Maxim Bange

Can pairing man with machine help prevent common industrial workplace injuries? A number of research institutions across Europe seem to think so. They've banded together to help further development of Robo-mate, an exoskeleton that some experts claim could be a viable aid to factory employees within just three years. According to BBC News, the project — which has already earned €4.5 million in EU funding — has also picked up support from automaker Fiat and Indra, a French car recycling company.

As those partnerships suggest, the robotic suit would help most in factories where workers follow established, repetitive routines. "It offers a hybrid approach in which the robotic parts support the human who can provide the decisions...

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De Russische regering heeft het plan om de Syrische chemische wapens onder internationaal toezicht te stellen overhandigd aan de Verenigde Staten, melden media in Rusland. Het voorstel wordt donderdag in Genève besproken als de ministers van Buitenlandse Zaken Lavrov en Kerry elkaar ontmoeten.

Kerry zei eerder vandaag dat hij de schriftelijke voorstellen van zijn Russische ambtgenoot afwacht.

Geen toestemming

Rusland blijft sterk gekant tegen militair ingrijpen in Syrië. Het parlementslid Poesjkov, die goede banden met het Kremlin heeft, zei dat Rusland de wapenleveranties aan Iran kan opvoeren als de Amerikanen toch besluiten tot militaire actie. Rusland zal dan overwegen om geen toestemming meer te geven voor Amerikaanse militaire transporten naar Afghanistan, zei hij.

Het besluit van president Obama om voorrang te geven aan de diplomatie, heeft bij het Syrische verzet tot teleurstelling geleid. Een woordvoerder van het Vrije Syrische Leger zegt dat de Syrische regering de internationale gemeenschap in de maling neemt en bezig is tijd te kopen.

The NSA's raw surveillance data may be more widely shared than many thought. According to a classified document published by The Guardian, Israel has routine access to the NSA's stockpile of unedited signals data, including transcripts, phone records and digital network intelligence. The memorandum explicitly states that Israeli agencies must handle the data in accordance with US law, but there are apparently no laws or court oversight mechanisms to ensure this takes place. In short, if the NSA has access to an email or a phone call, it's safe to assume Israeli agencies have access to it as well.

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Apple has an unlikely antagonist on Twitter: Denny's.

While the tech world wasn't too surprised to see Nokia continue its pattern of Apple-bashing with a derisive tweet after its rival announced the new iPhone 5C and 5S, this tweet mocking the new gold smartphone option was somewhat unexpected:

Here's how Nokia approached news of the gold iPhone 5S:

Even though Denny's clearly isn't an Apple competitor, the tweet isn't totally out of place.

Ever since Oreo tweeted about the Super Bowl halftime show blackout — a tweet that went insanely viral and won numerous advertising awards — brands have been obsessed with real-time social media marketing. Companies are now expected to piggyback on seemingly unrelated events in the news cycle to capitalize on the buzz.

Denny's also engaged in a bit of clever real-time marketing during the NSA scandal:

SEE ALSO: Nokia's other iPhone bashing tweet

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Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington spent a lot of time talking about Steve Jobs at TechCrunch Disrupt yesterday.

Benioff recalled the last gift Steve Jobs ever gave him, family and friends at a Stanford memorial service that Jobs planned himself.

Benioff says Jobs picked the speakers, which included Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, as well as the artists that would play there, Bono and Yo-Yo Ma. Jobs also picked the caterer and a gift for all attendees.

The gift came wrapped in a small brown box. Benioff waited until he was in his car to open it. He knew it was something his long-time friend and mentor would want to sink in. It would be some sort of message.

"I said, 'This is going to be good,'" Benioff recalls. "I knew this was a decision he made that everyone was going to get this. So whatever this was, it was the last thing [Jobs] wanted us all to think about."

In the box was a book by Yogananda about self realization. Autobiography of a Yogi was one of Steve Jobs' favorite reads.

