Anyone with a color printer knows that selling replacement ink cartridges is the quickest way to become a millionaire. But what if your printer never needed a single drop of ink to produce color images at impossibly high resolutions? A new laser printer can already do that by etching microscopic patterns onto sheets… Read more…
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This Laser Printer Creates High-Res Color Images Without a Single Drop of Ink
The one thing that helped me combat my irritation at being at an airport was the knowledge that airports are the great social equalizer: generally, it doesn’t matter who you are—rich, poor, famous, normal, whatever—you still have to check-in, go through security and get on the moving sidewalks to your gate. It sucks… Read more…
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LAX’s New Private Luxury Terminal For The Rich Is The Most Obnoxiously LA Thing Ever
An anonymous reader quotes CNN: Sales of consumer ebooks plunged 17% in the U.K. in 2016, according to the Publishers Association. Sales of physical books and journals went up by 7% over the same period, while children’s books surged 16%. The same trend is on display in the U.S., where ebook sales declined 18.7% over the first nine months of 2016, according to the Association of American Publishers. Paperback sales were up 7.5% over the same period, and hardback sales increased 4.1%… Sales of e-readers declined by more than 40% between 2011 and 2016, according to consumer research group Euromonitor International. “E-readers, which was once a promising category, saw its sales peak in 2011. Its success was short-lived, as it spiraled downwards within a year with the entry of tablets, ” Euromonitor said in a research note. The article includes an even more interesting statistic: that one-third of adults tried a “digital detox” in 2016, limiting their personal use of electronics. Are any Slashdot readers trying to limit their own screen time — or reading fewer ebooks? Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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As Print Surges, Ebook Sales Plunge Nearly 20%
An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon’s advertising business has loomed quietly in the digital media space for some time but the online behemoth has given the clearest indication yet that it will now come to the fore. Advertisers and agencies have been hearing Amazon-sized footsteps for some time but until now the business has erred away from revealing too much. However, on its latest earnings call Amazon was asked by one analyst as to whether advertising could become a more “meaningful part of the business” over the near to mid-term. “It’s pretty early in the days with advertising but we’re very pleased with the team we have and the results, ” said Amazon’s chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky in response to another analyst query. “Our goal is to be helpful to consumers and enhance their shopping or their viewing experience with targeted recommendations, and we think a lot of the information we have and preferences of customers and recommendations help us do that for customers.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Amazon Confirms Advertising Will Become a ‘Meaningful’ Part of Its Business
The future of illegal torrent websites doesn’t look good. As torrent websites continue to disappear, the founder of The Pirate Bay believes the trend is the just the beginning. From an article: While it might look like torrenters are are still fighting this battle, Sunde claims that the reality is more definitive: “We have already lost.” Take the net neutrality law in Europe. It’s terrible, but people are happy and go like “it could be worse.” That is absolutely not the right attitude. Facebook brings the internet to Africa and poor countries, but they’re only giving limited access to their own services and make money off of poor people. Well, I have given up the idea that we can win this fight for the internet. The situation is not going to be any different, because apparently that is something people are not interested in fixing. Or we can’t get people to care enough. Maybe it’s a mixture, but this is kind of the situation we are in, so its useless to do anything about it. We have become somehow the Black Knight from Monty Python’s Holy Grail. We have maybe half of our head left and we are still fighting, we still think we have a chance of winning this battle. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Pirate Bay Founder: ‘I Have Given Up’
While Amazon continues refining its delivery-by-UAV dream, Yelp is gearing up to test a grounded method to autonomously transport take out. The company is partnering with Marble to use their wheeled drone, which is designed to carry perishable cargo, to try out unmanned food delivery for its Seamless-like Yelp Eat24 service. Naturally, it’s starting the drone delivery trials on the streets of San Francisco. Specifically, they’re sending Marble’s robots on trips around SF’s Mission and Potrero Hill districts, so lucky Eat24 patrons might get the option to have their grub delivered via the boxy drones — and their humans. Handlers will “chaperone” the autonomous bots to make sure their initial forays into the world go smoothly. The robots use NVIDIA’s TX1 Jetson supercomputers to digest environmental data coming from a suite of cameras, LiDAR, and ultrasonic sensors, the same sensors used by autonomous cars. As they expand delivery to more neighborhoods, Marble and Eat24 will use their drones to map the city’s sidewalks and develop optimized routes. Someday, these robots could progress to truly unmanned courier jobs — and then, folks living above ground level will learn a cruel truth about the limits of our wheeled autonomous robo-coolers and their inability to defeat stairs. Via: TechCrunch Source: Marble
