the teen was agile in spite of his size. Bush switched him to running back and gave him a simple instruction: don't fumble.

"It's so much fun to have him go out [on the field] as a captain and see him shaking hands before the game," said Bush to Jack McNeel of Indian Country, "They're just kind of staring, like 'Oh my gosh, you've got to be kidding me!'" Bush added that most teams will sacrifice five guys to stop Picard, which left the rest of the White Swan team open to make plays.

Read the rest over at Indian Country - via Bleacher Report

Photo: Tony Picard

Update 11/17/13 - The video clip:

Today, I went with my boyfriend to meet his parents. I had to excuse myself to use the bathroom, and I ended up taking a huge crap that wouldn't flush. I had to reach in and break it up with my hands just so it would flush. Only after I washed up did I notice a plunger sitting under the sink. FML

(306): these people use weed stems as birthday cake candles. I'm never coming home.

For various reasons 2012 was not a good year for Usenet indexing services. First, pressure on payment processors such as PayPal, Mastercard and Visa became evident when the infamous Newzbin2 site shut itself down due to financial difficulties. Shortly after another giant bit the dust.

NZBMatrix was a very popular site in the newsgroup community and for many was the go-to place for NZB files linking to the latest content. In December 2012 the site was forced to close due to increased pressure from Hollywood studios who were sending more takedown notices than the site could handle.

Over the past year several sites have popped up to try to bridge the gap but while of decent quality, most are inherently prone to the same sort of attacks. If a site’s servers can be located then there is always a risk of litigation (or the threat of it at least) later down the line.

However, this week TorrentFreak has been speaking with Tyrion, the administrator of a fairly new Newznab-based site, who hopes to avoid some of the external pitfalls of running a Usenet indexer.

As its name suggests NNPbeta is in beta and at the time of writing is close to backfilling 340 groups to a total of 6,077,496 releases. But unlike other indexers the site is being built on an unusually secure footing right from the start.

“When I look back on the last few years of file sharing, I see the various organizations such as RIAA, MPAA, FACT, and Prenda getting ever-more aggressive in their hunting down of file sharers and search indexers,” Tyrion explains.

“For the file sharers and users of the services, the environment is getting to be one of Guerilla Warfare. They have taken away our ability to use centralized services and instead made us use small-force tactics in order to get our content.”

NNPbeta has no conventional web presence and cannot be found using Google. The site itself can be accessed via http://nnpbetabzsneptym.onion, but this link only works for users of Tor. The site is situated in what has become known as the Deep Web.

Tyrion naturally won’t say where his servers are other than they could be anywhere in the world. All users need to know is that by jumping onto Tor they are able to find the site as easily as they could a regular webpage but with much better security.

“Tor, I believe, is part of our evolution. By using Tor as the base of operations, we have reduced the risk of our users being discovered as well as the risk of the site being discovered, therefore providing a more reliable, long-term solution for indexing,” Tyrion says.

“We don’t know who our users are (unless they chose to provide a valid email) and they don’t know who we are. We hold the user’s privacy above all else and feel that this is the only way to accomplish our goal of providing a service that is stable, reliable, and resistant to external pressure.”

In describing what Tor does for the site (which he acknowledges isn’t entirely bulletproof), Tyrion uses a nightclub security analogy.

“We like to think of Tor as that bouncer at the front of the club that only lets people into our club that we want to let in. Yes, he can be overpowered if someone sets their mind to getting into the club regardless of the design of the system but we have a really good bouncer and the bad guys need significant manpower in order to beat him down,” said.

Tyrion believes there is a balance to be considered. Given the right manpower and resources it would be possible to bring down the site, but at some point the mounting costs versus the potential gains stop making financial sense.

Another thing for NNPbeta to consider is DMCA notices, not served on the site itself, but on external Usenet providers. One of the things pointed out by NZBMatrix in its goodbye message is that anti-piracy groups are becoming so fast at taking down infringing content from Usenet itself, Usenet indexers are being rendered much less useful. Tyrion believes that can be mitigated by acting quickly.

“From the time something is released on Usenet, [NNPbeta] users will have (at absolute maximum) about 30 minutes until we are able to identify that release until we are done with backfill. Once we are done, users can depend on knowing about a release in two minutes which provides that much more opportunity to grab files before something happens to them,” Tyrion concludes.

NNPbeta also plans on not succumbing to the payment processing issues suffered by other sites such as Newzbin2. Tyrion insists there will be no ads or affiliate links on the site, ever. As expected, the site will accept donations into a Bitcoin account.

Whether NNPbeta will grow to become a site as successful as NZBMatrix remains to be seen but they have significant hurdles to overcome. Not being indexed by search engines and sitting quietly in the Deep Web may be good for security, but it’s also likely to prove a hindrance to people who are just passing by.

Nevertheless, the emergence of sites hidden by Tor and other cloaking systems such as those employed by The Pirate Bay are an interesting development in the file-sharing space and a trend only like to increase in the months and years to come.

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

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Bryan Cranston and Malcom in the Middle’s Jane Kaczmarek star in this leaked ‘alternate ending’ from the Breaking Bad: The Complete Series box set, which will be released on November 26.

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Speaking recently with IGN, Shuhei Yoshida, President of Sony Worldwide Studios, shared his thoughts on why he believes Nintendo needs to succeed for both the sake of Sony and traditional gaming. 

“When you look at the situation around Nintendo that way, do you characterize Nintendo as our competition? I think in the bigger scale of things happening in the industry or tech or people’s lives, how they play games on what device, and how they start to learn to play games, I think Nintendo and us are pretty much in the same group, and we need Nintendo to be very successful to help induct as many consumers who like to play games with controllers, right?” Yoshida said. 

It's interesting to consider that Sony and Nintendo are sort of unofficially working together to keep gamers playing games with controllers. As mobile games continue to grow, the accessibility parents have to sharing simple touch-based games from their phones with their children is becoming more prevalent.

For the first time, we face a potential new generation of gamers that  are growing up with systems that don't have any dedicated controllers and buttons. Yoshida plays Wii U with his daughters because of the "fun family friendly games." Does he consider Nintendo's consoles the perfect gateway into Sony's? Who knows for sure, but one thing for sure: it's hard to find a gamer that wasn't first raised on the house of Mario.

PS4: Sony on Wii U, Changing your PSN Name [IGN]