Maxim Bange

Zestig studenten van verschillende toonaangevende Europese universiteiten onderzochten begin deze maand de mogelijkheid een van ESA's technologieën buiten de ruimtevaart toe te passen.

Thanks to strict termination customs in Japan, some workers have avoided firing by staying in job purgatory at their companies — banished to "chasing-out rooms" to surf the web and read the newspaper.

The New York Times' Hiroko Tabuchi reported last month on the trend in Japan, where lifetime positions are the expectation. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Japanese firms hope to reverse the social taboo against massive layoffs in order to revitalize the economy.

But many employees are resistant. From the Times:

Sony, Mr. Tani’s employer of 32 years, consigned him to this room because they can’t get rid of him. Sony had eliminated his position at the Sony Sendai Technology Center, which in better times produced magnetic tapes for videos and cassettes. But Mr. Tani, 51, refused to take an early retirement offer from Sony in late 2010 — his prerogative under Japanese labor law.

So there he sits in what is called the “chasing-out room.” He spends his days there, with about 40 other holdouts.

“I won’t leave,” Mr. Tani said. “Companies aren’t supposed to act this way. It’s inhumane.”

That's somewhat of a contrast from the United States, where firings are so intrinsic to American culture that the art of termination was made into a George Clooney movie.

Read the full report at the New York Times>

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An award-winning professor at Michigan State University will no longer be teaching this semester after a video of his anti-Republican remarks appeared on conservative blogs, the university announced. 

The video of Professor William Penn's comments from the first day of his creative writing class was originally posted by Campus Reform — a conservative blog that seeks to expose liberal bias in higher education. During the class, Penn says that Republicans are a group of "old dead white people" who have "raped" the country.

Among his comments posted on the video, Penn said:

If you go to the Republican convention in Florida, you see all of the old Republicans with the dead skin cells washing off them. They are cheap. They don't want to pay taxes because they have already raped this country and gotten everything out of it they possibly could ...

This country still is full of closet racists What do you think is going on in South Carolina and North Carolina. Voter suppression. Its about getting black people not to vote. Why? Because black people tend to vote Democratic.

Why would would Republicans want to do it? Because Republicans are not a majority in this country anymore. They are a bunch of dead white people. Or dying white people.

The video gained widespread attention after being posted on several conservative websites, and today MSU said that Penn's classes have been reassigned to other professors.

An MSU spokesperson told the Detroit Free Press, "The dean of the College of Arts and Letters and a representative from the provost’s office met with Penn, who acknowledged that some of his comments were inappropriate, disrespectful and offensive and may have negatively affected the learning environment ... Penn’s teaching duties have been reassigned to others. Students’ education will continue as scheduled with alternate instructors."

Check out the full video below:

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Redmond firm has Lumia, but not Nokia

This is Sonny Dickson:

Dickson is from Melbourne, Australia. 

He says he's "old enough to drink."

According to Fortune's Philip Elmer-Dewitt, Dickson spent his summer driving the people who run Apple absolutely nuts.

Dickson keeps posting pictures of iPhone parts on his blog, SonnyDickson.com. Plastic shells. Glass screens. Metal cases.

The problem for Apple is that these are parts for iPhones that aren't for sale yet. The photos are "leaks."

Here, for example, is a photo of a gold iPhone 5S that Dickson posted to his blog Friday night:

Dickson says he buys them from people who "work for Apple in China."

Dickson says Australian National Security visited his site 67 times this summer and that Apple employees visited his site 900 times in August, but that he isn't worried. 

He told Elmer-Dewitt, "Some people think I may be breaking the law, but they don't really know what I do. I'm not breaking any laws that other people don't do."

Dickson says he makes enough money from his site that he could "go over to Louis Vuitton today and buy one of their bags with the money I made this month."

Back in 2010, 21-year-old Brian Hogan was in a bar in Northern California when he found a funky looking phone. It was an iPhone 4 prototype. Hogan sold the phone to gadget blog Gizmodo for $5,000.

