Wetheriggs Animal Rescue Centre in Cumbria move their 1700 animals to a new home County Durham.

California Highway Patrol officers have allegedly been obtaining nude photos of female suspects from their cell phones and sharing them among other officers.

Sean Harrington, 35, allegedly sent photos from the cell phone of a DUI suspect to his own phone, reported the San Francisco Chronicle. He then reportedly shared the photos with other CHP officers.

The investigation began after a woman who was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence in August noticed that photos from her phone had been sent to a number that she did not recognize, according to the Contra Costa Times. The photos were sent when the woman was being processed in jail, the newspaper reported.

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Photo sharing site Twitpic will not be deleting its substantial archive of tweeted pictures after all, it announced today, after coming to an agreement with Twitter.

Twitpic announced in September that it would be closing down and deleting all the pictures it had hosted—rendering millions of historic tweets meaningless—after a trademark dispute with Twitter. Twitter issued Twitpic an ultimatum: drop its trademark claim to the word "Twitpic" or lose access to Twitter's API. Twitpic opted for the latter, promising to close down on September 25.

This crisis appeared to be averted on September 18 when Twitpic founder Noah Everett announced that the site had been acquired and would live on. However, the details that he promised would follow never materialized, and on October 16th Everett said that, once again, Twitpic was to close down, this time on October 25.

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I feel my vitality increasing just looking at these. Flickr user Jeffreyw

Normally, people do not enjoy being forced to do something. People also do not enjoy the guilt that comes with doing something that is bad for them. Surprisingly, these two wrongs seem to make a right: when people are compelled to engage in vices, they feel better than when they freely choose the vice for themselves. According to a new paper in the Journal of Consumer Research, persuading a friend to share a dessert removes the burden of choice from them, reducing their feelings of guilt and making them less conflicted about the decision.

Vices—junk food, movie marathons, celebrity gossip news, procrastination—have adverse consequences. Choosing them is ‘bad’ and results in guilt that we don’t get from virtuous activities such as exercise, working on a passion project, or reading high-quality media. “It has long been believed that yielding to vices…is bad,” write the researchers. “While not disagreeing with this picture, the current research presents the observation that a negative view of vices does not quite tell the full story.”

The researchers suggest that the guilt of choosing vices weighs us down, reducing our sense of ‘subjective vitality.' Vitality, a term used to describe the feeling of being energized, has been linked to mental and physical wellbeing, improved task performance, tenacity, and self-control. It is not quite the same thing as happiness, which is a related but conceptually different experience.

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A red light camera at the intersection of Sylvan and Coffee in Modesto, California. Cyrus Farivar

One of the three defendants indicted two months ago on federal corruption charges stemming from a major contract between Chicago and a major red light camera vendor will now plead guilty.

According to a new filing submitted to the federal court in Chicago on Wednesday, former Redflex contractor Martin O’Malley intends to appear before the court in early December to formalize his guilty plea. While the document does not explicitly say so, it’s likely that O’Malley also intends to testify against his co-defendants.

This marks the first guilty plea in a high-level case involving Redflex. Since losing the Chicago contract as a result of this corruption scandal, Redflex’s 2013 pre-tax profits in its North American division (its corporate parent is an Australian company) have plummeted over 33 percent—from $3.4 million in the first half of 2013, to $2.28 million in the second half.

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Stack Exchange

This Q&A is part of a weekly series of posts highlighting common questions encountered by technophiles and answered by users at Stack Exchange, a free, community-powered network of 100+ Q&A sites.

Den asks:

As recently reported, "Xamarin has forked Cocos2D-XNA, a 2D/3D game development framework, creating a cross-platform library that can be included in PCL projects."

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According to interviews given to German publication Manager Magazine (Google translate) this week, sources from Porsche, Mercedes, and Audi said that they are all readying electric cars to respond “to the success of the Californian newcomer Tesla with its Model S.”

Porsche’s chairman Matthias Müller reportedly said that the company is working on an all-electric car that will be based on the company’s Modular Standard Platform (Modularer Standardantrieb-Baukasten in German, or MSB for short) and look similar to the company’s Panamera (which has already been introduced with a hybrid electric engine).

The car will be "an advanced battery-powered variant [that] is tasked with challenging the Model S on both performance and range,” Autocar UK says. The publication added that Porsche is aiming for a curb weight lower than the 4,647 lbs of Tesla’s Model S in its forthcoming car, and that it will come with a synchronous electric motor with horsepower comparable to the Model S.

