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Submission + - Major Terrorist Attack Strikes France (bbc.co.uk)

An anonymous reader writes: Terrorist gunmen claiming to be from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria have stormed the building of a French publication Charlie Hebdo that had recently published a cartoon of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The gunmen are known to have killed eleven hostages so far and the situation is still ongoing. Currently, the BBC has the most information out of English news outlets. French speakers can consult the headline at Le Monde for more current news.

Submission + - The right to be forgotten (bbc.com)

NapalmV writes: The European Court of Justice has now ruled that links to "irrelevant" and outdated data should be erased on request by the operators of search engines:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...

According to spokesman Al Verney, Google is "very surprised" and disappointed with the ruling, and stated that they "need to take time to analyze the implications".

David Fidler, professor at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law, commented that the ruling is "potentially a nightmare of epic proportions for Google."

Submission + - Unreal Engine 4 Launching With Full Source Code (unrealengine.com)

jones_supa writes: Unreal Engine 4 from Epic to game developers is launching now. Supported platforms are Windows, OS X, iOS and Android, with desktop Linux coming later. The monetization scheme is unique: anyone can get access to literally everything for a $19/month fee. Epic is working to build a company that succeeds when UE4 developers succeed. Therefore, part of the deal is that anyone can ship a commercial product with UE4 by paying 5% of gross revenue resulting from sales to users, helping the ecosystem. The tools you get are the Unreal Editor in ready-to-run form, and the engine's complete C++ source code hosted on GitHub for collaborative development. Provided also is the foundation for the community: chat in the forums, add to the wiki, participate in the AnswerHub Q&A, and join collaborative development projects via GitHub. The company is also shipping lots of ready-made content, samples, and game templates. So, will this effort succeed? That's up to you and your judgment of the engine’s value. Unreal Engine 4 has been built by a team of over 100 engineers, artists and designers around the world, and this launch 'represents all of Epic's hopes and dreams of how major software can be developed and distributed in the future'.

Submission + - Google Android Wear

mrspoonsi writes: Business insider reports: Google today announced that it plans to officially bring Android to smartwatches through its new project entitled Android Wear. The project will enable developers to bring features such as Google Now to wristwatches, and Google notes that Android Wear will also bring health-focused apps and the ability to interact with your phone to the wrist.

Submission + - GOG.com Bringing Linux Games To The Store

jones_supa writes: More great news for Linux gamers: following the footsteps of Steam, GOG.com is preparing delivery of Linux games, with expected showtime being this autumn. The officially supported distributions will be Ubuntu and Mint. Right now they are performing testing on various configurations, training up their teams on Linux-speak, and generally preparing for the rollout of at least 100 titles — DRM-free as usual. This will update some existing games of the catalog with a Linux port and bring new ones to the collection. Further information on specific games is yet not known, but GOG invites fans and customers to their community wishlist to discuss.

Comment Re:Mexico City tried this... (Score 1) 405

It's about time they restrict (or at least make it more difficult) for people to have older cars instead of new. Like Japan. The older the car gets, the more expensive it it to keep it with the regulations.

For example, the same thing should be applied to Brazil (where I live). Here, licensing and taxes for older cars are cheaper than newer ones, because it's based percentage of market value. And if the car reaches 20 years-old, it's not even taxed anymore. It's stupid, making it easy for some ignorant douche to keep a dangerous, slow, polluting piece of 80's crap on the street. It should be the other way around.

Submission + - Algorithm Reveals Objects Hidden Behind Other Things In Camera Phone Images (medium.com)

KentuckyFC writes: Imaging is undergoing a quiet revolution at the moment thanks to various new techniques for extracting data from images. Now physicists have worked out how to create an image of an object hidden behind a translucent material using little more than an ordinary smartphone and some clever data processing. The team placed objects behind materials that scatter light such as onion skin, frosted glass and chicken breast tissue. They photographed them using a Nokia Lumina 1020 smartphone, with a 41 megapixel sensor. To the naked eye, the resulting images look like random speckle. But by treating the data from each pixel separately and looking for correlations between pixels, the team was able to produce images of the hidden objects. They even photographed light scattered off a white wall and recovered an image of the reflected scene--a technique that effectively looks round corners. The new technique has applications in areas such as surveillance and medical imaging.

Submission + - Elon Musk Addresses New Jersey's Tesla Store Ban (teslamotors.com)

An anonymous reader writes: On Tuesday, we discussed news that New Jersey is trying to ban Tesla stores, which would force the company to sell through car dealerships instead. Now, Elon Musk has prepared a response: 'The reason that we did not choose to do this is that the auto dealers have a fundamental conflict of interest between promoting gasoline cars, which constitute virtually all of their revenue, and electric cars, which constitute virtually none. Moreover, it is much harder to sell a new technology car from a new company when people are so used to the old. Inevitably, they revert to selling what’s easy and it is game over for the new company. The evidence is clear: when has an American startup auto company ever succeeded by selling through auto dealers? The last successful American car company was Chrysler, which was founded almost a century ago, and even they went bankrupt a few years ago, along with General Motors. Since the founding of Chrysler, there have been dozens of failures, Tucker and DeLorean being simply the most well-known. In recent years, electric car startups, such as Fisker, Coda, and many others, attempted to use auto dealers and all failed.'

Submission + - Nanoscale terahertz optical switch breaks miniaturization barrier (vanderbilt.edu) 1

Science_afficionado writes: There is a general consensus that ultimately photons will replace electrons running through wires in most of our microelectronic devices. One of the current technical barriers to the spread of optoelectronics has been the difficulty in miniaturizing the ultrafast optical switches required. Now a team of physicists at Vanderbilt has made terahertz optical switches out of nanoparticles of vanadium dioxide, a material long known for its ability to rapidly change phase between metallic to semiconducting states. They report in the Mar. 12 issue of Nano Letters that they have created individually addressable switches that are 200 nm in diameter and can switch between transparent and opaque states at terahertz rates.

Submission + - EU Votes for Universal Phone Charger

SmartAboutThings writes: The European Union has voted in favor of a draft legislation which lists among the “essential requirements” of electrical devices approved by the EU a compatibility with “universal” chargers . According to a German MEP, this move will eliminate 51,000 tonnes of electronic waste. The draft law was approved by an overwhelming majority of 550 votes to 12 . At the moment, according to estimates, there are around 30 different types of charger on the market, but manufacturers have two years at their disposal to get ready for the new restriction.

Comment As if... (Score 1) 66

'It would be considered as an [incentive] to terrorism and would give precise ideas to terrorists on the know-how (the methodology) and the details regarding the USA (but also how to find weaknesses in other countries).

Should we really believe that the so called terrorists don't already know what he's talking about? And why should we believe that, just because it hasn't been exploited on a large, TERRORIST, scale?

I mean, be them terrorists, but very likely, they're not stupid. If he in 4 months "discovered" this, I see nothing keeping some bright young hacker with a strong motive from finding this out too.

Comment Re:No, not those who don't understand... (Score 1) 921

Well, for an Oppo N1 user, makes no difference what angle you hold it, you can point the camera anywhere.

And there's also the other point given in the summary: if you want to record people, it's much easier to buy a cheap and small camera from China and conceal it.

Fearing being recorded is just stupid to me, because it can be happening any time, all the time, with or without your knowledge. And that will make you fearful ALL THE TIME, when it doesn't really matter.

I imagine a distant future where we find a way to extract our memories into electronic files. What then? Will you be fighting people that look at you for too long because then your image can be imprinted on their memory?

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