Amazon’s Chris Green, VP of Design at its Lab126 hardware arm, talked with me for a retrospective of the design choices that have defined and redefined the device, and the reasoning behind them. Green has been at Lab126 for a long time, but not quite for the entire Kindle project, as he explained to me. “My first day at Amazon was the day the Kindle launched – November 19, 2007. Read More
Read More:
How the Kindle was designed through 10 years and 15 generations
Uber has just taken another big step from a ride-sharing service to a transportation provider. It announced that it will buy up to 24, 000 Volvo XC90s, marking the first major vehicle fleet purchase by a ride-hailing service. Uber will take delivery of the SUVs between 2019 and 2021, then equip them with its own sensors and tech, allowing it to do fully autonomous, driver-free passenger rides . “This new agreement puts us on a path toward mass-produced, self-driving vehicles at scale, ” Uber’s Jeff Miller told Bloomberg . The XC90 starts at $47, 000, so this could be a pretty substantial purchase — over $1 billion worth of cars, to be exact. Uber and Volvo previously signed a $300 million pact, and Volvo, based in Sweden but owned by China’s Geely Auto , is using the proceeds to develop its own driverless cars. It has been working with Uber for nearly three years to develop a base vehicle with core autonomous tech, which the ride-sharing company could then customize as it sees fit. Uber has also made deals with Ford and Daimler. Uber aims to eventually give driver-free passenger rides, which is the only way such a service would be economically feasible. “It only becomes a commercial business when you can remove the vehicle operator from the equation, ” Miller told Reuters . However, Uber and everyone else are still far from that goal. Uber has been offering autonomous car rides in Ford Fusion and other vehicles for over a year in Pittsburgh. However, earlier this year, it admitted that human drivers had to take the wheel at least once every mile . City dwellers are also reportedly tired of the tests, as they haven’t provided the promised jobs and other benefits. On top of all that, Uber is embroiled in a lawsuit with Google’s Waymo, which accused it of stealing key self-driving tech. Source: Bloomberg
View article:
Uber orders up to 24,000 Volvo SUVs for its self-driving fleet
New submitter mrcoder83 shares a report from Futurism: Engineers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have been able to create a stable plasma ring without a container. According to the Caltech press release, it’s “essentially capturing lightning in a bottle, but without the bottle.” This remarkable feat was achieved using only a stream of water and a crystal plate, made from either quartz and lithium niobate. The union of these tools induced a type of contact electrification known as the triboelectric effect. The researchers blasted the crystal plate with an 85-micron-diameter jet of water (narrower than a human hair) from a specially designed nozzle. The water hit the crystal plate with a pressure of 632.7 kilograms of force per centimeter (9, 000 pounds per square inch), generating an impact velocity of around 305 meters per second (1, 000 feet per second) — as fast as a bullet from a handgun. Plasma was formed as a result of the creation of an electric charge when the water hit the crystal surface. The flow of electrons from the point of contact ionizes the molecules and atoms in the gas area surrounding the water’s surface, forming a donut-shaped glowing plasma that’s dozens of microns in diameter. Caltech posted a video of the plasma ring on their YouTube channel. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
See more here:
A Stable Plasma Ring Has Been Created In Open Air For the First Time Ever
An anti-piracy alliance supported by many major US and UK movie studios, broadcasters and content providers has dealt a blow to the third-party Kodi addon scene after it successfully forced a number of popular piracy-linked streaming tools offline. In what appears to be a coordinated crackdown, developers including jsergio123 and The_Alpha , who are responsible for the development and hosting of addons like urlresolver, metahandler, Bennu, DeathStreams and Sportie, confirmed that they will no longer maintain their Kodi creations and have immediately shut them down. The action comes after The_Alpha reportedly received a hand delivered letter to their UK home : “This letter is addressed to you by companies of the six-major United States film studios represented by the Motion Picture Association (MPA), namely Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., Disney Enterprises, Inc., Paramount Pictures Corporation, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Universal City Studios LLLP and Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., Netflix, Inc. and Amazon Studios LLC (represented by MPA via the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE)), Sky UK Limited, and The Football Association Premier League Limited, ” the opening paragraph reads. The letter identifies the developer as the creator of third-party software that provides “unlawful access to protected copyright works, including works owned by, or exclusively licensed to, the Content Companies” and notes their additional involvement in the upkeep of the Colossus repository, an online collection of various streaming Kodi addons. With Colossus gone, a popular TV show and movie streaming tool called Covenant is also currently unavailable. It’s scared a number of related addon developers, with Ares Wizard, another popular host, reportedly deciding to throw in the towel. The crackdown suggests the MPA/MPAA-led Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment has a thorough understanding of how owners of so-called “Kodi boxes” are able to stream TV shows and films illegally. While Colossus merely hosts the tools, urlresolver and metahandler did much of the heavy lifting for streamers. Their job was to scrape video hosting sites for relevant streaming links and serve them up for tools like Covenant inside Kodi. Streamers will find it very difficult to find working video streams of their favorite content without them, but they could reappear via a new host in the future. Sorry to say but I am stopping all development of the urlresolver, metahandler, and my other addons. I am not responsible for covenant and bennu but colossus has agreed to delete the repo too. — jsergio123 (@jsergio123) November 15, 2017 As pre-loaded Kodi boxes have surged in popularity in the past year, many of the most popular piracy-linked addons have targeted by rightsholders. In June, US satellite broadcaster Dish Network issued a lawsuit that targeted the TVAddons repository and forced streaming tools ZemTV and Phoenix offline. The action will be bad news for Kodi, the the company behind the popular media center. Despite attempts to distance itself from piracy, it often finds itself implicated in news reports that focus on actions taken against infringing third-party addons. Via: TorrentFreak , TVAddons
See more here:
Hollywood strikes back against illegal streaming Kodi addons
Benjamin Breen, an assistant professor of history at UC Santa Cruz, looks at art history to figure out what people cooked in the 1600s, and wonders whether it is possible to ascertain the taste of food. From a blog post: What can we learn about how people ate in the seventeenth century? And even if we can piece together historical recipes, can we ever really know what their food tasted like? This might seem like a relatively unimportant question. For one thing, the senses of other people are always going to be, at some level, unknowable, because they are so deeply subjective. Not only can I not know what Velazquez’s fried eggs tasted like three hundred years ago, I arguably can’t know what my neighbor’s taste like. And why does the question matter, anyway? A very clear case can be made for the importance of the history of medicine and disease, or the histories of slavery, global commerce, warfare, and social change. By comparison, the taste of food doesn’t seem to have the same stature. Fried eggs don’t change the course of history. But taste does change history. Fascinating read. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read More:
What Did 17th Century Food Taste Like?
