Author: kenmay

Verizon, Sprint Agree To Pay Combined $158 Million Over Cramming Charges

mpicpp sends news that Verizon has agreed to pay $90 million (PDF), and Sprint another $68 million (PDF), to settle claims that they placed unauthorized charges on their customers’s bills. The process, known as “cramming, ” has already cost T-Mobile and AT&T settlements in the tens of millions as well. Most of the settlement money will go towards setting up refund programs, but Verizon and Sprint will be able to keep 30% and 35% of the fees they collected, respectively. In response to the news, both companies issued vague statements about “putting customers first.” They are now banned from charging for premium text message services and must set up systems to ensure informed consent for third-party charges. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More:
Verizon, Sprint Agree To Pay Combined $158 Million Over Cramming Charges

Could this beautiful game signal the end of our dystopia fetish?

Over the past decade or so, gritty, apocalyptic worlds were the favored setting of popular video games, and machinelike cyber-dystopias were a reliable aesthetic before that. But No Man’s Sky , a highly-anticipated upcoming world, is infinite and hopeful. Read the rest

More:
Could this beautiful game signal the end of our dystopia fetish?

Ultra HD Blu-ray is bringing high-res movies home soon

After Blu-ray and HD DVD ushered in the age of HD and 1080p movies for the masses, discs were beaten to 4K by streaming services like Netflix , YouTube and Amazon. While the internet is still doing most of the heavy lifting for 4K, the Ultra HD Blu-ray specification is finally complete which means we should see movies and players arriving later this year. Besides being compatible with the 10, 000~ Blu-ray discs already out, Ultra HD Blu-ray players will be ready for high-res 3, 840 x 2, 160 video, “next generation object-based sound formats” (think DTS: X and Dolby Atmos ), more colors, high dynamic range (HDR) and even high frame rate video. That’s a lot of buzzwords to say movies will have the capability to look and sound better at your home than they ever have before. The BDA also made vague reference to a “digital bridge” setup for extending your movie purchased on a disc to other devices like phones and tablets, but didn’t say exactly how that will work, or if it’s going to be any better than Ultraviolet. The discs themselves are upgraded too, ready to hold 66GB or 100GB of data, up from the 25GB/50GB size of the current Blu-ray spec. According to the association licensing is expected to start this summer, and Samsung already announced it plans to release a player later this year. Hopefully, whatever it produces is better (and cheaper) than the slow, glitchy $1, 000 BD-P1000 that kicked off the Blu-ray era years ago. Panasonic showed off a demo player at CES this year, and we’re sure other manufacturers will follow suit. For people looking to future proof their setup, the new crop of Ultra HD TVs hitting shelves this year have support for the high-res video, plus HDR color, but they may need to support a new HDMI 2.0a standard to get the most out of new discs. There’s still a few more questions than answers about the rollout of 4K content, but as the picture clears up over the summer and into the holidays, we should have more information. Filed under: Home Entertainment , HD , Samsung , Sony Comments Source: Blu-ray Disc Association (Businesswire)

Follow this link:
Ultra HD Blu-ray is bringing high-res movies home soon

GE 3D-Printed a Miniature Jet Engine That Runs at 33,000 RPM

Curious about just how far they could take the company’s additive manufacturing technology, engineers at GE Aviation’s Additive Development Center in Cincinnati successfully created a simple jet engine, made entirely from 3D printed parts , that was able to rev up to 33, 000 RPM. Read more…

Excerpt from:
GE 3D-Printed a Miniature Jet Engine That Runs at 33,000 RPM

NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovered 1,000 Planets In Its Quest to Find Life

It was six years ago this month that NASA shot the Kepler telescope to the heavens on a galactic, planet-finding mission. Today, the space agency released this graphic that could also be Kepler’s mic-dropping resume. Read more…

View post:
NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovered 1,000 Planets In Its Quest to Find Life

Skype Translator Preview is Now Available to Everyone

Windows: Last year, Microsoft announced an app that would allow you to have real-time conversations with people who spoke different languages, built on Skype. While the service was only available to a small group of testers, it’s now open to everyone. Read more…

Read the article:
Skype Translator Preview is Now Available to Everyone

Don’t look now, but 3DS emulation is becoming a thing

Given enough time and attention from the development community, it’s practically inevitable that any video game console can and will be emulatable on a general-use computer. Hardware makers, always wary of the piracy implications of such a development, may hope that doesn’t happen until many years after that console ceases to be commercially viable. Unfortunately for Nintendo, that seems unlikely in the case of the 3DS. The Citra emulation project has been in the works for at least a year , but developers reached a breakthrough last December when they managed to load Ocarina of Time 3D for the first time. That title has now been shown running at nearly full speed on Citra with the help of an OpenGL renderer (though some visual artifacts still exist). Since then, compatibility work has continued on a seemingly game-by-game basis.  Virtual Console titles were shown off in February, and just this week team members posted evidence of Animal Crossing New Leaf , Super Monkey Ball 3D , and even the system’s home menu  running through emulation. There are a few homebrew demos available as well, including emulators for other systems running inside of the 3DS emulator and the kind of Minecraft port that’s seemingly required for all emulation projects these days. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Continued here:
Don’t look now, but 3DS emulation is becoming a thing

The US Is Finally Getting Access to a Promising Cancer Drug From Cuba

Tourism isn’t the only industry eager to benefit from the relaxing of the decades-long trade embargo against Cuba. Medical researchers on both of sides of the Straits of Florida now have the chance to collaborate with previously off-limits colleagues. Of particular interest to the U.S. is a Cuban lung cancer drug that took 25 years to develop. Read more…

View article:
The US Is Finally Getting Access to a Promising Cancer Drug From Cuba