Google Earth Pro Is Now Available for Free
Google Earth Pro, the premium version of Google's popular Google Earth service, is now free. Google sliced the price from $400 a year, so this is a pretty solid deal. If you like to make 3D measurements or create HD videos of virtual trips around the world, I'd jump on this. You can download the software key directly from Google and start an online global journey.
If you spent the past ten years paying $400 for the service, this news is probably annoying. Unlike standard Google Earth, Google Earth Pro comes with a suite of professional-grade features, like a map-making tool. It's not clear why Google decided on this freebie.
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New Video Shows ISIS Purportedly Beheading Japanese Journalist
AMMAN, Jordan (AP) -- An online video released Saturday night purported to show an Islamic State group militant beheading Japanese journalist Kenji Goto, ending days of negotiations by diplomats to save the man.
The video, released on militant websites, heightened fears for the life of a Jordanian pilot whose fate had been linked to that of Goto. Earlier this week, Jordan had offered to free an al-Qaida prisoner for the pilot, but a swap never moved forward.
Jordan's government spokesman, Mohammed al-Momani, declined comment late Saturday on the video of Goto's purported beheading.
Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said the Cabinet was convening an emergency meeting and was rushing to confirm the authenticity of the online video.
Suga described the online video as a `deplorable terrorist act."
The video, highlighted by militant sympathizers on social media sites, bore the symbol of the Islamic State group's al-Furqan media arm.
Though the video could not be immediately independently verified by The Associated Press, it conformed to other beheading videos released by the extremists, who now control about a third of both Syria and neighboring Iraq in a self-declared caliphate.
The video, called "A Message to the Government of Japan," featured a militant who looked and sounded like a militant with a British accent who has taken part in other beheading videos by the Islamic State group. Goto, kneeling in an orange prison jumpsuit, said nothing in the roughly one-minute-long video.
"Abe," the militant says in the video, referring to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, "because of your reckless decision to take part in an unwinnable war, this man will not only slaughter Kenji, but will also carry on and cause carnage wherever your people are found. So let the nightmare for Japan begin."
U.S. officials said they were trying to confirm the authenticity of the video.
"We have seen the video purporting to show that Japanese citizen Kenji Goto has been murdered by the terrorist group ISIL," said Bernadette Meehan, a spokeswoman for the White House's National Security Council, using an alternate acronym for the extremist group. "The United States strongly condemns ISIL's actions and we call for the immediate release of all the remaining hostages. We stand in solidarity with our ally Japan."
Goto, a 47-year-old freelance journalist, was captured in October, after he traveled to Syria to try to win the release of Haruna Yukawa, a colleague held by the Islamic State group.
Yukawa reportedly was killed previously, though authorities have yet to authenticate the video claiming that.
Saturday's video made no mention of the Jordanian pilot Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh, who was captured after his fighter plane went down in December over an Islamic State-controlled area of Syria.
Earlier this week, Jordan had offered to release an al-Qaida prisoner for the pilot. However, in a purported online message earlier this week, the militants threatened to kill the pilot if the prisoner wasn't released by Thursday. That deadline passed, and the families of the pilot and the journalist were left to wait in agony for two days.
Late Friday, Japan's deputy foreign minister reported a deadlock in efforts to free Goto.
The hostage drama began last week after militants threatened to kill Goto and Yukawa in 72 hours unless Japan paid $200 million.
Later, the militants' demand shifted to a release of the al-Qaida prisoner, Sajijda al-Rishawi, 44, who faces death by hanging in Jordan for her role in triple hotel bombings in Amman in 2005. Sixty people were killed in those attacks, the worst terror attack in Jordan's history.
Al-Rishawi has close family ties to the Iraq branch of al-Qaida, a precursor of the Islamic State group.
Jordan and Japan reportedly conducted indirect negotiations with the militants through Iraqi tribal leaders.
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Associated Press writer Jon Gambrell in Cairo contributed to this report.
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Follow Karin Laub on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/karin-laub .
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Two Eagles Balloon Lands Off Mexican Coast
Troy Bradley/Two Eagles Balloon Team via AP Photo
The pilots behind the Two Eagles Balloon flight over the Pacific Ocean landed off the Baja peninsula in Mexico a day after surpassing the distance record for gas balloons.
Recovery teams picked up American Troy Bradley and Russian Leonid Tiukhtyaev on Saturday morning, the Two Eagles Balloon team said, and took them to shore. The pilots had a "controlled descent to a gentle water landing," about four miles off the coast.
"They are fine, but are being checked out onshore by paramedics as a precaution," according to the Two Eagles Balloon team.
Their trip - which began in Japan - lasted 160 hours, and 38 minutes, besting the absolute world record for time aloft for gas balloons of 137 hours, 5 minutes and 50 seconds. They traveled a total of 6,646 miles, better than the previous record of 5,209 miles.
Earlier in the flight, Bradley told Mission Control he was "not nervous at all about the mission," according to the Two Eagles Balloon team.
Although the two pilots surpassed the mark for duration of gas balloons, the record has not been officially broken. This will determined by the U.S. National Aeronautic Association and FAI after a long process of documentation and review that can take up to several weeks, or even months.
ABC News' Rachel Hawatmeh contributed to this story.
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Honda, Toyota, Chrysler Re-Recall 2 Million Vehicles
(Bloomberg) -- More than 2.1 million previously recalled Acura, Dodge, Jeep, Honda, Pontiac and Toyota vehicles will be called back for more repairs following reports that the air bags could deploy while driving, the U.S. Transportation Department said.
The recalls, which affect certain models from 2001 to 2004, were announced in postings Saturday on the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration website.
To contact the reporter on this story: Andrew Zajac in Washington at azajac@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Bernard Kohn at bkohn2@bloomberg.net Alex Wayne
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The Difference Between Porter And Stout Beer: It's Complicated
Let’s just say this right off the bat: trying to understand the difference between a porter and a stout in today’s craft beer world can be a pretty dizzying experience. That’s because over the past ten years or so, in many craft circles, the names have been used pretty interchangeably when categorizing darker beers. It’s this occurrence that caused us to want to understand the different nuances between these two types of beer, because more often than not, someone will tell us they prefer one to the other or a recipe will call for one specifically, and yet it’s pretty hard to find a person who actually knows the difference.
