Humble Indie Bundle 4 abused by Scrooge-like Steam scamming

Humble Indie Bundle 4 abused by Scrooge-like Steam scamming:

This is how nice things like Humble Indie Bundles stop happening: the Humble Indie Bundle 4, which also supports charities like the Red Cross and Child's Play, has people abusing the system for grinchy gain. Here's how the scam worked: oogie-boogies purchased the bundle for a penny, then used the Steam codes from the bundle "to 'legitimize' automated Steam accounts in order to increase their odds of winning prizes in Valve's current raffle promotion."



"This is unfair to legitimate entrants and is definitely not what we wanted to encourage with Humble Indie Bundle 4," wrote organizers on the Humble Bundle blog. "It's a lose-lose situation for the indie developers, charities, Valve, and Humble Bundle."



New orders now have a required purchase price of $1 to obtain Steam keys. For those who can't afford the dollar (*glares at your $5 mocha*), a Steam key can be provided by contacting the support team and promising "not to resell" or "otherwise abuse it."



It's a fair compromise to a sad situation that shouldn't have happened in the first place.

Humble Indie Bundle 4 abused by Scrooge-like Steam scamming originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 22 Dec 2011 13:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Race And Ron Paul

Race And Ron Paul:

A slightly different perspective:

Why not Paul, when, in many instances, Paul’s voting record and political leanings have been more progressive and in-line with Black America’s than Barack Obama’s ...? Why not Paul, when he’s been one of the most vocal opponents of America’s continued support for the War on Drugs, an issue that many say is destroying black America. “The War on Drugs is a total failure,” Paul told time magazine. “It’s created a monster of a problem for us.” And while many an African American activist and political theorist have highlighted the problems with the U.S. military spending and the War on Drugs, most politicians have been flat out afraid to be labeled soft of defense and drugs.

A reader adds:

Let’s see: does a candidate who does any of the following seem like a racist or bigot to you? 1) Be the only one in a Republican debate to oppose racial profiling 2) Frame his opposition to the death penalty and end of the war on drugs in terms of discrimination by the law and law enforcement 3) Implore citizens of Christian America to put themselves in the perspective of Muslims in the Middle East when thinking of our foreign policy?

But all these current stands are aparently irrelevant when compared with racist newsletters written by someone else two decades ago which Paul now condemns. Conor makes related points in a must-read of intellectual honesty:

What I want Paul detractors to confront is that he alone, among viable candidates, favors reforming certain atrocious policies, including policies that explicitly target ethnic and religious minorities. And that, appalling as it is, every candidate in 2012 who has polled above 10 percent is complicit in some heinous policy or action or association. Paul's association with racist newsletters is a serious moral failing, and even so, it doesn't save us from making a fraught moral judgment about whether or not to support his candidacy, even if we're judging by the single metric of protecting racial or ethnic minority groups, because when it comes to America's most racist or racially fraught policies, Paul is arguably on the right side of all of them.

His opponents are often on the wrong side, at least if you're someone who thinks that it's wrong to lock people up without due process or kill them in drone strikes or destabilize their countries by forcing a war on drug cartels even as American consumers ensure the strength of those cartels.

In supporting Ron Paul, I am backing one of the few candidates in the GOP field not to have exploited racial code words, homophobia, illegal immigration, or generalizations about Muslims that come easily to the mind of, say, Newt Gingrich or Herman Cain, who actually said he wouldn't appoint a Muslim to his cabinet! I am backing one of the few GOP candidates not to have endorsed torture and to have opposed the Iraq war. To pick Paul out as the core bigot in this crowd, and to regard anyone who backs him as tainted by bigotry ... seems to me to be perverse.

[The first version of this post muddled a reader email and a blog-post. Apologies.]

Find All the Hackintosh-Compatible Parts You Need with This Buyer's Guide [Hackintosh]

Find All the Hackintosh-Compatible Parts You Need with This Buyer's Guide [Hackintosh]:

We've looked at how to find the right parts for a hackintosh on your own, but now hackintosh expert tonymacx86 has posted a comprehensive list of builds and parts for creating Intel-based machines of all kinds. It includes a quite a few sample builds as well as a very helpful, long list of compatible graphics cards. More »

Further proof stick shifts stop car crime [Save Our Sticks]

Further proof stick shifts stop car crime [Save Our Sticks]:

More evidence that a manual transmission is not merely a means to greater car control and a better driving experience: Like a similar case late last month, a shift lever and clutch pedal have prevented yet another carjacking. More »

Check Out Tonight's Stossel: What a Wonderful World!

Check Out Tonight's Stossel: What a Wonderful World!:

Tonight's Stossel show on Fox Business is based
on the theme of "What a Wonderful World!":

The media tell us life is getting worse. As usual, they miss the
big picture.

This is a wonderful world…and it’s getting better!

We’re living longer. This week, Stossel talks to Sonia Arrison
who says that, because of amazing advances in medical technology,
the first person who will live to be 150 years old has already been
born. And soon 150 years will be the AVERAGE.

Innovation makes our lives better. Swedish public health
professor Hans Rosling tells Stossel why. His
video that celebrates the miracle of the washing machine
has been viewed ten million times.

