Roumen.ganeff

Police in Illinois, America were faced with an interesting traffic stop recently after spotting a vehicle travelling along the road with a large tree embedded in its front grill. A video, taken...

A rooftop car park in Farnborough has become the centre of a UK-wide controversy after it was discovered to have no vehicular access. The 80-space car park, which is atop a gym and shopping...

Elizabeth and Destin Bayer got married at San Jose's AFK Gamer Lounge on the 30th anniversary of The Legend Of Zelda NES Japanese release - the 21st of February, 2016.

The location was decorated in Legend of Zelda theme and the Bridal Party all wore unique cosplay, with the bride as Zelda, the groom as Link and the father of the bride as Ganondorf.

Check out all the awesome costumes in the slideshow below, plus the gorgeous cake and painted glass altar - click right for more images:

Davain Martinez, the event organiser, told IGN, "During the ceremony we had Link walk out to the main theme of the Legend of Zelda, the Bride walked out to Zelda's Lullaby. And during the reception we had a professional ocarina player play various themes. We tried to make it as immersive as we could."

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Remember when Steve Ballmer likened Linux to cancer, and the notion of Microsoft courting the open source crowd was virtually unimaginable? The company has come a long, long way since then. Microsoft has unveiled a version of SQL Server, a flagship d...

It's a sad day for the Internet: Ray Tomlinson, widely credited with inventing email as we know it, has died from a suspected heart attack at 74. In 1971, he established the first networked email system on ARPANET (the internet's ancestor), using the...

Guardtime, a startup that uses the technology underpinning bitcoin to secure public and private data, has signed a deal with the Estonian government to secure all the country's 1 million health records with its technology.

The deal with the Estonian e-Health Authority comes alongside a partnership with Estonian Information Systems Authority, which will see more government data move to Guardtime's technology.

Guardtime uses blockchain technology, first invented to underpin bitcoin, to verify data and prove that its trustworthy. It has created a network that citizens, private companies, and the government can also access to verify information on it.

Estonia has one of the most digitally advanced societies in the world and helped to incubate Guardtime's technology. Estonian citizens carry a smartcard that stores their data and gives them access to over 1,000 government services.

Mike Gault, co-founder and CEO of Guardtime, told Business Insider: "The only thing that you can’t do online in Estonia is get married or get divorced. Otherwise you don’t need to go to a government office."

Gault said adopting Guardtime's technology for healthcare records would allow Estonia to "effectively eliminate lies," saying: "Every update to healthcare records and every access to healthcare records is registered in the blockchain. That makes it impossible for the government or doctors or anyone to cover up any changes to healthcare records and that’s really powerful.

"If you’re in the UK and you say what’s happened to my healthcare records? You just have to trust the NHS."

Gault says Guardtime and the Estonian government now plan to migrate more data onto its "industrial blockchain." First launched in 2007, it is also used by the US Department of Defence and Ericsson.

Blockchain technology — also known as distributed ledger technology — is a non-centralised database that allows a network of users to sign off and police data.

Data being added to the network is inspected by a majority of member of the network to make sure its accurate and once it's signed off the data is coded using complex cryptography which means it cannot be changed once it's added to the blockchain. It uses duplicated ledgers across a variety of servers, meaning if one is compromised the data is still intact.

Banks and finance firms have been getting excited about the cost cutting potential of the technology, as it would allow them to deal directly with each other rather than working through clearing and settlement houses who police trade to make sure no one gets ripped off.

R3, an industry-wide consortium of over 40 banks, announced on Thursday that its members had tested out issuing, trading, and redeeming fixed income products on 5 blockchains, signaling another step towards mainstream adoption.

But Gault told Business Insider: "We see the real opportunity for blockchain technology as data and data security."

Guardtime's CTO, Matthew Johnson, joined the company after performing due diligence on it for the US Department of Defence, which was keen to work with the business.

Johnson told BI: "The more I got involved with the company over the year 2012/13 I was absolutely convinced that what Estonia had built was indeed game-changing. I quit my job and moved to Estonia for the better part of a year to mature the technology roadmap."

Guardtime had revenues of $25 million last year and Gault confirmed the company has contracts with Ericsson, defence giant Lockheed Martin, and the US military. Of the latter, he said: "It’s not something we can talk a lot about."

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NOW WATCH: JAMES ALTUCHER: College is a waste of time and money

Wall Street banks are buzzing about blockchain.

Goldman Sachs says the technology "has the potential to redefine transactions" and can change "everything."

