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When Ellen DeGeneres' Oscars selfie (read: Samsung promo) broke the record for the most retweeted Twitter post ever, it raised a question: what, if anything could top that? Breaded chicken can, apparently. Twitter has confirmed that high school stu...

We break down where Star-Lord and the gang might be heading next.

When director James Gunn revealed that Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 would be the first movie shot with Red's 8K Weapon camera, he triggered a bit of speculation: what prompted the move beyond the incredibly high resolution? You might have a better...

A team of scientists have snipped away HIV DNA from the genome of live mice using a CRISPR system, and the rodents lived to (kinda) tell the tale. It's still much too early to call the method a possible cure, but the fact that it worked on a living a...

In order to expand its marketplace, Scuderia Ferrari watches have teamed together with Norwegian cruise line to create an incredible feature aboard one of its ocean liners. Norwegian Joy is the...

The Marvel sequel is now available in HD and 4K Ultra HD and hits Blu-ray on August 22.

The end of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 had big consequences and a whopping five post-credits scenes to set up what’s coming next. Let’s break down what it all means!

Full spoilers follow for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.

Peter Quill finally meets his father and it turns out ol’ dad is a Celestial space god (with a little “g”) named Ego, and the big twist is that Ego needs Peter to help him take over the universe and keep him company. Peter taps into the power passed on to him from Ego to brawl with his dad while the rest of the Guardians destroy the cosmic brain at the core of Ego’s planet. In the end, the Guardians succeed, but new member and surrogate father-figure Yondu sacrifices himself to save Peter. So basically, Peter met his biological father only to find out that the only dad he needed was there all along! Yondu’s heroic death also redeems him for breaking the Ravager code all those years before.

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Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is packed with more than a few deep-cut comic book references. Here’s everything we found!

Intel Corp announced an agreement to buy Israel-based Mobileye N.V., a maker of automotive vision technology used for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and fully autonomous vehicles.

I’ve been a fan of The Dark Tower for a better part of my life. Stephen King’s amalgam of worlds, stories, and terrors has served as a basis for my love of storytelling for quite some time. On the eve of its first trailer, I got a chance to talk with King himself, and discuss the movie, his process, and just how far his universe extends.

Asking King what he thought of the trailer, his reaction was simple. “I thought it was fantastic.” He elaborated, “Fans of the books are going to be delighted to finally see Roland and Jake on screen, not to mention Walter, the Man in Black.” Expanding on that, I asked him what he thought of seeing two of our most talented actors portraying these characters that he created so long ago. “It was great to see Idris Elba as Roland. He has terrific focus and tremendous energy as Roland. Mathew McConaughey is very scary and very intense as Walter. I love that right away you set up the tension between the two of them.”

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Coal power has been a fixture of British culture ever since the country's first plant went live in 1882. It shaped the Industrial Revolution (and the air pollution that followed), was involved in major labor disputes and even led to a famous album c...

Google's recognition for context goes beyond conversing with Assistant, it would seem. The search juggernaut is working on a feature that "thinks" of what you were looking at in Chrome and makes it available in other apps. It's called "Copyless Paste...

The music industry has struggled to adapt to the digital world over the past couple of decades, but it might just be hitting its stride again. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) has published its annual Global Music Repo...

Modern Star Wars movies have had a bad habit of slipping into December, but that isn't stopping Disney and Lucasfilm from wanting the space epic to become a summer blockbuster once again. The two have announced that Star Wars: Episode IX will debut...

YouTube Kids' mobile app is fine if your young ones are content to watch videos on a tablet, but what if you just want to plunk them down on the couch to watch on the big screen? You can after today. YouTube is trotting out a version of the Kids app...

Robotic limbs aren't a new technology, though the range of motion and strength of such limbs continue to improve. Controlling prosthetics with your mind is another area of refinement, but they're typically connected directly to a patient's brain. A n...

Sure, the K5 isn't the cutest robot making its first steps into human society, but that doesn't mean drunks get to knock it over. One of the five-foot droids took a tumble last week in Mountain View, when a drunk man took umbrage to its whistlin', pa...

Coffee tables aren't the most glamorous piece of furniture. If you're anything like me, they inevitably become a repository for loose stuff like keys and remotes. StoreBound's SOBRO smart table aims to be a lot more useful. It's not just nice to look...

iRobot is bringing Wi-Fi connectivity to its cheaper Roomba vacuum cleaning robots. The company is unveiling two new models today, the 690 and 890, which sit below its top-of-the-line 960 and 980 machines. Unlike the 650 and 860 -- its previous low-e...

