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Phoenix666 writes:

Last year, Kennedy, a 67-year-old neurologist and inventor, did something unprecedented in the annals of self-experimentation. He paid a surgeon in Central America $25,000 to implant electrodes into his brain in order to establish a connection between his motor cortex and a computer.

Along with a small group of pioneers, Kennedy, who was born in Ireland, had in the late 1980s developed "invasive" human brain-computer interfaces—literally wires inside the brain attached to a computer, and he is widely credited as the first to allow a severely paralyzed "locked-in" patient to move a computer cursor using her brain. "The father of cyborgs," one magazine called him.

Kennedy's scientific aim has been to build a speech decoder—software that can translate the neuronal signals produced by imagined speech into words coming out of a speech synthesizer. But this work, carried out by his small Georgia company Neural Signals, had stalled, Kennedy says. He could no longer find research subjects, had little funding, and had lost the support of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

When the definitive history of the personal computer is written, familiar and historic names such as Olivetti, Apple, IBM, will all be given recognition for their innovations of the 1960s and 1970s.

But will future generations remember visionary John Blankenbaker, and his ground-breaking invention, the Kenbak-1 Digital Computer?

It was a machine which first went on sale in 1971 and is considered to have been the world's first "commercially available personal computer", coming on to the market some five years before Apple 1.

In fact it was a panel of experts, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, meeting at the Boston Computer Museum in 1987, which gave the Kenbak-1 its pre-eminent status.

Back in 1970 Mr Blankenbaker, then a computer engineer and consultant, put together his machine at his home in Brentwood, California.

"I came into a little money and decided it was time to build a small computer that could be afforded by everyone," he tells me.

"It did not use any microprocessors, and I did the work in my garage."

In the early days of the office computer even a small device cost thousands of dollars, whereas Mr Blankenbaker's aim was a simple computer that would cost no more than $500 (then roughly £200).

Unlike most hobby computers of the time, it was sold as an assembled and functioning machine rather than as a kit.

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Phoenix666 writes:

"Bro, your face is pissing me off, want to throw down?"

That's an example of the sort of dialog that goes on in a new app called Rumblr, which can be used to set up fistfights with total strangers — you know, Fight Club style.

Rumblr is set up like a dating app, except the dates happen in parking lots and back alleys, not restaurants, and they culminate in throw-downs instead of get-downs.

Sigh.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Shad Balch, Manager of New Product and Public Policy Communications at GM, has told the nice folks at Autoblog that:

        "It's very safe to assume that this car is going to be here sooner rather than later," Balch said. "We've also committed that it's going to be a 50-state vehicle at launch. That's to show our commitment to the technology. Our hope is that it becomes a high-volume-selling car, and that it's not just for the coasts, it's not just for a certain income level, but it is a long-range EV that anybody can get themselves into. ... [This is] a good alternative to the luxury long-range EVs that are available now. It's something that people can see themselves actually affording to get into. That's the message from this car."

If true, this is great. The Bolt is predicted to have about 200 miles of driving range and cost about $30,000 after incentives (so probably around $37,500 if we only take into account the federal tax credit, but maybe more if they're including some amount for the most common state incentives).

The Bolt is set to be released in 2017, but the article does not address how Chevy will get around the bottleneck in battery production other EV makers are facing.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

You send us your most ephemeral and worthless communications, and we'll carefully transcribe them into the most long-lasting medium known to man - a clay tablet.
...
        Here's how it works:
        Just send us a tweet or text (use the text field in the order form)
        We'll carefully translate it into cuneiform
        We'll stamp it on an actual clay tablet
        and mail it to you.

Favorite jokes? Amazing pickup lines? Your 2-star review of last summer's blockbuster?
KEEP IT FOREVER.

I dunno, the choice of Old Persian is rather questionable when everyone knows the lingua franca was Akkadian, and looking at the tablets it's pretty clear they were using a sharpened chopstick rather than reeds harvested from the banks of the Euphrates. In sum: FAIL.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

"As a growing number of web users have become more security-conscious, there's been an explosion of VPNs and encryption tools and other security services for the Internet. But what about a device that lets you bypass the Internet entirely? That's the goal of RATS,[1] the Radio Transceiver System, an open source communication tool for the security-obsessed and/or the Internet-bereft."

"The RATS is simple: it's a small antenna that connects to computers by USB and lets them send encrypted messages and file transfers directly, via radio transmission. There are two obvious advantages to this: firstly, it doesn't rely on any network being up or even the power staying on — as long as your laptop has some batteries, you can send and receive — and secondly, it's a level of security and privacy that trumps most of what you can do on-line. Apart from being entirely separated from the Internet, it employs AES-256 encryption with a randomized salt so even the same message sent repeatedly will produce completely different encrypted data every time.

The range of the RATS antenna is about a kilometer in a city, but it can also be connected to superior antennas and, in areas with no obstacles, achieve ranges above 5km. Obviously this means it isn't suited to everything, but alongside the Internet it could be extremely powerful for certain local applications in urban neighborhoods, workplaces, and other situations where we normally use the robust global Internet just to send short messages to people within walking distance. But perhaps more than anything it could be a boon for people living under governments that censor and monitor on-line communications, allowing local groups to coordinate without so much as touching the compromised networks."

