How will Ken Block top Gymkhana 3? The same way he topped Gymkhana, Gymkhana 2, and Gymkhana 2.1: more cameras, more ridiculous stunts, and more… Anti-Flag? Die for the Gymkhana!

Did you go to any camp when you were a kid? If you did, what kind of camp was it? I can guess it’s most probably a Scout camp for most of us around this region. These days there are all kinds: day camp, country camp, sports camp, sailing camp, fat camp… you name it, there’s a camp for it. But after watching this video, we get the distinct feeling that we went to the wrong one. Where we should have gone was Ferrari camp.

Ferrari’s headquarters in Maranello, you see, isn’t just a factory and an office tower. It’s got a full village for employees; complete with a gym, restaurant, bar… you name it. And come summer time, it’s even got a day camp. You know, for the kids.

Recently, the company’s affable chairman Luca Cordero di Montezemolo stopped by the camp to see what the bambini were up to, and brought along Fernando Alonso, Felipe Massa and a few others for the day. Follow the jump to watch the video footage and lament how your childhood summers could have been spent.

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We’ve heard that the next Google Nexus phone is in the works, and that Google’s next major update to its Android platform, the Ice Cream Sandwich, will be arriving end of this year. And now, we have our first leak! Somebody’s leaked the first pictures of Android’s most delicious build to date to Android Police and RootzWiki. So, what’s new with Ice Cream Sandwich?

As you can see from the shots, the UI has undergone a redesign with electric blue highlights and a revamped notification bar. Android Police also reports the inclusion of an app drawer, launcher and task switching capabilities, as well as a panoramic camera mode. Nexus Prime owners should be stoked—they’ll be the first to receive the update, then Nexus S owners then the rest of the community in a process, coined by President Regan, known as “Trickle Down Upgradenomics.”

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EFF has released the first final version of its HTTPS Everywhere Firefox extension, which forces the browser to use a secure HTTPS connection on sites that offer it.

According to the EFF, version 1.0 includes support for more than 1000 new sites as the software moves out of beta.

The plugin currently supports all major sites including popular destinations such as, Google, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, Paypal, or the New York Time. It was created in collaboration with the Tor Project and is based on code provided by the NoScript Project.

The EFF said that HTTPS Everywhere was designed to deliver a simpler user experience than NoScript, but support complex rewriting rules that allow services like Google Search and Wikipedia to be redirected to HTTPS without breaking anything.

The HTTPS Extension is offered as free download.

One lightning strike was enough to take out a significant portion of Amazon’s EC2 and an unknown part of Microsoft’s cloud services in Europe.

Amazon said that the lightning hit a transformer near Dublin, Ireland just before 8 p.m. local time on Sunday and caused enough disruption to send its servers offline. Within two hours, the company provided first details about the service disruption and began restoring server instances again after three hours. The company told its users that it would need 24 to 48 hours to get all services back online.

While having servers offline is painful, some EC2 customers were told that the data on their servers may not be in perfect condition. Amazon said that some EC2 instances or EBS servers lost power before writes to their volumes were consistent, and left Amazon only with the option to give its customers a recovery snapshot. Before the instances are restored, the customers were asked to validate the status of their data.

Microsoft apparently was affected by the lightning incident as well and told its users via Twitter than certain cloud services of its Business Productivity Online Standard Suite were offline. Microsoft kept a lid on the information available to the public and provided details of the service disruption only to its customers.

Things seemed to be getting uglier between Samsung and Apple. The German courts sided with Apple earlier this week, which dealt a hefty blow to Samsung, effectively barring the import of Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablets into the European Union (except for the Netherlands).

This is all the result of an intellectual property battle between the two companies, even though they do work together in producing some of the key parts in the iPhone, iPod and iPad.

When it comes to the legal side of the business, however, there’s no love lost between these two at the moment. Samsung isn’t just going to take the court order; however, it has plans to get those Galaxy Tab 10.1 units exchanged for some cold hard Euros.

Director of Public Relations Kim Titus said in a statement:

“Samsung is disappointed with the court’s decision and we intend to act immediately to defend our intellectual property rights through the ongoing legal proceedings in Germany and will continue to actively defend these rights throughout the world.

The request for injunction was filed with no notice to Samsung, and the order was issued without any hearing or presentation of evidence from Samsung.

We will take all necessary measures to ensure Samsung’s innovative mobile communications devices are available to customers in Europe and around the world.

This decision by the court in Germany in no way influences other legal proceedings filed with the courts in Europe and elsewhere.”

Future movies may be using a different type of motion capture technique than we are used to today. Rather using a camera to record the motion of a person or object, actors may be wearing numerous outward-facing cameras on a body suit.

The advantage: Motion capture can be accomplished outside and in large areas that are typically not accessible by traditional motion capture cameras that are used within studio environments today.

Researchers at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute and Disney Research, Pittsburgh (DRP) are currently developing such a system. “Body-mounted cameras enable capture of motions, such as running outside or swinging on monkey bars, that would be difficult – if not impossible – otherwise,” said Takaaki Shiratori, a post-doctoral associate at DRP.

A wearable camera system makes it possible to reconstruct the relative and global motions of an actor thanks to a process called structure from motion (SfM), Carnegie Mellon said. SfM is already 20 years old, but is now used to estimate the pose of the cameras on the person. In the initial tests, the technology employed 20 lightweight cameras on the limbs, and trunk of each person. Each camera was calibrated against a reference structure. When the actor moved, the system was able to automatically build a digital skeleton and estimate positions of cameras on that skeleton.

DRP said that the technology does not yet match the precision of traditional motion capture and will require higher resolution compact cameras and an enormous amount of computing horsepower. One minute of motion capture will take up to a day of computer processing, DRP said.

SOURCE via Disney Research