Translators will have nothing to eat. Soon.

As I learned from Technet.cz, Google Translate was switched to a revolutionary new version of itself on the night between April 18th and April 19th. It's rather likely that you may already see the improvements now. The new software should result from the September 2016 scholarly work submitted to arXiv.org.

Up to that moment, Google Translate was exploiting more or less old-fashioned computer algorithms. However, it uses deep neural networks now. Google had to create its own processing units, the TPUs. Those "tensor processing units" are counterparts of GPUs, "graphics processing units", and they are capable of performing the tasks effectively. These TPUs have trained themselves by looking at millions of texts, including the corpus available through Google Books. They can "automatically", in an emulation of the human brain, learn some patterns and rules how to work not only with individual words and groups of words but even very complex sentences.




I have tried the translation in between the only two languages where I am still rather certain that my knowledge of all the nuances beats all the computers in the world – a statement that may cease to be true rather soon. The flawlessness of many translations has amazed me, indeed. Let me mention that the subtitle "translators will have nothing to eat" was obtained by Google Translate from the well-known quote (about glassmakers' jobs threatened by plastic cups) in a Czech comedy Cosy Dens – a 3-minute video.




Technet.cz has prepared lots of incredible examples in both directions – a soon-to-be-published text will show hundreds of them. I won't bother you with the Czech sentences – only 4% of the TRF readers, not necessarily all the homosexuals, understand Czech. But let me say that the sentence

We would like to try what is possible in the world of on-line translators and artificial intelligence. The new version of Google Translate utilizes deep neural networks to translate the whole sentences, not just short phrases. The neural networks analyze millions of different texts and then train themselves to perform better and better.

was translated to Czech almost flawlessly, just with one somewhat redundant word "it" in front of a sentence starting with "what is possible" – the Czech translation of "it" does naturally appear in similar complex sentences. The word "perform" was translated suboptimally as "may", more or less – not sure why. The old Google Translate had some 8 well-defined problems in the translation of the quote above; the new one has 2, at most 3.

To test the opposite translation, they picked a piece of the Czech tax code. The translation to English ended up like this:

Taxpayers are tax residents of the Czech Republic, if they are resident or usually reside in the Czech Republic. Taxpayers of the Czech Republic have a tax liability, which applies both to income flowing from sources in the Czech Republic and to income from sources abroad.

"If they are resident" could have said "residents" instead, the commas before "if" should be omitted in English, and you might find one similar imperfection but such complaints of ours are basically analogous to objections we could raise against translations done by human translators.

The translations really keep the "genre" and "style". Everyone who has followed the evolution of automatic translators must be as amazed as I am.

Technet.cz plans hundreds of examples of texts translated with the new Google Translate. Some commenters have added their own examples, often amusing ones. Mr Petr Konderla tried the following sentence on Twitter:

Supercharger availability is now displayed on your Tesla touchscreen so you can see how many stalls are open before you arrive.

On Twitter, you can get automatic translations to your language and they are provided by the Bing Translator. If I reverse translate the Czech text produced by Bing into English, it sounds as follows:

Through the blower[,] the availability is now displayed on "Tesla touchscreen" [kept in English], in order for you to see, how much the little tents can be opened before they arrive.

The new Google Translate says:

On the touch screen [correct Czech phrase] named Tesla, the availability of superchargers is now being displayed, in order for you to see how many tents are opened before the arrival.

The order of the words may look strange in English but in Czech, it's actually the more natural one and the automatic translator has really rearranged rather big pieces of that sentence, just like a human would do.

Of course, creative Czech commenters were able to construct sentences where the Google Translate did a lousy job. Mr Tomáš Kuchař started with a text that basically says

A šitty [literally: farted through] bumpkin in gum boots took a subway.

Sadly, the translation by Google Translate happened to be

A flipper ripped up in his boots with a subway.

This computer-generated sentence may be translated back to Czech and we get the Czech counterpart of

In his armpit himself in shoes he extracted his paddles.

which is my back-back-translation, or

Under the armpits, the fins pulled up in his shoes.

which is Google Translate's own back-back-translation, maybe better than mine. ;-) If you continue to switch back and forth by Google Translate, the sentence stabilizes a bit, except that the fins/paddles become fingers in the next step and "in the armpit" becomes "beneath the armpit" another step later.

You should definitely try the translations between pairs of languages that you know – in both directions – and tell us about your impressions. It's plausible that Google's apps that translate the spoken language are already doing a similarly good job, too.

