formaggio writes “Team Austria was just announced the overall winner of the 2013 Solar Decathlon for their beautiful LISI House. With its elegant and innovative moving curtain facade, a simple form, and a strong emphasis placed on creating a seamless space that combines outdoor and indoor living, the stunning net-zero home is a versatile enough…

Stars are realizing that their selfies have to be just so. Some are therefore delegating selfie-taking to trusted photographers…….

theodp writes “The Mercury News has an exclusive sneak peek of Apple’s planned headquarters in Cupertino, which Steve Jobs personally sought approval for in 2011. ‘We found that rectangles or squares or long buildings or buildings with more than four stories would inhibit collaboration,’ Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said, explaining the motivation behind the so-called…

Following the release of photos that purportedly show Google’s soon-to-be-released flagship Nexus phone and the company’s new mobile OS, we now have a nice long video to take in…….

Lucas123 writes “Consumers appear more willing to use a self-driving car from a leading technology company, such as Google, over an auto manufacturer like Ford or Toyota, according to a new study from KPMG. Based on polls of focus groups, technology companies scored highest among consumers, with a median score of 8 on a scale…

Good supply chain analysts offer speculation based on the best available data…….

An anonymous reader writes “The jor1k is an interesting open-source toy emulator project to emulate a 32-bit OpenRISC OR1000 processor, 63MB of RAM, ocfb frame-buffer, and ATA-hard drive … all in JavaScript. Though JavaScript based, there are asm.js optimizations and the performance seems to be quite decent in modern web browsers. The jor1k OpenRISC emulator…

Sen. Edward Markey sends a letter to the Federal Trade Commission asking whether Google’s upcoming changes to its Terms of Service violate a 2011 privacy settlement over its scrapped Buzz service…….

Jeremiah Cornelius writes “Rapture of the Nerds co-author Charlie Stross hates Microsoft Word, worse than you do. Best of all, he can articulate the many structural faults of Word that make his loathing both understandable and contagious. ‘Steve Jobs approached Bill Gates… to organize the first true WYSIWYG word processor for a personal computer —…

An anonymous reader writes “Winston Smith, the protagonist of George Orwell’s novel 1984, resorted to hiding the bushes with his lover in a failed attempt to escape the government’s ubiquitous surveillance. Orwell was concerned with totalitarianism and explicit thought control enforced by police action. While that is still very much an issue for many of…