The folks over at machinima are always conjuring up something awesome and now they have put a twist on one my favorite video game characters from childhood, Sonic. Now you can experience the classic Green Hill Zone (Act 1) like never before!
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Apple Sued Over Employee Bag Checks
Former Apple retail employees have filed a class action lawsuit against the technology giant for unpaid time during bag checks. Allegedly, employees are required to have their bags checked for stolen property before leaving the store at anytime. This bag check occurs anytime the employee leaves the store for breaks, lunch breaks, and at the beginning and end of each shift. All of this goes on off-the-clock, accounting for a lot of unpaid time over the years.
Apple has engaged and continues to engage in illegal and improper wage practices that have deprived Apple Hourly Employees throughout the United States of millions of dollars in wages and overtime compensation,” the complaint reads. “These practices include requiring Apple Hourly Employees to wait in line and undergo two off-the-clock security bag searches and clearance checks when they leave for their meal breaks and after they have clocked out at the end of their shifts.”
There doesn’t seem to be any indication of the amount they are seeking but the cost to Apple could be significant considering this practice is held across all retail stores worldwide.
Apple Developer Center Slowly Back Online
It’s been over a week now since Apple’s Developer Center has gone offline. This is all thanks to an intruder that hacked his way into the developer center last Thursday. Apple has since promised to completely rebuild everything and to slowly bring things back online. They have created an status page that shows the progress of their developer system and as of today, about half of it has come back online.
Here’s the actual statement that was sent out to developers via email.
Last Thursday, an intruder attempted to secure personal information of our registered developers from our developer website. Sensitive personal information was encrypted and cannot be accessed, however, we have not been able to rule out the possibility that some developers’ names, mailing addresses, and/or email addresses may have been accessed. In the spirit of transparency, we want to inform you of the issue. We took the site down immediately on Thursday and have been working around the clock since then.
In order to prevent a security threat like this from happening again, we’re completely overhauling our developer systems, updating our server software, and rebuilding our entire database. We apologize for the significant inconvenience that our downtime has caused you and we expect to have the developer website up again soon.
The Science of Bullets Underwater in Slow Motion
I saw this video trending on Youtube and had to share it with you guys. In a great two part video by the theslowmoguys and smartereveryday, we get to see some amazing and unexpected things happen when a gun is fired underwater. Not only is this awesome to watch but there’s a lot of really cool science going on here.
The first video really focuses on the high speed footage while the second part explains the science in a little more detail, so it’s well worth watching both parts. Both of these channels are on my subscribe list for sure and I’m sure you’ve seen videos from one of these channels before as well, but in the odd chance you haven’t, you can get your geek fix and check out some of their most popular videos.
Earth and Moon As Seen From Saturn
It’s not too often that we see our world from afar but when we do it’s truly an amazing and humbling experience. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft was able to get into position next to the great planet of Saturn and take a look back at Earth from 900 million miles away. The image is in color and in high resolution, Earth is nothing but a blue dot with a small white dot next to it, that white dot is the Moon of course. Saturn’s rings reflect sunlight towards the camera and against the black backdrop of outer space, it looks truly beautiful.
Cassini’s picture reminds us how tiny our home planet is in the vastness of space, and also testifies to the ingenuity of the citizens of this tiny planet to send a robotic spacecraft so far away from home to study Saturn and take a look-back photo of Earth.” Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
As NASA points out, pictures like these are very rare because Earth appears very close to the sun at that distance and trying to take a picture could ruin the camera’s sensitive electronics with that much sunlight hitting it. This is just one section of an image that will become a mosaic of Saturn’s rings. You can read the original article and see a full-resolution version of this image from NASA.