mbf tod@y

The Lego Zombie Survival Guide

by Keith  Goldman

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Robin Williams on Halo 3:"Just knives"

Cool Home Features

"Resistance and Uncharted, meanwhile, will give Home users access to full unpopulated levels from the games, allowing players to casually walk through battlefields with their Home avatars. In addition to this killer feature, Resistance will allow players to explore unseen portions of the game, and locate radio transmissions that further explain the storyline" (Scott Jon Siegel, Kotaku)

Now, this is pure genius.

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Tariq Krim, NetVibes

"Anche se terra ingrata, Tariq Krim per il momento ha deciso di restare in Francia. "Qui l'ambiente non è ostile, ma indifferente. La gente se ne frega dell'innovazione e della tecnologia. Non si pensa alle persone con la volontà e le capacità di cambiare il mondo, come gli esperti di cleantech. Io stesso non ho mai avuto alcun sostegno. Il sistema è incapace di notare un'azienda come la nostra". Ma come si può spiegare questa incapacità di investire sui giovani? "Oggi in Europa ci sono due visioni che si affrontano: una generazione che ha vissuto molto bene, che si avvicina alla pensione e che ha concentrato a sé tutto il potere decisionale. E la mia generazione, che si è accorta che se vogliamo produrre ricchezza in Europa bisogna fare cose nuove. Ma apparentemente in Francia non ci si preoccupa troppo di noi"." (La Repubblica, Giulio Zucchini)

Leggi

More info on Technology Review

Why Blu-Ray is on the Way Out

"Blu-Ray has a lifespan of only a few years. We just aren’t very far away from everything that you would want delivered on that disc to be streamed to you instead. I am probably not even going to bother buying any Blu-Ray discs; I watch most of my movies streamed these days, and if it weren’t too much hassle, I’d rip all my DVDs to hard drive." (Raph Koster)

I could not agree more.

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Starbucks was closed, but the Nation survived

"All 7,100 of the cafes across the country were closed until 9 p.m. tonight.

The company shut all stores at 5:30 p.m. to train 135,000 baristas to "perfect the art of espresso."

The corporate memo on the closure noted that 12,600 seconds passed without a Starbucks serving coffee anywhere in the United States of America.

The country hadn't really known life without Starbucks since the first store opened in Seattle in 1971." (Jill Tucker, The San Francisco Chronicle)

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Renzo Piano's L.A. museum opens to public

"The Broad Contemporary Art Museum at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened to the general public on Saturday: not a new institution, despite its name, but a component of architect Renzo Piano's master plan for remaking LACMA's 20-acre campus in Hancock Park. Visitors who know LACMA will be startled to find that Ogden Drive, which used to run behind LACMA's Ahmanson Building, offering access to a lot atop an underground parking garage, no longer exists. BCAM, as the new facility is known, sits roughly where Ogden formerly intersected Wilshire Boulevard, the thoroughfare fronting the seven pavilions that now make up LACMA." (Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle)

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Representing Identities with Lego

A short guide to findings from the Lego identity study, where people were asked to build metaphorical models of their identities ('Creative Explorations' by David Gauntlett). Truly awesome.

Italians are among the most spied upon people in the world

"Italians are among the most spied upon people in the world. That's the conclusion of the authoritative German scientific think-tank, the Max Planck Institute, which reports that Italy leads the world with 76 intercepts per 100,000 people each year. Although the Italian constitution guarantees privacy of information, and a national data protection authority was set up in 2003 with a communications ombudsman at its head, wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping are widely used not only by the secret services, but also by the judiciary, particularly in the fight against organised crime." (David Wiley, BBC)

Surveillance in Europe, an overview from the BBC.

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Apple's iTunes is 2nd U.S. music retailer

"Apple Inc's iTunes digital media store edged out Best Buy Co and Target Corp to become the second-largest U.S. music retailer, behind Wal-Mart Stores, according to data released on Tuesday from tracking firm NPD Group. Based on 2007 sales, legal music downloads now account for 10 percent of music acquired in the United States, but the increase failed to offset a decline in physical CD sales, NPD said." (Reuters)

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