- https://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20151031/07410132682/awesome-stuff-Internet-who-needs-it.shtml
(Archived) https://archive.is/XQxJm

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1688986732/rats-chat-and-send-files-without-Internet/description
(Archived) https://archive.is/ly2mt

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A Mayan village frozen in time 1,400 years ago by a volcanic eruption reveals that commoners had power in a culture best known for the works of the elite class.

Though elites in city centers had an impressive record in developing arts, hieroglyphs and a complex calendar, rural villagers weren't under the thumb of this ruling class, excavations in El Salvador suggest. In fact, nearly all decisions appeared to be under local control, and villagers had a remarkable quality of life, said Payson Sheets, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

[...] Instead, Mayan villagers called the shots for their own community, Sheets and his colleagues report in a new paper in the September issue of the journal Latin American Antiquity. Differences in artifacts from house to house reveal that individuals could decide the basic rhythms of their days, from when they did the dishes to whether they let the kids help make a pot. Households also had a great deal of discretion in deciding how to lay out their maize fields, when to weed and when to harvest.

Egyptologists have recently begun to revise their understanding of the lives of the workers who built the pyramids from slaves to valued craftsmen, and this suggests a similar shift in understanding among Mayanists.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Using a pedometer to measure the number of steps one takes in a day has been linked to lower fatigue in persons with rheumatoid arthritis, according to research presented this week at the American College of Rheumatology Annual Meeting in San Francisco.

Rheumatoid arthritis is the most common chronic autoimmune disease that affects the joints. RA has the potential for joint damage and deformity, with loss of function. The cause of RA is unknown. It affects people of all ages, and women more commonly than men. RA causes pain, stiffness and swelling, generally in multiple joints. RA may affect any joint, but the small joints in the hands and feet are most frequently involved. Rheumatoid inflammation may also develop in other organs such as the lungs.

Fatigue is a problem for many people with RA. And, this can often lead to them shying away from physical activity, which unfortunately contributes to a cycle of more fatigue and less physical activity. Researchers from the University of California in San Francisco recently looked at one way of breaking this cycle -- the use of pedometers.

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

Nobel Prizes are given for making important — preferably fundamental — breakthroughs in the realm of ideas and that just what Satoshi Nakamoto has done according to Bhagwan Chowdhry, a professor of finance at UCLA, who has nominated Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, for a Nobel prize in economics. Chowdhry writes that Prize Committee for the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, popularly known as the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, has invited Chowdhry to nominate someone for the 2016 Prize and he started thinking about whose ideas are likely to have a disruptive influence in the twenty first century.

"The invention of bitcoin -- a digital currency -- is nothing short of revolutionary," says Chowdhry. "It offers many advantages over both physical and paper currencies. It is secure, relying on almost unbreakable cryptographic code, can be divided into millions of smaller sub-units, and can be transferred securely and nearly instantaneously from one person to any other person in the world with access to internet bypassing governments, central banks and financial intermediaries." Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin Protocol has also spawned exciting innovations in the FinTech space by showing how many financial contracts -- not just currencies -- can be digitized, securely verified and stored, and transferred instantaneously from one party to another.

There's only one problem. Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? Suppose that the Nobel Committee is convinced that Satoshi Nakamoto deserves the Prize. Now the problem it will face is how to contact him to announce that he has won the Prize. According to Chowdhry, Nakamoto can be informed by contacting him online just the same way people have communicated with him in the past and he has anonymously communicated with the computer science and cryptography community. If he accepts the award, he can verifiably communicate his acceptance. Finally, there is the issue of the Prize money. Nakamoto is already in possession of several hundred million U.S. dollars worth of bitcoins so the additional prize money may not mean much to him. "Only if he wants, the committee could also transfer the prize money to my bitcoin address, 165sAHBpLHujHbHx2zSjC898oXEz25Awtj," concludes Chowdhry. "Mr Nakamoto and I will settle later."

Original Submission

Dave The Rocket Scientist writes:

On Saturday Nov 7th, my wife calls me frantically screaming to run outside and look in the sky. She thought she saw a meteor or something blowing up in the atmosphere over San Diego. I walk outside and see it and told her it was a rocket launch, possibly from a military exercise since the typical launches from Vandenburg AFB are more distant. She wasn't convinced, even though I am a rocket scientist (yes really!) and bet her $100. I won that bet...

A mysterious bright light in the sky has sent Californians into panic - only for it to be explained soon afterwards.

The light was spotted travelling quickly over Orange County and neighbouring areas late on Saturday, leading to fevered speculation online over its origin.

[...] On Friday, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said night-time flights to and from Los Angeles International (LAX) would avoid flying over the Pacific Ocean to the west of the airport, the second busiest in the US.

The FAA did not disclose the reason for the change, but indicated that military activity in the area would take place between Friday and Thursday.

