Google will end of support for XMPP based calling on May 15, 2014 . On that day 3d party systems such as Obi will no longer be able to use Google voice to make or receive phone calls. Fortunately the OBi device may be used with other service providers but non of them are free http://blog.obihai.com/2013/10....

I can't see many religious people lining up for an expedition to discover if life evolved on another planet. They still don't believe that it evolved on this one.

Animals might not have much to worry about from the radiation, until they try to reproduce that is. Cells are most susceptible to radiation damage during cell division and that is a lot of that happening in a embryo.

Oh great now there will be nothing to cover the stench of the politicians in congress.

Lets completely ignore the fact that what the economy is recovering from is the huge blunder of the private banking sector following deregulation. Lets repeal Dood-Frank, If they screw up again than we will simply bail them out with tax-payer money like last time, but I am sure they learned their lesson the first time around and what we need is even more deregulation.

I cannot believe that on a site that bills itself as news for nerds, we are slamming Microsoft for taking the bold step of bundling what is the most advanced motion sensing, image/voice recognition system available outside of DOD contractors with a gaming console and doing it for just $100 more than its otherwise similarly spec'd competitor. For everybody that complains that the kinetic should have been sold separately you got to remember that because of the lower volume and the added cost of packaging, advertising, etc a standalone kinetic would be priced in the $150-$200 range. Microsoft did its part, now its up to nerds to see where we can take it.

The opposition to this project is in fact just local opposition by people being affected by its construction but unfortunately it underscores a big problem that switching to Renweable Energy faces, namely the need for a lot of land and ugly infrastructure. In industrialized nations where land is expense, property rights are strong and citizens are very vocal in their opposition its almost impossible to envision a large scale sustained switch to Renweables.

"Visa, American Express, and MasterCard have announced that banks and merchants that have not adopted the technology for face-to-face transactions by October 2015 will be liable for fraudulent purchases" They are already liable. It is called a charge-back. Customers complains that the charge was fraudulent and the credit card company suspends payment to the processor until the merchant can prove that the transaction was not fraudulent. He gets 5-6 of these charge back requests a week, mostly from people who got tipsy and spent far more than they wanted. The processor will find against the merchant if the signature differs even by a little from the one on file. Sometimes the bartenders have to ask a customer to resign 2-3 times before they get one that exactly matches the signature on the card.

Only a handful of Olympians with star-power have sponsors. Some are still in school and receive scholarships. Most of them have normal jobs with which to support themselves and their training, about the only handouts they receive is free travel and lodgings to and from events and the occasional bonus for winning. The U.S Olympic comity awards $25,000 for gold, $10,000 for bronze, smaller events pay far less if anything. Lucky for us they do it for the love of their sport otherwise the Olympics would be reduced to a handful of big name sports with a handful of big name players.

Exactly why Amazon doesn't won't to release another media streaming box. Amazon is in the content selling business, what it wants to do is create the center of the living room version of the kindle, of course with so many cheap devices that can stream content it needs to do something else to differentiate itself in the saturated market.

Enter cheap gaming console. Hardware has gotten pretty cheap and unlike previous generation consoles neither the PS4 nor the Xbox 1 are heavily subsidized. Considering that the Amazon box won't be coming to the market for a while its quite likely that it can offer similar performance at the price point its looking to sell it at. If that's the case than I suspect there will be quite some interest from traditional console game developers looking to sell their products without having to pay the steep Sony/Microsoft licensing fees. It could quite literally kill their business model really. Very exciting, I hope its not just wishful thinking on my part

The ink is barely dry on the acquisition of IBM's x86 server business for about $2.3 billion and now the purchase of Motorola for $2.91 billion. These could be genius longsighted moves but to me it seems that Lenovo is in danger of trying to expand too quickly.

Everything will change when you can make anything.' said John Hornick, an IP attorney." I sure do hope so!

Cars are being fitted with an increasing number of crash avoidance technologies to compensate for varying degrees of driver abilities, sluggish or even incorrect response etc. I imagine an autonomous driving system would rely on these same technologies for emergency crash avoidance. In a production autonomous vehicle the driver would be required to operate the vehicle under certain conditions but most definitely, the driver would not be expected to stay alert in order to hit the brakes in a emergency.

I didn't think I had to specify "conventional weapons" since the topic we were discussing was armmament on "Autonomous weapons are robotic systems that, once activated, can select and engage targets without further intervention by a human operator". Weapons of mass distraction such as nuclear weapons by their very definition destroy indiscrimintatelly and would not be a very usefull on such systems.

We still rely on chemical energy to power our weapons and as such they all have the ultimate fail safe system. No matter how large the magazine, sooner or later they all run out of amunition.