HTC is spinning off its Vive VR business after all

HTC-Vive-14-1-800x420HTC may have hit some good points in the tech market of late, thanks to the relatively more successful HTC 10 and especially the HTC Vive VR, but it isn’t out of the woods just yet. At a shareholder’s meeting, company CEO Cher Wang and head of global sales Chang Chia-lin revealed efforts to establish a wholly owned subsidiary that … Continue reading

Photonic Swiss watch engraving might keep counterfeiters at bay

Counterfeit jewelry is a big business. Sometimes the fakes are so convincing that it can be nearly impossible to tell if that Rolex you’re eying is the real deal unless you have special equipment or an extremely trained eye. That’s something the folk…

Street Fighter V’s 1st July Update Will Feature Balrog

If you play games because you enjoy learning about the game’s story, then you might be pleased to learn that Street Fighter V will be getting a story mode. The story mode was actually announced and confirmed earlier this year where it was originally pegged for a release in June, but it seems that it has been slightly delayed.

The good news is that the delay is only for a couple of days. Like we said, the original release was for June but now according to Capcom’s post on the PlayStation Blog, the update has since been set for the 1st of July where it will be released at midnight Pacific Time. Even better news is that the update will also bring about a new character to the SFV roster in the form of Balrog.

According to Capcom, “Balrog is one of the most iconic characters in Street Fighter history, first appearing as one of the Four Kings of Shadaloo in Street Fighter II as a boss character. He’s always been one of the most vicious characters to ever appear in the series, using his devastating boxing style to knock out his opponents.”

The update will also bring about the story mode as promised, and the Ibuku character. There will also be new stages and costumes for players to choose from, all of which can be unlocked either using real money or fight money. In the meantime players can check out Balrog’s reveal trailer in the video above.

Street Fighter V’s 1st July Update Will Feature Balrog , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Bethesda Reiterates That Elder Scrolls 6 Is Still Years & Years Away

skyrim-DawnguardDuring E3, Bethesda’s director Todd Howard revealed that the Elder Scrolls 6 is being worked on, although he also added that they are a long way off from actually announcing anything. However recently it seems that there are some contradicting statements from the company as Bethesda’s marketing exec Pete Hines revealed on Twitter that they aren’t working on the game at the moment.

However Hines later followed up with a tweet that said that the game was still years and years away. Howard had also backtracked on his earlier statement in an interview which had quoted him as saying, “I should have never said a number because we have so many things. You could add it up in different ways. You could say it’s bigger or smaller. They’re a long way off. I think the larger point was, no one should expect to hear about those [games] anytime soon. We always overlap projects. We just have more going on now than we had before.”

So what can we take away from all of this? While it does sound contradictory, basically what we can take away from this entire thing is that the Elder Scrolls franchise is still here to stay and that the studio has not given up on it yet. While we suppose it is obvious that eventually there will be an Elder Scrolls 6, it won’t be out anytime soon as Bethesda is focusing on other titles at the moment, which we think is ultimately the message they are trying to get across.

That being said, Bethesda did recently state that they plan to make Skyrim: Special Edition as next-gen as possible, which hopefully will be able to tide gamers and keep the interest alive and well until the next Elder Scrolls game is released.

Bethesda Reiterates That Elder Scrolls 6 Is Still Years & Years Away , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Resident Evil 7 Won’t Put You In The Shoes Of A Hero

resident evil 7So far Capcom’s Resident Evil franchise has put players in the role of a hero, which we guess is kind of the norm since a lot of games usually puts players in those kinds of position where they are the hero and it is their job to stop an alien invasion, prevent war, or in the case of Resident Evil, stop zombies and monsters and to take down Umbrella Corp.

However with Resident Evil 7, it seems that Capcom really wants to revisit its horror roots because on its Unity Blog, the game’s producer Masachika Kawata and director Kōshi Nakanishi discuss the development of the game. According to Nakanishi, “Looking back at the history of the series and thinking ‘How do we get people playing today to experience the same fear that they felt in 1996 with the first game? How do we bring that up to date and bring that emotion back?’ That question and the answer is what led us to make the gameplay system as you see in the demo.”

To achieve that, Kawata states that they had to make players feel “powerless”. “To bring the horror experience right to the player, we thought now that you’re in first person you’ll feel like you’re there. You can’t be looking through the perspective of a macho, hero character because that’s not you at home. Or maybe you are macho, I don’t know [laughs]. It’s sort of a powerless, ordinary person you’re playing as.”

