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Tim Tebow just got signed by the New England Patiorts, but for the next two years he’ll be getting paid more by his former team.

The New York Jets are on the hook to spend more in cash and salary cap dollars than the Patriots for Tebow, who spent one uneventful season in New York before being signed by New England. The Jets had taken on a portion of the $6.3 million contract Tebow was owed from Denver, leaving New York required to pay $1.5 million in 2013.

Should Tim Tebow make the New England Patriots roster — and right now his is third on the depth chart behind Tom Brady and Ryan Mallett — he would make the league minimum base salary of $630,000. .

For the Patriots, Tebow is clearly worth the price. The team’s owner, Robert Kraft, said he’s looking for Tebow to be a good force in the locker room.

The New England Patriots will look for more than just locker room leadership from Tim Tebow. Coach Bill Belichick has a knack for getting a lot out of players considered older or washed up by NFL standards, including a quarterback with a resume much like Tebow’s, Doug Flutie.

Tim Tebow Will Be Paid More By The Jets Than Patriots For Next Two Years is a post from: The Inquisitr

I see you are gangster, I am pretty gangster myself.

white guys kills it

White Guy Kills It! [Video] is a post from: The Inquisitr

The latest post from Size Five Games about Gun Monkeys, the “Procedurally–Generated, Physics-based, Online Deathmatch platform game”, contains amazing news. Unlike during its announcement post, the game is seemingly no longer called GUN_MONKEYS. Just as well. All caps and an underscore? Was never going to happen. Oh! Also: it’s coming to Steam, and will launch with achievements, leaderboards, trading cards and stat tracking.

Gun Monkeys is a remake of Size Five’s first game, Gibbage, and was created to give developer Dan Marshall a break from upcoming stealth platformer The Swindle. Here’s the announcement trailer:

And here’s the set-up: “In Gun Monkeys, players take charge of a modern-day power company. In the distant future, a catastrophic experiment into Perpetual Energy obliterates all human life, leaving the world choc-full of free-for-the-taking energy. Your job is to send a legion of pleasingly-expendable monkeys forwards in time to collect Power Cubes and return them to present-day, all from the comfort of your PC.”

Gun Monkeys is planned for release on June 28th, after a beta period which “starts soon”.

The post Gun Monkeys headed to Steam, beta test starting soon appeared first on PC Gamer.

Ford Motors is taking a step back in terms of the technology it emphasizes in its vehicles. According to a new report the automobile giant is adding physical controls back into its in-car systems.

Ford in recent years has made every attempt possible to ditch physical knobs and buttons. Instead the car manufacturer had moved towards touchscreens and voice recognition systems.

According to the report the new Ford system will remove some of the complexity of the Sync and MyFord Touch systems by adding buttons and knobs that are easier to adjust when driving.

Global product development chief Raj Nair tells the Wall Street Journal that drivers are frustrated because they can’t easily change their systems volume or radio stations as quickly as they had with traditional knob setups.

Ford will not be doing away with its new control panels, instead the company will dumb down the technology to make navigating a far simpler task.

While nearly 80 percent of all Ford customers choose the Sync or MyFord Touch Systems, the company now believes that additional control systems based on knobs and buttons will help customers more thoroughly enjoy their vehicles. 

According to Nair:

“The satisfaction is higher on the vehicles equipped with MyFord Touch than without. We’ve been able to spend a lot of time with customers to find out what exactly are the areas that are bothering them.”

When Ford unveiled the MyFord Touch system the company watched as its quality survey ratings fell in both 2011 and 2012. Ford quickly worked to win back its customers trust through software updates for existing systems and better voice recognition software. Ford has since added a more streamlined layout for quicker access.

Do you think adding knobs and buttons to a modern touchscreen and voice-enabled system is a smart move by the team at Ford Motors?

Ford Motors Adding Physical Controls Back Into Vehicles After Switching To Touchscreens, Voice Recognition is a post from: The Inquisitr

Usually, asshat drivers try to skirt around traffic jams on the far right shoulder, which blocks emergency vehicles and screws everyone. This brave/stupid Russian driver chooses the far left shoulder, with humorous results.

