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Submission + - Twitter To Add Places & User Streams

Submitted by adeelarshad82
adeelarshad82 writes: Twitter has announced at the Chirp conference that its roadmap will include locations and user streams. Twitter will maintain and curate its own database of locations, such as hotels and restaurants, and make the database open to developers. Moreover, the API for user streams, a technical name for real-time data that will be for desktop apps only, will be available to users within the next few days. Through this API developers will be able to take virtually all Twitter data and make it available to desktop apps in real time. Twitter used its first Chirp conference to assuage the fears of some of its developer base, who are worried about whether they will be left out in the cold following the establishment of an "official" BlackBerry app and the acquisition of the Tweetie mobile app. Judging from the announcements at Chirp and a recent post which might indicate death to third party services like TweetDeck, it's safe to say that Twitter wants to push developers to start building services that leverage Twitter instead of just filling holes.

Submission + - Economist: Shorten copyright terms (economist.com)

Submitted by lxmota
lxmota writes: The Economist says that long copyright terms are hindering creativity, and that shortening them is the way to go: 'Largely thanks to the entertainment industry’s lawyers and lobbyists, copyright’s scope and duration have vastly increased. In America, copyright holders get 95 years’ protection as a result of an extension granted in 1998, derided by critics as the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act". They are now calling for even greater protection, and there have been efforts to introduce similar terms in Europe. Such arguments should be resisted: it is time to tip the balance back.'
Transportation

Submission + - Students Build 2,487 MPG Hypermiling Supercar (inhabitat.com) 2

Submitted by MikeChino
MikeChino writes: Students at Laval University recently took home the gold in Shell’s annual Eco-Marathon with a hypermiling supervehicle able to hit 2,487MPG! The team's combustion engine-powered vehicle took home the grand prize in the Prototype category (along with $5,000) but it was far from the only impressive entry — the Purdue University Solar Racing Team clocked in at 4,548 MPG with their Pulsar solar vehicle, and the Cicero North Syracuse High School achieved 780.9 mpg in the fuel cell-powered Clean Green Machine.
Image

Supersizing the "Last Supper" Screenshot-sm 98

Posted by samzenpus from the a-meal-fit-for-a-king-of-kings dept.
gandhi_2 writes "A pair of sibling scholars compared 52 artists' renditions of 'The Last Supper', and found that the size of the meal painted had grown through the years. Over the last millennium they found that entrees had increased by 70%, bread by 23%, and plate size by 65.6%. Their findings were published in the International Journal of Obesity. From the article: 'The apostles depicted during the Middle Ages appear to be the ascetics they are said to have been. But by 1498, when Leonardo da Vinci completed his masterpiece, the party was more lavishly fed. Almost a century later, the Mannerist painter Jacobo Tintoretto piled the food on the apostles' plates still higher.'"
Image

How the Internet Didn't Fail As Predicted Screenshot-sm 259

Posted by samzenpus from the series-of-popular-tubes dept.
Lord Byron Eee PC writes "Newsweek is carrying a navel-gazing piece on how wrong they were when in 1995 they published a story about how the Internet would fail. The original article states, 'Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.' The article continues to say that online shopping will never happen, that airline tickets won't be purchased over the web, and that newspapers have nothing to fear. It's an interesting look back at a time when the Internet was still a novelty and not yet a necessity."
Idle

Submission + - A Drop Of Oil Completes a Maze As Well As a Rat (popsci.com) 1

Submitted by infodragon
infodragon writes: Successfully navigating a complex maze is the basic lab test for intelligence. Rats can do it. Cuttlefish can do it. And now, inanimate droplets of oil can do it. By creating a pH gradient, scientists induced the an oil drop to navigate a maze, an advance with important applications in drug delivery, urban planning, and computer modeling.
Technology

Submission + - Video calling Android VPhone expected within weeks

Submitted by adeelarshad82
adeelarshad82 writes: The Verizon-powered, video-calling, Android 2.0 VPhone may be rolling out within weeks according to what the phone's creator Chad Sayers told PCMag. The VPhone was first seen around last November. The phone is being processed through Verizon's Open Development Initiative, which is the carrier's effort to get devices onto their network that they won't have to service or support. According to the company's president, the VPhone will have its own, non-Verizon-branded affordable service plans aswell. Moreover, company's video compression technology lets the phones use relatively little bandwidth, so they won't be network hogs.
Image

Living In Tokyo's Capsule Hotels Screenshot-sm 269

Posted by samzenpus from the living-in-the-hive dept.
afabbro writes "Capsule Hotel Shinjuku 510 once offered a night’s refuge to salarymen who had missed the last train home. Now with Japan enduring its worst recession since World War II, it is becoming an affordable option for people with nowhere else to go. The Hotel 510’s capsules are only 6 1/2 feet long by 5 feet wide. Guests must keep possessions, like shirts and shaving cream, in lockers outside of the capsules. Atsushi Nakanishi, jobless since Christmas says, 'It’s just a place to crawl into and sleep. You get used to it.'”
Google

Submission + - Google counter easter egg 1

Submitted by vrkid
vrkid writes: From time to time I to test extreme cases of how certain software behaves (I'm a sysadmin not a QA guy) just for the kicks of seeing how engineers write software, what they expect as input and what they don't expect as input. I don't know why, but today I decided to test Google's home page and I pressed the "I'm feeling lucky" button without inputting anything in the search bar. Much to my surprise at the bottom of the page popped up a counter that is slowly inching down. From the speed I gathered that it's counting down seconds. From a couple of quick calculations I found out that it's counting the seconds to the end of the year 2009... Right now there are: 882000 and a few seconds to the end of the year :-)
Music

ASCAP Seeks Licensing Fees For Guitar Hero Arcade 146

Posted by Soulskill from the understanding-is-too-much-effort dept.
Self Bias Resistor writes "According to a post on the Arcade-Museum forums, ASCAP is demanding an annual $800 licensing fee from at least one operator of a Guitar Hero Arcade machine, citing ASCAP licensing regulations regarding jukeboxes. An ASCAP representative allegedly told the operator that she viewed the Guitar Hero machine as a jukebox of sorts. The operator told ASCAP to contact Raw Thrills, the company that sells the arcade units. The case is ongoing and GamePolitics is currently seeking clarification of the story from ASCAP."
Bug

Are Complex Games Doomed To Have Buggy Releases? 362

Posted by Soulskill from the where-did-my-face-go dept.
An anonymous reader points out a recent article at Gamesradar discussing the frequency of major bugs and technical issues in freshly-released video games. While such issues are often fixed with updates, questions remain about the legality and ethics of rushing a game to launch. Quoting: "As angry as you may be about getting a buggy title, would you want the law to get involved? Meglena Kuneva, EU Consumer Affairs Commissioner, is putting forward legislation that would legally oblige digital game distributors to give refunds for games, putting games in the same category in consumer law as household appliances. ... This call to arms has been praised by tech expert Andy Tanenbaum, author of books like Operating Systems: Design and Implementation. 'I think the idea that commercial software be judged by the same standards as other commercial products is not so crazy,' he says. 'Cars, TVs, and telephones are all expected to work, and they are full of software. Why not standalone software? I think such legislation would put software makers under pressure to first make sure their software works, then worry about more bells and whistles.'"

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