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Submission + - A 16-Year-Old From India Built a Device to Convert Breath Into Speech (vice.com)

Submitted by stephendavion
stephendavion writes: A 16-year-old from India has designed a device that converts breath into speech. High-school student Arsh Shah Dilbagi invented TALK as a portable and affordable way to aid people suffering from ALS, locked-in syndrome, and anyone else speech-impaired or paralyzed. Prototyped using a basic $25 Arduino microcontroller, Dilbagi’s invention costs only $80, or about a hundred times less than the sort of Augmentative and Alternative Communication device used by Stephen Hawking. TALK works by translating breath into electric signals using a MEMS Microphone, an advanced form of listeningtech that uses a diaphragm etched directly onto a silicon microchip. The user is expected to be able to give two distinguishable exhales, varying in intensity or time, so that they can spell words out using Morse code.

Submission + - Chinese City Sets Up "No Cell Phone" Pedestrian Lanes

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Chinese city of Chongqing has created a smartphone sidewalk lane, offering a path for those too caught up in messaging and tweeting to watch where they're going. “There are lots of elderly people and children in our street, and walking with your cell phone may cause unnecessary collisions here,” said Nong Cheng, a spokeswoman for the district’s property management company. However, she clarified that the initiative was meant to be a satirical way to highlight the dangers of texting and walking.

Submission + - European Space Agency picks site for first comet landing in November

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Europe's Rosetta mission, which aims to land on a comet later this year, has identified what it thinks is the safest place to touch down. From the article: "Scientists and engineers have spent weeks studying the 4km-wide "ice mountain" known as 67P, looking for a location they can place a small robot. They have chosen what they hope is a relatively smooth region on the smaller of the comet's two lobes. But the team is under no illusions as to how difficult the task will be. Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, currently sweeping through space some 440 million km from Earth, is highly irregular in shape. Its surface terrain is marked by deep depressions and towering cliffs. Even the apparently flat surfaces contain potentially hazardous boulders and fractures. Avoiding all of these dangers will require a good slice of luck as well as careful planning.

Submission + - Ancient flying reptile was cross between a dragon and a pelican 1

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: An ancient flying reptile represents a cross between a dragon and a pelican. The front portion of the creature’s lower jaw had a deep, thin, crescent-shaped keel that may have been covered with keratin, akin to the beaks of modern birds. At the end of that bony keel, researchers noted a peculiar hook-shaped projection—a feature not seen in any other vertebrate, living or extinct—that might have served as an anchor for soft tissue. That distinctive bony projection suggests the creature's most distinct feature may have been a pelicanlike throat pouch that could hold fish gleaned from lakes and rivers. In a nod to flying creatures of our modern age, the new species has been dubbed Ikrandraco avatar—draco is Latin for “dragon,” and Ikran are the flying beasts depicted in the 2009 blockbuster Avatar. It’s difficult to estimate how much I. avatar weighed, the researchers say, but the fossils recovered so far hint that adults may have had a wingspan of about 1.5 meters.

Submission + - What Are the Most Confounding Features of Various Programming Languages? (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Every programming language has its own unique quirks, such as weird syntax, unusual functionality or non-standard implementations, things that can cause developers new to the language, or even seasoned pros, to scratch their heads in wonder (or throw their hands up in despair). ITworld's Phil Johnson has rounded up some of the WTFiest — from the + operator in JavaScript to the trigraphs in C and C++ and indentation level in Python. What programming language oddities cause you the most grief?

Submission + - Why Munich will stick with Linux (opensource.com)

Submitted by Jason Hibbets
Jason Hibbets writes: "There are many solved problems in open source. Groupware is not one of them," Georg Greve, co-founder and CEO of Kolab System starts off his post highlighting recent features of the latest release of the Kolab groupware project. He calls out a few newly elected politicans that don't like the current set-up, but says that thousands of users don't have the same experience. "In other words: The very problem used to criticise the LiMux desktop is already being solved."

Submission + - How IKEA turn to CG for its catalog - only 25% of pics are real (cgsociety.org) 1

Submitted by advid.net
advid.net writes: Have you ever wondered why the furniture look so beautiful in the catalog, but not that much once in your home?

In the IKEA catalog 75% of the pictures are computer generated, only 25% are shots of real scenes with real products.

CG Society interviewed Martin Enthed and his team about how they managed to switch from traditional shooting to CG:

[...] the real turning point for us was when, in 2009, they called us and said, “You have to stop using CG. I’ve got 200 product images and they’re just terrible. You guys need to practice more.” So we looked at all the images they said weren’t good enough and the two or three they said were great, and the ones they didn’t like were photography and the good ones were all CG!

The article stress many advantages CG have over traditional shooting, and points out that even the kitchen, the most expensive shooting, has its layout localized to the targeted country (big white sink or small stainless sink, more drawers, ...).

Submission + - 4chan Imposes DMCA Policy

Submitted by davidshenba
davidshenba writes: In the wake of leaked private photos of celebrities, 4chan has added Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown policy to its rules and policies. Under this new policy, the site will remove any notified and verified "infringement". It is not clear how effective this could be and how 4chan is going to handle the inflow of notifications or restrict the contents provided by users.

Submission + - Hypersonic Missile Testing Should be Banned Now, Before They Actually Work (thebulletin.org) 1

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: Mark Gubrud has a fascinating piece arguing for the US to lead the way in calling for a ban on the testing of hypersonic missiles, a technology that the US has been developing for decades. China has also started testing these weapons, which proponents optimistically claim would not be used to deliver nuclear weapons. Russia, India, and a few other countries are also joining in the fray, so a ban on testing would stop an arms race in its tracks. Good discussion of the two types of hypersonic technology, and whether that technology has civilian applications.

Comment Your views on b/ros culture evolution ? (Score 1) 220

by advid.net (#47815003) Attached to: Interview: Ask Christopher "moot" Poole About 4chan and Social Media

Can you share your views and feelings on how the popular culture of b/ros have evolved since this board started?

For instance (and I make up the following, I really don't know):

Would you say that ...
- at the begining people posting there were a mix of childish nerds, internet power user, and ...
- then arround 2005-2006 a nucleus of posters got a solid 4chan centric culture, characterized by such and such
- and after the xxx case 4chan draw enough attention to get a bunch of occasional tourist posters, contaminated by a small but steady stream of deviant cp-esque posts.
- etc

Submission + - Stealing ATM PINs with a cheap infrared camera (youtube.com) 1

Submitted by cccc828
cccc828 writes: German tech news website heise.de reports about a video by Mark Rober. It shows how to use a $300 infrared camera for the iPhone to read the residual heat signatures of an ATM. The residual heat signatures allow an attacker to reconstruct the PIN around 80% of the time. While this attack vector is not new, IR cameras used to be both rare and expensive. The best defense against the attack is to simply touch all the keypads keys after making a payment.

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