"That was the message: Actualize yourself," Benioff recalled. 

 "If you look back at the history of Steve and that early trip to India...he had this incredible realization that his intuition was his greatest gift," Benioff said. "He needed to look at world from inside out...his message was to look inside yourself and realize yourself."

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The "Touch ID" fingerprint scanner on Apple's new iPhone 5S isn't just a security device — it's also potentially the key that could unlock the long-promised (but little delivered) mobile payments revolution.

The company said yesterday that the fingerprint scanner will allow you to unlock your phone without using a password — the phone will know it's "you" from your fingerprints. With your real identity established, you'll be able to pay for stuff from iTunes and the App Store, too.

But marketers and retailers have broader plans for Touch ID: Making consumers feel secure about using their phones to make all sorts of payments.

The problem with mobile e-commerce is that consumers don't trust it. Everyone hates losing their phone; losing your mobile wallet and credit cards as well just makes it seem worse. Google has made a big play to get phone payments going with Google Wallet, but its adoption isn't close to being universal.

Apple's Touch ID potentially solves all that. Even if you lost your phone, no one else could use it to make payments because the fingerprint scanner won't let them.

David Marcus, president of PayPal, just told USA Today:

Within the next two years the vast majority of high-end smartphones will have biometrics and mainly fingerprint logins. It's going to be very useful for payments.

It's worth noting that Samsung has a fingerprint ID technology planned, too.

And Touch ID isn't merely about making iTunes downloads easier. It's about making payments faster, so fast they don't even require taps or clicks. Peter Nixey, an entrepreneur who has developed ID technology such as Clickpass, says:

It took me a moment to realise it but the fingerprint sensor is almost certainly not about securing your device. The fingerprint sensor is about securing your account. The fingerprint sensor is about payments, initially to Apple and then maybe subsequently elsewhere. The fingerprint sensor may be Apple’s mobile answer to Amazon’s web-bound One-Click.

... Amazon once measured a discernible difference in checkout rates from page loading increases of only 1/100th of a second. Apple has to request a password. That password has to secure the phone against chargebacks due to theft, purchases made by small children or just a trouble-making friend pinching your phone and playing with it. The only answer to those chargebacks today is to demand users to continually re-enter their passwords.

Nixey points out that Apple actually loses a lot of money because many people forget their App Store passwords.

While iTunes and the App Store get Touch ID-based payments immediately, everyone else — including PayPal et al. — are expected to get access to it in due course.

Touch ID also solves a problem that vexed the late Apple founder Steve Jobs:

"The swipe and PIN was one of the things Steve Jobs hated. It was in the way of the user experience," says Sebastien Taveau, chief technology officer of Validity Sensors.

SEE ALSO: Gorgeous Pictures Of Apple's New Gold iPhone 5S

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California is home to not only the largest photovoltaic installation in the world, but also the largest solar thermal.

And the latter is almost finished, and now you can take a Virtual Tour.

When completed, the Ivanpah solar thermal facility will generate 377 megawatts to power 140,000 homes. 

Here's a sampling of the tremendous images, but you should really spend a minute there yourself.

Also the aerial view from Google Earth of the site (located in California just a few miles southwest of Vegas) is insane:

Click here to take the full tour »

(Spotted by Gizmodo.)

SEE ALSO: The Solar Boom Is Making Life Miserable For Utilities

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It's becoming increasingly common for upper-middle class Chinese millennials to study abroad in the U.S.

At nearly 200,000 undergrads, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, they're blowing away the rest of the world in packing American universities.  

And if and when they return to China, they're bringing America back with them.

We spoke with two young professional Chinese, Alice Zhang and Jun Chu, both in their 20s, to talk about how American habits are beginning to infiltrate the upper end of Chinese youth culture.