But Hogan didn't ever get to spend the $5,000 on Louis Vuitton. He had to pay "much more" for lawyers. 

After Gizmodo published photos of the iPhone 4 prototype, Apple launched a very aggressive investigation. Subpoenas were served to Gizmodo and Hogan was quickly outed. He eventually paid a small fine and served a year of probation. 

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ABC News has published an amazing video of what happened when a light aircraft lost power over Queensland with a 22-year-old flight instructor and his 18-year-old student on board.

Josh Matica was at the controls on his first training flight when the Jabiru J-170 light plane lost power. The J-170 is a kit plane that seats two.

Instructor Doug Field took over when the engine started to fail.

“We’re at 1,100 feet, we’ve got about a bit under two minutes before we’re going to hit the ground at this point in time,” he told ABC News.

The duo calmly looked for a safe place to land. They were flying near Victoria Point, south-east of Brisbane, at the time.

Field told ABC News that “there weren’t too many good options there”.

The plane made a bumpy landing and ended up in a barb wire fence.

The duo were praised by flight school Pathfinder Aviation, which owned the aircraft, for a “textbook execution of the forced landing procedure”.

The video is below, and there’s more on ABC News.

SEE ALSO: Incredibly Lucky Driver Escapes Death As Massive Boulder Rolls Off Mountain Right Next To His Car

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Social media clearly dominates as an inbound marketing channel.

Inbound marketing earns the attention of customers with content, as opposed to outbound marketing like TV ads, where businesses have to buy attention. 

Twenty-one percent of marketers said that social media had become more important to their company's inbound efforts over the last six months, according to a recent HubSpot survey. That's down a bit from previous years, but still marks social media as the most important inbound marketing tool. 

Search engine optimization came in second with 16% of marketers who said it had become more important.

Owned media, such as a brand's Facebook page, has become the main engine for earned media, which is when the customer becomes your promoter and spontaneously shares your content and messages with their own friends. Everyone wants earned media and social media has emerged as one of the more effective platforms to generate and sustain it. 

The findings come from HubSpot's 2013 State Of Inbound Marketing Report, which surveyed 3,300 executives, business owners, and marketers worldwide. 

Download the chart and data in Excel.

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Speaking to analysts and investors on a call to discuss the proposed acquisition of Nokia's Devices & Services division, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer shared his opinion on Windows Phone naming conventions. "I will just say that I think we can probably do better," said Ballmer, noting that "an efficiency of being one company" is Microsoft will be able to avoid names such as "the Nokia Lumia Windows Phone 1020."

Under Ballmer and his predecessor, Microsoft has announced a slew of lengthily named mobile operating systems. What became "Windows Phone 7" was originally "Windows Phone 7 Series," itself a reboot of the tired Windows Mobile platform, which was originally named Pocket PC 2002 Phone Edition. With an entire phone company's expertise...

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De Apple iPhone 5C, in het geruchtencircuit al langer bekend als de 'budget iPhone' wordt ook in Nederland uitgebracht. Nieuwe uitgelekte foto's tonen stomtoevallig een Nederlandstalige handleiding.

I reached the breaking point, as many parents do, about two and a half months in. My newborn son, Oliver, was hitting a phase where his five senses were really coming online. The mere act of being awake was often overstimulating; sometimes he would start to cry when we turned on a bright light or closed a door too loudly.

It was late afternoon and he was sitting in my lap wailing. I rocked him, fed him, and changed his diaper, but nothing helped. In desperation I did something that until that point I had resisted: I grabbed my iPhone and opened up the Comics app. As soon as I started flipping through panels of the Wolverine saga, the crying stopped. His little mouth gaped open in wonder. I took his hand and swiped it across the...

