Technology news

Rience Priebus is out as White House chief of staff, the shortest tenure in the history of the presidency. 
It's the kind of thing that really makes you think. It made me immediately think about all the things in my fridge that have been there longer than Priebus' seven months working for President Donald Trump.
Here's an incomplete list:
CholulaImage:Flickr/mike mozartI cannot cook, so it's necessary to have tasty hot sauce. It has been there since November, when I made some particularly b

Those among us who are different — who constitutionally cannot conform to mainstream expectations no matter the pressure — are not a burden, but beautiful gifts who enrich our lives and move us all toward the light.
It's a truth as old as evolution itself, and a parabolic plot twist expressed in art since time immemorial, perhaps never with more clarity than in the 1964 TV special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, burnished beautifully by Inside Out. And we need these reminders, becaus

When I spoke with Oxford Professor Nick Bostrom a few weeks ago about simulation theory — whether or not we live in a computer, basically — we didn’t discuss rocks. We should have talked about rocks. Graphic artist Rense de Boer — possibly one of the creators of the real matrix — created this jaw-droppingly gorgeous 3D terrain video using the Unreal Engine. We said real-time rendering was the future of computer graphics, and by-jolly this is what we were

Reince Priebus will go down as the shortest-serving White House chief of staff in the history of the United States.
President Donald Trump announced Priebus was out of the job on Friday evening, and that Trump had replaced him with Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly. 
SEE ALSO: Turns out, the alt-right really loves Scaramucci and his potty mouth
The president heralded the end of Priebus's term with a few tweets sent from Air Force One, after Priebus had already disembarked

GUEST: Silicon Valley has long been the center of technology in the U.S., not just by largest (1) share of venture capital but also highest growth (2) in tech jobs. But as companies across all industries increasingly transform into tech companies, the demand for software developers all across the country has skyrocketed. In fact, a recent study (3) found that 89% of software developers today work and live outside of Silicon Valley.
This got us thinking: where are all of those deve

Having smashed record after box office record, Wonder Woman's looking to blaze another new trail – this time all the way to the Oscars. 
Variety reports Warner Bros. planning a "formidable" awards campaign for the film, with hopes of netting nominations for Best Picture and Best Director. 
SEE ALSO: 'Justice League' trailer: Wonder Woman is back, and she's brought some new friends
If the studio succeeds, it'll be nothing short of groundbreaking. It's not unheard of for superhero

The Trump White House, much like life, is a bizarre circus of surreal nightmares and crushed dreams.  President Donald Trump re-emphasized this with a series of late afternoon tweets on Friday, with which he announced Reince Priebus was out as his chief of staff.
These were the bombshell missives:I am pleased to inform you that I have just named General/Secretary John F Kelly as White House Chief of Staff. He is a Great American....
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 28, 2017
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Using Halo 5's robust level creator, an enterprising designer recreated the classic NES light gun game Duck Hunt, and it's straight-up bonkers.
A handful of players tried out the Duck Hunt map and corresponding Duck Hunt game mode released by the creative player Spartan Blood 1, who pushed Halo 5's Forge to its limits in creating this crazy game. The mode puts players into two teams; one team consists of a single player with a pistol, and the other team is stuck inside of a TV, jumping around w

Razer is bringing its wireless Thresher into the high-end gaming-headset fight. Its PlayStation 4 and Xbox One models launch worldwide for $250. That puts it up against competitors like the $200 Logitech G933 or the $300 Astro A50. As the pricing would suggest, the Thresher squeezes between those headsets in terms of features. It has 7.1 virtual surround sound, 50mm drivers, and a long-lasting battery.
After using it for a couple of weeks, I’ve found that the Thresher has a lot to like. Bu

Jacob Avital, the YouTuber who brought the Brilliant Earth diamond scam to the forefront of our collective attention earlier this year, is now being sued in a New York Court. Avital, who you may know as Jacob Worth, was one of the sources in our own Brilliant Earth exposé back in May — and one of the few, of more than a dozen people we spoke with, that elected to go on the record. According to court filings, Avital “bases the knowing falsehoods…on unsupportable assumpt

One day, when we're all very old and President Trump is long gone, our grandchildren will ask us where we were when we first learned that the White House communications director accused one of the president's top advisors of trying to suck his own cock. 
After The New Yorker published their already legendary "conversation" with Anthony Scaramucci yesterday, people who still had faith in American democracy demanded for the incoming communication director's resignation. You might imagine that

