Google's blockbuster $2.9 billion of Motorola Mobility to Lenovo won't include the Advanced Technology and Projects group led by former DARPA director Regina Dugan, The Verge has learned. The group, which most notably announced the Project Ara modular phone, will move to Google's Android team and Dugan will report to Sundar Pichai.
Developing...
A nearly unbelievable video of a drone that delivers 12-packs of beer to ice fishers on a frozen lake turns out to be too good to be true. Beermaker Lakemaid created the video as a riff on Amazon's announcement on 60 Minutes last month, where the company showed a theoretical vision of a service that delivers small packages by air, autonomously. But where Amazon's vision of the future is just that — a vision — Lakemaid was well into the process of creating such a service for local beer delivery, though those plans have been put on ice by the Federal Aviation Administration.
"They think it's a great idea"
"They think it's a great idea, though they're telling me to stop," Lakemaid president Jack Supple told The Verge, adding that the FAA considers the project commercial and therefore off limits until those policies are reviewed and potentially revised next year.
Supple says the Amazon service was indeed the spark for the idea, which Lakemaid had planned to test out at Minnesota's Twin Pines Resort, situated on the western shore of Mille lacs lake. The idea was to let those who were ice fishing put in orders without having to make their way back onto land.
"You know that people sitting in houses, just for the novelty of it, would order it," Supple says. "A frozen lake is the perfect venue."
But the reality of delivering beers by drone is not a simple operation. In the video you see a 12-pack take to the skies under the clutches of a six-propeller drone, though in reality it wasn't able to carry a full load. "It did deliver the box with something in it," Supple says. "[But] we had to keep taking bottles out to get it off the ground." An eight-propeller drone that's capable of lifting nearly 16 pounds would make short work of it though, and was going to be the delivery vehicle of choice for a real version of the service.
Human control still required
Another wrinkle: the video depicts the drone taking off and arriving to GPS coordinates seemingly on its own volition, something Supple also chalks up to video magic. The drone was actually being piloted by a human with a full visual of what was going on, though Supple believes the technical limitations of programming in the locations would be simple given how low ice fishing buildings are, and how flat the frozen lake is.
Lakemaid's video is not the first airborne alcohol delivery project to be shown off, nor is it likely to be the last. Earlier this month champagne vendor Plus de Bulles showed a video of champagne being sent to a bar near the top of the Verbier resort in Switzerland, though it required the recipient to take it off the drone with a pair of pliers. During an earnings call last month, FedEx's chief executive also noted that its current drone delivery research was currently capable of carrying "about" four cans of beer, with an operational time of roughly eight minutes.
Despite running up against the legal roadblock, and some rather obvious implications of running into other legal trouble complying with drinking age requirements, Supple says he's not giving up hope on the service, nor is the FAA. "They've told me ‘you'll be ready.'"
Yet another reason not to use GoDaddy.
Stories like this are why I’m so hard on apps that ask for your email credentials. If someone has access to your email account, they can get access to everything else you do online pretty quickly by password resets. (In related news, I’ve enabled two-factor authentication on a lot of accounts recently, and I suggest you do the same.)
The problem, as always, is people. These hacking stories increasingly include fake calls to big web services’ support lines, begging the human agents for password resets. It doesn’t matter how many non-repeated letters, non-consecutive numbers, and unique symbols are in a password that’s new every 6 months and not similar to the previous 10 passwords if attackers have no need to crack it.
Services have always needed to allow such requests because people really are legitimately that forgetful, and their online lives really are that turbulent. People forget their website passwords and lose access to their email accounts all the time.1
Smart services are closing these doors, but it’s not easy. If there’s any way for a human to override the security mechanisms if someone on the phone is crying and sounds legitimate, attackers can get in. And if there’s not, you’re going to have a lot of legitimate customers locked out and crying.
It’s not a safe assumption that people will always have access to the email account they signed up with. Often, people use school or workplace accounts that get deleted or redirected out of their control when they graduate, leave, or get fired.
And this is assuming that they typed their own email address correctly into your registration form in the first place. ↩
Less than two weeks ago, Prince filed a lawsuit accusing 22 people who engaged in “massive infringement and bootlegging of Prince’s material," by linking to “unauthorized copies of the performance" for download.
However, Prince and his attorneys decided to suddenly drop the case entirely without prejudice (PDF) on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, TMZ quoted Prince's attorneys as saying: "Because of the recent pressure, the bootleggers have now taken down the illegal downloads and are no longer engaging in piracy. We recognize the fans craving for as much material as possible, but we’d prefer they get it from us directly than from third parties who are scalpers rather than real fans of our work."
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Champion pinball player Steve Zahler gives a tour of Modern Pinball NYC, a Manhattan pinball arcade and showroom that he co-owns, in this ANIMAL New York video. The arcade allows players to pay a flat hourly rate for unlimited access to a showroom of pinball machines (all of which are for sale).