JPMorgan last month announced it was launching a trial project with the blockchain startup led by its former executive, Blythe Masters. 

Her company, Digital Asset Holdings, has secured funding from Goldman, Citi, ICAP, and a boatload of other financial firms.

If you're wondering what a blockchain actually is, or how its works, you're not alone. Autonomous Research, which calls the technology a "game changer," has released a report to answer all of your blockchain questions.

The important thing to understand is that it has nothing to do with bitcoin — at least for Wall Street's purposes. Blockchain is the technology behind bitcoin, but it has many other uses too.

Wall Street wants to use blockchains to simplify the way it processes transactions. 

That may not sound very exciting, but if it works, it could eliminate back-office jobs and costs. So it's worth paying attention to — especially if you're one of the thousands of people who work in bank back offices.

Here's how it works.

Blockchains are ledgers (like Excel spreadsheets), but they accept inputs from lots of different parties. The ledger can only be changed when there is a consensus among the group. That makes them more secure, and it means there's no need for a central authority to approve transactions.

Blockchains control information and avoid duplication.

There's no need for a centralized authority to validate transactions when multiple banks, asset managers, or custodians can agree and validate them instead.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

It's no mean feat to find the factors of a very large number -- even a supercomputer can take years to find all the multipliers. However, MIT researchers have found a way to clear this massive hurdle. They've built a quantum computer that discovers...

When Surrey NanoSystems introduced the original Vantablack, the company said the carbon nanotube material is capable of absorbing 99.96 percent of light that touches it. It's so dark, it can fool your eyes into seeing a smooth surface even when the n...

With a near infinite universe to explore, upcoming PS4 sci-fi epic No Man’s Sky is promising adventure without compare. However, think of any great space saga, and it’s at least partially defined by its cast of characters. With an intergalactic sandbox made up of 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 unique planets, how on Earth is developer Hello Games planning to fill all those worlds with consistent story, dialogue, lore and language?

Well, as has generally proven the case when it comes to all things No Man’s Sky, it turns out the answer is pretty remarkable. Last week, I stopped by Hello’s compact Guildford HQ to find out more.

“We’ve always talked about having factions in the game. It’s something we’ve always wanted. We had ideas on how we wanted that to fit in No Man’s Sky, but it’s taken us a while to get to the point where we’re happy enough to show it,” creator Sean Murray tells me, before launching into a demo.

In short, here’s how it works. As you travel around the universe you’ll encounter individuals from several distinct races. As with everything else in the game, how they look and what they say is procedurally generated based on a set of variables defined by the Hello Games team.

You’ll be able to trade with them, gain upgrades, learn more about the game’s lore, forge alliances and so forth.

Sound straightforward? Well, not so fast.

“The razor we use to cut features – to decide whether to implement them or not – is ‘does this thing encourage players to go out and explore the universe more?’,” explains Sean.

“With NPCs in No Man’s Sky, you actually have to learn their language; they speak to you in their native tongue.”

Yes, you read that correctly. Hello Games has devised a number of distinct alien languages which, at the game’s outset, you will not be able to understand. However, as you explore the universe, discover relics and talk to new NPCs, you’ll slowly start picking up their dialects.

Sean goes onto explain that there is real value in developing relationships with these characters. If you make the effort to learn the language of a particular race and interact with them regularly, your standing with them will increase. If you’re tight with a particular race, they’ll duly give you preferential treatment – cheaper prices perhaps, or better equipment. Indeed, if you want to buy a better ship that might allow you to travel to more distant star systems, you’ll need to cosy up with these factions.

“Blundering into conversations without knowing the language can have negative consequences.”

Conversely, just as it would in real life, saying the wrong thing in a dialogue tree will likely result in your standing to decrease, or in the trader ripping you off, or in you losing a useful item simply out of confusion. Worse still, it might even end up in your new-found attacking you.

As has been hinted at in previous trailers, there are a number of ways to play No Man’s Sky. You can focus on exploration, on fighting, survival or on trading, and the NPC system feeds directly into this overarching framework.

“The nice thing about it is that the NPCs are divided up into different races. So one race is perhaps more focussed on exploration and science, and knowing that helps you decide how to best interact with them,” says Sean.

“If you’re playing the game for exploration’s sake, you might want to focus on that race. But if you’re playing the game and all you want to do is kill things, there are more military-based races, so you might want to try and become friends with them.”

