'Star Wars' heading to the Magic Kingdom: Disney snags Lucasfilm

'Star Wars' heading to the Magic Kingdom: Disney snags Lucasfilm: The Hollywood giant is paying $4.05 billion for George Lucas' wholly-owned media empire. And Disney said the seventh 'Star Wars' film will be released in 2015, with Episodes 8 and 9 to follow. [Read more]

Disney Buys Lucasfilm, Announces New "Star Wars" Movie For 2015

Disney Buys Lucasfilm, Announces New "Star Wars" Movie For 2015: Less than three years after buying Marvel for $4 billion, The Walt Disney Company has announced it will acquire Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion in cash and stock. With the news arrives word of a new Star Wars movie for 2015.

What Is Daylight-Saving Time? | Wired Science | Wired.com

What Is Daylight-Saving Time? | Wired Science | Wired.com: Now let me assume an average price for energy at $0.1 per kilowatt*hour.  Of course, this price varies with location.  This would put the cost savings per day at $10 million dollars. If DLS is 200 days (I think it is actually 238), this would put a total yearly savings of $2 billion. That is compared to a gross domestic product of 14 trillion dollars for the USA.

Whedon Endorses Romney and His Vision for the Zombie Apocalypse

Whedon Endorses Romney and His Vision for the Zombie Apocalypse: Between prepping "The Avengers 2" and the "S.H.I.E.L.D." TV series, Joss Whedon found time to endorse Mitt Romney for President, finding common, post-apocalyptic ground with the candidate.

Sweet Home 3D 3.7 - Home interior design app.. (Free)

Sweet Home 3D 3.7 - Home interior design app.. (Free):

Sweet Home 3D is a free interior design application that helps you placing your furniture on a house 2D plan, with a 3D preview.

Rewriting the Marilyn Monroe story | TLS

Rewriting the Marilyn Monroe story | TLS: Banner, on the other hand, makes the event central to her understanding of Monroe: such abuse, she says, “can fragment a personality, producing, in Marilyn’s case, multiple alters”. It can also supposedly “produce lesbianism” – Banner claims credit for a new emphasis on Monroe’s possible bisexuality – “sex addiction, exhibitionism”. The catalogue of diagnoses here is a long one, including dyslexia and a stammer (Monroe linked its appearance to being assaulted and then disbelieved), bipolar and dissociative disorders, and endometriosis that required multiple operations over the years. It seems a little strange to add sex addiction to the list: Banner’s phrasing – “she covered untoward behaviour with a mask of good intentions, justifying her promiscuity through advocating a free-love philosophy” – makes it unclear whether she thinks promiscuity automatically counts as a disorder, and also somewhat undermines the portrait she wants to draw later on of Monroe as a genuine sexual radical.

Hands on with iBooks 3

Hands on with iBooks 3: In addition to unveiling a slew of new hardware on Tuesday, Apple also announced version 3 of iBooks, its reading app for the iPad and iPhone. We’ll have a full review soon, but in the meantime, here are some early impressions from our initial hands-on experience with the app.

Apple Introduces iPad mini

Apple Introduces iPad mini: Apple today introduced iPad mini, a thinner, lighter iPad design that fits in one hand. It features a stunning 7.9-inch Multi-Touch display, FaceTime HD and iSight cameras, ultrafast wireless performance, and 10 hours of battery life. Apple today also announced the fourth-generation
iPad featuring a 9.7-inch Retina display, new Apple-designed A6X chip, ultrafast wireless, and the new Lightning connector. iPad mini with Wi-Fi starts at $329 (U.S.), and the fourth-generation iPad with Wi-Fi starts at $499 (U.S.). They’ll be available for pre-order at the Apple Online Store on October 26 and arrive in Apple Retail Stores starting at 8:00 a.m. on November 2.

How to Create Fuel out of Thin Air

How to Create Fuel out of Thin Air: A small British company has developed a process that uses air and electricity to create synthetic fuel. Yes, it's slightly more complicated than that, but the result is what Air Fuel Synthesis is calling "carbon-neutral" gasoline.

Apple to stream special event online via Safari for Mac, iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and via Apple TV starting at 10am PDT

Apple to stream special event online via Safari for Mac, iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and via Apple TV starting at 10am PDT: Watch a live video stream of the special event online or via Apple TV starting at...