Enlarge / A Google Fiber installation box in Kansas City, Kansas. (credit: Julie Denesha/Bloomberg via Getty Images ) Google Fiber’s gigabit Internet service has consistently been priced at $70 a month since it launched in 2012, but it’s now available for just $55 in the ISP’s latest city. Google Fiber in San Antonio, Texas comes in just one speed tier , offering 1Gbps download and upload speeds at the rate of $55 a month. Google Fiber charges $70 a month for standalone gigabit service in all other cities where it offers wired Internet service. “[I]n San Antonio, we’ve priced our Fiber 1000 (1,000Mbps) service at $55 per month,” Google Fiber said in an announcement yesterday . “There’s no installation fee, no hidden fees, no contracts, and no data caps.” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
See original article:
Google Fiber now sells $55-per-month gigabit Internet (in one city)
If you’ve had trouble loading Google Docs this afternoon, you’re not alone. The company said that an outage has been “affecting a significant subset of users” who were unable to access it since about 3:48 PM ET. As of 4:55 PM ET the status had been updated to say “Google Docs service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future, ” and at 5:10, that ” The problem with Google Docs should be resolved.” So, yeah, get up and stretch before getting back to work, study or your obsessive spreadsheet of fantasy sports stats, but don’t go too far — things should be back to normal in about the time it takes for your browser to refresh. We’re actively investigating an issue with Docs not loading. Thanks for your patience as we look into it. — Google Docs (@googledocs) November 15, 2017 Docs is back up for most users, and we expect a full resolution for all users shortly. Sorry for this disruption and thanks again for your patience with us. — Google Docs (@googledocs) November 15, 2017 Source: Google Docs – Service Details
View the original here:
Yup, Google Docs went down, but it’s coming back
schwit1 shares a report from Aviation Today: A team of government, industry and academic officials successfully demonstrated that a commercial aircraft could be remotely hacked in a non-laboratory setting last year, a DHS official said Wednesday at the 2017 CyberSat Summit in Tysons Corner, Virginia. “We got the airplane on Sept. 19, 2016. Two days later, I was successful in accomplishing a remote, non-cooperative, penetration. [Which] means I didn’t have anybody touching the airplane, I didn’t have an insider threat. I stood off using typical stuff that could get through security and we were able to establish a presence on the systems of the aircraft.” Hickey said the details of the hack and the work his team are doing are classified, but said they accessed the aircraft’s systems through radio frequency communications, adding that, based on the RF configuration of most aircraft, “you can come to grips pretty quickly where we went” on the aircraft. Patching avionics subsystem on every aircraft when a vulnerability is discovered is cost prohibitive, Hickey said. The cost to change one line of code on a piece of avionics equipment is $1 million, and it takes a year to implement. For Southwest Airlines, whose fleet is based on Boeing’s 737, it would “bankrupt” them. Hickey said newer models of 737s and other aircraft, like Boeing’s 787 and the Airbus Group A350, have been designed with security in mind, but that legacy aircraft, which make up more than 90% of the commercial planes in the sky, don’t have these protections. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read the original:
Boeing 757 Testing Shows Airplanes Vulnerable To Hacking, DHS Says
Walks in Rome is an interactive map project that updates and modernizies a famous 1870 guidebook of Rome by August Hare. (more…)
Continue Reading:
Cool interactive map of Rome’s landmarks and related literary musings
Enlarge / Artist’s impression of the planet Ross 128 b. (credit: ESO) Astronomers have discovered a planet 35 percent more massive than Earth in orbit around a red dwarf star just 11 light years from the Sun. The planet, Ross 128 b, likely exists at the edge of the small, relatively faint star’s habitable zone even though it is 20 times closer to its star than the Earth is to the Sun. The study in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics finds the best estimate for its surface temperature is between -60° and 20° C. This is not the closest Earth-size world that could potentially harbor liquid water on its surface—that title is held by Proxima Centauri b, which is less than 4.3 light years away from Earth, and located in the star system closest to the Sun. Even so, due to a variety of factors Ross 128 b is tied for fourth on a list of potentially most habitable exoplanets, with an Earth Similarity Index value of 0.86. In the new research, astronomers discuss another reason to believe that life might be more likely to exist on Ross 128 b. That’s because its parent star, Ross 128, is a relatively quiet red dwarf star, producing fewer stellar flares than most other, similar-sized stars such as Proxima Centauri. Such flares may well sterilize any life that might develop on such a world. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
See the article here:
Astronomers find an Earth-size world just 11 light years away