To truly understand the difference between these two dark beers, we have to go back to where it all started in the first place: England. Out of the rowdy pubs of London in the eighteenth century emerged the porter, a dark, medium-bodied beer which had lots of malty goodness that was balanced by quite a bit of hops. Earliest reports of the beer’s creation claim it was initially invented by a barman in the pub, made by blending lighter, hoppier beers, with older aged ales – sort of like the Suicides you made at the soda fountain when you were a kid. The result was a drink that took off, and eventually brewers reverse-engineered the mix and started brewing porters, no mixing at the bar needed.
As more brewers across England made porters, experimentation naturally followed. Brewmasters would tweak recipes, add different ingredients and boost the alcohol content, and thus the stout was born. That’s right, all a stout technically is, is a stronger – or stouter – version of a porter. In fact, its original name was “stout porter.”
The stout really took off when a brand named Guinness became a household name and many people fell in love with the creamy, luscious libation they started assuming came with drinking a stout.
An ad for O’Keefe’s Stout from a 1919 issue of Canadian Grocer.
Fast-forward to present day and brewers are pretty mixed on what the main difference actually is between these two beers. That’s because a lot of craft brewers now brew porters that are stronger than most stouts, yet continue to call them porters, and stouts that are weaker than some porters, yet keep calling them stouts. Basically it’s become the wild wild west. When the magazine Craft Brewing Business actually asked some of the country’s most famous craft brewers this simple question, they basically said as much. “You can ask any number of brewers this question and get just as many different answers. The simple answer is that there really is no difference between the two,” said Luke Purcell of Great Lakes Brewing.
The only main difference many brewers still agree on is the kind of malt that should be used to brew each type of beer. Porters use malted barley and stouts are primarily made from unmalted roasted barley, which is where the coffee flavor most people associate with stout comes from. But even these rules seem to be somewhat blurry according to brewers. “My approach to a stout would be to use a larger percentage of roasted barley,” Wayne Wambles of the celebrated Cigar City Brewing tells CBB. “I subscribe to the never say never camp, though, so I can’t say that I would never put roasted barley in a porter. Under certain circumstances, I would consider it.”
Yep, as long as there are craft brewers who will continue to experiment, it seems there will never truly be a hard and fast difference between the two. So go with what the label on the bottle says and enjoy whatever you’re drinking, porter or stout, because they’re basically the same thing.
A page from the Canadian Grocer in 1907 showcasing Molsons’ range of beers, including their Porter
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Earth's soil to be observed by DIRTY-MINDED satellite
NASA has successfully launched a satellite that will collect global observations of Earth's soil moisture.
The U.S. space agency's bird – dubbed the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite – was blasted into space on the unmanned United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket.
During SMAP's three-year mission, the sat is expected to observe the soil moisture hidden just beneath our feet, NASA said after lift off.
And we have liftoff of @NASASMAP atop @ULALaunch's Delta II rocket! Watch live: http://t.co/KX5g7zxzYi pic.twitter.com/pk0b6D0k1y
— NASA (@NASA) January 31, 2015The telemetry of the spacecraft – which is expected to orbit Earth from pole to pole every 98.5 minutes – was understood to be in good health.
NASA hopes that SMAP's work will help boffins develop a better understanding of the water, energy and carbon cycles of Earth's system. It said:
SMAP's combined radar and radiometer instruments will peer into the top 2 inches (5 centimeters) of soil, through clouds and moderate vegetation cover, day and night, to produce the highest-resolution, most accurate soil moisture maps ever obtained from space.
"Soil moisture data from SMAP has the potential to significantly improve the accuracy of short-term weather forecasts and reduce the uncertainty of long-term projections of how climate change will impact Earth's water cycle," added SMAP project scientist Simon Yueh. ®
Sponsored: Driving business with continuous operational intelligence
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Planet Earth In Infrared, At 4k Resolution
Here's something you don't see every day: An ultra-HD time-lapse of Earth, as seen in infrared.
James Tyrwhitt-Drake is perhaps best known for his stunning microscopy work (this matryoshka-like GIF of a scanning electron microscope zooming in on an amphipod, a diatom, and, finally, a microscopic bacterium is a favorite of mine), but the University of Victoria student has been known to turn his attention on larger subjects. Last year, he created a beautiful ultra-HD view of Earth as imaged by Elektro-L, the first Russian weather satellite to operate in geostationary orbit; and, before that, a transfixing 4k time-lapse of the sun.
His latest creation combines hundreds of infrared images of Earth acquired by GOES-13 and GOES-15 (two geostationary NOAA/NASA weather satellites, positioned at longitudes 75° West and 135° West, respectively) acquired over a two-month period. As Tyrwhitt-Drake explains:
Heat is radiated from Earth's surface as infrared light, which is in visible to the human eye. In these images, brightness indicates the emission of infrared light into space. Infrared light is absorbed by water vapor and clouds; they appear dark and reveal the fluid motion of Earth's atmosphere.
...700 frames with a resolution of 3600x3000 were downloaded from each satellite over a period from November 30th, 2014, to January 26th, 2015. The frames were processed to remove image artifacts, played at 7fps and interpolated by a factor of four. The resulting animation plays at a speed of 21 hours/second.
Beautiful! The animations at the top and bottom of this post were created from the time-lapse that combines images acquired by GOES-13. The video, by comparison, synchronizes the images from both satellites. See both videos – as well as a third, which provides a close-up view of the northern and southern hemispheres – on Tyrwhitt-Drake's YouTube channel.
H/t The Verge
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Windows 10 for enterprise will not be free, splits into two upgrade branches
There aren't many people who don’t like the sound of "free", and this was one of the keywords taken away from Microsoft's Windows 10 event earlier in the month. As build 9926 was unleashed on eager upgraders, Microsoft revealed that it will be free to upgrade to Windows 10 in the first year.
At least this is the case for the average consumer; it's something of a different story for enterprise customers. Microsoft has confirmed that Windows 7 Enterprise and Windows 8/8.1 Enterprise are not versions that will be eligible for a free upgrade -- this is the personification of Windows as a service.
