The New York Times has just announced its unprecedented collaboration with Flipboard to deliver "full access to its content" for its digital subscribers — the first time the newspaper has offered full access to its content outside of its own catalog of digital offerings. It's certainly a big...
A sublime synthesis
While the Galaxy S III hasn't been subject to quite the same level of region-specific chopping and changing as its predecessor, various carriers and countries are offering Samsung's new flagship with differing components beneath its plastic battery cover. Models with LTE support have been using a dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor in lieu of Samsung's own quad-core Exynos chip, and we've also...
In US federal court this evening, Judge Richard Posner just ruled that the case of Apple v. Motorola will be dismissed in its entirety. The case, in which Apple alleged Motorola was in violation of four of its patents and Motorola was left with one claim in return (the patent counts had originally been higher on both sides), had been in litigation since 2010, most recently with a hearing in Chicago this past Wednesday.
"No more can Apple be permitted to force a trial in federal court the sole outcome of which would be an award of $1."
This isn't the first time Posner has dismissed the case — he had tentatively dismissed it a couple weeks ago, before allowing both sides one more chance to make their case. In his latest ruling, it looks like the reasoning is essentially the same as it was before: neither Apple nor Motorola were able to...
"This case is therefore dismissed with prejudice..." Judge Richard Posner
The MIT Media Lab has developed a system that uses blurred images on peripheral screens to provide a more immersive experience in television and movie watching. The Infinity-By-Nine system developed by Daniel Novy and V. Michael Bove Jr. generates real-time blurred images based on the images on-screen, and projects them to peripheral screens using ceiling-mounted projectors — a little like P...
See the movie, feel the movie, be the movie
In this jam-packed episode of On The Verge, our own Joshua Topolsky sits down with the legendary LeVar Burton to talk about his new Reading Rainbow app, life as a meme, his Star Trek fame, and… Gary Busey. Does LeVar channel his inner Geordi when Josh sets the mood with the distinctive hum of the Enterprise? You'll have to wait until the full episode appears on Monday to find out, but for...
The Agence France-Presse (AFP) has released a new e-diplomacy tool that curates and maps tweets from heads of state and government, officials, thinkers, and activists. The app displays the most-used hashtags, measures an individual's influence (think Klout), and maps the relationships between these important figures. The e-diplomacy hub is an effective way to show which figures are talking about what issues, and where these public diplomatic dialogues are taking place. The site also has a section that displays the Twitter use of militant groups like the Taliban in Afghanistan and Hamas...
Microsoft is lifting the curtain to provide a preview of some of the software and hardware changes for its Windows Phone 8 operating system today. NFC, dual- and quad-core support are all set, and Microsoft has shifted over to the NT kernel for Windows Phone 8 to make it even easier for developers to code for its mobile and desktop ecosystems. There's a new Wallet hub, deeper integration of Skype, and an updated Start Screen interface with support for small tiles. Despite the improvements and hardware support, Microsoft will not release this particular update to existing devices. Instead, the company plans to rollout a Windows Phone 7.8...
Amazon Studios, the film and television production arm of the online retail giant, announced the first film scripts to make it to the company's development process in April, and now it's added four television projects as well. Three comedies and one children's project were selected, including Doomsday, described as a "mockumentary about the supposed end of the world," and the animated comedy The 100 Deaths of Mort Grimley, where the titular...
Amazon's original content business is ramping up
Facebook has quietly made available a new feature called 'find friends nearby' that locates neighboring Facebook users with geolocation and displays them in a list. As TechCrunch reports, the feature has not been officially announced, but is live and working on Facebook's website and through its...
Samsung's Galaxy S III was announced in May, and throughout June it's coming to a number of different US carriers, including T-Mobile. We reviewed the international version of the device a few weeks ago, and luckily for T-Mobile customers little has changed in the device's migration stateside....
We all know the feeling. You're sleepless in the sad hours of the night or stumbling around early on a hazy weekend morning in need of something to read, and that pile of unread books just isn't cutting it. Why not take a break from the fire hose...
