Adam Schiff was the star today.

RED's Hydrogen One phone had a rocky rollout to say the least, and founder Jim Jannard has offered a partial explanation while announcing the first details on the device's successor. From a report: In a post on the Hydrogen-focused H4Vuser.net website, Jannard blames the Hydrogen One's unnamed Chinese ODM (original design manufacturer) for having "significantly under-performed" and making it "impossible" to fix the issues with the phone. Now Jannard's attention is on the Hydrogen Two as well as a long-promised camera module that will work with both phones. The Hydrogen Two is being designed "virtually from scratch" in partnership with a new ODM that is "clearly more capable of building and supporting the product we (and our customers) demand," Jannard says.

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Al Jazeera documentary suggested Bahrain's government worked with al-Qaeda operatives to murder dissidents.

Al Jazeera documentary suggested Bahrain's government worked with al-Qaeda operatives to murder dissidents.

Al Jazeera documentary suggested Bahrain's government worked with al-Qaeda operatives to murder dissidents.

Al Jazeera documentary suggested Bahrain's government worked with al-Qaeda operatives to murder dissidents.

Al Jazeera documentary suggested Bahrain's government worked with al-Qaeda operatives to murder dissidents.

A new paper in Nature Communications, coauthored by more than 60 researchers, sifted through 10,000 previous studies and found that the climatic chaos we've sowed may just be too intense for many animals to survive. From a report: Some species seem to be adapting, yes, but they aren't doing so fast enough. That spells, in a word, doom. To determine how a species is adjusting to a climate gone mad, you typically look at two things: morphology and phenology. Morphology refers to physiological changes, like the aforementioned shrinking effect; phenology has to do with the timing of life events such as breeding and migration. The bulk of the existing research concerns phenology. The species in the new study skew avian, in large part because birds are relatively easy to observe. Researchers can set up nesting boxes, for instance, which allow them to log when adults lay eggs, when chicks hatch, how big the chicks are, and so on. And they can map how this is all changing as the climate warms. By looking at these kinds of studies together, the authors of the Nature Communications paper found that the 17 bird species they examined seem to be shifting their phenology. "Birds in the Northern Hemisphere do show adaptive responses on average, though these adaptive responses are not sufficient in order for populations to persist in the long term," says lead author Viktoriia Radchuk of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Because of the convoluted nature of licensing agreements and the vagaries of corporate competition, what's on Netflix is substantively different than what's available on Hulu or Amazon Prime. Different still are the network-specific streamers, like the up-and-comers HBO Max and Disney+, and the more niche offerings, like Shudder, Kanopy, Mubi, and Criterion. All of them have the same aim, which is to lock up intellectual property to keep people streaming. It's a lot! Plex, a company that sells media server software, has found itself in the strange position of being the answer to that problem. It has two components: the piece of software that organizes media on your computer's hard drive and the client-side program that lets you and your friends and family stream that content from wherever you are on just about any device. It's clean. It's beautiful. It is extraordinarily simple to use. It looks a little like Netflix. Except, all of the content is custom, tailored by the person running the server. In the company's words, both pieces of its software are "the key to personal media bliss." What Plex doesn't say, however, is how that bliss is achieved. Because what's on Plex servers is populated by people, most of the commercial content you'd find there is probably pirated. And this is the main tension of using Plex: while the software itself is explicitly legal, the media that populates its customer-run servers is not -- at least the stuff protected by copyright law. The company, of course, doesn't condone this particular use of its software.

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As protests enter 12th day, Ricardo Rossello's office rejects reports the governor had decided to step down.

General Hashim Abdel Mottalib Ahmed and several officers arrested after coup attempt this month, state media reports.

General Hashim Abdel Mottalib Ahmed and several officers arrested after coup attempt this month, state media reports.

Beijing has outlined its defence plans that include a modern and advanced army.

Beijing has outlined its defence plans that include a modern and advanced army.

How much bigger can video games get? Video games are only getting more costly, in more ways than one. And it doesn't seem like they're sustainable. From a report: There's the human cost, which Kotaku has chronicled extensively. Contract workers are continually undervalued and taken advantage of, as Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 developer Treyarch is reported to do.[...] That's only the start of it. When you adjust for inflation, the retail cost of video games has never been cheaper, and it's been this way for some time. The $60 price point for a standard big-budget release has held steady for nearly 15 years, unadjusted for inflation even as the cost to make big-budget video games has risen astronomically with player expectations. Since changing the price point seems to be anathema, we've seen the industry attempt to compensate with all manner of alternatives: higher-priced collector's editions, live service games that offer annual passes or regular expansions a la Destiny, microtransactions, and free-to-play games. Then you have loot boxes. [...] Let's run down the Big Three. We're more than halfway through 2019, and Electronic Arts has only published one single-player game, the indie Sea of Solitude. Last year was much the same, with two indies as its only single-player releases: Fe and Unraveled 2. Activision's portfolio of single-player games looks even thinner: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is the only exclusively single-player, non-remake game that the publisher has released since 2015's Transformers: Devastation -- which itself is no longer available, thanks to an expired licensing agreement. Ubisoft is an exception, regularly releasing entries in single-player game franchises like Far Cry and Assassin's Creed. But it buttresses them with aggressive microtransactions and extensive season pass plans. (And the occasional diversion like Trials Rising and South Park: The Fractured But Whole.) The big-budget single-player experience is now almost entirely the domain of first-party studios making marquee games for console manufacturers, which bankroll games like Spider-Man and God of War. The economics of first-party exclusives are totally different -- they're less about making money by themselves and more about drawing players into the console's ecosystem. This is worth considering, because as big publishers prioritize live, service-oriented games, the number of games on their schedules has dropped. If you look at the Wikipedia listings for EA, Ubisoft, and Activision games released by year, you'll get a stark -- if unscientific -- picture of how each big publisher's release slate has thinned out in the last five years, relying on recurring cash cows like sports games and annualized franchises and little else. In 2008, those three publishers released 98 games; in 2018 they released just 28, not including expansions.

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