Living

Aug 11, 2012 9:00 PM   Yes. I'm going there. While considered to be one of the worst movies ever, I maintain that watching Battlefield Earth can be a fun, education experience so long as you pair it with two things: friends and alcohol. Obviously I'm coming at this from the "so bad, it's good; let's all laugh at someone else's horrifying inadequacy while tacitly patting ourselves on the back for not having failed so miserably in such a public way" angle, but that's not the only way to come at it. If you're interested in the mechanics of how good fiction works, how the seams are sewn, and how the pieces fit together, there's only so much to learn from good examples. Yeah, good movies are actually enjoyable on a level other than the ironic, but the gears are hidden. Battlefield Earth lets you see how the mechanisms of story-telling work by showing you how bad they can fail. Really bad. Battlefield Earth is streaming on Netflix now, so if yo...

How close does a video call come to replicating actual human contact? What if that call is the only contact you have with the outside world while in prison—does that change the calculus at all? Apparently so, for inmates in the District of Columbia Department of Corrections. The department's installed 108 video units, split between its jails and a Video Visitation Center at the District of Columbia General Hospital. That seems like a net positive on the surface, but it's actually a contentious topic: The District of Columbia made the switch on July 25 to video visitation, a growing trend in the corrections field. To proponents, the video systems provide a more convenient, safer, thriftier alternative to in-person visits. Some jurisdictions even make money, by charging for the video visits. Critics, including prisoner advocates and corrections officers concerned with how prisoners fare once they are released, fear that the video visits allow less meaningful contact with family ...

Aug 2, 2012 10:20 AM   The information about Apple's early iPhone prototypes and concepts just keeps coming. According to a court filing, Apple considered building a phone with shaped glass, but it never happened because it would have cost too much cash money. Look at those images above. Trippy concept, right? Network World discovered the deposition of former Apple designer Douglas Satzger, in which he details the curvy wonder. Satzger worked as a top level industrial designer at Apple from 1996 to 2008, and he is now the VP of Industrial Design at Intel. The idea was to put rounded glass on the top and bottom of the iPhone instead of the flat panels we have today. But as with the aluminum iPhone prototypes we learned about, the design and manufacture of the shaped-glass phone was deemed too complicated and expensive to be feasible: The technology in shaping the glass, the cost relative to shaping the glass at the time, and some of the design features of this specific shape were ...

Jul 29, 2012 3:30 PM   In February, the founders of notorious file-sharing having The Pirate Bay were ordered to pay out $675,000 to music labels; the money was intended to compensate the artists whose royalties had been depleted by piracy. Guess what? They're not going to see a dime. The problem, as reported by Torrent Freak, is two-fold. First, it's been terrifically difficult to recover that money from the Pirate Bay defendants. No surprise there. But even if and when that money does get collected, it's already been promised to IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry), an anti-piracy group. Sorry, musicians! You get nothing. The biggest losers when music gets pirated are, without question, the artists. Regardless of how you feel about the dumbheadedness of the RIAA and the labels it represents, the people who actually depend on royalties for their livelihood have every right to be ticked when their songs are acquired through file-sharing channels. W...

Jul 27, 2012 11:00 PM   If you're reading this post there's a pretty good chance you're doing so on a computer. You're probably sitting in a wonderfully ergonomic office chair too. We have Charles Darwin to thank for the latter—sort of. Darwin was a notorious workaholic. Though he spent many years gallivanting around the world collecting specimens, at some point he had to sit down and actually study them. Office chairs hadn't been invented yet, so Darwin slapped some wheels on the to feet of his chair so he could work faster. It's basically an armchair on wheels which isn't what we're used to, but it was ahead of its time. It took people a long time to accept Decent of Man , too. The office chair actually went into mass production long before Darwin's ideas were widely embraced. But we have industrialization to thank for its advent. With the rise of the clerical worker in the second half of the 19th century, office chairs were adopted to facilitate...

Jul 24, 2012 4:20 PM   "Oh my god! Is that a naked lady drowning in a river? We must help. Call backup! I'm going in after her." That must've been what 18 policemen in Shandong, China were thinking when they saw a 'woman' submerged in the river—embarrassingly for the police, it wasn't a real person they rescued but a sex doll. Yes, a deflated and dirtied sex doll where personal parts are inserted for human pleasure. Even more embarrassing though, is that the policemen (all 18 of 'em!) spent nearly an hour trying to rescue the doll. Aren't those things supposed to be cooperative? What were all 18 policemen even doing? Trying to compete against each other to see who could rescue the naked lady? Working on a pickup line? Not one of them thought, hey, maybe she looks like a fake person? Combining this hilarious incident with the mistaken mushroom identity of a sex toy that happened a month ago in China, it's clear that someone needs to give Chin...

Jul 22, 2012 12:49 PM   Google's Nexus 7 tablet is so popular that sales had to be suspended to try to catch up with demand. Units that were ordered up until last week will be delivered on time. The shortage comes because Google was taken totally off guard by how popular the 16GB model would be. It had expected the $200 8GB model to be the big seller. That hasn't happened, though. Instead, the $250 16GB model has been a massive, surprising success. This will probably be a minor setback at worst for Google and the Nexus 7. But hopefully it's also a wakeup call for Google and its competitors that the battle to catch the iPad isn't just a race to the bottom. [Guardian via Techmeme] View the original article here This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.