Two former servers at the Hard Rock Cafe in Orlando—the chain’s biggest site—are suing because they say the restaurant illegally paid them less than minimum wage for three years, the Orlando Sentinel reports. They say Hard Rock broke the law by requiring them to share tips not only…
Continue reading …Xbox 360 mandatory update restores boot to disc, detains Call of Duty pirates for a tad
January 20, 2011 No Comment
The story of the Trojan Horse must be a favorite among video game console manufacturers, because software updates these days often come with more than bargained for — today, Microsoft issued a mandatory Xbox 360 update, reportedly for a single bugfix, but which seems to have coincidentally halted scores of pirates and hackers from playing Call of Duty : Black Ops and Modern Warfare 2 on the console. Members of the Xbox-Scene forums noted the update was taking suspiciously long to download, discovered that backup copies of these games ceased to work, and presently believe that Microsoft included a patch for these two games to enable an anti-piracy feature that specifically targets burned copies. What does the mandatory update do for you if you’re not part of the hacking scene? It merely enables the console to automatically boot a pre-inserted game when you power it on, a feature that was accidentally disabled in November . [Thanks, Brian] Xbox 360 mandatory update restores boot to disc, detains Call of Duty pirates for a tad originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Jan 2011 20:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
Continue reading …Northwestern University’s curvilinear ‘eyeball camera’ is squishy, just like yours
January 20, 2011 No Comment
We’ve seen gooey lenses before, the Varioptic variety already having found a home in an honest to gosh retail product . But, this is a little different. It’s called the “eyeball camera,” a curvilinear lens and sensor system developed by a team at Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It uses a similar sort of flexible design, this one actuated by varying the pressure of fluids in the device — higher pressure for convex, lower pressure for concave. Interestingly here the camera sensor itself flexes right along with the lens, and while the maximum zoom is currently a measly 3.5x, higher power is said to be possible — eventually. No word was given on when we might see these coming to market, so don’t pull a Batou and get rid of your fleshy ones just yet. Northwestern University’s curvilinear ‘eyeball camera’ is squishy, just like yours originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Jan 2011 20:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
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Chris Noth, Kiefer Sutherland, and Jason Patric on their upcoming Broadway play, ‘That Chmpionship Season’ (Jan. 19)
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Click here to view this media After yet another pathetic performance on the Sean Hannity show the other night, where both Hannity and Palin were trying to paint her as the victim of this Tucson madness, The Daily Show decides to lower the boom on the thing that is known as Sarah Palin. After complaining (actually whining is more accurate) about the politicization of the shootings, Palin a few minutes later refers to Loughner as “an apolitical or perhaps even left-leaning criminal. “There must to be a word for complaining vociferously about a wrong being done to you whilst casually committing said wrong without even realizing it,” Stewart said. “For now let’s call it an ‘Anchorage Steamer.’” Stewart ends with what the rest of us had concluded long ago: “You have become a lighting rod less for your clarity of vision, but more for your ability to turn any criticism of you of into persecution of you.”
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A supplement containing vitamin E and essential fatty acids may help reduce symptoms of premenstrual syndrome (PMS), a study shows.
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An influential panel of experts has issued new guidelines for osteoporosis screening, recommending for the first time that women younger than 60 get bone density scans if they have risk factors.
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We’ve seen a lot of DIY clock mods in the past, but the Lunchtime Clock has to be the most useless. It’s great in theory: the thing speeds up 20 percent starting at 11AM and slows down twenty percent at 11:48AM. So, at 11:48AM the clock reads noon, and by 1:00PM it’s back in sync, giving you an extra 12 minutes to digest that chili dog you so hastily sucked down before returning to work. Here’s the catch: watches, cellphones, and computers also tell time, and if you work in an office where you’ve got to fake it to get an extra 12 minutes with your chili dog, you can bet your boss isn’t trusting ye olde wall clock. So, before you go tinkering with your office timepiece, thank the heavens you’ve been blessed with an hour long lunch break to begin with. We hear the guy at the chili dog stand only gets 15 minutes. Lunchtime Clock mod offers false promises to beleaguered office workers originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Jan 2011 19:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
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President Hu Jintao declared “a lot still needs to be done” to improve China’s record on human rights, a rare concession that came after President Barack Obama asserted that such rights are “core views” among Americans. AP’s Mark Smith reports. (Jan. 19)
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