In a blog post, Microsoft explains a little about how Windows as a Service will work, and what it will mean for customers. There's no word on pricing at this stage, but Jim Alkove does reveal a little about how the enterprise version of Windows 10 will be updated and how the update process can be customized to suit individual customer needs. Alkove also announces that there will be two different branches of Windows 10 for enterprise, the Long Term Servicing branches and the Current branch for Business.
But what does this actually mean?
The Long Term Servicing branches have a security focus and will not receive all of the same updates as the consumer version of Windows 10.
To support Windows 10 devices in these mission critical customer environments we will provide Long Term Servicing branches at the appropriate time intervals. On these branches, customer devices will receive the level of enterprise support expected for the mission critical systems, keeping systems more secure with the latest security and critical updates, while minimizing change by not delivering new features for the duration of mainstream (five years) and extended support (five years).
The aim is to ensure that key systems are not taken out of operation by updates that are not completely essential, and are not subjected to updates that have not been fully tested.
The Current branch for Business works in a slightly different way. This branch will be able to access the same updates as consumers, but on a timescale that suits individual businesses. It takes advantage of testing done by Windows Insiders, and updates can be deployed automatically through Windows Update, or via WSUS.
This renewed flexibility is a sign not only of Microsoft listening to its customers, but also the particular ethusiasm for Windows 10 to be more of a success than Windows 8.
Photo credit: woaiss / Shutterstock
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Snapchat jihadist-fearing peers return with LAST GASP Snoopers' Charter demand
As expected, peers are once again trying to sneak in amendments to the Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill to swiftly pass a law in the UK that would gift spooks and police with sweeping powers to snoop on Brits' internet activity.
Amendments to the proposed law were added overnight ahead of the bill reaching the report stage in the House of Lords on Monday.
The Register reported last week that four peers would return to lobby for what many have dubbed a Snoopers' Charter – a term which Lord West claimed was "emotive claptrap".
However, their amendments are based on Home Secretary Theresa May's widely pooh-poohed draft Communications Data Bill, which was mothballed in 2012, after the Tory-led government's junior Coalition partner, the Liberal Democrat Party, refused to throw its support behind the proposed legislation.
Lords King, Blair, West and Carlile will demand the changes be added to the Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill on Monday afternoon, by claiming that British lives could be lost if the law isn't updated to allow cops and spies to capture more data online.
As we saw last week, however, the peers repeatedly exposed their weak understanding of the subject matter. Lord King offered up some particularly choice remarks about technology with passages such as this:
I am not a tweeter. We have Facebook and Twitter. Somebody tried to explain WhatsApp to me; somebody else tried to explain Snapchat. I do not know about them, but it is absolutely clear that the terrorists and jihadists do.
The latest proposed amendments – which it's important to note are unlikely to slip through the House of Lords – can be viewed here. ®
Sponsored: Designing and building an open ITOA architecture
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If You Want a 100% Sunny Wedding Day You Can Pay $150k to Explode Clouds
This sounds fake as hell but it does have some scientific backup: A luxury travel company is offering a $150,000 cloud-killing package to guarantee sunny wedding days in the south of France. Pilots will consult with meteorologists to fly planes near the ceremony space three weeks leading up to the wedding. The planes spray silver iodide at clouds, which is supposed to cause them to condense and get all the rain out of the way. Boom! Sunny pictures.
You know Kim and Kanye looked into this shit.
This plan is controversial but it does have support. Many scientists are confident that these cloud-killing sprays can affect the weather. Cloud-seeding with silver iodide is used in Canada to shrink hail storms as they happen. In China, making artificial rain this way is a fairly common practice, and it was used in the Beijing Olympics to help ensure clear skies. In Wyoming, a study concluded that cloud-seeding increased snowfall by up to 15 percent, and Arizona may use it to combat drought.
Then again... there's no consensus that using chemicals to force precipitation is effective, or harmless. And recent initiatives to stop a drought in China using cloud-seeding didn't work. So it's necessary to be deeply skeptical here about the company's claims that it can guarantee sunshine.
Even if cloud-seeding was 100% effective, it costs $150,000 to to make it rain before your wedding so it doesn't rain on your wedding. For that eye-bleeding amount of money, you should be able to reschedule your wedding several times, or also do something much, much more useful with it.
[Petapixel | Oliver's Travels]
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British army's 77th Brigade to wage psychological war on Facebook
The British army is creating a new battalion of online soldiers in the form of the 77th Brigade. Hundreds of recruits will make up the division and will engage in "non-lethal warfare" on Mark Zuckerberg's social network from April.
The 77th Brigade will engage in psyops (psychological operations) to try to influence the opinions of civilians in certain parts of the world, as well looking to change the behavior of those engaged in various forms of warfare. The activities of groups such as ISIS (Islamic State) have shown the importance of the internet in general, but social networks in particular, to spreading ideas, messages and propaganda, and this is what the army is looking to manage.
In many ways, what the brigade will be doing is deploying propaganda of its own. It is a very public acknowledgement of the idea that wars are not won solely through violent means, and the army says that it will be using the "traditional and unconventional". An army spokesman said:
77th Brigade is being created to draw together a host of existing and developing capabilities essential to meet the challenges of modern conflict and warfare. It recognises that the actions of others in a modern battlefield can be affected in ways that are not necessarily violent.
Facebook has previously said that it will not block violent videos by default -- although it does pander to requests from some countries like Turkey when it comes to blocking insulting material -- but it has generally steered away from causes with more political leaning. Facebook has clearly been targeted by the army because of its size, reach and popularity, but it is somewhat unusual for the military to become so publicly involved, using the social network as a tool against foes.
As terrorists, guerrilla outfits and intelligence agencies make use of the web, it does make sense for other forces to do so as well. Whether the 77th Brigade turns out to be more than a spin and PR machine remains to be seen.
Photo credit: i4lcocl2 / Shutterstock
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Grav wave tsunami NOT caused by Big Bang – astro boffins
Claims that a gravitational wave tsunami swept the universe from the Big Bang have turned to dust.
In September last year, the smart money was already backing the idea that the signal didn't come from the early universe and, on Friday, scientists agreed that the "gravitational waves remain elusive."