While we’d hate to draw comparisons, so far from what we can tell in the demo, it kind of reminds us of the P.T. demo for Konami’s cancelled Silent Hill, which is a good thing actually as it does look kind of scary. Resident Evil 7 is expected to be released on the 24th of January, 2017 meaning that gamers still have a bit of waiting to do.

Resident Evil 7 Won’t Put You In The Shoes Of A Hero , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Writing aid for the blind provides a case study for “compassionate engineering” at Carnegie Mellon

comp_eng New mobile games and robot butlers are all well and good, but there are also many applications for the latest technology in poverty-stricken school districts and in the service of the disabled. A Carnegie Mellon project that targets both of those things is described by its leaders as an exercise in what they call “compassionate engineering.” Read More

Volkswagen To Announce $15 Billion U.S. Diesel Emissions Settlement: REPORT

WASHINGTON, June 27 (Reuters) – Volkswagen AG’s settlement with nearly 500,000 U.S. diesel owners and government regulators over polluting vehicles is valued at more than $15 billion cash, a source briefed on the matter said on Monday.

The settlement, to be announced on Tuesday in Washington, includes $10.03 billion to offer buybacks to owners of about 475,000 polluting vehicles and nearly $5 billion in funds to offset excess diesel emissions and boost zero emission vehicles, the source said.

A separate settlement with nearly all U.S. state attorneys general over excess diesel emissions will be announced on Tuesday and is expected to be more than $500 million and will push the total to over $15 billion, a separate source briefed on the matter said.

Spokeswomen for U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Volkswagen declined to comment.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, due to court-imposed gag rules, the original source said that owners of 2.0 liter diesel VW 2009-2015 cars will receive an average of $5,000 in compensation along with the estimated value of the vehicles as of September 2015, before the scandal erupted.

Prior owners will get half of current owners, while people who leased cars will also get compensation, said the original source.

Owners would also receive the same compensation if they choose to have the vehicles repaired, assuming U.S. regulators approve a fix at a later date.

The settlement includes $2.7 billion in funds to offset excess diesel emissions and $2 billion for green energy and zero emission vehicle efforts, the source said. The diesel offset fund could rise if VW has not fixed or bought back 85 percent of the vehicles by mid-2019, the first source said.

The settlement, the largest ever automotive buyback offer in U.S. history and most expensive auto industry scandal, stems from the German automaker’s admission in September 2015 that it intentionally misled regulators by installing secret software that allowed U.S. vehicles to emit up to 40 times legally allowable pollution.

VW still must reach agreement with regulators on whether it will offer to buyback 85,000 larger 3.0 liter Porsche, Audi and VW cars and SUVs that emitted up to nine times legally allowable pollution and how much it may face in civil fines for admitting to violating the Clean Air Act.

Reuters reported earlier the initial VW settlement would not include civil penalties under the U.S. Clean Air Act or address about 80,000 larger 3.0 liter Audi, Porsche and VW vehicles that emitted less pollution than 2.0 liter vehicles. A deal covering the 3.0 liter vehicles may still be months away.

The settlement does not address lawsuits from investors or a criminal investigation by the Justice Department.

Regulators will not immediately approve fixes for the 2.0 liter vehicles – and may not approve fixes for all three generations of the polluting 2009-2015 vehicles, sources previously told Reuters.

The actual amount VW will spend will depend on how many vehicles are repurchased.

Owners will have two years to decide whether to sell back vehicles – and it is not clear when EPA and California will decide whether to approve fixes, which may not eliminate all excess emissions.

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco will hold a hearing on July 26 to decide on whether to grant preliminary approval to the settlements. If granted he would hold a later hearing to give final approval. Buybacks are likely to start no earlier than October, the first source said.

In April, VW set aside $18.2 billion to account for the emissions scandal.

VW had said the scandal impacted 11 million vehicles worldwide and lead to the departure of CEO Martin Winterkorn.

Last week, Germany’s financial watchdog called on prosecutors to investigate VW’s entire former management board over the time it took to disclose the carmaker’s emissions test cheating, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters.

German prosecutors said this month they are investigating Winterkorn and a second unidentified executive over whether they effectively manipulated markets by delaying the release of information about the firm’s emissions test cheating. (Reporting by David Shepardson, editing by G Crosse and Bernard Orr)

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Raising My Voice for Ethiopian Girls

This article was posted in Ms Magazine on June 14, 2016 by Achie Gezahegne, Rise Up Girl Leader (Let Girls Lead is an initiative of Rise Up, which advances health, education and equity for girls, youth and women everywhere).

