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VIDEO: Fire engulfs Russian tower block
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VIDEO: SpaceX lifts off for ISS with supplies
VIDEO: SpaceX lifts off for ISS with supplies
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Lone Star Le Mans: Ars goes racing in Texas
CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});It's no secret that Cars Technica is a big fan of the World Endurance Championship. Thousand horsepower hybrids, racing versions of road cars like Porsche's 911 and Ferrari's 458, the sights, the sounds; we love it all. Once a year, the series visits the US, coming to the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas, where it shares an event with our national endurance racing series, the Tudor United Sportscar Championship. Ars is in town for the races as part of a future feature, but in the meantime here's a gallery to give you a flavor of the event. Not pictured? The crushing humidity.
Jonathan Gitlin
Audi's R18 e-tron quattro. Diesel power, flywheel hybrid, and a string of Le Mans victories
48 more images in gallery
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VIDEO: National party wins NZ election
Home Depot ignored security warnings for years, employees say
Former information technology employees at Home Depot claim that the retailer’s management had been warned for years that its retail systems were vulnerable to attack, according to a report by The New York Times. Resistance to advice on fixing systems reportedly led several members of Home Depot’s computer security team to quit, and one who remained warned friends to use cash when shopping at the retailer’s stores.
In 2012, Home Depot hired Ricky Joe Mitchell as its senior IT security architect. Mitchell got the job after being fired from EnerVest Operating in Charleston, West Virginia—and he sabotaged that company’s network in an act of revenge, taking the company offline for 30 days. Mitchell retained his position at Home Depot even after his indictment a year later and remained in charge of Home Depot’s security until he pled guilty to federal charges in January of 2014.
The Home Depot breach, which reportedly began in April of 2014 and went undetected until earlier this month, exposed an estimated 56 million credit card numbers. Home Depot spokesperson Stephen Holmes told The New York Times that the company maintains “robust security systems.” Home Depot officials have said that the malware used in the attack, BlackPOS, had not been seen before and would have been difficult to detect with its security scans.
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VIDEO: 66,000 cross from Syria into Turkey
Oculus announces new virtual reality headset prototype, Crescent Bay
Oculus VR announced a new prototype for its virtual reality headset at the Oculus Connect conference in Los Angeles on Saturday.
Some new features on the updated headset, called Crescent Bay, include improved optics, 360 degree head tracking (thanks to LED on the back of the headstrap), higher resolution, and a higher refresh rate. The headset is also lighter than the previous Oculus prototype. New built-in headphones, along with software from partner RealSpace3D, promise a virtual surround sound audio component to the Rift (though users will still be able to use their own headphones, if they wish).
While Oculus has yet to go into details on the tech specs of the new prototype, CEO Brendan Iribe said Crescent Bay's jump in performance over the latest Rift development kit is similar to the jump from last year's original DK1 dev kit to the new DK2. While this isn't the long-desired consumer version of the Rift headset, Iribe said it is closer than ever to being a consumer-ready product.
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VIDEO: Turkish IS hostages return home
There’s not a creativity deficit in science
Not so long ago, on a website not so far away, an opinion was expressed: creativity was being suppressed in science. On the surface, the statistics support this: younger researchers are getting progressively less of the funding. Older researchers, it is asserted, tend to propose less risky and less innovative research. As with any good opinion in science, Nobel prize winners are wheeled as supporting cast. But, is it really true? Are we truly suppressing the creative side of science?
The answer is, overwhelmingly, no. Scientific papers are a crude measure for scientific progress, but never have more papers being produced per year than now. Clearly, something creative is going on here. If you don't like scientific papers, simply look at technological progress: your smartphone would not have nearly as much punch without the creativity of scientists; antiviral drugs were not found lying about on the ground; experimental stem-cell therapies were not accidentally attempted. Behind all of these new things lies a decade or more of scientific research. But, you know, thats not creative at all.
Maybe a lack of creativity manifests if we restrict ourselves to more fundamental breakthroughs, like... finding exoplanets, brown dwarfs, the anisotropy in cosmic microwave background, the Higgs Boson, Bose Einstein Condensates, or the acceleration of the rate of expansion of the universe. Not to mention very clever experiments that test the very nature of reality itself, like Wheeler's delayed choice experiment, and Bell inequality tests. Oh wait, all of those have happened in the last 20 years. Some have even garnered Nobel prizes for their work.
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