Magazines, newspapers still in talks over iPad newsstand
Those who follow Apple rumors know that buzz has been picking up lately about Apple opening an iBooks-like distribution medium for the iPad, but for magazine and newspaper subscriptions. Now, the Wall Street Journal claims to have further inside information about Apple's digital newsstand, saying that Apple has stepped up its efforts to court publishers for a launch "as early as the next month or two."
According to "people familiar with the matter," Apple is pressing news and magazine conglomerates to get on board with Apple. Those in the industry believe the iPad could provide some much-needed revenue and distribution growth, but also fear giving Apple the kind of power the company had over the music industry for so long.
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The Large Hadron Collider cranks up the collisions
In our story about how protons find their way into the LHC, we spent a fair bit of time emphasizing the importance of the machine's luminosity, which is a rough measure of how many collisions it produces per unit of time. The greater the luminosity, the more data that physicists will have to work with, and the greater the chance that they'll catch a rare event that hints at some fundamentally new physics. The LHC was designed to have a very high luminosity, which is even more exciting to many physicists than the machine's record-setting 7TeV collision energies.
But, at least to begin with, the people running the collider were very cautious with their new machine. Protons get injected into the main LHC ring in bunches and the first runs of the hardware kept the bunch number low. This allowed some time to measure and tweak the performance of the hardware, ensuring that everything was working properly before it was pushed by the addition of more proton bunches. Somewhere around the start of August, as the graph above indicates, that caution came to an end, and the luminosity of the LHC started to rise dramatically as more proton bunches were injected for each run. In recent days, each physics run has produced a large vertical leap in the total number of collisions recorded.
The luminosity of colliders is, for reasons physicists seem loath to explain, measured in units called inverse barns (typically, the numbers are in the inverse pico- and femtobarn range). After barely registering a fraction of an inverse picobarn for several months, the numbers have shot up over the past few weeks, and have now reached nearly 3.5 pb-1. For context, however, the Tevatron's long operational history has allowed it collect about 10 inverse femtobarns; the LHC won't get to a fb-1 until sometime later next year.
The other thing to note is that there's a growing difference between the luminosity delivered to the detectors and the amount that's actually been recorded. That's because, as the luminosity increases, it outstrips the ability of the LHC's network and storage grids to capture it. With the increased luminosity, the hardware and software at the detectors need to start filtering out well understood events, enabling researchers to focus on those most likely to tell us something new. As the luminosity increases further, the gap between the two should grow larger.
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PlayStation Move teardown: not repairable, but impressive tech
The always-fascinating iFixit has turned its gaze, not to mention its screwdrivers, to the PlayStation Move, tearing apart the game controller. The verdict? With so many parts soldered down, there is little hope of repairing a broken unit, although the battery can easily be replaced. There is also a surprising amount of tech for the price."The Move contains many of components found in today's smartphones: a processor, accelerometer, gyroscope, Bluetooth transmitter, vibrating motor, and even a MEMS compass," Kyle Wiens wrote about the controller. "It's an amazing amount of tech for the money, even though we still think it's steep to pay $50 for a controller. Compared to a $40 WiiMote, though, it's quite the bang for the buck."
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Weeping with an eyepatch: no Pirates in Swedish parliament
The Swedish Piratpartiet (Pirate Party) seemed almost fated to win. Sweden's national elections took place yesterday, September 19—which just so happens to be "International Talk Like a Pirate Day." And the party had already sent two MEPs to Brussels to represent Sweden in the European Parliament. The 2010 national elections looked like they might be the time when the party, founded back in 2005, finally became a part of the Swedish establishment.It was not to be (see Sweden's electoral results). MEP elections are generally low-turnout affairs, making it easy for a motivated party to secure a seat or two with a small number of votes. National elections, on the other hand, have tremendous turnouts (this one had an 82 percent turnout), and Piratpartiet was not able to cross the mandatory four percent national threshold in order to secure a seat in the national Riksdag.
