firehose

RocketAcademy writes "The Lone Star State is moving to become a leader in spaceport development. The Houston Airport System is officially moving ahead with plans to turn Ellington Airport, near NASA's Johnson Space Center, into an FAA-licensed commercial spaceport. The airport system has completed a feasibility study for turning the field into a spaceport for suborbital spacecraft such as Virgin Galactic's SpaceShip Two and XCOR's Lynx. In the longer term, spacecraft could link Houston to Singapore in as little as three hours, according to airport system director Mario Diaz. Meanwhile, state Representative Rene Oliveira (D-Brownsville) introduced a bill that would allow county commissioners to close a local beach for launches from the proposed SpaceX launch site in Cameron County. The bill is part of a flood of spaceport-related legislation that has been introduced recently in the Texas legislature."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Frank Gehry. Architectural Review v.165 n.987 May 1979: 282 | RNDRD

"Give me yesterday’s Bread, this Day’s Flesh, and last Year’s Cider.”

“I don’t understand, you don’t have the technology.” OK, so it’s not actually a futuristic tool with the same capabilities as the one off the hit TV series Dr. Who, but this homemade “sonic screwdriver” is a multifunction device that’s pretty cool nonetheless.

Created around an Arduino Pro Mini, [Gunther] really one-upped the last screwdriver we featured. Built in functions include: brown note tone generator, dog whistle, EMF meter, flashlight, IR universal remote, laser pointer, ohm meter, sound level meter, voltage detector, and a voltage meter.  You can also have an electromagnet or output voltage supply if you want. If that wasn’t enough, it can even play the theme song from Star Wars! Whew. That’s a mouthful of functionality.

Although he has posted the Arduino code, you’ll have to keep an eye on his site for more details if you want to create your own. He’s mentioned that he’s working on blue prints and a full parts list… Awesome. Now where’s that lock pick function?

Check out a video showing off some of the features after the break.

[via Make]

Filed under: arduino hacks

Where is best to be a working woman in the rich world

IF YOU are a working woman, you would do well to move to New Zealand—or if that is a little out of the way, you could try one of the Nordic countries. To mark International Women’s Day, The Economist has compiled its own “glass-ceiling index” to show where women have the best chance of equal treatment at work. Based on data mainly from the OECD, it compares five indicators across 26 countries: the number of men and women respectively with tertiary education; female labour-force participation; the male-female wage gap; the proportion of women in senior jobs; and net child-care costs relative to the average wage. The first four are given equal weighting, the fifth a lower one, since not all working women have children. New Zealand scores high on all the indicators. Finland does best on education; Sweden has the highest female labour-force participation rate, at 78%; and Spain has the smallest wage gap, at 6%. The places not to be are South Korea and Japan, partly because so few women hold down senior jobs (though the new president of South Korea is a woman).

 

dakohli writes "Michael Geist has pointed out an interesting development at the National Post's website. 'If you try to highlight the text to cut and paste it, you are presented with a pop-up request to purchase a license if you plan to post the article to a website, intranet or a blog. The fee would be $150.' He notes that even if you are highlighting a 3rd party quote inside an article a pop-up asking if you want a license will appear. Mr Geist points out this might be contrary to Canadian Copyright Law's fair use provisions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“

3D printing technology has helped replace 75 percent of a patient’s skull with the approval of U.S. regulators.

The 3D-printed implant can replace the bone in people’s skulls damaged by disease or trauma, according to Oxford Performance Materials. The company announced it had received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for its skull implant on Feb. 18 — a decision that led to the first U.S. surgical operation on March 4.

“We see no part of the orthopedic industry being untouched by this,” said Scott DeFelice, president of Oxford Performance Materials.

”

- 3D-Printed Skull Implant Ready for Operation - Yahoo! News

By Adam Smith on March 7th, 2013 at 6:00 pm.

Cyberpunk is back, folks, even though I’m not entirely sure it ever went away. I’m not talking about Google attaching spectacles to your neural cortex and uploading your dreams to Youtube, I’m talking about the return of Shadowrun, Deus Ex and, of course, Cyberpunk 2077. Like an Englishman who is too lazy to make a proper meal on a Sunday afternoon, games have got chips on the brain. Net Gain, currently on Kickstarter, could stand tall in that proud company. It’s Uplink but you’re the corporation. It’s Covert Action with more complex strategies. Oh yes.

Level Zero are hoping to have a playable prototype ready in a few months, so for now all we have to go on is the concept and the huge amount of detail on the Kickstarter page. It’s a superb concept though.

In Net Gain, the player takes on the role of a corporate broker, hired by a powerful conglomerate to sabotage their competitors by any means. You’re in charge of investigating targets, planning missions, assembling teams, and leading the operation to success. All in a world that’s rapidly changing every day…

Net Gain promises to be both cyberpunk simulation and high-strategy game. Of course, we won’t know how well it works until the prototype and full game are with us, but I’m willing to be at least a little excited by the prospect.

The Kickstarter campaign has started well, raising over $12,000 of its $16,000 total with more than three weeks left on the clock. Twenty dollars is the minimum pledge for a copy of the game, which includes access to the prototype as soon as it is released.

I can’t mention Covert Action without expressing regret that there hasn’t already been an updated version and also recognising that it has the worst boxart in the history of the universe. Do you know of worse boxart? I cannot believe that you do.

