'Minecraft' tops 100 million sales and other top stories.

• 'Minecraft' tops 100 million sales

  

  Much of that success can be attributed to the game's open structure and limitless potential. Players can build anything they imagine, provided its outward-facing geometry is made up of simple, colorful blocks. The focus on creativity is why so many players, young and old, have been drawn to the game and continue to play years after its release. Mojang has supported the game with a steady stream of updates that have added new mechanics, creatures and materials. The game's flexibility has also ma..

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• The Sims 4 discards gender rules for all clothing, customizations

  

  Heels on male Sims? Short hair and suits on females? Maxis says you can finally go to fashion town on your virtual denizens.Maxis The Sims game series has typically offered a ridiculous number of options for how their virtual denizens live, work, play, and love—and it has never shied away from political blowback in the "love" category. The only major exception at this point has been a delineation between the series' three types of Sims—men, women, and children—in terms of 3D character render..

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• Microsoft's HoloLens now has apps for email and your calendar

  

  Scheduled Maintenance. It needs to happen sometime, Internet. Thanks for your patience as we make some upgrades. Usually this takes 30 minutes. Never more than 2 or 3 hours. Try doing other online stuff for a while, ok?

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• 72 new emoji include bacon, pickle and face palm

  

  The emoji masters have been cooking up a new batch of symbols for us, and they are about ready to be served.  Bacon, avocado and pancakes are among 72 new emoji officially announced Thursday. The emoji are set to be released in Unicode 9.0 on June 21 by the Unicode Consortium, which makes final decisions about the universal emoji roster. A new emoji installment has been in the works for some time, and while the emoji will be released later this month, they may not come to your phone right away...

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• Facebook kills off Notify news app

  

  Facebook’s attempt at a real-time, notification-based news app is shutting down. Today Facebook sent an alert to users telling them “Thanks for using Notify. We’re transitioning parts of Notify into other Facebook products, and the app will no longer be supported.” Facebook launched Notify in November, allowing users to select from over 70 publishers that they wanted to send them news notifications. People would receive short summaries they could click through to view full news articles. But w..

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• Google's self-driving cars are also self-honking cars

  

  Scheduled Maintenance. It needs to happen sometime, Internet. Thanks for your patience as we make some upgrades. Usually this takes 30 minutes. Never more than 2 or 3 hours. Try doing other online stuff for a while, ok?

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• Samsung's new Gear Fit 2 has GPS and a giant display

  

  Scheduled Maintenance. It needs to happen sometime, Internet. Thanks for your patience as we make some upgrades. Usually this takes 30 minutes. Never more than 2 or 3 hours. Try doing other online stuff for a while, ok?

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• Pebble's clip-on Core will tap into Amazon Alexa for voice assistance smarts

  

  It isn’t news that Pebble, the company behind one of Kickstarter’s most successful crowdfunding campaigns in history, is rolling a few new wearables off the proverbial (and literal) assembly line. But what is news is that one of them, the clip-on Core, is getting voice assistance features courtesy of Amazon. In a blog post on Thursday, Pebble announced that the Core will ship with Amazon’s Alexa technology on board. Alexa is basically unfettered on the Core, which is to say it can interpret mos..

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• Google 'Project Magenta' Drops First (Machine-Learned) Song

  

  It's a long way to Carnegie Hall, but we bet that Google researchers are already thinking of the day when they can send a robot or AI to play an interesting, improvised piano performance in a major venue. While that's not the stated end goal of Magenta, a new project from the Google Brain team, it's certainly a possibility. The entire premise of Magenta is built around two simple questions: Can machines make art? And can machines make music? And, dare we say it, there's also an unstated third qu..

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