A dog born with deformed front legs can run with the assistance of 3D-printed, blade-like prosthetic attachments, Make's Caleb Kraft reports.
The dog -- named Derby -- was born with what appears to be chondrodysplasia, a congenital disease that causes deformation in joint cartilage during development. It often afflicts the front legs of dogs, as it appears to have in Derby's case, making them unable to walk in a normal manner.
But with the advent of 3D printing, dogs like Derby have a chance at a normal life. As can be seen in the video below, the prosthetic attachments printed for Derby allow him not only to walk, but to run in a conventional manner. This is not due to the 3D printing technology itself, but to the advent of what is called "rapid prototyping."
Before, the cost and labor that went into producing a prosthetic apparatus like the one Derby uses would be prohibitive -- especially for an animal. But because prototypes can now be designed, cheaply printed, and then tested in quick succession, the costs of producing "failed" prototypes is minimal.
"This is what 3D printing is all about,” Tara Anderson, Derby's owner, said in the video. “To be able to help anybody -- a dog, a person -- to have a better life? There’s just no better thing to be involved in."
Watch the entire video documenting Derby's journey below via 3D Systems on YouTube.
CNN got more than it bargained for when it asked viewers on Twitter to supply the questions for a news special concerning police use of lethal force, Mashable reported.
The network promoted the hashtag #AskACop in advance of "Cops Under Fire," which featured host Don Lemon and a group of officers discussing instances in which they killed suspects.
In response, Twitter users took the opportunity to press the officers on not only personal encounters with law enforcement, but examples of police violence and questions about their perception among many members of the public. During the broadcast, CNN also appeared to use another tag, #CopsUnderFire, perhaps to divert attention from the critical response:
One person asked about Kelly Thomas, a homeless schizophrenic man who died in 2011 after being beaten and Tased by Fullerton police:
While others focused on the spate of fatal police shootings involving members of the Black community:
Watch a portion of CNN's "Cops Under Fire" discussion, as aired on Tuesday, below.
Plug a new electric Nissan Leaf into a charging station, and it’s easy to feel good that the vehicle’s environmental and climate impacts may be small compared to all the cars on the road running on gasoline.
But driving an electric car could be worse for both the climate and public health if the electricity that runs it was generated at a coal-fired power plant. If that electricity came from solar or wind generators, then an electric vehicle is among the cleanest forms of transportation around.
In fact, the environmental and human health costs of operating an electric vehicle using electricity generated from coal may be as much as 80 percent greater than driving a gasoline-powered vehicle, according to the study, conducted by a team of researchers at the University of Minnesota and published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The environmental health cost of driving an electric vehicle using electricity from solar or wind generators could be as much as 50 percent less than environmental and health toll of using gasoline.
“To have large improvements in the environmental health impacts of transportation relative to our current technology — gasoline — you really need to switch to electric vehicles, and that electricity needs to be clean, or radical improvements need to be made in fuel economy,” study co-author Julian Marshall, an associate professor of environmental engineering at the University of Minnesota, said.
Climate Central did a related analysis in 2012 and again in 2013, but only analyzed the greenhouse gas emissions impact. Here, the environmental findings are similar and these researchers have also shown there is a negative public health impact of coal-powered electric vehicles.
The researchers at the University of Minnesota investigated how the production and burning of 10 different gasoline alternatives affects costs and deaths associated with air pollution-related human health problems. Those alternatives, often cited as possible choices friendlier to the climate than gasoline, include diesel, compressed natural gas, corn grain ethanol, corn stover ethanol and electricity generated from a variety of renewable and fossil fuels.
Hundreds of thousands of people die from air pollution in the U.S. each year, some of which can be attributed to burning transportation fuels, Marshall said.
Vehicles running on electricity coming from coal-fired power plants ranked highest for both annual deaths and human health costs compared to gasoline, followed by vehicles running on electricity taken from an average electric grid operating today, which uses power generated from coal, natural gas, renewables and other sources.
Cars running on electricity coming from wind and solar ranked best overall, followed by electric vehicles using power from natural gas power plants and vehicles that are gasoline-electric hybrids.
