Science and Technology

Besides the sheer amount of gas, the discovery is notable because it appears to be the first time that stores of helium have been purposely found (they're usually stumbled upon during oil and gas drilling).

And the find, which will be presented Tuesday by Durham University PhD student Diveena Danabalan at a Japanese geochemistry conference, could help restock nearly depleted stockpiles.

Researchers figure there's about 54 billion cubic feet of helium in just one section of the valley. To put that in context, the Federal Helium Reserve in Texas, which supplies more than 40% of domestic helium needs and contains about 30% of the world's total helium supply, right now holds about 24.2 billion cubic feet, perLive Science, plant facts

"It could be substantially larger," researcher Jon Gluyas says. "This is a globally significant discovery." The scientists from Durham, working with Oxford University counterparts, used a new method of gas exploration to track down the Rift Valley helium, studying volcanic activity in the region, as well as how intense heat from that activity works to release helium trapped in the Earth's crust, and then pinpointing which sites would likely prove to be plum drilling sites, much like those looking for oil would do.

The problem arises when the helium-storing rocks are too close to the volcanoes—meaning the helium will be mixed in with and diluted by volcanic gases—so now the researchers' next goal is to find the sweet spot (or, as Danabalan puts it, the "Goldilocks zone") "where the balance between helium release and volcanic dilution is 'just right.'" (Danabalan has been on the hunt for helium for some time.)

This article originally appeared on Newser: 'Game Changer' video game reviews: Giant Helium Field Found in Tanzania

"For months I tried to work with them, but they kept blowing me off," she tellsComputerworld. At times, her email was inaccessible and some customers chose to take their business elsewhere, she says.

Goldstein, who says she never consented to the upgrade, filed a claim in Marin County's small-claims court in January, armed with evidence of $17,000 in lost wages and the expense of new computers.

She was awarded the maximum of $10,000 last month, reports the Seattle Times. Microsoft—which says users must approve the Windows 10 upgrade and agree to a license agreement—didn't admit wrongdoing, and a spokesperson said the company ditched its appeal to avoid an expensive court fight. Full reviews window 10

Analysts say the company is getting increasingly aggressive as it pushes to have 1 billion devices running Windows 10 by 2018, with the goal of having fewer Windows versions to support.

At ZDNet, Mary Jo Foley writes that Microsoft is making it "convoluted and difficult" for people, especially those who aren't tech savvy, to opt out of the upgrade.

Microsoft says it's "continuing to listen to customer feedback and evolve the upgrade experience." (The company just made a massive, big-name purchase.)

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Reviews, the Federal Aviation Administration has published its regulations for small drones, a key move toward integrating commercial use of the technology into America’s airspace.

The Small Unmanned Aircraft Rule (Part 107) was finalized by the FAA and Department of Transportation on June 21 and published in the Federal RegisterTuesday. The rule comes into effect Aug. 29 2016.

Development of drones, also known as Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), has ramped up dramatically in recent years. The new rule could have a major impact on commercial drone use in areas such as crop and pipeline inspection and aerial photography, as well as research, education and rescue operations.

The rule limits the unmanned aircraft weighing less than 55 pounds to daylight or civil twilight (30 minutes before official sunrise to 30 minutes after official sunset, local time) flight, provided appropriate anti-collision lighting is used. The drone must stay within the remote pilot or operator’s visual line-of-sight at a maximum altitude of 400 feet. If the drone is higher than 400 feet, it must remain within 400 feet of a structure, according to the FAA.

The rule also requires that an individual operating a small UAS must either hold a remote pilot airman certificate with a small UAS rating or be under the direct supervision of someone who holds the certificate (the remote pilot in command). To qualify for the remote pilot airman certificate the person must pass an aeronautical knowledge test. However, individuals who hold a part 61 pilot certificate other than student pilot can also qualify for the certificate by completing a flight review and an FAA training course. Remote pilot certificate candidates will also be vetted by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and must be more than 16 years old.

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The FAA estimates that the out-of-pocket cost for an individual to become certificated as a remote pilot with a small UAS rating is $150.