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World Health Organization

New data released Saturday by the World Health Organization show that worldwide Ebola cases have topped 10,000.

Of those, just under 5,000 people have died—Liberia and Sierra Leone remain the most affected countries. A young girl in Mali has become the latest victim of the deadly virus, the first to die in that West African nation.

As the WHO announced:

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Aurich Lawson

In April 2007, only diehard Broken Social Scene fans salivated when band member Leslie Feist released a solo album titled The Reminder. Sales were moderate for the first five months, reaching an average of 6,000 per week.

But that September, Apple released its most impactful ad since it unveiled the Macintosh. The spot had a simple concept: a pudgy iPod Nano laid flat against a white table, with a hand repeatedly removing it to reveal another Nano in another color. Each Nano showed the same music video—the song "1234" from Feist.

A little video for everyone.

Within five weeks of the commercial’s launch, Feist’s total album sales reached nearly 300,000 units. Roughly 100,000 of those sales came after the ad campaign started, according to USA Today. Fast forward six more months and The Reminder had moved more than 730,000 copies, according to Spin.

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Look, a wall plug! That's new for Kinect v2 as of this week.

On Wednesday, Microsoft announced more ways for PC developers to make and promote apps that utilize the upgraded Kinect v2 sensor, which debuted with the Xbox One nearly one year ago.

The biggest news came in the form of the first public Software Development Kit (SDK) for the sensor, The free download came after nearly a year of access for "preview program participants," and Microsoft opted to wave fees for the creators of commercial products made with the SDK. That means those creators will have more money to spend on a potential upgrade to Windows 8 or 8.1, which they'll need to use the SDK. (Speaking of Windows 8, Microsoft also opened the floodgates to Kinect v2 app distribution within the Windows Store this week.)

However, up until now, budding developers had to use a PC-only version of the Kinect v2 hardware, as the Xbox One version launched with a proprietary connector to simultaneously juggle data and power demands. In fact, last year, Microsoft went so far as to tell Xbox One owners that they would be out of luck. That changed with this week's retail launch of the Kinect Adapter for Windows, which requires both a USB 3.0 connection to your PC and a wall plug connection for power. The adapter will set budding developers back $50, which is the exact cost difference at the Microsoft Store between the $150 standalone Xbox One version of Kinect v2 and the $200 PC version of the same sensor.

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Google executive Alan Eustace has broken the world altitude record for a parachute jump by leaping from 135,890 feet (41,419 metres) beating Felix Baumgartner's record.

As promised earlier this week, AMD has pushed out a new Catalyst beta driver release to go hand-in-hand with this week’s launch of Civilization: Beyond Earth.  Though not entirely Civ focused, 14.9.2’s biggest change is that it enables Mantle support for the recently released turn based strategy game, including Mantle SFR support for Crossfire.

Otherwise these drivers do contain a handful of other Crossfire fixes, including fixes for Total War: Rome 2, Alien: Isolation, and Shadow of Mordor.

As usual, you can grab these drivers over at AMD’s website.

Entering a Facebook "room" requires a QR-type code, which can come in the form of a screenshot or can be harvested from the phone's camera.

After a clash over Facebook's "real-names" policy, the company released an app Friday that encourages communication between anonymous parties. Dubbed Rooms, the app lets users share content based on themes within different chat threads.

The app is in the spirit of other anonymous-sharing apps like Secret or Yik Yak, which consist of threads of short posts based around one's social network or location, respectively. Because of the way they are organized, both apps have caused their share of controversy. Rooms, by contrast, is organized by subject—for instance "Photography Lovers Unite" or "GIFs" (yes,GIFs)—and consist of threads of photos.

The organization harkens back to sites like reddit or AOL chatrooms, with front-facing account names that are defined on a per-room basis. Other users can comment on posts or endorse them with a "like" button that is customizable by the creator of the room.

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Apple

The multi-carrier Apple SIM in the iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini 3 lets US customers purchase data from either AT&T, Sprint, or T-Mobile. But it turns out that if you want the option of switching carriers, you'll either have to avoid AT&T or acquire another SIM card.