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As much fun as test driving pre-production cars may seem, cruising around a course meant to see how hard a car can take a beating usually means a few hits to the human inside, as well. Not to mention the fact that human drivers are notoriously high maintenance—always wanting things like "food" and "sleep" and "legal compensation." So in order to overcome both these obstacles, Ford is taking advantage of self-driving technology to put its cars through the ultimate durability tests.

Autonomous Solutions Inc. partnered with Ford to develop the robotic motorists, which uses a GPS-based system that's accurate to one inch. Such a high level of precision means that up to eight autonomous cars can cruise around a test track at the same time—24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Because another major perk of the mechanical car fiends is the fact that not only do they not require rest, but they can test for long hours without any detriment to their ability to perfectly duplicate.

Interestingly, the way these autonomous cars functions is actually very similar to Apple's newest pet startup's car, Anki Drive. The cars use a wireless connection to send their speed and location to a single-user-operated control room. Usually, the huge array of sensors and cameras will keep the car on-track and handle any bumps in the road, but the operator does have the ability to take over any single car at a time.

The next step for Ford will be to turn this fully robotic driver into an even more sensitive vehicle that can operate safely next to other human drivers—on test tracks, at first, but road-ready cars are sure to follow. And they'd likely be sharing the highway with Google's own fleet of self-driving cars, which Nevada has just recently set loose on its own streets. Each of Google's vehicles are still required to have two real-live people inside at all times, but as technology improves and more motor companies jump on board, it's only a matter time before we're all cruising along hands-free. And then we enter the Singularity. [Engadget]

'Tis the season for outdoor music festivals—which, traditionally, means days of sliding over mud-slick fields in galoshes. But in Lyon, a group of designers and engineers dreamt up an alternative: a Kinect-powered interactive amphitheater that radiates light based on the footsteps of attendees.

The pyramid was custom-built for Nuits Sonores, an annual EDM festival that included performances by Dan Deacon and Nosaj Thing. Housed primarily inside of a giant warehouse in Lyon, the festival also included an outdoor stage. So organizers tapped London interactive studio Is This Good? and Lyon architects Looking For Architecture to create an installation where concert-goers could dance facing performers.

Their five-tier system is made from semi-transparent plastic embedded with LEDs. These are controlled via an OpenFrameworks script, which draws information about the location of attendees from six nearby Kinects. When a person moves or jumps onto one of the platforms, the lights turn on and change in intensity as their movements are tracked—meanwhile, a Processing-based program pushes generative, dynamic animations to five hanging screens behind the platforms. It's lovely, in a futuristic, Saturday Night Fever kind of way. Check out the full video below. [Creative Applications]

“At first I though they just built a life-size model of the X-Wing Lego model, but I never imagined they actually built it out of REAL Legos! Very impressive!” — dapoculos

It has not been a great few years for hygiene at the stadia of the American League West. Earlier this year, a Houston Astros vendor pooped next to his snowcones. Before that, rats scurried all over Angel Stadium. (And, oh god, let us not forget the bees. So many bees.) And now a scourge has hit poor, unloved O.co Coliseum in Oakland.

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Just when you thought that mankind's genius could go no further, four years of research has given birth to a new apex in cork innovation. Please say hello to your newest wine-stopper, the Helix cork.

The product of a collaboration beween the industrious lushes at cork manufacturer Amorim and those at bottle-making company O-I, the new threaded, resealable design (and matching threaded bottle neck) is aimed at the "popular premium" wine market, which includes bottles that retail for between $8-$15, roughly. And while four years of research may seem a tad excessive, much of that time was spent waiting... and waiting... and waiting some more, allowing them to see whether or not the new cork had any effect on taste, aroma, or color. (Spoiler: it didn't.)

This kind of testing was necessary because the agglomerated type of cork used in the Helix is atypical of wine manufacturing. Since cork is cellular in nature, the presence of open spaces in a common, straight cork stopper is ideal—it allows the wine to fill those spaces, expand the cork, and form a tight seal. However, agglomerated cork is more granular, meaning fewer open spaces and less room for expansion. This would be a problem with a normal stopper, but the threaded design of the Helix creates its own tight seal, meaning oxygen can't escape on the sides while the density of the stopper prevents oxygen from escaping through the cork itself.

