Mobile slowdown hits Cyber Monday shopping
By (UPI)
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Mobile retail sites on average took more than 18 seconds to load Monday, twice their normal load time, the Mobile Commerce Index from Keynote, a mobile and website monitoring company, reported.
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Tablets and smartphones are becoming popular with shoppers. The number of people using them to make online purchases rose by 70 percent over 2011.
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Online shoppers typically won't wait more than 3 seconds for a website to load, Rudger said, and online retailers risk losing shoppers to competitors' sites if they don't present pages fast enough.
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Upgrading may be part of the art of mobile photography
By Star Rush
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I’ve kept my 3GS this long for aesthetic reasons, and because I liked the simplicity. I liked the softness, the appearance of grain and grittiness in black and white photos, and how the device struggled with light. I liked that I was pushing my little 3MP camera and exposure meter to their limits.
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After shooting with the iPhone 5 for nearly a month, I am surprised that my new photos closely resemble, aesthetically, those from my 3GS. Mostly, they look the same. Images are sharper, and they look brighter to my eyes on the retina screen. I have more pixels to work with for cropping. There’s more sharpness, which I sometimes adjust down by adding blur or grain to keep the look I want.
Comet, Seattle, October 2012. By Star Rush on the iPhone 5.
I've considered why the look hasn’t changed much. I think about my grip, how I hold my body when I photograph with my iPhone as opposed to a conventional camera, what I choose to look at and what I don’t, and my editing choices. I remember my tendency to work my exposure meter toward highlights, and how the movement of my arm, wrist and hand impacts the capturing process. I’m still shooting in black and white and also processing to black and white. I am still who I am, doing what I do. I see these physical habits of mine affecting the way my images look, especially since I’ve kept my editing apps and workflow unaltered through the device upgrade.
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My upgrade hasn’t changed how I make photographs or my relationship to my smartphone all that much on the surface of things -- yet. It has affected how I consume images, though. Faster processing and sharper, richer viewing encourages sharing, as participating in social networks is that much easier.
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Why It Sucks to Be a Woman in the Video Game Industry
By Tasneem Raja
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Thousands of women working in the video game industry are coming forward with stories of vicious sexism they've faced on the job. The Twitter hashtag #1reasonwhy sprang up overnight seemingly in response to Luke Crane, a fantasy role-playing gamer, who asked, "Why are there so few lady game creators?"
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And then there's the cold, hard question of compensation: According to an annual salary survey of about 4,000 gaming professionals by Game Developer magazine, female animators made $26,000 less than their male counterparts in 2011, on average—female programmers ($83,333) made about 10 grand less then male ones ($93,263).
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Obvious trolling aside, #1reasonwhy posters of both genders have done an admirable job of calling out how sexism makes it harder—and sometimes impossible—for women gamers to make games that they would want to play. A number of female engineers and artists noted that simply joining in on the hashtag and tweeting about the problem felt like a risky career move. But woman-repelling workplaces aren't just bad for the game industry's female employees; they are bad business, too. While the industry continues to cater to the supposed interests of teenage boys, those boys make up just 18 percent of the game-playing crowd—30 percent of gamers are adult women, according to the Entertainment Software Association, and they are the industry's fastest-growing demographic.
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Law Commission floats plans to stop jurors researching cases online
By Owen Bowcott
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Confiscating jurors' mobile phones and internet-enabled devices when they attend court should also be considered, the Law Commission contemplates in its consultation paper on reforming the laws governing contempt of court. Online service providers, such as Google and Facebook, may already be seen as publishers under the 1981 Contempt of Court Act but extra controls could be required, the consultation says.
Critics of the initiative may question whether it is practicable to keep raising barriers against new technology at a time when internet use is ever more pervasive, bloggers and citizen journalists proliferate and websites can be read from anywhere in the world.
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"Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and other social networking sites enable ordinary people to engage in public conversation and express their views on a scale and at a speed that has never before been possible."Once information has been released on the web, it is very hard to contain. And, unless steps are taken to remove it, it remains easily available to anyone with access to the internet in a way that is not true of printed materials.
"The commission is asking what safeguards can be put in place to prevent jurors searching for, and being able to find, potentially prejudicial material during the course of a trial, irrespective of when it was published."
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Chevrolet Spark EV Priced Below $25k After $7,500 Federal Tax Credit
By Brandon Hill
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Today, we've learned that General Motors has priced the vehicle at "under $25,000" when tax credits are taken into account. In other words, we're expecting that the vehicle will actually priced at $32,495 before the $7,500 federal tax credit is applied.
For comparison, the Nissan Leaf and Ford Focus Electric are priced at $35,200 and $39,995 respectively before the $7,500 federal tax credit kicks in. Depending on where you live, the Spark EV might also quality for state tax credits/rebates that would knock the price down even further.
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The Spark EV will also be the first vehicle that features SAE Combo DC Fast Charging capabilities. This allows the Spark EV to reach 80 percent of its charge within 20 minutes. Getting recharging times down to reasonable levels is a critical in the adoption of electric vehicles in the U.S. and this is a much needed step in that direction.
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Porn Studios Sue Verizon for Defending Its Customers From Torrent Suits
By Jason Mick
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Traditionally, piracy attack dogs have filed subpoenas to get ISPs to cough up the name and address of the customer associated with a particular IP address. The piracy watchdogs then turned around and sent extortion letters to the marks, telling them to pay a settlement or prepare to be sued.
Verizon is relatively cooperative with some copyright enforcement efforts. It's among the pioneering members of the so-called "six-strikes" plan, which could lead to customers who pirate having their connections throttled to disabled until they take remedial classes on anti-piracy "education".
However, that plan only deals with those who pirate content from the major movie studios and major music labels; porn piracy is not part of the deal (which is good news for certain Congressional offices with a taste for porn torrents). Thus the lawsuit, filed in plaintiff-friendly Texas federal court is likely in part a testament to this media market's frustration at being left out of Verizon, et al.'s anti-piracy pact.
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