Apple has called for US corporate tax rates be reduced to "single digits" after it admitted sheltering at least $30bn (£20bn) of international profits in Irish subsidiaries that pay no tax at all. In a dramatic display of how threats from multinational corporations are driving down taxes across the world, chief executive Tim Cook warned Congress that he would refuse to repatriate a total of $100bn stashed offshore unless it acted to slash the 35% US rate. He also revealed that Apple had struck a secret deal with the Irish government in 1980 to limit its domestic taxes there to 2%.

Makr Shakr is a robotic bartender system that lets people order drinks from a trio of industrial robots. A companion app lets people choose and customize a drink recipe from a list of more than 100 liquors and mixers. Two of the Kuka industrial robots are equipped with cocktail shakers for mixing duty, while the third delivers finished drinks to a conveyor, which passes them on to the person who ordered the drink (presumably so that nobody gets whacked by the extremely fast-moving robots). Makr Shakr is a collaboration between MIT SENSEable City Laboratory and Italian architecture studio Carlo Ratti Associati. It debuted earlier this month at the Google I/O 2013 conference in San Francisco. For more on the system see this Gizmodo article.

photo by Lucas Werthein

photo by Max Tomasinelli

video via Gizmodo

via Gizmodo

“I have long ago dealt with the issue of: What if something I create is put to bad use?” the mathematician says. “And I have found that, throughout history, the benefit of building good things outweighed the hazards,” he says, citing lasers and the Internet as net-positive inventions despite ample opportunity for abuse. “That’s true in my research; it’s also true in my teaching.”

The image on the handicapped sign looks passive, even helpless. For years there have been scattered efforts to replace it with a more active representation of people with physical limitations.

Court: You Don't Get to See bin Laden Death Photos Newser (Newser) – It doesn't look like the CIA's photos of a dead Osama bin Laden will ever see the light of day. A federal appeals court today ruled that the Obama administration's argument that releasing them would incite riots and anti-US violence makes sense, ... and more »

The fluoridation war is alive in Portland, Ore.

Politico

King sees disaster relief 'hypocrisy' Politico New York Rep. Peter King on Tuesday said he's willing to overlook the “hypocrisy” of lawmakers who opposed aid for his state in the wake of Superstorm Sandy but might support funding for tornado-stricken Oklahoma. “I think there's a lot of hypocrisy involved ... Storm renews debate about how to pay for disaster aid - USA TodayUSA TODAY Oklahoma senators embrace disaster aid after opposing Sandy relief billReuters Conservative Okla. lawmakers face dilemma: Will they support tornado relief ...Washington Post NBCNews.com -San Francisco Chronicle -Hunterdon County Democrat - NJ.com all 83 news articles »

Tim Cook now knows what every teen feels like when their grandfather gets a smartphone.

China has big plans for mountainous Yunnan province, in the southwest of the country. They include a building boom, a new road and a petroleum industry centered on oil and chemical refineries. The raw materials will come via Myanmar, just across the border—440,000 barrels of oil a day, along with an annual flow of 12 billion cubic meters of natural gas.

Except that Myanmar is not entirely playing along. While the Myanmar government has permitted the China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC) to build pipelines—which are almost complete—to carry oil and gas to Yunnan, rebels and ordinary citizens have risen up in protest, forcing a delay in opening the taps. On May 13, militants killed two people in an attack on the working compound of a local CNPC partner.

In response, CNPC has reversed long-standing practice and unleashed a charm offensive in Myanmar. Chinese officials are pushing CNPC to fulfill what they call social obligations, on top of the government-to-government aid and loans for which Beijing is better known. The oil company says it is spending $20 million on Myanmar schools, libraries and roads. It hopes the gas flow will commence by the end of this month.

Around the world, companies and governments are navigating a surge of public pushback against perceived excesses. Western retailers are overturning factory practices in Bangladesh because of an uproar over dangerous working conditions. Mining companies in Congo and South Africa are facing, respectively, criminal probes of bribery and devastating strikes by angry workers. In Kurdistan, ExxonMobil, Chevron and other oil companies are effectively embracing separatist aspirations in exchange for drilling rights. In China, the government is cleaning up pollution and punishing bribery against public ire over living conditions and an official sense of entitlement.

