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Submission + - Verizon Working On a La Carte Internet TV Service (pcmag.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: One of the reasons people have been fleeing cable TV in droves is the idea that they're paying for hundreds of channels but only using a handful. Even though that's not really true, Verizon is now working an an internet TV service that lets people pick and pay for only the channels they want. Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam said, "I think everyone understands it will go to a la carte. The question is what is that transition look like ... I don't think there is anyone that would stand up here and say the only way it's going to be offered five years from now is linear and it's going to be tied to your TV set because frankly they will miss the market and they will be the ones left behind."

Submission + - Robot Operating System (ROS) to Officially Support ARM Processors (linuxgizmos.com)

Submitted by __aajbyc7391
__aajbyc7391 writes: The Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF), which maintains the open source Robot Operating System (ROS) and oversees the ROS.org website, has announced its first formal support for an ARM target. The organization will add support for the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600, a smartphone-oriented, quad-core, Cortex-A15-like system-on-chip running up to 1.7GHz. The Linux version of ROS for Snapdragon 600 will be available in Q4 of this year, with the Android version due in the first half of 2015. The OSRF will test, refine, and fully integrate support for the ARM instruction set architecture into ROS development efforts. OSRF will also perform ongoing maintenance to support ROS on the Snapdragon 600.

Submission + - Adding Patterns and Animations to HTML5 Progress Bars (htmlgoodies.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The addition of the Progress element to the HTML5 spec has opened a whole new avenue for providing visual feedback on long-running tasks. In the Using CSS to Make a Visually Consistent Cross-browser HTML5 Progress Bar article, I demonstrated how to turn off the browser's default styling in order to give the Progress Bar element a consistent appearance across browsers. Beyond that, we went as far as to introduce different color schemes and even gradients to our progress bars. In today's article, we'll see how advanced CSS3 properties can be employed to do things that Web developers could once only dream of.

Submission + - Swedish ISP makes music video of security police visit (youtube.com)

Submitted by BlkAdr
BlkAdr writes: In 2013 Swedish internet service provider Bahnhof got a visit by Swedish secret police (SÄPO) pressuring Bahnhof give the police access to customer data. SÄPO made up stories of imagined terrorist attacks with hundreds killed to pressure Bahnhof, however Bahnhof was recording the meeting with a hidden recorder. You can read more about this here: http://www.goteborgdaily.se/ne.... Today Bahnhof reenacts this with a music video http://youtu.be/rHVVpNRwLk0.

Submission + - CERN Tests First Artificial Retina Capable Of Looking For High Energy Particles

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: Pattern recognition is one of the few areas where humans regularly outperform even the most powerful computers. Our extraordinary ability is a result of the way our bodies process visual information. But surprisingly, our brains only do part of the work. The most basic pattern recognition—edge detection, line detection and the detection of certain shapes—is performed by the complex circuitry of neurons in the retina. Now particle physicists are copying this trick to hunt for new particles. A team at CERN has built and tested an artificial retina capable of identifying particle tracks in the debris from particle collisions. And it can do it at the same rate that the LHC smashes particles together, about 800 million collisions per second. In other words, it can sift through the data in real time. The team says the retina outperforms any other particle-detecting device by a factor of 400.

Submission + - Verizon To Roll Out Mobile TV Service In 2015 (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Remember when Intel was going to be the next big TV provider, but then realized that was hard and sold the business to Verizon? Well, Verizon is announcing what it's doing with it: a "mobile TV service" that will bring the big four broadcast networks plus "custom channels" to subscribers. Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam was light on details, but said that the service wouldn't compete traditional pay TV offerings like Verizon's own FiOS, which probably means that it will be restricted to mobile devices only.

Submission + - Harvard's CompSci intro course boasts record-breaking enrollment (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: Harvard College's CS50, the school's Introduction to Computer Science course for undergrads, has attracted about 1 in 8 students this fall — a new record for the school and yet another sign of just how hot this field is becoming for the job-hungry. Overall, 818 undergrads (or 12% of the student body) signed up for the challenging course http://docs.registrar.fas.harv... this semester, and nearly 900 students are registered when factoring in graduate and cross-registered students. Topics included in the syllabus include Linux, cryptography, HTML and JavaScript. David Malan, a Harvard CompSci grad, teaches the course.