As aforementioned, there are a number of races in the game, and each speaks their own unique language. So, how long is it going to take the average player to wrap their tongues around a foreign dialect to the point of fluency?

“It depends how much you’re seeking it out. Even if it’s all you do, you’re definitely talking hours and hours of play to learn a language. But I think most players will never become fluent, unless it’s specifically something they’re seeking out.

“And there’s an element of fun to that! I like some of the silliness that ensues.

“Say you were to go into a farming building, and there are some instructions on the wall written in an alien language telling you how to run the machinery. You could make sure you have the necessary language skills to make sense of it, or you could just run up to the console and randomly press buttons. Take the latter approach and the sign could read, ‘DEFINITELY DO NOT PRESS THE RED BUTTON”, and you wouldn’t know it. That’s fun to me!”

It’s probably important to stress that the interactions you have with these NPCs are reasonably light. No Man’s Sky is not a narrative-driven RPG with a script to follow – it’s procedural, and enormous on a scale that is impossible to properly comprehend. Don’t expect contained quest lines à la, say, Mass Effect.

“You’re not sat there talking about philosophy, or discussing the weather for hours on end,” stresses Sean. “You are doing things like trading, or asking for technology, or sharing crafting recipes.

“We’re not trying to fill the entire universe with dialogue trees and long-running dramas. That’s not what it’s about.”

“Having said that, being No Man’s Sky, there is a procedural element to your interactions. The AI you talk to will know the name of the planet you’re on and will reference it. They’ll reference wanting certain things based on the environment they’re in. They’ll know if it’s cold, or hot, or whatever. You’ll see a reasonable amount of variety – it’s not just pre-baked dialogue.”

Before all of you who failed French class at school start getting a little nervous, No Man’s Sky is not expecting you to learn complex grammar, syntax, verb forms, pronunciation and so forth. To take a simplistic view of it, the languages are more like codes to decipher – generally speaking, you’re simply replacing a word for a word. That was a deliberate decision, made in order to foster a sense of collaboration and coordination amongst the game’s community of players. If you figure out what a particular word means, you can paste it up online and share the knowledge.

“Some of the languages – well, one in particular – is much harder to learn than the others,” Sean adds. “I think it will probably only be possible for people to decipher some of the dialogue by working together online.

“We’re not trying to build something that people will go out and try to speak in the real world, like how I learned Klingon when I was a kid because I thought it would be a great ice-breaker. Turned out not to be the case!

“I don’t expect to find people meeting at conventions and speaking one of our languages. That would be awful; please don’t do that!

“It’s more about creating a really interesting reason for people to explore the game and get some really emergent results.”

So, there you have it. Brush up on your social skills and learn some manners – they’ll likely be just as important as a quick trigger finger come June.

The post How No Man’s Sky fills its universe with lore, language and intelligent life appeared first on PlayStation.Blog.Europe.

You know that it's a topsy-turvy year when John McAfee isn't the most preposterous candidate vying for the White House. The antivirus millionaire has been talking up his chances with US News and believes that he'll have "no problem" becoming presiden...

Samsung has started shipping the 16TB (well, okay, 15.36TB) SSD it showed off at the Flash Memory Summit in California last year. The company says the positively tiny, 2.5-inch drive has the largest capacity among all the SSDs in the world. It still...

What do you give to the person who has everything? The world's best security camera to watch over it, we guess. Sony's latest Alpha product, the 850,000 yen ($7,500) SNC-VB770, may fit the bill. It's a 4K mirrorless, E-mount network camera that can c...

In response to recent moves by rivals to incorporate more technology in their customer operations, RBS has announced it's to deploy a new online virtual assistant to help deal with enquiries quicker. The bank says the AI, named "Luvo," was first test...

"I'm what ISIS doesn't need." That may sound like a quote from Republican presidential candidate/real estate tycoon Donald Trump, but it's actually from an AI-powered Twitterbot named @DeepDrumpf. Developed by Bradley Hayes, a postdoc student at MIT'...

Samsung on Thursday introduced its new lineup of high-capacity SSDs for enterprises. The new Samsung PM1633a family of drives includes the world’s first SSD that can store 15.36 TB of data and which leaves behind even the leading-edge hard drives. The solid-state drive not only offers the world’s highest-capacity, but also boasts with increased reliability and high performance. The manufacturer is already shipping the new SSDs to select customers.