Nick Berke of Pogomix has decided to share his method of ripping sounds from movies and TV shows and blending them together to create "mashup" remixes. Berke's process involves extracting audio samples from various media using Adobe Audition, then adding them to an arrangement...
Turning the surface movement of ocean waves into an energy source isn't a new concept, but a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley is proposing a system that would take a different approach — by utilizing the effects waves have on the ocean floor. In a paper published in the P...
In the late 90s, when faced with the task of turning Philip K. Dick's The Minority Report into a feature film, director Steven Spielberg assembled a crack team of forward-thinking minds to envision the technology-saturated world to come. The resulting film was an action movie, through and through. But much of what its various collaborators came up with quickly became hauntingly prophetic. From gesture-based...
Students from the Clark School of Engineering at University of Maryland made history with their human-powered Gamera II helicopter this weekend, keeping the aircraft hovering in the air for 50 seconds. Unfortunately they weren't able to reach...
In 1961, NASA's Plum Brook Reactor Facility in Sandusy, Ohio went live, with a focus on researching nuclear-powered vehicles — first airplanes, and then rockets. It was shut down 12 years later, and in 1998 NASA finally decided to begin the process of decommissioning the site. Wired has...
The US Justice Department's ebook price fixing lawsuit against Apple and two book publishers will head to trial on June 3rd, 2013. District Judge Denise Cote made the date official at the...
News broke earlier this week that Google CEO Larry Page would not take the stage at the I/O developer conference next week because (in the words of executive chairman Eric Schmidt) he has "lost his voice," but the CEO has seen fit to temper fears around the unspecified condition. Both The Wall Street Journal and Reuters report that Page told...
In a feat of dedication and artistic stamina, YouTube user andersramsell has re-created scenes from the iconic sci-fi thriller, Blade Runner, using a staggering 3,285 watercolor paintings. The animation is set to the film's original audio, and the effect is positively haunting — the coarse...
Virginia Tech and U. Penn, who've teamed up in past years to compete in the RoboCup humanoid soccer league, just had a repeat performance in the KidSize competition, beating CIT Brains in the finals for the second year in a row. Mexico City played host to the games this year, which included competitions for home, rescue, and industrial robots outside of the traditional soccer matches — for more background on the tournament and bots, we covered the annual RoboCup competition and Virginia Tech's Dennis Hong in detail last year. Team DARwIn's joint-developed DARwIn OP had to compete against a much-improved humanoid field this year —...
Google is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of mathematician Alan Turing with an interactive doodle based on the Turing machine. To complete the doodle, you must modify the string of commands to make your code match the example given. It starts off simply, but gets progressively harder (the image above is the final problem you'll face). It's a lot of fun and our only complaint is that it doesn't last long enough.
Turing is perhaps most famous for his work on the Bombe decryption...
We've spent some time with a handful of variants of the Samsung Galaxy S III, from the international version to those sold by Sprint and AT&T. Now we've had a chance to test out the version available to T-Mobile customers, a $279.99 phone (with a...
Struggling camera manufacturer Olympus may soon find relief from Sony, according to a new report from Nikkei. The two firms are said to be negotiating a $623 million investment from Sony Corp., which would make it Olympus' largest shareholder,...
Microsoft is making some big moves. Announcements about Surface hardware and Windows Phone 8 software are causing quite a bit of excitement and speculation. Lucky for us, The Vergecasters are back to set the record straight . On this week's episode, senior editor, London resident, and Microsoft fanboy Tom Warren Skypes it up with Josh, Nilay, Ross, and very special guest T.C. Sottek with some in-depth analysis, informed predictions, and a...
Apartment hunting may be about to become much harder, as today, Craigslist issued a cease and desist letter to Padmapper, a popular apartment rental aggregator, forcing it to remove all listings derived from its site. The action signals an aggressive new approach toward sites that display housing listings, and could put similar services in danger. By redisplaying listings on a Google Maps interface, allowing users to sort and view listings...