Apple to stream today's event to Apple TV

Apple to stream today's event to Apple TV: The company has quietly added an "Apple Events" app to its set-top box, allowing users to view a live stream of the event widely expected to bring the iPad Mini. [Read more]

How to fix drive-permissions problem in OS X

How to fix drive-permissions problem in OS X: When the setting to ignore permissions on secondary hard drives keeps toggling off, blocking access, here's what to try. [Read more]

Arts & Letters Daily (22 Oct 2012)

Arts & Letters Daily (22 Oct 2012):

A life in books. Joe Queenan can't stop touching them, smelling them, scribbling in them, and reading them - 6,128 of them, to be exact... more

Reading George Steiner. Polyglot polymath? Glorified dilettante? Eurocentric blowhard? Amit Majmadur has some thoughts... more

The greatest artist of our time? It's the man who closed the gap between art and technology. It's George Lucas, or so says Camille Paglia... more

What Can You Really Know? by Freeman Dyson | The New York Review of Books

What Can You Really Know? by Freeman Dyson | The New York Review of Books: Holt is a splitter and I am a lumper. Philosophers are mostly splitters, dividing their ways of thinking into narrow specialties such as theism or deism or humanism or panpsychism or axiarchism. Examples of each of these isms are to be seen in Holt’s collection. I find it more convenient to lump them into two big groups, one obsessed with matter and the other obsessed with mind. Holt asks them to explain why the world exists. For the materialists, the question concerns the origin of space and time and particles and fields, and the relevant branch of science is physics. For the Platonists, the question concerns the origin of meaning and purpose and consciousness, and the relevant science is psychology.

Add Hollywood-style effects to your iOS videos

Add Hollywood-style effects to your iOS videos: Freemium app Action Movie FX comes from Bad Robot Interactive, the software arm of the studio behind "Star Trek" and "Super 8." So, yeah, they know special effects. [Read more]

Create a music video with iMovie '11

Create a music video with iMovie '11: Perhaps you or a musician friend have a song, and you need a music video to help promote it and your band. Or maybe your son or daughter wants to create a video for a song they wrote and recorded. The good news is, you don’t need a mega-budget: just some creativity, a quality camera, friends and family (for potential extras), and iMovie ’11 to edit your masterpiece.

iCloud: Sharing done wrong

iCloud: Sharing done wrong: Looking at iCloud in particular, it seems that Apple's approach to sharing is almost antithetical to the concept itself. The online service rigidly defines what you can share and how you can share it; its primary directive often seems to be to keep you inside Apple’s ecosystem.

Indeed, Apple’s idea of making all of your files accessible to you from anywhere through iCloud overlooks two specific user needs: Sometimes you want to open files in multiple programs, and sometimes more than one person needs access to a file.

Eight ways to connect to a server

Eight ways to connect to a server: When you have to copy files from one Mac to another, make big files available to others, or get files from your company’s shared volumes, you need to connect to a server. It may be a file server, a NAS (network-attached server), or just another Mac on your network. You probably already know a basic way to perform this everyday task, but is that method the quickest and most convenient? Here are eight ways you can connect to a server.

Amazon's Whispercast for Kindle targets schools, businesses

Amazon's Whispercast for Kindle targets schools, businesses: New free online tool allows organizations to manage a "fleet of Kindles" and wirelessly distribute Kindle books, documents and apps. [Read more]

Peeling Away Healthcare's Sticker Shock

Peeling Away Healthcare's Sticker Shock: The health care industry plays a gigantic game of Blind Man's Bluff, keeping patients in the dark while asking them to make life-and-death decisions. The odds that they will make the best choice are negligible and largely depend on chance. Patients need to have data, including costs and their own medical histories, liberated and made freely available for thorough analysis. What health care needs is a window sticker; a transparent, good-faith effort at making prices clear and setting market forces to work.

the new wounded by catherine malabou - bookforum.com / daily review

the new wounded by catherine malabou - bookforum.com / daily review: In the 1600s, French philosopher René Descartes split the world into two kinds of stuff: material stuff subject to the laws of physics and immaterial stuff that operates according to some other set of rules. He argued that the human body is material but the mind is immaterial, relegating it to what the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle famously called "a ghost in the machine." But even Descartes, years after articulating his theory of the mind-body divide, amended it to suggest that the physical brain might act as an intermediary between the two. In his revised theory, the "spirits" of the mind worked on the tiny, almond-shaped pineal gland, sending messages through the brain, which issued commands to the rest of the body. Modern neuroscience has shown this amendment to be false (we now know the pineal as an endocrine gland that secretes hormones), but Descartes' dualism is still deeply, some would say perniciously, embedded in the language we use to talk about brain and mind.

The five weirdest Macs of all time

The five weirdest Macs of all time: However, if a company produces hundreds of computer models, chances are that a few might come out looking a little too distinctive, little too unique, or little too weird. Here are the five weirdest Macs ever released by Apple.

