5563643
submission
konohitowa writes:
Back in July, Amazon notified Delicious Monster (developers of the Mac-only Delicious Library) that their iPhone companion app to Delicious Library was in violation of Amazon's API licensing agreement. Their choices were to either remove the companion application from the iPhone store, or be cut off from Amazon's API — which would utterly cripple Delicious Library. I only found out about this when I read the release notes for the Delicious Library 2.2 software update. More details are available at The iPhone blog. Personally, I'm ticked off about it. I've deleted Amazon Mobile (their iPhone Amazon store application), have stopped spending my money at Amazon, and have sent them feedback. Maybe if enough people get irritated, they'll rethink this stupidity.
3317043
submission
konohitowa writes:
MIT's indefatigable Patti Maes is showing off a wearable interface, dubbed 'WUW' for 'Wear Ur World', that lets the wearer interact with objects around them. According to the AFP story the device, a collaboration between Dr. Maes and Pranav Mistry, "... can turn any surface into a touch-screen for computing, controlled by simple hand gestures. The gadget can even take photographs if a user frames a scene with his or her hands, or project a watch face with the proper time on a wrist if the user makes a circle there with a finger." There is much gushing about being as cool as Tom Cruise, but the picture on the project's info page leads me to believe no one will be mistaking wearers for John Anderton. Some of you may remember Dr. Maes' work with intelligent agents and the Firefly project from the late 90's.
289501
submission
konohitowa writes:
Mitsubishi Motor's recently showed off a concept electric car that includes a roof mounted solar panel and "a fan in the front air intake system, to enable wind power generation". The latter strikes me as the marketing staff overriding the engineering staff, and the tail end of the article indicates as much: "... these features are designed to highlight Mitsubishi's environmental focus and efficient energy use, according to the company".
One can only assume the wind turbines won't make it into the production version (if there ever is a production version). Unless they have supplementary plans for a system that keeps your vehicle pointed into the wind while it's parked.
In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
256581
submission
konohitowa writes:
Two German scientists claim to have performed an experiment in which microwave photons exceeded the speed of light. From the story: "The pair say they have conducted an experiment in which microwave photons — energetic packets of light — travelled "instantaneously" between a pair of prisms that had been moved up to 3ft apart."
Having seen claims such as these in the past, it will be interesting to see what mistake this particular pair made. And yes, I'm definitely assuming they're misinterpreting their results.