In all these cases, companies and countries are having to perform better, behave better, and be cleaner. Jonathan Macey, a Yale law professor and author of The Death of Corporate Reputation, is unconvinced that we are observing anything more than coincidence. “In my view what we are seeing is simply a happy, albeit momentary confluence of private interest in profits with the public interest in things such as factory safety and corporate social responsibility in Bangladesh and Burma,” Macey said in an email exchange.

But what is unusual about CNPC’s problems is that they are on both sides of the border: Chinese residents of Kunming, the Yunnan provincial capital, have protested one of the planned chemical plants too. So far the government has tamped down the protests rather than give in. Yet in other such cases around China, the government has attempted to reach an accord with unhappy local residents, sometimes even canceling plant construction.

In the case of Myanmar, it’s not that CNPC has suddenly embraced social responsibility abroad. Labor unrest continues in Chinese-run copper mines in Zambia, for example. Rather, as in China itself, it is the leverage of public pressure at work.

Xbox One, Microsoft's next-gen console, does not require users to be constantly connected to the internet, but it does require an internet connection, a Q&A post on Xbox Wire said. The post itself has since been removed.

The answer said the Xbox One "does not have to be always connected, but Xbox One does require a connection to the Internet."

Developers are able to use Microsoft's Azure cloud computing service with Xbox One - this could potentially shift certain computations to the cloud and require players to be online, even for single-player runs, Wired reports.

For pre-owned games, the Xbox One is designed "to enable customers to trade in and resell games," Microsoft said in the same Q&A post, promising more details later.

All games can be installed to the Xbox One's 500GB hard drive, removing the need for a disc entirely after the initial load-up, Microsoft tells Wired. If a second account wants to play that game the player will be asked to pay a fee and install the game on his own console. Whether this is a mandatory installation for every game, Microsoft says, "On the new Xbox, all game discs are installed to the HDD to play."

Microsoft: Xbox One isn't always online, but requires internet connection originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 21 May 2013 15:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Bowling Ball

I've been told that if the Earth were shrunk down to the size of a bowling ball, it would be smoother than said bowling ball. My question is, what would a bowling ball look like if it were blown up to the size of the Earth?

—Seth C.

A good, professional-quality bowling ball is smoother than the Earth.

Phil Plait, of Bad Astronomy, took a look at the claim that the Earth was smoother than a billiard ball. He concluded that the Earth was smoother but less round, based on published billiard ball roundness tolerances. However, he couldn’t find any information on the size and shape of a billiard ball’s pits and bumps.

Fortunately for us, there are people who digitally scan bowling ball surfaces.

These scans (along with various measurements of ball roughness^[1]) tell us that a high-end bowling ball is quite smooth. If blown up to the scale of the Earth, the ridges and bumps^[2] would be between 10 and 200 meters high, and the peaks would be between one and three kilometers apart:

By Earth standards, this is quite smooth; our highest mountains are 40 times higher.

What would this bowling ball world (we’ll call it “Lebowski”) be like?

For starters, bowling balls are a lot less dense than rock, so Lebowski’s surface gravity would be a quarter the strength of Earth’s:

It would also (at first) have no atmosphere.

The finger holes would be about a thousand kilometers across and a few thousand kilometers deep.

On Earth, holes this big would expose the molten interior. But Lebowski doesn’t have a molten interior.

The Earth’s core is hot for two reasons: It’s still glowing from the heat of all the dust collapsing together when it formed, and it’s full of radioactive metals. Lebowski wouldn’t have either of these, so its core would start out cold.

The holes would be far too big to hold themselves open against gravity; On that scale, the polymers in the bowling ball would behave more like a liquid. In the space of about half an hour, the holes would undergo a slow-motion collapse.

As they collapsed, the material around the holes would heat to a glow. At the center of the hole, a white-hot jet of charred hydrocarbons would fountain outward into space.

When it was over, Lebowski would be left with massive scars, each marking the location where an abyss collapsed to form a molten sea.

And now, thanks to this question, whenever I look at the Moon, I’ll notice the Sea of Tranquility, the Sea of Serenity, and the Sea of Crisis, and I’ll think: Finger holes.

But that’s just, like, my opinion, man.

