Apple Blazes A Trail With Streaming Route Sharing Patent

 Apple has a new patent that could result in interesting use cases, including getting navigation directions from a robot scouting ahead, or live route information from your local friend when you’re visiting an unfamiliar city. The new patent (via AppleInsider) describes the sharing of live path tracking between devices, which goes beyond the kind of location sharing in Find My Friends… Read More

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Apple Blazes A Trail With Streaming Route Sharing Patent

Breakthrough In Face Recognition Software

An anonymous reader writes: Face recognition software underwent a revolution in 2001 with the creation of the Viola-Jones algorithm. Now, the field looks set to dramatically improve once again: computer scientists from Stanford and Yahoo Labs have published a new, simple approach that can find faces turned at an angle and those that are partially blocked by something else. The researchers “capitalize on the advances made in recent years on a type of machine learning known as a deep convolutional neural network. The idea is to train a many-layered neural network using a vast database of annotated examples, in this case pictures of faces from many angles. To that end, Farfade and co created a database of 200, 000 images that included faces at various angles and orientations and a further 20 million images without faces. They then trained their neural net in batches of 128 images over 50, 000 iterations. … What’s more, their algorithm is significantly better at spotting faces when upside down, something other approaches haven’t perfected.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Breakthrough In Face Recognition Software

This Spherical Rescue Drone Is Straight Out of Star Wars

Flying drones inside burning buildings while looking for disaster survivors is incredibly hard, but it’s also one of the most promising applications of the machines. That’s why the Gimball search and rescue drone, billed as the world’s first collision-proof drone, was just awarded $1 million in the United Arab Emirates’ Drones for Good competition. Read more…

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This Spherical Rescue Drone Is Straight Out of Star Wars

Bulletproof Coffee: Debunking the Hot Buttered Hype

People are putting butter in their coffee. And hey, if you’re just craving a new flavor experience, more power to you. The problem is that Bulletproof Coffee , the company behind the trend, is claiming that drinking a mug of fatty joe every morning instead of eating breakfast is a secret shortcut to weight loss and mental superpowers, and now the butter coffee has developed a cult of highly caffeinated, shiny-lipped adherents. So now we have to talk about it. Read more…

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Bulletproof Coffee: Debunking the Hot Buttered Hype

Windows 10 Is a Free Upgrade for the First Year

Want Windows 10? You got it: for free. This is a sea change in Microsoft’s strategy when it comes to upgrades. Gratis upgrades will be available for Windows 7, 8.1 and even Windows Phone 8.1 users for a full year. Read more…

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Windows 10 Is a Free Upgrade for the First Year

Smart Home Security Guard Piper Now Has Night Vision

Piper is many things in a tiny package. The pint-sized home security device—it’s literally the size of a pint glass—watches over your house, automates your connected devices, and helps you keep in touch with friends. And now, with night vision too. Read more…

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Smart Home Security Guard Piper Now Has Night Vision

You Can Now Livestream Games On Steam

Ever since the dawn of the Twitch livestreaming age, it’s seemed like a no-brainer for Steam to add some sort of quick and easy broadcasting option. And yet for some reason (hint: it’s Valve), they’ve taken their time. But finally, it’s here. Read more…

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You Can Now Livestream Games On Steam

Bidding In Government Auction of Airwaves Reaches $34 Billion

An anonymous reader sends word that the 2014 wireless spectrum license auction has surpassed $34 billion. “A government auction of airwaves for use in mobile broadband has blown through presale estimates, becoming the biggest auction in the Federal Communications Commission’s history and signaling that wireless companies expect demand for Internet access by smartphones to continue to soar. And it’s not over yet. Companies bid more than $34 billion as of Friday afternoon for six blocks of airwaves, totaling 65 megahertz of the electromagnetic spectrum, being sold by the F.C.C. That total is more than three times the $10.5 billion reserve price that the commission put on the sale, the first offering of previously unavailable airwaves in six years.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Bidding In Government Auction of Airwaves Reaches $34 Billion

Apple Releases iMessage Deregistration Utility

tlhIngan writes When moving from an iPhone to something else, if you were an avid user of iMessage, you may find your messages missing, especially from iOS-using friends. Indeed, it has been such a problem that there are even lawsuits about it. While Apple has maintained that users can always switch off iMessage, that only works if you still have your iOS device. Unless one also has other iOS devices or a Mac, they may not even realize their friends have been sending messages that are queued up on Apple’s services via iMessage. Well, that problem has been resolved with Apple creating a deregistration utility to remove your phone number from the iMessage servers so friends will no longer send you texts via iMessage that you can no longer receive. It’s a two-step process involving proof of number ownership (via regular SMS) before deregistration takes place. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Apple Releases iMessage Deregistration Utility

Windows 10 Gets a Package Manager For the Command Line

aojensen writes: ExtremeTech reports that the most recent build of Windows 10 Technical Preview shows that Windows is finally getting a package manager. The package manager is built for the PowerShell command line based on OneGet. OneGet is a command line utility for PowerShell very similar to classic Linux utilities such as apt-get and yum, which enable administrators and power users comfortable with the command line to install software packages without the need for a graphical installer. ExtremeTech emphasizes that “you can open up PowerShell and use OneGet to install thousands of applications with commands such as Find-Package VLC and Install-Package Firefox.” It’s a missing feature Linux advocates have long used to argue against Windows in terms of automation and scale. The package manage is open to any software repository and is based on the Chocolatey format for defining package repositories.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Windows 10 Gets a Package Manager For the Command Line