“Any honest accounting of greenhouse gas mitigation strategies must account for co-benefits and consider the possibility of unintended consequences,” said Timothy Johnson, an associate professor in the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. Johnson, who is unaffiliated with the study, added that any side effects to petroleum alternatives mustn’t be ignored.
“The emergence of alternative transportation energy resources has been interesting to watch, if for no other reason that it couples transportation energy resources with agriculture and power production,” he said.
It’s important to understand the local environmental impacts of the production and consumption of these fuels, including increased air pollution from truck traffic going to ethanol refineries, he said.
“While these considerations go beyond the paper’s focus on air quality, the study reminds us that we need to widen our analytical boundaries if we are going to address greenhouse gas emissions sustainably,” he said.
Climate scientist Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, Calif., who is unaffiliated with the study, said he’d never seen a similar analysis, and it scoops a paper he and his team have been working on.
“Unfortunately, when a wire is connected to an electric vehicle at one end and a coal-fired power plant at the other end, the environmental consequences are worse than driving a normal gasoline-powered car,” Caldeira said via email.
“But electric vehicles are still good because they move us down a path toward a future near-zero emissions energy and transportation system,” he said. “Unfortunately, given the way electricity is generated in the U.S. today, the first steps down this path to lower pollution involves increases in pollution.”
Jim Parks, of the National Transportation Research Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, cautioned that the study is complex, and its conclusions should not necessarily be used as the basis for any choice of vehicle fuel.
Even electric vehicles using coal power might have an environmental benefit because they do not emit pollutants where they are driven, he said.
The controversial mass-murder simulator has been taken off the leading games distribution site, despite attracting thousands of positive votes
Controversial mass-shooting game Hatred has been removed from Steam, the biggest digital gaming download site.
The project, developed by Polish studio Destructive Creations, was submitted to the site’s Greenlight section, where users vote on whether new titles should be sold via the service. Within three hours, however, the game had been removed by Steam operator Valve Software.
Described as a “genocide crusade” by its creators, Hatred features a lone sociopath who must explore a range of environments shooting civilians and police officers, while gathering extra weapons. The only motivation is to kill and keep killing.
First announced in October, the game has attracted widespread condemnation. Software company Epic Games, which distributes the Unreal Engine used to develop the title, quicklyasked for its logos to be removed from the trailer.
“Based on what we’ve seen on Greenlight we would not publish Hatred on Steam. As such we’ll be taking it down,” Valve spokesperson Doug Lombardi told gaming news site, Eurogamer.
Destructive Creations has, in turn, published a statement on its own site: “We of course fully respect Valve’s decision, as they have right to do so. In the same time we want to assure you that this won’t in any way impact the game development, game’s vision or gameplay features we’re aiming for. The game is still to be released in Q2 2015 as planned.”
Amid widespread unease at the game’s themes and motiveless violence, a sizeable community has grown in support of the title. Just before it was removed from Steam, Hatred had attracted 13,148 “yes” votes supporting its inclusion on the site. Only 1,061 “no” votes were recorded. A video trailer of the game on YouTube has been viewed over 180,000 times.
The game will now need to be sold through other digital distribution stores or via its own dedicated site, though Steam utterly dominates the PC gaming market with over 100m active accounts. The site still features similarly themed titles such as Manhunt, a grueling horror game in which the player is forced to “star” in a snuff film, and Postal, about a disenfranchised worker who goes on a killing spree.
Valve’s decision to remove Hatred comes days after Apple initially rejected the award-winning simulation Papers Please for inclusion on the App Store due to its brief depiction of nudity . It also follows the decision by Australia retailers Target and KMart to remove Grand Theft Auto V from their shelves after an online petition criticised the game for its depiction of violence against women.
All of these stories have raised questions about the power of retailers and platform holders to control and censor content.
However, the situation has also provided a small previously unknown developer with plenty of what studios in the digital marketplace really need: publicity.
“We don’t treat this as a failure because yet again this showed us a huge community support we’re totally overwhelmed with,” reads the statement on the game’s official site.