No conclusive evidence could be found to support what many had hoped was a breakthrough discovery in March 2014, after a team of astrophysicists reported a sighting of gravitational waves – formed in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the universe as we know it blinked into existence about 13.8 billion years ago.
The European Space Agency brought that claim back down to Earth yesterday, however.
It said that a joint analysis of data from ESA's Planck satellite and the gorund-based BICEP2 and Keck Array experiments showed that the origin of the signal had not be detected after all.
This pic shows dust emission from the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.
Image credit: ESA/Planck Collaboration
“Searching for this unique record of the very early Universe is as difficult as it is exciting, since this subtle signal is hidden in the polarisation of the CMB [Cosmic Microwave Background – the legacy of light emitted only 380,000 years after the Big Bang], which itself only represents only a feeble few per cent of the total light,” said Jan Tauber, ESA project science for Planck.
The ESA added that while boffins had presented evidence that suggested the siginal originated in primordial gravitational waves, interstellar dust in our Milky Way Galaxy could conjure up a similar effect. ®
Sponsored: Driving business with continuous operational intelligence
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The Case Against DRM Needs to Be Made Now
DRM, or digital rights management, is a digital lock placed on media content and devices. Supporters say DRM protects businesses and artists from piracy and theft. Sounds good, right? Opponents say it kills innovation, doesn't stop piracy, and helps malware distributors. This month, a group led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation has assembled to come up with ways to fight DRM.
The World Wide Web Consortium, which just admitted the MPAA, has been pushing for every internet browser with HTML5 to ship with DRM since 2013. With Google, Netflix, and Microsoft on their side, it looks like DRM could very well become a requirement for browsers. But the opposition is about to take a stand. The Apollo 1201 project, led by the EFF with special consultant Cory Doctorow, is working with researchers and academics to try to repeal laws supporting DRM, including section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Why DRM Sucks: Part One
When you buy an e-book, Keurig coffee-making machine, iTunes media, or any wide host of gadgets and files, their sellers add DRM technology to control the ways you can use what you bought. So if you buy a Keurig, for example, the DRM prevents you from using non-Keurig coffee pods. If you buy a movie from iTunes, that means you can't put it on a DVD. These controls let companies put limits on the products they sell, and means people who buy them are circumscribed with what they can do with what they've purchased. It's like buying a tub of ice cream with a special lid that locks if you try to share with a friend or blend it into a milkshake.
And while it ostensibly protects creators, it also puts them at the whims of companies like Amazon and Apple. "Every time you buy a DRMed Kindle book, you can't move it to a Nook or Kobo or any device that comes in the future. So that means that if I don't like the way I'm getting treated by Amazon and want to sell my books elsewhere, I have to cross my fingers and hope you're willing to buy all my books again to read them on the new platform, or be willing to maintain two separate ecosystems to continue to access my stuff," Doctorow told me via email.
Why DRM Sucks: Part 2 (Horrorshow Edition)
So that's all shitty, but Doctorow believes there's another valid argument against DRM that everybody should be able to get behind. Far from safeguarding people, these controls could be the impetus for some serious security problems. "The real horrorshow is that DRM requires that your computer be designed to hide its operations from you, and the DMCA makes it a felony to tell you about vulnerabilities in the DRM that can be exploited by creeps and thugs and crooks and spies," Doctorow said. This means that it'd be illegal, for instance, to report a discovery of spyware ingrained in a program, whether it's put there by the NSA or some Russian malware ring.
"I think that most people miss that DRM can't be sustained without laws mandating silence about DRM's flaws," he said. These laws make it illegal to point out security problems, so white-hat hackers who violate DRM to discover vulnerabilities could go to jail for reporting serious issues. "No one really thinks about this- that they're filling their lives with voice- and gesture-controlled devices (implying that they're never out of range of a mic and a camera), and the government is willing to imprison people who point out potentially lethal flaws in them."
Doctorow hates DRM for basically all the reasons anyone could hate it, but he's adamant that it could end up dicking everyone over by hugely de-incentivizing people to report security flaws or malware. That's a compelling reason for anyone to support reform, if not an outright repeal of laws that push DRM.
This push against DRM is happening at a pivotal time, since the push for the technology has already developed momentum. In 2014, Mozilla was coerced into putting DRM in its browser, because Netflix and other video providers are preparing to implement a system where their content would require DRM. It was either keep fighting or lose the ability to show people Netflix, which would've tanked Firefox.
It's a long-shot that Apollo 1201 will succeed. But DRM is a threat to online security (not to mention creativity) that is worth fighting against despite the odds.
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Google Now now SLURPS data from 40 third party apps so YOU don't have to
Google has inked deals with 40 third party app makers, allowing the ad giant to rifle through data from the likes of Airbnb and Lyft to serve up "relevant information" to its Android users.
The firm said in a blog post on Friday that it would begin slurping the data from inside a number of apps for its Google Now service – a creepy, predictive search tech that Mountain View first unveiled in 2012.
Google has become increasingly aware of the rich info locked away in other apps that – up until now – the data-scraping firm has been unable to deeply mine for its multi-billion dollar search and ad biz.
Terms of the financial deals struck with the likes of Airbnb, Lyft, Pandora, Duolingo and the Guardian newspaper were kept secret.
Google's director of product management Aparna Chennapragada said:
[A] lot of useful information lives inside apps on your phone, from your favorite music to last-minute hotel deals to home-buying tips. Today, you have two ways to get information from these apps – either remember to constantly open them up and look, or get a notification, which you may forget to act on if it shows up at the wrong time.
Starting today, the Google app on Android can help you keep up with all the good stuff in 40 different apps at a glance – it’ll bring you Now cards to help you out with your day-to-day life, giving you information that’s helpful to you, right when you need it.
Users of the service will apparently be able to grant permission to the Google Now app, before it starts slurping the data from the 40 outfits that have tied up a partnership with the Chocolate Factory. ®
Sponsored: Network DDoS protection
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The Best Vape Pen for Every Appetite
Why settle for a vape pen that can only handle oils, waxes, loose-leaf marijuana or e-liquids when one pen can do it all? Multimode pens are getting easy to find, and they're quickly dropping down to double-digit prices. Problem is, a lot of these cannabis and tobacco-vaporizing devices perform like you bought them at a 99-cent store.