The Samsung PM1633a 15.36 TB SSD can deliver up to 1200 MB/s sequential read performance and features random read and write speeds of up to 200,000 and 32,000 IOPS respectively, according to the manufacturer. The 15.36 TB SSD supports 1 DWPD (drive writes per day) throughout the period of several years (unfortunately, Samsung does not specify of how many), which indicates very high endurance. The new solid-state storage solution features SAS-12 Gb/s interface and is compatible with servers that support drives in 2.5”/15 mm form-factor. Samsung does not reveal power consumption of the PM1633a 15.36 TB SSD, but based on power requirements the SSD can consume up to 13.7W.

Samsung PM1633a SSD Specifications
	15.36 TB
Controller	Samsung proprietary controller
NAND	Samsung's 256 Gb 48-layer TLC NAND
DRAM Cache	16 GB DDR3 SDRAM
Sequential Read	1200 MB/s
Endurance	1 DWPD (Drive Writes Per Day)
Interface and Form-Factor	2.5"/15mm SAS-12 Gbps

The PM1633a drives are based on Samsung’s new proprietary controller that can concurrently access large amounts of high-density NAND flash with the help of a special firmware. Thanks to the new controller, the PM1633a SSDs are even faster than the PM1633 drives unveiled last August (sequential read and write speeds of up to 1100MB/s and 1000MB/s, up to 160/18 thousand random read/write IOPS). Typically, high-capacity SSDs do not offer truly high performance because of peculiarities of their internal architecture, but Samsung has managed to develop a controller that weds performance and capacity.

The Samsung PM1633a SSDs utilize the company’s third-generation 256 Gb TLC 3D V-NAND memory chips. The 256 Gb dies are stacked in 16 layers and form a single 512 GB package. Samsung uses 32 of such packages to build its most spacious SSD, leaving around 1 TB of NAND for overprovisioning. The giant drive also features 16 GB of DRAM cache to ensure smooth performance. The Samsung PM1633a 15.36 TB will be the second product to use the company's 48-layer TLC 3D V-NAND after the Portable SSD T3. Eventually, Samsung will further expand usage of this flash memory.

The advantages of 15.36 TB SSDs in the server space are hard to overestimate. There are 2U servers that can fit in 48 SAS3/12G storage devices (1, 2). Each of such machines can store 737.28 TB of data (if fully populated with Samsung’s new PM1633a SSDs), whereas a 42U cabinet featuring 21 of such servers will be able to store 15482 TB of data (15.4 PB). By contrast, storage capacity of a standard 42U storage rack based on 360 3.5” 10TB HDDs is around 3600 TB.

Samsung did not reveal the price of its 15.36 TB SSD, but is probably in the range of several thousands of dollars.

Later this year Samsung plans to add drives with 7.68 TB, 3.84 TB, 1.92 TB, 960 GB and 480 GB into its PM1633a lineup.

At least one Palestinian man is dead, and another 10 reportedly have been severely wounded, after an Israeli Defense Force truck strayed into the Kalandia Palestine refugee camp on Monday -- reportedly at the direction of the Waze navigation app. Mul...

prochoiceamerica:

This week, the Supreme Court will hear the biggest reproductive rights case in decades.

we’re losing this one, day by day, state by state.

i was a clinic defense volunteer during the randall terry years in the late 80s and early 90s. 3 years ago when we were moving i found my volunteer shirts (”this clinic stays open” and the like). i considered letting them go. but then i thought, “i hope this isn’t true, but i may need these again.”

i cannot believe i need these again.

California cops shot and killed a man and woman Sunday after finding them unconscious in a car and spending 45 minutes trying to “deescalate the situation” before they “felt threatened,” according to Inglewood Mayor James Butts, a former police chief.

But Butts did not explain how Inglewood police felt threatened by an unconscious couple before opening fire on the couple.

All he said was that the woman, Kisha Micheal, had a gun in her right hand, which is what police have been saying all along.

However, Michael’s family said she did not even own a gun.

And as more details emerge from the incident, it certainly appears that things are just not adding up.

On Sunday, the Los Angeles Times described the incident as a “confrontation” with “suspects,” basing their report on information obtained from police.

On Monday, after attending a press conference and speaking to family members, the Los Angeles Times was no longer describing it as a confrontation but as a “mystery,” quoting Micheal’s sister, who stressed her sister did not even own a gun.

And on Tuesday, NBC Los Angeles reported that Mayor Butts admitted that the man and woman were not even awake – a tiny detail that was overlooked by police when they initially described their so-called confrontation.