“The whole situation only pushes us forward to go against any adversity and not to give up. It also makes us want to provide our fans Hatred pre-orders sooner, as many of you have asked for them”
We live in a world increasingly dominated by our personal data.
Some of those data we choose to reveal, for example, through social media, email and the billions – yes, billions – of messages, photos and Tweets we post every day.
Still other data are required to be collected by government programs that apply to travel, banking, and employment and other services provided by the private sector. All of these are subject to extensive government data collection and reporting requirements.
Many of our activities generate data that we are not even aware exist, much less that they are recorded. In 2013, the public carried 6.8 billion cell phones. They not only generate digital communications, photos and video recordings, but also constantly report the user’s location to telephone service providers. Smartphone apps, too, often access location data and share them through the internet.
Added to the mix are video and audio surveillance, cookies and other technologies that observe online behavior, and RFID chips embedded in passports, clothing and other goods – a trove of data collected without our awareness.
Trillions of transactions a year
Much of this data is aggregated by third parties we’ve never heard of with whom we have limited or no direct dealings. According to The New York Times, one of these companies, known as Acxiom, alone engages in 50 trillion data transactions a year, almost none collected directly from individuals.
Known as information intermediaries, they calculate or infer information from demographic information such as income level, education, gender and sex; census forms; and past behavior, such as what clothes and foods someone purchased. That can generate data profiles that can be very revealing and used in determining credit scores, marketing predictions and other ways to quantify us.
As the volume, importance and, indeed, the value of personal data expand, so too does the urgency of protecting the information from harmful or inappropriate uses. But as we know, that’s not easy.
Most data protection laws in the US and elsewhere place some or all of the responsibility for protecting privacy on individual subjects through what’s called “notice and consent.”
In 1998, for example, the US Federal Trade Commission, after reviewing the “fair information practice codes” of the United States, Canada and Europe, reported to Congress that the “most fundamental” principles to protect privacy are “notice” and “consumer choice or consent.”
US statutes and regulations tend to parallel the FTC’s rules and recommendations on notice and choice. All US financial institutions are required to send every customer a privacy notice every year, and doctors, hospitals and pharmacies provide similar notices, usually on every visit.
The focus on notice and consent is not limited to the United States. The draft of the European Union’s General Data Protection cites “consent” more than 100 times and emphasizes its importance.
People across the world are spending more and more of their lives online, in the process handing over billions and billions of documents with their personal data.
Reuters
All our fault
The truth is that notice and consent laws do little to protect privacy but typically just shift the responsibility for protecting privacy from the data user to the data subject – that would be us. After all, if anything goes wrong, it is our fault because we consented – often without realizing it.
Individual consent is rarely exercised as a meaningful choice. We are all overwhelmed with many long, complex privacy policies that most of us never read.
It is no wonder. One 2008 study calculated that reading the privacy policies of just the most popular websites would take an individual 244 hours – or more than 30 full working days – each year.
A reliance on notice and choice both under-protects privacy and can interfere with and raise the cost of beneficial uses of data, such as medical research and innovative products and services. (This is especially true when personal information is used by parties with no direct relationship to the individual, generated by sensors or inferred by third parties.)
‘Fantasy world’
In a May 2014 report, the US President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology described the “framework of notice and consent” as “unworkable as a useful foundation for policy.” The report stressed that “only in some fantasy world do users actually read these notices and understand their implications before clicking to indicate their consent.”
There are better alternatives. One is enacting laws that place substantive limits on risky or harmful data uses, for instance. Another is to increase oversight by government and self-regulatory agencies, which could potentially forbid certain uses of personal data by third parties.
Many privacy advocates note that the US is the only industrialized country without a dedicated privacy office in the federal government. Creating one might help ensure more attention is paid to privacy.
Other efforts are underway to restrict notice and choice to times when they are necessary and meaningful, and then to make them simpler and clearer.
Another promising approach would be to ensure that businesses take responsibility for their uses of personal data by making them legally liable for the reasonably foreseeable harm they cause, rather than allowing them to use notice and consent to continue shifting the responsibility to us.
