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Speed Cameras In Chicago Earn $50M Less Than Expected

countach44 writes that (in the words of the below-linked article) “Chicagoans are costing the city tens of millions of dollars — through good behavior.” The City of Chicago recently installed speed cameras near parks and schools as part of the “Children’s Safety Zone Program, ” claiming a desire to decrease traffic-related incidents in those area. The city originally budgeted (with the help of the company providing the system) to have $90M worth of income from the cameras — of which only $40M is now expected. Furthermore, the city has not presented data on whether or not those areas have become safer. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Speed Cameras In Chicago Earn $50M Less Than Expected

Ubuntu Turns 10

Scott James Remnant, now Technical Lead on ChromeOS, was a Debian developer before that. That’s how he became involved from the beginning (becoming Developer Manager, and then serving on the Technical Board) on the little derivative distribution that Mark Shuttleworth decided to make of Debian Unstable, and for which the name Ubuntu was eventually chosen. On this date in 2004, Ubuntu 4.10 — aka Warty Warthog, or just Warty — was released, and Remnant has shared a detailed, nostalgic look back at the early days of the project that has (whatever else you think of it ) become one of the most influential in the world of open source and Free software. I was excited that Canonical sent out disks that I could pass around to friends and family that looked acceptably polished to them in a way that Sharpie-marked Knoppix CD-ROMs didn’t, and that the polish extended to the installer, the desktop, and the included constellation of software, too. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Ubuntu Turns 10

Skin Buttons Are Working Buttons Projected Onto The Skin

The folks at Carnegie Mellon’s Future Interfaces Group have made something really cool. Essentially, they are using small lasers to paint icons onto your skin through the bottom of a watch. The icons are touch sensitive and can be projected in any shape. The team consists Gierad Laput, Robert Xiao, Xiang Chen, Scott E. Hudson, and Chris Harrison, researchers at CMU’s… Read More

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Skin Buttons Are Working Buttons Projected Onto The Skin

Autonomous Boats Are Helping The Navy Swarm On Threats

I rarely like to focus on military robots but this video is fascinating. It talks about the SWARM program, a system for controlling multiple boats in a body of water and ensuring they don’t crash into each other and can easily swarm on another ship as needed. These boats, which are connected via software called Control Architecture for Robotic Agent Command and Sensing, can be armed but… Read More

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Autonomous Boats Are Helping The Navy Swarm On Threats

Despite Patent Settlement, Apple Pulls Bose Merchandise From Its Stores

Apple has long sold Bose headphones and speakers in its retail stores, including in the time since it acquired Bose-competitor Beats Audio, and despite the lawsuit filed by Bose against Apple alleging patent violations on the part of Beats. That’s come to an end this week, though: Apple’s dropped Bose merchandise both in its retail locations and online, despite recent news that the two companies have settled the patent suit. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Despite Patent Settlement, Apple Pulls Bose Merchandise From Its Stores

Direct3D 9.0 Support On Track For Linux’s Gallium3D Drivers

An anonymous reader writes Twelve years after Microsoft debuted DirectX 9.0, open-source developers are getting ready to possibly land Direct3D 9.0 support within the open-source Linux Mesa/Gallium3D code-base. The “Gallium3D Nine” state tracker allows accelerating D3D9 natively by Gallium3D drivers and there’s patches for Wine so that Windows games can utilize this state tracker without having to go through Wine’s costly D3D-to-OGL translator. The Gallium3D D3D9 code has been in development since last year and is now reaching a point where it’s under review for mainline Mesa. The uses for this Direct3D 9 state tracker will likely be very limited outside of using it for Wine gaming. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Direct3D 9.0 Support On Track For Linux’s Gallium3D Drivers

New Music Discovered In Donkey Kong For Arcade

First time accepted submitter furrykef . writes Over 33 years have passed since Donkey Kong first hit arcades, but it still has new surprises. I was poking through the game in a debugger when I discovered that the game contains unused music and voice clips. One of the tunes would have been played when you rescued Pauline, and two others are suggestive of deleted cutscenes. In addition, Pauline was originally meant to speak. In one clip she says something unintelligible, but it may be “Hey!”, “Nice!”, or “Thanks!”. The other is clearly a cry for help. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New Music Discovered In Donkey Kong For Arcade