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Microsoft has spent a good amount of energy detailing the controller for its upcoming console, and now we've learned yet another detail — the Xbox One will support up to eight wireless controllers simultaneously. That's double what the Xbox 360 supports, and the One's wireless controllers will also feature a 30 foot range. Of course, it's unlikely that many developers will utilize so many controllers for local multiplayer, but it could potentially be a great way to play Madden or FIFA with a large number of friends. More importantly, it also means that the Xbox One could be home to the next-gen Bomberman game of our dreams.

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A bug in CoreText, Apple's text rendering engine, causes apps to crash when displaying a certain combination of Arabic characters, reports TechCrunch.

Not too long after it was discovered, the string of characters floated around the Internet and ultimately landed Twitter, and just to read these letters in your timeline was enough to crash your Twitter app. A Russian tech site claims that Apple knew about this defect for six months without doing anything about it.

These magic Arabic letters (we're not going to publish them here for obvious reasons) that make your technology go bye-bye carry out their deed simply by appearing on your screen. Anywhere that CoreText is generating user-generated characters – Twitter timeline, Facebook updates, even a list of available wireless networks – is a potential place to set a trap.

The bug affects both your iOS 6 devices and your OS X 10.8 setup (10.9 is unaffected). Facebook has already blocked these characters from being posted on its site.

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The Thinkpad T440s, T440 and X240 arrive with thinner and lighter designs

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NASA has big plans for its future space travel, but one of the agency's earliest luminaries thinks it's on exactly the wrong track. The Houston Chronicle has interviewed Chris Kraft, NASA's first flight director and the man who oversaw its first human spaceflight, first human orbital flight, and first spacewalk, as well as the director of flight operations for the Apollo program. Now, his outlook for the agency is far from sunny. While NASA is working on plans for a manned Mars mission and an asteroid-capturing venture, Kraft thinks it should be focused on the one place it's said it's not sending humans back to: the moon.

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Net Market Share

In July, Windows 8 passed Windows Vista in market share. In August, it passed every single version of Apple's OS X, combined. Internet Explorer 10 grew sharply, too, with almost one in five Internet users now on the latest version of Microsoft's browser.

Net Market Share

Windows 8 made substantial gains in August, picking up 2.01 points of share. This is 37 percent growth on July's figure. Windows XP also fell substantially, losing 3.53 points. With luck, this might mean that Windows XP is finally on the way out. It has less than a year until it stops receiving free security patches from Microsoft; once this happens, it will essentially be in a state of permanent zero day exploits. Even this level of decline isn't enough to see the operating system eradicated in time for its end of life. That's good news for spammers, who'll have plenty of zombie machines to recruit into botnets, but bad news for everyone else.

Net Market Share

Net Market Share

Among desktop browsers, Internet Explorer was up 0.99 points, Firefox was up 0.59 points, and Safari was up 0.17 points. Chrome, however, was down significantly, losing 1.76 points. This means that yet again Chrome has closed in on Firefox, almost passing it, only to fall back.

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Macs don't get viruses.

The more megapixels your camera has, the better it is.

Shelling out more money for expensive cables is worth it.

These (and more!) are some of the most common myths revolving around the technology we use every day. From battery draining to deleting files off your computer, we've explained and debunked some of these popular beliefs.

You should let your phone's battery drain before recharging.

A common myth surrounding phone and laptop batteries is that it's always best for the life of the battery to let it drain fully before charging it again. 

This is true in some cases. When a device uses a Nickel-Cadmium battery, for example, you'd want to let your phone fully drain before charging it again. Why? Nickel-Cadmium batteries, unlike Lithium-Ion batteries, suffer from what's known as "memory effect." When they are charged and discharged hundreds of times, they start to lose the ability to charge up to 100%, draining your battery life significantly over time.

There was a time when most electronics ran on Nickel-Cadmium batteries. Cordless telephones and answering machines all ran on Nickel-Cadmium. In 2006, most NiCd batteries were replaced with technology that used Lithium-ion batteries. These can be found in all Apple devices and do not suffer from "memory effect" the way NiCd batteries do.

