The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed a formal objection to the inclusion of DRM in HTML5, saying that a draft proposal from the W3C could hurt innovation and block access to people around the world. From their press page: '"This proposal stands apart from all other aspects of HTML standardization: it defines a new 'black box' for the entertainment industry, fenced off from control by the browser and end-user," said EFF International Director Danny O'Brien. "While this plan might soothe Hollywood content providers who are scared of technological evolution, it could also create serious impediments to interoperability and access for all."'
Casual Italian cafe/gelateria Morso has closed its Pearl District location last week, slightly more than a year after opening. Portland Monthly was first to spot the shutter, which only affects the spot's NW location near Powell's Books (Morso's outpost in the Bridgeport Village shopping center remains open, business as usual). According to a Facebook announcement:
"As our cost[s] have become to[o] much to bear, it is with a heavy heart that I announce the closure of Morso, effective May 23, 2013. The people of Pearl welcomed us with open arms, and for that I will be forever grateful. We have developed many friendships and loyal customers over the time, and I shall miss them. Many thanks to my staff, customers and the great people of Portland and the Pearl! Thank you for being a part of MORSO over the last year. I wish you all the best life has to offer."
Morso (Italian for "morsel") debuted in the Pearl last May as a new cafe concept by Mio Gelato founder Bob Lightman and longtime Bluehour chef Kenny Giambalvo; both locations transitioned existing Mio Gelato scoop shops into full-fledged cafes. Giambalvo stepped down from day-to-day operations five months later; he's currently the chef at Edgefield's Black Rabbit restaurant.
· Morso [Official site]
· All Previous Morso Coverage [Eater PDX]
What’s driving the explosive growth in sales of fashionable bullet-resistant clothing for the rich and not so famous?
Colombian specialty clothier Miguel Caballero has no idea. He’s just glad he’s selling a lot more of his “personal ballistic protection apparel” than he used to. And he’s doing so in some unexpected places, including Uruguay, India, Panama and at Harrods in London.
Caballero is in the news these days with a new line of bullet-resistant backpacks for children in a post-Newtown United States. But the US market is nothing compared to what Caballero’s eponymous firm is doing in the Middle East, Asia and Latin America. He’s not surprised that all the guns, violence, terrorism and armed kidnappings have helped him build a booming business out of selling exclusive ready-to-wear and custom body armor to political leaders and celebrities.
He says those threats help explain how his tiny boutique firm has rocketed in recent years to $20 million in annual sales and retail partners in dozens of countries. Besides his Bogotá base, Caballero now has a second location in Mexico City to keep up with the frenzy of orders in the region.
But he is a bit puzzled about why many of his best clients are relatively anonymous corporate executives and their families who live in parts of the world where one might not expect to be getting shot at. They probably feel safe at home, he told Quartz, “but they have to travel a lot, and to neighborhoods that are very dangerous.”
“There are a lot of problems in the world,” he adds. “I guess we are part of the solution.”
Personalized protection.
Miguel Caballero
Caballero started his business 20 years ago with the idea of protecting fellow Colombians from the narco-war there. Colombia is now just 5% of his business. Dubai, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and other parts of the Middle East are by far the biggest growth area. He’s also expanding rapidly throughout South and Central America, and the Caribbean.
There are other clothiers who sell protective clothing. President Obama was rumored to be wearing such a suit during his first inauguration. But Caballero has cornered the high-end market by expertly hiding bullet-resistant material within clothing fashionable enough to wear at a business meeting or the opera. The sales pitch for his “Black Collection“ describes it as “sophisticated and elegant… discrete protection for people who demand fashion and comfort.”
His most popular item: an $1,800 t-shirt (reduced price) designed to be worn under a dress shirt yet withstand a shot or two from a 9 mm pistol or even an Israeli-made Uzi. Also selling briskly: $3,475 polo shirts and “puffer vests” for women and children. He’s also made trench coats, sweaters, leather jackets and even a bullet-proof kimono for actor Steven Seagal.
Those in hot climates often pay more for highly customized clothing. Light-weight tunics for women are big in Dubai, as are traditional kurtas for the well-heeled in South Asia. Ceremonial and ethnic shirts, like the one made for the prime minister of Malaysia, are hot as well.
