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Submission + - Nvidia To Install Computers In Cars To Learn How To Drive (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Nvidia has unveiled the Drive PX, a $10,000 computer that will be installed in cars and gather data about how to react to driving obstacles. "Driving is not about detecting, driving is a learned behavior," said Jen Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia. The data collected by Drive PXes will be shared, allowing cars to learn the right and wrong reactions to different situations, essentially figuring out what to do from experience rather than a rigid set of pre-defined situations.

Submission + - Google finally explains why Glass failed (dailydot.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google's "Director of Moonshots" Astro Teller gave the final keynote of SXSW's explicitly tech-centric portion, in order to proudly embrace the kind of failure that's usually anathema to the tech industry.

Submission + - White House Proposal Urges All Federal Websites To Adopt HTTPS

Submitted by blottsie
blottsie writes: In an effort to close security gaps that have resulted in multiple security breaches of government servers, the Obama administration on Tuesday introduced a proposal to require all publicly accessible federal websites to use the HTTPS encryption standard.

"The majority of federal websites use HTTP as the as primary protocol to communicate over the public Internet," reads the proposal on the website of the U.S. Chief Information Officer. "Unencrypted HTTP connections create a privacy vulnerability and expose potentially sensitive information about users of unencrypted Federal websites and services."

Submission + - Speaking a second language may change how you see the world (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Where did the thief go? You might get a more accurate answer if you ask the question in German. How did she get away? Now you might want to switch to English. Speakers of the two languages put different emphasis on actions and their consequences, influencing the way they think about the world, according to a new study. The work also finds that bilinguals may get the best of both worldviews, as their thinking can be more flexible.

Submission + - Al Gore: Climate Change Deniers Should Be Punished (chicagotribune.com)

Submitted by KermodeBear
KermodeBear writes: At the SXSW conference, Al Gore gave a speech in which he claimed that anyone who rejectes "accepted science" should be punished. No matter what side of the climate debate you prefer, the concept of punishing skeptics of any kind seems to return us to the times when religious institutions did the exact same thing to scientists and members of other faiths.

Should there be a consequence, aside from the disapproval of your peers, for those who reject any kind of "accepted science," or should we always be free to question the status quo and try to poke holes in commonly held beliefs?

Submission + - Twitter Adds Tool To Report Tweets To the Police (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Twitter is ramping up its efforts to combat harassment with a tool to help users report abusive content to law enforcement. The reports would include the flagged tweet and its URL, the time at which it was sent, the user name and account URL of the person who posted it, as well as a link to Twitter’s guidelines on how authorities can request non-public user account information from Twitter. It is left up to the user to forward the report to law enforcement and left up to law enforcement to request the user information from Twitter.

Submission + - Facebook Introduces Payment System (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Today Facebook announced a new feature for its Messenger services: the ability to send money to friends. The payment system will work by connecting debit cards from Visa or Mastercard — no credit cards, and no bank accounts. The complain claims they aren't trying to make money on it, since it'd be such a small business compared to their ad revenue. "Once the $ button is tapped, users simply enter the dollar amount and hit Pay. The money is instantly taken from their debit account and delivered to the recipient’s debit account. Facebook never holds the money, though the receiver’s bank will usually take a few days to make the funds available as is standard. Both users see a confirmation message detailing the transfer status and time." Facebook says transaction information is encrypted, and users will protect their cards with a dedicated passcode (or fingerprint identification).

Submission + - Privacy for me but not for thee

Submitted by Presto Vivace
Presto Vivace writes: Tech titans want their home contractors to sign non-disclosure agreements

These powerful documents, demanding the utmost secrecy, are being required of anyone associated with the homes of a small but growing number of tech executives, according to real estate agents, architects and contractors. Sometimes the houses themselves are bought through trusts or corporate entities so that the owners’ names are not on public deeds.

Submission + - NVIDIA's GeForce GTX TITAN X Becomes First 12GB Consumer Graphics Card

Submitted by Deathspawner
Deathspawner writes: When NVIDIA announced its GeForce GTX TITAN X at GTC, no one was surprised that it'd be faster than the company's previous top-end card, the GTX 980. But what did impress many is that the company said the card would sport a staggering 12GB of VRAM. As Techgage found, pushing that 12GB is an exercise in patience, with you really having to go out of your way to come even close. This is future-proofing at its best.

Submission + - Gates-Backed Echodyne's Metamaterials Radar for Drones

Submitted by Benjamin Romano
Benjamin Romano writes: High-performance radar: Not just for the nose cone of your F-22 anymore. Metamaterials enable radars capable of things like simultaneous scanning and tracking at costs and weights low enough to be viable for commercial applications including drones, self-driving cars, and other autonomous vehiclesaccording to Echodyne, a Seattle-area startup developing the technology with investment from Bill Gates and Paul Allen, among others.

Submission + - SoftMaker sponsors a paid developer for Thunderbird (softmaker.com)

Submitted by martin-k
martin-k writes: Mozilla Thunderbird is used by millions of people as the e-mail client of choice. Even after Mozilla cut back their support, usage worldwide has been rising and continues to grow. German office-suite developer SoftMaker has now announced that it will pay for a full-time developer to participate in the Thunderbird project and help the Thunderbird volunteer developers fix bugs and add features. First topics include CardDav support and a rewrite of Thunderbird's addressbook. Disclosure: The submitter is head of SoftMaker.

Comment Re:I hate Pi Day. (Score 1) 107

by billstewart (#49264767) Attached to: Pi Day Extraordinaire

There was a good reason for 4:20 (though not particularly for 4/20.) It was when all of the Waldoes were done after-school activities and could get together and smoke before going home or riding bikes up and down the mountain or whatever.

Comment Friends of a friend got married yesterday (Score 1) 107

by billstewart (#49264753) Attached to: Pi Day Extraordinaire

They were both geeks, picked Pi Day as a day to get married. (I doubt they were the ones mentioned in the article, but I don't know them.)

Friends of mine had a Pi Day brunch yesterday. It didn't start at 9:26am, because that was just way too early, so they decided to end it at 9:26pm if anybody was still there. We reset one of the clocks to Eastern time so we could do 9:26pm EDT, cheer, etc.

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