Month: July 2017

Enlarge / The fourth-gen Apple TV. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

It's a problem everyone has had: you're watching a movie and don't catch a key bit of dialogue. In September 2015, Apple unveiled a new feature for Apple TV that solves the problem. Users can ask "what did she say?" and Siri will skip back 15 seconds and temporarily enable captions.

But a Florida company says that it has patented this idea. The company, CustomPlay, filed a lawsuit on Thursday.

The patent, filed by CustomPlay CEO Max Abecassis, dates back to 1998. And it appears to exactly cover Apple's "What did she say" feature. It covers the concept of skipping back a predetermined number of seconds, enabling captions, playing the video, and then disabling captions after the replayed portion is complete.

Enlarge (credit: Amazon)

If you've ever lived in an apartment, you know how difficult it can be to receive packages. They get lost, misplaced, or dropped in front of the wrong door all the time. Amazon wants to change this with what is, essentially, a big digital storage unit for your apartment building. Amazon Hub is a new system that's similar to the online retailer's locker units that safely stores packages inside locked boxes so you can retrieve your items whenever is most convenient for you by using a special unlock code.

According to the Hub webpage, it's built for use by residents of apartment buildings and housing complexes. Indoor and outdoor "hubs" are available, depending on the layout of the apartment structure, and the physical unit starts at 6 feet wide and includes over 20 compartments. When a package is delivered, it is safely stored in a locked box. Residents use the touchscreen keypad to enter a unique code that unlocks the individual unit that contains their package. Residents can pick up packages at any time since the hub doesn't require personnel to operate. Amazon is billing it as "self-service delivery" and a system that can benefit apartment owners by "freeing you and your staff from daily package management."

Hubs are not exclusively for Amazon packages either. The company says any delivery service can use hubs, meaning residents could get packages from USPS, FedEx, UPS, and others delivered to the locked boxes. It's unclear how those companies would deliver unlock codes to residents, though. Amazon would likely send residents their unlock code via e-mail or through the Amazon mobile app.

Enlarge / Rendering of a Falcon Heavy on the launch pad. (credit: SpaceX)

Thursday night, SpaceX founder Elon Musk tweeted that the Falcon Heavy rocket would make its maiden launch in November from Launch Complex-39A in Florida. Although this event has been long promised by the company, with real hardware being tested and moved across the country, this date finally feels real.

Musk has recently attempted to set expectations for the maiden launch, which will carry a dummy payload because the rocket is so experimental. "I encourage people to come down to the Cape to see the first Falcon Heavy mission," Musk said earlier this month during a talk at the International Space Station Research & Development Conference. "It's guaranteed to be exciting."

The Falcon Heavy is powered by a modified Falcon 9 rocket as its center core, with two Falcon 9 first stages as side boosters. To work, its 27 orbital-class engines must ignite simultaneously, and SpaceX has been conducting tests on the ground. But the challenges don't end there. The company isn't sure about the airflow around the rocket as it goes through the sound barrier, nor how it will handle loads at MaxQ, when the vehicle is under maximum dynamic pressure.

Enlarge (credit: Central Press/Getty Images)

In 1915, Albert Einstein, with a ee pittle help from his friends, developed a theory of gravity that overturned what we’d thought were the very foundations of physical reality. The idea that the space that we inhabit was not perfectly described by Euclidean geometry had been inconceivable—so much so that the philosopher Immanuel Kant, a radical thinker in so many ways, proclaimed that it was not possible for any theory of physics to dispense with it.

The physicist Werner Heisenberg later pointed out the implications of Kant’s mistake. The great philosopher had posited that our intuitions about the ancient geometry of Euclid meant that it was the necessary foundation for physical reality. The fact that this turned out to be false called the integrity of Kant’s entire philosophical edifice into question.

Despite their radical break with past ideas of space and time, Einstein’s theories would soon end up lumped in with Newton’s as part of “classical physics.” We needed to do so because there was a revolution in scientific thought so profound that it created a bright line in the history of science: the development of quantum physics.

Enlarge / San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón, seen here in 2014. (credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images News)

San Francisco’s district attorney says that a California state law mandating "theft-deterring technological solutions" for smartphones has resulted in a precipitous drop in such robberies.

In a press release sent to reporters on Thursday, George Gascón said that since the law went into effect on July 1, 2015, smartphone-related robberies have fallen 22 percent from 2015 to 2016. When measured from the peak in 2013, "overall robberies involving smartphones have declined an astonishing 50 percent."

"The prevalence of these crimes made it evident early on that enforcement and prosecution were not sufficient tools to reduce the violence on our streets," Gascón said in the statement. "Because of this hard-fought legislation, stealing a smartphone is no longer worth the trouble, and that means the devices we use every day no longer make us targets for violent crime."