At minimum, big users of personal data should be required to assess and document the risk those uses pose, and the steps they have taken to mitigate those risks. A more formal approach to managing privacy risks could better protect privacy, lead to greater consistency and predictability over time, and allow data users to make productive uses of data if risks can be mitigated.
The alternative is to continue to rely on notices no one reads, choices no one understands, and the other ineffective tools of the fantasy world that privacy law has become.
This was the year that digital media got big and got optimistic. While that’s good news for the mobile-native winners, the new influx of money and scale is bad for the second and third tier. How huge is the market now? Well, three years ago, AOL bought the Huffington Post for $315m (£200m) , after the site posted 2010 revenues of $30.7m (£19.7m). That was a huge deal, which cemented HuffPo’s top-dog status. Today, by contrast, both figures look downright modest.
Nick Denton, founder and owner of Gawker Media , recently revealed his company has $60m (£38m) in revenues. The man Denton considers his arch-rival, BuzzFeed boss Jonah Peretti, has already seen his 2014 revenues surpass $100m (£63m), and is giving each of his 700 employees an Apple Watch to celebrate. He can afford it: he raised $50m (£32m) in new venture capital this summer, from a single investor, at a valuation of $850m (£541m).
And that’s just the start. Business Insider raised $12m (£7.6m) in March, at a $100m (£63m) valuation, after Mashable raised $13m (£8m) in January. Vox Media raised $46.5m (£29.6m) in November, at a valuation of $380m (£242m). Automattic, the owner of Wordpress.com, raised $160m (£102m) in May, valuing the company at $1.16bn (£738m). And then, dwarfing all the others , Vice Media raised an eye-popping $500m (£318m) , in a deal which valued the company at $2.5bn (£1.59bn). What’s more, founder Shane Smith is now telling anybody who’ll listen that he’s going to have $1bn (£630m) in revenues in 2015, which makes the valuation almost seem modest.
Not all of these investments will end up being profitable, and not all of these valuations will end up seeming sensible with hindsight. But digital media has now clearly established itself as a rational asset class to invest in. The result is real problems for the owners of companies which shouldn’t aspire to massive scale: New Republic owner Chris Hughes insists on referring to the magazine’s losses as the amount he’s “investing”; and Pierre Omidyar, billionaire owner of troubled First Look Media, is having a lot of difficulty reconciling the tensions between founding a start-up technology company and subsidizing important journalism .
One problem for such people is that the table stakes for starting a digital media company are getting seriously big. It’s still possible to make a large splash on a relatively small budget – PlayBuzz is a prime example, albeit one which appears to have zero interest in journalism – but as we enter 2015, there’s a relatively small number of large, highly ambitious and lavishly capitalized companies, all of which are competing very, very hard for those precious minutes that under-30s, in particular, spend staring at their phones. It’s hard to match the money being put into those companies when you’re spending your own cash, even if you’re worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
To make matters worse, the generous nature of the old web, where linking to other people was a smart strategy, doesn’t help you in mobile. Web surfing on a phone is a clunky, unhappy experience, so that a whole generation is growing up preferring to get all its information from inside one fast, slick app. (Even when that app is Snapchat: Vice claims its Snapchat-based news show is America’s most-watched.)
So the result of the 2014 new-money surge is that the world of online publishing has become bifurcated. Either you aspire to become a “platform”, or you simply join up with somebody else’s. (Take your choice: WordPress, Tumblr, Medium, YouTube or, of course, Facebook.) The small but self-sustaining bloggy site is a thing of the past: if you’re not getting 20-30 million unique visitors every month, and don’t aspire to such heights, then you’re basically an economic irrelevance. Advertisers won’t touch you, you won’t make any money, and your remaining visitors will inexorably leach away as they move from their desktops to their phones.