Here's what they told us: 

Coffee

Jun: "A huge and still growing coffee culture. Chinese people loved tea and we consumed a lot of tea. Now the younger generations are hooked on coffee! There are Starbucks everywhere (and boy are they expensive! A grande latte is 33 kuai I believe, which translates to 5 bucks!) that might be cheap for Americans - or not - but average Chinese pay is still at developing-world standards.

"In addition to Starbucks, all sorts of coffee chains, Costa Coffee, Pacific Company (from Hong Kong) are all present. Similarly, young people love western food, from pizza to burgers to pasta to sandwiches, etc. Traditional Chinese go get dim sum on the weekend, now I see a brunch culture. But that could be because of I am in the middle of a yuppy crowd."

Tans

Jun: "Traditionally we want girls to have fair skin, as pale as possible, and as skinny and fragile as possible. Now there are actually women who prefer to look tanned, to have some lean muscles. There's a Chinese term for this kind of beauties - 美黑 (pronounced as meihei, or dark beauty)." 

Assertiveness

Jun: "I work in an American firm with American bosses. I also work at a public affairs consultancy so it is a fast-paced industry/office-- so I may be biased. I've heard in state-owned enterprises people are still very conservative, group-thinkers, and slow. But my Chinese colleagues are not afraid of expressing themselves, they are more independent thinkers. Instead of shying away, they know the work place (and our generation) is more competitive and they need to be more aggressive and speak up. Note that 90% of my colleagues have overseas education experience or have worked in foreign companies before. So I consider it a western influence."

Unnecessarily high-end food and designer furniture

Alice: "Shopping in Ikea with DIY concept, and buying organic food in high end supermarket or getting them from specialized stores. People who studied abroad before sort of bring back or keep these lifestyle they had when they were abroad."

Transparency at work

Alice: "Emphasis on more on fair and transparent working environment. The promotion standards are more transparent these days. Care more for the long term career development. A relatively clear career path is usually laid out when firms try to recruit people."

Traveling abroad

Alice: "…Esp. among young working population. They'll go to exotic places like Nepal for backpacking hiking, or snorkeling in Malaysia islands. It was very rare in the past. For my parents' generation, they didn't travel that much. And even they did, it was very typical sightseeing and photo taking type."

Brunch

"Traditional Chinese go get dim sum on the weekend, now I see a brunch culture...brunch is more popular among the yuppy urban Chinese. It's not that ridiculous as it is in NYC. I think it is quite expensive for the Chinese standard. Typically $20.00. But again, I am talking about a small yuppy hipster Chinese. A lot of ordinary Chinese people don't do brunch still.... One does see long lines outside certain places."

SEE ALSO: 26 Things China Copied From The Rest Of The World

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Marijuana legalization appears to be going well in Washington State. 

Here's a picture of a Makisupa policeman helping a man light a marijuana joint that weighs two pounds at the Northwest Harvest Fest in Bow, Washington.

Special thanks to Barry Poppins at WeedMap's news site Marijuana.com for posting it:

Here's the full video:

Earlier this year at U.C. Santa Cruz, police decided that rather than assisting the celebrants in lighting a two pound joint they would instead confiscate it. How far we've come. 

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De Belgische politie heeft foto's van een overleden vrouw op Facebook gezet om achter haar identiteit te komen. Mensen die op de pagina van de politie van Blankenberge kwamen, kregen de dode vrouw direct te zien. Dat kwam de politie op kritiek te staan.

De vrouw werd negen dagen geleden gevonden in de duinen. Ze had geen papieren op zak en rechercheurs hadden geen idee wie ze was. Daarom werd besloten om de foto op televisie te laten zien en op Facebook te zetten. Dat laatste gebeurde echter zonder waarschuwende tekst. Internetters zagen onmiddellijk het gezicht van de dode vrouw.

Geschokte reacties

"Facebook is een relatief nieuw en zeer interactief medium", zegt de Belgische commissaris Quaghebeur in Belgische media. "Op de foto zijn vrij snel opmerkingen gekomen, waaronder een aantal negatieve en zelfs geschokte reacties."

