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2015 Corvette Valet Mode Recorder Illegal In Some States

innocent_white_lamb writes: The 2015 Corvette has a Valet Mode that records audio and video when someone other than the owner is driving the car. Activating the Valet Mode allows you to record front-facing video as well as capture audio from within the car so you can help keep your Corvette safe when it’s in the hands of others. Well, it turns out that recording audio from within the car may be considered a felony in some states that require notice and consent to individuals that they are being recorded. Now GM is sending notices out to dealerships and customers alerting them to this fact as well as promising a future update to the PDR system. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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2015 Corvette Valet Mode Recorder Illegal In Some States

Soon you can own the world’s first electric keyboard

When Hermann von Helmholtz designed what was essentially the world’s first electric keyboard, he didn’t do out of a need to lay down crunchy riffs on the shores of the Rhine. What he needed was a way to generate tones and mix timbres in a bid to better understand the musicality and substance of vowel sounds. He ultimately came up with a series of electrically activated tuning forks hooked up to brass resonators , and now you can try to own one of your every own… assuming you’ve got between at least $20, 000 burning a hole in your pocket. This particular unit — hewn of wood and keys whittled from African ivory — wasn’t made by Helmholtz himself, but it is one of the few remaining examples of such 19th century tech still in existence. To hear auction broker Bonhams tell the tale, there’s just one other floating around the United States (another seems to be in safe hands at the University of Toronto ). Intrigued? The Helmholtz synthesizer will go up for auction in New York come late October along with a slew of other scientific curios from back in the day. Comments Source: Bonhams

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Soon you can own the world’s first electric keyboard

Samsung has more employees than Google, Apple, and Microsoft combined

Samsung loves “big.” Its phones are big, its advertising budget is big, and as you’ll see below, its employee headcount is really big, too. Samsung has more employees than Apple, Google, and Microsoft combined . We dug through everyone’s 10-K (or equivalent) SEC filings and came up with this: Samsung Electronics vs the headcounts of other companies. Ron Amadeo At 275,000 employees, Samsung ( just Samsung Electronics) is the size of five Googles! This explains Samsung’s machine-gun-style device output; the company has released around 46 smartphones  and 27 tablets  just in 2014. If we wanted to, we could cut these numbers down some more. Google is going to shed 3,894 employees once it finally gets rid of Motorola. Over half of Apple’s headcount—42,800 employees—is from the retail division, putting the non-retail part of the company at only 37,500 employees. The “Sony” on this chart only means “Sony Electronics,” the part of the company that is most comparable to Samsung Electronics. Sony Group has a massive media arm consisting of Sony Pictures Entertainment, Sony Music Entertainment, and Sony Financial Services. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Samsung has more employees than Google, Apple, and Microsoft combined

Euclideon Teases Photorealistic Voxel-Based Game Engine

MojoKid writes Not many would argue that current console and PC graphics technologies still haven’t reached a level of “photo-realism.” However, a company by the name of Euclideon is claiming to be preparing to deliver that holy grail based on laser scanning and voxel engine-based technologies. The company has put together a six-minute video clip of its new engine, and its genuinely impressive. There’s a supposed-to-be-impressive unveil around the two minute mark where the announcer declares he’s showing us computer-generated graphics rather than a digital photo — something you’ll probably have figured out long before that point. Euclideon’s proprietary design purportedly uses a laser scanner to create a point cloud model of a real-world area. That area can then be translated into a voxel renderer and drawn by a standard GPU. Supposedly this can be done so efficiently and with such speed that there’s no need for conventional load screens or enormous amounts of texture memory but rather by simply streaming data off conventional hard drives. Previously, critiques have pointed to animation as one area where the company’s technique might struggle. Given the ongoing lack of a demonstrated solution for animation, it’s fair to assume this would-be game-changer has some challenges still to solve. That said, some of the renderings are impressive. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Euclideon Teases Photorealistic Voxel-Based Game Engine

