CBC reports on sad news for Star Wars fans: "Grant McCune, a special effects artist who earned an Oscar for his work on the 1977 film Star Wars, has died. He was 67. McCune died Monday at his home in ...

orzetto writes "Italian newspaper La Repubblica reports that YouTube and similar websites based on user-generated content will be considered TV stations (Google translation of Italian original) in Italian law, and will be subject to the same obligations. Among these, a ...

Well folks, it's officially the second to last new year before the apocalypse. Let's go ahead and make it a good one, k? Gosh, looking back, 2010 was filled with so many amazing new experiences! Just kidding, ...

tetrahedrassface writes "Solar maximum is supposed to be occurring, and everything from satellite communications to your toaster or radio could be affected. The only problem is that this just isn't happening, and NASA continues to revise downward the original prediction. ...

It's been a great year at TR, but an odd week. You have natives been oddly restless, calling me out on all sorts of things -- many of which I deserved, but you normally let me slide on -- although ...

This is an interactive guide to 2010 divided into a bunch of different categories. Except this is just a picture of the interactive guide, I didn't actually embed the thing. You're gonna have to follow the link if ...

Toe, The writes "A perennial icon of New Year's Eve is the geodesic ball which first dropped in Times Square in 1907. Over the past century, there have been seven iterations of this ball. The first one, made out of ...

The elderly: they're brittle. If a mugger swings a sockful of nickels at one 9 times out of 5 they're gonna break something. Worried about the safety of your pop-pop and meemaw? Get 'em a taser cane. ...

​I'd like to start out the last FFF of 2010 with a request -- or a challenge, if you will. If you want crazier fan fics on TR, find them and send them to me. I read erotic fan fics ...

When it comes to proposing marriage to that special someone, I can think of at least ten better ways to do it than Facebook status update. At least eight of which involve wearing a clown mask and jumping out ...

Techmeology writes "GSM eavesdropping has been demonstrated at the Chaos Computer Club Congress in Berlin using a €10 Motorola phone and open source GSM firmware. Karsten Nohl and Sylvain Munaut replaced the firmware on the phone, enabling them to process ...

These are the most popular stories that ran on Ars Technica during 2010. We've split them into two categories: multipage features and reports. Without ...

Normally it's Japan that leads the world in breast technology, but China has taken a major leap forward, and the day is slow enough that I thought that I could recognize their achievement. Behold the Top Charming Breast Stimulator, which ...

theodp writes "'The web is better when it's social,' declared Google as it unveiled its OpenSocial initiative. Sounds great, right? Well, maybe not so much, unless you're keen on giving companies the capability to 'exponentially' bombard you with advertising across ...

The Top Charming titty jiggler is supposed to grow breasts by vibrating them to stimulate the blood flow or something. I honestly don't know. What I do know is there's a 5:00 video after the jump that's half ...

​Sorry for the bizarre and vague article title -- I couldn't help myself. Remember the massive Dark Tower movie/TV series project Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman are working on? Well, there are rumors for who's up to play Roland, and ...

lothos writes with news that China has arrested thousands more people and shuttered 60,000 websites in an ongoing anti-pornography crackdown. "Wang Chen, director of the Information Office of the State Council, said at a news conference that some 350 million ...

Ars Staff picks: our 10 favorite Android apps of 2010: 2010 has been the Year of the App, and the Ars staff has listed ...

​I suppose it's before Christmas of 2011, but whatever. The point is that in an interview with Dread Central, Paul Reubens -- Pee Wee Herman -- said he was busy working on a sequel to Nightmare Before Christmas. I assume ...

realperseus writes "The American telecommunications satellite Galaxy 15 has been brought under control after spending most of the year traversing the sky and wreaking havoc upon its neighbors. The satellite is currently at 98.5 degrees west longitude (from 133 west). ...

Well, my friends, much like the Indian curry at your last office holiday party, another year has passed. Yep. Another year of joys and sorrows. Achievements and failures. Lifelong dreams and The Last Airbender.Today is a day to ...

I cannot tell you how much I approve of this trend of male actors singing the theme songs to cartoons. Peter Travers, who runs the interviews and the dude asking these folks to sing, is truly doing the Lord's work. ...

Frosty P writes "As a result of the US Government's complete failure to investigate credible warnings about 'Underwear Bomber' Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from none other than Abdulmutallab's father, senior American counterterrorism officials say they have altered their criteria so that ...

Microsoft does a great job of promoting Xbox Live Arcade games. There's the Summer of Arcade, which this year featured excellent titles like Limbo ...

jcombel writes with this link to The Smoking Gun, which says "As part of an international criminal probe into computer attacks launched this month against perceived corporate enemies of WikiLeaks, the FBI has raided a Texas business and seized a ...

So, this is actually going to be our last post in 2010 (well maybe. If big news happens will drag our drunk asses back here and tell you whats up.)… and it’s not even ours (we’re such lazy fucks). Our ...

Here we are on New Year’s eve, on the day where people around the world are preparing for the end of the year. The special day where people around the world gather together to celebrate the coming year and get ...

cylonlover writes "In a new, more efficient approach to solar powered microelectronics, researchers have produced a microchip which directly integrates photovoltaic cells. While harnessing sunlight to power microelectronics isn't new, conventional set-ups use a separate solar cell and battery. What ...

polar_bear` writes "Red Hat's Matthew Garrett has been checking to see who's naughty and nice. Most Android tablet vendors? Naughty, naughty, naughty, when it comes to GPL compliance. The current crop of Android tablets fails miserably when it comes to ...

Relayman writes "Joe Mailer wanted to download an iTunes movie recently and his Apple TV told him it would take two hours. When he switched his DNS resolver settings, the download time dropped to less than 20 seconds. Apparently, iTunes ...

l_bratch writes "Since December 22nd DICE have been running a competition between each target platform of their latest Battlefield expansion — Bad Company 2: Vietnam. Players were required to complete a large number of 'team actions' in game, in order ...

This may be one of the greatest Christmas gifts ever for a young child as he worked hard and deserved the gift he received for Christmas this year. The young child above, Alfe Game, was only 5 when he was diagnosed with ...

Ellis D. Tripp writes "Today marks the end of an era for photo geeks, with the shutdown of the world's last Kodachrome film processing line. Dwayne's Photo, of Parson, KS will pull the plug on their K-14 processing equipment at ...

2010 was a big year for Apple, as it saw the debut not only of the iPhone 4, but the iPad. There were also ...

SharpieMarker writes "In what could be the most extreme and influential crowdsourcing project ever, Democrats are beginning to organize to purposely vote for Palin in the 2012 Republican primaries. Their theory is by having Palin as an opponent, Obama will ...