Microsoft working on Vermeer, a 'touchable' 360-degree holographic display (video)

Vermeer
Touchable is a stretch when talking about Vermeer, but we'd definitely call it interactive. Instead of hiding the 360-degree display under an acrylic or glass dome it uses a parabolic reflector to float a 3D "object" in space and tracks hand motions with an IR sensor or Kinect. It's not unlike RePro3D, but with slightly less bulky hardware. Don't take our word for it though, check out the video after the break.

Continue reading Microsoft working on Vermeer, a 'touchable' 360-degree holographic display (video)

Microsoft working on Vermeer, a 'touchable' 360-degree holographic display (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 08 Jan 2012 04:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/08/microsoft-working-on-vermeer-a-touchable-hologram/

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Marine Corps May Lose 27,000 Troops Under Pentagon Cuts

I want to relay my many thanks to everyone at Marine Corps Association and Military Historical Tours for providing me the opportunity to experience such a wonderful trip to Russia. Had I not won this trip through MCA I may have never taken advantage of such fantastic travels. The group, the Russian Tour guide (Oleg Alexandrov) and Charlie Dunn were wonderful companions during the trip. It will be a memory I will cherish all of my remaing days on this earth.

Again, Many thanks and Semper Fidelis!

Source: http://www.mca-marines.org/node/18074

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CatholicNewsSvc: CNS Rome bureau: Pope names 22 new cardinals, including three North Americans: http://t.co/dAzzmLcG #CNSstory

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UK police identify body found on queen's estate (AP)

LONDON ? The remains of a woman found on one of Queen Elizabeth's vast estates belong to a 17-year-old missing girl, British detectives investigating the murder said Sunday.

Forensic tests identified the decomposed body as that of Latvian Alisa Dmitrijeva, who was reported missing from her home in eastern England in August, Norfolk Police said.

The body was found by a dog walker on New Year's Day in woodland three miles (five kilometers) from the royal residence at Sandringham House.

Sandringham, in rural Norfolk, is a vast estate where Queen Elizabeth II and her family traditionally gather to celebrate the holiday season. The royal family is not implicated in the crime in any way.

Part of the nearly 31-square-mile (8,000-hectare) estate is open to the public, and the body was found at Anmer, a hamlet of several dozen people.

Detective Chief Inspector Jes Fry, who is probing the case, said police are trying to find out about any activity that took place on or near the site in August through September, and looking for people who may have worked in the area.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/britain/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120108/ap_on_re_eu/eu_britain_human_remains

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Euthanasia to control shelter population unpopular

This undated photo courtesy of Best Friends Animal Society shows Turtle Dove, a Labrador retriever, resting at the Best Friends Animal Society in Kenab, Utah. Best Friends Animal Society operates the country's largest no-kill sanctuary for abandoned and abused animals. (AP Photo/Best Friends Animal Society, Molly Wald)

This undated photo courtesy of Best Friends Animal Society shows Turtle Dove, a Labrador retriever, resting at the Best Friends Animal Society in Kenab, Utah. Best Friends Animal Society operates the country's largest no-kill sanctuary for abandoned and abused animals. (AP Photo/Best Friends Animal Society, Molly Wald)

This undated photo courtesy of Best Friends Animal Society shows a cat named Cala Lilly at the Best Friends Animal Society in Kenab Utah. Best Friends Animal Society operates the country's largest no-kill sanctuary for abandoned and abused animals. (AP Photo/Best Friends Animal Society, Molly Wald)

This undated photo courtesy of Best Friends Animal Society shows Stray Moon, a boxer, left, and Patagonia, a hound mix, as they play at the Best Friends Animal Society in Kenab, Utah. Best Friends Animal Society operates the country's largest no-kill sanctuary for abandoned and abused animals. (AP Photo/Best Friends Animal Society, Molly Wald)

(AP) ? Seven in 10 pet owners say they believe animal shelters should be allowed to euthanize animals only when they are too sick to be treated or too aggressive to be adopted.

Only a quarter of the people who took part in a recent AP-Petside.com poll said animal shelters should sometimes be allowed to put animals down as a population control measure.

Gisela Aguila, 51, of Miramar, Fla., believes shelter animals should only be euthanized when there is no chance they'll be adopted ? for example, if they are extremely ill or aggressive. "I don't think shelters should be euthanizing animals to control the population," she said.

She'd like to see an end to shelters destroying animals when they run out of room, saying, "We are way too civilized of a society to allow this."

But Leslie Surprenant, 53, of Saugerties, N.Y., believes shelters should be allowed to control populations. She says no-kill shelters that only accept animals with good prospects for adoption or that turn away animals once the shelter reaches capacity do not solve the problem.

