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Teslas will now be sold with enhanced hardware suite for full autonomy

Enlarge (credit: Tesla) Late Wednesday, Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk announced that the company would be adding its own hardware to new all new Tesla cars to allow up to Level 5 autonomy. In the automotive industry, Level 5 denotes a fully self-driving vehicle. Musk said that it would be some time before Tesla’s software would advance to meet capabilities of the new hardware available, which the company is calling “Hardware II.” Still, the CEO stressed that all new cars would come with the new hardware suite, even if the software isn’t activated. The hardware includes eight cameras for a 360-degree view, twelve ultrasonic sensors, “forward-facing radar with advanced processing,” and an Nvidia Titan GPU that’s capable of 12 trillion operations per second. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Teslas will now be sold with enhanced hardware suite for full autonomy

T-Mobile punished by FCC for hidden limits on unlimited data

Enlarge T-Mobile USA failed to adequately disclose speed and data restrictions on its “unlimited data” plans and has agreed to pay a fine and provide some benefits to customers, the Federal Communications Commission said today. Like other carriers, T-Mobile slows the speeds of its unlimited data customers after they’ve used a certain amount of data each month; when these customers connect to congested cell towers, they receive lower speeds than customers without unlimited data plans. The throttling is applied after customers use 26GB in a month. “Under its ‘Top 3 Percent Policy,’ T-Mobile ‘de-prioritizes’ its ‘heavy’ data users during times of network contention or congestion,” the FCC said in an announcement today. “This potentially deprived these users of the advertised speeds of their data plan. According to consumers, this policy rendered data services ‘unusable’ for many hours each day and substantially limited their access to data.” Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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T-Mobile punished by FCC for hidden limits on unlimited data

Vudu Movies On Us Offers Thousands of Free Movies, If You Don’t Mind Some Ads

It’s annoying to pay for a movie service and wonder where all the good movies are . Vudu’s hoping that you won’t mind that feeling quite as much if you get your movies for free (with a few ads, of course). Read more…

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Vudu Movies On Us Offers Thousands of Free Movies, If You Don’t Mind Some Ads

XG.fast DSL does 10Gbps over telephone lines

(credit: Bob Dormon / Ars Technica UK) Nokia has achieved a connection speed of 5Gbps—about 625MB/sec—over 70 metres of conventional twisted-pair copper telephone wire, and 8Gbps over 30 metres. The trial used a relatively new digital subscriber line (DSL) protocol called XG.fast (aka G.fast2). XG.fast is the probable successor of G.fast , which was successfully trialled in a few countries over the past couple of years and will soon begin to commercially roll out. (In an unusual turn of events,  the UK will probably be the first country with G.fast .) Fundamentally, both G.fast and XG.fast are best described as “VDSL on steroids.” Basically, while a VDSL2 signal frequency maxes out around 17MHz, G.fast starts at 106MHz (it can be doubled to 212MHz) and XG.fast uses between 350MHz and 500MHz. This means that there’s a lot more bandwidth (the original meaning of the word), which in turn can be used for transferring data at higher speeds. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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XG.fast DSL does 10Gbps over telephone lines

Samsung’s new 10nm process promises big power efficiency improvements

Enlarge (credit: Samsung) The news hasn’t been great for Samsung’s smartphone division lately, but there is good news for the chipmaking arm of the company: Samsung announced today that it has started to mass-produce chips on its new 10nm LPE manufacturing process, a major improvement over its current 14nm process. According to Samsung, 10nm chips can fit 30 percent more transistors within the same physical area as a 14nm chip. Chip designers will be able to create chips that are up to 27 percent faster or chips that use up to 40 percent less power, though most chips will probably do a little of both instead of maximizing one or the other. A second-generation, 10nm LPP process will begin mass production in the second half of 2017, roughly one year from today. Other than the timing, we only know that this revision is intended to boost performance. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Samsung’s new 10nm process promises big power efficiency improvements

iOS 10.0.3 fixes iPhone 7 cellular connectivity problems

Enlarge / The iPhone 7 and 7 Plus. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) Apple has just released iOS 10.0.3, a minor update to iOS 10 intended to fix cellular connectivity problems with the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus . Unlike most iOS updates, this one is available exclusively for the newest iPhones, since older iPhones and iPads running iOS 10.0.2  don’t seem to be affected. The problem seems to affect US users on Verizon the most consistently, and most users’ complaints say that the phones drop their LTE connections and either fall back to 3G speeds or lose connectivity altogether. Reports of similar connectivity problems have also come from AT&T users, and late last week, Bloomberg also reported on complaints from Chinese users who were losing their signals . Apple’s release notes don’t mention any particular countries or carriers, but iOS 10.0.3 will hopefully resolve the problems for everyone. Apple is also working on a major update to iOS 10, version 10.1, which adds the “portrait mode” feature to the iPhone 7 Plus’ dual-camera system and makes other tweaks. That update is currently in its third developer beta and will be released later this fall. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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iOS 10.0.3 fixes iPhone 7 cellular connectivity problems

Scientists Create Fully Functional Eggs from Skin Cells

Using skin cells extracted from mice, researchers in Japan have produced fully functional egg cells that were used to produce healthy mouse pups. Should the method work in humans, it could introduce powerful new ways of treating infertility—and even allow same-sex couples to produce biological offspring. Read more…

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Scientists Create Fully Functional Eggs from Skin Cells

Explore Over 500 Years of English Slang With This Online Dictionary

There’s enough slang within the English language to make up a whole new language. If you need to do some research for an English assignment, or you’re just into linguistics, this online dictionary is your best bet. Read more…

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Explore Over 500 Years of English Slang With This Online Dictionary

Feds Claim They Can Enter a House and Demand Fingerprints to Unlock Everyone’s Phones

Under the Fourth Amendment, Americans are protected from unreasonable searches and seizures, but according to one group of federal prosecutors, just being in the wrong house at the wrong time is cause enough to make every single person inside provide their fingerprints and unlock their phones . Read more…

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Feds Claim They Can Enter a House and Demand Fingerprints to Unlock Everyone’s Phones

Why You Should Upgrade Your Raspberry Pi

The hard-working developers behind Raspbian OS, the custom-made Linux distro tweaked for the Pi, have announced a major update called Pixel (short for Pi Improved Xwindows Environment, Lightweight, if you’re wondering). It’s now the default OS offered for download by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and here’s why you should give it a try. Read more…

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Why You Should Upgrade Your Raspberry Pi