I still have a vivid memory of a room filled with over 35 girls, each with her own powerful ideas, strong presence, and remarkable depth. We all came together for a Let Girls Lead training with the aim of solving the problems facing girls in Ethiopia. But little did we know that the event would come to redefine our perceptions of the power of girls.

The strength of our voices together was contagious. I felt amazed not only at what I observed before me, but also imagining what was possible. The power to question, speak, refuse and fight was innate, though buried in social and ethical barriers. Our power had been covered by fear, struggle and abuse. My own power was obscured in a web of economic and social burden, traditional barriers, expectations and stereotypical misrepresentations.

From the girls’ training to the Ethiopia National Girl Summit to the World Government Summit in Dubai, Rise Up enabled me to go on the journey of a lifetime to represent Ethiopian girls. I held discussions in schools to get the perspective of others like me, I traveled to New York for the Commission on the Status of Women, and I returned to Ethiopia to participate in the global Financing for Development (FFD) meeting, all to advocate for girls’ rights and potential. The FFD meeting offered a hands on experience in the development of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as I and other Rise Up girl leaders spoke with delegates, ambassadors, local and international ministers and policy makers, UN officials, all of whom had a say in the negotiation, development and approval of the SDGs.

We, as girl leaders fighting for other girls in Ethiopia and around the world, set out to contribute to the process of putting girls at the center of these global goals for 2030. I believe we have succeeded.

After the after the adoption of the SDGs in September of 2015 with girls at the center, the next steps are integration and implementation. The coming fourteen years will delineate a new outline for the world if these ambitious goals are strengthened by potent implementers and joint contribution from governments, civil societies and the people of the world.

In my own way of being a part of this and continuing with what has been a very rewarding experience, I am going to finish my undergraduate degree in either Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering or Civil and Environmental Engineering – fields not usually encouraged for women. Then I want to join in my country’s journey of eradicating poverty. Hand in hand with others, I would like to start up an institution to help girls defeat their challenges by peer counseling, mentorship, guidance, and training.

I am optimistic that by 2030, girls will take a step forward in transforming communities at the national and international level. In Ethiopia by 2030, I want to see girls dressed in their traditional wear going to school safe and filled with hope, never having to choose between being an Ethiopian girl and being successful. I want to see an Ethiopia where girls’ education is not hindered by harmful traditional practices or cultural beliefs that force girls to follow in the footsteps of their mothers. I want to see the eradication of female genital mutilation and child marriage.

I believe with strong implementation and government dedication, with the inclusion of girls in policy making, 2030 will be the start of a new era in Ethiopia in the consolidation of democracy and realization of national goals. It will mean taking one more step forward in the journey of transformation from a world of male domination to a world dominated by good ideas, and by women and men working together to implement them.

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Achie Gezahegne Gebre is a graduating high school honor student from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia who has volunteered for the Young Women’s Christian Association of Ethiopia for two years, in coordinator and leadership positions for diverse programs. She is an award-winning essayist dedicated to advancing the rights of women and girls in education and health.

Rise Up advances the education health and equity of girls, youth and women everywhere. Rise Up unifies the power of Let Girls Lead, Champions for Change and the Youth Champions Initiative, to benefit 115 million girls, youth, and women globally.

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The Senate Wants To Let The FBI See Your Browser History. This Democrat Is Trying To Stop It.

WASHINGTON — Last week, Republican leaders in the Senate held open a floor vote for an hour, trying to corral support for legislation that would have given the FBI the power to search Americans’ browser histories without a warrant. That attempt failed narrowly, so the upper chamber will likely give it another go.

At least, that’s what Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a staunch privacy advocate, predicts will happen.

When senators were first alerted that the provision would be brought up, Wyden thought the move seemed sudden. Lawmakers didn’t have much time to figure out what they were voting on.

“A conservative came up to me and said, ‘Do you think people know that under this [bill], without any court approval the government can get people’s browsing history?’” Wyden told The Huffington Post. “I said, ‘I don’t think most of the Senate knows that.’”

The measure, authored by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Richard Burr (R-N.C.), would have allowed the FBI to use an administrative subpoena to gather people’s digital records, including email, chat records and browsing history. The provision would have been attached to a larger spending bill.

McCain and others called for its passage in light of the Orlando, Florida, massacre, arguing that the measure would help the FBI better identify terror threats.

In a floor speech leading up to the vote, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) said the amendment would help the FBI to “connect the dots,” which he added is the “biggest problem that they’ve had in identifying these homegrown, radicalized terrorists, like the shooter in Orlando.”

Burr said that under current law the FBI is forced to wait for court approval before it can access web history, which he claimed isn’t feasible during an emergency.

