Pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong decided to suspend a vote on whether to accept government concessions on Sunday citing disagreements over its format.

An all-terrain camera slider, successfully funded on Kickstarter in 2012 and effectively abandoned by the creator in 2013. Kickstarter

The public life-cycle of a Kickstarter rarely ends in tragedy. Often, if a Kickstarter manages to get covered by the media before its funding round end, or even starts, it can meet its goal within days, and superfluous funds continue to roll in over the next few weeks. By the time its crowdfunding stage closes, the creators, backers, and media alike are excited and proud to have ushered this new project so quickly to a place of prosperity, eager for it to continue to grow.

Plenty of projects manage to deliver the goods, even if the timeline slides a bit. That was the case with Tim Schafer's Kickstarter game Broken Age. If creators miss deadlines, backers typically continue to receive updates via e-mail and the Kickstarter page. But sometimes the end of funding is the beginning of a slide into radio silence, which ultimately turns into few or no backer orders fulfilled, and no satisfactory explanation for why the project didn't pan out according to the orderly delivery schedule the creators promised.

A project can go off the rails and fail even after its funding succeeds for a number of reasons. There can be unforeseen costs, or design problems, or a team member quits or fails to deliver their part of the project. Often, when a project skids to a halt, the final updates are obscured from the public and sent only to backers, which may be part of the reason failures are often not well-publicized. Occasionally, backers who receive them pass them on or post them publicly on forums, which is as good as it gets in terms of letting the outside world know a project did not ultimately pan out.

Why burn out when you can fade away

MyIDkey, a password manager dongle, raised $473,333 on Kickstarter in March 2013, and $3.5 million overall from other investors. The team decided to change the design of the product and many of its features midstream. In his second-to-last update to backers, which was sent privately rather than posted publicly on the project page, creator Benjamin Chen wrote about how his company's funding situation very suddenly changed:

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The story of Umm Ahmed, an Iraqi woman whose son, husband and brothers-in-law vanished overnight.

Justa Canaviri is Bolivia's top celebrity chef and one of the country's best-known traditionally dressed "cholitas". Born in La Paz in 1963, she speaks to the BBC for 100 Women.

Flowing lava from the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii could soon force dozens of residents in Pahoa to flee their homes.

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

Footage from World Wingsuit League China Grand Prix earlier this month.

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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By the end of the year, British forces will have ended combat operations in Afghanistan leaving Afghan security forces to fight the Taliban threat.

Russia prepares to turn back the clocks, moving the country on to "permanent winter time" - a move which has divided opinion

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.