Hasta La Gadget!

Yesterday it was reported that Apple has hired top Nike design director Ben Shaffer to work on wearable devices. Shaffer was the Studio Director at Nike’s Innovation Kitchen, it was said that his work at the company included Nike’s Flyknit shoes and its Fuelband fitness tracker. A new report by Fast Company states that while Shaffer was indeed the studio director at the Innovation Kitchen, he never worked on the Fuelbands. According to the report, Shaffer’s work at Nike was related to “footwear innovation.”

Apparently the Innovation Kitchen is littered with knitting machines and shoe prototypes, but its not where work on the Fuelband is done. The report claims that Fuelband’s development was lead by the Digital Sport group at Nike, which is said to be in a totally different building than the Innovation Kitchen. This certainly contradicts the earlier report which implied that Shaffer had been poached from Nike due to his experience with wearable devices, particularly those that are fitness focused. The iWatch itself is said to be fitness focused, so it seemed logical for Apple to bring someone in who had worked on a similar device before. No confirmation of Shaffer’s appointment at Apple has been made as yet.

Top Nike Design Director Apple Hired Didn’t Reportedly Work On Fuelband original content from Ubergizmo.

Just how does the NSA piece together all that metadata it collects? Thanks to “newly disclosed documents and interviews with officials,” The New York Times today shed light on how the agency plots out the social activity and connections of those it’s spying on. Up until 2010, the NSA only traced and analyzed the metadata of emails and phone calls from foreigners, so anything from US citizens in the chains created stopgaps. Snowden-provided documents note the policy shifted later in that year to allow for the inclusion of Americans’ metadata in such analysis. An NSA representative explained to the NYT that, “all data queries must include a foreign intelligence justification, period.”

During “large-scale graph analysis,” collected metadata is cross-referenced with commercial, public and “enrichment data” (some examples included GPS locations, social media accounts and banking info) to create a contact chain tied to any foreigner under review and scope out its activity. The highlighted ingestion tool in this instance goes by the name Mainway. The NYT article also highlights a secret report, dubbed “Better Person Centric Analysis,” which details how data is sorted into 164 searchable “relationship types” and 94 “entity types” (email and IP addresses, along with phone numbers). Other documents highlight that during 2011 the NSA took in over 700 million phone records daily on its own, along with an “unnamed American service provider” that began funneling in an additional 1.1 billion cellphone records that August. In addition to that, Snowden’s leak of the NSA’s classified 2013 budget cites it as hoping to capture “20 billion ‘record events’ daily” that would be available for review by the agency’s analysts in an hour’s time. As you might expect, the number of US citizens that’ve had their info bunched up into all of this currently remains a secret — national security, of course. Extended details are available at the source links.

Filed under: Misc, Internet

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Via: The Verge

Source: New York Times

If you’ve never heard of the Maersk Line Triple-E, it’s currently the World’s Largest Ship. The vessel measures over 1300-feet-long and 193 feet-wide, and can carry a whopping 18,000 20-foot-long containers of goods. Stood on its end, the Triple-E is 25% taller and almost as wide as New York’s Chrysler building.

Now, you can own this enormous ship in LEGO form – though it is quite a bit smaller than the real deal.

The freshly announced LEGO Maersk Line Triple-E model (#10241) measures about 25″(L) x 8″(H) x 3″(W) when complete, and consists of 1,518 individual LEGO bricks.

The boat model is highly-detailed, complete with rotating gold propellers, twin 8-cylinder engine models, adjustable rudders, moving cranes, detachable lifeboards, and of course lots of little shipping containers. The set also includes a display stand with a fact plaque, as well as the gold coin that has been placed under the mast of Maersk Line ships for good luck.

Keep an eye out on shop.LEGO.com and LEGO Stores in January 2014 to order this awesome model of this modern engineering marvel for $149.99(USD).

Lego just announced that it will sell a brick version of the Maersk Triple-E, the world's largest ship.

(Credit: Lego)

Owners of the new Lego version of the Maersk Line Triple-E might be tempted to smash a bottle of champagne against it once they’re done building, given that it’s a model of the world’s largest ship.

Alas, the model would probably smash to bits. Still, maritime and Lego fans alike may want to rush out in January to buy the new $150 set. Comprised of 1,518 bricks, the Lego Maersk Triple-E re-creates the real ship with what the toy company said is a high attention to detail.

The largest ship in the world — in Lego! (pictures)

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Apple’s iPad has long dominated the tablet market. It is by far one of the most insanely popular tablets available in the market, demand for Apple’s slate has skyrocketed since 2010 when the original iPad came out. However, according to ABI Research, Android tablets are now giving the iPad a run for its money. The research firm believes that iPad has now “passed the baton” to the Android ecosystem and they provide numbers to back this statement up. The firm’s research indicates that in the second quarter of 2013, the iPad was outsold by Android tablets with 30.5 million units being sold as opposed to Apple’s 14.5 million. In Q2, tablet sales generated $12.7 billion in revenue, the iPad look slightly less than 50 percent. Notwithstanding the nominal market share of Windows RT and Windows Pro tablets, it appears that Android tablets are now raking in a significant chunk of the revenues as well.

Regardless of the gains made by Android tablets, the manufacturers still haven’t been able to beat the iPad brand. These numbers represent Android tablets manufactured by a plethora of companies against the iPad, which belongs to just one company, Apple. The closest someone has come to Apple in this regard is Samsung, which sold nearly 8.1 million Android tablets alone in the second fiscal quarter of 2013.

Android Tablets Giving The iPad A Run For Its Money [Research] original content from Ubergizmo.