Eight parties did manage to clear the bar, including the Greens and the nationalist Swedish Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna). But all other parties, including the pirates, together rang out only 1.4 percent of the total votes.
Preliminary results (source: Sweden's Election Authority)
The result is bad news for The Pirate Bay; had the pirates picked up any seats, they had pledged to host the Bay from servers physically located within the Swedish Parliament building. (The goal, of course, is obtaining parliamentary immunity from prosecution.)
When we interviewed Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge last year, he said that pirates "want to change Sweden, Europe, and the rest of the world, in that order." But he's got four more years before he can take another crack at winning some national seats.
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The future looks weedy
There’s an old saying that when the going gets tough, the tough get going. And for many species, climate change is set to make things a whole lot tougher. The question on ecologists’ minds is, which species will be able to get going? Plants are of particular concern, given that they tend to lack legs, making rapid migrations problematic. (There are a few notable exceptions, but they make tortoises appear speedy.) Ecologists have speculated that weedy species—which reproduce quickly and disperse widely—may not suffer as many consequences, but trees are not likely to be as fortunate. Two new studies in the journal Ecology Letters set out to test these hunches, and their results largely confirm what many had suspected.
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Facebook denies phone rumors, but possibility still exists
Is Facebook attempting to be the new Google? It might be, if the latest rumors are to believed. Mobile developers at Facebook are said to be working on a secret project, and that project may be a Facebook phone—despite the company's denial.Two well-known developers at Facebook, Joe Hewitt and Matthew Papakipos, are said to be holed up working on a project that few people have knowledge of, including other Facebook staff. Hewitt is known for his work on Firefox and a web-based "OS" known as Parakey before working for Facebook. There he worked on a mobile version of the website for the iPhone, as well as creating the native iOS client.
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Benjamin Franklin, the first IP pirate?
There are few professions in American society that haven't claimed Benjamin Franklin as one of their own. Inventors and scientists chime in first, followed by newspaper editors, typographers, postal workers, astronomers, engineers, diplomats, civil rights advocates, libertarians, socialists, and revolutionaries of all flavors. Mr. Franklin has also picked up some fans among hedonists and voluptuaries of late, especially after the Parisian bathtub scene in the recent HBO series John Adams, which tweaked a rediscovery of his interesting essay on how to choose a mistress.
We thought the great man had been carved up into as many occupational and philosophical pieces as possible. But then we stumbled across Lewis Hyde's diverting new book Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership, which includes a chapter titled, "Benjamin Franklin, Founding Pirate."
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Google Apps gains extra layer of security with two-step verification
Companies migrating their e-mail and other cloud services over to Google Apps is becoming an increasingly popular phenomenon, but there have been lingering doubts about whether making such a transition would put company security at risk. After all, there are numerous says for sysadmins to add extra layers of security for when users check their e-mail from outside the building, but switching everything to Gmail means that everything is left behind a single—and possibly insecure—password.
Google has long been aware of this problem, and now the company is doing something about it. Google announced early Monday the availability of two-step verification, a more secure way for Google Apps users to sign into their accounts. Instead of just relying on a password set by the user, the two-step verification process will force users to log in with something they know (their password) as well as something they have (a PIN number sent to their mobile device).
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Feature: An intro to 3D on the Mac, Part II: Animation and Rendering
I'd like to apologize for the long wait for this final portion of our 3D on the Mac series. It's been a while since the first article in this two-part series came out and it's shocking how much can change in the span of a few months. The long-rumoured 64-bit Qt port of Maya for OS X is out, Pixologic released the fantastic ZBrush 4, Cinema 4D R12 and Houdini 11 added some sweet additions, and SIGGRAPH 2010 was enlightening with some ground-breaking changes to the world of 3D.