The other 1 percent: Audiophiles | The Audiophiliac - CNET News

The other 1 percent: Audiophiles | The Audiophiliac - CNET News: High-end gear can be expensive, but it can provide decades of enjoyment. A pair of Magnepan MMG flat-panel speakers ($600), an NAD C 326BEE integrated amplifier ($550), and a Pro-Ject Carbon turntable ($400) would make for a very respectable budget high-end system. Some folks spend as much as that system's cost on Starbucks or beer in a year, but a comparable system with used gear would be an even more affordable way to be part of the 1 percent audiophile "elite." My $70 starter system would still qualify as a hi-fi, so cost shouldn't stop anyone from joining the 1 percent club.

Mac classics: Why BBEdit rules

Mac classics: Why BBEdit rules: But the real reason for BBEdit’s endurance is that it has the one crucial characteristic shared by every truly great creative work: It has a purpose beyond the way it articulates its immediate function. Casablanca is a black-and-white movie displayed in the wrong aspect ratio with mono sound, starring people who are long dead and who are portraying characters under threat from a war that ended nearly 70 years ago.

And yet it still feels relevant. At its core, the story is about human relationships, sacrifice, and understanding. The sets and the dialogue are just ways of expressing that simple core. It’s about something universal and permanent.

Great apps are no different. They’re great because they’re about something. Every decision that Bare Bones Software has made about BBEdit since 1991 has been informed by that singled-mindedness, which is why it remains an important tool for any task that involves pressing buttons labeled with letters and numbers.

Do more with Mountain Lion’s Contacts

Do more with Mountain Lion’s Contacts: Among the many things your Mac is tasked to do is to help you stay in touch with other people. And the first step in doing so is to have some notion of how to contact them—through email, snail mail, phone, chat, FaceTime, and social networking services. The repository for this vital information is Mountain Lion’s Contacts application. Formerly known as Address Book, Contacts is often overlooked, since many people think that the job it handles is mundane. But Contacts has hidden depths, including the ability to pull in Twitter handles and Facebook friends automatically, sync Google contacts, display a map of a contact’s address, and help you put faces to names.

Getting started with Messages

Getting started with Messages: When OS X Mountain Lion first appeared, many veteran iChat users fired up the new Messages chat program, poked around a bit, and then quit it in despair. Eventually, some of us relaunched it and began to slog around in it, figuring out how to use the new app to do what we wanted to do, but still we felt a bit lost.

If that sounds familiar to you, perhaps I can help. Now that I’ve muddled through Messages more thoroughly, I think I can provide guidance on how to make the switch from iChat to Messages, for people who still haven’t made the switch.

Power management hot keys in OS X

Power management hot keys in OS X: If you need to shut down or restart your Mac, you can do so using quick hot-key sequences. [Read more]

Sleep the display
A final power mode option that Apple supports is display sleep, which can be handy for quickly killing the output to your monitor without shutting down the system, sleeping your computer, or turning off your monitor if you have an external display. This will maintain full function of your system, so you can continue any ongoing tasks you have running. To do this, press Shift-Control-Eject on your keyboard.

How EA keeps its Simpson game alive and kicking

How EA keeps its Simpson game alive and kicking: EA has released a healthy set of updates that are timely and connect to the show, keeping the game relevant for players. [Read more]

Bling! Researchers create 24k gold in the lab

Bling! Researchers create 24k gold in the lab: There's gold in them thar chlorides! Researchers at Michigan State University figure out how to transmute a toxic chemical compound into solid gold. [Read more]

Review: Record and replay live radio with TuneIn Radio Pro for iOS

Review: Record and replay live radio with TuneIn Radio Pro for iOS: With an abundance of radio and podcast apps swarming the App Store, any new radio app has to bring something different (or better) to the table in order to grab your attention. TuneIn Radio Pro—a $1 app for iPhone and iPad—does just that: it creates a sort of audio DVR for your iOS device.

Apps like iHeartRadio already provide access to thousands of radio station streams for users to listen to on their iPhone or iPad. Stitcher Radio combines that live stream access with a podcast library that lets users create an audio-on-demand experience. But TuneIn Radio Pro, on the other hand, has radio feeds from 70,000 stations and reportedly more than 2 million podcast selections, while also offering users the option to record live radio feeds.

Pot legalization struggles in Oregon, thrives in Washington, Colorado

Pot legalization struggles in Oregon, thrives in Washington, Colorado:

More than $4 million has flowed to Washington and close to a million in Colorado. Yet in Oregon — a state with one of the nation's highest rates of pot use and a reputation for pushing the boundaries on marijuana laws — organizers are looking at a bank account with just $1,800.

Glass Works: How Corning Created the Ultrathin, Ultrastrong Material of the Future | Wired Science | Wired.com

Glass Works: How Corning Created the Ultrathin, Ultrastrong Material of the Future | Wired Science | Wired.com: Don Stookey knew he had botched the experiment. One day in 1952, the Corning Glass Works chemist placed a sample of photosensitive glass inside a furnace and set the temperature to 600 degrees Celsius. At some point during the run, a faulty controller let the temperature climb to 900 degrees C. Expecting a melted blob of glass and a ruined furnace, Stookey opened the door to discover that, weirdly, his lithium silicate had transformed into a milky white plate. When he tried to remove it, the sample slipped from the tongs and crashed to the floor. Instead of shattering, it bounced.

