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Kārlis Dambrāns

On Tuesday, eBay announced that in 2015 it would be splitting off its PayPal unit into a separate, publicly traded company. Investors lauded the move, sending eBay's stock price up nearly eight percent on the day, as of this writing.

PayPal has been an enormous player in the online payments and mobile payments sectors, but for years eBay's CEO John Donahoe resisted the clamor from investors to split PayPal into its own company. But after conferring with the company's board of directors, eBay has now changed its tune.

eBay acquired PayPal back in 2002, and it has been the company's fastest-growing segment, the Associated Press reported.

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Microsoft talked briefly about the new features in its upcoming Windows 10 operating system, but it glossed over one thing that will surely be of great interest to sysadmins and developers alike: the further refinement of the Windows command line into a truly useful development and administration environment. Fortunately, engineer and blogger Rafael Rivera has spent some hands-on time with a technical preview, and he’s got a great post up explaining some of the new features—at least, as they stand right now.

The new Windows 10 command prompt options, from the current technical preview.

Rafael Rivera

Rivera has a whole raft of additional screenshots demonstrating the additional command line features, but one of the simplest—and most anticipated—is proper text selection within command prompt windows. And we’re not just talking about Powershell, either—this is for every console window, including windows featuring good ol’ cmd.exe.

Previously, as anyone who’s dealt with a Windows command shell knows, selecting text at the prompt required a number of steps beyond simply clicking and dragging. You had to invoke a context menu, select "Mark" to tell Windows you wanted to mark text to select, and then lasso a selection box around what you wanted to pick. Text that spanned multiple lines was treated as not a single string, but rather multiple lines of text, with extraneous spacing and line breaks intact. This made for an annoying process—for more than basic selection, it was often easier to redirect whatever you were doing into a text file and do selection with a text editor.

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Lightsaber keychains are cool, but novelty key maker Rockin’ Keys can save you some pocket real estate while still letting you flaunt your love for Star Wars with its Light Saber Keys.

You can get Rockin’ Keys’ Light Saber Keys in Kwikset KW1/KW10/KW11, Schlage SC1 or Weiser WR3/WR5 formats.

Use the browser Luke and head to Rockin’ Keys’ online shop to order. Light Saber Keys cost $10 (USD) per pair, but there are also slightly discounted 4-packs and 6-packs. However, as of this writing only the red and blue designs are in stock; the green and purple ones will be available later this year.

[via ThisIsWhyImBroke]

Some American kids today are being told that what happened on September 11, 2001 was unimaginable. But that's simply not true. We had imagined it—or something like it—for years, in about a thousand different ways .

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Tobacco companies are about the last group you might expect to be overly conscientious about consumer health, but in approaching e-cigarettes, it seems they're doing just that. The New York Times points out that tobacco giants Altria and Reynolds American, who make Marlboro and Camel, are branding their vapor products with elaborate warnings about the dangers of nicotine, despite being under no legal obligation to do so.

In some cases, e-cigarettes feature even scarier warnings than cigarettes do. For instance, look at the warning on Altria's MarkTen compared to a pack of Marlboro Lights:

The MarkTen package warns: "This product is not a smoking cessation product and has not been tested as such. This product is intended for use by persons of legal age or older, and not by children, women who are pregnant or breast feeding, or persons with or at risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, or taking medicine for depression or asthma. Nicotine is addictive and very habit forming, and it is very toxic by inhalation, in contact with the skin, or if swallowed. Nicotine can increase your heart rate and blood pressure and cause dizziness, nausea, and stomach pain. Inhalation of this product may aggravate existing respiratory conditions. Ingestion of the non-vaporized concentrated ingredients in the cartridges can be poisonous." It also warns: "This product contains nicotine, a chemical known to the State of California to cause birth defects or other reproductive harm." It also says "Keep out of reach of children" and promises "important additional safety information" inside the package.

The Marlboro Lights feature only one warning: "Smoking By Pregnant Women May Result in Fetal Injury, Premature Birth, And Low Birth Weight."

In that case, the e-cigarette case warns of the same problems as the cigarette pack — pregnancy complications — in addition to other risks.

Cigarettes in the US are required to carry either the aforementioned warning about pregnancy or one of the following (some of which identify risks that aren't associated with e-cigarettes): "Quitting Smoking Now Greatly Reduces Serious Risks to Your Health"; "Cigarette Smoke Contains Carbon Monoxide"; "Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, And May Complicate Pregnancy."

Tobacco manufacturers recently, and narrowly, avoided having to put graphic warning labels on cigarette packs, including pictures of diseased lungs and a smoker with a hole in his throat.

So why are these companies placing such aggressive warnings on e-cigarettes?

"Experts with years studying tobacco company behavior say they strongly suspect several motives, but, chiefly, that the e-cigarette warnings are a very low-risk way for the companies to insulate themselves from future lawsuits and, even more broadly, to appear responsible, open and frank," Matt Richtel writes in the Times. "By doing so, the experts said, big tobacco curries favor with consumers and regulators, earning a kind of legitimacy that they crave and have sought for decades. Plus, they get to appear more responsible than the smaller e-cigarette companies that seek to unseat them."

In any case, most experts agree that e-cigarettes are not as bad for you as cigarettes, though the full extent of their health effects is unknown.

We do know that nicotine is addictive; withdrawal effects include feeling irritable and depressed. Being a stimulant, it can also be dangerous for people with heart problems. However, it is not a carcinogen. And according to the American Cancer Society, "[i]n the brains of animals, tobacco smoke causes chemical changes that are not fully explained by the effects of nicotine" that might partially explain why cigarettes are so addictive.  Many brands of e-cig also contain propylene glycol, which can be dangerous, but typically only at exposures much higher than those caused by vaping. 

On the other hand, the health effect of smoking cigarettes are well-documented, and include lung cancer, throat cancer, emphysema, and heart disease.

READ MORE: Professor: E-Cigarettes Could Save Millions Of Lives

SEE ALSO: CDC Report: E-Cigarette Use By Kids Doubled In The Last Year

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Arduino

Arduino, maker of the open source hardware platform of the same name, is teaming up with a startup called Sharebot to sell a 3D printer for about $1,000.

Announced today, Materia 101 will be demonstrated at the Maker Faire in Rome this weekend. An on-sale date has not been revealed.

"The printer will be available only on the Arduino Store both as a kit and pre-assembled," the announcement said. "Official pricing of the device will be disclosed at a later date but the kit will sell for less than 600 EUR/800 USD, while the pre-assembled version will be available for less than 700 EUR/1000 USD."

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I'm not sure what's the best part of this new Taken 3 trailer. No wait, yes I do. It's when Liam Neeson uses a 911 to take out a plane's landing gear.

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