When you set up cellular data on a new iPad with the multi-carrier SIM, you'll get this screen, which lets you choose a carrier:

Jon Brodkin

Click on AT&T and you'll see this warning, stating that once the SIM is activated on AT&T's network, it will be locked to AT&T and that you'll need a new Apple SIM to change carriers:

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The TP-Link router that was to be the basis of TorFi. TP-Link

Kickstarter is apparently not the place to go if you’re trying to crowdfund privacy hardware. Just days after the Anonabox project, a highly criticized effort to package the Tor privacy protection service into a portable miniature Wi-Fi router, was suspended by the crowdfunding site, another similar project has met its demise—and its founder’s account has been deleted.

TorFi, which Ars mentioned in a report on October 21, was a project by Jesse Enjaian and David Xu of Berkeley, California, aimed at creating home routers with turnkey Tor protection and support for OpenVPN connections—allowing users to route all their Internet traffic either through Tor's "onion router" network or a virtual private network provider of their choice. The project’s initial pitch was dependent on repurposing routers from TP-Link purchased through retail and re-flashing them with a customized version of the OpenWRT embedded operating system.

But just a day after Ars covered the TorFi project, Kickstarter suspended it. David Gallagher, a member of Kickstarter’s communications team, said that he couldn’t discuss the specific reasons for the suspension. “It’s our policy not to comment on individual projects,” he said in an e-mail.

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Yesterday after an all-day session of benchmarking on Wednesday, we published our initial performance results for Civilization: Beyond Earth. As can often be the case with limited testing, we ran into a problem and were unable to find a solution at the time. In short, while there was a lot of talk about how developers Firaxis had spent some effort to improve latency using a custom Split-Frame Rendering (SFR) approach with Mantle on CrossFire configurations, we were unable to produce anything that corroborated that story. Emails were sent, but it took half a day before we finally had the answer: enabling SFR actually requires manual editing of the configuration file. Oops.

We could ask why manual editing of the INI file is even necessary, and there are other user interface items that would be nice to address as well as I noted in the conclusion of the original Benchmarked article. But that's all water under the bridge at this point, so let me issue a public apology for not having the complete information yesterday.

I've updated the text of the original article (and added a discussion of minimum frame rates in case you missed that), but since many people have potentially read the article already and are unlikely to revisit the subject, I wanted to post a separate Pipeline to update everyone on the true performance of CrossFire with Mantle and SFR. But before we get to that, let me also take this opportunity to provide some of the additional information from Firaxis and AMD on why SFR matters. Firaxis has a couple blog posts on the subject (including one highlighting the benefits of Mantle with multiple GPUs), and here's the direct quote from AMD's marketing folks:

With a traditional graphics API, multi-GPU (MGPU) arrays like AMD CrossFire are typically utilized with a rendering method called "alternate-frame rendering" (AFR). AFR renders odd frames on the first GPU, and even frames on the second GPU. Parallelizing a game’s workload across two GPUs working in tandem has obvious performance benefits.

As AFR requires frames to be rendered in advance, this approach can occasionally suffer from some issues:

• Large queue depths can reduce the responsiveness of the user’s mouse input
• The game’s design might not accommodate a queue sufficient for good MGPU scaling
• Predicted frames in the queue may not be useful to the current state of the user’s movement or camera

Thankfully, AFR is not the only approach to multi-GPU. Mantle empowers game developers with full control of a multi-GPU array and the ability to create or implement unique MGPU solutions that fit the needs of the game engine. In Civilization: Beyond Earth, Firaxis designed a "split-frame rendering" (SFR) subsystem. SFR divides each frame of a scene into proportional sections, and assigns a rendering slice to each GPU in AMD CrossFire configuration. The "master" GPU quickly receives the work of each GPU and composites the final scene for the user to see on his or her monitor.

If you don’t see 70-100% GPU scaling, that is working as intended, according to Firaxis. Civilization: Beyond Earth’s GPU-oriented workloads are not as demanding as other recent PC titles. However, Beyond Earth’s design generates a considerable amount of work in the producer thread. The producer thread tracks API calls from the game and lines them up, through the CPU, for the GPU’s consumer thread to do graphics work. This producer thread vs. consumer thread workload balance is what establishes Civilization as a CPU-sensitive title (vs. a GPU-sensitive one).

Because the game emphasizes CPU performance, the rendering workloads may not fully utilize the capacity of a high-end GPU. In essence, there is no work leftover for the second GPU. However, in cases where the GPU workload is high and a frame might take a while to render (affecting user input latency), the decision to use SFR cuts input latency in half, because there is no long AFR queue to work through. The queue is essentially one frame, each GPU handling a half. This will keep the game smooth and responsive, emphasizing playability, vs. raw frame rates.

