Tuesday, 22. May 2012

Showtime: SIGGRAPH 2012: Technical Papers Preview Trailers


*Wait a minute — since when have technical conferences been doing “preview trailers” of unreleased “papers”?

*I wonder if any of these forthcoming SIGGRAPH papers involve any actual “paper” at all. “Yeah, here’s my lab’s brand-new work on interactive facial-recognition in calibrated three-D projectors — clips, illustrations? Why no, I just described everything we do in my lucid English prose.”

wired.com

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Burn Note


lets you send messages that are deleted after they are read.

You can use Burn Note to send a password or have an off-the-record conversation with a friend.

Burn Note enables you to communicate online as privately as a spoken conversation.

Each Burn Note can be viewed only once and then it is deleted. Deleted Burn Notes are completely erased from the Burn Note servers so it impossible for anyone to retrieve them. More details are available on our FAQ and our technical information page.

Burn Note is useful for private communication. For example Burn Note can be used to securely send a password. It can also be used to have an off-the-record conversation with a friend.

Burn Note

burnnote.com

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Facebooks Fiasko


Der "Facebook-Fluch" setzt sich fort: Nach der elektronischen Panne zum Börsenstart stürzte die neue Aktie des sozialen Netzwerks am zweiten Tag dramatisch ab. Kritiker bemängeln, der Handelsplatz Wall Street sei außer Kontrolle geraten.

Die Wall Street hat ein neues Ratespiel: Wie tief kann die Facebook-Aktie trudeln? Viele tippen auf 30 Dollar, andere auf 20 Dollar. Pessimisten wetten sogar hämisch auf "sechs bis sieben Dollar", ein Siebtel des kurzzeitigen Höchstpreises - ein Wert, den sie anhand der Bewertung anderer Silicon-Valley-Riesen wie Apple und Google herleiten.

spiegel.de

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Facebook shares sink 11 percent as reality overtakes hype


Facebook shares sank 11 percent in the first day of trading without the full support of the company's underwriters, leaving some investors down almost 25 percent from where they were Friday and driving others to switch back to more established stocks.

reuters.com Morgan Stanley cut Facebook estimates just before IPO

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Techdirt Threatened With Defamation Suit Over Story On Feds Getting Royalty In Movie From Mexican Drug Cartel Money Launderer


We recently wrote about a very strange case, in which the US government apparently ended up with a 10% royalty in a soon to be produced Hollywood movie that is being billed as the "prequel" to Passion of the Christ -- the famous Mel Gibson movie that made over $600 million. The details were convoluted, but apparently our reporting on the subject upset someone, as we were sent an email, claiming that our post was defamatory and could cause damages in "the hundreds of millions of dollars," threatening that legal action would be taken if we did not change the post immediately.

techdirt.com

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DEA Wants To Install License Plate Scanners and Retain Data for Two Years


Everyone driving on Interstate 15 in southwest Utah may soon have their license plate scanned by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. The DEA and two sheriffs are asking permission to install stationary license plate scanners on the freeway in Beaver and Washington counties. The primary purpose would be to catch or build cases against drug traffickers, but at a Utah Legislature committee meeting Wednesday, the sheriffs and a DEA representative described how the scanners also could be used to catch kidnappers and violent criminals. That, however, wasn't the concern of skeptical legislators on the Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Interim Committee. They were worried about the DEA storing the data for two years and who would be able to access it.

sltrib.com aclu.org

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Penn Jillette Discusses Obama’s Hypocrisy on Drugs


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Ring of Fire Eclipse: 2012 49 photos total


A rare annular eclipse - a ring of sunlight as the new moon, passing between Earth and sun, blocks most, but not all, of the sun's disc. It is striking to see. Differing from a total solar eclipse, the moon in an annular eclipse appears too small to cover the sun completely, leaving a ring of fire effect around the moon. The eclipse cast its shallow path crossing the West from west Texas to Oregon then arcing across the northern Pacific Ocean to Tokyo, Japan.

boston.com

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Monday, 21. May 2012

Raspberry Pi gets snappy with camera add-on


While the the Raspberry Pi foundation continues to struggle to meet the demand for its £16 Linux machine, it has already revealed improvements. The latest: a prototype camera add-on.

raspberrypi.org

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5 Nuclear Sites That Could Launch War With Iran


This week, the U.S. and its allies will sit down with some of their arch-nemeses: the Iranians. The meeting in Baghdad is the definition of high stakes, as 2012 has been characterized by frequent speculation that Israel would bomb Teheran to prevent it from going nuclear, launching a war that would inevitably draw the U.S. in. That's something the U.S. doesn't want – the Air Force chief of staff has publicly questioned the wisdom of a bombing campaign – but big, unresolved questions persist about Iran's nuclear program, which Iran swears exists just to produce peaceful nuclear energy.

In particular, those questions primarily concern five installations that trouble the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the world's nuclear watchdog. And unless you're a nuclear wonk, you probably don't understand them.

wired.com

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High tide: Four tonnes of cannabis worth over $3million found floating off the coast of California


Nearly FOUR TONNES of cannabis has been found floating off the coast of Orange County, California by Harbour Patrol officers, according to reports.

The monster weed haul is said to have been packed into around 160 bales with an estimated street value of $3.6 million.

Border patrol agents told CBS Los Angeles that the mass of marijuana was discovered on Sunday after authorities had been informed about a “suspicious” sighting.

"Shortly before noon on Sunday, May 20, maritime law enforcement authorities received a tip about suspicious bales floating in the water off the coast of Orange County, near Dana Point," border patrol agent supervisor Michael Jimenez is quoted as saying.

High tide

latimes.com msnbc.msn.com mirror.co.uk

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6.0M Earthquake In Europe And 6.0M Earthquake In Japan


sincedutch.wordpress.com

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