Here are 10 popular food items that can actually be poisonous if eaten the wrong way. There are some surprisingly common fruits and vegetables in this list, so be sure to enlighten yourself by watching the video!
When the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that affixing GPS devices to vehicles to track their every move without court warrants was an unconstitutional trespass, the outcome was seen as one of the biggest high court decisions in the digital age.
That precedent, which paved the way for the disabling of thousands of GPS devices clandestinely tacked onto vehicles by the authorities, is now being invoked to question the involuntary placement of GPS devices onto human beings.
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!
Earlier this week, Llamasoft founder and veteran game developer Jeff Minter first spoke out publicly about his months-long legal disagreements with Atari over the rights to Vita tube shooter TxK and its similarity to Atari's Tempest series. Following some heated public comments on the matter (including complaints of being "savaged by [the] undead corpse" of Atari), Minter spoke to Ars Technica via e-mail to clarify his position on the game and its legal standing in more detail.
Minter says he first heard from "Infogrames" ("I refuse to call them Atari" he says of the ever-changing legal entity that owns Atari's classic IP) last April, through a lawyer-drafted letter about TxK's supposed infringement. "Since then there has been a succession of letters from [legal firm] Dorsey [and Whitney] which basically can be summarized as, 'Give us personal information about your finances or we will fuck you up.'" Even after Minter sent financial information showing that the Vita version of TxK is no longer making any significant income, he says Atari persisted in "demanding that I take down TxK from the PSN store and that I sign papers stating I would never make a Tempest-style game again."
Despite Atari's claims to be in "constant contact" with Minter over the issue, he says he wouldn't classify the back-and-forth bantering between his lawyers and theirs as real communication. "There was never any dialogue as such, just a series of demands with me conceding a little more each time, expecting a little concession from their side in return but never once receiving any," he says.
Happy International Happiness Day! According to a United Nations resolution passed in 2012, today is the day that countries across the globe should celebrate happiness and wellbeing.
But just how happy is each country? The U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network uses data from the Gallup World Poll to answer that question. According to the most recent report in 2013, Denmark is the world’s leader in happiness, while Togo has the most progress to make.
Here’s the chart from the 2013 report:
The report combines a number of factors that can affect happiness: life satisfaction, healthy life expectancy, perceptions of corruption, gross domestic product per capita, freedom to make life choices, social support and generosity in each country. While the Gallup World Poll is the primary source of the report’s data, it also uses information from the World Bank (for GDP) and the World Health Organization (for life expectancy).
The United States, meanwhile, has been getting more glum. Happiness in the U.S. fell by 4 percent between the 2005-2007 report and this edition, which covers the 2010-2012 period.
Google Fiber might be on the brink of a huge breakthrough in the way TV ads are tracked, AdWeek's Sam Thielman reports.
Google will be rolling out a system that allows advertisers to see exactly how many views their TV ads are getting from Fiber users in Kansas City, one of the first places to get its blazing fast internet and TV service.
With the current status quo, advertisers rely on viewership numbers from Nielsen, which aren't very exact, since they extrapolate from the viewing habits of a small group of people.
Fiber's tracking system would be much more similar to how ads are measured online. The system will also allow advertisers to dynamically insert their ads onto a viewers' device.
"Fiber TV ads will be digitally delivered in real time and can be matched based on geography, the type of program being shown (sports, news, etc.), or viewing history," the company explains in a blog post that AdWeek saw in advance. "Like digital ads, advertisers will only pay for ads that have been shown, and can limit the number of times an ad is shown to a given TV. We're excited to see how this test progresses, and we're looking forward to hearing from local businesses and viewers along the way."
A source told AdWeek that Google is being very cautious around privacy issues and will let viewers opt out of being shown ads based on their TV viewing history.
This is great news for advertisers, who traditionally haven't had a super-accurate way to know how many people are watching their ads. They will pay based on the number of times their ads are shown.
Right now, it seems Google will only be testing this system in Kansas City, not either of the other two cities where Fiber is live.
But as Thielman puts it, "one-to-one measurement of viewers is still a giant step forward on television."