Let me provide an example. Let’s say a frame takes 60 milliseconds to render, and you have an AFR queue depth of two frames. That means the user will experience 120ms of lag between the time they move the map and that movement is reflected on-screen. Firaxis’ decision to use SFR halves the queue down to one frame, reducing the input latency to 60ms. And because each GPU is working on half the frame, the queue is reduced by half again to just 30ms.

In this way the game will feel very smooth and responsive, because raw frame-rate scaling was not the goal of this title. Smooth, playable performance was the goal. This is one of the unique approaches to MGPU that AMD has been extolling in the era of Mantle and other similar APIs.

When I first read the above, my initial reaction was: "This is awesome!" I've always been a bit leery of AFR and the increase in input latency that it can create, so using SFR to avoid the issue is an excellent idea. Unfortunately, it requires more work and testing to get it working right, so most games simply stick with AFR. Ironically, while reducing input latency is never a bad thing, it honestly doesn't matter nearly as much in a turn-based strategy game like Civilization: Beyond Earth. What we'd really love to see is use of techniques like SFR to reduce input latency on games from genres where input latency is a bigger deal – first-person games like Crysis, Battlefield, Far Cry, etc. and third-person games like Batman, Shadow of Mordor, Assassin's Creed, etc. being prime examples. With that said, let's revisit the subject of Civilization: Beyond Earth and CrossFire performance, with and without Mantle:

Our graphing engine doesn't allow for sorting on multiple criteria, otherwise I might try sorting by average + minimum frame rate. Regardless, you can see that across the range of options the CrossFire Mantle SFR support is now doing what we'd expect and improving frame rates. But it's not just about improving frame rates; as the above commentary notes, improving input latency is also important. We aren't really equipped to test for input latency (that would require a very high speed camera as well as additional time filming and measuring input latency), but the minimum frame rates definitely improve as well.

What's interesting is that CrossFire without Mantle (which uses AFR) has higher average FPS in many cases, but the minimum frame rates are worse than with a single GPU. The two images above show why this isn't necessarily a good thing. We haven't tested SLI performance, but I have at least one source that says SLI performance is similar to CrossFire AFR: higher average FPS but lower minimum FPS. It's entirely possible that driver updates will improve the situation with D3D, but for now CrossFire with Mantle SFR definitely scores a win over Direct3D AFR as it provides for a smoother gaming experience.

Let's look at the above charts in a different format before we continue this discussion.

We can see that even with just two GPUs splitting the workload, our CPU has apparently become a bottleneck with the R9 290X. Average frame rates still show an increase going from 4K Ultra to QHD Ultra to 1080p Ultra to 1080p High, but when we look at minimum FPS we've apparently run straight into a wall. For the R9 290X with Mantle, CrossFire effectively tops out with a minimum FPS of roughly 65FPS while a single GPU hits a lower minimum of around 50FPS without Mantle, and regular CrossFire on the 290X (i.e. without Mantle) has a minimum of 45FPS. Again, there are likely some optimizations that could be made in both drivers and the game to improve the situation, but it wouldn't be too surprising to find that Mantle and SFR with three or four GPUs doesn't show much of an increase over two GPUs.

I do have to wonder how applicable the above results are to other games. Last I checked, Mantle CrossFire rendering on Sniper Elite 3 was basically not working, but if other software developers can use Mantle to effectively implement SFR instead of AFR that would be nice to see. But didn't we have SFR way back in the early days of multiple GPUs? Of course we did! 3dfx initially called their solution SLI – Scan Line Interleave – and had each GPU rendering every other line. That approach had problems with things like anti-aliasing, but there are many other ways to divide the workload between GPUs, and both AMD (formerly ATI) and NVIDIA have done variations on SFR in the past.

The problem is that when DirectX 9 rolled around and we started getting programmable shaders and deferred rendering, at some point synchronization issues cropped up and basically developers were locked out of doing creative things like SFR (or geometry processing on one GPU and rendering on another). The only thing you can do with multiple GPUs using Direct3D right now is AFR. That may change with Direct3D 12, but we're still a ways out from that release. Basically, AFR is the easiest approach to implement, but it has various drawbacks even when it does work properly.