De foto's werden na de kritiek achter een link geplaatst, zodat mensen zich ervan bewust zijn dat ze een foto te zien krijgen van een dode. De politie hoopt binnen enkele dagen te weten wie de dode vrouw is.

The Syrian civil war has been going on for more than two years, but it hasn't been a fair fight.

While the Assad regime has tanks, jets, artillery — and of course, chemical weapons — the fragmented Free Syrian Army have mostly small arms and whatever they can put together or find.

We're talking slingshots, catapults, and rockets made in garages.

Both sides have backing: The Russians and Iranians give Assad cash and weapons, while the rebels get mainly humanitarian aid from the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. That humanitarian support may turn into full blown weapons and training if Senate hawks like John McCain and Lindsey Graham have their way.

Aid or not, when you see these pictures, you'll be pretty impressed they've been able to fight the Syrian army, and continue to hold ground throughout the country.

The FSA often has to improvise, like using a shotgun to launch an improvised grenade.

Or launching homemade bombs with a catapult.

Here's another one in Aleppo.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

On 9/11/2001 it was contained chaos in New York. Planes were not allowed in or out of the city for some time, so in essence, New Yorkers were left alone with the wreckage of the most tragic attack in American history.

Fortunately there were many Americans from all over the country that weren't going to stand for that.

One of them was John Corr, a Pennsylvania wine dealer who drove up to the city to volunteer at Ground Zero on September 14th. He kept a journal of everything he saw, and one of the most interesting entries is about some of the dauntless citizen volunteers he met while he was there working for ten days.

Corr was kind enough to share his writing with Business Insider, so you can read his thoughts on the people he encountered below:

There was the husband and wife team that left the Midwest even before the second plane hit and immediately set up their own clothing supply depot in the American Express building on West St (before it was even declared safe). When I first saw them there were long lines of fire fighters waiting to be fitted with Carharts and work boots from them. In the search and rescue on the pile with the hot sun and even hotter steel environments, the heavy coats and boots that the firefighters normally wore were not appropriate gear. And since many of the fireman refused to leave or break off the search, they needed the change of clothes right then and there. I can’t imagine how many fireman that husband and wife team outfitted in the first important days of the emergency. And they did it all with cell phone calls to outside donors and a 24/7 hustling service.

There were coal miners from Kentucky that I met on Saturday the 15th. They were very young men whose expertise was setting support posts and props in the many holes and caverns in the treacherous and constantly shifting pile of steel and iron. They were filthy, tired and a bit overwhelmed when I ran into them at the cafeteria at Public School 236.

There were construction workers and iron workers who were some of the first to show up and filled the ranks of the bucket brigades.

There were brigades of police cadets who came to work the bucket brigades. They came with just their uniforms and nothing else. We would spend hours outfitting them with helmets, masks, goggles and gloves as the work and safety regulations demanded it. Their appearance changed considerably upon their exit from GZ.

There were the legions of Hispanic works sent in to clean up the buildings surrounding GZ. Like the police cadets, they were totally without equipment (except for cleaning equipment) and it was downright criminal to send them into the toxic environment without helmets, masks etc. Many workers would exchange clothing upon exiting GZ. They didn’t want to bring contaminated clothing home with them.

There were Red Cross workers from all over the U.S. and the world and many physicians, nurses and hospital personnel.

There were the ubiquitous Salvation Army with their encouraging smiles and amazingly delicious mobile food stations.

There was a building demolition expert from North Carolina who sneaked into GZ and stayed for almost 4 months, becoming the volunteer expert-consultant on picking apart the tangled pile of steel safely and efficiently.

…And the above list is woefully inadequate in describing the thousands of people who made their mark on Ground Zero.