Matt Ridley explains how “ideas having sex” is a reason the
world is getting better. Sounds inappropriate, but he’s
right!

Even though our government’s regulations become more
burdensome on a daily basis, some entrepreneurs find innovative
ways around the regs. Two entrepreneurs founded Blueseed, a
boat that will sit 12 miles offshore and house foreign innovators
who don’t want to wait 35 years for a visa … but want to share
their ideas with Silicon Valley.

And finally, an entrepreneur offering a reward for success says
a prize leads to better innovation than government central
planning. He’s running competitions to see who can land a robot on
the moon, who can invent a 100 mpg car, and a device that gives you
better medical diagnoses than your doctor might.

Reason runs Stossel's columns every Thursday (his latest, on
what business owners have to fear from Obamacare,
is here) and we're happy to have staffers featured regularly on
his show.

For more on Stossel, which airs on Fox Business
Thursdays at 10pm ET and several times over the weekend, go
here.

Brainy bibs for baby, markets in everything

Brainy bibs for baby, markets in everything:

View them here, the economics entries are here.

570 Million-Year-Old Fossils Hint at Origins of Animal Kingdom

570 Million-Year-Old Fossils Hint at Origins of Animal Kingdom:

New research suggests that fossils thought to represent some of the earliest multicellular life are instead single-celled, amoeba-like organisms. But even if they’re not quite full-blown animals, they may hint at how animals came into being.

The 570-million-year-old Doushanto formation, first unearthed in South China in 1998, contains tiny clusters of cells that look similar to animal embryos. During the embryo stage of life, cells become organized into tissues and organs, one of the hallmarks of all animal species.

Using a technique called x-ray tomographic microscopy, researchers captured an unprecedented level of detail in the Doushanto fossils, imaging internal and external features down to a ten-thousandth of an inch. They could even see individual nuclei within the cells, some of which were caught in the act of dividing.

Interestingly, these nuclei had distinctive shapes, quite unlike the cell nuclei of animal embryos, which lose their contours when they divide. Furthermore, while the cells were rapidly dividing, they weren’t differentiating into specialized tissues. The cell clusters also sprouted peanut-shaped protrusions filled with spore-like cells.

“All of that is completely incompatible with an animal embryo hypothesis,” said paleontologist Philip Donoghue from the University of Bristol in the U.K., a co-author on the new work, which appears Dec. 22 in Science.

Electron micrographs and 3D renderings of the Doushanto fossils. Image: Huldtgren et al/Science

When it was originally proposed, the animal embryo hypothesis “was met with almost palpable relief” wrote Cambridge University paleobiologist Nicholas Butterfield in an accompanying commentary. The Doushanto formation sat at the base of a 40 million-year-long time period known as the Phanerozoic, which came just before the Cambrian — a time known colloquially as the Cambrian explosion, during which many new phyla of animals appear suddenly in the fossil record.

According to the theory of gradualistic evolution, which holds that life evolves slowly and steadily rather than in punctuated bursts, “the pre- Phanerozoic oceans must have swarmed with living animals–despite their conspicuous absence from the early fossil record,” wrote Butterfield. If the Doushanto fossils really were animals, “it was indeed the fossil record that had let us down, not the textbooks, and certainly not the exciting new insights from molecular clocks.”

But the new findings “look set to revoke the status of these most celebrated” fossils, Butterfield wrote.

Instead of resembling animals, the pattern is more consistent with a class of single-celled organisms known as Mesomycetozoea. These creatures, which exist in an amoeba-like adult stage, reproduce by dividing into hundreds of new cells that remain in a tightly packed mass until being released as tiny spore bodies.

While the finding is a blow to those who consider the Doushanto fossils early animal embryos, they may shed light on how cells first became organized into multicellular groups, said Donoghue. The Cambrian explosion could have been primed by the sophisticated behavior seen in these fossils, with permanently multicellular arrangements following naturally from temporary communality.

This is, to be sure, speculative, but compelling enough for Butterfield to herald “the arrival of this revolutionary new clade.”

The research is “a great step forward” in understanding early single and multicellular life, said paleontologist David Bottjer of the University of Southern California, who was not involved in the new work. But he cautioned that researchers are still at the beginning of the game regarding these fossils and new evidence could change the story once again.

Image: Swedish Museum of Natural History

Citations: “Fossilized Nuclei and Germination Structures Identify Ediacaran ‘Animal Embryos’ as Encysting Protists” Therese Huldtgren, John A. Cunningham, Chongyu Yin, Marco Stampanoni, Federica Marone, Philip C. J. Donoghue, Stefan Bengtson, Science, Vol. 334, Dec. 23, 2011.

“Terminal Developments in Ediacaran Embryology.” N. J. Butterfield. Science, Vol. 334, Dec. 23, 2011.

