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Just watched this episode of The Ray Bradbury Theater and it is shocking how on the mark he was about the way society was going.

A facial recognition experiment that claims to be able to distinguish between gay and heterosexual people has sparked a row between its creators and two leading LGBT rights groups. The Stanford University study claims its software recognises facial features relating to sexual orientation that are not perceived by human observers. The work has been accused of being "dangerous" and "junk science". But the scientists involved say these are "knee-jerk" reactions.

MILWAUKEE -- Harley-Davidson will take its electric motorcycle division public through a blank-check company, valuing the enterprise that has been part of the Harley for 10 years at $1.77 billion. The news gave a jolt to long-suffering shares of Harley-Davidson, which jumped 12% before the opening bell Monday.

The outage at Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud-computing arm left thousands of people in the U.S. without working fridges, roombas and doorbells, highlighting just how reliant people have become on the company as the Internet of Things proliferates across homes. Multiple Ring users even said they weren’t able to get into their homes without access to the phone app, which was down. The outage prompted people to reflect on the pitfalls of having a “smart” home that’s overly dependent on not only the internet, but one company in particular -- while those with “dumb” homes gloated that their fridges and light switches...

What would the Metaverse be without ultra-realistic humanoid robots waiting for you when you decide to step out of it? Say hello to Ameca, a humanoid robot with the most realistic facial expressions and mannerisms that you’ve ever seen. Pretty soon you won’t be able to tell the difference between reality and fantasy, and maybe that’s the whole point. “And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men, And deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to...

Parag Agrawal, who was appointed this week as Twitter's CEO, has joined at least a dozen other Indian-born techies in the corner offices of the world's most influential Silicon Valley companies. Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Alphabet's Sundar Pichai, and the top bosses of IBM, Adobe, Palo Alto Networks, VMWare and Vimeo are all of Indian descent. Indian-origin people account for just about 1% of the US population and 6% of Silicon Valley's workforce - and yet are disproportionately represented in the top brass. Why? "No other nation in the world 'trains' so many citizens in such a gladiatorial manner as India...

If you have been keeping up with what’s going on in the so-called science of AI (Artificial Intelligence), you are aware that the bite into the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is again taking place. The present-day satanic tempters are again not whispering into the ears of mankind, but blatantly and proudly pronouncing that we can and will become like God with our partaking of the technological breakthroughs. The term is itself, obviously, one formed in the dark, rebellious brilliance of Lucifer’s own mind. I’m referring to the term “transhumanism.” We are being promised...

The camera relies on a light capture system called “synthetic wavelength holography,” according to a press release from Northwestern Engineering. It works by scattering laser light onto hidden objects, then bouncing it back to the camera, where an AI reconstructs the signals to show the hidden object. A paper of the researchers’ findings has been published in Nature. Since the holography method allows the scientists to see fast-moving objects such as cars driving around corners, or even a heart beating through a person’s chest, it could be used in early-warning navigation systems for automobiles or for non-invasive medical imaging. The...

This year, lawmakers have unleashed a barrage of proposals aimed at Big Tech. Their latest attempt is perhaps the most bizarre: Since they’re unhappy with the state of digital markets, they're trying to rewrite American antitrust laws to look more like Europe’s. Last month, Senators Amy Klobuchar and Chuck Grassley unveiled the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which dictates how technology companies can present information on their own platforms. Contrary to its name, the bill would negatively impact innovation and choice in digital markets, while simultaneously bringing antitrust law, and the American economy, closer to the EU’s competitor-focused model....

Chinese private tech giants are reacting after three tech companies saw their founders and CEOs quit companies. Zhang Yiming, the founder of TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, , announced his resignation as ByteDance CEO in May. ByteDance in November said Zhang had completed the job transition and officially stepped down. Zhang, a Chinese computer engineer, founded Bytedance in March 2012.In October 2014, Bytedance established the CCP branch, followed by a Party Committee in April 2017, then grassroots Party branches such as audit and operations, public affairs, and technical support, according to state-owned media.In 2016, Zhang launched a short-form video app called...

The Constitution contains a powerful set of ideals and a wise system of governance, based on a deep reading of classical and medieval history as well as Renaissance philosophy. However, none of this matters if no system of force is in place to keep and defend the Constitution. Ultimately, this what the 2nd Amendment is about: A distributed capacity for violence guaranteed to private citizens so that they may serve as a check and balance on the power of the state. America’s Founding Fathers understood an uncomfortable truth: Behind every law is the implicit threat of force, and behind every...