"Lithium-ion polymer batteries have a high power density," Apple says on its website, "and you can recharge a lithium-ion polymer battery whenever convenient, without requiring a full charge or discharge cycle."

Apple does advise, however, that you should let the device go through at least one charge cycle each month to help keep the electrons moving (as opposed to a NiCd battery which needs to go through a full charge cycle every few days). Letting the device drain from 100% to fully shutting off at 0% helps to maintain the life of the battery.

Jailbreaking is illegal.

It's important to note that "jailbreaking" and "unlocking" a device mean different things. Unlocking a device means you've freed your device to work on any carrier, not just the one you bought it from, while jailbreaking refers to bypassing Apple's security to install modifications that are not allowed in the App store.

The U.S. Library of Congress deemed it illegal to unlock any phone purchased after January 26, 2013 using a third-party vendor, but jailbreaking your iPhone is still legal until at least 2015 under an exemption in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Note that jailbreaking your iPad is illegal. Some catch, right?

More bars means more service.

Bars on your smartphone actually indicate your signal strength to the cell phone tower closest to you. Your service depends on how many devices those towers are serving at a given time.

Metropolitan areas are equipped to handle the dense population of people trying to use their phones in one confined space. In unexpected situations (say, a music festival where there are a lot of people in a small area), your phone can be showing lots of bars, but service will be impossible to find; everyone's trying to tap into that one cell tower.

PS4 to support just four

Albeit one year late

Will also further a music career

Social Media Insights is a daily newsletter from Business Insider Intelligence that collects and delivers the top social media news first thing every morning. You can sign up to receive Social Media Insights here or at the bottom of this post.

Sharing Content On LinkedIn Makes A User 10x More Likely To Be Contacted (LinkedIn Blog)
According to a LinkedIn blog post, users who share content on the professional social network at least once a week are nearly 10 times more likely to be contacted for new opportunities than people who don't share. 

It's further evidence that LinkedIn is most effective as a career management platform if the user is fully engaged. Users who simply post a static resume and don't make an effort to interact with others in their network will not receive as many opportunities. Read >

Twitter's 'Secret Weapon' On The Monetization Front (AdAge) 
Kevin Weil, a former Ph.D. candidate at Stanford in theoretical particle physics, is turning out to be Twitter's "secret weapon" on the monetization front. Weil, who was hired by Twitter as a data scientist, is now a key executive in charge of building revenue-generating products such as promoted tweets. Read >

Facebook Tests 'Trending' Section On Desktop News Feed (TechCrunch)
A small percentage of Facebook users will notice a new "Trending" section on their News Feed if they are using a desktop computer. The new feature appears fairly standard -- a box with a list of linked topics. Read >

Hashtags On Facebook Do Nothing To Increase Exposure (EdgeRank Checker) 
The early consensus from EdgeRank Checker is that Facebook's new hashtag system does nothing to increase engagement or reach. Read >

Managers Don't Want To Be Facebook Friends With Their Employees (AllFacebook) 
Only 14% of managers are either very comfortable or extremely comfortable being Facebook friends with their Gen Y employees, while 24% of employees expressed that sentiment. Those figures are 24% and 32%, respectively, for LinkedIn. Read >

Heineken Is Getting Creative With Instagram Marketing (Business Insider) 
Heineken is sponsoring a scavenger hunt on Instagram that will eventually lead winners to free tickets to the U.S. Open Men's Final. Read >

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Een politierechter in Maastricht vindt het gedoogbeleid over softdrugs zo onbegrijpelijk dat hij geen uitspraak heeft willen doen in een strafzaak tegen zes coffeeshops. Hij heeft het OM niet-ontvankelijk verklaard.

De eigenaren van de coffeeshops en acht personeelsleden stonden terecht voor de verkoop van softdrugs aan buitenlanders. In een eerdere zaak tegen dezelfde shops had dezelfde rechtbank hen wel veroordeeld.