Hence the turmoil within First Look Media and the New Republic. The core journalism being produced by these titles simply isn’t suited to a mass audience – yet we’re entering a world where niche publications are less viable than ever before. They might have found a way to make things work on the old World Wide Web, but they can’t even get their foot in the door of the new mobile-first digital universe. The owners, especially when they’re technologists, worship at the altar of “scale”. They naturally aspire to going big, and to building organizations which can support such ambitions. Only too late do they learn that trying to impose big-dream structures can crush the kind of journalistic enterprise which never aspired to going huge.
An "early version" of the screenplay for the new James Bond film was the latest victim of a massive hacking attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment, its producers said in a statement on their website Sunday.
The news came less than two weeks after details of the new Bond movie "Spectre", starring Daniel Craig and Christoph Waltz, were unveiled.
Eon Productions confirmed "that an early version of the screenplay for the new Bond film SPECTRE is amongst the material stolen and illegally made public by hackers who infiltrated the Sony Pictures Entertainment computer system."
It expressed concern that whoever carried out the hack could try and publish the "stolen" screenplay and vowed to take "all necessary steps" to protect their legal rights.
Hollywood giant Sony Pictures Entertainment has been hit by a string of embarrassing leaks following a huge hack, which some have blamed on North Korea after its anger at the forthcoming movie "The Interview", which lampoons its leader, Kim Jong-Un.
The leaks revealed a producer, Scott Rudin, describing Angelina Jolie as a "minimally talented spoiled brat" plus racially insensitive exchanges about US President Barack Obama between Rudin and co-chairwoman Amy Pascal.
"Spectre" is due to hit screens worldwide on November 6 next year and also features Monica Bellucci and Lea Seydoux.
The immense popularity of social media seems to have redefined “privacy” from the sense of keeping information secret to being in control over how information is shared – among friends, colleagues, companies or the government. Perhaps it’s no surprise then that the world’s largest social network, Facebook, has announced it’s aim to develop algorithms that could protect us from ourselves and the danger of the “overshare”.
The idea is that Facebook could warn, or prevent you, from unleashing an embarrassing picture or revelation when under the influence or having not thought through the consequences of the impact it could have – on family, friends, or the boss. This idea is not particularly new – there are mobile apps that try to prevent people from drunk dialling or texting on their phones, for example. One was even featured as the “killer app” developed by the protagonists in the Hollywood film The Internship.
The danger of the drunk dial
The aim of these apps is to stop people from embarrassing themselves as a result of being too quick, too thoughtless, or – let’s face it – too drunk to reflect on the potential consequences. But Facebook’s project is different because it intends to use the deep learning form of artificial intelligence, rather than more simple measures such as the time taken between the last key stroke and hitting the send button, or the number of spelling errors made while typing the message.
Deep learning refers to a collection of artificial intelligence methods that try to build abstract relationships between concepts based on different representations of the data. For example, one application of deep-learning techniques might be include facial recognition, so that an individual can be identified across different photographs even when the lighting, the angle of the face in the picture, and the facial expression all vary. In fact Facebook, Apple and Google already offer this in their products as a means to quickly scan our digital photo library to help identify and tag our friends and family.
Deep learning is one of various machine learning techniques used by IBM’s Watson system that has already demonstrated it has the power to win the game show, Jeopardy!.
So Facebook’s initial target appears aimed at extending its face recognition capability to automatically differentiate between a user’s face when sober and drunk, and use this to get a user to think twice before hitting the post button. Of course being detected as being drunk in photographs won’t be the only factor that determines when we want to moderate our social media sharing behaviours. The nature of the links we share, like and comment on can reveal a wealth of information about us, from ethnic and socio-economic background to political inclination and our sexuality. This makes the task for any artificial intelligence of managing our online privacy a challenging one.
Staying in charge
A key challenge to help us manage our privacy more effectively will be to develop techniques that can analyse the data – photographs, their time and location, the people in them and how they appear, or the content of links – and correlate this to the privacy implications for the user given the privacy settings.
Our own research on adaptive sharing in social networks uses a quantitative model of privacy risk and social benefit to evaluate the effect of sharing any given piece of information with different members of the user’s social network. Then it can provide recommendations for audiences to share with, or avoid.