It's Friday afternoon, you've made it through the long week, and it's time for Happy Hour, Gizmodo's weekly booze, etc. column. A cocktail shaker full of innovation, science, alcohol, and other goodies.
Too many are manufactured by fly-by-night firms and utilize components chosen for discount pricing rather than performance. So how do you find a portable vape that's durable and powerful enough for everyday use, adaptable enough to meet your ever-changing toking requirements and affordable enough to not break your budget? You keep reading, that's how.
When it comes down to it, vaporizers are basically just portable miniature ovens: a battery pack provides power to the heating element which gently cooks the botanical material in its heating chamber until the active ingredients vaporize and travel up an airway into your mouth. Easy?
I've found each of these four components play a vital role in my vaping experience:
- The battery has to be strong enough to last at least a half-day of moderate use (for me that's about 100 puffs between 7am and noon, your requirements will vary) or else you'll spend an inordinate amount of time looking for places to plug in recharge.
- The heating element has to get hot, quickly, and stay nice and hot to efficiently vaporize those botanicals. That determines the taste, quality, and quantity of the resulting vapor. It has an impact on battery life too.
- The heating chamber itself needs to be durable enough to spend a day in my pocket without breaking (you'd be surprised how few do) but also easily loaded. That is, you shouldn't need a magnifying glass and tweezers to pack a single hit's worth of loose-leaf into the can.
- The airway should be entirely made of glass or steel to keep the taste pure. All-glass pathways are generally considered superior as less expensive alternatives like aluminum or PVC can impart a metallic or plastic aftertaste.
You'd be surprised how few miniature ovens are actually up to spec.
The Best Overall: Pinnacle Pro DLX
While the $200 Pinnacle Pro DLX is significantly pricier than the rest of the competition, lacks the ability to vaporize e-liquids, and offers a relatively short battery life too—just under an hour of near-continuous smoking—it makes up for these shortcomings in spades.
For one, you can just as easily use the device while it's plugged in and charging. What's more, it heats from stone cold to 475 degrees Farenheit in just over a minute. That's quite speedy. It's made from high density plastic that can withstand being dropped onto concrete from waist-high, utilizes a convection heating element that toasts your botanicals cleanly and evenly without singeing, and delivers the vapor through an aluminum air path that doesn't impart any added taste to the vapor.
The coolest feature, though, is the optional water pipe attachment that sits over the mouthpiece. Like a portable version of the bulky Cloud EVO, it produces super-clean, water-cooled vapor.
The Best for e-Liquids: V2 Pro Series 3
As we've discussed previously, the $60 V2 Pro is one sleek little vaporizer and even after testing plenty of others designed to do essentially the same thing, this unit stands out from the pack for its e-liquid abilities in terms of cartridge capacity, unit durability, vapor quality, and general ease of use. Its 650 mAh battery is decent enough as an e-liquid vape (maybe half a day with moderate use) but does drain more quickly when heating loose-leaf.
It may not be the best 3-in-1 solution, though: the loose-leaf canister has just been released for $24, significantly more than an $8 e-liquid canister replacement, and there's still no firm release date for the the wax can.
The Most Informative: Ago G5
There's a lot to love about the Ago G5. If it weren't for the e-liquid canister's penchant for disassembling itself in my pocket, I'd recommend it even more highly. The G5 incorporates an incredibly helpful LCD display that not only monitors the battery charge but also counts how many puffs you take between charges. This thing is great—I know exactly how much charge I have left, which means I rarely get stranded with a dead battery. The 650 mAh battery is on par with the one in the V2 Pro, lasting about half a day between charges and moderate use.
Unfortunately, it also uses low-quality coiled-wire heating elements for both the wax and loose-leaf cans. Those often led to uneven heating, scorched buds, and required I continually clean the cans. Luckily you can pick up a G5 starter kit for the ludicrously low price of $40.
Dube2
The $60 Dube2 was far and away the smallest and most easily concealed unit I tested, measuring a mere half-inch in diameter. It's the Benson and Hedges of portable vapes. But it holds less than 2 ml of e-liquid or hash, and literally a single hit's worth of loose-leaf. You'll likely wind up spending more time trying to load the damn thing than you'll ever spend vaping from it.
Zeus Thunder
I was so enamored with the Thunder when I first reviewed it. Not so much now that I've broken all three wax canisters—some after the first use—and cracked an e-liquid tank after dropping it 10 inches onto carpet. At $7 a pop, that gets pricey fast. The durability isn't what I'd hoped.
Atmos Dart
The Atmos Dart is sturdily built, rugged, and only rarely leaked nico-juice while in my pocket. But the battery life is unforgivable. The longest session it could muster was 24 minutes of absent minded puffing (3-4 draws/minute). It also took two full hours to recharge. Dealbreaker.
DaVinci Ascent
The DaVinci Ascent is a very functional dual-material vaporizer that accommodates both loose-leaf and waxes. It's got long battery life (and long charge times) and an all-glass pathway. But even Mr. Magoo can tell this isn't a vape pen.
Pinnacle Pro
The predecessor of the DLX, the Pro sports many of the same specs including size, weight, and battery life. It does not, however, have a six-stage heating element, only a two. You can likely pick one up at a discount, but if you can afford it, go for the newer DLX model.
Zema Pro
The Zema Pro is a serviceable 3-in-1 from Got Vape. It's relatively inexpensive, utilizes a slick Pyrex mouthpiece atop an aluminum air path, and is easy to use but just doesn't get me excited enough to warrant dropping $90 on it.
Kind Pen (aka KandyPen SkyCloud, Vibe Stix, Sutra, E-Paradise, Konyo Triad, iPuff Vape, Ovale Elips-C, and e-Hitter)
Remember how Sub Zero and Scorpion from Mortal Kombat were basically the same character, just with different finishing moves and swapped color palettes? Those two had less in common than these short-lived, leaky clones.
The White Rhino Trifecta (aka Budy Pen Combo, Daborizer, Randy's 3-in-1, EZ Vape X 3-in-1, EZO 3-in-1)
Just like the Ago G5, except without the useful LCD screen. It does use standard 510 threading, mind you, so you can easily swap in larger batteries and more robust, aftermarket canisters if you so choose.
