According to Buck Rogers, the Earth has a black President in the 25th century, and it's Gary Coleman: http://t.co/A03CMRch Continue reading →
Mission Restaurant Opts Out of Controversial Facial-Detection Application Southpaw BBQ on Mission Street, between 17th and 18th streets, has opted-out of a controversial face-detection application currently being implanted at some San Francisco bars. Some people were creeped out by the application, which led its CEO to write a letter to San Francisco insisting that his application is harmless. That didn’t stop Southpaw from opting out of the program after hearing complaints by customers. “The main feature we thought might be helpful to our customers was the capacity feature that shows, as a percentage, how full we are, so that patrons could discern when the best time might be to come in for dinner. It was not our intention to invade the individual privacy of customers. ... Continue reading →
Illustration by Neil StevensMake Your Gmail Work for You Your time is valuable. On the Gmail team, we work hard to offer a user experience that won't bog you down. But we also want to share some tips for being even more productive with Gmail. Alex Gawley, Gmail Product ManagerFocus on search, not folders: Google was built on search, and we've aimed to bring that same search experience to Gmail. Studies show that users save time when they search for an email instead of categorizing it into a folder. In Gmail, you can quickly find the exact message you want by typing keywords into the search box, or you can rely on the program's search autocomplete to specify the attributes you want (try typing 'from:[sender]' ... Continue reading →
Anyone else see The Avengers? Just like in Iron Man 1 and 2, Tony Stark has the coolest interactive 3-D displays. He can pull a digital wire frame out of a set of blueprints or wrap an exoskeleton around his arm. Those moments aren’t just sci-fi fun; they’re full of visionary ideas to explore and manipulate objects in 3-D space. Except for one thing: How would Stark feel all of these objects to move them around? In reality, he’d be touching nothing but air. Jinha Lee, from the Tangible Media Group of the MIT Media Lab, in collaboration with Rehmi Post and Hiroshi Ishii, has been playing with the idea of manipulating real floating objects in 3-D space to create a truly tactile user interface. ... Continue reading →
Lunch Beat founder Molly Range Something extraordinary is happening in Sweden. At lunchtime in Stockholm last month, more than 600 workers walked out of their offices and into a large conference hall in the city center. They gave an entrance fee to someone at the door, grabbed a sandwich and bottle of water off some tables on the side, and entered darkness. White disco lights began to swirl. Then the beat. At 1pm on the dot, DJ Johannes Drakenberg started pumping something akin to Dubstep through the hall’s speakers. The workers, some still nicely dressed in suits and carrying laptop bags, looked around and started swaying and bopping – tentatively. This was midday after all. But soon the music got faster, and inhibitions slowly melted ... Continue reading →
For most of the latter half of the 20th century, the United States and the Soviet Union were leading adversaries in the nuclear arms race known as the Cold War. Seemingly no potential advantage was to be overlooked, regardless of sector or industry. This was true in technology and espionage as well, and, in the 1960s, the CIA found a marriage of the two which could have been a potential game-changer. That innovation? A bionic spy cat named the Acoustic Kitty. According to former CIA agent turned author Victor Marchetti, the CIA had developed a way to, literally, wire a cat so that it could be used in espionage missions. The CIA surgically implanted a power supply into the cat, as well as wires going ... Continue reading →
How can anyone dispute what Nick Hanauer is saying? If you give a "job creator", say someone who makes widgets, a big tax break, do you really think he is going to hire more people if no one has money to buy his widgets? No, he is just going to pocket the money. This is the foolishness of supply-side economics. On the other hand, do you really think the widget maker will hold off hiring people if there is a great demand for widgets? Taxes are the lowest in 60 years. Where are the jobs? TheQRabbit 36 minutes ago 4 Continue reading →
