Month: February 2017

(credit: Flickr: Rego Korosi )

YouTube just added a new feature to its mobile app that allows content creators to reach out to fans more personally. The online video company announced that it has opened up mobile live-streaming for creators with over 10,000 subscribers. In addition to live-streaming from smartphones, creators and viewers now have access to a feature called "Super Chat," which lets pin a comment to the top of the live chat window for everyone, including the creator, to see for a longer period of time.

YouTube has supported live-streaming to its website from a PC for a few years, but the feature that was announced last year at VidCon has only been available to a few select creators until now. According to a Google blog post, this rollout will put the feature into the hands of "hundreds of thousands of creators." But there's still a significant barrier to entry for YouTubers who have yet to break through that 10,000-sub ceiling. YouTube does plan on eventually rolling out the feature to every user in the future.

Super Chat adds an interesting monetary value to YouTube live streams. The paid feature is available on both PC and mobile YouTube live streams, and it lets viewers pay to highlight their comment and pin it at the top of the live chat window for up to five hours. In addition to letting viewers "get a creator's attention" more easily, Google's blog post states that "Super Chat gives viewers a chance to add a little visual flair to their chats and gives creators a new way to keep connected to their fans while earning a little money on the side."

(credit: Ada Be)

Betraying your heart in a relationship may be a worthwhile gamble. In insurance fraud cases, not so much.

A Middletown, Ohio man was indicted on arson and insurance fraud charges after police reviewed data collected from his pacemaker, as well as other evidence. On Tuesday, the man, Ross Compton, pleaded not guilty to setting his home on fire on September 19.

According to the Associated Press, Compton told police that upon seeing that a fire had broken out in his house, he hurriedly packed some items in a suitcase and bags, busted a window with his walking cane, tossed the stuff out the window, rushed out of the house, and carried all the stuff to his car. He also mentioned to the cops that he had an artificial heart.

Enlarge / Neat painted mural on one of the pool bulkheads at the Neutral Buoyancy Lab. (credit: Lee Hutchinson)

On a recent February afternoon, I strolled up to a fat, brightly painted yellow line and peered down into a clear, seemingly bottomless pool. Like the mythical sirens of the Homeric Age, the water called to me. As if he read my mind, Kurt Otten hurriedly called out to me. “Please don’t jump in, because this would be the last day on my job."

Fortunately for the facility manager, I didn’t. But it was hard not to be tempted by the beautiful, blue depths before me. Hotels, health clubs, and other facilities often brag about possessing an Olympic-size swimming pool. That’s cute. At 202 feet in length, a depth of 40 feet, and a total of 6.2 million gallons, about ten Olympic swimming pools would fit into the NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab, or NBL.

There’s one very good reason why the pool was built so big—it had to accommodate segments of the International Space Station during assembly. Before astronauts flew to the station aboard the shuttle, crews would spend exhausting “runs” inside the pool, wearing a combination of weights and flotation devices to simulate the weightlessness of orbit. Then they would practice whatever aspects of station construction there were to do in space.

Enlarge / A red light camera is located at La Brea Ave. and Santa Monica Blvd. in Los Angeles. (credit: Glenn Koenig / Getty Images News)

Redflex, the embattled red-light camera vendor, has agreed to pay $20 million to the City of Chicago as part of its recent deal with federal prosecutors.

The formal settlement comes less than two months after the Department of Justice and Redflex reached a "non-prosecution agreement," one in which Redflex would not be prosecuted in exchange for paying restitution and damages. At the time, Redflex also agreed to pay $100,000 to the city of Columbus, Ohio to settle similar allegations.

Starting in 2003, Redflex secured major contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars in the Windy City. In 2012, the Chicago Tribune revealed allegations that the city’s deals with the company were not entirely above board. The mayor later booted the company out of the city, giving Xerox a similar red-light camera contract.