Archive for the 'Technology' Category
Robot with Broken Leg Learns to Walk Again in 2 Minutes
July 30th, 2014Via: Medium: When animals lose a limb, they learn to hobble remarkably quickly. And yet when robots damage a leg, they become completely incapacitated. That’s not so much of a problem for robots that are confined to factories where help is always on hand. But robots have been evolving rapidly and are now on the […]
Why Hoboken is Throwing Away All of its Student Laptops
July 30th, 2014In other news: Finns Beat U.S. with Low-Tech Take on School. Via: WNYC: Inside Hoboken’s combined junior-senior high school is a storage closet. Behind the locked door, some mothballed laptop computers are strewn among brown cardboard boxes. Others are stacked one atop another. Dozens more are stored on mobile computer carts, many of them on […]
Billionaire Hedge Fund Manager to Clients: EMP Greatest Risk to Society
July 30th, 2014Yeah, and there were only two seasons of Jericho: Via: CNBC: Billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer has issued an unusual warning for investors, calling the threat of a widespread blackout from an electromagnetic surge the “most significant danger” in the world. Called an “electromagnetic pulse” or EMP, the events can occur naturally from solar […]
Russia Offers $111,000 to Crack Tor
July 28th, 2014Via: Ars Technica: The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) has offered a 3.9 million ruble (approximately $111,000) contract for technology that can identify the users of Tor, the encrypted anonymizing network used by Internet users seeking to hide their activities from monitoring by law enforcement, government censors, and others. In a notice on the […]
The French City of Toulouse Saved 1 Million Euro by Migrating Desktops to LibreOffice
July 28th, 2014Via: European Commission: Toulouse in south-west France is one of the successes of the free software movement, having replaced Microsoft solutions with LibreOffice. Free software and open source in general is now an established part of the city’s comprehensive digital policy, and the open model promotes economic development and employment in the region.
Government Surveillance and Internet Search Behavior
July 27th, 2014Via: SSRN: This paper uses data from Google Trends on search terms from before and after the surveillance revelations of June 2013 to analyze whether Google users’ search behavior shifted as a result of an exogenous shock in information about how closely their internet searches were being monitored by the U.S. government. We use data […]
If TaskRabbit Is the Future of Employment, the Employed Are Fucked
July 25th, 2014Welcome to the IT industry of the mid 2000s. Via: ValleyWag: The employment of the future is here, and it’s terrific for everyone except the people doing the work. TaskRabbit, which lets you outsource the things you don’t want to do to people who need money, is at the forefront of this chore revolution, and […]
JIBO “Family Robot”
July 25th, 2014Via: My Jibo:
Microsoft’s Station Q Researching Quantum Computing
July 25th, 2014Via: Tech Week Europe: Microsoft has set up a laboratory dedicated to producing quantum computers that will push computing power to a higher level. Station Q, based at the University of California, Santa Barbara will work on ways to construct machines with multiple quantum bits (qubits), under the leadership of Dr Michael Freedman, a mathematician […]
Germany: Typewriter Manufacturers See Boom in Sales
July 24th, 2014Via: The Local: German typewriter manufacturers are enjoying a boom in sales following the NSA spying scandal. A German defence manufacturer switched to typewriters last year, while last week a leading politician called for the government to use the old technology. The head of the parliamentary inquiry into spying by the US National Security Service […]
