MDMA is widely used both on and off festival grounds. But the drug is quietly making a comeback as a therapeutic aid. Last week, the DEA approved a clinical trial that will use a combination of the psychedelic drug and psychotherapy to treat anxiety ...
Scientists had a pigeon, hawk, and owl fly over super-sensitive microphones to measure how much sound was created by their flapping. Owls are known for their silent flying abilities and this is demonstrated by the barn owl in the GIF above. Watch the video
What could've been just another blood-soaked tale of DayZ douchebaggery turned into something, well, kinda beautiful.
In this DayZ video from Michael Gramlin, a player is taken hostage with all the traditional fixings—bag over his head, tied up, surrounded, and marinated in a baste of his own sweat and urine—with zero hope of escape. But then his captors make a request:
"If you want to survive, we just need you to sing us a song. Any song. If you don't comply, we'll execute you."
Then a brief moment of silence from the player, possible uncertainty. His captors tell him it can't be anything easy. No happy birthdays or what have you.
"No, no, no, I've got one," he replies. More skepticism from his captors. "Nah, just... just stay put," he adds, so calm you'd think he just woke up from the world's greatest nap.
That's when he picks up an actual guitar—in real life—and starts strumming. He proceeds to play and sing an absolutely gorgeous, not to mention fitting, rendition of "Hang Me, Oh Hang Me" by Dave Van Ronk. Everyone else stops aiming their guns at him, puts their hands up, and slowly sways back and forth in time with the music.
The whole moment is... wonderful. It's so fucking cool.
As players struggle to believe it even happened, they promise the guy they're definitely not gonna execute him after all of that. And that's it. He's free to go. DayZ may bring out the worst in people sometimes, but when it delivers, goddamn does it ever deliver.
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Beginning March 23, a collection of movie props sculpted by the FXSMITH Studio hits the auction block, including the cybernetic dolphin from Johnny Mnemonic! And the suggested prices are eminently reasonable!
Mother wants fresh meat. Nay, she craves fresh meat. Will you feed her?
Mother is an ad agency in New York. "Fresh meat" is its in-house term for "interns." To encourage meat units to apply to its internship program, Mother produced this video expressing how much the agency hungers for interns. Do you qualify? The dark hooded narrator describes the qualifications:
It doesn't matter where you've been before. We want you raw because we're hungry Even if you've been on the floor. [...]
No want no day old meat. No want no stinky feet. No want to take no heat. Just give us our fresh meat.
The gentle tale of Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends Piglet, Eeyore, and Tigger gets mashed up with Ridley Scott’s Alien in a new tale by Giant Hamburger. Pooh’s reaction to a face hugger latching onto his snout: “Oh, Bother.” Things progress from there in the manner you would imagine, with frequent stops for smaller stories wedged into intermissions. There’s even a cameo appearance by the Predator. Start here to read it all, and choose the largest size you can to see all the gory details. -via b3ta
Graham Fink is an artist with an incredible ability to concentrate. He must be: he manages to draw images like these by subtly shifting his gaze around a screen, recording those movements using eye-tracking software.
More than two years ago movie studio Voltage Pictures took its legal crusade against pirating BitTorrent users to Canada.
After targeting tens of thousands of people in the US, the company hoped to expose 2,000 Internet subscribers of Canadian ISP TekSavvy. The studio behind “The Hurt Locker” argued that they have a solid case under the Copyright Act.
The efforts led to objections from the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) who demanded safeguards so Voltage wouldn’t demand hefty fines from subscribers without oversight. The court agreed on this, but allowed the customers to be exposed.
The only matter that remained were the costs associated with identifying the alleged pirates. According to Voltage these would only be a few hundred Canadian dollars, but Teksavvy claimed more that $350,000.
This week the Federal Court ruled on the matter (pdf), settling the costs at $21,557. This includes $17,057 in technical administrative costs and $4,500 in legal fees associated with the IP-address lookups.
The total sum translates to roughly $11 per IP-address, which is a tiny fraction of the thousands of dollars in settlements Voltage usually requests.
The Court decided not to award any assessment costs, noting that both parties are intent on disparaging each other’s business practices. Taking claims from both sides into account it concluded that neither party should be rewarded for its conduct.
“TekSavvy, without justification, has greatly exaggerated its claim, while Voltage has unreasonably sought to trivialize it based on unreliable and largely irrelevant evidence,” Judge Aronovitch writes.
In the future it would be wise to agree on a fixed rate for linking IP-addresses to the personal details of subscribers before taking the matter to court, the Judge further notes.
“The best practice, in my view, would be for the rights holder to ascertain, in advance, with clarity and precision, the method of correlation used by the ISP, as well as the time and costs attendant on the execution of the work based, to begin, on a hypothetical number of IP addresses.”
The verdict opens the door for more of these cases in Canada. The question is, however, whether the costs and the restrictions still make it worthwhile.
University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist, who followed the case closely, believes this troll-type activity may not be as financially viable as Voltage has hoped.
“With the cap on liability for non-commercial infringement, the further costs of litigating against individuals, the actual value of the works, and the need to obtain court approval on demand letters, it is hard to see how this is a business model that works,” Geist notes.
Voltage, however, appears to be determined to continue its actions against the subscribers. The studio’s lawyer is happy with the verdict and says the decision “confirms the court’s commitment to facilitate anti-piracy and allow companies like Voltage to pursue pirates.”
How long a vacation can you take before you start falling "out of shape"? The answer can vary, depending on how fit you were to start with and whether we're talking strength or endurance.
An enormous crocodile ancestor with blade-like teeth walked on two legs and was at the very top of North America's food chain 231 million years ago, according to a new study.
Named "Carolina Butcher" (Carnufex carolinensis), the newly discovered toothy beast reveals that predecessors of today's crocodiles — crocodylomorphs — were top predators in North America prior to the reign of dinosaurs.
Carolina Butcher, described in the latest issue of the journal Scientific Reports, lived up to its horror movie-style name.
"Carnufex lived in what is now North Carolina around the time the supercontinent Pangea was breaking apart," lead author Lindsay Zanno told Discovery News. "The skull of Carnufex is slender and long-snouted with dozens of blade-like teeth. For all practical purposes, this was an animal skillfully adapted for slicing flesh from the bones of its victims." Read more...
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MDMA is widely used both on and off festival grounds. But the drug is quietly making a comeback as a therapeutic aid. Last week, the DEA approved a clinical trial that will use a combination of the psychedelic drug and psychotherapy to treat anxiety ...
More than two years ago movie studio Voltage Pictures took its legal crusade against pirating BitTorrent users to Canada.
