Internet-connected devices are starting to become tools to help in criminal cases. As first reported in The Information, police in Bentonville, Arkansas have issued a warrant to Amazon, asking the company to hand over data from an Echo device to help prosecute a suspected murderer. James Andrew Bates, the suspect in the case, was charged with first-degree murder in November of 2015 after… Read More
Originally posted here:
An Amazon Echo may be the key to solving a murder case
Uber has launched a website for a service called Uber Freight. While there are little details about the company’s expansion from ride-hailing, Uber Freight is meant to prepare the world for autonomous delivery trucks, according to Inverse. From the report: Uber acquired a startup called Otto, which planned to bring the first self-driving trucks to market, in August. Since then the company has used its trucks to deliver 50, 000 cans of beer and hundreds of Christmas trees in San Francisco. This new service won’t use those trucks, at least not at the beginning. Instead it will function much like Uber’s existing platform: Some people will sign up to drive items across the country, and others will join so they can send packages without having to sign a contract with established shipping companies. The service will likely bring “surge pricing” to trucking, too. Uber Freight could also help Otto’s trucks by using data gathered from drivers on the platform. This would allow the self-driving vehicles to learn from experienced people while regulators figure out how to govern autonomous trucks and the technology catches up to all of the promises made by its creators. Uber Freight’s launch coincides with growing interest in trucking from many tech companies. Nikola Motor Company wants to use tech to make trucking more environmentally friendly and appealing to millennials; Tesla’s working on self-driving trucks; the list could go on. Uber told Inverse it’s going to wait until the new year to elaborate on how the system works. “We don’t have any new information to share at the moment, ” a spokesperson said, “but hope to in the new year so please do stay in touch.” It looks like the future of trucking — or at least one potential future — is going to take a little while longer to make its debut. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
View post:
Uber Launches ‘Uber Freight’ Website To Prepare the World For Autonomous Delivery Trucks
Star Citizen is still far from being ready , but it now has a more solid underpinning. Cloud Imperium has revealed that it has switched both Star Citizen and Squadron 42 from Crytek’s CryEngine to Amazon’s Lumberyard engine as of Star Citizen ‘s just-launched Alpha 2.6 release. It was an “easy and smooth transition” due to Lumberyard’s CryEngine roots, but both secures the “long term future” of the games and promises some distinct advantages. It taps directly into the cloud through Amazon Web Services, for instance, and makes Twitch streaming easy. The studio has already been collaborating with Amazon for “over a year, ” so this isn’t a panicked response to Crytek’s financial woes . The timing is more than a little convenient, mind you. It gives Cloud Imperium more of a safety net if Crytek ever has to stop its own development — it won’t have to switch engines while it’s in panic mode. It’s easy to imagine frustration from backers at the thought that the Amazon switch might delay Star Citizen even longer, but that might be better than risking the entire project. As it stands, Alpha 2.6 is a big step forward: it’s the first release with Star Marine , the game’s first-person shooter component. You now have two competitive multiplayer modes (everyone-for-themselves and a Battlefield -style capture-and-hold mode) for those times when you just want to fight friends instead of exploring the cosmos. Numerous other parts of Star Citizen have received some polish, too, such as first-person animations and third-person cameras. Although this is still no substitute for a finished game, it at least shows that Cloud Imperium is getting a handle on some of the many, many features it has been promising over the years. Via: Polygon Source: Roberts Space Industries (1) , (2)
View article:
‘Star Citizen’ switches to Amazon’s game engine
IBM wants to put the patent war in perspective. Big Blue said that it is poised to get the most U.S. patents of any tech company for the 24th year in a row. From a report on VentureBeat: In 2015, IBM received more than 7, 355 patents, down slightly from 7, 534 in 2014. A spokesperson for IBM said the company is on track to receive well over 7, 000 patents in 2016. In 2016, IBM is also hitting another interesting milestone, with more than 1, 000 patents for artificial intelligence and cognitive computing. IBM has been at it for more than a century, and it is seeking patents in key strategic areas — such as AI and cognitive computing. In fact, one-third of IBM’s researchers are dedicated to cognitive computing. IBM CEO Ginni Rometty said during the World of Watson conference in October that the company expects to reach more than 1 billion consumers via Watson by the end of 2017. (Watson is the supercomputer that beat the world’s best Jeopardy player in 2011.) Read more of this story at Slashdot.
View article:
IBM On Track To Get More Than 7,000 US Patents In 2016
By now the Amazon boxes are piling up in your house before the holidays. Before you toss them in the recycling, Give Back Box wants them. The service, in partnership with Amazon, will give you free shipping labels to send donations to Goodwill. Read more…
Continued here:
Use Your Old Amazon Boxes to Ship Donations to Goodwill For Free
In case you wanted to ground your abstract TV FOMO in hard numbers, FX has data on the fact that, yes, there really is too much TV. An anonymous reader shares a report: The network, whose CEO John Landgraf coined the idea of “peak TV, ” has released its unofficial tally of the number of shows on TV, finding that 455 different scripted television series from broadcast, cable, and streaming sources aired in the last year. That’s an 8 percent increase from last year, when 421 shows aired on TV; a 71 percent increase from 2011, when a mere 266 shows were on TV; and a 137 percent increase from 2006, when there were 192 shows on TV. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
View original post here:
A Record High of 455 Scripted TV Shows Aired in 2016
The Monju nuclear reactor. (Image: Nife/Wikimedia) The government of Japan has decided to decommission the experimental Monju nuclear reactor, which worked for just 250 days out of its total 22-year lifespan. Read more…
Taken from:
Japan Just Scrapped a $9 Billion Nuclear Reactor That Never Really Worked
A remotely operated sub has captured stunning images of the Antarctic seafloor, revealing a surprisingly dynamic and colorful world filled with spidery starfish, coconut-shaped sponges, and dandelion-like worms. Read more…
Image: De Agostini Picture Library via Getty Beneath eighteen hundred miles of crust and mantle flows a molten iron hell river whose satanic secrets the European Space Agency has unleashed. Cool! Read more…
Continued here:
An Iron Hell River Is Flowing Beneath The Earth
Today on In Case You Missed It: Amazon has been testing drone deliveries for three years now, even having to move to the UK to keep it going once the FAA changed its UAV guidelines. The company released a video of its first fully autonomous drone delivery, which happened on December 7. Meanwhile a team of researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory dug into what would happen if a sizable meteorite hit the ocean and the modeling shows a substantial amount of water vapor would get thrown into the stratosphere, which would not do great things for climate change. Finally, the Danish Neighborhood Watch came out with a robbery-preventing Christmas light and app combination to deter robbers– and provide laughs for the rest of us. If you’re looking for the dash cam video of an Uber car going through a red light, that’s here . As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.
See more here:
ICYMI: Amazon made its first drone-powered delivery