Of course there are other potential pitfalls with doing alternative workload splitting like SFR. They can require more work from the CPU, and as you add GPUs the CPU already creates a potential bottleneck. AMD informed us that the engine in Civilization: Beyond Earth is actually extremely scalable with CPU cores, so while we're testing with an overclocked i7-4770K, AMD said they even saw a 20% improvement in performance (with Mantle) going from hex-core Ivy Bridge-E to octal-core Haswell-E with R9 290X CrossFire. There are apparently other cases where certain hardware configurations and game settings can result in an even greater improvement in performance thanks to Mantle (e.g. the 50% increase in minimum frame rates on the R9 290X at our 1080p High settings).

The bottom line is that if you have an AMD GPU, games like Civilization: Beyond Earth can certainly benefit. Maybe Direct3D 12 will bring similar options to developers next year, but in the meantime, congrats to both AMD and Firaxis for shining the light on the latency subject once again. NVIDIA made some waves with similar discussions when they released FCAT last year, but the topic of latency and jitters is definitely important – and don't even get me started on silliness like capping frame rates at 30FPS by default (cough, The Evil Within, cough).

US EIA

Last year, the US Energy Information Agency suggested that emissions of carbon dioxide by the US had peaked in 2005 and were unlikely to return to such heights. So far, that prediction has held up, although there have been some bumps in the road. The year 2013 appears to have been one of those bumps, as emissions increased for the first time since 2010, reaching levels not seen since last decade. But there are many pieces of good news in the details.

To begin with, the EIA blames the boost in emissions, which came in at a 2.5 percent increase, primarily on the heavy use of heating during last year's unusually cold winter. A secondary factor was a rise in natural gas prices that shifted some electricity generation to coal (more on that later). The increase in emissions, however, wasn't tied to economic growth. While the GDP per capita went up by 1.5 percent, the energy use per GDP only went up by 0.5 percent; in turn, the carbon dioxide intensity of energy production actually declined slightly.

So, to an extent, carbon emissions have been decoupled from economic growth. They've also been somewhat decoupled from electricity use. Demand has decreased in recent years, in part due to a decrease in industrial activity, in part due to increased efficiency. A switch to natural gas has also decreased the carbon emissions per unit of generation, although, as noted above, this trend reversed slightly last year.

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Getting an accurate read on how well the new generation of consoles is selling is a difficult job, and it's complicated by sporadic and sometimes vague numbers provided by the console makers themselves. After taking a dive into the most recent numbers, Ars estimates that the PlayStation 4 has sold at least 42 percent more units worldwide than the Xbox One through September. This makes Sony's system responsible for at least 59 percent of hardware sales in the two-console market (PS4 and Xbox One).

Estimating Xboxes

Determining those ratios was not a simple process. As a starting point, we used Microsoft's announcement that it had shipped five million units of the Xbox One as of mid-April. Since then, the company has only released quarterly reports on how many total Xbox systems have shipped, lumping the Xbox 360 and the Xbox One together, which obscures the new console's true market performance.

For the April to June quarter, there were 1.1 million combined Xbox shipments. For the July through September quarter, there were 2.4 million combined Xbox shipments. Add all those numbers together, and you get an absolute ceiling of 8.5 million potential Xbox One shipments through September. For the new system to hit that ceiling, though, you'd have to assume that Microsoft has shipped exactly zero Xbox 360 units in the last six months, which is obviously false.

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A Silicon Valley startup said Friday that police agencies were field testing its new product: a wireless sensor that transforms officers' weapons into smart guns with real-time telemetry.

Yardarm Technologies' sensor is a small device that goes inside gun handles and provides dispatchers with real-time geo-location tracking information on the weapon. The Yardarm Sensor also sends alerts when a weapon is unholstered or fired, and it can "record the direction of aim, providing real-time tactical value for commanders and providing crime scene investigators valuable data for prosecution," the company said.

The 10-employee company based in Capitola, California, said it was deploying the technology on a trial basis. The first takers have been the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Department in California and the Carrollton Police Department in Texas.

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Over the last couple of years, the ultra-compact form factor (UCFF) has emerged as one of the bright spots in the troubled PC market. Intel kickstarted the category with their Sandy Bridge NUC kits in early 2013. Recognizing the popularity of this segment, other vendors also began to promote similar products. GIGABYTE targets this market segment with an extensive lineup of products under the BRIX brand. We recently looked at the high-end Haswell BRIX, the GB-BXi7-4500. Today, we will take a look at the opposite end of the spectrum - the Bay Trail-D Celeron J1900-based GB-BXBT-1900. As a note, due to GIGABYTE's regional marketing policies, this model is currently not being sold in the North American market, but targets price conscious buyers everywhere else.