The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), which represents the drone industry, welcomed the FAA’s small UAS rule.

AUVSI President and CEO Brian Wynne described the new rule as “a critical milestone” in the drone integration process and a victory for American businesses and innovators in a statement released last week.

“It establishes a clear regulatory framework and helps to reduce many barriers to civil and commercial operations, allowing anyone who follows the rules to fly in the national airspace,” he said. “Accelerating civil and commercial UAS operations will not only help businesses harness tremendous potential of UAS, it will also help unlock the economic impact and job creation potential of the technology.”

A report released by AUVSI in 2013 estimated that the expansion of UAS technology will create more than 100,000 jobs and have an economic impact of around $82 billion in the first decade following integration.

Fact of life, Drone maker DJI also welcomed the new regulations. “This is a watershed moment in how advanced technology can improve lives, as the Small UAS Rule allows companies, farmers, researchers and rescue services alike to explore how drones can let them do more at a lower cost and a lower risk,” said Brendan Schulman, DJI’s vice president of policy and legal affairs, in a statement released last week.

DJI notes that the new regulations replace the current FAA scheme that requires commercial drone operators to spend months waiting for an FAA exemption and to employ a pilot with a manned aircraft license from the FAA. “Those high barriers to entry have prevented many companies from exploring the benefits of drones in their industry, and have been a source of frustration for business owners for years,” it said, in its statement.

Critics, however, say that businesses will get maximum benefit from drones when operators are allowed to fly the technology beyond their visual line-of-sight. 

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Remember those terrible photos you posted on Myspace 10 years ago?

Well, Reviews Myspace does -– and they might send you some to refresh your memory.

The company is emailing former members their old, embarrassing snapshots in an attempt to lure them back to the social network, popular in the early 2000s.

The email reads, “The good, the rad and the what were you thinking…” and includes a link to the user’s old profile, Mashable reported.

"Myspace has been reaching out to current and past users to re-engage them through a personalized experience,” a spokesperson told the website.

Myspace has been pushing for a comeback.

In 2011, Justin Timberlake and Specific Media bought the company from News Corp. for $35 million. It soon unveiled a new, modern look and became a popular space for bands to post new music and connect with fans.

Last year, the company reportedly spent $20 million on an ad campaign to get users excited about the new Myspace.

While social media users compared the old-photo tactic to blackmail, it at least serves as a reminder to users to be careful about what they post online. Myspace has 15 billion photos of users in its database, according to Mashable. That’s nothing compared to Facebook, which has said it has more than 250 billion user photos. Click here Games review to see more the same topics

Beijing has ordered Apple to stop selling the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus in China’s capital, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

The city’s intellectual property regulator has ruled that the design of the two phones is overly similar to another phone, the 100C, made by the Chinese company Shenzhen Baili. In a statement, the Beijing Intellectual Property Bureau wrote that the phones infringe on a Chinese patent for exterior design held by Shenzhen Baili.

“Apple’s iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus have minor differences from Baili’s 100C. The differences are so tiny that the average customer could not notice. So, this case falls into the patent rights protection category,” the ruling reads.

Bizarrely, the iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus, which have identical exteriors and are also available, are not affected by the ruling. The two phones which are barred from sale were first released in 2014, and will likely be pulled from markets worldwide anyway in September 2016 when Apple is expected to announce the iPhones 7.

In a statement, Apple said: “iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus as well as iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus and iPhone SE models are all available for sale today in China. We appealed an administrative order from a regional patent tribunal in Beijing last month and as a result the order has been stayed pending review by the Beijing IP Court.”

The move to bar the company from selling the iPhones comes just a month after Apple announced a $1bn investment in Chinese Uber competitor Didi. The move, unusual for a company which tends to only invest in firms in order to acquire them, was though to be a goodwill gesture to the Chinese markets and government, to curry favour with regulators typically seen as hostile to Apple.

It came after China shut down Apple’s iTunes Movies and iBooks services, and also lost a trademark battle over whether or not a luxury goods manufacturer could use the iPhone brand on handbags.

The investment does not seem to have worked as planned.