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firehosevia Snorkmaiden: "I'm not all that happy with Google these days, but this was amusing."
firehosevia Russnorkian Sledgemaidens
Nia and I found this book in the library. There is no context, description, or listed author. Every page is a picture of Humphrey Bogart. The only words we could find were the title and the dedication.
I want this book
firehosedon't fuck with Staten Island
djempiricalhe seems nice
Grimm was being interviewed after the SOTU, when a local NYC reporter, Michael Scotto, began to ask him about what the New York Daily News has called "donor swapping to skirt fundraising limits", when Grimm refused to even hear the full question and ran off camera.
Then, thinking the camera had stopped rolling, the bully returned and threaten to kill the reporter.
Scotto: "And just finally before we let you go, we haven't had a chance to talk about some of the..." [Grimm cut him off]Terrorist.Grimm: "I'm not speaking to you off-topic, this is only about the president." [Grimm walks off camera]
Scotto: "So Congressman Michael Grimm does not want to talk about some of the allegations concerning his campaign finances,"
[Grimm returns]
Grimm: "Let me be clear to you, you ever do that to me again I'll throw you off this fucking balcony."
Scotto: "Why? I just wanted to ask you..."
[cross talk]
Grimm: "If you ever do that to me again..."
Scotto: "Why? Why? It’s a valid question."
[cross talk]
Grimm: "No, no, you're not man enough, you're not man enough. I'll break you in half. Like a boy."
Threatening to kill a reporter, that's the kind of tactics employed in Putin's fascist state.
The hilarious part, Grimm had just told the reporter that President Obama's SOTU address was... wait for it.. "divisive",
BWHEHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHA
Keep fucking that chicken, GOP!
By using data pulled from the United Nations Development Program, Time has compiled a map showing just how far the world has to go to reach gender equality.
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I have to say, as the creator of one of these test/benchmark things, with Women in Refrigerators, I am a little skeptical about how they are sometimes applied.
In both cases, they weren’t meant to stigmatize good work on an individual level, they were meant to categorize trends that people might not be aware of, at least in my opinion. A great work can ‘fail’ the Bechdel test, and a piece of garbage can pass, and passing alone is no guarantee of a work being feminist or even female-friendly. The same with my own Women in Refrigerators standard.
Those are just my thoughts, I feel like it’s possible for undue influence to be given to these pass/fail benchmarks, at times.
That said, I am fascinated by just how MUCH political stuff is in children’s media, for good or ill.
I wonder if it’s possible to compare male role models to female ones in children’s media? Are heroes defined differently by their actions in regards to gender? Are conflicts mental or physical for boys and girls, in different proportion? How important is physical attractiveness for characters depending on gender in kidlit? Are antagonists split fairly equally along the gender spectrum?
I’d like to know all those things. Hope this helps, and good luck!
The past few years, there's been a running dialogue in the U.K. over the fact that major awards, like the BSFA Awards and the Clarke Awards, tend to feature way more male authors on their shortlists. This year, both awards are trying to address that in different ways.
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firehose'In co-op, which was revealed on Polygon and allows players to drop-in and drop-out at any time, each participant is given control over a specific set of Octodad's limbs; one player controls his left arm while another controls his right leg.'
Octodad: Dadliest Catch will feature a local co-op mode when it launches on Steam tomorrow, January 30. In Octodad: Dadliest Catch, players control an octopus posing as a loving human husband and father.
In co-op, which was revealed on Polygon and ...
firehosevia Albener Pessoa
Here are more musings on life.
firehosevia Russian Sledges
"We will (finally!) be releasing a bottled iced coffee that will be the equal of the iced coffee we sell in our shops."
http://thedapperdude.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/stumptown-cold.jpg
James Freeman of Blue Bottle Coffee. Photo: The Chronicle/Paul Chinn
While Peet’s opened a shiny new San Francisco flagship and Guy Fieri is putting Flavortown in your mug, Blue Bottle Coffee has completed a second round of funding, following up on its 2012 $20 million influx with a fresh $25.75 million investment from high-profile Internet people, as well as Morgan Stanley Investment Management.
Many are saying that this is a sign that America can and will welcome the upscale artisan coffee culture that San Francisco has long embraced. That said, The Chronicle’s Caleb Garling has a smart take on the investment, which he points out isn’t necessarily a vanity project for a bunch of rich “hipster techies” that might like to hang out at Blue Bottle:
We should be thinking less about the price of the cup of coffee but rather, the logistics it takes to create it. That requires a lot of smart software. To me, this is a relatively cheap investment in a company with a (ahem) ground-up look at supply chain management.
Getting that latte into your cup requires an immense amount of coordination through a mind-numbing matrix of roasters, shipping companies, delivery men, farmers, brokers, wholesalers and myriad unnamed players in between. Those are nodes on a grid — data. And that’s where a lot of investment dollars seems to be heading these days.
Blue Bottle currently has five Bay Area cafes (plus five in New York), and is in the process of opening two more in the Bay Area, in Oakland and Palo Alto.
