LG's G4 is now available in the US

The phone for Android diehards is now available from the Uncarrier. T-Mobile today launched online sales of the LG G4, pricing it at $599.76 outright or $0 down with 24 monthly payments of $24.99. The G4 is available in either metallic gray or brown leather — and apparently T-Mobile has an exclusive on the latter option among US carriers. Sprint will begin selling the G4 next week and will offer a black leather option, and US Cellular will also launch sales on June 4th. Verizon Wireless and AT&T have not yet revealed their own release dates. T-Mobile says it will begin shipping online orders out immediately, which means early buyers will get a jump on those who prefer to buy in-store; the G4 will hit T-Mobile retail shops on June 3rd.

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LG's G4 is now available in the US

ABC completely misses the point, invites Amy Schumer to be The Bachelorette

ABC has invited one of the greatest comics alive, Amy Schumer, to be its next Bachelorette. She shouldn't take the gig. No woman should.

This season of The Bachelorette is determined to destroy the series. After a tasteless two-night season premiere that, for the first time, let a group of men choose between two women who would be this year's Bachelorette, viewers were shown a "this season on" preview montage. Usually, this is where ABC parades the most extravagant dates, majestic sunsets, juicy smooches, and a handful of dramatic showdowns between the men trying to court the woman of their shared dreams.

This season is determined to destroy the series

The first half of the preview delivered as expected, but the second half boiled the...

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ABC completely misses the point, invites Amy Schumer to be The Bachelorette

Watch Jason Segel become David Foster Wallace in the first trailer for The End of the Tour

James Ponsoldt's The End of the Tour, starring Jesse Eisenberg and Jason Segel, debuted at Sundance last winter to rave reviews probably for a few reasons. First, as a movie about David Foster Wallace, it's less a biopic and much more a considered portrait of an author wrestling with his fame. Second, Jason Segel is excellent in his portrayal of Wallace, pained and forever on the offensive against a journalist (Eisenberg) so focused on his genius. The movie is powerful and moving, and its first trailer doesn't hide that fact. Thankfully, audiences will be able to see it in full when it debuts in theaters on July 31st.

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Watch Jason Segel become David Foster Wallace in the first trailer for The End of the Tour

Mice develop thinner skin after just three months in space

Experiencing weightlessness for prolonged periods of time may cause skin to become thinner, according to a very small study of mice that spent three months aboard the International Space Station.

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Mice develop thinner skin after just three months in space

The big drone companies are investing millions to create new drone startups

Three weeks ago, DJI became the most valuable consumer drone company on earth when the venture capital firm Accel invested $75 million in the company. Today the partnership between the two parties deepens, with the announcement of the Skyfund, a joint initiative to invest in drone startups and more broadly across the booming field of robotics and intelligent machines.

Make it rain

They aren't alone. This morning Airware, one of the better-funded drone startups in Silicon Valley, announced it was launching its own venture, the Commercial Drone Fund, with plans to pour millions into exactly the same strategy. The fund will be overseen by Airware CEO Jonathan Downey. It announced the first two recipients this morning, RedBird and Sky...

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The big drone companies are investing millions to create new drone startups

RZA is directing a film about youth and hip-hop starring Azealia Banks

RZA is making more movies. Deadline reports that the Wu-Tang rapper is working on a new film entitled Coco, starring fellow rapper Azealia Banks in her first lead role. Banks, who just released a critically-acclaimed album in Broke with Expensive Taste, will play a young artist trying to start a career in hip-hop while still trying to balance her parents' dream that she finish college. She'll be joined by the likes of Common, Jill Scott, Pitch Perfect's Hana Mae Lee, and Orange Is the New Black's Lorraine Toussaint. Filming is said to begin soon.

Coco will be RZA's second film in the director's chair. His last feature, the kung-fu epic The Man with the Iron Fists, saw release in 2012. Since then, he has divided his time between...

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RZA is directing a film about youth and hip-hop starring Azealia Banks

Google starts answering questions on your phone before you finish asking them

Google is rolling out an update for mobile search that displays answers to certain queries before you've finished typing them. Although instant search results have been available on desktop and mobile for a while now, this tweak puts results directly into the autocomplete bar instead of updating the whole page. The update was first spotted by The Next Web, although we've yet to hear anything official from Google itself.

We tried the function out with a number of queries, and when it works, it seems like a smart and obvious way to deliver simple facts. However, there were quite a few misses (notably nothing for "how" questions such as "how many centimeters in an inch") and the suggested results had an odd obsession with Paul Walker —...