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Set to ship in the fourth quarter

Hollywood may be glamorous, but getting a start there often isn't. Even James Cameron, director of blockbusters including The Terminator and Avatar, started out on the bottom floor. In a new book, Cameron says that he was able to get his big break by standing out from the pack while modeling a spaceship for B-movie legend Roger Corman: "I thought, OK, it's Roger Corman. He does girls-in-bamboo-cages movies. What is he selling? He sells tits! So I designed a kind of Amazon warrior spaceship — basically a spaceship with tits." The design impressed Corman, and he was soon put in charge of more than just modeling.

Cameron elaborates upon how his interaction with Corman set him up to direct his first feature film, Piranha II: The Spawning,...

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A group of Victoria's Secret employees in New York City took on the company for better pay and hours, and won. 

Debbra Alexis told CNNMoney that she was making an hourly wage of $9.93 at the chain's Herald Square store. Her hours ranged from 10 to 30 per week, making it impossible to budget. 

Alexis found that other employees had the same complaints, so in June they presented their employer with a letter of demands. 

Victoria's Secret didn't answer the letter, so Alexis sought help from the Retail Action Project and posted a petition on Change.org. 

"The majority of our store’s approximately 700 workers struggle because we’re classified as part-time – only managers are considered full-time," Alexis wrote in the letter. "Since we don’t have guaranteed minimum hours, our hours are slashed without notice – leaving us unable to pay our rent, succeed at school, get promotions, or take care of our families."

The petition received more than 800 signatures, leading Victoria's Secret to notice Alexis' pleas. 

The company announced last month that all Herald Square employees would get raises of between $1 and $2 an hour, depending on experience.

Alexis recently left the company to work for a non-profit.

Victoria's Secret declined to comment for the CNNMoney story.  

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Here's how Apple works: It creates a new, innovative product from thin air, then spends years refining it, adding features, and making it best in class. 

Eventually, many years later, it makes that original product obsolete with something new.

Yesterday was an excellent example of this model.

Apple hasn't discovered anything that's better for mobile experiences than the iPhone. So, it didn't reveal some new iPhone-killing product.

For the seventh iteration of the iPhone, the iPhone 5S, Apple refined its camera system, and added a fingerprint scanner which will make the phone simpler to unlock and make secure.

The iPhone 5S appears to be an excellent phone. Probably the best on the market. 

The innovative, iterative spirit for its products, however, does not carry over to its business model. Yesterday delivered no deviation from Apple's established pricing scheme for the iPhone. 

The entry level high-end iPhone 5S costs $199 with a two-year wireless contract. The entry-level iPhone 5C costs $99 on contract. The 5C the exact same phone as the iPhone 5, but with a plastic casing in six bright color options. Apple kept the iPhone 4S, which will be free on contract. 

Just about everyone expected Apple to deviate from its established pricing pattern, making the iPhone 5C a lower-priced phone. When we say everyone, we mean everyone. 

Apple blogger John Gruber was looking for a lower-priced iPhone. Apple analyst Gene Munster expected a lower-priced iPhone. The Wall Street Journal expected it. Even our Apple uber-bull commenter Sammy The Walrus IV thought it would be cheaper.

Apple didn't deliver a cheaper phone, and today the stock is down 5%. 

Investors and analysts believe Apple needs a cheaper iPhone to expand its smartphone market share. Globally, Apple is getting trounced by Android. The latest numbers show Android with 80% of the smartphone market. Apple has only  13.2% of the market.

Apple doesn't believe it needs to go chasing market share. While the stock market may not agree, it's not hard to understand why Apple thinks it is right. 

The iPhone business is still growing, it's still a premium brand, and people are still in love with the phone. 

A lot of people, ourselves included, have been harping on the fact that quarterly iPhone unit growth measured on a year-over-year basis decelerated from a high of triple digits to a low of single digits. 

However, the reason Apple's growth shrank to 7% earlier this year was that it was going against a difficult comparison. In the first quarter of 2012, Apple launched the iPhone 4S in China. It launched the iPhone 5 in China in the fourth quarter of 2012. 

