>>> a federal judge in new orleans has approved a deal calling for bp to pay a record $4 billion in criminal penalties from the deepwater horizon spill, the worst environmental disaster of all time. it includes manslaughter charges for the 11 workers who died on the rig. the judge called it just punishment for what has happened.
Source: http://video.msnbc.msn.com/nightly-news/50632797/
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Since their launch in 2011,?Chromebooks?have slowly been gaining steam. Lenovo just thew their hat into the Chrome OS arena along with Acer and Samsung with a?Chromebook designed for education. Starting at $199, Chromebooks do one thing: launch Chrome and connect to the web. In a world of tablets and smartphones, do Chromebooks matter?at all?in your opinion? Would you buy one/recommend buying one? What do you like or dislike about the idea of a Chromebook? Will businesses get on board? Consumers? What do you think Google is trying to accomplish with the Chromebook? Are Chromebooks (and Chrome OS) an important challenger to Microsoft and Apple? Here?s the Think Tank to give you their opinion:
Let me start off with that! What a day for computing. Yesterday, I had a hard drive crash on my desktop, then went to get my 6 month old laptop and when I opened it up, the screen went all pinkish and had horizontal lines flashing through it! Both in one day! Sheesh!
After months of stoking anticipation and dealing with criticism, RIM will finally reveal BlackBerry 10 to the world on Wednesday. It's got to be a heady moment for everyone involved -- this is the company's big shot at redemption and relevance -- but until then the rest of us will just have to make do with another 
Andrew Bujaski?s Computer Chess was my favorite of the 28 films I saw at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. It is a complete and utter cinematic experience, in large part due to it being shot on the Sony AVC 3260, a ?70s-era tethered video tube camera. The camera first hit the market in the late ?60s and was designed as a lightweight portable camera for both professionals and amateurs. Its shallow focus, low contrast black-and-white image looks at first like modern security camera footage, but the Sony has a zoom lens that allows for a wide variety of framings, which provides a varied depth of field from shot to shot and this is in part what defines its most unique trait. Computer Chess features both tightly composed shots of heads bent over computer screens in a crowded room and long empty shots of a man dancing down a long hotel hallway. The camera itself is tethered to a recording box and then the film?s tech team was also simultaneously digitizing the image. This made the camera extremely bulky and immobile. Consequently, inside crowded rooms, the camera does not glide or dance with the actors like it does in modern films. The shots are often static and frames are often angled in such a way that it feels as if we don?t have unlimited access to these strange characters and their often obtuse arguments. The quality of the image could be called crude by comparison to today?s high resolution, high contrast, hypersensitive focus control cameras, but nevertheless, its unique vibe is both disorientating and transporting.
Bujalski?s film tells the story of a group of cutting edge computer geeks who gather in a Texas hotel for a computer chess tournament in the early 1980s. The team whose computer wins will face off in the final match for the ultimate man vs computer challenge, reminiscent of the actual Garry Kasparov chess challenges. There are an assortment of computer types with weird haircuts and unhip period clothes verbally sparring with each other about tech problems as well as larger esoteric questions regarding their own individual computers idiosyncrasies. Also in the hotel for the weekend is a marriage encounter couples therapy group who sit in a circle attempting to better understand their partners? and their own frustrations.
The dislocation caused by the physical aspects of the production, the weird haircuts, lingo, clothes and the black-and-white imagery transport you to a world that for sure existed but has never really been explored on the big screen with such texture. Unlike other films of this period, Computer Chess doesn?t attempt to evoke warm fuzzy nostalgic feelings of a bygone era; instead, it uses the dislocation generated by the video image to cause us to be hyper-aware of how different the world was in the past from how it is now. Bujalski depicts an innocent computer age when the excitement of technology was driven by a pure pursuit of exploration, rather than the pursuit of application value. At one point a programmer says the future of computers is in dating and we are reminded that there was a time when computer science had yet to be fully co-opted by the corporate consumer driven mentality that currently fuels the dreams of young tech geniuses.