Author: Sal McCloskey

If you’re going to give up something that you really enjoy, you might as well get paid for it. That was the mentality of a 14-year-old girl who wanted to focus on “getting a job and working harder at school” when she asked her father to draft a different sort of contract. The agreement, shown above, was that she would get off of Facebook for 6 months in exchange for cold hard cash. According to Buzzfeed: Paul Baier, a vice president for Boston energy firm Groom Energy Solutions, drafted up a legal agreement for his 14-year-old daughter Rachel. The contract agrees to award Rachel $200 if she can stay off…

There are four primary ways that a malevolent entity, whether it be terrorists or a foreign state, could go about attacking the United States or any country as a whole: military attack, medical epidemic, economic attack, or a cyberattack on the infrastructure. It’s the last on the list, the one that gets the least amount of attention from the people and the media, that was potentially launched in January when the US Department of Energy fell victim to hackers. Hundreds of employees and contractors may have had their Personally Identifiable Information (PII) accessed by the hackers. Many are…

It’s a mobile world. Of that, there is little doubt. There is no longer a question about whether the smartphone and mobile industry in general can take over the mind (and hand) share of the data and communications industry. The only question that needs to be answered is who will be able to cash in and who’s going to cash out soon. Android and Apple are in wonderful positions. Microsoft Windows Phones and the newest re-entry into the segment, BlackBerry, are on the bubble. They are alive today, but for how long? Perhaps there’s only room for one of them. Perhaps neither will survive. This small graphic…

There have been some pretty amazing creations with Minecraft over the years. The wildly popular world-building game may be simply a batch of blocks and grazing sheep to the casual explorer, but to those dedicated to the art that can be drawn from the tools, the results can prove that the hard work was an exercise in sheer awesome. Such is the case for the best Minecraft creation I’ve ever seen by Will Blew and Jacob Granberry, the ever-patient folks over at WesterosCraft. Their rendition of King’s Landing, the fictional capital of the Seven Kingdoms in Game of Thrones, took over 100 builders and…

For a video that’s over 45 years old, it comes pretty close to describing the realities of the 21st century home office. The multiple screens are a nice touch, though not for the right reasons. They anticipated different devices based on purpose rather than form. Having a pair of computer monitors, an iPad, and smartphones may not have been part of the original vision, but they understood the direction of the future well enough. They knew that most everything would be digitally rendered from telephones to newspapers to stock reports. They anticipated that for many, the “work would come to the home”…

Twitter built its empire around brevity. There were others in the microblogging field, most notably Jaiku and Pownce, that offered a longer format than Twitter. Conventional wisdom at the time was the the shortness of Twitter was its weakness, but it turned out to be its greatest strength. Now that they’ve introduced Vine, the Twitter app that allows users to upload 6-second videos and post them in their stream, it would appear that their hope in the world of video is that “brevity is the soul of wit.” Did they cut it a little too short this time? Is 6 seconds enough time to put together a compelling…

If you’re one of those who almost deleted your Instagram account but did not because you figured you’d give them one last chance to stop leaning towards the dark side, the latest round of Facebook/Instagram controversy should be enough to push you over the edge. As has been widely covered, Instagram and Facebook are locking people out of their accounts and requiring government issued photo IDs to get back into them. The story isn’t the fact that they’re doing this; Facebook has been known to have zero concern for their users and a distinct willingness to push their social media addiction to the limits….

“Striking” might be overkill, but in a world where Jesse Eisenberg can get away with playing Mark Zuckerberg, this geek CEO doppelganger image is creepy enough to note. Kutcher tweeted the image after the premier of his new movie, jOBS, at the Sundance Film Festival. As far as the movie itself, the initial reviews range from lukewarm to pleasantly surprised. Nobody is heralding it as triumph, but few are calling it the stinker that many anticipated and reviews of Kutcher’s performance have been positive. Are you going to see it? Thank you Sundance for your support of Jobs twitter.com/aplusk/status/…—…

Believe it or not, the Atari brand that American’s have known for the last 31 years has been profitable. Their parent company, Atari S.A. (formerly known as Infogrames before it purchased Atari), is a debt-laden French company that has not been as lucky on the balance sheet. As a result, Atari US has filed for bankruptcy in the hopes of breaking away and building their own future as a privately held independent company. According to the LA Times: There is evidence that the U.S. operation, which after the sale of other assets now makes up the bulk of Atari S.A.’s business, has been improving. The corporate…

Things that we take for granted can be challenging in zero gravity. Take cutting your finger nails, for instance. It’s something that few people think about as a challenge. In space, they can be floating projectiles that end up in astronauts’ eyes, inhaled, or otherwise embedded where they do not belong. The answer – suction. If you can stand watching someone else trim their nails, here’s a video from the quirky Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield as he demonstrates the complications of this mundane task in space. …