In the second quarter of the year, when Apple didn't have a stilted comparison, sales were up 20% on a year-over-year basis. That's rather astounding when you think about it. There was nothing new from Apple in the quarter. Its main rival, Samsung had released its flagship phone, the S4 a few months prior and was marketing it like crazy. And yet, Apple still grew iPhone units by 20%.

Overall, if you look at iPhone sales, it's still growing. 

The reason iPhone units continue to grow is that Apple's iOS is the best smartphone operating system on the market for a normal person to use. It's clean, simple and it gets the best applications. Apple is also going to start bundling iWork, its productivity apps with iOS, an offensive move against Microsoft Office and Google Docs. 

In Apple's opinion, that's worth paying a premium. 

Unlike Android phone makers which have no way to differentiate beyond price, Apple believes it has a complete package from software to hardware to services to retail that is worth more. 

Will Apple lose market share? Probably. But does that even matter? Probably not. 

The risk of losing market share is that Apple becomes relegated to a second-tier citizen in the platform wars. Well, Apple is about to sell its 700 millionth iOS device. It has hundreds of millions of  active iOS users. Apple is not RIM. It is not Nokia. It will not collapse suddenly and lose those customers. 

If you need an illustration of the power that Apple still has over the mobile market despite its minority share, look no further than NFC, which is a close-proximity wireless transmission system. Google with all its Android might tried to make NFC a widespread technology used by most consumers. As analyst Benedict Evans noted, NFC has been left for dead, largely because Apple chose to ignore it. 

In the U.S., the market that matters most for developers, iOS is leading Android, when measured by web traffic, which is the best indicator of active, engaged consumers. 

If Apple gives up some more share in countries where people aren't downloading apps, then so what? That's not going to make developers skip iOS for Android, which is the big risk of losing out on a platform battle. 

When you get down to it: the only argument in favor of a cheaper phone is market share.

Apple has been totally clear that it does not care about market share. Most people chose not to believe Apple. Starting today, that should change.

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Lenovo heeft nieuwe laptops in zijn ThinkPad-serie aangekondigd. De modellen zijn voorzien van Haswell-processors. Het topmodel beschikt over een 15,5"-scherm met een resolutie van 2880x1620 pixels en wordt verkocht vanaf november.

Rejoice, hipster parents — there's a new way for your children to be way cooler than their peers.

DJ and NYC-resident Natalie Elizabeth Weiss has started a Baby DJ School in Brooklyn.

As Gothamist notes, the 8-week-long program is for kids ages 0 to 3 and claims it will "encourage babies to love dance music and appreciate the way it's made in a family-friendly, positive environment!"

The cost of letting your baby drool all over real recording equipment? $200.

"Why should children hear the same nursery songs underscored by the same instrument time and time again?" Weiss asks on her website. "Switch out a guitar for a sampler, a piano for a mixing board and a song about black sheep for a song about back beats, and you have an exciting new musical landscape that both young and old will enjoy."

The babies will jam/passively listen to disco, hip hop, and house music, as well as play with vinyl records, mix and match beats, and create their very own samples. Classes will be held on Wednesdays from 10:30 AM to 11:15 AM starting next week on September 18th at Cool Pony in Prospect Heights.

This isn't the first time that Weiss, who's worked with LCD Soundsystem and the Brooklyn Philharmonic, has held seminars that teach children about music. In the past few years, she's also held classes where she's taught children to build musical scores with Legos and compose music with electronics.

You can find out more information on Weiss's blog.

SEE ALSO: 11 Babies Who Will One Day Rule The World

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Video games get a bad rap. They are often portrayed as violent, addictive, and a mindless waste of hours that encourage obesity.  

But that's only part of the story. 

Computer gaming is a $20 billion industry. In 2012, 58% of Americans played video games, according to the Entertainment Software Association. 

Most virtual games can be designed to have educational and physical benefits for players. Games that use repetitive actions, such as the swinging of a bat or targeting a moving object, train the brain and muscles to perform better in real-life activities. 

