Author: luapo

Re-live top events and moments from 2010 from around the globe through search, images, and video.

IN THEORY, the ownership of a business in a capitalist economy is irrelevant. In practice, it is often controversial. From Japanese firms’ wave of purchases in America in the 1980s and Vodafone’s takeover of Germany’s Mannesmann in 2000 to the more recent antics of private-equity firms, acquisitions have often prompted bouts of national angst.

Such concerns are likely to intensify over the next few years, for China’s state-owned firms are on a shopping spree. Chinese buyers—mostly opaque, often run by the Communist Party and sometimes driven by politics as well as profit—have accounted for a tenth of cross-border deals by value this year, bidding for everything from American gas and Brazilian electricity grids to a Swedish car company, Volvo.

The ability to capture extremely detailed panoramic views made up of hundreds of perfectly stitched individual photos is tremendously useful for scientists studying everything from rock outcrops to birds to microscopic organisms.

The creators of the GigaPan robot, which can automatically create zoomable gigapixel-scale images, announced eight winners of a science photography contest Nov. 11 at the Fine International Conference on Gigapixel Imaging for Science.

The long awaited new installment of the Gran Tourismo franchise hit the shelves on November 24th. The release received better than expected sales results worldwide.

Sony said. Gran Turismo 5 is actually the ninth installment of the racing game; after several delays, it finally made its debut last month.

This jackass stole a bunch of video game consoles used by little kids with cancer (during their treatment). Thanks to everyone that sent this one in, hopefully we can help catch the guy.

“We are definitely making every attempt to get these gaming systems back to the young patients at Carolinas Medical Center so that they won’t be deprived much longer from playing their favorite video game while enduring treatment for their illnesses,” officers said in a news release about the theft.
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I’d like to preface this by saying I planned on taking this tale to my grave, or at least not telling it until Cash Cab went off the air. I don’t want to be the guy who ruins the fun, you know? But a number of stories have popped up on the internet in the past few days, saying things along the lines of “Cash Cab is fake!” I was on the show, and I’d like to set the record straight. It’s not fake. It’s just kind of fake.

The methods Discovery uses to screen contestants and get them in the right cab are deliberately misleading, but only to better the show. And it’s not like the actual game is fixed. The night I played, I signed some papers that said I’d get my winnings revoked if I squealed. But that’s of no concern to me, because I lost on the final question and got no money. Spoiler alert.