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Google starts answering questions on your phone before you finish asking them

Charter vows to uphold net neutrality as it seeks Time Warner Cable deal

Having just witnessed the sudden collapse of Comcast's Time Warner Cable takeover, Charter is already looking to assuage concerns of investors and the public about its own newly announced merger attempt. Tom Rutledge, who is Charter's current chief executive, pledged during a conference call that New Charter would keep away from data caps and some of Comcast's unpopular business tactics. "Through Charter, we’ll offer consumers a broadband product that makes watching online video, gaming, and engaging in other data-hungry applications a great experience, including at peak times," Rutledge said during a conference call yesterday.

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Charter vows to uphold net neutrality as it seeks Time Warner Cable deal

Splatoon is an online shooter for people who hate online shooters

Nintendo plays it safe too often.

The company has become known almost exclusively for a small list of franchises. When you buy a new piece of Nintendo hardware, you do it because you'll get to play a new Mario Kart, Super Smash Bros., and (eventually) The Legend of Zelda. Those games are great, but you already know what to expect: it's pretty rare when Nintendo releases a game that's genuinely surprising. But when it does, the results can be incredible, like the wacky life sim Tomodachi Life or small experiments like the black-and-white puzzle game Boxboy.

Splatoon is the most surprising release from Nintendo in years. It's an online-focused, competitive shooter where groups of players team up to fight each other across a series of...

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Splatoon is an online shooter for people who hate online shooters

Innovative smartphone design isn’t dead, it’s just taking a really long nap

If it wasn’t for Samsung, this would be the most boring year for smartphone design ever. Let that sink in for a moment. The company that perfected the art of reissuing the same insipid plastic design is now the one that’s making the biggest strides forward. That is to Samsung’s credit, for enacting overdue changes in its phones, but also to the discredit of everyone else. Where have all the exciting new phones gone? Did they all perish when Nokia made the historic decision to sell off its mobile business? It certainly feels that way.

The new and improved HTC One M9 looks the same as the old and imperfect One M8. The Xperia Z4 is indistinguishable from the Xperia Z3. And if you haven’t yet seen the LG G4, just go look at a G3 with a...

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Innovative smartphone design isn’t dead, it’s just taking a really long nap

Author Chuck Palahniuk tells us why it's time to re-open Fight Club

“His theory is that there’s been a rock opera for every generation since Tommy and The Wall, and the millennials really haven’t had a rock opera. So he hopes it will be Fight Club.” Author Chuck Palahniuk is on the other end of the phone, and I’m struggling to match the calm, thoughtful voice I’m hearing with chaotic novels like Choke, Invisible Monsters — and of course, Fight Club. It’s the day before Palahniuk leaves on a book tour promoting his new collection of short stories, Make Something Up: Stories You Can’t Unread, but at the moment we’re talking about David Fincher’s aspirations for the Fight Club musical.

“He’s got Trent Reznor working on the score for one year. And after a year they expect to have enough of the primary...

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Author Chuck Palahniuk tells us why it's time to re-open Fight Club

World Cup sponsor logos redesigned to protest labor abuses in Qatar

Qatar has come under intense criticism in the lead-up to the 2022 World Cup, amid reports that new stadiums and luxury hotels are being constructed under labor conditions that amount to modern-day slavery. Nepalese workers, who comprise about 20 percent of Qatar's migrant labor force, were dying at a rate of one every two days as of late last year, according to The Guardian, often due to extreme heat and poor safety standards. The country's kafala labor system also ties migrant workers to their employers, who can confiscate passports and withhold pay as they see fit. Last week, The Guardian reported that many Nepalese workers were denied leave to attend funerals held after a massive earthquake struck their home country last month.

The...

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World Cup sponsor logos redesigned to protest labor abuses in Qatar

After ending Sean Connery's career, Fox is making another League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is getting a reboot. According to Variety, 20th Century Fox has decided to have another go at adapting Alan Moore's dark and wildly imaginative comic book series for the big screen. Although the comics themselves are much admired, Fox has so far had two failed attempts to get the franchise up and running. A movie adaptation in 2003 starring Sean Connery was financially successful but a bit of a critical flop (it was also Connery's last starring role — though that might just be coincidental), while a planned TV series in 2013 never made it out of development.

Let's hope the reboot gets it right this time

It's a shame, as the League has more potential than most comic book adaptations. It's basically T...

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After ending Sean Connery's career, Fox is making another League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie

First Click: You don’t have to be smart to sell millions of dumb TVs

The tide seems to be turning against Smart TVs. Just look at the uptick in stories saying “you shouldn’t buy one” or begging for sales of a dumb equivalent. Vlad explained the case in detail last year. Still, it’s damn near impossible to find a dumb TV with cutting edge specs. As such, there seems to be growing opportunity for a budget television maker like TCL or Hisense to step in with the right advertising campaign and make a killing. Hell, the tagline practically writes itself:

"Our TVs are dumb because you’re smart"

or

"They can’t outsmart our dumb TVs"

Diesel won a Grand Prix award at Cannes for its “Be Stupid” campaign back in 2010. The ads played off the idea that it’s better to be stupid than smart. Stupid is daring, it’s...

