Nove infografiche per conoscere e comprendere il budget 2012-2013 dell'Unione Europea.

Durante la sessione plenaria di dicembre, il Parlamento europeo ha adottato il pacchetto del budget 2012-13. L'accordo, firmato dai presidenti del PE, Consiglio e Commissione assicurano un finanziamento supplementare per saldare il deficit del 2012. Esso garantisce anche la copertura da parte delle istituzioni del defici anticipato per il 2013.

Il pacchetto per il budget 2012-2013 prevede 6 miliardi di euro per pagare le fatture del 2012. Il pacchetto stabilisce anche la crescita e il lavoro come priorità del budget 2013, e pone l'accento su una strategia di gestione del pagamento del deficit per l'avvenire.

La breve, ma esauriente storia della fotografia a colori raccontata da Luminous-Lint.

To understand what is happening in color photography today it is beneficial to know what has been previously accomplished. The quest for color photography can be traced to Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre's 1839 public announcement of his daguerreotype process, which produced a finely detailed, one-of-a-kind, direct-positive photographic image through the action of light on a silver-coated copper plate. Daguerreotypes astonished and delighted, but nevertheless people complained that the images lacked color. As we see the world in color, others immediately began to seek ways to overcome this deficiency and the first colored photographs made their appearance that same year. The color was applied by hand, directly on the daguerreotype's surface. Since then scores of improvements and new processes have been patented for commercial use.

La fotografia pubblicata in alto è stata scattata da Louis Ducos du Hauron tra il 1869 e il 1879. Si tratta di uno dei primi esempi di fotografia non colorata a mano.

Uno splendido time lapse catturato da Elia Saikaly durante una giornata al campo base del monte Everest.

Questo è il modo più veloce (incredibilmente veloce) per piegare camicie a mezze maniche e magliette.

In un video Carla Dauden spiega le ragioni della protesta contro le spese sostenute dal governo Rousseff per l'organizzazione dei mondiali di calcio in Brasile.

Il calcio è più importante dell'insoddisfazione delle persone.

Joseph Blatter, splendido gaffeur e presidente della FIFA, ha liquidato così le proteste che in tutto il Brasile hanno portato in strada centinaia di migliaia di persone contro le spese giudicate eccessive per l'organizzazione della Coppa del Mondo 2014.

In Siria circa 50 italiani convertiti all'islam starebbero combattendo al fianco dei ribelli.
Le rivelazioni di Repubblica dopo il caso del giovane genovese morto nel conflitto siriano.

Si chiamava Giuliano Ibrahim Delnevo aveva vent'anni ed era nato a Genova, recentemente convertito all'islam. È morto combattendo al fianco di un gruppo di ceceni nel conflitto siriano.
Repubblica racconta la storia del primo terrorista islamico di origini italiane.

La nazionale del paese meno popolato a trionfare in un torneo continentale nella storia del calcio alla Confederations Cup 2013 in Brasile raccontata dal Corriere della Sera.

Il valore di mercato del solo Neymar è di 27 volte superiore a quello dell'intera rosa di Tahiti.

Gli scienziati hanno scoperto perché il cemento utilizzato dagli antichi romani ha qualità così rivoluzionarie.

The secret to Roman concrete lies in its unique mineral formulation and production technique. As the researchers explain in a press release outlining their findings, "The Romans made concrete by mixing lime and volcanic rock. For underwater structures, lime and volcanic ash were mixed to form mortar, and this mortar and volcanic tuff were packed into wooden forms. The seawater instantly triggered a hot chemical reaction. The lime was hydrated -- incorporating water molecules into its structure -- and reacted with the ash to cement the whole mixture together."

The Portland cement formula crucially lacks the lyme and volcanic ash mixture. As a result, it doesn't bind quite as well when compared with the Roman concrete, researchers found. It is this inferior binding property that explains why structures made of Portland cement tend to weaken and crack after a few decades of use, Jackson says.

In attesa di provare sul campo le potenzialità della Xbox One e della PlayStation 4, The Verge illustra gli obiettivi della prossima generazione di videogame presentati alla E3 2013.

We're just scratching the surfaces of what the next generation has to offer, assuming we're even seeing true next-gen games at all. As some developers from EA and Ubisoft admitted, we're really still in a transitional period between the console generations. Many of the games we're seeing here at E3 2013 were conceived before PS4 and Xbox One specs were even finalized, to say nothing of working with the actual controllers and development kits. Many of the games we did manage to see are far from complete, and most developers guided us through carefully scripted demos rather than allowing us to play.

Though many games looked great and felt advanced since the last console generation, that doesn't mean we've reached anything near perfection yet. For example, as beautiful as the next generation of virtual cars look, their tires still don't realistically cling to the track.

Character animation still leaves a lot to be desired: despite the amount of motion capture video game studios are doing these days, video game characters still look much better standing still than when they're talking or moving. We haven't really seen what's possible with motion gaming here at E3. And if the best we can offer today in the way of freedom is the freedom to hack or kill whoever you choose and (a la The Witcher) experience a limited number of branching story paths, we've got a long way to go yet.

The next generation of consoles won't magically make games more compelling than they were before. It's a step forward, for certain. Now it's up to developers to build experiences worthy of the "next-gen" moniker.

TPM ha analizzato la chat live di oltre un'ora del Guardian con Edward Snowden, la gola profonda dello scandalo legato all'operazione di spionaggio PRISM.

Perhaps the most interesting answers offered by Snowden on Monday came when he addressed the line between what intelligence agencies are technically capable of versus what policy allows them to do.

The issue came up twice. The first time, Snowden was responding to a question asking him to "[d]efine in as much detail as you can what 'direct access' means." (In the wake of the original stories in The Guardian and The Washington Post citing documents released by Snowden, several of the technology companies that had been identified as part of the PRISM program denied giving the government "direct access" to their servers.)

Here's how Snowden responded:

More detail on how direct NSA's accesses are is coming, but in general, the reality is this: if an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc analyst has access to query raw SIGINT databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want. Phone number, email, user id, cell phone handset id (IMEI), and so on - it's all the same. The restrictions against this are policy based, not technically based, and can change at any time. Additionally, audits are cursory, incomplete, and easily fooled by fake justifications. For at least GCHQ, the number of audited queries is only 5% of those performed.

Snowden returned to the issue later in the chat. A reader asked Snowden if he stood by his claim that, as an NSA contractor, he "had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you, or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President if I had a personal email." Snowden said that he stood by the claim, then again discussed the relationship between policy protections and technical capabilities:

US Persons do enjoy limited policy protections (and again, it's important to understand that policy protection is no protection - policy is a one-way ratchet that only loosens) and one very weak technical protection - a near-the-front-end filter at our ingestion points. The filter is constantly out of date, is set at what is euphemistically referred to as the 'widest allowable aperture,' and can be stripped out at any time. Even with the filter, US comms get ingested, and even more so as soon as they leave the border. Your protected communications shouldn't stop being protected communications just because of the IP they’re tagged with. More fundamentally, the 'US Persons' protection in general is a distraction from the power and danger of this system. Suspicionless surveillance does not become okay simply because it's only victimizing 95% of the world instead of 100%. Our founders did not write that 'We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all US Persons are created equal.'