Voor coffeeshops geldt in heel Nederland sinds begin dit jaar het I-criterium: wiet en hasj mogen alleen verkocht worden aan Nederlandse inwoners. Het is ingesteld om overlast van drugstoeristen tegen te gaan.

Onvoldoende onderzocht

De rechter wijst erop dat deskundigen het niet eens zijn over het I-criterium. Wellicht zijn er ook minder vergaande maatregelen mogelijk om overlast van drugstoeristen tegen te gaan. Bovendien is het maar de vraag of het verbod op verkoop aan buitenlanders de overlast wel terugdringt. Volgens de rechter is dat nog onvoldoende onderzocht.

De zaak van vandaag was door de gemeente, het OM en de shophouders bedoeld als proefproces, om juridische helderheid te krijgen. Maar volgens de rechter wordt in dit proces alleen het gemeentelijk belang gediend, omdat de ondernemers nog bereid zijn met de gemeente te overleggen over de drugsverkoop.

Justitie is niet-ontvankelijk verklaard omdat het strafrecht volgens de rechter niet is bedoeld voor het dienen van het gemeentelijk belang.

Het OM gaat tegen het besluit in hoger beroep. Het is verrast dat dezelfde rechtbank eerder wel een vonnis velde in een soortgelijke zaak. Ook voor de verdachten bestaat nu onduidelijkheid, zegt het OM.

Maersk Line, which is the world's largest cargo shipper, has an awesome Instagram account that should appeal to anyone who's interested in world trade, or even just gigantic ships.

We picked out some of our favorites. (via @pcdunham and Reuters)

"The Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller in Rotterdam on it's maiden voyage."

"Eleonora Maersk. Nighttime in the Port of Aarhus, Denmark."

"Early containership Axel Mærsk as seen in 1976."

"The famous stairwell as seen from below"

"The giant four-bladed propeller for the first Triple-E being loaded onto the Maersk Salalah in Hamburg."

"Edith Maersk in a puddle. From the Port of Rotterdam."

"Edith Maersk and the Solitude of the Sea."

"The windsurfer feat. Louis Maersk (1984)."

"Frozen over in Saint Petersburg."

"Cargo hold 4 & 3 on one of our new Triple-E vessels. From the DSME shipyard in Okpo, South Korea."

"The wall of Maersk."

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SHANGHAI - Het Chinese jongetje He Yide is misschien wel de jongste piloot ter wereld. Pas net vijf jaar oud zou hij al zelfstandig een ultralightvliegtuig kunnen besturen, zo melden Chinese media. Het ventje wordt daarbij flink gepusht door zijn vader. Doel: een vermelding in het Guinness Book of Records.

On January 20, a year after Megaupload was raided in 2012, Kim Dotcom launched his new file-storage service Mega.

In a matter of days the site’s membership went from zero to more than a million and in the weeks that followed the site continued to expand its user base.

The introduction of Mega has been one of the most prominent tech launches this year and the privacy company has big plans to expand its business in the future. But despite the early successes, Kim Dotcom has chosen to move on.

Filings to the New Zealand Companies Office reveal that Dotcom was replaced as Mega Director last week. The move was confirmed to BusinessDesk by Mega CEO Vikram Kumar, who said that Mega’s founder will use the time to work on his many other projects.

One of the new ventures Dotcom will focus on is the music platform formerly known as Megabox. Unlike Mega, the new music service will be operated by a company owned by the Internet entrepreneur himself.

Dotcom previously told TorrentFreak that he dropped the Megabox name for a better one, to be revealed at a later date. Dotcom did say that unlike his other projects, he will not be using the “Mega” brand for the new music service.

There are currently 22 developers working on the project and it’s expected to launch a few months from now.

In addition to the music service, Dotcom also has political aspirations. A few days ago he told TorrentFreak that he has written a draft program for a new party that he wants to participate in New Zealand’s elections next year.