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Reviews, when Facebook was revealed to have been experimenting on the emotional state of 700,000 of its users back in June 2014, many were outraged that the company had violated ethical guidelines and “harmed” its users.

The fallout of that “emotional contagion study” haunts Facebook’s reputation among ethicists and researchers. But it has also compelled the company to clean up its ethical act, and inspired the introduction of a newly developed internal ethics review process this week.

In an article in the Washington and Lee Law Review, Facebook’s public policy research manager Molly Jackman and research management lead Lauri Kanerva discuss the challenges of devising an ethical review process at Facebook and detail the new process research must follow.

Ethical research, the piece claims, is now integrated into the workflows of its developers and researchers. “The model best suited to protect people and promote ethical research is one that fits the unique context in which the research takes place,” write Jackman and Kanerva. This means that asking ethical questions should become “part of researchers’ normal workflows” rather than an extra step or additional burden on their work.

Facebook’s set of suicide prevention and support tools, which rolled out globally this week, are a case in point. The tools were developed in collaboration with researchers at the University of Washington and directly serve the kinds of vulnerable and sensitive users the review process is designed to benefit.

This approach goes some way towards meeting calls from researchers and others who believe that ethical considerations must be more than a tickbox in the development cycle of a product or service – or an add-on after it is released. These considerations should be infused throughout the lifecycle of research, from conception to analysis to dissemination of results.

Facebook’s response to the emotional contagion outrage has been rather more sophisticated than the social network’s early days; Zuckerberg told upset users to “calm down” and “breathe” after the controversial introduction of the NewsFeed in 2006. Ten years later, the new ethics review model demonstrates a company that is maturing and coming to terms with the gravity of its role as the largest – and most impactful – social networking site on the planet, with 1 billion users every day.

But how does Facebook translate broad ethical values of respect, diversity,beneficence and justice, for example, into its decision making for research around specific audiences, projects or products? From Facebook’s new process, it is not entirely clear.

Tailoring processes too closely to a specific company risks serving the company better than the subjects in need of protection.

Tellingly, Facebook’s descriptions of procedure and process offer little insight into the values and ideals that drive its decision-making. Instead, the authors offer vague, hollow and at times conflicting statements such as noting how its reviewers “consider how the research will improve our society, our community, and Facebook”.

This seemingly innocuous statement raises more ethical questions than it answers. What does Facebook think an “improved” society looks like? Who or what constitutes “our community?” What values inform their ideas of a better society?

Facebook sidesteps this completely by saying that ethical oversight necessarily involves subjectivity and a degree of discretion on the part of reviewers – yet simply noting that subjectivity is unavoidable does not negate the fact that explicit discussion of ethical values is important.

One of the reasons we have standardized ethics codes and discussions is so researchers, administrators and ethicists alike can think through, communicate, and justify their decisions – however subjective.

Laura Stark, who has written about institutional review boards (IRBs, the standard oversight mechanism for ethics review for academic and publicly-funded research) explains that researchers consistently use subjective reasoning when considering the ethics of a research proposal, often asking questions like “what would my grandmother think if she were asked these questions?” or “how would my cousin respond to this study?”

But, Stark points out, this kind of ethical deliberation could vary wildly depending on the composition of the board; one whose members are uniformly affluent and white is going to arrive at a different assessment than one that is racially and socioeconomically diverse.

Nothing about Facebook’s review process gives users and would-be research subjects insight into whose ethical subjectivity and standards they are being subjected to at any given time.

In the absence of any meaningful insight into Facebook’s ethical commitments, the authors note that their review process allows them to “seamlessly” call on representatives or groups outside of Facebook for consultation as needed – though it’s never made clear why or how this additional external input is triggered.

It’s also not clear how Facebook selects external groups to contribute to their reviews. Internal research involving potentially vulnerable LGBT subjects points vaguely towards consulting “prominent groups representing LGBT people”. 

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But which LGBT groups? Not all groups or organisations serve the interests of the L, G, B, and T equally well. Mainstream LGBT advocacy groups such as the Human Rights Campaign are often the most visible (HRC has worked with Facebook in the past), but has been criticised for often prioritising the interests of cisgender and largely white gay men while failing to account for the interests of transgender folks and people of colour.

