I tried to tackle the same thing a couple of months back using OpenCV and a smartphone. Before starting I consulted with people that knew sign language and the problem is not so much recognizing hand gestures, but facial expressions. They say that most of the conversation happens with a a given look, a frown, or the movement of the lips.

Needless to say, I though it was too hard to solve the problem on a smartphone so I postponed the project. I don't think Kinect can do a much better job at picking up the small details of facial expressions, but let's wait an see.

The number of pulses and the purpose were written in the summary twice in quick succession, to remove background noise.

1 billion EV per meter is not going to cut it. Everyone knows you need 1.21 Gigawatts...

Wow! They probably remote flew a helicopter and then crashed it at a few miles per hour and it went up in a big ball of fire, but not before giving out some exciting new data taken by high-speed cameras placed....

*watches video*

It's a fuselage dropped from a crane not 30 feet from the ground. That was pretty anti-climatic...

I hope it comes with its own hand-crank, because I find it hard to believe that is going to hold a charge past 60 minutes...

The article is pretty flimsy with the tech details, but if it is anything like magnetic induced current, the car need to be in motion to recharge (ie, traveling across the magnetic field). Unless you plan to be running along the road to charge your laptop, I'd say it's pretty inconvenient to recharge your devices that way.

Maybe you should read the part where it says "low earth orbit"

Humilty

You should watch GATTACA

So when the government tracks your every move without your knowledge or consent, that's okay. When private companies do it letting you know beforehand in a written contract, that's very very wrong.

brb.. ears bleeding...

The Terminator must be the only robot that gets wrinklier as time passes...

There is a nice article in wikipedia
The point being, if the patient believes it works, sometimes it does.

Defense agency investing in Machine Learning technology? What could possibly go wrong?!

I think you can get something similar for free right now from Autodesk

I never completely understood the need of launching massive ships from Earth whenever we want to leave it. Whenever we wanted to travel the seas, we did not build a massive caravel inland then painstakingly dragged it all the way to the coast. We reasoned it made more sense to build it in a dry dock, that way it only requires a tiny push to get it into the ocean.

Wouldn't anyone at NASA think that making a "Space Dock" made sense?. Make a bunch of tiny trips to lower earth orbit and build the ship there, so you can make a larger ships to travel further. Mass would not be such a big issue (granted, fuel would be), but at least the escape velocity problem would be non-existent.