One mostly discontinued item: fancy men’s blazers, says Carolina Ballesteros, Caballero’s wife and head of design and R&D. “You lose protection in the sternum.”
explains so much "jars of emotion" ~ "binders full of women"
According to the noted psychologist Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, it takes three positive emotions to balance out a single negative. As Fast Company reports, Fredrickson's findings are at the heart of Google's design philosophy. When considering any user interface decision, designers working on Android have to work out how to inform users of an issue — such as reaching the final homescreen — without making them feel like they've done something wrong, meaning that means pop-ups and other invasive techniques are a no-go. For the homescreen problem, Google settled on the now-familiar glimmering animation, which subtly shows that a user has no more homescreens to swipe across to, while rewarding them with an artistic flourish.
can't wait for cheap printers and expensive proprietary filaments
Meet the Replicator 2. She’s top of the line, for home 3D printers, and she’ll cost you $2,200, not including shipping.
Not self-replicating. Yet.
MakerBot
That’s about what a good PC cost in the 1980′s. And the parallels between the personal computing revolution and the one in 3D printing are irresistible (they’ve been made countless times in all the usual places). Ok, so these things don’t do much more than print out easily-breakable, rough-hewn plastic tchotchkes, but watch out! Some day we’ll use them to solve the really big problems.
Now meet the Pirate3D printer, care of a startup in Singapore. It claims that once it launches, it will be the “world’s cheapest” 3D printer, at around $350 apiece.
Pirate3D printer is so named because it’s supposed to help you pirate physical objects.
Pirate3D
But wait! World’s cheapest anythings rarely remain that way for long, and Pirate3D’s claim seems extra silly considering that another company, Hong Kong-based MakiBox, says it will be churning out an even cheaper model for as little as $200 by June of 2013. Meanwhile, current record-holder for world’s cheapest 3D printer, Printrbot, will be shipping a new model for just $300.
The A6 LT will cost you a third as much as an unlocked iPhone.
MakiBOX
What’s incredible about these devices is how quickly their prices are falling. Just two years ago, a DIY kit for making your own home 3D printer—with huge amounts of assembly required—was $500. A year later, a comparable but simpler model from Printrbot was $400. And as of this year, the list of cheap 3D printers is longer than ever.
If the trend in 3D printers is like the one seen in PCs over the past thirty years, the features in $2000 3D printers will rapidly make it into the low-end models. Meanwhile, some low-end models will become even cheaper, and as more and more people begin playing with them, an entire ecosystem will emerge.
So why do home 3D printers matter? Just as with the PCs of yore, kids everywhere are going to be playing with these things in their garages, learning non-trivial skills that are hard to pick up as an adult, like how to model things in 3D and how to get creative with the limits of fragile materials and layer-by-layer manufacturing. Those kids will grow up and deliver the manufacturing revolution that is the promise—but not yet the reality—of 3D printing.
"The Philippines, like Thailand, is pursuing a massive infrastructure spending program worth around $10 billion. ... the program has already created upwards of 400,000 jobs" LOL BUT STIMULUSU
The Philippine economy grew by 7.8% in the first three months of 2013, surpassing every single analyst estimate and putting it just above China as one of Asia’s fastest growing economies. The torrid growth, the best in nearly three years, is especially impressive given that exports declined 6.2% as electronics shipments collapsed.
If foreigners aren’t going to buy your goods, you better hope the locals are. Domestic demand in the Philippines has been very strong, driven by private investment and consumer growth in a way that China must envy. Manufacturing growth is up by 9.7% due to demand for food, appliances, communication and transport, and construction was up a whopping 32.5% in the first three months of the year. Services expanded 7%.
“Initially, this was led by infrastructure spending from the government,” the National Economic and Development chief Artemio Balisacan told the Philippine Star. “By the second half of 2012, private construction started to rebound.”
3) Remittance Payments
Underpinning domestic demand is a raft of remittance payments that make their way to the Philippines each year from its vast diaspora—over $5 billion in the first quarter of 2013. The cash transfers have long helped the Philippines pay off foreign debt and boost domestic consumption.
Can it continue?
