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27 Apr 12:37

Nvidia GeForce Experience rewards for Genshin Impact are the stingiest yet

As a bit of a Genshin Impact fan I'm always stoked to hear about any in-game freebies that are on offer. While some of Genshin Impact's resources are notoriously difficult to attain at higher levels, there are a lot of little web events to help provide them here and there. Things like the daily check in page can really help to put a few more Mora and Primos in your pocket when you need them.

Right now, Nvidia and Genshin Impact have joined forces to offer rewards to those using the Nvidia's GeForce Experience app. Any PC gamers with a somewhat recent Nvidia branded card probably are, or can at least download it and get started for free. Not that I'd necessarily recommend doing it for what's on offer.

The amazing bounty in this complimentary GeForce bundle includes 20,000 Mora, four Mystic Enchantment Ores, and two Hero's Wit. If you don't play Genshin Impact it's impossible to know what this all means, but it truly is a pittance, and there are dozens of ways to earn these particular resources in-game with relatively little effort. 

Still, free is free, so I loaded up the GeForce Experience on my PC to try to redeem the rewards. According to the information page on the Nvidia website, you not only need an Nvidia account and GeForce, but also have to opt into their rewards. I couldn't find an option that only lets you opt in for rewards, and instead had to tick one that would also send me notifications about game recommendations, which is less than ideal.

NEW GEFORCE REWARD AVAILABLE NOW!🟢 Sign into GeForce Experience🟢 Access complimentary @GenshinImpact GeForce BundleAvailable on a first come first served basis so make sure your NVIDIA account is primed to receive RewardsLean more👉 https://t.co/K0fo1yT0iV pic.twitter.com/Yzalw14J8oApril 26, 2022

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Swapping back to my Nvidia GeForce app and I don't have any rewards yet. Nvidia's site explains there should be a notification I can click on in app but that hasn't popped up, and I've rechecked my settings a few times now. In between logins, very slow loading pages on Nvidia's side, and a few other issues it's taken me about half an hour to attempt to redeem these rewards that I still haven't gotten. I could probably earn them in about three minutes in-game. 

It's wild that a partnership between two huge companies essentially seems to be acting as a promotion of Nvidia's software and mailing lists while offering so little. Especially given how tricky it seems to even activate. Nvidia even states the number of bundles on offer is finite and may run out. Unless you're really dying for that Mora, this one doesn't even seem worth trying for.

Hopefully something a little better will be available by the time the next banner runs around. For those who are pulling for the current new Cryo DPS Ayaka, as always I wish you luck, but I don't think this particular set of rewards will help much. If help is what you're after, we do have a list of her best builds to really kit you out.

25 Nov 10:05

Company claims breakthrough in concentrating the Sun’s rays

by John Timmer
Image of a solar thermal tower and its associated mirrors.

Enlarge / Heliogen's demonstration facility. (credit: Heliogen)

The explosion of solar energy capacity has been driven almost entirely by the plunging cost of photovoltaic hardware. That has made the situation difficult for an alternate technology known as solar thermal. Thermal uses mirrors to focus incoming sunlight onto a location that reaches high temperatures, which can then be used to generate electricity by driving a steam turbine. Since heat is relatively easy to store, these plants can continue to produce power long after the Sun has set. In some cases, these plants are able to operate around the clock.

Today, a company backed by tech investors is announcing that it has developed an enhanced form of solar thermal generation that can push the temperatures at the point of focus much higher. That's significant, because the promised temperatures reach heat needed for industrial processes like concrete production, metallurgy, and hydrogen production. While there are clear advantages when it comes to generating electricity, the key to this technology may be how readily it can be integrated into these industrial processes.

A hot startup

The company in question is a startup called Heliogen, which has received backing from several Silicon Valley investors and Bill Gates. But the technology Heliogen has developed does have a rather heavy tech component.

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03 Sep 16:39

Hurricane Dorian is going to come very, very close to Florida

by Eric Berger
Official forecast track for Hurricane Dorian as of 8am ET.

Enlarge / Official forecast track for Hurricane Dorian as of 8am ET. (credit: National Hurricane Center)

During the overnight hours, Hurricane Dorian has pounded the northern Bahamas with devastating winds, storm surge levels of 20 feet above normal, and very heavy rainfall. Dorian has tied the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 with the highest landfalling wind speeds in the Atlantic basin, hitting Great Abaco Island with 185-mph winds.

The storm has weakened slightly this morning, as its eye has expanded, and its organization lessened a little bit. As of 8am ET, the National Hurricane Center estimated winds at165 mph.

Another significant problem is that high pressure to the north of Dorian has weakened during the last 24 hours, causing the storm's steering currents to collapse. This has led Dorian to essentially halt over Grand Bahama Island on Monday morning, prolonging the Category 5 hurricane misery over the northern Bahamas. The tweet from the National Hurricane Center's Eric Blake demonstrates this painful stall over the Bahamas.

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22 Mar 17:28

Building megasocieties didn’t require divine intervention, study says

by Kiona N. Smith
Studying a societal chicken and egg situation?

Studying a societal chicken and egg situation?

A new study in Nature claims that big, complex societies arose before people started believing in major gods or powers that enforced social rules. That's a new twist in the debate over whether such "moralizing" religions were a prerequisite for social expansion.