For those wondering about what all this means for Blue Bottle (and more importantly, consumers) in the near future, the company addressed that very question on its blog today:
So what will change? Well, lots, we hope. We plan on opening an R and D facility to workshop green coffee, roasted coffee and the food that accompanies our coffee. We will be traveling more to source a greater percentage of our coffee directly, and working on deepening our relationships with our existing coffee-growing partners. We will be working on sustainable packaging that will let our customers enjoy our coffee for longer periods of time. We will (finally!) be releasing a bottled iced coffee that will be the equal of the iced coffee we sell in our shops. And we will be opening more shops.
· All Blue Bottle Coffee coverage [Inside Scoop]
· Previously: Blue Bottle’s new ownership raises questions [Inside Scoop]
firehoseA: inactive
TW: use of the word "squee"
Hello, Portland! I'm looking for some classy drink-loving ladies and I need your help. I recently came across mention of an organization called LUPEC- Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails and immediately knew I need this in my life. Unfortunately, the LUPEC PDX Facebook and Twitter pages haven't been updated in ages and I can only find news articles from a couple years ago. Anyone know if this group is still active and, if so, how to contact them?
firehose"If Google does sell Motorola for $3 billion, it will have taken a struggling company, done all the cleanup work, set it on a good trajectory, and still lost a ton of money."
'twas all about the patents, though
ChinaDaily, Reuters, and The New York Times are all independently claiming that Lenovo is gearing up to take Motorola off of Google's hands. Reports peg the sale at $3 billion. Google originally paid $12.5 billion for Motorola and sold off the set-top box division for $2.35 billion, so if the reports are true, Google would be taking a hit of about $7 billion.
Motorola has been losing money, but a turnaround seemed to be in full swing. Google had sold off the parts of Motorola it didn't want, including the aforementioned set-top box division and a few factories, while cutting a significant amount of the staff. Google installed its own executives at the top of the company, and it hired the former head of DARPA to run the R&D department. Google seemed to understand the task ahead of it, repeatedly stating that turning around Motorola would involve clearing an "18-month pipeline" of work-in-progress devices—Google only took over Motorola in May 2012.
Recent products, like the Moto X and Moto G, were well-received and even innovative, and the CEO of Motorola recently talked about building a $50 smartphone. If Google does sell Motorola for $3 billion, it will have taken a struggling company, done all the cleanup work, set it on a good trajectory, and still lost a ton of money.
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firehoseofficial
'Google will 'retain the vast majority of Motorola's patents,' which they hope to continue using to stabilize the Android ecosystem'
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
firehosevia Snorkmaiden
firehoseI suppose you have no choice
If you live in Iowa and you want to play in a video game tournament, state law limits your options to golf games with a trackball, like the bar staple Golden Tee Golf franchise.
But Rep. Chris Hagenow introduced a bill this week in the Iowa House of Representatives that would expand that limitation and allow Iowans to play in tournaments with other video game machines.
As seen in the excerpt below, H.F. 2702 would amend in Section 99B.11, subsection 2, paragraph e, Code 2014 of Iowa law by striking the world "golf" twice, adding a phrase to broaden the definition of controlling games and striking a phrase that limits lawful play to golf games.
A video machine
golftournament game which is an interactive bona fide contest. A player operates a video machinegolftournament game with a trackball assembly or by player-directed movement with a video or electronic gaming device whichacts as the golfer's swing anddetermines the results of play and tournament scores.
The bill "authorizes the paying of awards and prizes to participants in video machine tournament games," though, according to a report in the Quad-City Times, Hagenow said that the changes aren't designed to allow for gambling.
"It does not allow for gambling or wagering or any of those kinds of things," he said. "We don't want to go there at all."
firehosevia Albener Pessoa
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| Courtesy, SpyArtStudios |
firehosevia Amy Lynne Grzybinski
meanwhile, in Portland
firehosewelp
firehoseasshole
firehosevia Albener Pessoa
Facebook has built a prototype cold storage system that uses Blu-ray Discs instead of traditional drives. "The Blu-ray system reduces costs by 50 percent and energy use by 80 percent compared with its current cold-storage system, which uses hard disk drives," the IDG News Service reported, based on a talk given by Facebook VP of infrastructure engineering Jay Parikh at yesterday's Open Compute Summit.The prototype storage cabinet reportedly holds 10,000 Blu-ray Discs for a petabyte of data. The idea is to store rarely accessed files, such as backups of users' photos and videos, and not the primary copies that need to be on faster storage systems so they can be accessed immediately.
Facebook expects to eventually increase the capacity of each cabinet to 5 petabytes. According to GigaOm, Parikh also revealed that "the first site is now in production and storing 30 petabytes of data, but a second will be coming online soon. Within a couple of months, Facebook expects to have 150 petabytes of data in cold storage, which is just a fraction of the 3 exabytes each facility is designed to house."
The design of the Blu-ray system will likely be made public through the Open Compute Project, which Facebook created to share hardware designs. IDG reports:
