Hasta La Gadget!

Out of all the undead, there seems to be a soft spot for zombies – this particular group tends to get more attention than the rest, while the vampire comes in a close second. Werewolves remain a distant third, and when you talk about mummies and the Frankenstein monster, those are few and far in between. Well, expect more zombies with the release of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Ascendance on the Sony PS4 and its predecessor, the Sony PS3.

Out now on the two aforementioned consoles, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Ascendance will see the introduction of a quartet of multiplayer maps, a new directed energy weapon, as well as Infection, which so happens to be the next chapter in Exo Zombies.

The quartet of new maps are called Perplex, Site 244, Climate, and Chop Shop, where it will take the fight to whole new destinations, including an alien crash site located right beneath Mt. Rushmore, all the way to the corridors of a black market exoskeleton complex. It is also nice to see the title feature the Exo Zombies story arc with Infection, which is a totally new chapter where a quartet of survivors find themselves on the outskirts of the mutant-ravaged Atlas Corporation facility, and you will have to handle totally new enemies. It is time to unleash a whole bucketload of pain on the undead! [Press Release]

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Ascendance Arrives On PS4, PS3 , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

It has been a couple of years now since Apple refreshed its set-top box. The Apple TV was recently discounted and this led to speculation that perhaps the company is going to release a new set-top box this year. Those rumors are gathering more steam now and another indication has appeared in their favor, shipping estimates of the existing Apple TV set-top box have started to slip by 1-2 weeks.

Usually this indication means that a refresh is just around the corner, we’ve seen this happen with tablets, smartphones and even MacBooks in the past. Therefore it’s highly likely that Apple may unveil a new set-top box in the near future.

Apple has a keynote coming up at the Worldwide Developers Conference 2015 in June and it’s expected that the company will unveil the new Apple TV at this event.

At WWDC 2015 Apple is also expected to debut its new music streaming service and some believe we might even get to see the company’s much rumored internet TV streaming service, which may be launched later this year in the fall.

As for what the new Apple TV set-top box may bring to the table, it’s expected to be thinner than its predecessor, come with a new tactile remote and even an App Store-like repository for applications and games.

WWDC 2015 takes place from June 8-12th.

Apple TV Shipping Estimates Slip, New Set-Top Box Expected , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Stolen handsets are nothing out of the ordinary, and they seem to be a rather common occurrence these days, which means one ought to be extremely careful with one’s surroundings, making sure that your handset remains safe and sound at all times. The same goes for the tablet, too. Well, it looks like we have a rather serious case of tablet theft here – where an apparent prototype iPad was stolen from a rather lonely man in his 20s. This man is suspected to be an Apple worker.

It has been reported that this unnamed man responded to an online sex ad, and just like many dubious sites online, you might end up getting more than what you are looking for – in a bad way, of course. The victim answered an advert from 20-year old Katherine Stump, only to meet up with her later with her friend Alexander Nejat, who is 24.

Both of them (as you can see above) drove to his house, and while inside, Stump was said to have threatened the man with a knife, while her partner pepper-sprayed him in the face. Other than taking the prototype iPad, they also scooted away wit prescription drugs and $7,500 in cash, A police report was made later on, where the stolen tablet was deemed to be “a test model iPad from Apple”, but it remains to be seen whether the tablet is a prototype of an upcoming iPad, or that of an old device.

Secret Prototype iPad Stolen From Apple Employee , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Microsoft’s BUILD conference is into its second day today and the company has already made quite a few interesting announcements for consumers and developers alike. Usually consumers don’t get to experience the products that Microsoft introduces for developers, they only get to experience what developers build using those products. Microsoft launch a new face detection API for developers but also put it to use on a new website which you can access so see if it can accurately guessing your age.

The idea behind this website was to create an experience that could be both intelligent and fun, and was capable of capturing the attentional of a truly global audience. Microsoft looked at the APIs it had available in the Azure Machine Learning Gallery which contains many finished products.

Microsoft found the ability of its face API to guess age and gender “particularly interesting,” and decided to use it for this project which involves a simple website that anyone can visit around the world to see if the API is smart enough to guess their age.

The website will let people upload their own pictures which is then scanned followed by the API making a guess about the age, users can also decide to pick photos from a web search obviously powered by Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

Results are not accurate all of the time, but it’s fun to try it out if you have a few minutes to kill, the website can be accessed at how-old.net.

Microsoft Launches A New Website To Guess Your Age , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Think of it not as a new deal but a new devolution, an ongoing decline of quality substance, concern, and even basic awareness in public life. With three unfortunately good examples on current display.