But Wyden called that a cop-out. Under the USA Freedom Act, in a section he said he wrote himself, the FBI is able to “demand all of these records immediately in an emergency and get court approval after the fact.”

Indeed, the electronic records of Omar Mateen, the man who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State moments before attacking the gay club in Orlando, had been previously reviewed by authorities twice, according to FBI Director James Comey. That’s why Wyden considers the new push a “knee-jerk” reaction to Orlando.

“If you know what websites a person is visiting, it’s akin to spying on their thoughts,” Wyden said, adding that he’s geared up to fight whenever Republican leaders try to bring the measure up again.

The 58-38 vote didn’t reach the 60-vote threshold needed to overcome a filibuster, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) flipped his vote to no at the very end, which allows him to bring the measure back up when he sees fit. On Friday, a spokesman for McConnell said there were no scheduled announcements on the amendment. 

“We only won by a couple of votes, but we still have to win again because there is going to be a revote,” said Wyden, who vowed to talk to as many of his colleagues as he could to round up sufficient opposition.

In particular, he’s appealing to senators who voted last year against allowing the National Security Agency to continue its bulk metadata collection program of Americans’ phone records.

“Web browsing history is also incredibly revealing,” Wyden said. “If you know a person visits the website of a mental health professional, or a substance abuse support group, or a political organization, or a particular dating site, you know a lot about that person. To me, this level of intrusiveness ought to come with court oversight and they ought to get a court warrant unless it’s an emergency.”

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Donald Trump's Adviser Has Been Battling Multiculturalism Since High School

On Monday, Politico published a lengthy profile of Stephen Miller, the 30-year-old Senate staffer turned Donald Trump adviser who now revs up crowds for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee by railing against trade, immigration and political correctness.

It’s a comprehensive look at Miller, from his early conservative rabble-rousing to his time as a top staffer for Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the first senator to endorse Trump, to his role today — which involves everything from warming up crowds to attending policy meetings to ordering Ubers. The piece, written by Julia Ioffe, is well worth the read to understand the mindset of a person who could very well be a top policy adviser to the next president of the United States.

What’s striking about Miller is how far back his animus toward multiculturalism and political correctness — particularly with regard to race and ethnicity — actually goes. Miller has been pushing back against a multiculturalist society since he was 16, an age when most kids are more worried about passing their driver’s test than about changing cultural norms.

The first target of Miller’s political ire, at least in print, was Santa Monica High School, from which he graduated in 2003. The area, then as now, was liberal and had a large Latino community. Miller didn’t like the school’s leadership — they said the Pledge of Allegiance too infrequently, praised the U.S. too little and allowed too much Spanish to be spoken, according to various columns he later wrote.

He didn’t drop the issue even after he graduated. In 2005, when Miller was in college, he devoted most of a 1,600-word column at the conservative site FrontPage Magazine to attacking Oscar de la Torre, a member of the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District’s board. It’s a broadside that de la Torre, a Democrat, hasn’t forgotten.

“He was biased toward people of color. Anything that was about multiculturalism, he was against,” de la Torre told The Huffington Post. “Anything that was about ethnic studies or promoting people of color in any positive way, this guy was against. So it’s no surprise to me that he’s working for Donald Trump.”

Miller did not respond to a request for comment.

One of Miller’s biggest complaints when writing and talking about his high school back then was its approach to ethnicity, race and class. At age 16, he lamented in a letter to the editor of a local news site that the school did “nothing for American holidays but everything for Mexican holidays.” He also claimed that there were “very few, if any, Hispanic students” in his honors classes and that many students at the school lacked basic English skills (he did not specify a race). The school’s policy of making announcements in both English and Spanish exacerbated the problem, he argued.

“As politically correct as this may be, it demeans the immigrant population as incompetent, and makes a mockery of the American ideal of personal accomplishment,” Miller wrote then.

As a teen, Miller appeared repeatedly on the radio show of Larry Elder, a conservative commentator, and denounced what he called his high school’s liberal culture run amok. He told Elder that liberal students punished classmates who took positions they deemed politically incorrect, and that teachers were biased against conservative students.

The school was “an institution not of learning, but of indoctrination,” where one teacher had referred to the Mexican-American War as the “Northern-American invasion,” Miller wrote after graduating.

A couple of years later, Miller weighed in again in his column focused on de la Torre. He accused de la Torre of bringing gang members to campus and nearly inciting a riot — an allegation that the police made as well. (De la Torre, for his part, has said that he brought the men to speak out against gangs and that police had falsely accused one of them of ordering assaults.)

