For whatever reason, recording the audio streaming through your computer—whether that’s an internet radio station, video game music, or an online presentation—is always a pain to do. Digital Inspiration shows off a way to do it easily with Audacity and a couple cables. Read more…
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Record Any Streaming Audio from Your Computer Using Audacity
With plenty of third-party sellers populating its online store, Amazon is well accustomed to playing the middleman for processing transactions. Now the e-tailer’s taking that middleman role one step further; it will now manage monthly subscription payments for companies such as wireless service provider Ting. It’s just the latest move in Amazon’s ongoing effort to overtake PayPal . Amazon users will be able to use their stored credit-card information to make monthly payments at participating sites. For anyone who’s used PayPal, the process will be very familiar; you’ll see a payment button that will pull in your billing info from Amazon to process a transaction. Beyond Ting, it isn’t clear which companies will take advantage of the service, but we’d expect to see digital music services, additional wireless providers and gaming sites. Naturally, Amazon will get a fee for each transaction. For partners, the benefit comes in the form of Amazon’s name, which will theoretically make you feel safer when shopping at little-known web merchants. For many customers, though, privacy concerns remain. VP of seller services Tom Taylor told Reuters that Amazon will only collect the dollar amount of customers’ transactions, rather than information about which items were purchased. In any case, it all depends on customer trust – and a long list of partner merchants – for Amazon to make a dent in PayPal’s business. Filed under: Internet , Amazon Comments Source: Reuters
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Amazon takes on PayPal with subscription-based payments
A familiar dialogue box for riders on the Northeast corridor. Amtrak is looking to build a trackside Wi-Fi network on its Northeast corridor that would bump its trains’ connections to broadband-level speeds. The increase is meant to accommodate busy trains with hundreds of customers crowding the Wi-Fi, a common scenario that results in slow or no connections for some customers. Amtrak has offered Wi-Fi on trains running between Boston and Washington, DC for several years now , but currently, the connection is 10Mbps shared among everyone on the train. In this reporter’s experience on crowded trains, this means you can only get on the Wi-Fi long enough to re-establish a connection through the network’s dialog boxes before the process resets. The company has requested proof-of-concept bids to bump the connection speed to 25Mbps per train “to meet growing customer data usage demands.” The bids will be used to see if it is “technically and financially feasible” to bring network improvements to the entire stretch of the Northeast corridor. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Amtrak wants 25Mbps per train
You may not pay much notice to product trackers like barcodes and RFID tags, but they’re absolutely vital in some fields; they cut back on bootlegging and help police determine the origins of bombs. Worcester Polytechnic Institute may have just delivered a major breakthrough, then, by developing nanoparticle barcodes . The minuscule tracers identify an object by producing a unique thermal signature (those colored lines you see in the photo) when they reach their melting point. As they don’t participate in any chemical reaction, you can integrate them into any item and get a positive ID whenever you like, even if you’re dealing with exploded TNT. The substance would most likely be used to stop counterfeiters, thieves and other shady dealers by making it impossible to erase evidence without destroying any ill-gotten goods. However, the technology might be particularly handy for fighting terrorism. Investigators could easily pinpoint the suppliers of not just explosives, but the chemicals used to make explosives — they could identify the manufacturer (and even the individual store) for the fertilizer in a homemade bomb. The scientists’ stealthy barcodes are a long way from reaching store shelves, if they do at all, but there could be a day when it’s possible to trace virtually any high-value product. [Image credit: Ming Su/Worcester Polytechnic Institute] Filed under: Science Comments Via: BBC , Geek.com Source: Scientific Reports
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Nano barcodes can trace bombs even after they’ve exploded
Coaster enthusiasts are always on the hunt for their next big thrill, and come 2016 they may be drawn back to Orlando. That’s when the Skyplex complex is set to open, featuring the world’s tallest roller coaster wrapped around its 570-foot tall tower. Read more…
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The World’s Tallest Roller Coaster Will Tower 55 Stories Above the Earth
An anonymous reader writes “In a lull between product launches Tesla intends to keep making improvements to the Model S according to Elon Musk. Tesla will automatically push software to the Model S fleet that will help the car learn the driver’s habits and the navigation system will offer directions to avoid traffic jams. ‘This year, Tesla is offering only the single model, the Model S that is EPA rated at up to 265 miles on a single charge, the most of any electric car. The company’s next model won’t come until next year, when the delayed Model X crossover goes on sale. Musk says the holdup has centered on making sure its signature design element, gullwing doors to make it easier to get in the rear, works properly and is leak-proof. “Getting the door right is extremely difficult, ” he says.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Tesla Makes Improvements To Model S
London’s property bubble has got people energetically expanding their property, digging out sub-basements — and the insane bubblenomics of London housebuilding are such that it’s cheaper to just bury the digger and abandon it than to retrieve it. London’s accumulating a substrate of entombed earthmoving machinery. Read the rest
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London property bubble entombs a thousand digger-machines
It’s a good time to be a cord-cutter in the U.S. A new study says that 47% of all American households subscribe to Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime or a combination of these. And almost half the country has at least one internet-connected TV set. Read more…
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Almost Half The U.S. Subscribes To Netflix, Amazon Prime or Hulu Plus
schwit1 (797399) writes “Eugene Goostman, a computer program pretending to be a young Ukrainian boy, successfully duped enough humans to pass the iconic test. The Turing Test which requires that computers are indistinguishable from humans — is considered a landmark in the development of artificial intelligence, but academics have warned that the technology could be used for cybercrime. Computing pioneer Alan Turing said that a computer could be understood to be thinking if it passed the test, which requires that a computer dupes 30 per cent of human interrogators in five-minute text conversations.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Turing Test Passed
An anonymous reader writes “Mesa 10.2 was introduced this week as the new shining example of what open source graphics (and open source projects in general) are capable of achieving. The latest release of this often underrepresented open source graphics driver project has many new OpenGL and driver features including a number of new OpenGL 4 extensions. The reverse-engineered Freedreno driver now poses serious competition to Qualcomm’s Adreno driver, an OpenMAX implementation was added for Radeon video encoding support, Intel Broadwell support now works better, the software rasterizer supports OpenGL 3.3, and many other changes are present.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Mesa 10.2 Improves Linux’s Open-Source Graphics Drivers