All photos courtesy Kevin J. Walter It was a project eight years in the making—well, technically nine now. One LEGO fan has built his own Star Trek Klingon Bird of Prey using about 25, 000 blocks, based on a virtual blueprint he started all the way back in 2008. Read more…
See the original post:
Guy Builds Intricate Star Trek Klingon Warship Using 25,000 LEGO Blocks
An anonymous reader writes: Chuck Finley checked out 2, 361 books from a Florida library in just nine months, increasing their total circulation by 3.9%. But he doesn’t exist. “The fictional character was concocted by two employees at the library, complete with a false address and driver’s license number, ” according to the Orlando Sentinel. The department overseeing the library acknowledges their general rule is “if something isn’t circulated in one to two years, it’s typically weeded out of circulation.” So the fake patron scheme was concocted by a library assistant working with the library’s branch supervisor, who “said he wanted to avoid having to later repurchase books purged from the shelf.” But according to the newspaper the branch supervisor “said the same thing is being done at other libraries, too.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
View post:
Library Creates Fake Patron Records To Avoid Book-Purging
An anonymous reader quotes IEEE Spectrum: This year, Verizon and AT&T plan to deliver broadband internet to select homes or businesses using fixed wireless networks built with early 5G technologies. These 5G pilot programs will give the public its first glimpse into a wireless future that isn’t due to fully arrive until the early 2020s. With 5G, carriers hope to deliver data to smartphone users at speeds 10 times as fast as on today’s 4G networks, and with only 1 millisecond of delay… Over the past year, companies have completed a flurry of lab tests and trials to figure out what types of radios, antennas, and signal processing techniques will work best to deliver 5G in hopes of bringing those technologies and their capabilities to market as soon as possible. The article notes that standards groups are halfway through their eight-year process of finalizing technical specifications (set to finish in 2020), but “With so much cash on the line, and facing pressure from data-hungry customers, carriers are moving fast.” In Japan, NTT Docomo has even tested dozens of programmable antennas simultaneously transmitting signals, resulting in transmissions at 20 gigabits per second. “At that speed, a complete 2-hour, 1080p, high-definition movie can be transmitted in a second and a half.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
View article:
Verizon and AT&T Prepare to Bring 5G To (Select) Markets In 2017
schwit1 writes: A team at Stony Brook Children’s Hospital was able to use a 3-D printer to produce a replica of baby Vincent’s skull, which, in turn, allowed the medical team to fully rehearse the surgery long before they stepped into the operating room. Through a collaboration with Medical Modeling in Colorado, known now as 3D Systems, Egnor and Duboys were able to virtually plan the entire surgery in advance. Duboys said images from a CT scan of baby Vincent’s head were sent to the company, which then manufactured a model skull using the CT information as a template. The company also created a model of what Vincent’s skull should look like after surgery. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Original post:
Baby’s Skull Rebuilt With Help From A 3D Printer
An anonymous reader writes: Remember that story about how women “get pull requests accepted more (except when you know they’re women).” The study actually showed that men also had their code accepted more often when their gender wasn’t known, according to Tech In Asia — and more importantly, the lower acceptance rates (for both men and women) applied mostly to code submitters from outside the GitHub community. “Among insiders, there’s no evidence of discrimination against women. In fact, the reverse is true: women who are on the inside and whose genders are easy to discern get more of their code approved, and to a statistically significant degree.” Eight months after the story ran, the BBC finally re-wrote their original headline (“Women write better code, study suggests”) and added the crucial detail that acceptance rates for women fell “if they were not regulars on the service and were identified by their gender.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read More:
Pull Requests Are Accepted At About The Same Rate, Regardless of Gender
A portrait is often defined with a little depth of field of effect that makes the person in focus really pop. Most smartphone’s can’t produce this effect, but How-To Geek shows off a way to use a single Photoshop effect to create the same look. Read more…
Read More:
Quickly Improve a Smartphone Portrait in Photoshop with a Simple Depth of Field Effect
It’s not just tech giants like Apple that are taking online stores to task for allowing counterfeit goods on their virtual shelves. Run-DMC is suing Amazon, Walmart (including Jet.com ) and partners for selling bogus shirts, hats and other goods that violate the legendary group’s trademark. The internet retailers are allegedly “trading on the goodwill” of Run-DMC by either allowing third parties to sell counterfeits or, in Amazon’s case, supposedly selling the fakes directly. We’ve asked Amazon and Walmart for comment and will let you know if they can respond. With that said, there’s no question that stores like Amazon have taken at least some steps to crack down on counterfeits . The concern isn’t really that they’re knowingly profiting from knockoffs — it’s that they might not be doing enough to prevent these frauds from slipping through the cracks. These sorts of lawsuits may become more commonplace if artists and companies feel that their brands aren’t getting adequate protection. Source: CNET
Read More:
Run-DMC sues Amazon, Walmart over online counterfeits