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Look no further than the world of eSports for a concrete example of how the very idea of popular culture has warped in the past decade. Just because something is popular with an enormous group of people, that doesn't mean that it's truly ubiquitous. When most people see the word "baseball" around the world, they can conjure up the basics. eSports, and all of the many very different games that fall under that banner, still occupy a weird, weird space. Take League of Legends, arguably the most popular eSport in the world. The League of Legends World Championship can net 32 million viewers and all of those viewers can still be called "crazy" by successful, seemingly popular sports reporters while scholarships for League of Legends college players are laughed at. Just because there are millions of fans, that doesn't mean everyone knows what they're fans of.

Engadget will be your guide into this world of competition. If you don't know what eSports are, what a MOBA is or what a League of Legends may be, then we have a show for you. JXE Training Day is a regular eSports show for beginners, introducing competitive games and how to look at them. Our first series begins with an extensive, bi-weekly look at League of Legends.

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Amazon 2014 Summer TCA

There's another confusing video acronym on the horizon: HDR, or high dynamic range. When it comes to photos, HDR refers to merging footage shot in different exposures into a single, hyper-realistic scene -- for video it's more about improving overall contrast. Today Amazon announced that it'll be bringing the feature to its Prime Instant Video service, starting with its original series, later this year. But, not surprisingly, Amazon fails to lay out why we'd want to watch everything in HDR. The company claims that it will offer better contrast and "detailed shadows and distinct highlights to make colors appear richer," but judging from HDR demos we saw at CES, it's not an aesthetic appropriate for everything. Amazon isn't the only company hyping it up: Netflix also demoed 4K HDR video at CES, and its chief product officer Neil Hunt even considers it "more important" than 4K.

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The US and China are like two neighbors who annoy each other with loud music after 11pm, but can't bring themselves to discuss the problem properly. The latest passive-aggressive broadside between the pair sees the US blocking Intel from being able to sell its Xeon Phi chips to China to upgrade the latter's Tianhe-2 supercomputer. BBC News is reporting that the US Department of Commerce shot down the move because of a concern that the hardware would be used to conduct "nuclear explosive activities."

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Nikon's best DSLRs will soon be able to record sharper video, making them much more useful for videographers. The Japanese company says its D4s, D810 and D750 full-frame DSLRs will get "greater support for recording high-definition, uncompressed data" to external recorders via the HDMI port. In addition, you'll be able to send start/stop commands to supported video recorders and edit video more efficiently, presumably via the addition of timecode or other metadata. There's no word on exact video specifications or whether RAW output would be supported, but the company promised to reveal more at NAB tomorrow (the firmware is due this summer). Considering that Nikon was the first to put video on a DSLR, we're glad it's not treating it like the ugly stepchild anymore.

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Saturday Night Live 40th Anniversary Special - Season 2015

Kanye West worked with Nike and Adidas on versions of his iconic Yeezy sneakers, but the artist says the folks on Infinite Loop wanted to collaborate, too. The New York Times' T Magazine reports that West turned down "a multimillion dollar partnership with Apple." During a meeting with a group of designers, the hip-hop mogul briefly mentioned the offer without elaborating on the details, since the subject of the talk was his lofty fashion-focused ambitions. The obvious deal would be some sort of collaborative effort with the upcoming Beats Music/iTunes relaunch. Of course, there's no concrete evidence of this, but reports indicate that Apple's Jimmy Iovine (a Beats co-founder) is doing his best to lure some of Tidal's roster of artist-owners over to its streaming option. Exclusive releases or release windows wouldn't be too much of a stretch, as Apple tried a similar tactic with last year's U2 release -- though it didn't go so well.

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This post was done in partnership with The Sweethome, a list of the best gear for your home. Read the full article at TheSweethome.com.

After pushing almost 25 pounds of leafy, crunchy, pulpy produce through nine top machines, we think the Tribest Slowstar ($380) is the best and most versatile juicer for the home. Its single vertical auger turns at a slow 47 rpm, making it one of the slowest juicers available -- key for getting maximum nutrients and enzymes from produce -- and it still yielded more juice than nearly every other model we tested, meaning theres less going to waste. It comes with a 10-year warranty on parts and the motor, so you can crank it up every day without worry about wear and tear.

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Scores of you - an obscene number, maybe - have already pre-ordered your Apple Watch. Perhaps you even sauntered into a well-appointed Apple Store-within-a-store for some valuable shopping advice before you took the plunge. Regardless, after you've made up your mind about which fancy wrist-computer will be yours in several weeks, you might want to take a look at how much Apple wants to protect it for you.

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You know how long it's been since we first heard that iRobot's making a robotic lawn mower? Nine years. After almost a decade of wondering if we'll ever see Roomba's more outdoorsy sibling, iRobot's finally giving us a glimpse of how the device will work through an FCC filing. Other robot lawn mowers require you to prep your lawn by burying wires around the perimeter -- the machines will recognize those wires and won't venture beyond them. iRobot, however, plans to use a wireless beacon system that entails burying four to nine beacons to mark the edges of your lawn. Those beacons will calculate the robots' position within the property and transmit it to the machine.

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There are times in life when you wonder what it is that you've done to deserve such neglect from those you hold dear. It's a feeling that plenty of Mac users will be experiencing today as Apple has announced that it found a serious security flaw in OS X, but will only fix it for users of the latest version. If you aren't running Yosemite, which was updated yesterday with the relevant patch, then you'd better get it, and quick.

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MI6 Building

While it's public knowledge that the UK government has secretly monitored the communications of the British public, questions over the legality of these practices still remain. After an independent UK court first ruled that security agencies, including GCHQ, had partly infringed on human rights laws, only to be overruled by a Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) report a month later, privacy groups campaigning for clarity are taking their fight to Europe.

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