Good news lasts only so long, and analysts have pointed to several risks. Exports may continue to fall as China slows and Europe stagnates. Remittance payments, although large, are at their lowest in nearly four years, and the Philippine stock market tumbled almost 4% on Thursday, in line with the Nikkei, despite the strong economic growth figures. Manila is sticking with a 6-7% growth target for the whole of 2013.
“There’s a disconnect between the economy and the valuation of the market,” a Manila-based trader told Bloomberg. “While overseas investors say they like our economic fundamentals, they find valuations to be stretched.” The Philippine stock market is one of Asia’s best performing bourses, up 41% in the last year, but traders are clearly worried about whether there is an asset bubble in the making. The Philippines has strengths China doesn’t, but building roads and pushing up the budget deficit is not enough when it comes to a long-term strategy.
Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee is looking into the ramifications of not paying back money owed to lenders following the collapse of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning developer 38 Studios, the Providence Journal reports.
According to spokeswoman Christine Hunsinger, the state has been collecting data for a number of months; however, the administration has no plans to follow through on this decision. Data gathering is currently being done "to understand the ramifications of what that decision would be," said Hunsinger.
Rhode Island owes a total of $112.6 million — $75 million for the initial loan and $37.6 million in interest. Chafee has proposed to pay back this amount over the next decade in installments of $12.5 million.
doug141 writes "A scientist proposes the best way to deal with an asteroid on short notice is to hit it with an impactor, followed by a nuke in the crater. From the article: 'Bong Wie, director of the Asteroid Deflection Research Center at Iowa State University, described the system his team is developing to attendees at the International Space Development Conference in La Jolla, Calif., on May 23. The annual National Space Society gathering attracted hundreds from the space industry around the world. An anti-asteroid spacecraft would deliver a nuclear warhead to destroy an incoming threat before it could reach Earth, Wie said. The two-section spacecraft would consist of a kinetic energy impactor that would separate before arrival and blast a crater in the asteroid. The other half of the spacecraft would carry the nuclear weapon, which would then explode inside the crater after the vehicle impacted.'"
Google’s security researchers are well known for uncovering vulnerabilities in other people's products. Standard operating procedure is to give the affected company sixty days before publishing the problem, keeping things under wraps until a fix can be shipped out. But when it comes to critical vulnerabilities that are actively being exploited, Google wants its researchers to cut that down to just a week. A post on its Online Security Blog explains the reasoning behind the seven-day guideline: "each day an actively exploited vulnerability remains undisclosed to the public and unpatched, more computers will be compromised."
The change in policy comes two weeks after Google engineer Tavis Ormandy disclosed a publicly unknown vulnerability ("zero-day") in Windows 7 and Windows 8. Ormandy made the announcement just five days after informing Microsoft of the bug, bemoaning the company’s security team as "difficult to work with." And while Google finds vulnerabilities in various companies' products, Redmond is a frequent target. In Microsoft's huge "Patch Tuesday" bugfix in February, Google researchers uncovered more than half of the reported flaws.
The company says it's holding itself to the same standard
So is Google in the right? The company argues that speedy disclosure is important for a bug that's actively being exploited, and that even if it’s not enough time for the affected vendors to patch its software, it should be long enough to tell users about workarounds that mitigate the problem. Others disagree, arguing that the benefits are outweighed by the likelihood that publicizing vulnerabilities puts hacking tools in the hands of malicious users. Google is still recommending the normal 60 days for vulnerabilities that are non-critical or aren’t being actively exploited, and the company says it’s holding itself to the same standard, but we doubt everyone is going to take too kindly to the revamped schedule.
"We are right between the rock and the hard place, or, if you're a literary type, between Scylla and Charybdis," Frederic M. Umane, president of the New York City Board of Elections, told the Times.
Officials in New York City are looking to reintroduce lever voting machines for the upcoming mayoral election, citing procedural issues with the electronic scanners currently in use. As the New York Times reports, the city has spent $95 million on replacing the old lever machines with electronic alternatives, but after less than three years of use, it now appears poised to redeploy the originals, which were first developed in the 1890s.
Proponents including Mayor Michael Bloomberg argue that it took too long to count votes using the electronic scanners, though some are upset with what they see as an egregious waste of government money.
"We are right between the rock and the hard place."