This post originally ran on November 21, 2014
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Sorry, admins: Microsoft says NO new Windows Server until 2016
While it's looking like the final version of Windows 10 for client PCs could ship before the end of the year, it seems data center admins needn't hold their breaths. Microsoft confirmed on Friday that the next version of Windows Server won't arrive until 2016.
"As we continue to advance the development of these products, we plan to release further previews through the remainder of 2015, with the final release in 2016," Redmond's Enterprise Cloud team said in a blog post. "Our next preview is planned for the spring of 2015."
As a consolation prize, however, Redmond says that the next version of System Center Configuration Manager, which will include support for managing Windows 10 clients, will ship "in a timeframe that aligns with Windows."
The new schedule doesn't necessarily mean the next Windows Server has been delayed, because Microsoft has not previously offered a specific timeframe for the release (or, for that matter, for the release of Windows 10).
The software giant quietly offered a Technical Preview of the server OS in October, shortly after flinging the Windows 10 Technical Preview to the public, but that version is still missing lots of features planned for the final release.
Among the big updates planned for Windows Server is support for containerized applications based on the Docker image file format. Microsoft, which has partnered with Docker to develop the tech, says this will be a Server-only feature that won't be available in client Windows 10.
Also planned are updates to Active Directory Federation Services, Remote Desktop Services, PowerShell, Hyper-V, and improvements to clustering, networking, and storage.
Although Microsoft seems keen to ship the final update next year, it has not said whether the product will be called Windows Server 2016 or something else.
The Enterprise Cloud team said to expect more updates on what's coming in the next release of Windows Server at its inaugural Ignite conference, which will take the place of the former TechNet show and several of Microsoft's smaller, server-themed conferences from May 4–8 in Chicago. ®
Sponsored: 5 critical considerations for enterprise cloud backup
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Sweden Invented Bulletproof Walls
Those weird pellets? They're hard ceramic. And through some wizardry they're absorbing bullets without letting them penetrate or ricochet.
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The Future of GIFs Is Killing What Makes Them So Great
Those wonderful looping animations we call GIFs are an unlikely story of survival in an age when digital formats come and go like the wind. The lure of the decades-old GIF format has caused people to ignore its flaws, but those looking to bring the format into modern times might just be inadvertently drowning its very soul.
As much fun as GIFs are, they are not well-equipped for modern interneting. That's not really a surprise, since the format was developed in 1987—basically biblical times. Its method of compression was meant for teeny tiny images composed of only a handful of colors. Today's GIFs are usually made from video clips containing thousands if not millions of colors at much higher resolutions.
Converting this type of content into a GIF yields large file sizes that hog bandwidth and can slow down webpages to a crawl. They are the bane not only of users with slow connections or old computers, but of website operators who have to make sure they have enough bandwidth to accommodate thousands of these files.
The task of modernizing the GIF is being tackled as we speak by a number of players in the online image game. The most recent is Imgur, which hyped its new GIFv format last year, and this week released a tool for converting video clips to GIFs. GIFv promises better quality with smaller files. As Sam Gerstenzang, Imgur's product director explains,
GIFV seamlessly wraps 2 video formats and the original GIF together because the user shouldn't care what the underlying format is, just about the expectation that GIFs are short, looping and without sound. Under the hood, there's a WebM file, a MP4 and GIF. We dynamically swap based on the user's browser and the file size of the GIF to ensure the best "GIF-like" experience.
Awesome, but the name is a misnomer. GIFV is not a GIF at all. It's not even really a file! It's a set of HTML5 instructions that converts the video clip to a highly compressed MP4 or webm file, then tells it to play automatically and loop forever, just like a GIF. The result is better quality and faster loading. Others are offering similar services to Imgur, like the site gfycat.com, which also uses HTML5 to display videos in a GIF like way. Twitter also proudly touted their own GIF support, but is simply converting them into looping video files.
Unlike true GIFs, GIFV and other HTML5 variations are tethered inextricably to the browser they are viewed in. You can share them as an embeddable object within various services and sites, but you can't download and view them on your computer. You can't email them, or archive them locally, except as video files. Imgur says it will always give users the option to download the actual GIF file, but then you're giving up all the advantages of GIFV.
Here's an embedded GIFV that I made with Imgur's Video to GIF tool. I could only display it on this page by copying a string of code from Imgur and pasting here. Looks nice! But if you try and download the file, you get a video file that does not loop on its own and will confuse the hell out of your friends if you try and put it in an email.
Call me old-fashioned, but I see the contained, portable nature of the GIF as part of what makes it so great, if not the whole of it. The fact that you can send it, view it, post it absolutely anywhere with a near guarantee that it will be seen on the other end is essential. There's a purity to it that makes it the folky, populist digital artifact that it is.
We live in the age of the embed, where everything is proprietary. Media on the internet is consumed according to which service it is tied to, and only a handful of elite purveyors with the resources to make their services essential control how media is displayed. We don't share video files. Instead we share a Vine, or a YouTube. Just imagine if a video form existed that was so universal that it could be viewed on any computer, any browser, no matter what the version number or specs, and without the necessity of embed code. That's what we have with the humble GIF! Formats like GIFV are a step away from that democratic state.
For Imgur's part, they say they recognize the trade-off in their new format, and are working to ameliorate it. The great rethinking of the GIF is still in its early stages. We don't know how this will play out. It could be that one particular format, whether it's a variation of GIFv or some other solution, reaches such popularity that it becomes completely widespread and everything is just fine and dandy. I hope so! But competition is fierce, and matching the simple universality of the GIF is a staunch challenge. Until that day comes, I'll stick with what works, and it ends in .gif.
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Beware: Porn-Based Malware Is Sweeping Across Facebook
Don't click any porn links on Facebook. Just don't. It's a good rule of thumb, but there's an extra good reason right now. There's a troubling type of porn-based malware that's apparently infected over 110,000 Facebook users in two days. And you could get the same Click Transmitted Disease.
The Facebook malware is disguised as a Flash update. Basically, you'll see a link to a porn video in one of your friend's posts. If you click on it (don't) you'll be taken to a website that may or may not be disguised as YouTube and see the first few seconds of the video. Then the video will prompt you to download a Flash update to keep watching. If you do, you'll infect your computer with a Trojan that can highjack your keyboard and mouse.