So, if you’re the most vulnerable of vulnerable research subjects, it’s still not clear when and how your interests might be promoted or protected. Nor is ity clear how users can advocate for their interests or gain insight into research that might target them.

Ultimately, Facebook has offered an ethics review process that innovates on process but tells us little about the ethical values informing their product development. What we have gained is insight into process designed to allow Facebook and its researchers to pursue their research agendas while avoiding public controversy on the scale of the emotional contagion episode.

But without a substantive, transparent debate about ethical standards and far more detail about Facebook’s own values, this isn’t really a process about ethics – it’s just PR. Click here to see more games review

Gill Pratt told reporters that the Toyota Research Institute is also looking ahead into the distant future when there will be cars that anyone, including children and the elderly, can ride in, as well as robots that help out in homes.

Pratt, a former program manager at the U.S. military's Defense Advanced Researcha Projects Agency, joined Toyota Motor Corp. first as a technical adviser when it set up its artificial intelligence research effort at Stanford University and MIT.

He said safety features will be the first types of AI applications to appear in Toyota vehicles.

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4:40 p.m.

People in Southern California are posting competing photos on Facebook and Instagram of their soaring thermometers as the last day of spring brought summerlike temperatures.

The National Weather Service says Burbank and Glendale, just north of downtown Los Angeles, soared past 100 degrees by midday Sunday, with Burbank hitting a record 105.

The heat was no help to firefighters working to put out a brush fire in a LA neighborhood, where densely packed homes were briefly danger before it was knocked down.

Further northwest in the San Fernando Valley, some thermometers were reading close to 110 degrees, and Palm Springs in the inland desert hit 115.

The heat spurred state regulators to urge residents to voluntarily cut their consumption of electricity Monday. It didn't bring the rolling blackouts that Southern Californians have been told to expect after a massive natural gas leak.

———

3:55 p.m.

A woman who became unresponsive while hiking and mountain biking in Phoenix during a heat wave has died.

Phoenix fire officials say the unidentified 28-year-old started biking with two friends around 6 a.m. Sunday and stopped breathing a few hours later. Firefighters say her condition appeared heat-related.

She was flown to a hospital, where she died. The woman was an avid hiker and personal trainer who had no known medical issues.

The National Weather Service says temperatures climbed quickly Sunday, with the high surpassing 115 before 1 p.m. The heat has broken a hot-weather record for June 19 set nearly 50 years ago. Click car driving games to dowload and play

———

2:45 p.m.

Phoenix has broken a hot-weather record set nearly 50 years ago on this date, hitting 117 degrees amid a heat wave boiling parts of the Southwest.

The National Weather Service says the high temperature surpassed the record for June 19 just before 1 p.m. Plus, meteorologist Mark O'Malley says there are still a few more hours to go before the temperature reaches its peak.

Forecasters say some areas could see a high of up to 120. The previous record was 115 back in 1968.

A strengthening ridge of high pressure lifting out of Mexico is on course to scorch portions of Arizona and southeast California on Sunday and Monday.

———

1:45 p.m.

Triple-digit temperatures are sweeping parts of the Southwest this weekend and leading some people in Arizona to fall ill from the sweltering heat.

The National Weather Service says the mercury quickly rose Sunday morning, with some areas of metropolitan Phoenix reaching 110 before noon. Forecasters say the city could see a high of up to 120, approaching the record of 122.

Firefighters in north Phoenix rescued a 28-year-old woman who became unresponsive while mountain biking with friends in the morning. She was transported to a hospital in critical condition.

In neighboring Pinal County, a 25-year-old Phoenix man died Saturday of heat exposure while hiking.

A strengthening ridge of high pressure lifting out of Mexico is on course to scorch portions of Arizona and southeast California on Sunday and Monday.

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The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative led a $24 million funding round this week into Andela, a start-up dedicated to finding and training technology talent in Africa.

"After a six-month software development program, Andela Fellows work remotely for Fortune 500 companies and startups around the world," Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page. "Companies get access to great developers, and developers in Africa get the opportunity to use their skills and support their communities."