Redfin is not exactly a household name in the world of consumer tech – it’s a residential real-estate brokerage built on the Internet – but it’s the closest thing the tech IPO market has to a hero as we enter the second half of 2017. Following disappointing IPOs from Snap, Blue Apron, and Tintri, Redfin priced above its expected range and closed up 46 percent on its first day of trading.
Last week, Redfin priced its shares between $12 a share and $14 a share. Late Th

The final weekend of the third season of all-electric racing series Formula E is here, and it features a pair of races in Montreal that will decide the winners of two trophies. Renault has almost completely run away with the team championship, so that one’s pretty much settled. But 10 points is all that separates Sebastien Buemi from his challenger in the drivers’ championship fight, Lucas di Grassi. Both races — one on Saturday and one on Sunday — start at 4PM ET.
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Three years ago, Justin Miller had a six-hour phone call he says saved his life.
Miller is a medically retired military veteran, previously serving two deployments in Iraq. The trauma of combat led him to develop severe post-traumatic stress disorder and a traumatic brain injury. 
SEE ALSO: 6 ways you can use your iPhone to do good
The nightmares didn't let him sleep, and he was scared things would never get better. 
“I called the VA after having a particularly bad nightmare and

If you want to join the electric vehicle revolution but you're not willing to downsize from your rugged SUV or pickup truck, your dream ride may have just arrived. 
Bollinger Motors, an independent EV startup based in upstate New York, just unveiled its first (and only) vehicle: the B1. The company claims the B1 is the world's first all-electric, all-wheel drive sport utility truck, finally adding some grit and muscle to the EV scene.  
The truck looks like a cross between a Jeep and a

Bow down to this epic party planning.  
The world's coolest coworkers pulled together a Beyoncé themed baby shower for one lucky pregnant woman. The appropriately named, Bey-Bey shower, has been a huge hit on Twitter after @yelirand posted some photos of the event earlier this week.  
SEE ALSO: Beyoncé and her babies are being rightly compared to works of timeless art
And we must applaud them for the attention to detail.got to help throw a Beyoncé themed baby showe

Google is paying tribute to one of America's landmark civil rights protests: the Silent Parade.
In honor of the demonstration's 100th anniversary, Google's homepage is commemorating the July 28, 1917 New York march to protest racism and violence against black people. 
SEE ALSO: Google Doodle celebrates the 'man who saw the internet coming'
Organized and led by the NAACP, it saw around 10,000 men, women, and children — including prominent civil rights activists like W.E.B. Du Bois and

Senator John McCain came to his senses Friday morning and joined his Republican colleagues Senators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins in voting no on a "skinny" repeal of the Affordable Care Act. 
In the past five days, Murkowski and Collins have consistently voted against measures to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Meanwhile, McCain voted yes on Tuesday to proceed with debate, and yes on a repeal and replace amendment that failed to pass. It was only during Wednesday and Friday's votes that

An Apple TV with 4K and HDR support has been rumored for months, if not years, but it seems like Apple may finally be gearing up to release an updated version of its set-top streaming box. According to a new report from MacRumors, iTunes is beginning to list movies as supporting 4K and HDR in users’ purchase histories, implying that Apple’s digital storefront — and likely, its devices — could be supporting higher-quality videos soon. Image: MacRumorsIt’s worth notin

If you had any doubts Apple was working on a 4K Apple TV, you can rest easy iTunes is apparently showing listing certain movies as 4K and HDR in users’ purchase history, as reported by MacRumors. Users are still limited to 720p and 1080p downloads, but Apple seems to be adding the new tags to prepare for a 4K rollout soon. That the tags are showing up publicly is likely a mistake; something similar happened with Google Play Movies last year. Of course, we knew 4K had to come eventually. A

Bandai Namco has released Tales of the Rays for iOS and Android today. It’s a new entry in the popular Japanese role-playing game series that touts similar graphics and action as its console and PC counterparts.
The Tales series is one of the more popular in the JRPG genre, with the franchise selling more than 16 million games worldwide. Most of those have been on consoles, with recent entries like Tales of Berseria also coming out on PC.
The series has had mobile releases before, but they

A rare, sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. for the NES sold for just over $30,000 on eBay Wednesday. No, that's not a typo.
Classic video game trader DKOldies put the copy of the 1985 game up on eBay a week ago at a starting bid of one cent, CEO Drew Steimel said. Bids started coming in quickly, and the auction hit $6,000 a few hours before closing.
"The last minute it started climbing up," Steimel said. "And then in the last 10 seconds it went from $6,000 to $30,000, and I was just like, 'Oh my g