In that 2005 column, Miller also returned to his favorite theme, the ills of multiculturalism, which he said led to students thinking of themselves as “Mexican, or Honduran, or Guatemalan first, and American second.”

Miller criticized the school for providing funding to Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, or MEChA — a Chicano group that, according to its own summary, was “founded on the principles of self-determination for the liberation of our people.” Miller called it a “radical national Hispanic group that believes in racial superiority and returning the southwestern United States to Mexico to create a ‘bronze nation,'” and told Elder the group advocated for a violent overthrow of the U.S.

Miller wasn’t a fan of the Black Student Union either, or its plans to, as he put it, combat “black and Hispanic underachievement, violence, and racial tension.”

“It is just more of the same, a declaration of institutional racism followed by extreme plans for re-education and multiculturalism,” he wrote. “Its leftist illusions and destructiveness are self-evident, yet both the superintendent and the principal have agreed to work with the coalition and incorporate their ideas.”

At Duke University, his profile grew. Another student active in conservative politics at the time said Miller was already connected among conservatives by the time he came to campus, but “sort of did his own thing” there at first. (The Duke alumnus, who asked not to be named, laughed when he heard that Miller is now working for the Trump campaign. “All I can say is I’m not surprised,” he said.)

“He was sort of a conservative wunderkind in that respect,” the Duke alumnus said. “Usually you don’t come on campus already sort of guns blazing. But he was sort of like that.”

Miller became a columnist for the Duke Chronicle, which in turn made him into something of a campus name. He criticized the “condescension” of being asked to write a birthday note for the school janitor. He accused writer Maya Angelou of “racial paranoia,” and again warned of the evils of multiculturalism.

“The administration is so obsessed with multiculturalism (a.k.a. segregation) that they deem it necessary to include in freshman orientation a separate luncheon for black students,” he wrote in September 2005, when he was a junior. “Call me a sentimental fool, but I agree with Martin Luther King Jr. and don’t think that we should divide people based on the color of their skin. But then again, social engineering is just so much fun — ask any leftist.

Miller became president of Students for Academic Freedom, where he called for diversity in the faculty — of the political kind, not the racial, religious or socioeconomic kind.

“All we’re trying to do is to hold hiring practices to a certain standard and to hold the teaching to a certain standard, which would, by its very nature, lead to diversity, because diversity is a natural state of affairs,” he told Duke Magazine at the time.

His highest-profile columns addressed the 2006 Duke lacrosse scandal, when a black woman working as an exotic dancer accused three white student-athletes of rape. Many students and faculty were quick to condemn the athletes, but Miller argued that potentially innocent people had been presumed guilty and unfairly treated as a result. He even went on CNN to discuss the issue with Nancy Grace.

Miller was eventually vindicated: Charges against the lacrosse players were dropped and North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper (D) said there had been a “tragic rush to accuse.”

It took guts for Miller to speak up like he did ahead of the charges being dropped, said KC Johnson, a history professor at Brooklyn College who wrote a blog post at the time praising Miller for standing up for due process. Johnson, a Democrat who is no fan of Trump, said Miller deserves credit for that.

“The one thing that I always had a sense of with Stephen is that he was someone who was fearless, I guess in a good way, and who would be willing to make moves if he believed in it,” Johnson told HuffPost. “Even if you could make a case [that] there was some career risk in doing it.”

Miller’s lacrosse columns were intensely focused on race. He wrote that the allegations had “provided a fantastic opportunity to advance a social agenda and to keep the distance between the paranoid delusions of widespread racism upon which so many of the careers and the lives of the activists have been built and the rather obvious reality that the overwhelming majority of whites in America are not racist.”

He wrote another column about a fellow student calling him racist — an accusation he called “grotesquely false and baseless” — and said he told her that she was actually the one obsessed with race. He also argued that adopting “the outrageous assumption that conservatives, or wealthy white people or successful white people have it in for blacks and other minorities” did a great disservice to people of color.

After graduating from Duke, Miller went on to work for then-Reps. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and John Shadegg (R-Ariz.). He joined Sessions’ team in 2009, where, the senator told HuffPost, “extraordinary was an understatement” for the work he did.

Some of that work involved long emails and phone calls to reporters about immigration and trade — particularly regarding potential job losses, criminal undocumented immigrants and an increase in the number of Muslims in the country.

One Democratic aide who worked with him occasionally said Miller was always perfectly nice and friendly until the subject of immigration came up. Then the tone would shift and become more tense. Immigration, it seems, never stopped being a touchy subject for him.

“It was like one of his trigger words,” the aide said.

Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophoberacistmisogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.

 

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