"We are right between the rock and the hard place, or, if you're a literary type, between Scylla and Charybdis," Frederic M. Umane, president of the New York City Board of Elections, told the Times. "It's the best solution that we've been able to come up with."
Calls for change became more vociferous following a small legislative special election in March 2012, and a Congressional primary election last year. In both cases, the Board of Elections faced criticism for taking too long to determine a winner — something officials attribute to the peculiarities of the electronic process.
The scanners currently in use, they say, can be cumbersome to prepare for quick turnarounds, as in the case for the upcoming mayoral election, which will see a primary on September 10th, followed by a runoff on September 24th. The plan is to temporarily use the older machines for these two elections, before returning to the scanners for the November 5th general election.
"The voter confusion that’s going to be caused is unfathomable."
Dick Dadey, executive director of the watchdog group Citizens Union, tells the Times that the decision to return to the lever machines — even if on a temporary basis — could do more harm than good. "It's absurd that in a 21st-century New York, we would go back and vote on machines first used in the 19th century when Tammany Hall controlled the elections," Dadey said. "The voter confusion that’s going to be caused is unfathomable."
But the Board of Elections seems intent on moving forward with the plan, as determined during a meeting held this week. The state Senate has already passed a bill that paves the way for the lever machines to be reintroduced, as well as a provision that would delay the runoff by three weeks. Governor Andrew Cuomo, meanwhile, says his office is looking into the problem, describing it as a "conundrum."
Apple has started listing a new 16GB iPod touch model in its online store. When the 5th generation iPod touch went on sale last year, it was only available in 32GB and 64GB models; Apple continued to sell 16GB and 32GB variants of the 4th generation model.
That older iPod now appears to have been discontinued in favor of the new 16GB model, which features a 4-inch Retina display, dual-core A5 processor, and front-facing FaceTime HD camera in the same 0.24-inch-thick case as the 5th generation variant. There is no rear-facing camera at all, however, and Apple has also omitted the lanyard hook.
The new 16GB iPod touch is available to order now for $229 in either black or silver, and Apple says it will ship within 24 hours.
Russia will send missiles to Syrian regime to counter action of 'West's hotheads' The Independent Russia has said that it plans to deliver an advanced missile defence system to Bashar al-Assad that would strongly boost the embattled Syrian leader's defensive capabilities, in part to restrain “hot heads” in the West from planning intervention scenarios.
Firaxis Games's XCOM: Enemy Unknown for iOS will support cloud saves so players can start a game on an iPad and continue it on an iPhone, according to a 2K Games representative. The game will also support multiplayer, but the multiplayer mode will come in a free title update that is due to release later down the line.
Polygon recently played a demo of XCOM: Enemy Unknown on iPad and we were able to experience the game's touch control optimizations. Where a player would use their mouse to move the camera and zoom in and out in the PC version of the game, the iOS version allows players to move the camera with a finger, zooming in and out by pinching and pulling on the screen.
Controlling characters involves tapping on a soldier to select and double tapping a location to get them to move. Players can select soldiers to perform actions by either finding them on the map and tapping on them directly, or using the swiping motion to swipe between soldiers.
According to publisher 2K Games, XCOM: Enemy Unknown for iOS is the full XCOM game with fewer maps and slightly lower resolution textures due to the limitations of the hardware. However, the differences aren't noticeable and, during our time with the game, we did not encounter repeated maps.
When Polygon spoke with XCOM: Enemy Unknown's lead designer, Jake Solomon earlier this year, he said the iOS version is intended to be a complete port of the AAA console and PC experience. While the iOS version may feature fewer maps, "we still have all the destructible environments, there's the fog of war," and all integral cutscenes have been kept.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown for iOS is due to release this summer at a premium app price. It will not launch with multiplayer, but 2K Games confirmed that a multiplayer mode will be included in a free title update.
ananyo writes "Researchers have found that a 5,000-year-old Egyptian trinket is made from a meteorite (abstract). The result explains how ancient Egyptians obtained iron millennia before the earliest evidence of iron smelting in the region, solving an enduring mystery. It also hints that they regarded meteorites highly as they began to develop their religion. The tube-shaped bead is one of nine found in 1911 in a cemetery at Gerzeh, around 70 kilometres south of Cairo. The cache dates from about 3,300 BC, making the beads the oldest known iron artefacts from Egypt. But the first evidence for iron smelting in ancient Egypt only appears in the archaeological record in the sixth century BC. Using scanning electron microscopy and computed tomography to analyse one of the beads, researchers found that the nickel content of this original metal was high — as much as 30% — suggesting that it did indeed come from a meteorite. Backing up this result, the team observed that the metal had a distinctive crystalline structure called a Widmanstätten pattern. This structure is found only in iron meteorites that cooled extremely slowly inside their parent asteroids as the Solar System was forming."
