A History Of Violence Edge Master Class 2011 | Conversation | Edge

A History Of Violence Edge Master Class 2011 | Conversation | Edge: What may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history is that violence has gone down, by dramatic degrees, and in many dimensions all over the world and in many spheres of behavior: genocide, war, human sacrifice, torture, slavery, and the treatment of racial minorities, women, children, and animals.

Galaxy Clusters Back Up Einstein's Theory of Relativity

Galaxy Clusters Back Up Einstein's Theory of Relativity: Researchers have validated general relativity on cosmic scales using data collected from 8,000 galaxy clusters.

Amazon Kindle Fire tablet: $199, 7-inch screen, ships Nov. 15 - latimes.com

Amazon Kindle Fire tablet: $199, 7-inch screen, ships Nov. 15 - latimes.com: A look at the specs of the Kindle Fire reaffirms the idea that the focus of this tablet is consuming media -- and consuming it directly from Amazon.

US cable TV may unbundle to stem tide of Internet video

US cable TV may unbundle to stem tide of Internet video: US cable and satellite providers signaled Tuesday that they wanted to unbundle their channel packages to stave off the incursion of Internet video and a tough economy. DirecTV, Mediacom, Suddenlink, and others are pushing the FCC and others to alter retransmission fee systems and let them sell access by the channel so that they can lower the actual cost of selling TV services. At costs as high as $4 per month just for ESPN and now with normally free-to-air networks charging for access, they argued to Reuters and others that they were forced to charge high prices....

Apple to hold iPhone special event on Oct. 4

Apple to hold iPhone special event on Oct. 4: Apple sent invites to the press on Tuesday, announcing an iPhone-themed special event on October 4, beginning at 10 a.m. Pacific.

The ultimate utility bike? Maybe it's an e-bike | Gaming and Culture - CNET News

The ultimate utility bike? Maybe it's an e-bike | Gaming and Culture - CNET News: A new effort from the Palo Alto, Calif., design consultancy Ideo and Santa Cruz, Calif., bike builder Rock Lobster Custom Cycles may have pushed the industry a step closer to achieving the goal. The team created a bike for the Oregon Manifest 2011 Constructor's Design Challenge, a bike building competition pitting three teams of designers and handcrafted bike builders. Their goal: create the best utility bike for urban living.

Apple's 'Assistant' Seen as Key Feature for New iPhone Hardware

Apple's 'Assistant' Seen as Key Feature for New iPhone Hardware: Assistant will also reportedly integrate a conversational aspect in which the system can ask the user questions to clarify and refine its understanding of what is being requested.
The system will actually speak back and forth with the user to gain the most information in order to provide the best results. The user essentially can hold a conversation with their iPhone like it is another human being.

Assistant is also said to integrate with WolframAlpha, allowing users to obtain answers to factual questions using the service's computational capabilities.

The report notes that the sophisticated voice features will require the new iPhone hardware from Apple, relying on the company's A5 system-on-a-chip and a bump in RAM to 1 GB to support the heavy workload.

CBR Readers Rank "Batwoman" #1 Top Title of the New 52: Wave 2

CBR Readers Rank "Batwoman" #1 Top Title of the New 52: Wave 2: CBR readers overwhelmingly chose "Batwoman" #1 as their favorite title form the second full week of DC Comics' New 52 releases, with "Demon Knights" coming in directly behind the second place "Green Lantern."

Researcher: Facebook's Timeline will be boon for hackers

Researcher: Facebook's Timeline will be boon for hackers: A Sophos security researcher warns thatFacebook's new Timeline will likely make it easier for crooks to mine the social network for personal information they can use to launch malicious attacks and steal passwords.

The American Scholar: Dubya and Me - Walt Harrington

The American Scholar: Dubya and Me - Walt Harrington: So began a long and fascinating acquaintanceship with the man who would become one of the most admired and, later, reviled presidents in U. S. history. Over the next 25 years, our paths crossed again and again, most recently in his Dallas office last April. I had just read Bush’s 2010 memoir Decision Points, and I was struck by his many references to history. In the back of my mind was an article that Karl Rove had written for The Wall Street Journal in 2008, which revealed (much to the consternation of the president’s derisive critics) that Bush had read 186 books for pleasure in the preceding three years, consisting mostly of serious historical nonfiction. Intrigued, I asked Bush whether he would talk to me about how his passion for reading history had shaped his presidency and perspective, and he agreed.

How the two-party duopoly operates

How the two-party duopoly operates:

By now, probably everyone reading this is already sick of America's quadrennial political spectacle -- the one in which politicians and media outlets ask us to believe that there remain vast differences between our two political parties. It's like cheaply staged pornography on a red and blue set, with words like "polarization," "socialist" and "extremist" comprising the breathless dialogue in a wholly unconvincing plot.

Facebook Makeover Reveals New Vision for Sharing | Epicenter | Wired.com

Facebook Makeover Reveals New Vision for Sharing | Epicenter | Wired.com: The grand plan begins visually. The new “Timeline” product is something of an overview of your past Facebook activity in an entirely different visual format. Timeline goes back into your history of status updates, the apps you’ve used and the places you’ve checked into. The information collected in your timeline is dependent on what sort of data about yourself you want collected over time. So in order to, say, begin collecting data about your music listening habits, adding an application to a user’s timeline is a simple, one-click process.