The future National Inventors Hall of Fame inductee didn’t know it, but he had just invented the first synthetic glass-ceramic, a material Corning would later dub Pyroceram. Lighter than aluminum, harder than high-carbon steel, and many times stronger than regular soda-lime glass, Pyroceram eventually found its way into everything from missile nose cones to chemistry labs. It could also be used in microwave ovens, and in 1959 Pyroceram debuted as a line of space-age serving dishes: Corningware.

How to connect to a Windows machine from OS X

How to connect to a Windows machine from OS X: Apple supports several ways to establish file-sharing connections with Windows PCs. [Read more]

'It’s hard to prepare for a once-in-a century storm'

'It’s hard to prepare for a once-in-a century storm':

Nearly half a century after it ripped through the Pacific Northwest, people still talk about the Columbus Day storm of 1962 – and with good reason. It is one of the deadliest weather events in Oregon's history.

With wind gusts measured at 145 miles per hour – and peak velocity that may have reached as high as 175 mph, the storm demolished trees, homes and lives.

During the storm, the pressure level dropped to at least 960 millibars, Dello said, which is equivalent to a Category 3 hurricane. The contrast with the high pressure system to the north intensified the storm, which swept up the Willamette Valley leaving a swath of destruction.

The manually operated wind gauge in Corvallis recorded a gust of 127 mph, before the operator fled, leaving a note behind that merely stated, “abandoned station.” Sustained winds, of a minute or longer in duration, reached as high as 69 mph.

Cape Blanco, regarded as perhaps the windiest spot along the coast, recorded the highest official gust – 145 mph. But the entire western portion of the state was battered, Dello said, by amazingly strong gusts and sustained periods of high winds. Portland recorded a gust of 116 mph near the Morrison Street Bridge. Mount Hebo Air Force Station recorded a gust of 130 mph.

As the storm began, it dumped heavy rain on California, forcing the postponement of a World Series game between the San Francisco Giants and the New York Yankees. As it moved into Oregon, the rain lessened but the winds intensified with the pressure change.

Some reports say the storm damaged as many trees in Oregon and Washington as the combined annual timber harvest of both states. Power was not only knocked out throughout western Oregon, but entire distribution systems were destroyed and some communities went weeks without electricity.

Kids post Facebook pics of themselves burglarizing house

Kids post Facebook pics of themselves burglarizing house: Some teens allegedly break into a house, have a party and then post the evidence on Facebook. Oh, and they tag themselves too. [Read more]

'Star Trek' fusion impulse engine in the works | Crave - CNET

'Star Trek' fusion impulse engine in the works | Crave - CNET: "The fusion fuel we're focusing on is deuterium [a stable isotope of hydrogen] and Li6 [a stable isotope of the metal lithium] in a crystal structure," Txchnologist quotes team member and aerospace engineering Ph.D. candidate Ross Cortez saying. "That's basically dilithium crystals we're using." Let's pause and savor that for a moment. Dilithium crystals. Awesome.

My day with Siri

My day with Siri: The iOS virtual assistant has learned to respond accurately to a variety of new instructions. You can now use Siri to get information about movies, sports, restaurant reviews, and reservations, in addition to testing its know-how regarding weather, stocks, and the like. You can also use Siri to post to Facebook and Twitter, launch apps, and get directions—and that’s all in addition to its ability to set timers, send messages, perform searches, and more.

I now find myself using Siri throughout the day, for a wide variety of tasks and queries. Here's how one such day might go.

Review: TV Guide Mobile for iOS

Review: TV Guide Mobile for iOS: If you like a traditional list-type guide to find what’s on, TV Guide’s free app is a solid choice.

Spouting Nonsense About Apple's Secret Hedge Fund - Forbes

Spouting Nonsense About Apple's Secret Hedge Fund - Forbes: So as to Zero Hedge’s insistence that we don’t know anything about what Apple is doing with Apple’s cash I think we can refute that. For of course the company, Braeburn, that Apple uses to manage said cash is a subsidiary of Apple. And thus appears, consolidated, in Apple’s accounts. So if we want to know what Braeburn is doing we should go and read Apple’s accounts.

Apple subsidiary Braeburn tapped as 'world's biggest hedge fund'

Apple subsidiary Braeburn tapped as 'world's biggest hedge fund': The hedge fund reportedly had $117.2 billion in assets under management, besting Bridgewater, which had $100 billion. [Read more]