Month: July 2019

Enlarge / Hulu's poster and key art for the new season. It's been surreal seeing public transit ads for this long-dead, personal favorite show around town. (credit: Hulu)

Cue Air's “La femme d’argent.”

Ah, the optimism of youth. Sure, 2004 Veronica Mars, your best friend was murdered, your high school sweetheart dumped you, your family was publicly shamed, your father lost his job, your mother ran out on you, and your friends have all banished you from the inner circle forever—all before your first episode even began.

But those rock-and-roll clothes, that air of earned cynicism and suspicion, and your don’t-mess-with-me attitude aren’t fooling anyone. Deep down, you’re a marshmallow, and you always rise above. And if you can focus on the fun and sweetness even amidst all that, maybe all of us watching can, too. It’s a big part of the appeal for your cult following.

Enlarge / Skynet light? The Tianjin-controlled bike stalks one of its creators. (credit: Jing Pei et al.)

We tend to think of AI as a monolithic entity, but it's actually developed along multiple branches. One of the main branches involves performing traditional calculations but feeding the results into another layer that takes input from multiple calculations and weighs them before performing its calculations and forwarding those on. Another branch involves mimicking the behavior of traditional neurons: many small units communicating in burst of activity called spikes, and keeping track of the history of past activity.

Each of these, in turn, has different branches based on the structure of its layers and communications networks, types of calculations performed, and so on. Rather than being able to act in a manner we'd recognize as intelligent, many of these are very good at specialized problems, like pattern recognition or playing poker. And processors that are meant to accelerate the performance of the software can typically only improve a subset of them.

That last division may have come to an end with the development of Tianjic by a large team of researchers primarily based in China. Tianjic is engineered so that its individual processing units can switch from spiking communications back to binary and perform a large range of calculations, in almost all cases faster and more efficiently than a GPU can. To demonstrate the chip's abilities, the researchers threw together a self-driving bicycle that ran three different AI algorithms on a single chip simultaneously.

It's turning out to be a very good year for zombie comedy. We had Jim Jarmusch's deadpan The Dead Don't Die in June, and the long-awaited Zombieland 2: Double Tap is coming this fall. And now we have the red band trailer for Little Monsters, Australian Director Abe Forsythe's new black comedy that debuted at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.

Kindergarten teacher Miss Caroline (Lupita Nyong'o) takes her young charges on a school field trip to Pleasant Valley Farm. Tagging along as a chaperone is Dave (Alexander England), a failed musician whose nephew is in her class. Dave has a romantic interest in Miss Caroline and is chagrined to discover that he has a rival for her affections: a famous children's TV personality, Teddy McGiggle (Josh Gad), who also happens to be at the farm organizing all the planned activities.

But something has gone terribly wrong at a nearby military base, and a zombie outbreak turns the innocent excursion into a bloody fight for survival. Miss Caroline, Dave, and Teddy join forces to make sure the kids don't get eaten—and hopefully aren't traumatized for life by the sight of the ravenous undead.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Jacobo Zanella)

The major broadcast networks today sued the makers of Locast, a nonprofit organization that provides free online access to broadcast TV stations. The lawsuit filed by ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC seeks financial damages and a permanent injunction that would shut Locast down.

Broadcast TV networks are available for free over the air with an antenna. But selling the rights to retransmit those signals in other ways is a big business. Broadcasters reportedly collected $10.1 billion in 2018 via retransmission fees they charge cable and satellite TV companies.

TV providers routinely pass this cost along to consumers in the form of "Broadcast TV" fees. Pay-TV providers use these fees to raise the actual cost of service above their advertised prices and to raise customers' prices even while they're under contract.

Enlarge / A monitor displays Equifax Inc. signage on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York on Friday, September 15, 2017. (credit: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg | Getty Images)

If you haven't already filed a claim for cash compensation in response to the Equifax breach, you might be out of luck. The company is no longer offering payouts in lieu of credit monitoring.

The Federal Trade Commission page devoted to the settlement it announced with Equifax last week was updated July 31 to say that any consumer affected can claim up to 10 years of free credit monitoring. "Previously, a cash payment was identified as an option," the site now adds, "but there are limited funds available."

The FTC said in a statement that "public response to the settlement has been overwhelming." In a separate blog post, the commission said the "unexpected number of claims" would result in claimants not getting the money they thought.

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  The Galaxy Tab S6 with keyboard case.

Samsung is still not giving up on the Android tablet market. Today the company announced the Samsung Galaxy Tab S6, its latest high-end tablet, for $649.

The Samsung Tab S6 features a 10.5-inch 2560×1600 OLED display, a 2.84GHz Snapdragon 855, and a 7040mAh battery. The base version has 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, with a higher tier of 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. For cameras, there's an 8MP front camera, while the rear gets a 13MP main camera and a 5MP wide-angle lens. The device is down to 5.7mm thick and weighs 420 grams. This is Samsung's first-ever tablet with an in-screen fingerprint reader. Interestingly, it's an optical reader instead of the ultrasonic tech that the Galaxy S10 uses.

Somehow, on a 10-inch tablet, Samsung couldn't find room for a headphone jack. Even Apple, which ditched the headphone jack two years ago, still puts a headphone jack on iPads. Samsung is apparently declaring war on the headphone jack with this round of updates—the Galaxy Note 10, launching next week, is expected to dump the headphone jack, too.

Enlarge / The text is inscribed on all four sides of the stylus. (credit: Museum of London Archaeology)

"I have come from the City. I bring you a welcome gift with a sharp point that you may remember me,” reads the Latin inscription on the 2,000-year-old iron stylus. “I ask, if fortune allowed, that I might be able [to give] as generously as the way is long [and] as my purse is empty." The “City" almost certainly refers to Rome, and the souvenir stylus essentially boasts a more flowery version of today’s “I went to Rome, and all I brought you was this pen.”

The stylus dates to around 70 CE—about 20 years after the founding of Roman Londinium, a decade after a Celtic uprising burned it to the ground and about 50 years before the first stones were laid for Hadrian’s Wall. It’s among 14,000 artifacts unearthed during the construction of Bloomberg’s European headquarters starting in 2013, and conservators are finally ready to put it on display.

Pre-Bloomberg

The site where the stylus was found stands on the banks of the ancient River Walbrook, a tributary of the Thames that now flows beneath the city’s streets. Before London officials culverted and covered the river during the 1400s, it flowed through the center of London, and before that, it bisected Roman Londinium.