For at least 45 minutes, police attempted “to rouse” them in an effort “to de-escalate the situation,” said Butts. It is the first public explanation for what transpired early Sunday morning during the time between the initial call and the shooting. Police previously had stated responding officers saw the woman had a gun, retreated to behind cover, and then gave orders for the couple to exit the vehicle.

“Obviously at some point they were conscious because somebody felt threatened,” said Butts, a retired law enforcement officer who previously had served as police chief in other cities. He said it is important for police to finish their investigation, and verify facts, before commenting further.

Other details emerging Tuesday was that Michael was out with a man named Marquintan Sandlin, a 32-year-old single father of four daughters. Michael was a single mother of three sons.

The two were apparently out on a date, having left their children in the care of family members. But it appears as if they had too much to drink and ended up passing out, which drew the attention of police, who claimed the woman was holding a gun.

That prompted them to call the SWAT team and at least one armored car, who began ordering them through a megaphone to wake up and exit the car.

At one point, the couple apparently did wake up, which led to the gunshots.

 

The post California Cops Shoot and Kill Man and Woman Passed Out in Car appeared first on PINAC News.

CBS's new take on Nancy Drew, simply titled Drew, has found its leading lady in Sarah Shahi.

According to Entertainment Weekly, the Person of Interest star will play a grown-up Nancy Drew in the CBS pilot, which offers a modern day take on the long-running mystery novel series.

Sarah Shahi as Shaw in Person of Interest.

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20th Century Fox has set new release dates for many of its upcoming movies, including two unnamed Marvel character movies, The Predator, and more.

The first untitled Marvel film will be released on October 6, 2017, and the second on January 12, 2018.

Deadpool 2 is a likely guess for one of these two slots, though we'll have to wait for an official confirmation.

Additionally, Fox has moved Gambit off its schedule for the time being, something many foresaw when the film's production got delayed and directing duties changed, with Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Edge of Tomorrow) stepping in for Rupert Wyatt (Rise of the Planet of the Apes). That being the case, one of those new Marvel-movie dates could be used for Gambit - most likely the one in October 2017, given Gambit was going to open this October originally.

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SatNav voices can often be tedious and repetitive, mispronouncing place names and generally getting on motorists' nerves. However, Google's GPS navigation app, Waze, aims to change...

Supercomputers are absurdly impressive in terms of raw power, but it comes at a price: size and energy consumption. A multi-university team of researchers might've sidestepped that, though, with protein-powered biocomputers. Lund University notes tha...

Expect 2016 to be the year when all of the talk around 5G starts to feel like more than hype. It seemed as if the big tech companies couldn't shut up about it at Mobile World Congress this week -- and for good reason. It's been over six years since L...

It's not easy turning embryonic stem cells into sperm cells in the lab, but a team of Chinese scientists managed to grow viable specimens using samples from mice. To prove their method works, they fertilized eggs with their dish-grown sperm cells, wh...

A few hours ago Xiaomi rocked the mobile world by announcing the latest Mi 5 flagship. During the lengthy presentation, impressive facts about the handset were flying towards us at supersonic speed - the new 16 LED backlight display, UFS 2.0 storage, full-featured NFC, the list goes on and on. But the camera was one area that company VP Hugo Barra seemed particularly excited about, even leaking sample photos prior to the announcement itself. The Xiaomi Mi5 has a 16MP main shooter with an aperture of f/2.0 and the Sony IMX 298 sensor. But the real rabbit in the hat is definitely the new 4-axis optical image stabilization. The technology looks truly impressive. In fact, to showcase just how well it works, Hugo Barra showed a demo clip on stage, which has leaked online and can be seen below. In it, we can clearly see the Xiaomi Mi 5 obliterate the image stabilization of the latest iPhone 6s Plus. Mind you, the latter is a clever system of both OIS and digital stabilization, although the software part is said to be a post-processing thing, so the demo might actually be taking it out of the equation. Still, the results are impressive, to say the...

(via poetryandpills)

Lenovo and Google are hard at work on the first consumer-friendly Project Tango smartphone, but actually building the thing isn't the only hurdle that needs clearing. The bigger problem is an existential one: How do these huge companies convince peop...

Lithium-ion batteries, like those commonly used in laptops and smartphones, are no longer allowed to be shipped as cargo on passenger planes, the United Nation's International Civil Aviation Organization decided this week. There's no need to worry ab...

Find it nigh-on impossible to focus when writing on your computer? You now have a dedicated device to help you shut out the social networks and other distractions: after more than a year's wait, Astrohaus has started taking orders for the Freewrite (...