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Tales of the TOS: we can throttle P2P whenever we want
When it comes to wireline broadband, most people have few good choices. Some only have one option; in many parts of the country, getting anything over 6Mbps requires a cable modem. Because of this, consumers largely accept what the ISPs dish out, but it's still worth taking an occasional look at the terms governing Internet service—some surprising, even shocking, nuggets are buried in all that fine print.Take Time Warner Cable. The company's acceptable use policy (AUP) governing Internet access generally makes sense, even when it tends toward the overbroad—TWC subscribers are not allowed to "upload, post, transmit or otherwise make available any materials or content that violate or infringe on the rights or dignity of others," for instance.
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iPad vs. netbook: direct cannibalization and collateral damage
Last week, pundits seized on a comment that Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn made to the Wall Street Journal, where he suggested that the iPad had significantly cannibalized the sales of laptops and netbooks by as much as 50 percent. Dunn isn't the first person this year to blame the netbook's decline on Apple. A Morgan Stanley analyst made the same case back in May, citing NPD numbers to argue that the mere announcement of the iPad had immediately gutted netbook sales. We poured cold water on the May report, and a number of other sites have similarly questioned Dunn's estimate that the iPad could be gutting netbook sales. But we've also suggested that the iPad is responsible for killing the e-reader market for everyone but Amazon and, to a much lesser extent, Barnes & Noble. So is the iPad the culprit behind the undeniably precipitous drop in netbook sales?
The answer is probably that the iPad has been a factor in declining netbook sales, but there are also other places to look when assigning the blame.
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Masterpiece: Shadow of the Colossus
In our ongoing search to find the best games ever created, the titles that help to define this hobby of ours, we separate the merely great from the sublime with our "Masterpiece" designation. With the high-definition update of Shadow of the Colossus now a reality, it's time to look at what made this game so special.Shadow of the Colossus is brought up so often in arguments about whether or not games are art that it's hard for people who haven't played it to hear the name without rolling their eyes. It doesn't help that the game's framerate is hard to tolerate, as it was annoying even for the time it was released. The vision of Team Ico exceeded what the PlayStation 2 could reasonably deliver; the love given to the game is due to the haunting world of the game's battles, and the story that made your actions seem more villainous than heroic.
Some people dismiss Shadow as being a series of boss battles, which is true to an extent, but that's like calling Lost in Translation a romantic comedy.
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Weird Science shrugs off Chernobyl
The proteomics of Chernobyl: The area immediately surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear plant has been deemed unfit for human habitation, but plants and animals don't pay attention to safety officials, and have happily taken advantage of the fact that they can go about their business undisturbed in the exclusion zone. Researchers have checked whether one plant that's thriving in the area (flax) has acquired any specific adaptations to deal with the radiation. The answer, apparently, is no. When the seeds of a plant grown with contaminated soil were checked using proteomes, only 35 proteins showed significant changes, and these performed a broad range of functions. They're never too young to start them on irony: Well, maybe before they know how to speak would be too young, but kids seem to grow up fast when it comes to things like hyperbole and understatement. The authors recorded nine hours of family conversation among parents and kids from about four to six. Children's responses to their parents "revealed some understanding of ironic language, particularly sarcasm and rhetorical questions." Kids as young as four were already able to use rhetorical questions themselves, and (no surprise here) showed a tendency towards hyperbole.
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Child trafficking victim sues Village Voice over sex ads
A teenage child trafficking victim has filed a lawsuit against Village Voice Media, for knowingly allowing her pimp to post ads for her "services" on the popular backpage.com. The pimp, Latasha Jewell McFarland, has already pleaded guilty to prostitution charges, but the victim (going by M.A. in the complaint, as she is still a minor) says that Village Voice knew that the photos being posted of her were illegal but "failed to investigate for fear of what it would learn." M.A. says she was 14 when she was found as a runaway by McFarland, who began pimping out M.A. for $100 per sex act (McFarland took half the earnings). In order to advertise M.A.'s services, McFarland took pornographic photos of M.A. and posted them on backpage.com in the personals section for those seeking sex. McFarland pleaded guilty earlier this month to photographing M.A. in pornographic poses, posting child porn on backpage, paying the site for the postings, transporting M.A. for the purpose of pimping her out for sex, and collecting money for M.A.'s sexual services.
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