"turn-based strategy games work really well on mobile devices. It's sort of a happy accident, in that sense."
"This isn't just like a port to a new platform," XCOM: Enemy Unknown designer Jake Solomon tells me over the phone. "From a development angle, this is one of the - and I honestly can't think of another experience except for The Walking Dead - where it's a game, a AAA game that we just put out on consoles, and we're putting the whole thing out to tablet. This is something that I can't take any design credit for, but turn-based strategy games work really well on mobile devices. It's sort of a happy accident, in that sense."
The project can be traced back to the time when Firaxis was finishing up its work on XCOM: Enemy Unknown for PC and consoles. 2K China presented a version of the game running on iOS, and from there Firaxis would work with them on the portable incarnation due this summer. It features the full functionality seen on other platforms, thanks to the Unreal foundation that has played nice with iOS since late 2010.
"Without Unreal, it certainly wouldn't have been possible," Solomon says.
At the initial consult, my fantastic oral surgeon gave me a panoramic x-ray, to see how badly the offending teeth were impinging. It turns out I probably should have had them out a decade ago.
But if I had, I would have likely missed a great opportunity. We now live in an age of digital conical X-rays, cheap DVD burners, and 3D printers. I wondered what it would take to turn that collection of medical data into a physical copy of my own skull.
As it turns out, a couple of days of software wrangling and eleven hours of printing later, I had my answer.
The big one is life-sized. The little guy was the first test print.
Painful (data) extraction
If I was going to produce a 3D model suitable for printing, the first step was obvious: I’d need to get the data off of the DVD my dentist gave me and into a print-friendly format.
The scanner stores the data on disc as a “stack” of 0.4mm slices. Imagine taking your head to the supermarket and putting it on a deli slicer. Lop off the top couple of centimeters, slice the rest all the way down to the bottom of your chin, stack it up neatly on some brown paper, and there you have it. Here’s a video fly-through of my head, from top to bottom (generated by RadiAnt viewer).
Fortunately my DVD came with a friendly viewing program called i-CAT Vision, supplied by the manufacturer of the cone beam X-ray scanner. It can take that stack of images and turn it into a variety of projections, including an interactive 3D model.
i-CAT Vision in action.
This tool made it very easy to get a sense of the state of my teeth. It can zoom in on any angle and show a 3D model of the scan results. The only trouble is that it offered no obvious way to extract the model itself to any common format.
Fortunately for the medical world (and the rest of us), there’s DICOM. It’s the lingua franca of medical imaging. It’s to medical imaging software what PDF is to e-book readers. There are a bunchofprograms out there that can take a stack of image data in DICOM format and reconstruct a model from it. And i-CAT Vision fully supports exporting to DICOM.
Now the bad news: As so often happens with specialized free software, each program is good at one or two things (whatever itch the programmer had to scratch) and terrible at anything else (abysmal user interfaces, abandoned codebases, poor documentation, etc.)
I eventually found InVesalius, a free (as in GPL) DICOM viewer and model creation tool from Brazil. It has a very nice interface for choosing which densities you’re interested in (Bone? Skin? Blood vessels? You pick!) and will export directly to STL (the generally preferred format for conversing with 3D printers). Plus, it was the least crashy of any of the DICOM software I tried.
Clean your teeth
Now that I had a model in a nice STL file, I encountered my second problem. Life (and poor dental hygiene habits) have not been kind to my teeth. I’ve got a ton of fillings, crowns, spikes from root canals, and other foreign metallic strangeness in my teeth. It shows up as bright white on the scan.
Metal Head
See those dark bands around all of that expensive dental work? I believe that happens because of the limited dynamic range of each slice. If you’ve got a lot of bright spots, you won’t have enough bits to provide detail in the shadows. These shadows and diffraction effects end up creating some really weird artifacts in the 3D model.