Unknown Sixth Toe Discovered in Elephants

Unknown Sixth Toe Discovered in Elephants:

By Elizabeth Pennisi, ScienceNOW

Buried beneath the leathery skin of an elephant’s foot lies one of anatomy’s unappreciated mysteries. Three hundred years ago, a surgeon claimed elephants had six toes instead of the usual five, setting off a debate about whether an extra digit was really possible. Modern anatomists scoffed at the idea, insisting instead that the extra toe was really just a big lump of cartilage. Now a study of scores of elephant feet shows that the lump really does turn into bone. The digit is not a true toe—it’s more like a panda’s faux thumb. But it nonetheless helps support the pachyderm’s mighty girth.

In elephants, “the unique structure of the foot must clearly be considered a key innovation,” says Matthew Vickaryous, a vertebrate morphologist at the University of Guelph in Canada who was not involved in the study. “The elephant foot is deceptively complex.”

The giant panda’s extra thumb is a famous example of evolution’s inventiveness. The animal’s real thumb looks just the rest of its fingers, and together they form a paw with five claws. But in addition, pandas have a somewhat opposable digit low on the inside edge of the paw that helps them grasp bamboo. This “thumb” is really just a sesamoid, a bit of bone that typically forms inside tendons and ligaments where they cross joints. The knee cap is one example of a sesamoid. But in the panda, the sesamoid on the outside base of the true thumb became enlarged, taking on a digit-like identity that helps the animal eat more efficiently.

John Hutchinson, an evolutionary biomechanist at the Royal Veterinary College in the United Kingdom, wondered if something similar was going on with the elephant’s toe. An expert in elephant locomotion, he had for years collected and preserved elephant feet—flesh and all—from animals that died in zoos. The animals ranged in age from newborns to those in their 50s. He had been performing computed tomography (CT) scans, which use x-rays to image tissues in slices to get 3D pictures of them, and other studies to understand how the feet worked, when he noticed that the cartilaginous lump often became denser, like bone, as each elephant aged. The lump could be up to 15 centimeters long and 6 centimeters wide, and it really did seem like it could work like a toe, he says. It’s in the same position as the panda’s thumb, but it’s embedded in cushiony tissue called a fat pad.

Though they are not visible, an elephant’s real toes are oriented somewhat vertically, so that the animal is actually walking on tiptoe, with the wrist and heel off the ground. At first glance, the extra toe seems to be too high off the ground to bear weight or do much good. But by putting some of the collected elephant feet in a device that made it seem as if the foot was supporting the elephant’s weight and imaging them with additional CT scans, Hutchinson and his colleagues showed that the faux toe also acts to support weight, as they report online Dec. 22 in Science. “The extra digits do change position and come into contact with the ground,” says Elizabeth Brainerd, a functional morphologist at Brown University who was not involved in the study.

To trace the evolution of the extra toe, Hutchinson and colleagues performed CT scans on feet of tapir-like species representing the earliest elephant-like mammals and on more recent elephant fossils. They found no evidence of the extra toe in 50-million-year-old fossils, which appeared to walk flat-footed, leaving no room for the sixth toe. Those animals likely spent most of their time in the water. But by 40 million years ago, the more recent fossils had telltale signs of this sixth toe. At that time, elephants were getting larger and becoming more land-based. Their feet were changing to better support their weight, with an expansion of the fat pads.

Although extra fingers and toes sometimes arise as genetic anomalies, and are even common in certain cat breeds (a condition known as polydactyly), Hutchinson thinks it was easier for the sesamoid bone to be recruited for extra support than for a true sixth toe to evolve in elephants. Making a sixth toe would have required a revamping of the complex developmental program that leads to the formation of the foot, he explains.

The sesamoid bone came in handy for the elephant, notes Vickaryous. “Gigantic body forms require innovative adaptations to cope with large increases in body mass.” The researchers are investigating whether other very large animals, such as sauropod dinosaurs, had similar innovations.

Many scientists think that the study of anatomy is past its prime. But that’s not true, says Marcelo Sánchez, an evolutionary morphologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. “Even animals as ‘well known’ as elephants can be subject of exciting, new discoveries, the study of which provides major insights into evolution.”

Source: ScienceNOW

Image: John R. Hutchinson

Space Travel: The Interplanetary Tours Reservation Desk

Space Travel: The Interplanetary Tours Reservation Desk:

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Today, space travel is closer to reality for ordinary people than it has ever been. Though currently only the super rich are actually getting to space, several companies have more affordable commercial space tourism in their sights and at least one group is going the non-profit DIY route into space.

But more than a decade before it was even proven that man could reach space, average people were more positive about their own chances of escaping Earth’s atmosphere. This may have been partly thanks to the Interplanetary Tour Reservation desk at the American Museum of Natural History.

In 1950, to promote its new space exhibit, the AMNH had the brilliant idea to ask museum visitors to sign up to reserve their space on a future trip to the moon, Mars, Jupiter or Saturn. They advertised the opportunity in newspapers and magazines and received letters requesting reservations from around the world. The museum pledged to pass their list on to whichever entity headed to each destination first.

Today, to promote its newest space exhibit, “Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration,” the museum has published some of these requests. The letters manage to be interesting, hopeful, funny and poignant all at once. Some even included sketches of potential space capsules, rockets and spacesuits. The museum shared some of its favorites with Wired for this gallery.

Images: Copyright American Museum of Natural History