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Google

Google Engineer Sponsors New Kinect Bounties 96

ashidosan writes "Hot on the heels of the Adafruit competition, Matt Cutts (a search spam engineer at Google) is sponsoring two more $1,000 bounties for projects using Kinect. 'The first $1,000 prize goes to the person or team that writes the coolest open-source app, demo, or program using the Kinect. The second prize goes to the person or team that does the most to make it easy to write programs that use the Kinect on Linux.'" Relatedly, reader imamac points out a video showing Kinect operating on OS X.

Comment sour note (Score 1, Flamebait) 234

1) Andrews & Arnold Ltd don't have 4 million numbers. They have fewer than 100,000 geographic numbers, plus a few tens of thousands of non-geographic numbers, assigned to them by the UK telephony regulator. I suppose it's possible that they could have agreed to use more through another provider.

2) Trapping a few telemarketers and tormenting them for entertainment purposes is fine, as is making money for receiving these calls, but what will happen in practise is that they will answer a lot more "wrong numbers" from regular people who have mis-dialed. If they search their existing CDRs for rejected calls to their unused numbers they will almost certainly find that there are a few numbers that already receive many call attempts because the number actually dialed is similar to some other genuine number. Recording and using mistaken calls from "your mum" for entertainment purposes and charging her for the privilege is somewhat immoral in my opinion.

3) The correct behaviour is to reject unused numbers with an NU indication. Anything else is antisocial and profiteering, but they would be welcome to do this on their freephone numbers (where they are charged for the calls).

Note: I work for a telephone company that does have millions of numbers assigned, including many premium rate and pay-per-call numbers. We could make a significant amount of money from caller's mistakes, but that would not be right.

Comment Re:Scanner (Score 1) 133

You still need all the mechanism of the machine to transport hundreds of feet of film past the scanning head at a constant speed without breaking it and keeping it nicely spooled. If the 35mm film had sprockets perhaps they could have used the mechanism from an existing 35mm film projector instead of having to make their own constant speed mechanism for the sprocketless film.

The phototransistor (photodiode, CCD etc) method is a long established technique for playing back an optical analog sound track from film http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound-on-film and I can't see any particular need to reinvent the wheel for this. If they considered that the film was too fragile to pass through the machine more than once, it would not be difficult or expensive to have 8 phototransistors so that all the tracks could be played back and recorded digitally at the same time.

Security

Tabnapping Scams Around the Corner? 362

scamdetect pointed us to an interesting bit of news about a new security risk called tabnapping that was recently outlined by Aza Raskin. The short story is that background tabs are updated with login forms impersonating the sites they originally contained, but hosted by helpful third parties primarily interested in your password. (CT:Original writeup removed at request of submitter)
Sony

Submission + - Sony Sued Over Other OS Removal (thinq.co.uk) 1

Stoobalou writes: A Californian Playstation 3 user has filed the first class action lawsuit against Sony over removal of the 'Install Other OS' function from the Playstation 3.

The action seeks to redress Sony's "intentional disablement of the valuable functionalities originally advertised as available with the Sony Playstation 3 video game console."

The suit claims that the disablement breaches the sales contract between Sony and its customers and constitutes "an unfair and deceptive business practice perpetrated on millions of unsuspecting customers".

Image

Supersizing the "Last Supper" 98

gandhi_2 writes "A pair of sibling scholars compared 52 artists' renditions of 'The Last Supper', and found that the size of the meal painted had grown through the years. Over the last millennium they found that entrees had increased by 70%, bread by 23%, and plate size by 65.6%. Their findings were published in the International Journal of Obesity. From the article: 'The apostles depicted during the Middle Ages appear to be the ascetics they are said to have been. But by 1498, when Leonardo da Vinci completed his masterpiece, the party was more lavishly fed. Almost a century later, the Mannerist painter Jacobo Tintoretto piled the food on the apostles' plates still higher.'"

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