Video game brain training has the same effect as reading a book or riding a bike — when the brain is learning, thousands of new connections are being formed. The addition of a reward system motivates players to continuously improve their skills.

A driving game improved memory and focus in older adults.

In a study published in the journal Nature researchers "discovered that swerving around cars while simultaneously picking out road signs in a video game can improve the short-term memory and long-term focus of older adults," The New York Times reports.

A group of adults between the ages of 60 and 85 were were recruited to play a game called NeuroRacer for 12 hours over a month. Six months after playing the game, the older adults were better at multitasking, retained more information in a short period of time, and had stronger attention skills.

People who play action-based games make decisions 25% faster.

Fast-paced video games typically require quick thinking to avoid being killed. In real-life situations, active gamers have a better sense of what is going around them and are able to make decisions faster, according to scientists from the University of Rochester. 

In the one study, participants aged 18 to 25 were split into two groups. One group played 50 hours of the action video games "Call of Duty 2" and "Unreal Tournament," and the other group played 50 hours of the strategy game "The Sims 2." The action game players made decisions 25% faster in a task unrelated to playing video games, without sacrificing accuracy.  

"Action game players make more correct decisions per unit time. If you are a surgeon or you are in the middle of a battlefield, that can make all the difference," study researcher Daphne Bavelier said in a statement.

Video games improve vision.

Another study led by Daphne Bavelier of the University of Rochester, showed that video games improve vision by making players more sensitive to slightly different shades of color, known as contrast sensitivity.

People who played action-based video games — particularly first-person-shooter games — were 58% better at perceiving fine differences in contrast, the researchers said.

"When people play action games, they're changing the brain's pathway responsible for visual processing," Bavelier said in a statement. The training might be helping the visual system to make better use of the information it receives.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

After leaked documents began to reveal the scope of surveillance by the NSA, FBI, and other agencies, the Obama administration has strongly defended its policies. But it's also trying to rebuild the public trust, even as it insists that no privacy problem existed in the first place. That means declassifying documents, promising reviews, and — obviously — starting a Tumblr.

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Now that we're all done being disappointed by the iPhone 5S and 5C launch, it's time to get down to business and figure out which one of these bad boys to purchase. 

We're seeing some people suggest you go with the iPhone 5C over the iPhone 5S. If you're due for an upgrade, and you want an iPhone, that's absolutely crazy talk. 

The iPhone 5S is the phone to buy. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it. 

To get the iPhone 5S for $200, you're signing up for a two-year contract. If you get an iPhone 5C, it costs $100. That hundred bucks is the only thing that's better about the iPhone 5C than the iPhone 5S*. 

The iPhone 5S has a faster "64-bit" processor that Apple says makes it as fast as a desktop computer. It has an M7 chip, which tracks motion, giving health and fitness apps a new way to make cool stuff. The camera is significantly better. 

And if all that wasn't enough, it has a fingerprint scanner that unlocks your phone! How cool is that? It's the kind of gee-whiz technology that you can show off to your friends. 

The iPhone 5C, on the other hand, has nothing other than a colorful casing.

You want a colorful casing for the iPhone 5S? Buy an iPhone case . 

But what about the $100? Over a two-year span, that's just $50 a year, or $4.17 a month, or $0.14 a day. If you can afford the $100 a month you're spending on your iPhone's data plan, you can afford $0.14 extra per day for two years. 

*Arguably, you could spend $200 on an iPhone 5C and get twice the storage. But, who needs storage? The cloud, man! You can get Spotify or iTunes Match for your music, and Flickr to back up all your photos for free. 

SEE ALSO: Why Apple Didn't Release A Cheap iPhone

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Steam Family Sharing, an upcoming service from Valve, will allow Steam users to share their games with friends and family, the company announced today.

The service is designed to allow "close friends and family members" to share a library of games while Steam tracks achievements and save data for each individual user, said Valve in a press release.