Submission + - Ant-sized radio runs on radio waves (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Researchers have created a radio so tiny that almost seven would fit on the face of a penny. The device runs without a battery; instead it uses “power harvesting,” a process by which it recovers and uses energy from the same waves that carry signals to its antenna. Even if the radio chip did need a battery, a single AAA battery has enough power to run it for more than a century, researchers report. Many components of the radio had to be scaled down to fit onto the tiny silicon chip; the antenna, for example, is one-tenth the size of a Wi-Fi antenna—and yet, it runs at a fast speed of 24 billion cycles per second. The tiny radios cost only a few cents to manufacture, the researchers say, and such devices are key to the next wave of wireless devices; eventually they could link together gadgets like smart phones with everyday objects, which will then be able to make decisions with minimal human intervention.

Submission + - Stanford Engineer Aims to Connect the World with Ant-Sized Radios (stanford.edu)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: # Article:
http://news.stanford.edu/news/...

# From Article:

"A Stanford engineering team has built a radio the size of an ant, a device so energy efficient that it gathers all the power it needs from the same electromagnetic waves that carry signals to its receiving antenna â" no batteries required.

Designed to compute, execute and relay commands, this tiny wireless chip costs pennies to fabricate â" making it cheap enough to become the missing link between the Internet as we know it and the linked-together smart gadgets envisioned in the "Internet of Things."

"The next exponential growth in connectivity will be connecting objects together and giving us remote control through the web," said Amin Arbabian, an assistant professor of electrical engineering who recently demonstrated this ant-sized radio chip at the VLSI Technology and Circuits Symposium in Hawaii.

Much of the infrastructure needed to enable us to control sensors and devices remotely already exists: We have the Internet to carry commands around the globe, and computers and smartphones to issue the commands. What's missing is a wireless controller cheap enough to so that it can be installed on any gadget anywhere.

"How do you put a bi-directional wireless control system on every lightbulb?" Arbabian said. "By putting all the essential elements of a radio on a single chip that costs pennies to make."

Cost is critical because, as Arbabian observed, "We're ultimately talking about connecting trillions of devices.""

# Archives of Article:
1: https://archive.today/5aIuj
2: http://web.archive.org/web/201...

Submission + - German Court: Google Must Stop Ignoring Customer E-mails (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: If you send an email to support-de@google.com, Google's German support address, you'll receive an automatic reply informing you that Google will not respond to or even read your message, due to the large number of emails received at that address. Now a German court has ruled that this is an unacceptable response, based on a German law saying that companies must provide a means for customers to communicate with them.

Submission + - Universal Big Bang Lithium Deficit Confirmed

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: New observations of the star cluster Messier 54 show that it is just as deficient in lithium as our own galaxy, furthering a mystery about the element's big bang origins. "Most of the light chemical element lithium now present in the Universe was produced during the Big Bang, along with hydrogen and helium, but in much smaller quantities. Astronomers can calculate quite accurately how much lithium they expect to find in the early Universe, and from this work out how much they should see in old stars. But the numbers don’t match — there is about three times less lithium in stars than expected. This mystery remains unsolved, despite several decades of work."

Submission + - Why Africa needs strict protections for privacy (contadorharrison.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: If one owns a mobile money account in Africa, one can expect to receive a call or text message from agents offering products ranging from cheap loans to club memberships.

Submission + - GamerGate May Have Been an Op

Submitted by Bob9113
Bob9113 writes: Casey Johnston at Ars Technica has a story on GamerGate: "A set of IRC logs released Saturday appear to show that a handful of 4chan users were ultimately behind #GamerGate, the supposedly grass-roots movement aimed at exposing ethical lapses in gaming journalism. The logs show a small group of users orchestrating a "hashtag campaign" to perpetuate misogynistic attacks by wrapping them in a debate about ethics in gaming journalism...."

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