“I’m excited about the party and I’m confident that I can help make New Zealand a significant Internet economy player. Someone needs to lead New Zealand into the future. Unfortunately the current government doesn’t know what the future looks like,” Dotcom said.

Aside from the music venture and his political aspirations, Dotcom will also be focusing on Megaupload’s legal battles. He and several of his Megaupload colleagues are fighting an extradition request from the United States, where they are wanted for several alleged crimes.

Dotcom’s extradition hearing is currently scheduled for November this year, but may be pushed to April 2014 because legal arguments on a number of issues have complicated the case. In the United States, Megaupload has asked the court to dismiss the criminal indictment against the company, but a decision on this request is yet to arrive.

Source: Kim Dotcom Resigns as Mega Director to Focus on Music Venture

Yesterday, Paramount revealed the name of the next "Transformers" film along with a teaser poster on Yahoo! Movies.

The name of Michael Bay's next robot film is "Transformers: Age of Extinction."  

Check out the poster:

Yahoo! Movies hinted that the film has something to do with Dinobots — transformers that, yes, turn into Dinosaurs.  

Empire Magazine is since reporting that the Dinobots are confirmed, citing a translated quote from producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura. 

"I can not disclose the specifics, but you can be sure that the arrival of the Dinobots will give the audience a lot to be excited about," di Bonaventura told the Beijing News. "The world's coolest, most exciting cars will appear in the film, including Chinese vehicles, so whether you are a car enthusiast or not, it will be a feast for the eyes."

Prior to this quote, film blogs were stirring about a leaked call sheet for the film which announced Dinobots in the film. 

Paramount asked the call sheet to be taken down across numerous sites.  

If you're interested, the specific characters that turn into dinosaurs are as follows: 

Grimlock: A Tyrannosaurus Rex

Slag: a Triceratops

Sludge: an Apatosaurus 

Snarl: a Stegosaurus

Swoop: a Pteranodon 

Bay has previously said on his website that the film will take place four years after 2001's "Dark of the Moon and that this will be the start to a new trilogy.

"The story makes a very natural transition, and reason as to why we have a whole new cast," writes Bay. "This Transformers will feel very different than the last three." 

For those that are familiar with Transformers lore, the film's name "Age of Extinction" also hints toward a much bigger storyline in which the Transformers are in danger. 

In addition to the Dinobots, the ultimate nemesis of both the Autobots and Decepticons is a Transformer by the name of Unicron. 

Who is Unicron?

He's only the most massive transformer from the '80s. Seriously, he transforms into a planet. 

Check this out and see how any of the normal-sized Transformers pale in comparison to his size. 

The reason we believe he may be involved in the trilogy is because he has tried to wipe out all of the Transformers. Unicron sets out to destroy any planets in their path and enslave their populations. The warring Autobots and Decepticons from previous films have had to work together to destroy him. 

Back in December, many blogs believed Unicron would be the main villain after site unleashthefanboy.com claimed to get its hands on a copy of the script. 

Rumors of a Unicron appearance have continued to surface online as more details of the film emerge. 

Placement of such a largely known Transformers villain would be a very natural transition indeed and lend itself to a three-film story arc.

"Age of Extinction" comes to theaters June 27, 2014.

SEE ALSO: Justin Timberlake would like to play the Riddler in a future Batman film

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Amazon is trying to poach Microsoft employees right from Microsoft's campus. 

A tipster emailed us the following photos from the Overlake Transit Center, which is the bus stop in the heart of Microsoft's campus that shuttles employees from Seattle to Redmond (and elsewhere). It's also a hub for the campus shuttle. 

Typically, Microsoft just buys the ad space and promotes its own stuff, or there is a general ad for whatever. This month, Amazon bought the ad space, and its advertising jobs.

This is an especially ingenious place to advertise job openings because if you're taking the bus from Redmond to Seattle in rush hour you're sitting in traffic. A 15 minute trip can take 45 minutes. If you worked for Amazon, you wouldn't deal with that trip since it's right in Seattle. 

Here are the posters:

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