Google is clearly ahead of the competitors such as Microsoft here. But if someone tries to catch up with Google and a war erupts in between the competitors, computers could very well surpass humans in a few years.

There is little more infuriating than a selfish motorist blocking a zebra crossing on a busy city street. To teach one such ignorant motorist a lesson, the pedestrians in this short clip...

Our fingerprints are quickly replacing PINs and passwords as our primary means of unlocking our phones, doors and safes. They're convenient, unique, and ultimately more secure than easily guessed or forged passwords and signatures. So it makes sense...

This morning AMD is taking the wraps off of their next line of video cards, the Radeon RX 500 series. Like past video card lineup refreshes, the RX 500 series is based on AMD’s existing GPU architecture, Polaris, but shipping in new configurations and at new prices in order to boost AMD’s GPU performance and their competitiveness. This gives AMD and its partners something new to sell for 2017, while at the same time also giving them something even faster to tempt current 300/200 series owners into upgrading to Polaris. Adding an extra wrinkle into all of this, there’s even a new Polaris GPU joining the family, albeit at the low end.

Our leaders may be determined to make their daily dealings less transparent, but they probably didn't reckon on bored Steve Ballmer. The former Microsoft CEO has spent more than $10 million on a new project to open up the US government budget. USA Fa...

If this weekend's box office estimates hold then The Fate of the Furious will surpass Star Wars: The Force Awakens to score the biggest worldwide opening of all time.

The Fate of the Furious, the eighth installment in the 16-year-old franchise, grossed $532.5 million worldwide in its opening weekend. The previous record holder, The Force Awakens, made $529 million in its 2015 bow.

Fate grossed an estimated $100.2 million domestically and $432.2 million internationally, breaking the record previously held by another Universal release, Jurassic World ($316.7 million). Before Fate, Jurassic World had been Universal's biggest worldwide debut with $525.5 million.

Fate's international tally includes $190 million from China alone, where it now holds the record for the country's biggest three-day opening for a Hollywood movie. (It should be noted that The Force Awakens did not open day and date in China as Fate did.)

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In biggest shake-up of the standardised driving exam since the introduction of the theory test, UK drivers will be required to demonstrate that they can navigate using a sat nav. The Driver & Vehicle Standards Agency has confirmed that from Decem...

Toddlers really need their sleep. It's crucial when our brains our first developing, so early problems can ripple across your lifetime. That makes a report by Birbeck University of London researchers somewhat disturbing -- they found that toddlers be...

Spring is nature's way of saying, Let's party!  ~Robin Williams 


Young people are in a condition like permanent intoxication, because youth is sweet and they are growing. ~ Aristotle

April prepares her green traffic light and the world thinks Go.  ~Christopher Morley, John Mistletoe 

You can only be young once. But you can always be immature. ~ Dave Barry 

I'm youth, I'm joy, I'm a little bird that has broken out of the egg. ~James M. Barrie

It's spring fever.  That is what the name of it is.  And when you've got it, you want - oh, you don't quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!  ~Mark Twain


We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future. ~Franklin D. Roosevelt

Science has never drummed up quite as effective a tranquilizing agent as a sunny spring day.  ~W. Earl Hall

Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing. ~George Bernard Shaw 

April is a promise that May is bound to keep.  ~Hal Borland

Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find his own. ~Logan Pearsall Smith

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.  ~Margaret Atwood
I am not young enough to know everything. ~Oscar Wilde
Every spring is the only spring - a perpetual astonishment.  ~Ellis Peters

We are none of us infallible--not even the youngest of us. ~W. H. Thompson

Spring has returned.  The Earth is like a child that knows poems.  ~Rainer Maria Rilke

There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age. ~Sophia Loren

April hath put a spirit of youth in everything.  ~William Shakespeare

Youth is easily deceived, because it is quick to hope. ~Aristotle

Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!  ~Wallace Stevens

You're never too old to become younger ~Mae West

Tis a month before the month of May, and the spring comes slowly up this way. ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Young people need models, not critics ~John Wooden

Spring hangs her infant blossoms on the trees,
Rock'd in the cradle of the western breeze. ~ William Cowper,
First image Credit Flickr User CzechR

Besides a cache of potentially damaging zero-day exploits against many versions of Windows, another element of today's Shadow Brokers release is a folder titled SWIFT. Inside, it has documents listing the internal structure at EastNets, a Dubai-based...

Yesterday, the mysterious "Shadow Brokers" posted some hacking tools for Windows that were allegedly stolen from the NSA. All of them were at least a few years old, but exploited flaws in several versions of the operating system to move across networ...