Rescue teams in Japan have resumed their search for survivors of a volcanic eruption on Saturday.

A charity has developed a range of meat products made from the iconic Dartmoor Pony, in what it says is a bid to save the species.

Afghanistan's new government takes office on Monday, almost six months after the country's election process began.

A Gay Pride march has taken place in the Serbian capital Belgrade for the first time in four years, as Guy Delauney reports.

Thousands of Indian-Americans heard Indian PM Narendra Modi speak on Sunday at Madison Square Garden in New York; he meets President Obama on Monday.

Nationalists tear down a statue of Lenin in the centre of Ukraine's second-largest city, Kharkiv, in a move supported by officials.

President Obama says American intelligence underestimated the growing strength of Islamic State militants occupying large parts of Syria and Iraq.

Hong Kong police have used tear gas to disperse thousands of pro-democracy protesters near the government complex, after a week of escalating tensions.

Version:3.17-rc7 (mainline) Released:2014-09-28 Source:linux-3.17-rc7.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-3.17-rc7.tar.sign Patch:patch-3.17-rc7.xz

World of Warcraft players have Blizzcon. Fans of Id Software have Quakecon. Now, fans of Firaxis franchises like Civilization and XCom: Enemy Unknown have Firaxicon.

A little under 200 people paid $40 for tickets to attend this first-of-its-kind fan gathering this weekend, put on by the developer in its hometown of Cockeysville, Maryland, just outside of Baltimore. Your humble gaming editor was among them, taking in the sights and sounds that included demo time on a pre-release version of the upcoming Civilization: Beyond Earth, an XCom: Enemy Unknown tournament, tons of board games, and a dinner discussion with Sid Meier himself. We also tagged along for a behind the scenes tour of Firaxis' offices, located just a few minutes away from the convention hotel.

The one-day event was a far cry from major gaming conventions like E3 or PAX, but what it lacked in size it made up for in the passion of the fans, many of whom were Firaxis die-hards from back when the company was still known as Microprose. If the interest in this year's event was any indication, we're guessing Firaxicon 2015 will be a much larger gathering that cements the company as part of the annual gaming convention calendar.

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Welcome to 1999, friends! Everyone, buy Apple stock, trust me. Andrew Cunningham

jonathan: perhaps AndrewC should have to use OS 9 for a day or two ;)
LeeH: omg
LeeH: that's actually a great idea

The above is a lightly edited conversation between Senior Reviews Editor Lee Hutchinson and Automotive Editor Jonathan Gitlin in the Ars staff IRC channel on July 22. Using Mac OS 9 did not initially seem like such a "great idea" to me, however.

I'm not one for misplaced nostalgia; I have fond memories of installing MS-DOS 6.2.2 on some old hand-me-down PC with a 20MB hard drive at the tender age of 11 or 12, but that doesn't mean I'm interested in trying to do it again. I roll with whatever new software companies push out, even if it requires small changes to my workflow. In the long run it's just easier to do that than it is to declare you won't ever upgrade again because someone changed something in a way you didn't like. What's that adage—something about being flexible enough to bend when the wind blows, because being rigid means you'll just break? That's my approach to computing.

I have fuzzy, vaguely fond memories of running the Mac version of Oregon Trail, playing with After Dark screensavers, and using SimpleText to make the computer swear, but that was never a world I truly lived in. I only began using Macs seriously after the Intel transition, when the Mac stopped being a byword for Micro$oft-hating zealotry and started to be just, you know, a computer.

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Every September, Hampden brings new meaning to "racing to the toilet." Sean Gallagher

Baltimore recently celebrated the bicentennial of "The Star Spangled Banner," the poem that became the United States's national anthem when set to the tune of a drinking song. But one big party a month is not nearly enough for Charm City, so last weekend another Baltimore-born tradition with a somewhat less historic provenance had its turn—the annual Hampden Toilet Races.