Once you're infected, the malware starts posting porn links to your Facebook wall and tagging up to 20 friends each time. Unlike blasting messages, this technique enables the malware to keep a low profile (as low as you can while posting literal porn), while also displaying itself publicly on your profile. That's evidently how the malware infected so many Facebook users so quickly.
We haven't seen this malware in action, and we don't want to. We've also reached out to Facebook to see how they're handling the issue. Regardless, you can save yourself the hassle of dealing with it if you just avoid clicking porn links on Facebook. Don't do it! In general! [ThreatPost]
Update (4:10pm): Facebook just issued the following statement:
We use a number of automated systems to identify potentially harmful links and stop them from spreading. In this case, we're aware of these malware varieties, which are typically hosted as browser extensions and distributed using links on social media sites. We are blocking links to these scams, offering cleanup options, and pursuing additional measures to ensure that people continue to have a safe experience on Facebook.
Screenshot via CSO
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Everybody In Uganda Is Kung Fu Fighting
KAMPALA, Uganda—
The red dirt road through Wakaliga is slick and wet with morning rain, staining the shoes and socks of travelers the color of dried blood. Commuters tiptoe carefully around the slippery streets, but Racheal Nattembo dashes fearlessly through them. The determined young girl is late for kung fu practice and has no time to fret about cleanliness.
She stops in front of Nateete Mixed Academy, a rundown school at the heart of the slum in the Ugandan capital. She fumbles with her shoelaces before entering the compound where five of her classmates are already practicing. The 8-year-old joins her peers in formation, practicing their moves.
“I like kung fu to act in movies,” Racheal tells me, wiping the rain away from her face. “It is fun—the best part is kicking.” She aims a swift kick at her invisible opponent and ducks in anticipation of a retaliatory blow.
Racheal Nattembo (centre) leads her peers through a kung fu routine in the school yard of Nateete Mixed Academy in Wakaliga, Kampala. The promising young martial artist played “Liz” in “This Crazy World,” a 2014 action flick by Ramon Film Productions. Photo: Elizabeth McSheffrey
I’ve been invited to watch the practice by Charles Bukenya, a kung fu master with more than 10 years of experience, who has trained the children since 2013. But the objective of their training isn’t to master self-defense, I quickly learn—it’s to tap into the soaring popularity of martial arts movies in Uganda.
Over the last 10 years, the local film industry, also known as “Ugawood,” has grown exponentially with increased access to technology and international distribution via the Internet. There are more than a dozen active films companies in Uganda today, nearly all of which were founded between 2000 and 2014. It is now estimated that Ugawood produces roughly 30 films per year, and while the movies span across all genres, action and martial arts rate among the most popular.
“If you see Western movies, it’s full of action which is dominating now here in Africa,” says Isaac Nabwana, founder of Ramon Film Production in Wakaliga. “Martial arts are rising and everyone now is trying to do what I’m doing because they see I’m doing something that is unique and is loved.”
The next generation of the film industry in Africa
Though the first official Ugawood movie was released in 2005, Isaac’s 2010 film called Who Killed Captain Alex? is widely credited as the country’s first action feature. His latest kung fu film, This Crazy World stars Rachael and her classmates in their big screen debut and went straight to DVD in 2014 under the local title, AniMulalu, or Crazy People . The movie features the young Wakaliga martial artists and their daring escape from child sacrifice rituals.
“I played Liz,” says Racheal excitedly, aiming a punch at a crumbling fence. “She was fighting to go back where she was living.” Isaac believes these children are not only the future face of the country’s film industry, but also evidence of a rising martial arts mania that is sweeping the city streets of Kampala.
Since 2006, the director has made more than 10 films, but none have sold better than This Crazy World. He attributes the movie’s success not only to its junior actors, but to its overarching kung fu theme. “I think this is going to be the next generation of the film industry in Africa at large,” he says.
Film director Isaac Nabwana shows off one of his latest movie posters starring the kung fu children of Wakaliga. He calls them the “Wakastarz” of “Wakaliwood,” a brand he created through his company, Ramon Film Production. Photo: Elizabeth McSheffrey
When a new Ugawood movie is released in Kampala, it goes straight to DVD and is sold door-to-door until a movie theatre or cinema hall, picks it up for a public showing. Since 2005, the industry has pumped out a number of well-known local martial arts actors including Kizza Ssejjemba, Dauda Bisaso, and the children’s trainer, Charles Bukenya.
“They will be good actors and actresses because they love what they are doing,” says Charles, inspecting the children’s movements for errors in technique. “I think they knew nothing about Kung Fu and now they are good, they are trying.” The trainer is one of Uganda’s first martial arts movie stars, having acted in both Who Killed Captain Alex? in 2010 and The Return of Uncle Benon in 2011.
Martial arts are not new to Africa; Nubian wrestling, which is depicted in ancient Egyptian art as early as 2300 B.C., is believed to be a predecessor to Greco-Roman wrestling. And Zulu stick fighting appears in written history nearly four millennia later as warfare training for Northern Nguni men in 19th-century Southern Africa.
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How Would The World Change If We Found Extraterrestrial Life?
The ALH84001 meteorite, which in a 1996 Science publication was speculated to be host to what could be ancient Martian fossils. That finding is still under dispute today. Credit: NASA/JSC/Stanford University
In 1938, Orson Welles narrated a radio broadcast of “War of the Worlds” as a series of simulated radio bulletins of what was happening in real time as Martians arrived on our home planet. The broadcast is widely remembered for creating public panic, although to what extent is hotly debated today.
Still, the incident serves as an illustration of what could happen when the first life beyond Earth is discovered. While scientists might be excited by the prospect, introducing the public, politicians and interest groups to the idea could take some time.
How extraterrestrial life would change our world view is a research interest of Steven Dick, who just completed a term as the Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair of Astrobiology. The chair is jointly sponsored by the NASA Astrobiology Program and the John W. Kluge Center, at the Library of Congress.
Dick is a former astronomer and historian at the United States Naval Observatory, a past chief historian for NASA, and has published several books concerning the discovery of life beyond Earth. To Dick, even the discovery of microbes would be a profound shift for science.