"That doesn't truly mean no-kill shelters. It means there are more animals out on the streets being hit by cars and starving and living in Dumpsters," said Surprenant, who has two dogs and a cat. "It does not mean the general population is lower; it just means that they've opted not to kill."

Surprenant believes spaying and neutering is the way to go. In fact, higher rates of spaying and neutering in recent decades have cut the number of abandoned puppies and kittens, which in turn has cut euthanasia rates. Before 1970, about 20 million animals were euthanized each year in this country. In 2011, fewer than 4 million abandoned animals were euthanized.

Younger pet owners are most likely to favor no-kill policies, with 79 percent of those under 30 saying shelters should only euthanize animals that are untreatable or too aggressive, compared with 67 percent of those age 50 or over saying that.

The poll results are encouraging to leaders of the nation's no-kill movement, who'd like to see the U.S. become a "no-kill nation" with homes for every adoptable pet, and euthanasia reserved only for extremely ill or aggressive animals.

Any plan will take teamwork between shelters with government contracts that must accept every animal and the no-kill shelters that often only take animals they can help, said Ed Sayres, president and CEO of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Rich Avanzino, president of Alameda-based Maddie's Fund, pioneered no-kill in San Francisco in the early '90s through a pact between the open-admission city shelter and the local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

"We are just a breath away from doing what is right for the animals," Avanzino said.

He believes the country can achieve no-kill status by 2015, partly due to corporate giving to animal causes, which totaled about $30 million in 2010 and is expected to reach $70 million by 2015. That money can help with spaying, neutering and outreach, he said.

Public attitudes are also changing, with more people saying it's unacceptable for pets to languish or die in an animal shelter, Avanzino said.

Avanzino pioneered the no-kill concept in San Francisco. Sayres succeeded him and nurtured it, then went to New York and implemented it there in a much bigger way. The model is the same, but instead of two partner agencies like in San Francisco, New York has 155, Sayres said.

About 44,000 animals enter New York City shelters each year. Since Sayres has been there, the euthanasia rate has dropped from 74 percent to 27 percent.

The ASPCA has also teamed up with 11 communities from Tampa, Fla., to Spokane, Wash., in no-kill efforts, Sayres said.

He believes he will see a no-kill nation, at least for dogs, in his lifetime. Cats may take a little longer because of the large feral population, he said.

The euthanasia issue attracted some attention this week when it was reported that a stray cat being held at a West Valley City, Utah, animal shelter survived two trips to the shelter's gas chamber. The shelter has stopped trying to kill the cat, named Andrea, and she has been adopted. Shelter officials are investigating why the gassing failed.

Best Friends Animal Society operates the country's largest no-kill sanctuary for abandoned and abused animals. The Kanab, Utah, preserve is home to 1,700 dogs, cats, birds, rabbits, horses and wildlife undergoing rehabilitation, said Best Friends director Gregory Castle.

More than 800 grass-roots rescue organizations belong to Best Friends' No More Homeless Pets Network and are working to make their communities no-kill, Castle said. Attendance at an annual conference for network members has grown from 250 in 2001 to 1,300 last year.

The sanctuary's newest venture is a groundbreaking effort involving what Castle believes is the largest public-private partnership ever forged in the no-kill movement.

Best Friends is going to operate a shelter for the Department of Animal Services in Los Angeles as an adoption and spay and neuter center, he said. All animals will come from six open-admission Los Angeles city shelters.

The coalition's initial goal is 3,000 adoptions and 6,000 sterilization procedures, Castle said.

Differences in the varying no-kill campaigns are mostly a matter of nuance, Castle said, and how you define sick and aggressive.

Nathan Winograd, director of the Oakland-based No Kill Advocacy Center, believes 95 percent of all animals entering shelters can be adopted or treated. And even though the other 5 percent might be hopelessly injured, ill or vicious, he said they should not all be doomed.

Some, if not most of them, can be cared for in hospice centers or sanctuaries, he said. As for pit bulls and other dogs with aggressive reputations, he said shelters need to do a better job of trying to find them homes.

The AP-Petside.com Poll was conducted Oct. 13-17, 2011, by GfK Roper Public Affairs and Corporate Communications. It involved landline and cellphone interviews with 1,118 pet owners. Results among pet owners have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.

___

AP Global Director of Polling Trevor Tompson, Deputy Director of Polling Jennifer Agiesta and News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius contributed to this report.