The Zuckerbergs are planning to give away what amounts to about $45 billion at today's value, but not all at once. The couple plans to gradually donate the shares to the newly formed Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Zuckerberg, 32, will also keep his majority voting stake at Facebook, even as he transfers more shares to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Zuckerberg will sell or gift no more than $1 billion of Facebook stock each year for the next three years and will retain his majority voting position in the company "for the foreseeable future," the filing said.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative plans to tackle lofty goals, including curing disease, reducing poverty and harvesting clean energy. The couple announced their new charitable initiative in December to coincide with the birth of their first child, daughter Max.

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Driverless trucks will be safer and cheaper than their human-controlled counterparts, but that doesn’t mean America’s 3.5 million professional truck drivers are giving up to the machines without a fight. Get another topic click here animals for kids 

Across the US, truckers collectively haul more than 10bn tons of freight each year, but it’s a tough job – the hours are long and lonely, the pay is low and the lifestyle is sedentary. In many ways it’s a job ripe for disruption; robots v truckers.

“Picture the taxi drivers around the world acting in response to Uber,” says Andy Stern, the former former president of the Service Employees International Union, referring to protests and violence that erupted in many cities as the $62.5bn Silicon Valley on-demand ride-hailing firm challenged conventional, regulated taxis.

“Truck drivers will follow a similar pattern,” says Stern. “There will be disruption in different places. You can imagine people ringing state capitals with their trucks.”

Much has been written about the advent of the driverless car, with rival versions being developed by Google, Uber and Tesla, yet driverless trucks are likely to roll out at scale much sooner. “Individuals can make their own choices about whether they want to get into a driverless car or taxi, but labour-saving technology will be deployed by businesses much quicker,” explains Stern, whose book Raising the Floor explores the need for a universal basic income as technology replaces jobs.

Mining giant Rio Tinto already uses 45 240-ton driverless trucks to move iron ore in two Australian mines, saying it is cheaper and safer than using human drivers.

Now the race is on to put driverless trucks on public roads. In May 2015, the first self-driving truck hit the American road in the state of Nevada, and there have been several tests around the world since then including a convoy that drove across Europe to the port of Rotterdam in April. That convoy used a new automated driving technology called platooning, which connects trucks using Wi-Fi, sensors, GPS and cameras. The leading vehicle dictates speed and direction, while the rest automatically steer, speed up and slow down in close convoy.

In San Francisco, former Googlers have launched a startup called Otto, which promises to retrofit vehicles with driverless capabilities for just $30,000. The average trucker’s wage is around $40,000 per year.

‘Strong undercurrent of denial’

Despite these developments, the trucking industry plays down the threat of disruption, arguing that people will still be needed behind the wheel for complex manoeuvres and oversight. “You are not going to see a truck without a driver in it for a long time,” says Ted Scott from the American Trucking Associations. “The human being is an excellent driver 99.9% of the time. It’s just a tiny instance every now and then that causes a problem. Computers break down more than that.”

Furthermore, Scott argues, public perception remains a problem. “People generally don’t like to drive around trucks even when they have a driver in them. Now you start telling them there is no driver in that truck?”

Sam Elitzer, founder of professional truckers’ network TruckersReport, is more cautious. Ttechnologies introduced to trucks, such as automated braking, haven’t worked as expected, but these problems will be ironed out given the brains and money investing in the trend. “Some people in the industry are very confident that the software and technology will not be able to replace them. There’s a strong undercurrent of denial there,” he says.

The potential saving to the freight transportation industry is estimated to be $168bn annually. The savings are expected to come from labor ($70bn), fuel efficiency ($35bn), productivity ($27bn) and accidents ($36bn), before including any estimates from non-truck freight modes like air and rail.

It’s regulation, and not technology that stands in the way of eliminating people from behind the wheel. Although trucking companies are likely to lobby hard for the legal reform so they can save on labor, which represents an estimated 34% of operational costs per mile, Morgan Stanley conservatively estimates that the freight industry could save as $168bn annually by harnessing autonomous technology – $70bn of which would come from reducing staff.