No, I’m not really biting a stick. I’m biting radio artifacts!
While it was possible to clean all of that up a slice at a time in InVesalius, that proved to be extremely time consuming. Since I just wanted to make something to spook my friends with (and not necessarily a completely accurate anatomical reference) I turned to a different tool: Autodesk MeshMixer.
Working with MeshMixer is a bit like modeling in clay. You have a few tools that let you push, stretch, smooth, or otherwise mangle your model. The emphasis is on organic manipulations rather than razor sharp precision. In other words, it’s the perfect tool to touch up a human skull.
It’s messy in there. Just like real life.
The inspector tool is a powerful and very fast way to clean up artifacts (like the thousands of disconnected globules hanging around inside my brain, or the dozens of broken meshes that need to be repaired). After a couple of hours of playing with my skull in MeshMixer, I finally had something that looked like it would print well.
And since my X-ray imaging data stops at the top of my eye sockets, I thought adding an organic bowl shape would make for a nice candy dish when printed.
Corporeality
With the model complete, all that was left was to print it. I asked my good friend and 3D printing guru Rich Olson if he’d mind trying to print it out on his Replicator 2. The first couple of test prints looked very promising. After a little more cleanup (adding supports for some overhangs and making the bottom of the model perfectly flat) we decided to try for a full-sized print.
Ten and a half hours later, the results were much better than I’d hoped.
What’s next?
Now that I have my very own mini-me in PLA, I’m thinking of continuing to improve the model. If I remove the jaw, I could print it separately and get a perfect replica of my bottom teeth. If I make the walls just thick enough, I should be able to cast it in aluminum or maybe bronze. Of course, now I want to go get a full MRI of my body (or at least my brain!) and make more models of various organs.
A man brought a pressure cooker he claimed was a bomb into the Teacher Standards and Practices Commission office and told employees he tried to blow up their sign because it was misspelled on Wednesday morning.
After discussing his failed attempt to detonate his bomb, the man complained that the instructions he downloaded to make the bomb also had misspellings.
"If you needed proof that you shouldn’t take physics advice from a bartender (excuse me, mixologist), this would be it. No, you can’t control the rate of dilution with big cubes any more than you can with small cubes. Thermodynamics is in the driver’s seat in both cases—you’re just in a sidecar, along for the ride."
I think this is missing the point, which is simply to reduce the rate of dilution. The actual temperature of the drink has less to do with it--it's serve chilled, not serve at 2C.
Yes, big cubes melt (and therefore dilute your drink) more slowly, but at the cost of cooling your drink more slowly. How much more slowly?
There’s a lot of bogus and exaggerated claims for using big ice cubes in drinks. Dr. Drang sets us straight.
Deep in the heart of Doctor Who fandom is a small group dedicated to television show reconstructions—building piecemeal renditions of 1960s-era episodes using photographs of the original broadcasts. They don’t do this because they’re following some bizarre fan doctrine only other Whovians understand. They do it because “wiping,” the practice of erasing seemingly unimportant show recordings to free up archival space or re-use tape, obliterated decades of programming. The television industry practiced wiping broadly until the early 1970s, destroying many early Who episodes permanently. And it wasn’t just silly science fictions shows that were lost. The industry proved remarkably bad at choosing what was worth archiving, erasing influential works like The Avengers and cultural touchstones like Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.
Such a practice would never occur in television today. It’s generally understood that the medium is a deeply important part of our culture, that ...
WASHINGTON—Saying that it’s the Lord’s will, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann announced on her website Wednesday that she has decided not to seek reelection in 2014 because God wants her to earn millions of dollars working for a high-powe...
"This isn't just like a port to a new platform," XCOM: Enemy Unknown designer Jake Solomon tells me over the phone. "From a development angle, this is one of the - and I honestly can't think of another experience except for The Walking Dead - where it's a game, a AAA game that we just put out on consoles, and we're putting the whole thing out to tablet. This is something that I can't take any design credit for, but turn-based strategy games work really well on mobile devices. It's sort of a happy accident, in that sense."
Jake Solomon on XCOM iOS and the 'happy accident' of mobile strategy games originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 30 May 2013 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