For the past few years, the biggest fight in the music industry has been against ad-supported music. Apple attempted to kill Spotify's free tier before it launched Apple Music; the industry has railed against what it perceives as low payments from YouTube for years; and SoundCloud, one of the most popular ad-supported streaming sites in the world, is on the brink of collapse. But the truth is that ad-supported streaming isn't going anywhere. YouTube is too big to fail at this point, and labels h

In The Emoji Movie, a malfunctioning Meh emoji named Gene (T.J. Miller) escapes from a text app so he can be reprogrammed (and subsequently saved from deletion) by an infamous hacker. He travels though a teenager's smartphone with a washed-up High-Five emoji (James Corden) who hopes the hacker can make him popular again.We went to see The Emoji Movie at 9:30AM at a Times Square movie theater, just so the experience would be a little bit worse than it had to be. We don’t recommend you see t

GUEST: The 2016 election laid bare multiple divisions in American society, but one of the biggest is geographical. In major cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, people are generally doing well (although not equally so), while many places situated far from urban business centers aren’t.
Remarkably, faith in the American dream runs highest in locales where social mobility is lowest. U.S. companies, which for the past eight months have been strugglin

Saturn’s moon Titan harbors a key chemical ingredient that may allow organisms to exist on this distant, chilly world. Astronomers have spotted a molecule in Titan’s atmosphere that could be instrumental in the formation of cells, which are a crucial building block of life. That means the molecule — and possibly some form of cellular life — might be located on the moon’s surface as well.
Researchers have suspected for a while that Titan might have this compound, cal

Apple’s latest patent spat with Nokia resulted in a $2 billion up-front payment from the iPhone maker, a colossal sum that seems to indicate Apple was eager to avoid a protracted and ugly dispute that could rival the one it had with Samsung. The amount of the settlement, which was first announced back in May without the disclosure of a financial amount or the new licensing terms, was first spotted in Nokia’s second quarter earnings release by the blog Nokiamob.“We got a substan

Everyone has their preferred approach when it comes to parsing David Lynch’s enigmatic work. The miraculous new 2017 revival of his landmark 1990 TV series Twin Peaks has seen critics studying each hour from every conceivable angle. Plenty of writers take the traditional road and attempt to divine a plot from what can feel like arbitrarily arranged scenes. Others prefer a formal, more academic analysis. Some read the show through the context of Lynch’s career. And I’m sure some

OPINION: Paint, aka MS Paint, aka Microsoft Paint, is wonderful. It is incredibly simple to use, unlike all its competitors, rip-offs, and successors. Windows 10 may have a Snipping Tool, Paint 3D, and countless third-party options, but none of them are as straightforward to use as Paint.
On Sunday morning, a Microsoft document titled “Features that are removed or deprecated in Windows 10 Fall Creators Update” made the news. Paint was listed as “deprecated” in the upcomin

The Vergecast summer 2017 continues! This week, The Verge launched Verge Guidebook, a new guide to show you what to buy, what you shouldn't, and how to use it all. Nilay, Dieter, and Paul start off the show discussing the new review system and how-tos coming to the site.Then, there’s another set of obituaries this week: Apple nano, Adobe Flash, and Microsoft Paint. The crew pays their respects to the weird moments these products gave us.Returning for episode 3 of her series Next Level, Lau

Luc Besson’s latest science fiction film is an adaptation of the classic French comic book Valérian and Laureline. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets follows the titular Valerian and his partner Laureline as they race to protect an interstellar city known as Alpha, which is home to thousands of aliens from across the galaxy.Follow along for all the trailers, news, and commentary for Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.Continue reading…

Hello, and welcome to another GamesBeat weekly roundup! This time, we got to check out the anticipated shooter Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, Middle-earth: Shadow of War is heading to mobile, and Overwatch released its 25th character.
Enjoy, and have a great weekend!
Pieces of flair and opinion
The DeanBeat: Pittsburgh steels itself to become a regional game hub
PC Gaming Weekly: Have you heard of … Roblox?
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds: Watch us earn chicken bucks
Game

Like previous years, the convention center at San Diego Comic-Con 2017 became a hub for cosplayers, with fans from across the world sporting elaborate costumes, celebrating just about every film, TV show, or comic out there. Every Comic-Con, the community seems to champion a specific character, releasing an army of meticulously dressed near-clones across the crowded halls. Last year it was Harley Quinn. This year it was Wonder Woman. The standout costume is often a statement, made en masse, on t