Update: Bug in Bash shell creates big security hole on anything with *nix in it

Mac OS X Mavericks is also a *nix, and also vulnerable to the Bash bug. Sean Gallagher Update: The Bash vulnerability, now dubbed by some as “Shellshock”, has been reportedly found in use by an active exploit against web servers. See Ars’ latest report for further details. A security vulnerability in the GNU Bourne Again Shell (Bash), the command-line shell used in many Linux and Unix operating systems, could leave systems running those operating systems open to exploitation by specially crafted attacks. “This issue is especially dangerous as there are many possible ways Bash can be called by an application,” a Red Hat security advisory warned. The bug , discovered by Stephane Schazelas , is related to how Bash processes environmental variables passed by the operating system or by a program calling a Bash-based script. If Bash has been configured as the default system shell, it can be used by network–based attackers against servers and other Unix and Linux devices via Web requests, secure shell, telnet sessions, or other programs that use Bash to execute scripts. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Update: Bug in Bash shell creates big security hole on anything with *nix in it

Flexible travelers can rent cars for free

Add / Remove While holiday car rentals may offer greater flexibility and freedom over public transport systems, that flexibility usually comes at a steep financial cost. However, when the plan is to travel from one city to another, there’s now a service that shows how  customers and companies could benefit from each other, while reducing costs and polluting less. transfercar is an online vehicle relocation service that reduces costs for rental companies while offering a free way to travel. Car rental services are both spending and polluting on a huge scale in order to relocate cars between different locations. Looking to solve that problem with a perk for the consumer, transfercar is a service that offers holidaying drivers a free one-way rental. Users can visit the transfercar website to see which rentals are available and where those rentals need to be relocated to. If the start point and destination match the driver’s travel plans, then they’re good to go — provided they have a driving license valid in the United States and are over 18 years old. The company reasons that by offering the cars for free, rental services will still save by reducing their freight costs and the use of expensive trucks for relocation. The promo video can be seen below: After a successful spell in New Zealand, the company launched in the US last month and will initially focus on transfers between LA, San Francisco, San Jose, San Diego and Las Vegas on the West Coast. Can you think any other ways where costs can be reduced by involving customers? Website: www.transfercarus.com Contact: www.transfercarus.com/contact

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Flexible travelers can rent cars for free

Monster Manual: bestiaries from 16th Century/1977/2014

Robert sez, “Dungeons & Dragons, now celebrating its 40th anniversary, is about to release its new Monster Manual — the original Monster Manual was a watershed moment in human history, part of a history that includes a 16th century bestiary, the Augsburg Book of Miracles; bestiaries reveal our profoundly human desire for an enchanted, magical world.” Read the rest

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Monster Manual: bestiaries from 16th Century/1977/2014

California’s giant battery test is a step towards clean energy

One of the biggest challenges of switching to clean energy sources is finding a place to store excess power. That’s relatively easy on a small scale , but it’s much more daunting for your utility company. Southern California Edison is apparently ready to take on that challenge, however. It just launched the Tehachapi Energy Storage Project , a large-scale experiment in using lithium-ion batteries (608, 832 of them, to be exact) to preserve unused electricity. For the next two years, the 32 megawatt-hours array will scoop up leftover energy from nearby sources, including a wind turbine area; SCE will be watching closely to see how the lithium-ion packs improve its grid’s real world performance. It could be a while before you see this sort of battery station elsewhere on SCE’s network, no matter how successful the test may be. The batteries are only supporting a substation in a small town. It would take a considerably larger effort to support a major city, and even China’s record-setting storage system tops out at 36 megawatt-hours. However, it’s still an important step toward bringing eco-friendly energy to many more people — eventually, you might not have to be picky about where you live (or use your own generators) in order to get all your power from renewable resources. Filed under: Misc Comments Source: Edison International

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California’s giant battery test is a step towards clean energy

Japan Tests Its New 500kmph Maglev Train

Maglev trains have been promised as the future of public transport since about forever, but high-speed magnetic levitation systems are rapidly gaining a serious reputation — something Japan’s public demonstration of its high-speed maglev system is only going to help. Read more…

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Japan Tests Its New 500kmph Maglev Train