___

Online: http://www.petside.com/no-kill-shelters

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2012-01-05-Pets-No%20Kill%20Nation/id-f7341cc2f0d14e2b89a1d84288922e3a

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Featured: Rockchip Wants to Bring Android 4.0 Tablets in US and EU for Under $100

Rockchip, an ARM chip market for inexpensive tablets, wants to bring Android 4.0 tablets in USA and Europe, from China. After the big news that Ainovo wants to make a $100 Android 4.0 tablet, using the MIPS architecture, it seems Chinese companies want to do it too now, and they want to expand to US and Europe to enlarge their markets and have higher profits.

One of the reasons I believe Android can?t be beaten in market share anymore, is because it can be used for any kind of device, and it can easily bring down prices fast in a certain market, thanks to it being an open source OS that is free for manufacturers. The Chinese manufacturers have paid attention to the ?success? of the $100 HP Touchpad firesale, and they know there?s a huge market for tablets that work reasonably well, have the latest OS, and cost $100-$150.?The $200 Kindle Fire has also reinforced this idea that cheap tablets are popular, and millions of people at a time want to buy them.

Rockchip will face competition from ARM titans like Qualcomm, TI, Nvidia and even Samsung in Europe and US, but I think they know those chip makers won?t compete with them directly for now, because they won?t be in tablets that are so cheap. So the road is clear for Rockchip to dominate the very low end of the tablet market.

MIPS will be their main competitor at that level, however MIPS has one small disadvantage of not being able to run most 3D games and other applications that have been written with native code and not in Java. The Dalvik virtual machine works across architectures, but native code doesn?t by default. So unless the developers adopt that architecture, too, some apps won?t work on MIPS, although 95% of them should still work. Still it?s an advantage that Rockchip will have over MIPS and their tablets.

Tags: android 4.0, ARM, featured, MIPS, rockchip

Category: androidheadlines.com

Source: http://androidheadlines.com/2012/01/featured-rockchip-wants-to-bring-android-4-0-tablets-in-us-and-eu-for-under-100.html

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PFT: Fisher to pick Rams or Dolphins next week

fisher-jeff-101226Getty Images

Earlier this week, we pointed out that the Jeff Fisher Leverage Game had begun.? We then observed that the Jeff Fisher Leverage Game was working.

Now, the Jeff Fisher Leverage Game is moving toward its climax.

Friday?s announcement that Fisher will pick either the Rams or the Dolphins narrowed his options, but necessarily publicly pitted two franchises against each other.? Last night?s report from Howard Balzer of 101espn.com that Fisher is on the verge of picking the Rams over the Dolphins likely will prompt the Dolphins to accelerate their efforts to make it rain over Fisher in the hopes of getting him to choose South Beach over St. Louis.

In the end, the question becomes how much money Fisher is willing to leave on the table, if he?s inclined to coach the Rams.

Fisher is wise, or at least shrewd, to make it known at this point that he?s leaning toward the Rams.? Dolphins owner Stephen Ross seems to be more desperate than Rams owner Stan Kroenke to hire a guy with a recognizable name, and it already has been reported that Ross won?t be outbid for Fisher.

So if Ross ups the ante, Kroenke may feel compelled to sweeten the deal.? And Ross could then throw some more cash onto the pile.? With each step in this waltz, Fisher wins.

Even though Ross seems to be willing to overpay for the biggest name on this year?s market in lieu of finding the next Sean Payton or Mike McCarthy or Mike Tomlin from the ranks of assistant coaches, there?s a certain point where the money gap should get Fisher?s attention.? Sure, picking Miami would put Fisher in the same division with Bill Belichick and Tom Brady.? But the AFC currently has only three teams that can be regarded as elite:? the Patriots, Ravens, and Steelers.? In the NFC, Fisher would have to deal with a crowded two tiers of teams (Packers, 49ers, Saints, Falcons, Giants, Lions, Eagles, Cowboys) that could take turns dominating the conference over the next five years.

Besides, the NFC West no longer consists of a four-pack of Twinkies.? The Niners will be competitive for as long as Jim Harbaugh is the coach.? The Seahawks and Cardinals finished strong in 2011.? As a result, 7-9 went from being good enough for first place to good enough for third place in only one year.

And so, while Balzer?s report is surely based on legitimate information originating with Fisher?s camp, it?s the flip side of Mike Silver?s report from earlier in the week, which pointed to Fisher picking the Fins.? The carefully orchestrated dance will continue, until Fisher has coaxed the maximum offer out of both owners.? Then, and only then, will we know what Fisher definitely will do.