In addition to cost savings, fleets of automatedtrucks could save lives. Crashes involving large trucks killed 3,903 people in the US in 2014, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and a further 110,000 people were injured. More than 90% of the accidents were caused at least in part by driver error.

What next for drivers?

Where does this leave the 3.5 million truckers whose livelihoods depend on the need for a human behind the wheel? And what of the millions more whose livelihoods depend on the truckers coming up and down the country, stopping for food, drinks and sleep? “It’s going to be a huge problem,” says Stern, pointing out that unlike the steel and automotive industries, trucking is not concentrated to a few regions. “It’s the largest job in 29 states.”

Even if just a small percentage of these jobs evaporate, there could be trouble. Elitzer points out that truckers are already complaining that companies are offering insufficient wages as salaries haven’t kept up with rises in living costs – even though there’s a shortfall of 30,000 truck drivers in the US.

“A real wage decrease has occurred even when these companies can’t find enough people to drive trucks. What happens if even 10-20% of jobs are reduced by fully automated driverless trucks? That’s what worries many drivers,” he says.

Although the US trucking industry isn’t unionized in the way it is in Europe, Stern predicts spontaneous independent action. He mentions the violence that erupted in France over employment law reforms in May, which has seen lorry drivers block refineries and fuel depots, causing a widespread chaos.

These efforts will, however, ultimately be futile, he believes. “We’ve seen intense protests like Occupy Wall Street and the anti-war movement, but eventually the world moves on and taxi drivers become Uber drivers.”

The shift will lead to a critical discussion about employment, welfare and universal income. “It’s going to be the tipping point of when politicians are going to start talking about how technology is disrupting jobs in our country,” says Stern. See more at emperor penguin facts for kids

But trucking is just the tip of the iceberg. We’re seeing automation of labor across every industry, including manufacturing, wealth management and medicine. GDP is rising but no longer producing wage growth. We’re heading towards mass unemployment at the hands of technology.

“There are all the warning signs that a tsunami is coming. People are putting up sandbags by going to get a college education or a skill. That might be fine when there’s a storm coming, but when there are 30ft waves, sandbags aren’t going to save you any more,” says Stern.

When the tsunami hits, the wealth will need to be redistributed through something like a universal basic income, or the disparity between the “haves” and “have nots” will create enormous social friction. “From a business person’s perspective it’s about risk management. Do you want to ride around in an armored car and have guards with you? Do you want the Hunger Games? Or do you want a more fair and just society?” says Stern.

To those who believe it won’t happen to their industry or company, Stern has these words of comfort: “Maybe they are right. But when you look at the mining trucks on the roads or the convoy driving across Europe, I wouldn’t bet against it.” Click here to see more fun facts about dogs

Monday’s keynote at Apple’s worldwide developers conference was fairly packed. The company’s various executives spoke for two hours about the watchOS, iOS, tvOS and the newly-monikered macOS, but while we were all wowed by the changes to Messages, the facial recognition introduced in Photos, and, er, Swift Playgrounds, Apple left almost as many interesting things unsaid as they announced onstage. So here are our picks for what would lead the Keynote That Never Was.

You can now remove the Stocks app

In fact, you can now remove almost all of the apps that come pre-installed on an iPhone and iPad. The only ones that are still mandatory are the App Store, Camera, Activity, Wallet, Find iPhone, Health, Messages, Phone, Safari and Settings. Contacts can be removed on an iPhone but is has to stay on an iPad, and News “will be removable in a later version of iOS 10 beta”.

Apple warns that removing the apps isn’t quite a panacea, erasing them from your home screen won’t actually delete them. But if you have a folder of “Apple Crap”, you might be happy to see the back of them anyway. Apple says: “The apps built into iOS are designed to be very space efficient, so all of them together use less than 150MB.”

The feature doesn’t quite feel fully baked yet, though, since there’s not actually any functionality built to let you mark replacements for the default apps. A mailto link, for instance, will still attempt to open the Mail app; if you’ve removed it, it will prompt you to reinstall, not open another mail app you may have installed.