"Our customers have expressed a desire to share their digital games among friends and family members, just as current retail games, books, DVDs, and other physical media can be shared," said Valve's Anna Sweet. "Family Sharing was created in direct response to these user requests."

According to Valve's FAQ for Steam Family Sharing, a user can authorize his or her entire Steam library —...

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Vienna University of Technology professor Peter Purgathofer has devised a way to scan Kindle e-books using nothing more than Lego Mindstorms and cloud-based software for optical character recognition, reports All Things D.

Amazon's copyright software generally prevents Kindle e-books from being copied or transferred — forcing everyone to pay full price for them.

The Mindstorms rig uses a robotic arm to tap the spacebar on the keyboard of a MacBook. That triggers its iSight camera to take a picture of an upright Kindle, with the book's text displayed on its "page." Lego "fingers" advance the next page button. The rig strikes the spacebar again, and this process runs in a loop until the book ends.

While this is happening, the MacBook is uploading these pictures of the book's contents from the Mindstorm rig to a cloud-based optical character recognition service, which pulls out any text appearing in a picture and renders it as standard plain text.

Purgathofer's device isn't to be taken as a statement on the supposed evils of e-books – he's an e-book fan. Instead, he's unhappy with the tradeoff in licensing your Kindle e-books instead of owning them.

Purgathofer says this is a project based on personal interest and has nothing to do with his professional work.

Here's a video of the DIY Kindle Scanner in action:

DIY kindle scanner from peter purgathofer on Vimeo.

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SCHIPHOL - De kans dat een passagier bij een vliegtuigongeluk betrokken raakt is tegenwoordig minimaal en van passagiers die wél de pech hebben dat hun vliegtuig crasht, overleeft ook nog eens een groot deel. “Het gaat minder vaak mis en als het misgaat, zijn de gevolgen minder ernstig dan voorheen”, zegt Michel Piers, directeur van NLR Air Transport Safety Institute, onderdeel van het Nationaal Lucht- en Ruimtevaartlaboratorium, in een gesprek met Luchtvaartnieuws.

This Sunday's Miss America pageant will be a little different from past years.

For the first time in history, a contestant will expose her tattoos during the bikini portion of the competition.

That bold contestant is Miss Kansas, Sgt. Theresa Vail, who also happens to be the second contestant in the military to compete in Miss America.

Vail, 23, will be breaking a long-standing taboo with her two giant tattoos – the insignia for the U.S. Army Dental Corps on her left shoulder and the Serenity Prayer running down her right side. 

"Why am I choosing to bear my tattoos? My whole platform is empowering women to overcome stereotypes and break barriers," the Miss America hopeful explains to People magazine. "What a hypocrite I would be if I covered my ink. How can I tell other women to be fearless and true to themselves if I can't do the same?"

Much of Vail's confidence comes from being an expert M16 marksman, a skydiver, a boxer, a mechanic, fluent Chinese speaker, and a bow hunter who can skin a deer and apparently cooks a mean squirrel stew – skills not usually associated with beauty queens.

"Nobody expects a soldier to be a beauty queen," Vail tells People, "but I'm all about breaking stereotypes." 

Vail, who recently re-enlisted for six more years in the Kansas Army National guard, hopes to eventually follow in her father's footsteps and become an Army dentist.

But she also wants to use Miss America to get her message of female empowerment out to young girls.

"I was bullied when I was a kid. It got so bad that I nearly took my own life," Vail explains to the magazine. "My dad took me hunting with him and it saved my life. Ever since then, I've been an outdoors girl. My passion is empowering girls through male-dominated outdoor sports." 

She adds, "I know many young girls look at beauty candidates and think, 'What a perfect life they have.' But I want them to know that I haven't led a perfect life. And that beauty comes from the inside."

Check out Vail's full interview with People here.

SEE ALSO: Google Glass is a big trend at New York Fashion Week

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