Author: kenmay

General Mills To Drop Artificial Ingredients In Cereal

schwit1 writes: General Mills announced Monday that it will be removing artificial colors and flavoring from its cereal products over the next two to three years. The company said that Trix and Reese’s Puffs will be some of the first cereals to undergo the changes adding that cereals like Lucky Charms that have marshmallows may take longer to reformulate. They say 90 percent of their cereals will have no artificial ingredients by the end of 2016. “We’ve continued to listen to consumers who want to see more recognizable and familiar ingredients on the labels and challenged ourselves to remove barriers that prevent adults and children from enjoying our cereals, ” said Jim Murphy, president of General Mills cereal division, in a statement. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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General Mills To Drop Artificial Ingredients In Cereal

Teardown Reveals Beats Headphones Contain Metal Weights to Give Impression of Quality

Prototype Engineer Avery Louie tore down a pair of Beats headphones to see what makes them tick (or thump) and what he found inside is pretty sad. Amidst “generic drivers” and the cost-reducing tricks of the trade many of you ID’ers are familiar with—designing plastic parts that snap together rather than use screws, etc.—Louie found this gem: A little bit of weight makes the product feel solid, durable, and valuable. One way to do this cheaply is to make some components out of metal in order to add weight. In these headphones, 30% of the weight comes from four tiny metal parts that are there for the sole purpose of adding weight. I’ve got no experience with the industrial design of consumer electronics (my specialty was structural package design, where we’re trying to make everything stronger but lighter). Louie mentions that adding metal weights to a product is “a somewhat common trick, ” although he doesn’t list other examples.  But if any readership would know, it would be you guys and gals. So, ID’ers among you working in the consumer electronics space, have you seen—or god forbid, had to do—the adding-weights thing before? Anything you can tell us without violating an NDA? Via Medium

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Teardown Reveals Beats Headphones Contain Metal Weights to Give Impression of Quality

The US military is developing Star Wars-style hoverbikes

Last time we heard from Malloy Aeronautics, it was testing hoverbike technology with a robot-carrying drone . A few months later, it’s partnering with a Maryland-based defense company to develop a hoverbike for the US military . Working with Survice Engineering Co., the UK aeronautics company will set up shop in Maryland as part of “an ongoing research and development contract.” The duo will also work with the US Army Research Laboratory on the project that aims to create “a new class of Tactical Reconnaissance Vehicle (TRV).” The goal is to replace some of the work a helicopter does with the hoverbikes, a vehicle that provides increased safety and costs significantly less. “With adducted rotors you immediately not only protect people and property if you were to bump into them, but if you ever were to bump into somebody or property it’s going to bring the aircraft out of the air, ” Malloy’s marketing sales director Grant Stapleton told Reuters . Funds from a Kickstarter campaign for those compact UAVs was used to build scale models capable of carrying a human — one of which was on display at the Paris Air Show. [Image credit: Malloy Aeronautics] Filed under: Transportation Comments Via: Reuters Source: Malloy Aeronautics

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The US military is developing Star Wars-style hoverbikes

The Least Unhealthy Items at Seven Popular Fast Food Joints

Fast food is hardly health food, but when you’re on the road or it’s late at night, sometimes it’s your only option. These are the menu options to look for that will fill you up without filling you out. Read more…

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The Least Unhealthy Items at Seven Popular Fast Food Joints

Survey says weed prices are crashing in Colorado

Even though the price of an 1/8th ounce of recreational cannabis in Colorado has dropped from $50-$70 to $30-$45 in the last year, revenue is up, because the number of visitors to stores has greatly increased. Read the rest

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Survey says weed prices are crashing in Colorado

Free Trials Were Just Reset on All the Adobe Apps You’ll Never Pay For

There comes a time when you go to launch Photoshop and realize that you’re trial period expired the day before. Instant dread. Well, today is a fabulous day, as Adobe has reset the clock for free trials on all of its Creative Cloud apps. Read more…

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Free Trials Were Just Reset on All the Adobe Apps You’ll Never Pay For

NIST Workshop Explores Automated Tattoo Identification

chicksdaddy writes: Security Ledger reports on a recent NIST workshop dedicated to improving the art of automated tattoo identification. It used to be that the only place you’d commonly see tattoos was at your local VA hospital. No more. In the last 30 years, body art has gone mainstream. One in five adults in the U.S. has one. For law enforcement and forensics experts, this is a good thing; tattoos are a great way to identify both perpetrators and their victims. Given the number and variety of tattoos, though, how to describe and catalog them? Clearly this is an area where technology can help, but it’s also one of those “fuzzy” problems that challenges the limits of artificial intelligence. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Tattoo Recognition Technology Challenge Workshop challenged industry and academia to work towards developing an automated image-based tattoo matching technology. Participating organizations in the challenge used a FBI -supplied dataset of thousands of images of tattoos from government databases. They were challenged to develop methods for identifying a tattoo in an image, identifying visually similar or related tattoos from different subjects; identifying the same tattoo image from the same subject over time; identifying a small region of interest that is contained in a larger image; and identifying a tattoo from a visually similar image like a sketch or scanned print. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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NIST Workshop Explores Automated Tattoo Identification

Airplanes grounded in Poland after hackers allegedly attack flight plan computer

Around 1400 passengers at Warsaw’s Chopin (Okecie) airport in Poland were grounded on Sunday after hackers allegedly attacked the computer system used to issue flight plans to the airplanes. The source of the attack isn’t yet known. The alleged hack targeted LOT, the state-owned flag-carrying Polish airline. Reuters is reporting that the attack took place on Sunday afternoon, and was fixed about five hours later. 10 LOT flights were cancelled and about a dozen more were delayed, according to a LOT spokesman. The spokesman didn’t provide any details of what had actually occurred, though he did give away this one tantalising morsel: “We’re using state-of-the-art computer systems, so this could potentially be a threat to others in the industry.” The spokesman said that flights that were already in the air were not affected by the hack and could land normally. Also, the hack didn’t affect the airport itself; it was just the LOT computers. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Airplanes grounded in Poland after hackers allegedly attack flight plan computer

Linux 4.1 Kernel Released With EXT4 Encryption, Performance Improvements

An anonymous reader writes: The Linux 4.1 kernel has been announced and its release brings expanded features for the Linux kernel including EXT4 file-system encryption, open-source GeForce GTX 750 support, performance improvements for Intel Atom / Bay Trail hardware, RAID 5/6 improvements, and other additions. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux 4.1 Kernel Released With EXT4 Encryption, Performance Improvements