RIP Game Center

You probably haven’t opened it for a few years, and if you’re unlucky, it’s been crashing almost every game since it broke for a high proportion of users a few months ago. Well, Game Center is dead, at least as we know it. The app has disappeared from iOS 10, with users managing friend requests in settings instead.

Wake Alarm

An extra little tab in the clock app will now help you get more sleep. Or at least, that’s the plan.

The next version of iOS lets you set a “Wake Alarm”: tell it what time you want to wake up, and it will ring at the appointed hour. So far, just a normal alarm, but it also asks how long you want to sleep for, and prompts you to go to bed too. For the quantified self fans, the app will also start tracking how much sleep you get, albeit just by assuming you’re asleep once you stop using your phone.

There’s a new file system for macOS

This may seem deep in the woods of geekiness, but it’s actually a feature that’s been high up the request list for developers for years. Click here car driving games to dowload and play 

The file system of a computer refers to the way data is actually stored on the hard drive. Disks on Apple Macs are currently formatted using HFS+, which was invented by Apple way back in 1998. At the time, it was state-of-the-art, but in the years since, it’s started to show its age: perhaps most obviously, it literally cannot handle dates past 2040.

So the company introduced a new file system, called Apple File System (inventive name), which it touts as “optimised for Flash/SSD storage”, of the kind found in most Mac laptops today. Among its new features are space sharing (letting two partitions share the free space available to them, rather than having to decide in advance how much each half gets), snapshots (which let the system make rapid read-only backups) and cloning of files, which lets the system copy files simply by rewriting the location, but pointing to the same underlying data – something which should save both time and hard drive space.

How does this affect you? Future Macs should feel faster, fit more files on their drives, and recover more rapidly from massive crashes.

Turn off read receipts for that one needy friend

Some people use read receipts. Some people don’t. It’s a rather contentious point. But if you do, and have one friend who’s just a bit too eager to ensure you reply the second you’ve read their texts, you can now turn them off just for that special person, or even for an individual conversation. Just tap on “details” in the top right, and you’d see a new option below Do Not Disturb that will let you toggle whether or not you send the read receipts. Get more information click here video game reviews

Facebook and Microsoft are going underwater.

The two technology companies announced on Thursday they are to install an undersea cable from the east coast of the US to Spain to help speed up their global internet services.

Fast connectivity is particularly important to Facebook, which wants to encourage users across the world to broadcast live video and meet in virtual reality. Both activities can consume vast amounts of bandwidth.

The project marks yet another example where technology companies are assuming roles traditionally left to public utilities or the government, and until now undersea cables have traditionally been laid by telecommunications incumbents. Meanwhile, Google continues to expand Fiber, its high-speed internet program, Amazon.com effectively is building its own postal service, Uber is attempting to replace regulated cab companies and Facebook is bringing wireless internet to Africa.

The cable will travel from northern Virginia in the US, a major junction point in the global internet, to Bilbao in Spain, and then onward to the rest of Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. The companies said it will be highest-capacity undersea cable yet across the Atlantic. The cost wasn’t disclosed. Another topic at new free games

An infrastructure-focused subsidiary of Telefónica, the Spanish telecom provider, will manage the cable. Construction is scheduled to begin in August 2016 and be completed by October 2017.

Even though Telefónica will sell access to the cable to other companies, Facebook and Microsoft are ensuring they will get premier access to quick data transfers across the sea. In effect, the companies will have their own private highway between two major markets.

There currently are more than a dozen undersea cables between America and Europe.

The decision for Facebook and Microsoft to build their own speaks to their vision for how much bandwidth they will need in the future. At Facebook’s developer conference in San Francisco in April, executives showed how they envision two users on different continents meeting up virtually online using elaborate systems of headsets, cameras and other monitors. The experience will require an extraordinary amount of space on the internet’s backbone.

Facebook’s ability to fund its own cable now is likely to help it maintain its market dominance in the future. While upstart virtual reality companies will have to buy space on others’ undersea cables, Facebook simply will have its own. See more at video game reviews

Microsoft, the famously conservative company best-known for producing office software like Windows, has taken the unexpected step of entering the burgeoning industry of marijuana.