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First Click: You don’t have to be smart to sell millions of dumb TVs

Confused by the FIFA corruption news? John Oliver explained it last year

If you only pay attention to soccer once every four years for the World Cup, then this morning's news that a number of FIFA officials have been arrested on corruption charges might not strike you as interesting. However, to those with a passing interest in the world's most popular sport, this is very much a Big Deal. To get an idea of how long these arrests have been coming and just how corrupt FIFA is, it's best to watch John Oliver's rant on the subject from this time last year. "FIFA is a comically grotesque organization," Oliver says. "In fact, telling someone about the inner workings of FIFA for the first time is a bit like showing someone 2 Girls 1 Cup. You do it mainly so you can watch the horrified expressions on peoples' faces."...

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Confused by the FIFA corruption news? John Oliver explained it last year

Sure, let's put 'meme' in the dictionary, but call us when they add dank memes

Merriam-Webster has had, in its own words, a bit of a growth spurt, adding a clutch of new words to its unabridged dictionary. These include some genuinely great entries ("colossal squid" is the perfect name for a new cat and/or firstborn) but also a lot of boring-snoring internet words, including WTF, emoji, clickbait, photobomb, and meme. The thing is, I'm not sure if I really care.

savvy marketing from the suits at big Dictionary

I'm not objecting to these additions because they're not particularly new (the Oxford English Dictionary added LOL and OMG to its hallowed pages back in 2011), or because adding them is just more savvy marketing from the suits at Big Dictionary. It's just that there's something about seeing these words...

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Sure, let's put 'meme' in the dictionary, but call us when they add dank memes

Man breaks Guinness hoverboard record after standing on a drone

A Canadian inventor has set a new Guinness World Record for the farthest hoverboard flight, thanks to a homemade contraption that looks nothing like Marty McFly's ride of choice. The engineer, Catalin Alexandre Duru, broke the record this week on Lake Ouareau, Quebec, after riding his hoverboard for a distance of 905 feet and 2 inches — more than five times longer than the previous record. He did it using a propeller-based, drone-like prototype machine that lifted him to a height of about 15 feet above the lake's surface. Afterward, Duru said he undertook the challenge "to showcase that a stable flight can be achieved on a hoverboard and a human could stand and control with their feet."

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Man breaks Guinness hoverboard record after standing on a drone

Identity thieves nabbed 100,000 tax filings from the IRS

Identity thieves used social security numbers and other data to access the tax filings of more than 100,000 Americans this year, the IRS has admitted. In a statement, IRS commissioner John Koskinen said the "Get Transcript" feature, which which allows people to access tax returns and other filings from previous years, was targeted by "extremely sophisticated criminals" who were then able to obtain an estimated $50 million in fraudulently claimed tax refunds.

Security researcher Michael Krebs wrote about the problem back in March, but the IRS said it was was only alerted to the thefts when technicians noted a higher-than-usual number of people using the Get Transcript feature from February to mid-May. Koskinen said that of 23 million...

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Identity thieves nabbed 100,000 tax filings from the IRS

A tiny string of text can disable iPhone Messages

Apple device owners have discovered a string of text characters that, when received on an iPhone in Messages, can lock people out of the app and — reportedly in some cases — crash the phone. Users who receive the string with Messages open won't be able to go back to other conversations without crashing the app, while users who get the string on their lock screen won't be able to open the Messages app entirely.

People have already started using this forbidden string for evil, sending the code to others in a bid to block them from seeing Messages from any recipients. The effect is undone if the sender follows up with another message, but according to a legion of Twitter users, some nefarious jokesters are refusing to send replies to...

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A tiny string of text can disable iPhone Messages

The first trailer for the Point Break remake shows silly stunts and a sillier script

The bank-robbing antagonists of the original Point Break were a gang of surfers — sufficiently extreme for the '90s, perhaps, but obviously not wild enough for the upcoming remake. 2015's Point Break's villains are surfers, sure, but as the first trailer shows, they're also dirtbikers, snowboarders, wingsuiters, BASE jumpers, and partiers. Just in case you weren't convinced of their extreme-itude, some of them have even have tattoos.

On first glance, the remake appears to have lost something of the original's silliness, giving the death-defying proceedings a cold blue sheen that makes the movie look like a version of Twilight on motorbikes. But even from two-and-a-half-minutes of action, it's clear the script remains as ludicrous as...

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The first trailer for the Point Break remake shows silly stunts and a sillier script