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Electronic Arts officer Rich Hilleman has told a conference in the UK that portable gaming hardware now outnumbers consoles by 2 to 1.
Noting the success of the DS, PSP and iPhone, Hilleman slammed the price of producing console games has rocketed, with marketing costing up to three times more than the development of a title.

That’s only logical. Polishing a turd is a lot more work than producing it.

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This sort of analysis turns into uncomfortable news for environmentalists. Tesco looked into building more small stores and encouraging people to walk to them, rather than big stores with parking lots. They discovered that the carbon impact of the food people eat to power their walk to the store outpaces the gains from reduced car usage! The analysis of a grande latte – in the video above – shows that a company like Starbucks uses almost no water in producing a beverage, a few liters in producing a cup and lid, and hundreds in growing the coffee. You can bring a recyclable cup, and you’ll save some water… but if you really want to save water, you need to address the supply chain.

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T-shirts worn by the Smith-Cotton High School band have evolved into controversy among parents.

The shirts, which were designed to promote the band’s fall program, are light gray and feature an image of a monkey progressing through stages and eventually emerging as a man. Each figure holds a brass instrument. Several instruments decorate the background and the words “Smith-Cotton High School Tiger Pride Marching Band” and “Brass Evolutions 2009” are emblazoned above and below the image.

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“I made the decision to have the band members turn the shirts in after several concerned parents brought the shirts to my attention,” Pollitt said.

Pollitt said the district is required by law to remain neutral where religion is concerned.

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Band parent Sherry Melby, who is a teacher in the district, stands behind Pollitt’s decision. Melby said she associated the image on the T-shirt with Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

“I was disappointed with the image on the shirt.” Melby said. “I don’t think evolution should be associated with our school.”

and what a great teacher she is…

They should probably replace it with a t-shirt that shows the Earth orbiting the Sun.

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This is an interesting picture.

The fact that “verified by snopes” has been appearing on more and more of these kinds of chain letters lately tells me one thing: Over the years, those of us who have directed more than our fair share of moms, dads, brothers, sisters, etc. to snopes.com in an effort to (1) clear up blatant misinformation and/or urban legends, and (2) hopefully make the point that you shouldn’t trust everything you read without verifying it yourself… have been wasting our time utterly. We have been outsmarted by people who know their target audience better than we know them, as demonstrated by the fact that the addition of the words “verified by snopes” (and the suspect omission of any link to an article that might actually verify something) to any pile of shit that makes it to your inbox, automatically legitimizes otherwise batshitinsane claims.

Because this is what Snopes has to say:

The book does not posit a “defeated America,” nor does it express a Muslim point of view.

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Thousands of people have signed a Downing Street petition calling for a posthumous government apology to World War II code breaker Alan Turing.

Writer Ian McEwan has just backed the campaign, which already has the support of scientist Richard Dawkins.

In 1952 Turing was prosecuted under the gross indecency act after admitting to a sexual relationship with a man. Two years later he killed himself.

The petition was the idea of computer scientist John Graham-Cumming.

He is seeking an apology for the way the young mathematician was treated after his conviction. He has also written to the Queen to ask for a posthumous knighthood to be awarded to the British mathematician.

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Two New Zealand schoolgirls humbled one of the world’s biggest food and drugs companies after their school science experiment found that their ready-to-drink Ribena contained almost no trace of vitamin C.

Students Anna Devathasan and Jenny Suo tested the blackcurrant cordial against rival brands to test their hypothesis that cheaper brands were less healthy.

Instead, their tests found that the Ribena contained a tiny amount of vitamin C, while another brand’s orange juice drink contained almost four times more.

“We thought we were doing it wrong. We thought we must have made a mistake,” Anna told New Zealand’s Weekend Herald.

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GSK is in court in Auckland today facing 15 charges relating to misleading advertising, risking fines of up to NZ$3m (£1.1m).

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The creator of highly-acclaimed hard-hitting TV drama The Wire has said television can only be worthwhile when freed from the constraints of advertising.