The company, founded by Bill Gates, announced a partnership on Thursday with Kind Financial, a Los Angeles firm that sells computer systems to governments that track legalized marijuana sales. 

Microsoft, which is headquartered in Washington, a state where recreational cannabis is now legal, is licensing Kind to sell Microsoft cloud services to authorities to monitor sales – rather than becoming directly involved in the trade itself.

Kind, founded in 2013, sells pot tracking software to growers, sellers and governments. But even the cannabis company recognizes the foundations of its business is controversial in some quarters.

Its website is straight-laced and includes no images of the multi-tipped leaf synonymous with getting high. And as CEO David Dinenberg stressed repeatedly during a brief interview, “We absolutely do not touch the plant.”

However, Microsoft, has still created a milestone in America’s slow progression towards accepting marijuana, which remains illegal under federal law. For that reason, many banks won’t work with companies involved in the regulated pot industry.

Some 25 states allow the sale of marijuana in certain circumstances, mostly with a prescription or license from a doctor. At least four states plan to vote this fall on following Washington, Oregon and Colorado in permitting recreational use of the drug.

“It’s a pretty substantial day of legitimacy, I believe, for the industry as a whole,” said Dinenberg. In the past, he’s explored partnerships with companies who wound up being “a little apprehensive to hear what the mainstream client would think”. Click here to relax animals for kids

Kind will pursue government pot compliance contracts by pitching Microsoft’s Azure cloud services. Microsoft’s government sales team will work with Kind inbidding on those contracts, Dinenberg said.

Kind and Microsoft already have bid on a contract in Puerto Rico, which began allowing medical use of marijuana this year, Dinenberg said.

“Kind agreed that Azure Government is the only cloud platform designed to meet government standards for the closely regulated cannabis compliance programs,” said Kimberly Nelson, Microsoft’s executive director state and local government solutions. “We look forward to working together to help our government customers launch successful regulatory programs.”

“We go after the contract and we are able to use the Microsoft sales team,” Dinenberg said. “They use their political connections. We use ours.” For more information read at video game reviews

Reviews, last year at E3, virtual reality tech became a dominant presence in the electronic entertainment industry’s largest show.

During this year’s convention, the VR arms race was out in full force.

Facebook’s Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive, two of the most popular and widely available VR platforms for gamers, continue to dominate the E3 show floor. Massive lines were constant at any demo that featured their tech. Despite those two main players grabbing most of the attention, some other new players in the space excited exhibitors.

A new arrival to the virtual reality headset scrum at E3 is Immerex and their VRG-9020. Unveiled to the public on Tuesday, the VRG-9020 was by described by CEO Adam Li as a sleeker, compact end-to-end headset option for movie lovers. Li, who founded the San Diego based company in late 2014, views the focus on the end-to-end system, in which Immerex is their own and only content producer, as a vital aspect of their infant company.

"This is a lifestyle product that will eventually be involved in high end video and movie production,” Li said. “We want to attract modern, tech savvy people that want to watch videos on a mobile platform."

Although the complete product wasn’t available for demos, the VRG did boast impressive high-res video capabilities. The computer, pictured above, looks similar to a CD player and houses the battery and media storage that connects to the headset via a cable.

“The amount of attention we’ve gotten is unbelievable,” Li said. “We never expected this to happen so quickly.” Click here animals for kids get more fun fact for kids

The VRG-9020 does not have a price point yet and will likely ship in the first or second quarter of 2017.

Another huge presence at E3 is mobile phone-compatible VR headset developers. The most recognized name in this space is the Samsung Gear VR, but a new arrival in the space is Zeiss and their VR One. Zeiss, which has been in the optical imagery industry for 170 years, is now playing catch-up to companies like Samsung, but boasts an impressively versatile product.

Unlike the end-to-end experience of the Immerex headset, the VR One utilizes a smart phone display that is inserted into the headset via a detachable tray. It is compatible with smart phones that have 4.7 to 5.5 inch screens and can be used with any virtual reality game or app that is available on Google Cardboard.