For years, the Tommy Wiseau film The Room has been celebrated as one of the worst films ever made, eliciting a devoted following of people who enjoy bad acting, worse writing, and inexplicable football-throwing. Nearly two years ago, Greg Sestero—the best friend turned wife-stealer in The Room—announced he was writing a book about his experience with the film, but it looks like it’s finally happening. Via the Instagram account of McNally’s Cristin Stickles comes the above image, and Sestero recently told the UK’s The Independent that it’s due out in October. It’s called The Disaster Artist, and it should be catnip for spoon-throwing Room devotees. Bonus: It was written with Tom Bissell, who covered The Room for Harper’s, and whose “Expensive Trips Nowhere” was adapted into the acclaimed film The Loneliest Planet. 

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Hey, I just got the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon demo

And this is… what happens when you meet Swanna in PMD: Gates to Infinity. Shout outs to Karkachu for taking a photo of this convo and posting it online. Additional out-shouting to the eShop for being so awesome today.

PREORDER Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity (March 24)

Age of Empires 2 HD is taking over Steam on April 9, and until that day it's 10 percent off, or $18. Age of Empires 2 HD is a revamped version of the 1999 real-time strategy game from Ensemble Studios, now under the care of Hidden Path Entertainment.

Age of Empires 2 HD heading to Steam on April 9 originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 07 Mar 2013 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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F-Zero GX for GameCube was one of a pair of games. It was released concurrently with F-Zero AX, a game designed for the Sega/Namco/Nintendo "Triforce" arcade platform, which connected to the home game via memory cards to unlock tracks. AX had arcade-style timed gameplay, along with those tracks.

Modder "Ralf" found that the full code for the arcade game is hidden on the GameCube disc - and accessible with a series of codes for the Action Replay cheat device. The long list of codes is found on The Cutting Room Floor (a site which, if this is your first visit, you're welcome).

Now, someone go peek in Mario Kart: Double Dash and see if Arcade GP is in there.

Full F-Zero AX arcade game discovered in F-Zero GX originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 07 Mar 2013 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mister Bubbles Mission Briefing (Paranoia) (by Kumeelyun)

“In modern America we believe racism to be the property of the uniquely villainous and morally deformed, the ideology of trolls, gorgons and orcs. We believe this even when we are actually being racist.”

Ta-Nehise Coats: The Good, Racist People

starcock:

pureironimpala:

myedol:

Street Performer Plays Crystal Glasses

An incredible street performer recreates Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen using nothing more than water and wine glasses. I have no idea who this person is, or where he’s from, but this is mesmerising and I’ve never seen anything like it before.

[via: Devour]

WHEN HE SHAKES THE TABLE OMG

i’m-

apiphile:

essequamviderinunc:

Kailashnath Temple, also Kailash Temple or Kailasanath Temple is a famous temple dug…in the wall of a high basalt cliff in the complex located at Ellora, Maharashtra, India. It is a megalith carved out of one single rock. It was built in the 8th century by the Rashtrakuta king Krishna I.

The Kailash Temple is notable for its vertical excavation—carvers started at the top of the original rock, and excavated downward.

It is estimated that about 400,000 tons of rocks was scooped out over hundreds of years to construct this monolithic structure.

INDIAN HISTORY LITERALLY NEVER MANAGES TO BE BORING OR EVEN TBQH SHORT OF BREATH-TAKING 

Portlandia

An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from Geek.com: "In what must be a big blow for EA and Maxis, Amazon has stopped selling download copies of the just released SimCity. The game has at time of writing received 833 reviews on Amazon, and has an average rating of just one star. That's because 740 of those are one star reviews. Only 20 people gave it 5 stars. There's few better ways to gauge how a game has been received, and this is pretty damning as to how EA has handled the launch."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

First time accepted submitter Curupira writes "The official WebM blog announced that MPEG LA has licensed all VP8 essential patents to Google Inc., allowing the company to sublicense the described techniques it to any VP8 user on a royalty-free basis." TechCrunch offers a bit more analysis.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

fuck yeah Red Sonja

"Thank you all for coming to this retrospective on the work of Robert Rodriguez, here at the Film Society of Underwater New Denver. The career of Mexican-American filmmaker Robert Rodriguez is one of steady maturation, a flowering that can be measured in the many, incrementally idiosyncratic places he found throughout his oeuvre to stick guns. Let's begin the slide show.

The guitar case full of weapons seen in El Mariachi—the work of an inventive, yet clearly novice director still learning the cinematic language of where one can stick guns—soon gave way to the machine-gun guitars and rocket-launching and flame-throwing guitar cases of Desperado and Once Upon A Time In Mexico. These, in turn, led to Rodriguez’s experiments with sticking guns in crotches and on amputated legs in From Dusk Till Dawn and Planet Terror—stylistic innovations that signified the filmmaker was finally claiming his own authorial ...

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Studies of Symmetry by Koji Tajima

LoL by: Unknown (via The Doghouse Diaries)

Tagged: dogs , best friends , comic Share on Facebook

Immediately invalidating our suggestion that Alejandro González Iñárritu’s upcoming Birdman should cast Jack Nicholson in the role of the actor who drives Michael Keaton’s retired superhero crazy, through some combination of unreasonable demands and deadly laughing gas, Deadline reports that the part has instead gone to Edward Norton. Norton—who obviously has his own history of being an egomaniacal jerk to directors, adding yet another layer of self-reference to this thing—joins the cast that also includes Emma Stone, Zach Galifianakis, and his former Painted Veil co-star Naomi Watts. Presumably midway through the film, Norton’s character gets so out of control that he transforms into a giant rage-monster and rampages through the city, and only Keaton’s Birdman can stop him. Make the movie like we say!

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le Bat

Hot Wheels

He never took a piece of direction, ever! 

More technion related stuff

It seems "Sex" doesn’t sell, at least through Apple. The new series by Joe Casey and Piotr Kowalski debuted Wednesday in print and digital, but not via any Apple iOS apps. ROBOT 6 has the full story.