First, we have the troubled ongoing roll-out of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Now, it may well be that she is the best qualified candidate for president; I suspect she is. And it is true, as the Clintons’ defenders point out, that there is no smoking gun in the revelations about massive foreign contributions to the Clinton Foundation during her tenure as US secretary of state. Just as there is no smoking gun in the controversy over her decision, decidedly unusual in federal government service, to run all her e-mail as secretary of state through a private e-mail address and server in her personal possession.

But there sure is a heck of a lot of smoke, isn’t there?

Not at all incidentally, we have just learned that more than a thousand foreign contributions to the Clinton Foundation have not been disclosed, despite the apparent policy.

That’s not troubling, is it?

And the messiness around millions in contributions from a Canadian nuclear firm then undergoing takeover by Rosatom, the giant Russian nuclear concern, should not be concerning, either, should it?

Rosatom’s acquisition of the Canadian firm gives it control over one-fifth of US uranium production capacity. Hillary’s State Department was one of the agencies which had to approve this deal, given uranium’s status as an obviously strategic resource.

Now, this is not to say that Vladimir Putin has anything like control over US nuclear weapons. Though Pravda did crow about this coup by the Putin administration; the Kremlin’s security state advisors, many of them ex-KGB like the Russian president, have their hands in all major companies in Russia.

The whopping $500,000 speaking gig for for former President Bill Clinton from a Kremlin-tied Russian investment bank which played a major role in the nuclear takeover deal? Not a concern, either.

If Putin is akin to Hitler, as Hillary claimed in one of her own megabucks speeches last year at UCLA, why such a cozy financial relationship with the Kremlin?

Taking a thousand-mile van ride from her New York mansion out to Iowa as part of her campaign launch was a nice populist touch for HRC, especially since she seems to be adopting a significantly more left-leaning economic stance, but it doesn’t really mesh with the long plutocratic history that the Clinton Foundation controversies highlight.

Moving away from kinkenseiji, the 1980s Japanese term for money politics, it seems that we accidentally killed two Western hostages in one of our supposedly highly-targeted, well-advanced drone strikes. American Warren Weinstein and Italian Giovanni Lo Porto were being held hostage in Pakistan. In a compound that the CIA had ever so carefully targeted for its habitation by Al Qaeda operatives. (Including an American from Orange County who was a real blowhard but not much of a real threat.)

After we belatedly discovered we had killed two people we were supposed to save, without ever knowing they were there, there were some questions about what the heck we are doing with this program.

Amusingly, Senator Dianne Feinstein, then chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee overseeing the program, was asked in 2013 by the New York Times why she was so sure she was getting the truth about the drone program and its supposed lack of civilian casualties from the very agency she insisted was lying to her about its torture programs. Surprised, she replied: “That’s a good question, actually.”

Why yes, it is. A better question is why the CIA, and I’m for a strong CIA, is conducting warfare rather than intelligence. Which is its actual mission.

The drone program is the principal tip of the spear of our global war on terror. And the reality is that we don’t really know much at all about what is going on. Because it’s all a big secret. And that troubling ignorance clearly extends, albeit to a lesser degree, to the folks running the program for the Obama administration.

So when former President George W. Bush attacked Obama for his Middle East policies, I thought at first he might be referencing this. Hah! No such luck.

Instead, Bush blasted Obama, at a speech to the war hawk Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas, for problems with Iran and Isis.

It’s all so ludicrous. What Bush so conveniently forgets is that he himself created the very crises, to the extent they are severe, that he is supposedly so upset about. Absent his disastrous leadership, Iran is still counterbalanced by Iraq and Isis does not exist.

I was recently reminded of discussions with an old school friend from Kuwait when the Iran-Iraq War began in 1980 with Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran. The little oil emirate at the top of the Persian Gulf, stuck in the midst of Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, then had an even tinier navy than it has now. Kuwaiti elites were deeply worried about possible threats to their shipping and ports. For the first few years of the war, as it happened, there was great tension but no major problem. Then Iran, already perturbed by Kuwait’s financing of Saddam Hussein’s war against it, began trying to block Kuwaiti shipping, which often carried Iraqi supplies as well as a heck of a lot of oil.

Ultimately, the US, which already tacitly backed Saddam as a counter against newly revolutionized Iran, providing him with intelligence, fought a successful naval war against Iran to keep the shipping lanes clear.

Later, when Saddam invaded and seized Kuwait, Bush’s father rolled back the invasion but wisely left Saddam in power in Iraq to continue his role countering Iran.

Hard to believe that W still doesn’t get it.

And it’s even harder to believe that Jeb Bush is using many of the same geopolitical advisors who got it so spectacularly wrong on our invasion of Iraq to advise him in his own presidential campaign.

But it’s all of a piece with the new devolution. Careless, thoughtless, ever reliant on lack of awareness.

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