A common theme in most of the world's major religions today is that some supernatural power will enforce a set of rules that do two things: proscribe how people worship and dictate how they relate to each other. This can be enforced via an omnipotent god or a mechanism like karma.

People have believed in, and worshipped, supernatural powers for a very long time, but the gods they worshipped haven't always done both these things. Many early ones didn’t always care whether humans played nicely with each other as long as the gods got their prescribed due. If any supernatural entity enforced human social norms, it was often a minor god or spirit, not one of the big cosmological players.

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04 Mar 12:19

Tesla will unveil the Model Y next week

by Timothy B. Lee
Elon Musk speaks in front of a giant Tesla logo.

Enlarge / Tesla CEO Elon Musk. (credit: Yuriko Nakao/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The Model Y, Tesla's more affordable SUV based on the Model 3 platform, will be unveiled at a March 14 event in Los Angeles, Elon Musk announced on Twitter on Sunday.

After introducing the Model S in 2012, Tesla reworked the vehicle into an SUV form factor and sold it as the Model X starting in 2015. Tesla is taking the same basic approach with the Model Y: it will look a lot like a Model 3, but will have a larger body and roomier interior.

"Model Y, being an SUV, is about 10% bigger than Model 3, so will cost about 10% more & have slightly less range for same battery," Musk tweeted.

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04 Feb 13:05

01/01/2019

(Toady One) Here's the first Bay 12 Report of 2019! Here's the Future of the Fortress: Part 1 , Part 2 .
20 Oct 14:36

Blog: VR music tips for the game composer

Strategies for implementing music in VR projects were offered during the Virtual Reality Developers Conference this year, so let's look at some of the best tips. ...

30 Sep 15:44

To better grok how all 37 trillion human cells work, we need new tools

by Cyrus Farivar

At Ars Technica Live, Aaron Streets discussed the ways he's using microfluidics to advance cellular biology. (video link)

In recent decades, one of the largest-scale government-funded science research projects was the Human Genome Project, an effort to map the entire genetic blueprint of our species.

Since 2016, a new version of that herculean effort is underway, known as the Human Cell Atlas.

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26 Apr 12:53

Feds: someone gave us the passcode in NY drug case, so we don’t need Apple

by Cyrus Farivar

(credit: Beryl_snw)

In a short letter filed Friday evening, US federal prosecutors wrote to a Brooklyn judge to say that they no longer needed Apple’s help in accessing the data on a seized iPhone 5S running iOS 7 associated with a drug case.

In the letter, United States Attorney Robert Capers wrote:

The government respectfully submits this letter to update the Court and the parties. Yesterday evening, an individual provided the passcode to the iPhone at issue in this case. Late last night, the government used that passcode by hand and gained access to the iPhone. Accordingly, the government no longer needs Apple’s assistance to unlock the iPhone, and withdraws its application.

This case pre-dates the debacle that played out earlier this year in San Bernardino, but relied on many of the same legal arguments. Here, in October 2015, the government asked the court to grant it an order that would have forced Apple to assist the unlocking of a phone belonging to Jun Feng, a man who eventually pleaded guilty to drug charges. Unlike the case in California however, Apple does have the ability to extract data on pre-iOS 8 devices with minimal difficulty. Feng has claimed that he forgot the passcode to this particular iPhone. According to the Wall Street Journal, it was Feng himself who recently supplied the passcode to investigators.

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28 Dec 15:24

Pouring a Thermos of Hot Tea at -40°C Near the Arctic Circle

by Christopher Jobson

ice-1

Ontario-based photographer Michael Davies timed this impressive shot of his friend Markus hurling a thermos of hot tea through the air yesterday in -40°C weather. At such frigid temperatures water freezes instantly to form a dramatic plume of ice. For the last decade Davies has worked as a photographer in the fly-in community of Pangnirtung in Canada’s High Arctic, only 20km south of the Arctic Circle, a place that sees about two hours of sunlight each day during the winter. He shares via email that almost nothing was left to chance in creating the photo, as so many things had to be perfectly timed:

Around 1pm I jumped on my skidoo along with my friend Markus and we drove 45 minutes to the top of a nearby mountain where the light (which is almost always pink near the solstice) would hit the hills. Prepared with multiple thermoses filled with tea, we began tossing the water and shooting. Nothing of this shot was to chance, I followed the temperature, watched for calm wind, and planned the shot and set it up. Even the sun in the middle of the spray was something I was hoping for, even though it’s impossible to control.

You can see more of Davies’ most recent photography over on Flickr.

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28 May 12:30

Google's experimental 3D-scanning tablet goes on public sale for $512

by Mat Smith
If you're fascinated (or baffled) by Google's spatially aware, three-dimensionally scanning Project Tango tablet, you can now buy and try one yourself. The in-development tablet is now (still?) $512, invite-free at the Google Store. While the device ...
09 Apr 12:37

IBM Tests Mobile Computing Pioneer’s Controversial Brain Algorithms

IBM is testing a contentious idea for making computers more intelligent by trying to copy mechanisms from the human brain.

For more than a decade Jeff Hawkins, founder of mobile computing company Palm, has dedicated his time and fortune to a theory meant to explain the workings of the human brain, and provide a blueprint for a powerful new kind of artificial intelligence software. But Hawkins’s company, Numenta, has made little impact on the tech industry, even as machine learning has become central to companies such as Google.