The other half of Facebook’s vision: Apps. Facebook’s new class of social applications include the media-centric — music, movies, news and books — as well as what the company calls “lifestyle apps.” Essentially, instead of just “liking” things, the new class of apps will allow you to “read, watch and listen” to the integrated media services. Lifestyle apps capture most everything else

Apps are the stuff of Timeline. Installing this new class of apps onto your timeline will curate and summarize the history of your life as seen through Facebook — a collection of your activities curated and seen on a single page.

“It’s a container big enough to hold your entire life,” said Facebook vice president of product Chris Cox.

Can Neutrinos Move Faster Than Light? | Wired Science | Wired.com

Can Neutrinos Move Faster Than Light? | Wired Science | Wired.com: Over three years, OPERA researchers timed the roughly 16,000 neutrinos that started at CERN and registered a hit in the detector. They found that, on average, the neutrinos made the 730-kilometer, 2.43-millisecond trip roughly 60 nanoseconds faster than expected if they were traveling at light speed. “It’s a straightforward time-of-flight measurement,” says Antonio Ereditato, a physicist at the University of Bern and spokesperson for the 160-member OPERA collaboration. “We measure the distance and we measure the time, and we take the ratio to get the velocity, just as you learned to do in high school.” Ereditato says the uncertainty in the measurement is 10 nanoseconds.


However, even Ereditato says it’s way too early to declare relativity wrong. “I would never say that,” he says. Rather, OPERA researchers are simply presenting a curious result that they cannot explain and asking the community to scrutinize it. “We are forced to say something,” he says. “We could not sweep it under the carpet because that would be dishonest.” The results will be presented at a seminar tomorrow at CERN.

Can Neutrinos Move Faster Than Light?

Can Neutrinos Move Faster Than Light?: If it's true, it will mark the biggest discovery in physics in the past half-century: Elusive, nearly massive subatomic particles called neutrinos appear to travel just faster than light, a team of physicists in Europe reports. If so, the observation would wreck Einstein's theory of special relativity, which demands that nothing can travel faster than light.

Facebook unveils new version of Open Graph | Geek Gestalt - CNET News

Facebook unveils new version of Open Graph | Geek Gestalt - CNET News: All told, the new feature will allow "frictionless experiences," "real-time serendipity," and finding patterns and activity.

YouTube adds Magisto automatic video editing tool | Digital Media - CNET News

YouTube adds Magisto automatic video editing tool | Digital Media - CNET News: Now any video being uploaded to YouTube can be edited automatically. No manual intervention is needed whatsoever--just one click of a button--and Magisto's tool instantly "finds" the best scenes in your video and cuts out the blurry, bad and boring bits. Music and effects (wipes, transitions, titles, and fades) can also be added with two button clicks. The tool is dead simple to use as it literally walks you through the editing "process" in seconds.

Facebook's enraging status update

Facebook's enraging status update:

Like, oh, around 750 million other users of Facebook, I logged on to the world's biggest social media network this morning and was immediately annoyed. Facebook had changed its user interface, again. Gone was the "Most Recent" button, which allowed users to see what their friends have posted in a simple, straightforward, chronological order. Now Facebook was indulging, again, in outright effrontery: employing its own secret algorithmic sauce to highlight what it considered the most important "top stories," while mixing in other recent posts far below.

Move data from an old Mac to a new Mac | Operating Systems | Working Mac | Macworld

Move data from an old Mac to a new Mac | Operating Systems | Working Mac | Macworld: There are many reasons to get a new Mac—your old one is too slow, too ungainly, or it’s incompatible with the latest version of OS X. Regardless of why you’ve walked a new Mac through your front door, when you do, you face this immediate challenge: Moving the data on your current Mac to the new computer. There are multiple means for doing this. We’ll look at one built into Mac OS X—Migration Assistant.

Dvorak: The serious flaw with Microsoft’s Windows 8 and Metro – MacDailyNews - Welcome Home

Dvorak: The serious flaw with Microsoft’s Windows 8 and Metro – MacDailyNews - Welcome Home: a better-designed UI that doesn’t continuously destroy users’ visual memory

Reel change comes to Roseburg theaters | The News-Review - NRtoday.com

Reel change comes to Roseburg theaters | The News-Review - NRtoday.com: Digital images will take over as crews tear out green metal 35 mm film projectors and replace them with black plastic digital projectors.

Two screens, one in each theater at the Garden Valley Cinema 8 and Harvard Cinema, were changed several years ago to show blockbuster 3-D films such as “Avatar.”

Now, it's time to convert nine remaining screens, said General Manager Nathan Davies.

The Roseburg movie houses will join theaters across the country in a flurry of renovation as Hollywood abandons 35 mm film to adopt the newer medium.

Scott Hicks, whose Portland company, American Cinema Equipment, is installing the digital equipment in Roseburg, said about 60 percent of the U.S. theaters have already converted to digital.

Although the images will be clearer, cleaner and more stable than the 35 mm images, Hicks and Davies agree that moviegoers likely won't notice the change.