“If we found microbes, it would have an effect on science, especially biology, by universalizing biology,” he said. “We only have one case of biology on Earth. It’s all related. It’s all DNA-based. If we found an independent example on Mars or Europa, we have a chance of forming a universal biology.”
If contact with extraterrestrial life is made through radio telescopes, a decipherment process may have to take place to understand the message. Credit: NASA
Dick points out that even the possibilities of extraterrestrial fossils could change our viewpoints, such as the ongoing discussion of ALH84001, a Martian meteorite found in Antarctica that erupted into public consciousness in 1996 after a Science article said structures inside of it could be linked to biological activity. The conclusion, which is still debated today, led to congressional hearings.
“I’ve done a book about discovery in astronomy, and it’s an extended process,” Dick pointed out. “It’s not like you point your telescope and say, ‘Oh, I made a discovery.’ It’s always an extended process: You have to detect something, you have to interpret it, and it takes a long time to understand it. As for extraterrestrial life, the Mars rock showed it could take an extended period of years to understand it.”
Mayan decipherments
In his year at the Library of Congress, Dick spent time searching for historical examples (as well as historical analogies) of how humanity might deal with first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. History shows that contact with new cultures can go in vastly different directions.
Hernan Cortes’ treatment of the Aztecs is often cited as an example of how wrong first contact can go. But there were other efforts that were a little more mutually beneficial, although the outcomes were never perfect. Fur traders in Canada in the 1800s worked closely with Native Americans, for example, and the Chinese treasure fleet of the 15th Century successfully brought its home culture far beyond its borders, perhaps even to East Africa.
A second look by the Mars Global Surveyor at the so-called Viking “Face on Mars” in Cydonia revealed a more ordinary-looking hill, showing that science is an extended process of discovery. Credit: NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems
Even when both sides were trying hard to make communication work, there were barriers, noted Dick.
“The Jesuits had contact with Native Americans,” he pointed out. “Certain concepts were difficult, like when they tried to get across the ideas of the soul and immortality.”
Indirect contact by way of radio communications through the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), also illustrates the challenges of transmitting information across cultures. There is historical precedence for this, such as when Greek knowledge passed west through Arab in the 12th Century. This shows that it is possible for ideas to be revived, even from dead cultures, he said.
It’s also quite possible that the language we receive across these indirect communications would be foreign to us. Even though mathematics is often cited as a universal language, Dick said there are actually two schools of thought. One theory is that there is, indeed, one kind of mathematics that is based on a Platonic idea, and the other theory is that mathematics is a construction of the culture that you are in.
“There will be a decipherment process. It might be more like the Mayan decipherments,” Dick said.
The ethics of contact
As Dick came to a greater understanding about the potential cultural impact of extraterrestrial intelligence, he invited other scholars to present their findings along with him. Dick chaired a two-day NASA/Library of Congress Astrobiology Symposium called “Preparing for Discovery,” which was intended to address the impact of finding any kind of life beyond Earth, whether microbial or some kind of intelligent, multicellular life form.
Finding microbes on a moon such as Europa could alter the culture on Earth, even though they are not considered intelligent life. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute
The symposium participants discussed how to move beyond human-centered views of defining life, how to understand the philosophical and theological problems a discovery would bring, and how to help the public understand the implications of a discovery.
“There is also the question of what I call astro-ethics,” Dick said. “How do you treat alien life? How do you treat it differently, ranging from microbes to intelligence? So we had a philosopher at our symposium talking about the moral status of non-human organisms, talking in relation to animals on Earth and what their status is in relation to us.”
Dick plans to collect the lectures in a book for publication next year, but he also spent his time at the library gathering materials for a second book about how discovering life beyond Earth will revolutionize our thinking.
“It’s very farsighted for NASA to fund a position like this,” Dick added. “They have all their programs in astrobiology, they fund the scientists, but here they fund somebody to think about what the implications might be. It’s a good idea to do this, to foresee what might happen before it occurs.”
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Obama's Precision Medicine Plan Sounds Great—Unless It's an IT Nightmare
After teasing a "Precision Medicine Initiative" in his State of the Union address, President Obama today released the details of his $215 million plan: A massive database containing the genetic profiles and health records of at least a million volunteers. Genetics sequencing! Big data! These all sound like good things! But there is potential problem: Electronic heath records are a goddamn mess.
The big winner under Obama's plan is the National Institutes of Health, which gets $200 million to develop the million-large volunteer cohort and carry out cancer research. (To read more about the research, head on over to our sister site io9.) A tiny slice of the initiative's budget—$5 million—is also going to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. According to the White House's fact sheet, the ONC is going to "support the development of interoperability standards and requirements that address privacy and enable secure exchange of data across systems."
That sounds deathly boring, I know, but the ONC is building the scaffolding that makes this Precision Medicine Initiative possible. If it fails, the whole thing is not going to get off the ground. Here's why.
The NIH is not going to recruit a million volunteers anew; instead, it's going to pull data from a pool of over 200 existing cohort studies that could range from the Framingham Heart Study in Massachusetts to a database at Kaiser-Permanente in California. Each of these studies has been collecting data in their own way in their own systems. Smooshing all those individual databases together into one centralized one will be a gargantuan task.
"They're going to have severe problems because the federal government refused to demand data standards," says Ross Koppel, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in healthcare IT. He is referring to the lack of interoperability between EHR systems built by different companies. For example, says Koppel, a simple question about smoking can be asked in many different ways: Do you smoke? Have you ever smoked? How many times a day do you smoke? When did you quite smoking? How do you combine answers to all those questions into one coherent database?
The ONC currently has a 10-year road map for interoperability, which Koppel calls "nine and a half years too late." The $5 million is welcome boost to the ONC's $75 million budget, it's a tiny droplet in the ocean for the $3 trillion that Americans spend on EHR every year.
But there are reasons to be optimistic because, honestly, we do all want this to work out. The NIH's eMERGE Network successfully combined medical records from nine different healthcare centers. The Precision Medicine Initiative has the real potential to revolutionize medical research, so it'd be a grand shame for it to be hobbled by IT problems.
Top image: Christian Delbert
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