Month: January 2019

Enlarge (credit: Umair Abbasi / Flickr)

In Anchorage, Alaska, in the bleakest midwinter, the sun rises just after 10am, hovers close to the horizon for a few hours, and dips back down again shortly before 4pm—all in all, just five hours and 28 minutes of daylight. Around that winter solstice (just in time for Christmas), Spotify listeners in the most northerly latitudes of the world dial down the intensity of their music choices, choosing calmer and more relaxing music.

No, it's not because of chilled-out Christmas playlists: in the Southern Hemisphere, the exact opposite happens, with a peak in intensity just after the summer solstice in December. A paper in Nature Human Behaviour this week drew on the listening data of nearly a million Spotify listeners from around the world, describing the daily and seasonal variations in how people listen. The researchers suggest that the results point to a universal human habit that probably sounds familiar: choosing your music to both match and change your mood.

Morning music vs. midday music

Cornell PhD student Minsu Park and her colleagues were interested in how mass trends in music choices could illustrate the rhythms of music's role in people's emotional lives. So, when she ended up interning at Spotify, Park used the opportunity to work with Spotify colleagues and her advisor to dig into the treasure trove of information that's now available on people's music choices.

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Adding a high-end graphics card to a desktop PC isn’t usually all that hard. But things get trickier when you want to add desktop-class graphics to a laptop or mini-desktop (which may have no room for a discrete GPU). Enter graphics docks, which allow you to use a desktop graphics card with any computer… as […]

The post Gigabyte’s new external graphics dock houses a GeForce RTX 2070 GPU appeared first on Liliputing.

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Enlarge / A monitor seen on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday, Sept. 4, 2018. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

Verizon this week is laying off 7 percent of the 11,385 employees in its failing media division, which includes Yahoo and AOL.

Verizon confirmed the job cuts to Ars and provided the text of an email sent to employees Wednesday. The cuts were reported yesterday by The Wall Street Journal.

"This week, we will make changes that will impact around 7 percent of our global workforce across the organization, as well as certain brands and products," Verizon Media CEO Guru Gowrappan wrote in the email to employees.

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Enlarge / "No more games, asteroid. Tell us who delivered the stuff! You don't want to upset my partner here..." (credit: NASA)

Imagine reconstructing the itinerary of a globe-trotting, Carmen-Sandiego-like character using nothing but the beach sand accumulated in the bottom of her suitcase. That’s a task that even a CSI writer would consider implausible, but it’s not far off from the work of reconstructing the Earth’s formation.

In the earliest years of the Solar System, matter was clumping together from a diffuse disk of gas and dust spinning around an infant Sun. As the clumps grew, the largest of them could transform, partitioning elements and minerals between inner cores and outer mantles. Clumps from different areas of the disk formed from different starting elements, and collisions mixed this with that. From that chaotic picture, we somehow want to work out how the Earth got the exact mix of elements that helped make it what it is today.

The puzzle of how the Earth got its water is perhaps familiar, but this isn’t the only fleeting substance researchers have pondered. Carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur were also critical “volatile” elements, meaning that they could easily have been boiled off by impacts. But impacts would have also been needed to deliver these materials to a growing Earth. How could both of those be true?

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Need a cheap pair of wireless earbuds that you wouldn’t be devastated to accidentally lose in the back seat of a cab or forget in your gym locker? Right now you can pick up a pair of Stalion wireless earbuds for $10. I’m not familiar with the brand, I wouldn’t expect them to sound amazing, […]

The post Daily Deals (1-24-2019) appeared first on Liliputing.

Last year, several major Hollywood studios, Amazon, and Netflix filed a lawsuit against Dragon Media Inc, branding it a supplier of pirate streaming devices.

Under the flag of anti-piracy group ACE, the companies accused Dragon of using the Kodi media player in combination with pirate addons. As such, the company facilitates mass copyright infringement, it was argued.

Dragon Box swiftly responded to the allegations by halting its sales. The company later decided to change its business model, moving from a Kodi-addon platform to a subscription-based service called BlendTV.

The box vendor maintained that this was perfectly legal, but the copyright holders clearly disagreed. This prompted Dragon Box to halt its sales again.

That wasn’t the end though. Last month the boxes returned with yet another service called “My TV Hub.” According to the Hollywood studios, this service is not legitimate either. Growing tired of this “whack-a-mole” they asked the court to intervene.

The ACE members requested a preliminary injunction to halt the infringing activity. It appears, however, that this is no longer required. A few days ago, Dragon Box’s attorney informed the court that they’ve agreed to settle the matter.

“Defendants respectfully notify the Court that the parties have agreed in principle to settle the above-entitled case,” attorney Matthew J. Faust writes.

“At this time, the parties are in the process of preparing a settlement agreement and intend to file the documents related to the final disposition of the case within the next few days,” he adds.

The court responded to the filing by vacating all other hearings and deadlines that were on the docket. However, given the history of this case, it’s probably wise to wait until all paperwork is filed before marking it as resolved.

At the time of writing the Dragon Box website remains online. The boxes themselves are no longer listed for sale, but the site does link to a “Blend TV” subscription which prospective users can buy.

A spokesperson for ACE informed us that they would release more information on the matter in the near future. We will update this article when that arrives.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

Last year, several major Hollywood studios, Amazon, and Netflix filed a lawsuit against Dragon Media Inc, branding it a supplier of pirate streaming devices.

Under the flag of anti-piracy group ACE, the companies accused Dragon of using the Kodi media player in combination with pirate addons. As such, the company facilitates mass copyright infringement, it was argued.

Dragon Box swiftly responded to the allegations by halting its sales. The company later decided to change its business model, moving from a Kodi-addon platform to a subscription-based service called BlendTV.

The box vendor maintained that this was perfectly legal, but the copyright holders clearly disagreed. This prompted Dragon Box to halt its sales again.

That wasn’t the end though. Last month the boxes returned with yet another service called “My TV Hub.” According to the Hollywood studios, this service is not legitimate either. Growing tired of this “whack-a-mole” they asked the court to intervene.

The ACE members requested a preliminary injunction to halt the infringing activity. It appears, however, that this is no longer required. A few days ago, Dragon Box’s attorney informed the court that they’ve agreed to settle the matter.

“Defendants respectfully notify the Court that the parties have agreed in principle to settle the above-entitled case,” attorney Matthew J. Faust writes.

“At this time, the parties are in the process of preparing a settlement agreement and intend to file the documents related to the final disposition of the case within the next few days,” he adds.

The court responded to the filing by vacating all other hearings and deadlines that were on the docket. However, given the history of this case, it’s probably wise to wait until all paperwork is filed before marking it as resolved.

At the time of writing the Dragon Box website remains online. The boxes themselves are no longer listed for sale, but the site does link to a “Blend TV” subscription which prospective users can buy.

A spokesperson for ACE informed us that they would release more information on the matter in the near future. We will update this article when that arrives.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.