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A Yelp bot will deliver your sushi in San Francisco
If you’re itching to return to the days where you watched Saturday morning cartoons in your pajamas while eating cold cereal straight from the box (I can’t be the only one, right?), Boomerang is now live . Turner has turned the digital TV channel into a standalone streaming service where subscribers can watch over 1, 000 episodes — and over a dozen movies — of classics like Tom and Jerry , Scooby-Doo , Looney Tunes and more. This is the first time these franchises are being offered on a streaming platform. Boomerang will add new original shows or classic episodes each week. You can check out the current catalog on the official website . The Boomerang app is available iOS and Android , and you can watch on the web as well. A subscription costs $4.99/month, or you can save 33 percent by buying an annual membership for $39.99. It looks like the yearly membership is only an “introductory offer” though. Turner plans to expand the service to several more platforms after launch, including Amazon, Roku and Apple TV. So cord cutters, if you want to plop your kids in front of the TV and distract them with a little Richie Rich , you’ll have to wait. Via: The Verge Source: Boomerang
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Stream your favorite animated classics for $5 a month
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Denis Grisak, the man behind the Internet-connected garage opener Garadget, is having a very bad week. Grisak and his Colorado-based company SoftComplex launched Garadget, a device built using Wi-Fi-based cloud connectivity from Particle, on Indiegogo earlier this year, hitting 209 percent of his launch goal in February. But this week, his response to an unhappy customer has gotten Garadget a totally different sort of attention. On April 1, a customer who purchased Garadget on Amazon using the name R. Martin reported problems with the iPhone application that controls Garadget. He left an angry comment on the Garadget community board: “Just installed and attempting to register a door when the app started doing this. Have uninstalled and reinstalled iPhone app, powered phone off/on – wondering what kind of piece of shit I just purchased here…” Shortly afterward, not having gotten a response, Martin left a 1-star review of Garadget on Amazon: “Junk – DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY – iPhone app is a piece of junk, crashes constantly, start-up company that obviously has not performed proper quality assurance tests on their products.” Grisak then responded by bricking Martin’s product remotely, posting on the support forum: “Martin, The abusive language here and in your negative Amazon review, submitted minutes after experiencing a technical difficulty, only demonstrates your poor impulse control. I’m happy to provide the technical support to the customers on my Saturday night but I’m not going to tolerate any tantrums. At this time your only option is return Garadget to Amazon for refund. Your unit ID 2f0036… will be denied server connection.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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IoT Garage Door Opener Maker Bricks Customer’s Product After Bad Review
Amazon is taking a tough stance against vendors who sell fully-loaded Kodi boxes and other “pirate” media players through its platform. From a report: The store now explicitly bans media players that “promote” or “suggest” the facilitation of piracy. Sellers who violate this policy, of which there are still a few around, risk having their inventory destroyed. While Kodi itself is a neutral platform, millions of people use third-party add-ons to turn it into the ultimate pirate machine. In some cases, the pirate add-ons are put onto the devices by vendors, who sell these “fully-loaded” boxes through their own stores or marketplaces such as Amazon. The ecommerce giant appears to be well aware of the controversy, as it recently published an updated policy clarifying that pirate media players are not permitted on the platform. Merely ‘suggesting’ that devices can be used for infringing purposes is enough to have them delisted. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Amazon Bans Sales of Media Player Boxes That Promote Piracy
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Jeff Bezos has leapt past Amancio Ortega and Warren Buffett to become the world’s second-richest person. Bezos, 53, added $1.5 billion to his fortune as Amazon.com Inc. rose $18.32 on Wednesday, the day after the e-commerce giant said it plans to buy Dubai-based online retailer Souq.com. Bezos has a net worth of $75.6 billion on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, $700 million more than Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s Buffett and $1.3 billion above Ortega, the founder of Inditex S.A. and Europe’s richest person. Amazon’s founder has added $10.2 billion this year to his wealth and $7 billion since the global equities rally began following the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president on Nov. 8. The rise is the third biggest on the Bloomberg index in 2017, after Chinese parcel-delivery billionaire Wang Wei’s $18.4 billion gain and an $11.4 billion rise for Facebook Inc. founder Mark Zuckerberg. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Jeff Bezos Is Now the World’s Second Richest Person