As Prison Population Sinks, Jails Are a Steal

HughPickens.com writes After rising rapidly for decades, the number of people behind bars peaked at 1.62 Million in 2009, has been mostly falling ever since down, and many justice experts believe the incarceration rate will continue on a downward trajectory for many years. New York, for example, saw an 8.8% decline in federal and state inmates, and California, saw a 20.6% drop. Now the WSJ reports on an awkward byproduct of the declining U.S. inmate population: empty or under-utilized prisons and jails that must be cared for but can’t be easily sold or repurposed. New York state has closed 17 prisons and juvenile-justice facilities since 2011, following the rollback of the 1970s-era Rockefeller drug laws, which mandated lengthy sentences for low-level offenders. So far, the state has found buyers for 10 of them, at prices that range from less than $250, 000 to about $8 million for a facility in Staten Island, often a fraction of what they cost to build. “There’s a prisoner shortage, ” says Mike Arismendez, city manager for Littlefield, Texas, home of an empty five-building complex that sleeps 383 inmates and comes with a gym, maintenence shed, armory, and parking lot . “Everybody finds it hard to believe.” The incarceration rate is declining largely because crime has fallen significantly in the past generation. In addition, many states have relaxed harsh sentencing laws passed during the tough-on-crime 1980s and 1990s, and have backed rehabilitation programs, resulting in fewer low-level offenders being locked up. States from Michigan to New Jersey have changed parole processes, leading more prisoners to leave earlier. On a federal level, the Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder has pushed to reduce sentences for nonviolent drug offenders. Before 2010, the U.S. prison population increased every year for 30 years, from 307, 276 in 1978 to a high of 1, 615, 487 in 2009. “This is the beginning of the end of mass incarceration, ” says Natasha Frost. “People don’t care so much about crime, and it’s less of a political focus.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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As Prison Population Sinks, Jails Are a Steal

Chemists Grow Soil Fungus On Cheerios, Discover New Antifungal Compounds

MTorrice writes: Many drugs that treat bacterial and fungal infections were found in microbes growing in the dirt. These organisms synthesize the compounds to fend off other bacteria and fungi around them. To find possible new drugs, chemists try to coax newly discovered microbial species to start making their arsenal of antimicrobial chemicals in the lab. But fungi can be stubborn, producing just a small set of already-known compounds. Now, one team of chemists has hit upon a curiously effective and consistent trick to prod the organisms to start synthesizing novel molecules: Cheerios inside bags. Scientists grew a soil fungus for four weeks in a bag full of Cheerios and discovered a new compound that can block biofilm formation by an infectious yeast. The chemists claim that Cheerios are by far the best in the cereal aisle at growing chemically productive fungi. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Android On Intel x86 Tablet Performance Explored: Things Are Improving

MojoKid writes: For the past few years, Intel has promised that its various low-power Atom-based processors would usher in a wave of low-cost Android and Windows mobile products that could compete with ARM-based solutions. And for years, we’ve seen no more than a trickle of hardware, often with limited availability. Now, that’s finally beginning to change. Intel’s Bay Trail and Merrifield SoCs are starting to show up more in full-featured, sub-$200 devices from major brands. One of the most interesting questions for would-be x86 buyers in the Android tablet space is whether to go with a Merrifield or Bay Trail Atom-based device. Merrifield is a dual-core chip without Hyper-Threading. Bay Trail is a quad-core variant and a graphics engine derived from Intel’s Ivy Bridge Core series CPUs. That GPU is the other significant difference between the two SoCs. With Bay Trail, Intel is still employing their own graphics solution, while Merrifield pairs a dual-core CPU with a PowerVR G6400 graphics core. So, what’s the experience of using a tablet running Android on x86 like these days? Pretty much like using an ARM-based Android tablet currently, and surprisingly good for any tablet in the $199 or less bracket. In fact, some of the low cost Intel/Android solutions out there currently from the likes of Acer, Dell, Asus, and Lenovo, all compete performance-wise pretty well versus the current generation of mainstream ARM-based Android tablets. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Android On Intel x86 Tablet Performance Explored: Things Are Improving