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ave you heard the story about LaVena Johnson?

LaVena Johnson, a high school honor student, decided to enlist in the Army to pay for college. On July 19, 2005, after serving eight weeks in Iraq, she was killed, eight days short of her 20th birthday.

Pvt. Johnson — she was posthumously promoted to private first class — was found dead on a military base in Balad, Iraq, in a tent belonging to military contractor KBR, a spinoff and former subsidiary of Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s company. She was the first woman from Missouri to be killed in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The U.S. Army officially ruled her death a suicide, saying she shot herself in the head, case closed. But this is where the story begins.

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But the truth began to make itself known when the family received the autopsy report and photos they had requested under the Freedom of Information Act:

The 5-foot tall, 100-pound woman had been struck in the face with a blunt instrument, probably a weapon. Her nose had been broken, and her teeth knocked back. There were bruises, teeth marks and scratches on the upper part of her body. Her back and right hand had been doused with a flammable liquid and set on fire. Her genital area was bruised and lacerated, and lye had been poured into her vagina. The debris found on her suggested her body had been dragged.

And despite all this mutilation, she was fully clothed when her body was found in the tent, with a blood trail leading to the tent.

Despite the overwhelming evidence, the Army has refused to investigate.

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Sheikh Ahmed Yamani, his Saudi Arabian counterpart, reportedly said: “I wish we had found water.”

Such resignation reflects bitter experience of the way that dependency on natural resources can poison a country’s economic and political system. Inflows of hard currency push up prices, squeezing the competitiveness of non-oil businesses and starving them of capital. As a result, productivity growth withers (a phenomenon known as “Dutch disease” after the negative effects of North Sea gas production on the Netherlands). Meanwhile, the state institutions in charge of oil often become corrupt and evade democratic control. And oil-rich states almost invariably waste the income it brings, many ending their oil booms deeper in debt than when they started.

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Never trust a Sperm Whale.

More science videos from NPR’s Science Friday with Ira Flatow.

Time Lapse From Space

Chef Wylie Dufresne on Frying Hollandaise

Oliver Sacks on Music and the Brain

Water Balloons in Space

A Home That Heats Itself

Elephants Can’t Jump

Bending Balloons into Giant Flowers

X-Rays as Art

The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshiped anything but himself.

Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821 – 1890)

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Right-wing Republican activists and “Tea-Baggers” have been showing up at town hall meetings with posters of President Obama photo-shopped to look like Hitler and have been asking their representatives why they support a “Nazi” policy. But, as usual, these “protesters” display an appalling ignorance of history.

As Peter Muehlbauer points out in his Telepolis article Obama, Hitler und die Krankenversicherung (Obama, Hitler and Health Insurance) the Third Reich was actually a paradise for private health insurers: they were innovators when it came to disenfranchising policy holders – especially Jews.

Tatsächlich ähnelt die Gesundheitspolitik im Dritten Reich sogar sehr viel eher jener, wie sie die Gegner öffentlicher Gesundheitsfürsorgepläne propagieren. (In fact, the health care policy of the Third Reich had much more in common with what the opponents of public health care plans are advocating.)

Private insurance industry leaders played key roles in the Nazi regime.  Hitler appointed Dr. Kurt Schmidt, a director of Allianz Insurance Group, as economic minister – an indication of the importance of private insurance in the Third Reich.  Dr. Gerhard Wagner , who worked for the private health insurer DKV, became the chief advocate of Nazi euthanasia, setting up Hitler’s original Death Panels.

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By far, the health insurers were the most radical among all the German insurance groups in implementing restrictions against Jews long before this became the official policy of the Nazi regime. Insurance claims by Jewish policy holders were denied, and the reimbursement claims by Jewish doctors were also denied when “review boards” of Aryan physicians “determined” that there were no valid medical reasons for the diagnoses. Eventually long-time Jewish policy holders were simply cut from the rolls as “bad risks”.  Some of the insurers even used this as part of marketing campaigns, advertising to German consumers that they were “Judenfrei” – free of any Jewish policy holders.  By the time the Nazi insurance authority directed the termination of Jewish insurance contracts up to April 1940, most of the companies didn’t have Jewish clients any longer. The “free market” approach had worked beautifully.