Suppliers to two blacklisted Chinese companies—telecom giant Huawei and China’s top chipmaker SMIC—were approved to receive billions of dollars worth of licenses for U.S. technologies shipments between November and April, documents released by the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on Oct. 21 detail.Some 301 licenses worth a total of $103 billion were approved for suppliers to sell goods to Huawei and SMIC, according to the documents prepared by the Commerce Department.Huawei and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) were put on a U.S. trade blacklist, known as the “entity list,” in May 2019 and December 2020 respectively over national security concerns....

* Seven in 10 tech workers are considering quitting in the next year, per a new survey of 1,200 people. * Their top reasons included working hours, limited career progression, and toxic work environments. * The labor shortage continues to cause havoc across multiple industries.Seventy-two percent of US tech workers are considering quitting their jobs in the next 12 months, according to a new survey from learning software firm TalentLMS and Workable.About four in ten of the 1,200 IT, software, and tech workers surveyed said that limited career progression made them think about leaving their jobs.Other common reasons for considering...

It appears soldiers will have to wait a few more months before getting issued the Army’s new heads-up display. The Army has delayed its scheduled fielding date for the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), the game-changing goggles Microsoft developed for the service based on the company’s HoloLens technology. While the futuristic goggles were expected to be fielded to soldiers this year, the Army office charged with overseeing the project, Program Executive Office (PEO) Soldier, announced on Thursday that the first unit would not be equipped with them until next September. A delay in the IVAS timeline was first reported by...

The impact of Monday’s internet outage spread a lot further than just Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Amazon, Amazon Web Services, Google, Google Fiber and CloudFlare; Verizon,AT&T, T-Mobile, Xfinity, Peacock, US Cellular, Cricket, Cox; Snapchat, Zoom and TikTok: These companies are among those who received massive upticks in complaints of non-working services from users frustrated with their inability to access either Facebook companies themselves, or Facebook services integrated into their sites. Facebook says “the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change,” detailing the expensive disaster in a Tuesday post, but don’t get distracted: The ripple effect of this...

Parents, wake up! Your children are being taken from you without you realizing. Think for a second about the last family dinner you had with your son or daughter. What were they doing? Were they present in the conversation, enjoying the meal with you? Or were their heads stuck in their phones, giggling every now and then? My guess is that it is probably the latter. Our youth today are addicted to their phones and technology. Apps like TikTok have poisoned the brains of our future generation. The Wall Street Journal recently did an investigation on the app's algorithm, trying...

Two small human challenge studies explore the possibility in the era of COVID-19by , Staff Writer, A non-invasive biometric sensor screening device accurately identified flu and the common cold prior to symptom onset, researchers found in two small human challenge studies. In the first, which involved 31 participants inoculated with influenza, Empatica's E4 wristband detected the difference between infection and non-infection with up to 92% accuracy. The second involved 18 participants inoculated with human rhinovirus, and here the E4 wristband detected the difference between infection and non-infection with 88% accuracy, reported Jessilyn Dunn, PhD, of Duke University in Durham, North...

If there ever was a time when you could see a trend solidly in motion, now is it.That the Western, previously civilized world is in decline has been known to anyone with an ounce of curiosity and little analysis of data points.Before Xi’s ascension to power one could have argued that this trend was worrying, but not terrifying.What makes it terrifying is that Xi managed to abolish the two-term limit for his presidency with an overwhelming majority (2,959 to 2 and 3 abstaining votes - no prizes for guessing where those 5 guys are now).He then proceeded to have his...

The typical rocket launch dumps the same amount of CO2 into the atmosphere as one airliner does in the course of a trans-Atlantic crossing If you’re worried about your ‘carbon footprint’ - a concept foisted on the world in 2004 by British Petroleum to persuade people that their own behaviour, and not giant oil companies like BP, is causing the climate problem -- then you definitely should not sign up for a sub-orbital space flight. Besides, you probably can’t afford it ($250,000 pp). Millions of people can afford it, however, and since the Branson/Bezos ‘space race’ last month tickets for...

An octopus-inspired, origami robotic arm. Credit: Shuai Wu. A combined team of researchers from The Ohio State University and the Georgia Institute of Technology has developed a robot arm that moves like an octopus arm without the need for a motor. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their robot arm, which moves in response to changes in a magnetic field around it. Noting that the need for motors and control units makes most robot arms big and heavy, the researchers set themselves the goal of building one that would not need...