Telegraph.co.uk

Russia says it was robbed in Eurovision song contest Los Angeles Times MOSCOW — As might be expected, Russia's foreign minister spent his day Monday grappling with the biggest international crisis facing his country, an "outrageous incident" that has inflamed public passions. And Sergei Lavrov promised decisive action: an ... Joint probe into Russia's Eurovision votes 'stolen' in Azerbaijaneuronews Russia vows reprisals for 'stolen' song contest votes - USA TodayUSA TODAY Eurovision: Azerbaijan probes Russian 'nul points'BBC News Armenpress.am -San Jose Mercury News all 64 news articles »

Microsoft today unveiled the Xbox One, the third generation of its popular gaming console and the first significant hardware upgrade since 2005. With it, Microsoft continues a quest to be king of the living room and remains, at least in this market, a more innovative and successful company than Apple.

The new console has more storage, a faster processor, and more powerful graphics capabilities. Those upgrades come while Microsoft already dominates its market, outselling Sony’s Playstation and  Nintendo’s Wii U every month for the last 28.

But like all Xboxes before it, the Xbox One is not just a gaming product. Microsoft said today that the Xbox team is on a “new mission” to create the perfect an all-in-one entertainment system. The Xbox One connects traditional broadcast and cinematic media with social media, gesture-based controls, and intelligent recommendations. (The Verge has a good roundup of all the new features.)

Nearly every major video provider is already available on the Xbox system, from Amazon to YouTube. Verizon FiOs already allows subscribers to watch live TV through its Xbox 360 app. Comcast Xfinity TV subscribers can watch the service’s on-demand content, HBO has an app for its HBO Go service, and Netflix has a very popular app for Xbox, too. Even content owned by Microsoft competitor Sony can be found through the Paramount Movies and Sony Pictures apps.

Apple TV, by contrast, only offers access to eight services, and all of them are also available on Xbox.

With the launch of the Xbox One, Microsoft is adding a partnership with the NFL to provide live broadcasts paired with fantasy league statistics. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said during the announcement that “there’s no one better” than Microsoft in interactive entertainment.

Microsoft has sold 77.2 million Xbox 360s since 2005. In April, it reported $641 million in quarterly revenue from the system. Apple TV sales are not regularly disclosed but have been estimated to be much lower.

When the remote that shipped with Apple TV was first announced in 2005, Apple’s then-CEO Steve Jobs said it “captures what Apple is all about,” because it only had six buttons compared to the Windows Media Center remote, which had more than 40.

With its Xbox Kinect system, released in 2010 as a peripheral for the console, Microsoft dispensed with the remote control entirely. The Xbox One can be controlled simply through voice commands and body gestures. The Apple remote still has six buttons.

	rachel shared this story from The Daily Bunny:
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Thanks, Alysha and bunnies Blackberry and Hazel!

rachel shared this story from Boing Boing.

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Shapeways interviews the amazing Bathsheba Grossman, a sculptor who creates mathematics-inspired 3D printed objects that can be bought on the Shapeways store. I own a bunch of her pieces, and I never tire of staring at them and handling them.

I was originally a math major interested in geometry and topology, when as a college senior I met the remarkable sculptor Erwin Hauer, and suddenly it was obvious that what I had in mind was more art than math. Symmetry is the foundation of what I do: there are many more ways to be symmetrical in 3-space than the familiar ones, but not so many that you can't explore them all and delve into the most interesting ones. Over the years I've moved away from literal math -- as the field has grown I no longer feel called on to make nifty math models simply because no one else is doing it! -- and into more freewheeling biomorphic shapes. But although now I play more with suggesting and breaking it, now I believe I'll always be working in some way with symmetry.

... Let's start by saying that I love 3D printing the way it is. Before technology I worked with lost-wax casting, machining, fabricating, all by hand; since then I've watched artistic 3D printing grow from crude cornstarch parts to the sleek metal models that we see now, and I'm still over the moon about it. It's better and cheaper and more flexible than I ever hoped, and while I believe it will get better, if it never does I'll be perfectly happy doing just what I'm doing now.

Personally I'm most interested in archival materials, like metals, glass and ceramic as opposed to plastics and resins. Art buyers like them which is pretty important! In that area it seems like the last frontier is multi-materials: interlacing different metals, maybe metal with glass? Progress is slow because material science is hard. We wait in hope.

Something not mentioned in the interview: Bathsheba's twin brothers are Austin "YOU" Grossman and Lev "The Magicians" Grossman.

Designer Spotlight: Bathsheba Grossman

Just a few weeks after Cody Wilson and friends successfully fired an instance of their own 3-D printed handgun design, Sparrowvsrevolution writes, "a couple of Wisconsin hobbyist gunsmiths have already managed to adapt Defense Distributed's so-called Liberator firearm and print it on a $1,725 Lulzbot 3D printer, a consumer grade machine that's far cheaper than the industrial quality Stratasys machine Defense Distributed used. They then proceeded to record their cheaper gun (dubbed the 'Lulz Liberator') firing nine .380 rounds without any signs of cracking or melting. Eight of the rounds were fired from a single plastic barrel. (Defense Distributed only fired one through its prototype.) In total, the Lulz Liberator's materials cost around $25 and were printed over just 48 hours."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's a bit of reflection on my first semester teaching Unity at an art and design school, mixed undergrad / grad level. They're in the form of rough guidelines that I'm giving myself for next semester:

» Don't assume mastery of coding fundamentals. Some students will be able to formulate and solve abstract problems with little help, while other students will need to be taught the difference in syntax between variables and functions, repeatedly. Course prerequisites, even if enforced by your school's registar (at Parsons, they usually aren't), are no guarantee of mastery. In my class, I put a code comprehension section on the midterm exam, only to realize that some students didn't understand nested for() loops, which implies they don't fully grasp how unnested for() loops work either; but it was the midterm, and it was already too late. Some students didn't know how to use AND or OR, and some didn't understand scoping. I should've caught these problems earlier instead of unintentionally punishing them for it.
Recommendation: On the first or second week, conduct a diagnostic quiz that asks code comprehension questions, and assess which students need which kinds of help.

» Cover vector math, every day. Do light drilling. Even students with significant code experience may have trouble conceptualizing how vectors work together / what vector operations do, especially in 3D. I don't think I'd necessarily impose grade school drilling, like worksheets with 50 problems and 1 minute to solve all of them, but a few minutes or short drill, every day or week will help a lot.
Recommendation: At the start and end of each class, do some vector math problems together as a class. Practice thinking about vectors in multiple modes: visually as spatial coordinates, abstractly as sets of numbers, and procedurally as variables in code.

» Teach Maya and Unity, side by side, in parallel. I front-loaded the syllabus with Unity stuff, and only started Maya in the second half of the course. I think this was a mistake because we ended up having a 2 week break where students did very little code and focused on Maya, and it seemed to be like we were moving "backwards." I should've paced the class better to prevent this dead time.
Recommendation: When teaching the basics of 3D transformations in Unity, also teach the basics of 3D transformations in Maya, and emphasize the many similarities in interface and project organization: scene hierarchies, hotkeys, lights, materials handling, etc.

» Don't teach coroutines. I tried to teach this early in the course, and it ended up confusing a lot of people. Personally, I use coroutines constantly because I find them really useful for timing things... but maybe I shouldn't have projected my own practices on them.
Recommendation: Teach the use of timer variables and bookkeeping variables / using Time.time instead. It is worse practice sometimes, but it is a more immediately intuitive way of timing things, and reinforces fundamentals of controlling logic flow.

» End with procedural mesh generation / mutation? I really want this to be an "a-ha" moment of the course -- when students realize that everything is just a different way of storing data, and artists are just people who can figure out how to get the data looking and performing the way they want. Considering the emphasis on 3D, I think this is a much more coherent endpoint than my previous emphasis on AI and behavior.
Recommendation: If students have been working in Maya for a while and they understand for() loops, they might be ready to iterate through arrays of mesh data. Maybe look at implementing some Perlin noise or a simple sculpting tool.

This summer, I'm going to try to put these ideas into practice when teaching 6 week Unity intensives at NYU Game Center. Feel free to check-up on us on the class GitHubs (session 1) / (session 2).

IBM’s Watson has been helping clinicians diagnose ailments and bankers recommend the right products for customers, and with its latest job it will help brands provide better customer service and reach a wider audience.

2headedsnake:

Manuel Fernandez

‘30 frames per second’ Animated gif. Variable dimensions. 2012

30 frames per second is what the human eye can capture in a moving image, the piece explores the essential mechanics of the moving image. Reduces its execution to its literal description, creating another way of perception in the viewer’s relationship with his own time.

the-absolute-best-gifs:

This post has been featured on a 1000notes.com blog.

meme4u:

http://memeblock.com/

Jack Chick is best known as the creator of Chick Tracts, the little religious comics that predict dire fates for those who celebrate Halloween, read Harry Potter books, or adhere to any religion not approved by Chick. But how did he get his artistic chops?

At the Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum & Library Blog, Caitlin McGuirk posts a fascinating selection of Chick’s pre-tract comics, a caveman series from the 1950s titled Times Have Changed? Like The Flintstones and BC, both of which came later, the comics use modern-day gags in a caveman setting. The writer was P.F. Clayton, and Chick handled the art.

The vintage-comics blog Strippers Guide has more samples of Times Have Changed?, although when the post first went up, in 2008, they didn’t realize that the artist was that Chick. The official biography of Chick on his website says that he had liked to draw since he was a child, but there is no mention of his pre-tract comics: “He had always longed to be a professional cartoonist, but now as a Christian, he desired to use his artistic talents for the Lord.”

Looking at his early single-panel work, it’s hard to imagine that Chick would become the creator of a line of comics that would achieve such notoriety. Times Have Changed? looks like pretty much every single-panel cartoon published in the 1950s, with a fairly generic style and bland subject matter. The leap from that to the madness of Chick tracts such as Somebody Goofed shows considerable evolution, although not so much in skill as imagination — or maybe Chick was just bottling it up all along.

Laurent Durieux


Laurent Durieux

Laurent Durieux

The latest Call of Duty, dubbed Ghosts, has drafted Syriana and Traffic writer Stephen Gaghan to provide its fiction.

Games don't get more Hollywood than Call of Duty, and Activision has shown little hesitance in acquiring composers and writers from the silver screen to aid in its ever bigger and brasher efforts. Gaghan's work on Traffic, a dour crime drama, and political thriller Syriana made him a standout candidate for Ghosts. The game follows the remainder of the US military in a world scarred by a weapon of mass destruction.

According to developer Infinity Ward, Gaghan didn't swoop in and drop off a script - he requested an office, and worked from one amidst the game's single-player team all throughout the game's production. That's a sterling gesture, but I asked Call of Duty: Ghosts executive producer Mark Rubin to explain why Gaghan was deemed suitable to write for players, not viewers.

"Basically, we looked at his work - he's a great writer, no doubt about it and that's fine, there are probably lots of great writers out there," Rubin said. "So what we did is we actually got the chance to talk to him a long time before we decided to go forward with it. And we realized he was getting it. We've had writers before, and they know how to write, but they don't understand the game aspect of it.

"And I feel like with Gaghan, he really understood what we were trying to do. He asked more questions than try to sell himself, and that was, I think, a really big selling point. He was asking how things work and how we do things, and was really interested in how we craft the story, not from a writing standpoint but from the visuals and gameplay. He was really asking more questions. Although he was a gamer - he knew it from that side - he didn't know it from the dev side. He really was asking a lot of questions about the dev side, he really wanted to know more. I think that interest in what we were doing is really what drove us to him."

Call of Duty: Ghosts written by 'Syriana' and 'Traffic' scribe Stephen Gaghan originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 21 May 2013 13:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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shattered - Lucky & Wild (Namco - arcade - 1992)

requested by thats-beautiful-dad

Elementary has gotten some flak for being the "lesser" modern-day Sherlock Holmes. But now that its first season is over, we're realizing this show understands the Arthur Conan Doyle canon — it's just not afraid to ask questions. Here's why Elementary is the Sherlock Holmes we never knew we always needed.

Read more...

We've pulled together the very best minds at Joystiq Tech to analyse the all-important changes between the old Xbox logo (left), originally on the Xbox.com site, and a new logo (right) that's appeared today. After hours of heated discussion, they came to a consensus.

1. The font's a different color.
2. The sphere doesn't have the same sheen.
3. The X on the sphere is darker, and a bit wider, maybe

When asked what this all means, if anything, our hive-mind melted into a puddle before quickly evaporating into a steam cloud that drifted out of the window. Maybe we'll find out more in a few hours time.

Xbox logo undergoes subtle change on site ahead of next-gen reveal originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 21 May 2013 11:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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One of the most common questions I hear about the original 1962-63 run of "The Jetsons" is where are all the people of color?