Like Facebook’s efforts, our work is to apply machine-learning techniques – which will one day include detecting drunkenness in photographs, or automatically determining the sensitivity of different information and calculating the potential regret factor of the post you’re about to make. Far from being a flippant or fanciful use of technology, these sorts of models will become a core part of the way we can engineer better privacy-awareness into the software we use.
Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg wants people to be able to quickly express broader ranges of feelings at the leading online social network, but a "dislike" button doesn't make the cut.
During a question-and-answer session with an audience at the Facebook headquarters in Northern California, available online Friday, Zuckerberg gave a thumbs-down to the idea of a button to register disdain for posts at the social network.
"That's not something that we think is good for the world," Zuckerberg said, expressing concern that "like" and "dislike" buttons could turn into a voting system to judge posts.
"The thing that I think is very valuable is that there are more sentiments that people want to express."
While Facebook's well-known thumbs-up "like" buttons let people easily show support or enthusiasm for posts, some folks think the sentiment seems off-target for somber subjects such as news of death or other sadness in the lives of friends.
"We are talking about a right way for people to easily express a broader array of emotions," Zuckerberg said, giving examples such as empathy, surprise, or laughter.
No changes along those lines were on the immediate horizon.
"We need to figure out the right way to do it so that it is a force for good and not a force for bad in demeaning the posts that people are putting out there."
Facebook would also risk irking advertisers by giving members a quick way to tag marketing messages with "dislikes," according to analysts.
Zuckerberg noted that Facebook members are free to comment on posts, but can wind up feeling pressured to be witty or insightful.
Campaigners in favour of hardcore pornography staged an unusual "face-sitting" protest outside the British parliament on Friday against new rules banning a series of extreme sex acts from online videos.
Around 20 fully-clothed couples simulated sex on the lawn in Parliament Square, with women in black leather boots sitting astride the men's faces.
They were protesting an amendment to the Communications Act requiring video-on-demand online pornography to follow tougher rules, already laid out by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) for DVDs sold in shops.
Spanking, caning, penetration by any object "associated with violence", physical or verbal abuse, physical restraint and female ejaculation were among the acts to be banned from online productions.
Strangulation, face-sitting and fisting were also banned, with the BBFC deeming them "life-endangering".
"While the measures won't stop people from watching whatever genre of porn they desire, as video shot abroad can still be viewed, they do impose severe restrictions on content created in the UK, and appear to make no distinction between consensual and non-consensual practices between adults," said the Facebook page of the protest organisers.
"Adult performers are going to be affected by this," said Charlotte Rose, a former professional dominatrix who organised the protest.
She said it would "push more people into poverty".
"What the government is doing is taking our personal liberties away without our permissions," she said.
A woman named Mistress Absolute said the law was inhibiting her "sexual freedom".
"This is a gateway to other laws being snuck in," she said.
A spokesman for the government's Department for Culture, Media and Sport said the legislation provided the same level of protection to the online world that already exists for the high street sales of DVDs.
"In a converging media world these provisions must be coherent and the BBFC classification regime is a tried and tested system of what content is regarded as harmful for minors," he said.
The US navy has demonstrated a ship-mounted laser weapon system in the Persian Gulf, off the coast of Iran, capable of destroying targets on speeding boats or even aircraft with pin-point accuracy, it told reporters Wednesday.
The laser weapon is 30 kilowatts in power, which makes it 30m times more powerful than a hand-held laser pointer. It can be run at lower power, to “dazzle” – which disrupts or damages sensors and instruments – or at full power to destroy targets.
In a video of the demonstration, the device is shown targeting a mounted missile on a speeding boat, and then first dazzling, then destroying, an unmanned aerial drone in mid-flight.
The navy was keen to point out that this was not just a scientific test – the laser device is fully operational. “We’re not testing any more – it’s working,” Rear Admiral Matthew Klunder, the chief of naval research, said in a press conference at the Pentagon Wednesday.