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Microsoft’s chief Washington lobbyist has been convening regular meetings attended by the company’s outside consultants that have become known by some beltway insiders as “screw Google” meetings, DailyFinance has learned.

Of course, you could include other companies as well, and rewrite the above as “screw Competitor in DC meetings”

Instead of investing money in making better products, we’ve come to the point where success has to include not only dominating the market, but influencing social media and the regulatory environment. It’s almost like making products is an afterthought for companies these days.

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Former president George W. Bush criticized President Barack Obama today for taking such a brief August vacation, arguing that the brevity of his summer break “sends the wrong message to terrorists.”

“The one way to let the evildoers know that they don’t have you all stressed out is by taking all of August off,” Mr. Bush told reporters at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. “I always made sure I did that.”

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“I didn’t think this day would come. Squeaky Fromme tried to assassinate President General Ford. She’s been let out of prison. She was paroled. Is she going to get a job? If you think about it, there aren’t many jobs for unstable, gun-toting women, unless she wants to run for governor of Alaska.”

–David Letterman

The picture is fake, of course. The rumors are not going away, and it’s going to be an interesting time to watch Apple…

source: Gizmodo

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A fire broke out at Google’s UK headquarters in London on Thursday afternoon, officials told BNO News. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

The 6-story building is located at Buckingham Palace Road, near the Victoria Place Shopping Centre. “We were called in at 1.53 p.m. (local time),” a fire brigade spokesman said. He added that the fire broke out on the fifth floor.

(hint for google personnel: you have to follow the sponsored links)

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The United Arab Emirates has seized a cargo of North Korean weapons being shipped to Iran, which would have violated a U.N. embargo on arms exports from the communist state, Western diplomats said on Friday.

The weapons seized on Aug. 14 included rocket launchers, detonators, munitions and ammunition for rocket-propelled grenades, they said. The ship, called the ANL-Australia, was Australian-owned and flying a Bahamas flag.

Diplomats said the UAE reported the incident, which occurred two weeks ago, to the Security Council sanctions committee on North Korea. The committee sent letters to Tehran and Pyongyang on Aug. 25 informing them of the seizure and demanding a response within 15 days.

“Based on past experience … we don’t expect a very detailed response,” one of the diplomats said on condition of anonymity.

The diplomats said the Australian firm whose ship was seized is controlled by a French conglomerate and the actual export was arranged by the Shanghai office of an Italian company. The diplomats did not name any of the firms involved.

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At a town hall meeting Wednesday Sen. Jim Inhofe told Chickasha residents he does not need to read the 1,000 page health care reform bill, he will simply vote against it.

“I don’t have to read it, or know what’s in it. I’m going to oppose it anyways,” he said.

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Is Using A Minotaur To Gore Detainees A Form Of Torture?

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When he fell ill March 15, the 17-year-old Carlton boy’s parents, Greg and JaLea Swezey, thought he had food poisoning. But over the next three days, they realized it was something else, perhaps the flu. He’d had a fever, and was vomiting with severe diarrhea.

During those three days, aunts, uncles and grandparents came to his bedside to pray. On March 17, his father did not call a doctor or an ambulance. Instead, he called elders from their church. They came to the house and anointed Zakk with olive oil, and prayed for him as Zakk’s family waited outside in the hall. Members of the Church of the First Born, the Swezeys believe in faith healing.

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An autopsy later revealed the Pateros High School student died of a ruptured appendix.

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Washington’s law specifies that a person treated through faith healing “by a duly accredited Christian Science practitioner in lieu of medical care is not considered deprived of medically necessary health care or abandoned.” Other religions are not mentioned.