The Toilet Race is part of Hampdenfest, an annual one-day street festival named for the historic, once primarily blue-collar neighborhood made semi-infamous by John Waters' 1998 film Pecker (Waters still collects his fan mail via the neighborhood's Atomic Books). A combination of backyard engineering, performance art, and hipster Soap Box Derby, the race pits unpowered vehicles against each other in downhill drag races on Hampden's Chestnut Street. The "racers" must meet six simple requirements:

1. All racers must include at least one clean human defecation device.
2. All racers must be gravity-powered, and may not have any other power or propulsion source
3. The dimensions of a racer may not exceed 5 feet wide, 12 feet long, and 13 feet tall.
4. There are no minimum dimensions for a racer, but it must carry at least one pilot during the race.
5. The racer must be capable of steering both left and right.
6. The racer must have a brake and be capable of stopping without damaging the street

This year's entrants ran the gamut from a pedal-less bicycle with a bedpan welded to its frame to a rolling tiki bar fronted by urinals. The winner, "Stool Pigeon," was a fine-tuned speed machine piloted from a traditional porcelain throne.

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Aaron Getting

An online fundraiser for legendary phone phreaker John Draper, better known as Cap'n Crunch, has passed its target $5,000 in just three days. Draper himself doesn't even know who started the fundraiser, but the money is intended to help with his medical bills. According to a recent blog post, he suffers from both degenerative spine disease and C. Diff, an inflammation of the colon.

I want to thank with the bottom of my heart for an anonymous person for setting me up with qikfunder.... http://t.co/mwzDLLRpHH

— John Draper (@jdcrunchman) September 25, 2014

In conjunction with others in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Draper figured out that a toy whistle given out in boxes of Cap'n Crunch cereal emitted a tone at 2600 Hertz. By pure coincidence, that happened to be the tone AT&T used to reset its trunk lines. As a result, Draper became a legend in the nascent world of phone phreaking, a predecessor to early personal computer hacking.

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The iPhone 6 Plus has already become scarce. Megan Geuss

After reports began to surface that the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are far more bendable than their predecessors, Consumer Reports promised it would put the new handsets to the test. As of Friday evening, the results are in: "Our tests show that both iPhones seem tougher than the Internet fracas implies."

How exactly did the magazine come to that conclusion? Using an Instron compression test machine, the researchers applied a "three-point flexural test... in which the phone is supported at two points on either end, then force is applied at a third point on the top." Consumer Reports tested a number of phones for comparison: an iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, LG G3, Samsung Galaxy Note 3, HTC One (M8), and, for good measure, an iPhone 5.

According to The Verge, which visited Apple's secret test site near 1 Infinite Loop, the phone maker itself applied 25 kilograms (55.1 pounds) of force to test the flexibility of thousands of iPhone 6 and 6 Plus units. Consumer Reports says Apple's tests delivered "approximately the force required to break three pencils," but the magazine wanted to go even farther.

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Hollywood actor George Clooney has shown off his wife, Amal Alamuddin, the day after the couple married in Venice.

Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has used his speech at the United Nations General Assembly to attack America's 'military interference' in the world.

Thirty hikers found near the peak of Mount Ontake are feared dead after being found unresponsive, rescuers say.

Mariam Ibrahim, who was sentenced to death in Sudan for refusing to renounce her Christian faith, tells the BBC's Tom Esslemont she believes her time in prison was ''a test''.

Google

An example of a generic interface that Google designs. Developers can customize the colors and icons.

7 more images in gallery

Google just released a set of Android Auto developer documents to developer.android.com, detailing more of Google's in-car platform and giving developers a better sense of the system's capabilities.

Android Auto "apps" aren't really apps; they're additional Android Auto-specific content that developers add to their existing Android apps. This is exactly the way Android Wear works. Developers don't have separate phone, watch, and car apps; they just include additional interface attributes in their regular apps for display on the other form factors.

Developers don't get to design interfaces in Android Auto, it's more of a "fill-in-the-blanks" style of development. Google makes the interface layout, and developers get to change the colors, button actions, and text of that interface. Apps also provide a content stream for playback, but that's pretty much it.

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Google

Don't text and drive, kids, not even if you're using high-tech, hands-free goggles to do so.

Researchers at the University of Central Florida have concluded in a study that using Google Glass to text while driving is clearly a distraction. They also discovered, however, that Glass wearers were more capable of regaining control of their vehicles than smartphone users following traffic incidents.

The peer-reviewed study was the first to examine the impact of Glass on driving, and was conducted with the hope of finding new ways for technology to deliver information to drivers with minimal risk. "As destructive influences threaten to become more common and numerous in drivers' lives, we find the limited benefits provided by Glass a hopeful sign of technological solutions to come," said researcher Ben Sawyer.

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