Hasta La Gadget!

The National Security Agency (NSA) has formally recommended that the White House drop the phone surveillance program that collects information about millions of US phone calls and text messages. The Wall Street Journal reports that people familiar wi…

She told viewers to “prepare yourselves” for the end of the hit sitcom.

Hey, good morning! You look fabulous.

Nintendo’s Switch continues to climb the pantheon of iconic consoles. According to today’s earnings report, it’s now outsold the Nintendo 64. Meanwhile, Microsoft admits password-expiration policies are useless,…

One of the problems experienced by those who are disabled is being able to effectively communicate with other people around them. For example, we have seen how this can involve the use of computers and having to type out things that they want to say. Now thanks to the efforts of researchers at UC San Francisco, they might have come up with something better.

The researchers have created an implant, which when worn by the patient, will allow their brain activity to be converted into synthetic speech by a computer. This means that these patients will be able to think of what they want to say, and it will be spoken out.

According to one of the researchers, Edward Chang, who is the professor of neurological surgery, “For the first time, this study demonstrates that we can generate entire spoken sentences based on an individual’s brain activity. This is an exhilarating proof of principle that with technology that is already within reach, we should be able to build a device that is clinically viable in patients with speech loss.”

At the moment the system is far from perfect as it can sometimes end up with garbled sounds, but it is a work in progress. The researchers are hoping that their system will help to restore the voices of patients who have ALS or Parkinson’s where speech loss tends to be irreversible.

This Implant Can Turn Brain Activity Into Synthetic Speech , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

If there is a reason why developers and publishers are loving the microtransaction model, it is because it allows them to earn a lot more over the course of the game’s lifetime. This is versus the previous model where once the game was bought and paid for, that’s where their revenue kind of comes to an end.

A good example would be NetherRealm’s Mortal Kombat 11, in which based on a post on Reddit by AccomplishedPoet8, they have taken the time to calculate how much it would cost gamers to buy all the skins available in the game. Spoiler alert: it does not come cheap and assuming the calculations are right, it will cost a whopping $6,440.

Now, we should point out that you don’t need to spend real-life money to unlock these skins. This is because the skins can be unlocked by doing character tutorials and completing basic towers. The in-game currency used to unlock the skins can also be grinded out, but this will take gamers a very, very long time and isn’t very realistic unless you have a lot of time and patience.

That being said, we imagine that most gamers would probably only focus on their favorite characters, but based on this calculation, it seems that there is at least an additional $6,000 worth of untapped revenue that NetherRealm could get from the game after it has been bought.

Buying All The Mortal Kombat 11 Skins Will Cost You Over $6,000 , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.