The CIA Is Trying to Stop Russia Building Monitoring Stations in the US

The CIA is quietly trying to stop Russia building a series of monitoring stations—devices that form part of Moscow’s version of the Global Positioning System—on US soil. Read more…        

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The CIA Is Trying to Stop Russia Building Monitoring Stations in the US

Bitcoin mining motherboards promise huge profits (for your energy provider)

As Bitcoins have become more valuable, they’ve also become much harder to accumulate using the mathematical process known as “mining.” This air of futility hasn’t fazed ASRock , however, as the company has revealed two new motherboards that promise to help DIY-ers to “join the gold rush now!” The H61 Pro BTC and H81 Pro BTC are both Intel socket boards, with the latter being Haswell compatible, and their main party trick is to carry extra PCIe slots and power connectors so you can exploit the compute power of up to six graphics cards simultaneously. What ASRock doesn’t specify, however, is how much profit one of its fully-loaded mining motherboards might deliver. So, although we’re quite deliberately not experts at this stuff (aside from a bit of armchair interest ), we plugged some numbers into the Bitcoin Profitability Calculator , based on six Radeon HD 7990 cards running in parallel, and discovered that this monster of a system might never actually break even, due to its ridiculously high energy costs. This could well explain why all the big boys use dedicated ASIC boards for mining these days, instead of consumer-grade hardware. Filed under: Desktops Comments Via: Bit-tech Source: ASRock [1] , [2]

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Bitcoin mining motherboards promise huge profits (for your energy provider)

Sony sells over 1 million PlayStation 4 consoles in first 24 hours

There was little doubt that the PlayStation 4 would sell well on launch given the sheer amount of hype , but we now have proof: Sony has revealed that it sold over one million PS4s in North America during the console’s first 24 hours of availability. While that figure pales in comparison to the sales numbers we see for smartphones , it gets the company a long way toward its goal of moving five million units before the end of its fiscal year in March. It also suggests that Sony won’t face the same lackluster response that greeted Nintendo, which took a week to sell its first 400, 000 Wii U systems in the US. The real question is whether or not the PS4 will preserve its sales momentum — with the Xbox One launch just five days away, Sony won’t keep the high end of the console market to itself for much longer. Filed under: Gaming , Sony Comments Via: Joystiq Source: PR Newswire

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Sony sells over 1 million PlayStation 4 consoles in first 24 hours

Your Phone Number Is Going To Get a Reputation Score

Jah-Wren Ryel writes “Yes, there’s yet another company out there with an inscrutable system making decisions about you that will affect the kinds of services you’re offered. Based out of L.A.’s ‘Silicon Beach, ‘ Telesign helps companies verify that a mobile number belongs to a user (sending those oh-so-familiar ‘verify that you received this code’ texts) and takes care of the mobile part of two-factor authenticating or password changes. Among their over 300 clients are nine of the ten largest websites. Now Telesign wants to leverage the data — and billions of phone numbers — it deals with daily to provide a new service: a PhoneID Score, a reputation-based score for every number in the world that looks at the metadata Telesign has on those numbers to weed out the burner phones from the high-quality ones.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Your Phone Number Is Going To Get a Reputation Score

Zero Point Is the First 3D, 360 Degree Movie for the Oculus Rift

People have been working on video and explorable environments for the Oculus Rift, but Condition One , the immersive videography group, is upping the ante with a complete 20-30 minute movie all in 3D. Read more…        

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Zero Point Is the First 3D, 360 Degree Movie for the Oculus Rift

Newborn twins mistake bath for womb

Via Her.ie : …the original source of the clip has been discovered. Sonia Rochel, a nurse at Clinique de la Muette in Paris, captured this video to showcase a very unique ‘baby spa’ bathing technique. What the 51-year-old nurse didn’t realise was the remarkable effect the special interaction between these new born twins would have around the world. Rochel gently massages and caresses the tiny baby boy and girl in a ‘Thalasso Baby Bath’, as they mimic life inside the womb. Video via LiveLeak        

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Newborn twins mistake bath for womb

Lead Contractor On Health-Care Web Site Led By Execs From Troubled IT Company

thomst writes “The Washington Post’s Jerry Markon and Alice Crites report that ‘The lead contractor on the dysfunctional Web site for the Affordable Care Act is filled with executives from a company that mishandled at least 20 other government IT projects, including a flawed effort to automate retirement benefits for millions of federal workers, documents and interviews show. CGI Federal, the main Web site developer, entered the U.S. government market a decade ago when its parent company purchased American Management Systems, a Fairfax County contractor that was coming off a series of troubled projects. CGI moved into AMS’s custom-made building off Interstate 66, changed the sign outside and kept the core of employees, who now populate the upper ranks of CGI Federal.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Lead Contractor On Health-Care Web Site Led By Execs From Troubled IT Company

London Will Soon Have Fifth Element Style MultiPass For Public Transit

All of a sudden, it’s the 23rd Century. The UK’s government innovation board has just approved funding to begin implementing an all-in-one train/bus/subway/airline pass in 2014. And yes, the actually named it MultiPass after the thing from the Bruce Willis movie. Read more…        

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London Will Soon Have Fifth Element Style MultiPass For Public Transit

Google’s Wind, Solar Power Investments Top $1B

Lucas123 writes “Google just announced it is investing another $80 million in six new solar power plants in California and Arizona, bringing its total investment in renewable energy to more than $1 billion. The new plants are expected to generate 160MW of electricity, enough to power 17, 000 typical U.S. homes. They are expected to be operational by early 2014. With the new plants, Google’s renewable power facilities will be able to generate a total of 2 billion watts (gigawatts) of energy, enough to power 500, 000 homes or all of the public elementary schools in New York, Oregon, and Wyoming for one year, it said. Currently, Google gets about 20% of its power from renewable energy, but it has set a goal of achieving 100% renewable energy.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google’s Wind, Solar Power Investments Top $1B