The prototype device is mounted on the USS Ponce, an Austin-class amphibious transport vessel. Because the Ponce is 43 years old – one of the oldest vessels in the US navy – the laser weapon was installed with its own power generator, though Klunder said that newer vessels would be able to use their own power grid.
According to a release from the navy, sailors working with the laser – which is officially designated Laser Weapon System, or LaWS – say that it has performed “flawlessly, including in adverse weather conditions,” and that it has exceeded expectations for reliability.
The laser has not yet been fired in anger, but Klunder said that it is fully battle-ready if it is to be needed. “If we have to defend that ship today, we will [use the laser] to destroy a threat that comes,” he said. The Captain of the Ponce has authorisation to use the weapon, if the situation calls for it.
The device is operated using what Klunder said “looks a lot like a game controller, Xbox, PS4 or whatever.” He added, “Any of you that can do Xbox or PS4, you’ll be good with this.”
Rear Admiral Bryant Fuller, deputy commander of ship design, integration and naval engineering at naval sea systems command, added that an effect of the video-game like design of the controller was that those joining the navy “are [already] very good at it.”
The location of the demonstration, close to Iranian waters in the Persian Gulf, may be seen as boastful, if not outrightly provocative, but Fuller denied that there was any ulterior motives behind the location of the testing site and said that it was chosen because harsh conditions in the area allowed them to test the device to its fullest capacity.
One advantage the laser system has over traditional weapons systems is its cost. The price of firing – or “flyaway” cost – a missile, Klunder said, can be as much as $2m each, while the flyway cost of the laser system is just the price of the electricity it takes to power the device – 59 cents per shot.
According to Fuller, the entire cost of installing the system on the Ponce, including its separate power-generation system, cooling systems and control station, was $40m, but that, he said, would come down considerably “if we are going to mass-produce.”
Klunder said that the device is not powerful enough to destroy “frigate-sized vessels,” but said that there was a 150 kilowatt laser weapon – five times as powerful as the one mounted on the Ponce – currently in development.
Under Protocol IV of the Geneva Convention (added in 1995), laser weapons are currently banned for use against humans. This is perhaps why, in the demonstration, wooden human figures are propped up on the target boat, to show that the system is accurate enough to destroy mounted weaponry while avoiding human targets.
“We will not point lasers at people,” said Klunder. “We are going to honor the conventions.”
Chicago opened a new front in the war on ridesharing services like Uber on Wednesday, approving a plan to sponsor an app for riders to hail local cabs.
The measure was part of a package including financial supports for taxis, such as fee breaks, passed by the city council on Wednesday.
A union that has expanded into cab drivers and organized Chicago this year pushed hard for the package, which had the support of Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
"We have found a way to level the playing field,” between cabs and ridesharing services, said City Councilman Emma Mitts, a co-sponsor of the ordinance.
Uber's app to let mobile phone users summon drivers is growing fast around the world, but concerns over fair competition with cabs, the safety of Uber drivers and Uber's use of data about riders, recently has led to questions and government measures, including bans on Uber service, in parts of India, Thailand and some U.S. cities.
Uber declined to comment directly on the Chicago plans, while saying that its efficiency and safety were superior to those of the taxi industry.
The Chicago ordinance commits the city to developing a mobile app that will serve as a dispatch for all the city's taxicab companies. Rideshare companies including Uber and smaller rival Lyft offer dispatch of a variety of cars, and in some markets the Uber app can call taxis.
It is not yet determined how the Chicago mobile app will be administered, who will pay for it, and whether rideshare services would be able to bid for the contract to develop or run it.
Chicago appears to be the only major city to agree to develop its own app, although New York City Council Member Ben Kallos this week proposed a similar app. The Chicago move also represents a political push from the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), a union which has organized drivers in two cities so far.
More than half of Chicago's 7,000 active cabbies have joined AFSCME since June. In New Orleans, the second U.S. city where AFSCME has organized taxi drivers, more than 800 drivers have signed up, which represents more than half of the city's fleet.
Cheryl Miller, a Chicago taxi driver for 20 years, says the rideshare issue was key to making drivers organize this year. She says the app might serve to increase her customer base, but she says the more pressing issue is increased regulation and accountability of Uber drivers.