Source: http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2012/01/06/jeff-fisher-says-his-decision-will-come-next-week/related/

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Boxer is an awesome free Mac app that lets you relive your DOS playing days

If you?re the type of person who loved old school DOS games and you also own a Mac then you owe it to yourself to go and check out Boxer, a free Mac app that ?plays all the MS-DOS games of your misspent youth? on your machine.

Emulators and ROMs that port old games from the past too today?s range of computers and phones have been popular for some while but Boxer is 100% dedicated Mac app. It?s based on the hugely successful DOSBox?emulator and it literally builds games into apps, as it explains on its site:

Boxer takes your CDs, floppies and bootleg game copies and wraps them into?app-style gameboxes you just click to play. They?re self-contained so you can back them up or share them with friends. No mess, no fuss.

The games look and feel like the originals, and run at full screen resolution with no quality issues, as this shot from Commander Keen 4 shows:

commander keen boxer1 520x444 Boxer is an awesome free Mac app that lets you relive your DOS playing days

Those who had big boxes of floppies or CDs in the past can relive the feeling of being well stocked as Boxer turns the folder on your Mac into a virtual shelf, which is a nice touch.

virtual shelf boxer 520x319 Boxer is an awesome free Mac app that lets you relive your DOS playing days

Boxer 1.2?has recently been unwrapping (running on for OS X 10.5 upwards) and the newer version has tweaked its look and feel (adding MT-32?emulation), improved usability, fixed some bugs and, most importantly, added support for a bunch of new games.

This video uses the older version of the app but it still gives an clear idea of how Boxer works, and the kind of fun you can have with it:

Boxer is yet to make it into the Mac Store but there are plans to do so at some point according to the developer behind the project. For now, it can be downloaded from its website, and ? good news ? there are no plans to introduce any subscription and it will remain free.

? Boxer

Source: http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/01/05/boxer-is-an-awesome-free-mac-app-that-lets-you-relive-your-dos-playing-days/

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5 dead, others wounded in Nigeria church attack (AP)

GOMBE, Nigeria ? Gunmen attacked a church in northeast Nigeria during a prayer service Thursday night, killing at least five people and wounding others in an assault that occurred amid an increasingly violent campaign by a radical Muslim sect.

Pastor Johnson Jauro said the gunfire sprayed the Deeper Life Church in Gombe, the capital of Gombe state, injuring several worshippers and killing his wife and two others. He spoke at a local hospital, where a joint team of soldiers and police officers stood guard. Two other people later died at the hospital from their wounds and an Associated Press reporter saw their bodies.

Local police spokesman Ahmed Muhammad confirmed the attack, but declined to say how many people the gunmen killed and wounded.

The assault occurred as Nigeria remains under attack by the sect known as Boko Haram. The oil-rich nation's president recently put regions of the country under a state of emergency due to the threat, but that did not include Gombe, which sits about 350 miles (570 kilometers) from Nigeria's central capital, Abuja.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, but suspicion immediately fell on Boko Haram. The sect has carried out increasingly sophisticated and bloody attacks in its campaign to implement strict Shariah law across Nigeria, a multiethnic nation of more than 160 million people.

Boko Haram, whose name means "Western education is sacrilege" in the local Hausa language, is responsible for more than 500 killings this year alone, according to an Associated Press count. The group claimed responsibility for an attack that killed at least 39 people in a Christmas Day bombing of a Catholic church near Abuja, as well as a suicide car bombing targeting the U.N. headquarters in the capital that killed 25 people and wounded more than 100.

Nigeria's weak central government has been slow to respond to the sect.

On Dec. 31, President Goodluck Jonathan declared regions of Borno, Niger, Plateau and Yobe states to be under a state of emergency ? meaning authorities can make arrests without proof and conduct searches without warrants. He also ordered international borders near Borno and Yobe state to be closed.

However, it remains unclear what effect that will have on a sect that has adopted hit-and-run attacks and suicide bombings to target the country's military and police, as well as civilians.

Meanwhile, a military spokesman said Thursday that soldiers killed two armed men suspected to be Boko Haram members after "resisting arrest" in the northeastern city of Maiduguri. Lt. Col. Hassan Ifijeh Mohammed said the army believes the gunmen were responsible for an attack Wednesday evening that left two people dead.

However, human rights activists say security forces have carried out so-called "extra-judicial killings" out of frustration and anger at being unable to stop Boko Haram.

___

Associated Press writers Ibrahim Garba in Kano, Nigeria; Njadvara Musa in Maiduguri, Nigeria and Jon Gambrell in Lagos, Nigeria contributed to this report.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/world/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120105/ap_on_re_af/af_nigeria_violence

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