Thomas Cane patented a device in 1996 that will alert children to the presence of Santa Claus. If someone trips the sensor disguised as a ribbon across the fireplace, lights in the stockings will be triggered, giving proof that Santa came through the hearth! One would think the appearance of candy in the previously-empty stockings might be proof enough.
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.
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.
Yesterday, in central London, thousands of students and others gathered to protest as Britain’s Parliament met to vote on a proposal to raise university tuition fees significantly – nearly tripling them – as part of a continuing set of austerity programs.
During the protest, several clashes took place between police and protesters, resulting in numerous injuries and 43 arrests. Late in the demonstration, a group of protesters attacked the car of Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall as the couple were inside, being driven to the London Palladium. The car was slightly damaged, the royal couple unharmed, though a bit shaken by the incident. Parliament did end up narrowly approving the measure, and the fee increases are set to take effect in 2012.
A listing for Mass Effect 3 popped up on the EA online store today, and a plot description describes a fight to take back planet Earth.
The listing for the PC version of the game was spotted by gaming blog Destructoid today. The official summary on EA’s store states:
Earth is burning. Striking from beyond known space, a race of terrifying machines have begun their destruction of the human race. As Commander Shepard, an Alliance Marine, your only hope for saving mankind is to rally the civilizations of the galaxy and launch one final mission to take back the Earth.