Media in California confirmed that the light came from an unarmed Trident missile fired from the USS Kentucky navy submarine.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34759177
YouTube video https://youtu.be/yu7mNmqJJ10

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Scientists in Japan say they have found a way to create a new type of glass that’s almost as strong as steel and nearly unbreakable.

Researchers at the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Industrial Science have published findings of their experiments in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, a breakthrough that could change commercial use of glass.

Glass as we currently know it, is based on silica (silicon dioxide), the main component of sand. The innovative method that the Tokyo team has come up with uses a different process for creating safer, indestructible glass. The secret ingredient used in creating the durable glass is alumina, an oxide of aluminum. Mixed with silicon dioxide, it results in an exceptionally tough glass.

Original Submission

tonyPick writes:

According to Hackaday the robot rock band Compressorhead are planning to build a (robot) Lead Vocalist and produce their first original album.

Animatronic bands playing to pre-recorded background music are Chuck-E-Cheesy. Compressorhead, in contrast, slays it. We don’t know if it’s the fact that they’re actually playing real instruments “live” or if it’s just that the folks behind the scenes are really brilliant MIDI programmers, but Compressorhead sounds really good.

The kickstarter page, set up to support this effort, goes into a little more detail on the plans for the project:

We, being Frank, Markus and Stock, are fulltime artists. What we love, is to build party machines and let them rock. Now we want Compressorhead to be the first Robot Band to record an original album. Together with the Canadian music-legend John Wright (of NomeansNo & The Hanson Brothers) we are producing fantastic new songs for our Rocking Robot Band.

The official Compressorhead page has yet more background and video clips of the band in action, such as this YouTube video of a 2014 performance.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

All UK homes and businesses will have access to "fast broadband" by 2020, David Cameron has pledged.

The PM is to introduce a "universal service obligation" for broadband, giving the public a legal right to request an "affordable" connection.

It would put broadband on a similar footing to other basic services such as water and electricity.

Labour said it meant "another five years on the broadband back-burner" for those struggling with their service.

In 2010, the coalition government promised the UK would have the best superfast broadband in Europe by 2015.

Then, in 2012, a pledge was made by then-Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt that the UK would have "the fastest broadband of any major European country" by 2015.

He defined high-speed broadband as offering a download speed of greater than 24 megabits per second (Mbps). Communications regulator Ofcom defines it as 30Mbps.

Mr Cameron's latest announcement is aimed at ensuring consumers have access to a broadband connection with a speed of at least 10Mbps, no matter where in the country they live or work.

[...] Chi Onwurah, shadow minister for culture and the digital economy, said the government needed to set out how the new pledge would be funded and when consumers would "actually see the benefits".

"Five years after abandoning Labour's fully-funded commitment to universal broadband, the government's "superfast" broadband rollout is still being hit with delays and at the mercy of a single provider," she said.

The government has already given BT £1bn to extend broadband to some rural areas, although its record has been criticised, BBC reporter Rob Young says.

It is unclear whether more taxpayers' money will be available for this latest ambition, he adds.

BT says faster universal broadband needs to be "commercially viable". Virgin Media has argued against state subsidies.

In September, BT hit back at rivals calling for its break-up, as it announced a strategy to make the UK the fastest broadband nation.

It revealed plans to connect 10 million homes to ultrafast broadband (300-500Mbps) by the end of 2020 and raise the minimum broadband speed for homes that cannot get fibre to 5-10Mbps.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Back in 2012, during the early days of KeepSafe, we sought to implement an encryption scheme for our Android App. Through many iterations and prototypes, we found a sweet spot of sorts by leveraging the power of the JNI (Java Native Interface.) We decided to write our interface into the encryption library we utilized in Java, calling into the library via the JNI solely for the purpose of encryption and decryption. We opted for an on-the-fly solution, minimizing the impact on user experience as much as possible. Once we were happy with our solution, we decided to deploy it into our production app. We rigorously tested our code and were confident that everything would go smoothly; that is, until things beyond our control broke.

As we anxiously refreshed our crash reports following our release, we started to notice a recurring error. Users were running into an “UnsatisfiedLinkError”, which means that either A) the native library we were calling into did not exist or B) the native method we were calling did not exist. Since B) would almost always be caught via compiling and basic testing, we were immediately perplexed at the fact that users’ installations did not have the native libraries we shipped within the APK.

That's the agony and ecstasy of software development right there, pal.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A man wearing a jetpack soared across the Hudson River in New York City on Tuesday (Nov. 3), looping around the Statue of Liberty before landing safely on the deck of a boat.

The jetpack-wearing joyrider was David Mayman, an Australian entrepreneur who has spent the past 10 years designing and building prototypes of the wearable flying device. He's been helped in this effort by Nelson Tyler, a Hollywood-based inventor best known for developing helicopter camera systems and other movie-ready technologies, three of which have earned him Academy Awards.

Mayman and Nelson's lightweight pack, dubbed the JB-9, is small enough to fit in the trunk of a car, but it's powerful enough to rocket its wearer 10,000 feet (3,050 meters) above the ground and can hit speeds of 63 mph (102 km/h).

Original Submission