"I see this as a first step. I'm excited about that," she says.
Labor groups say that the taxi industry suffers from identical issues of low-wage workers in the fast-food and other industries, namely stagnant wages and limited bargaining rights.
The taxi industry says the Chicago measures, which include reducing the fees drivers pay to lease their car or medallion, lowering amounts they can be fined, and giving taxi drivers a share of in-car advertising revenue, will collectively raise income for drivers up to $8,000 annually.
The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) has formed alliances with taxi worker groups in New York and other cities.
The Chicago measure does not increase regulation of rideshare services. Taxi and rideshare proponents vigorously disagree about whether rideshare companies are adequately controlled. Regulations vary considerably between cities and countries.
Taxi groups say rideshare drivers, and their vehicles, do not have to go through the same rigorous security checks or training as licensed taxi drivers.
"They operate with impunity and are invisible to city oversight. That's not just unfair but can be dangerous," said AFSCME spokesman Anders Lindall.
Uber says its background checks and insurance requirements are equal to or better than those of city drivers.
"Uber has more insurance and we perform more thorough background checks than the taxi industry, which is why the city of Chicago has validated our approach," Chris Taylor, general manager of Uber in Chicago, told Reuters by email.
"The regulations created for taxis and rideshare services are appropriate for how each industry has proven itself capable of protecting riders and drivers."
Mayor Emanuel, who has had strained relations with unions and whose brother is an Uber investor, also supported the measure.
The "reforms represent what is necessary to further modernize this growing industry" Emanuel said in a statement.
(Reporting by Mark Guarino; Editing by Peter Henderson and Lisa Shumaker)
An associate professor at Harvard Business School suggested that he could sue a local Chinese restaurant for overcharging him by $4 on a recent order, Boston.com reported.
"I have already referred this matter to applicable authorities in order to attempt to compel your restaurant to identify all consumers affected and to provide refunds to all of them," Ben Edelman said in an email after learning that he paid too much for his takeout order from Sichuan Garden in Brookline, a suburb of Boston.
Edelman contacted Ran Duan, whose parents founded the restaurant's other location in Woburn, on Friday, arguing that he paid $1 more per item compared to the prices listed on the restaurant's online menu. When Duan explained that the restaurant had not updated its menu, Edelman then demanded that he get a $12 refund.
"The tripling reflects the approach provided under the Massachusetts consumer protection statute, MGL93a, wherein consumers broadly receive triple damages for certain intentional violations," Edelman wrote, contending that the restaurant knowingly overcharged customers.
Duan told Edelman that the Brookline restaurant operated under different management and different pricing, while the menu Edelman saw online was from the Woburn location.
"Our website states that 'price subject to change based on location' highlighted in a [red] box," Duan wrote on Saturday, adding, "The Brookline location has its own website sichuangardenbrookline.com granted it has been down for quite some time. I do not manage or control that location or its policy's."
The restaurant's website currently states, "we are updating our menu, please check back soon for updated selections and prices." It also contains the box Duan mentioned. The site for the Brookline location was down, as Duan stated, as of Tuesday night.
However, Edelman replied saying that the price disclaimer was not on the site when he visited it, and that it would not cover cases where the site was not updated properly.
"Increasing the price of each and every item, and not updating the site for a long period -- that just won't fly," Edelman wrote on Sunday. "I count myself fortunate to live in a state that deems that practice unlawful."
The Harvard Business School website states that Edelman has worked as a consultant on online fraud issues for the New York Times, National Football League, and American Civil Liberties Union, among other clients. Edelman told Boston.com that he plans to "take a few days" before deciding whether to pursue legal action against the restaurant.
"I personally respond to every complaint and try to handle every situation personally," Duan said regarding the exchange with Edelman. "I have worked so hard to make my family proud and to elevate our business. It just broke my heart."
Duan's business, the Baldwin Bar, is located inside Sichuan Garden's Woburn branch. He was described as "America's Most Imaginative Bartender" in a profile in GQ magazine last month.
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