And its resealability is a major plus in the eyes of consumers, who want the convenience of a resealable container but still prefer cork to other methods of wine stoppering such as screw tops. According to Erik Bouts, O-I Europe president:

Cork is still by far the preferred stopper. Our research has found that at least 80% of consumers prefer the cork and glass combination for their wine. It has the highest-quality image in the market and now we have made it easier to use. And it is still the most sustainable option.

The Helix cork is being unveiled at Vinexpo in Bordeaux today, although its creators say it may still be two years before we start seeing it on shelves. So if you must have your fancy corks, until the day comes that we can leave the cork screws behind and securely reseal wine with ease, it seems your best option is to just finish the bottle. No one said being classy came easy. [Cork.pt, The Drinks Business]

“From the bestselling children’s novel ‘The Invention of Hugo Cabret’ to the Oscar nominated film ‘Hugo,’ automatons – mechanical marvels from a time gone by – are in the spotlight. Seth Doane takes a look at the extraordinary world of automatons.” — CBS

Sometimes you don't realize your behavior is actually compensating for a design flaw. That is, until you see the solution. When borrowing a car and carrying anything heavy or delicate—a full toolbox, a few bottles of booze, a birthday cake—I always place it in the rear seat footwell. It would be much more convenient to load into the hatch, but I don't want those things sliding around because I took the corner too hard after watching Fast & Furious 6.

That's where the Stayhold comes in. The Velcro strip on the bottom adheres it firmly to the carpeting inside your car, allowing you to wall things off against the edges or build your own little fort.

As humble as this device is, to me it represents the ideal of what industrial design has to offer: It's simple, largely monomaterial, addresses a valid need, and is relatively inexpensive. Sure it's not going to wind up in the MoMA, but then again, neither is anything in the trunk of my car.

via http://everythingyoulovetohate.us/post/49039378953

Watson may have been able to trounce a pair of Jeopardy champs, but it can't hold a candle to the new king of number crunching, the 3.12 million-core Tianhe-2.

Built by China's National University of Defense Technology at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzho, the Tianhe-2 supercomputer runs on a proprietary Linux build. The system is powered by 32,000 Xeon processors, themselves augmented by 48,000 Xeon Phi accelerators and a petabyte of memory to sustain its 33.86 petaflop (quadrillion mathematical calculations per second) performance.

That's double, double, what the last year's top-ranked (by the semi-annual Top 500) supercomputer, the 17.59 petaflop Titan at Oak Ridge National Labs can do. But the race to hit a Quintrillion calculations a second, an exoflop, is just heating up. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's deputy director, Horst Simon, believes that the exoflop barrier could be broken by the end of the decade, assuming researchers can figure out how to power the process. The Tianhe-2 consumes 17.8 megawatts currently and as Horst explains:

The increasing trend in power efficiency, though it might look like a gradual slope over time, is really a one-time gain that came from switching to accelerator/manycore [architectures] in 2010. This is not a sustainable trend in the absence of other new technology. There is no more magic — we're maxed out. Right now, the most efficient system needs 1 to 2 megawatts per petaflops. Multiply that by 1,000 to get to exascale and the power is simply unaffordable.

Perhaps most impressive is the amount of indigenous hardware employed in the machine. Outside of the Intel processors, "The interconnect, operating system, front-end processors, and software are mainly Chinese," said Top500 editor Jack Dongarra. We'll have to wait until December, however, to see if the Tianhe-2 can hold onto its crown in an increasingly crowded field. [Top 500 - CNet - Image: Top 500]

Today, I lost my virginity. Not only did my parents somehow find out, they posted about it on Facebook. FML

Regular gamers have expressed quite a bit of upset at Xbox One's ridiculous DRM policies, but nowhere is the disdain more keenly felt -- nor more justified -- than that coming from America's armed services. Considering the troops have a lot of downtime, and games are a good way to soak up the hours, the Xbox One is absolutely useless to them.

An article in the Navy Times calls the Xbox One's DRM "a showstopper," and explains to its readers exactly how they'll be unable to use the Xbox One, should they be stationed aboard ships or overseas. 

"Microsoft has single handedly alienated the entire military. And not just the U.S. military -- the militaries of the entire world," stated naval aviator Jay Johnson. 

As well as the region locking and online check-ins, the Navy Times highlights the "serious security concerns" with the built-in Kinect and its constant listening. Always listening. Forever listening.