Innholdsfortegnelse for #266 i Techlife News

Dinosaurs in museums tend to be of the fossilized variety, but a new exhibit in Philadelphia is bringing the creatures and their world to life. “Jurassic World: The Exhibition” opens at the Franklin Institute. Based on the blockbuster dinosaur movie franchise, the experience mixes the vibe of a theme park with the backstory of science, but the big - like, really big - attraction is the animatronic dinosaurs, some measuring over 24 feet tall. The traveling show made its world premiere in Melbourne, Australia, earlier this year, but Philadelphia’s U.S. debut offers some new features. Here’s what visitors can expect at the exhibit, which runs through April 23: DINOSAUR PETTING ZOO Guests can meet a towering Brachiosaurus, come face-to-face with a Velociraptor and get up close and personal with a…

Someone renamed Donald Trump’s midtown Manhattan building on Google Maps, and the new moniker isn’t very flattering. Instead of Trump Tower, it was briefly renamed “Dump Tower.” Users of the mapping service began noticing the new name for the Fifth Avenue building on Saturday and some took to social media to report it. Trump, the Republican president-elect, has not yet commented on it. Trump has been using Trump Tower as his transition headquarters. A Google spokeswoman told The Associated Press that the company has changed the name back to its original. The spokeswoman said user contributions help provide an up-to-date map, but also occasionally lead to inaccuracies.…

In Britain, Big Brother just got bigger. After months of wrangling, Parliament has passed a contentious new snooping law that gives authorities - from police and spies to food regulators, fire officials and tax inspectors - powers to look at the internet browsing records of everyone in the country. The law requires telecoms companies to keep records of all users’ web activity for a year, creating databases of personal information that the firms worry could be vulnerable to leaks and hackers. Civil liberties groups say the law establishes mass surveillance of British citizens, following innocent internet users from the office to the living room and the bedroom. Tim Berners-Lee, the computer scientist credited with inventing World Wide Web, tweeted news of the law’s passage with the words: “Dark, dark days.”…

A contentious internet surveillance bill that creates databases of Britons’ online activity has become law - though the government says some of its provisions still need “extensive testing” before taking effect. House of Commons Speaker John Bercow told lawmakers on Tuesday that the Investigatory Powers Bill had received royal assent, the last formality to becoming law. It was passed by Parliament earlier this month, after a year of argument and amendments. Civil liberties groups have condemned the bill, which requires telecoms companies to keep customers’ browsing histories for a year. The information includes the websites users visited and the apps and messaging services they used, though not the individual pages they looked at or the messages they sent. The data will be accessible by the police and intelligence services, government…

Imagine a new picture book based on a famous song. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt told The Associated Press on Monday that it was publishing “Imagine,” inspired by the John Lennon classic of the same name and authorized by his widow, Yoko Ono. With illustrations by Jean Jullien, the book will feature Lennon’s lyrics as it tells of a young pigeon’s mission to advocate for peace. “Imagine” comes out Sept. 21, the United Nations’ International Day of Peace. It will be released in partnership with Amnesty International, which will receive some of the proceeds. In recent years, Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Outlaw Pete” have also inspired picture books.…

Pete’s Dragon An orphaned boy, Pete, makes friends with a dragon named Elliot and lives in the forest with him. However, a man threatens to ruin their bond when he attempts to capture Elliot to prove that he is real. FIVE FACTS: 1. The director, David Lowery, decided to make Elliot the dragon a furrier creature than you’d imagine a dragon to be. He said that he wanted to create something people would want to hug, as opposed to a scaly, intimidating Game of Thrones-type dragon. 2. This movie is a remake of the classic Disney movie of the same name, released over 39 years ago. Lowery has claimed it to be more of a re-invention of the classic, distancing itself from the source material. 3. Pete is barefoot in…

Megan Levinson had one wish when she turned 12. She was already starring onstage as Clara in the “Radio City Christmas Spectacular” but she wanted more. “I blew out my candles and I said, ‘I hope I grow tall enough to be a Rockette,’” she recalled. Wish granted. Levinson, of North Caldwell, New Jersey, is one of two former Claras who have graduated to the ranks of the 80 women whose high kicks electrify this year’s holiday show in New York. A family tradition for many, the show attracts an estimated 1 million visitors during its eight-week season, according to Madison Square Garden. The other is Katelyn Gaffney, of Clark, New Jersey, who also played Clara, one of the show’s young stars, in 2003 in Branson, Missouri, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin,…

Shoppers put in a strong showing on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday. Holiday spending rose 9 percent Thursday and Friday combined, compared with the same two-day period last year, according to First Data. The bump was fueled by shoppers turning to online deals. E-commerce sales rose 10.8 percent for the two-day period, while sales at physical stores grew 8.6 percent, according to First Data, which analyzed online and in-store payments across different forms of payment cards from nearly one million merchants Thanksgiving and Friday. The data captures about 40 percent of all card transactions in the U.S. but excludes cash. The Thanksgiving weekend kicks of the holiday shopping season though stores have increasingly started their sales earlier in October. The Friday after Thanksgiving - known as Black Friday - used…

Samsung Electronics said Tuesday it will increase shareholder returns and review its corporate structure as investors step up pressure to reform the South Korean tech giant’s governance structure following the Galaxy Note 7 fiasco. The South Korean company said in a statement that it will boost dividends by 30 percent from 2015 to about 4 trillion won ($3.4 billion) for the full year of 2016. It will also repurchase its shares in January, which will be then canceled. The total budget for the shareholder returns including dividend payment and share buyback will be about half of its free cash flow for this year. Samsung also promised to strengthen corporate governance procedures in its board. It will invite one new independent member to the company’s nine-person board and create a new…

You can now play “Pac-Man” with your Facebook Messenger buddies. Facebook is adding the option to play games with your contacts on the messaging app beginning Tuesday. You can access the feature in the latest version of the app by tapping a game controller icon. Games available include classics such as “Pac-Man,”‘’Space Invaders” and “Galaga,” as well as newer titles like “Words With Friends.” It’s the latest effort by the world’s biggest social network to get people to spend even more time on its properties. Messenger has a billion users. The app will recommend games based on whether your friends play. Currently there is no way to play with people who are not your Messenger contacts, so if your friends don’t like to play games, you are out of luck.…

Whizzing around a green felt table chasing a soccer ball beaming infrared light, the boxy robot shoots - and scores - and wins its Taiwanese teenage creators first prize at this year’s student robot games. The two breadbox-sized scooters, playing goalie and kicker, from the team called “Wings of Storm” were up against another Taiwanese team’s robots in the “Football” category of the World Robot Olympiad held over the weekend in the Indian capital of New Delhi. “We have been practicing since primary school,” said Liaw Jia-wun, 15, thrilled to have won with his teammate. “We never in our lives could think that we would win the world championship.” Other categories at the robotics championships - attended by more than 450 teams from 50 countries - asked participants to create…

The executive in charge of marketing the new electric Chevrolet Bolt keeps coming back to one word. “Driving an electric vehicle is just now practical,” Darin Gesse says of the Bolt. He repeats “practical” with the same fervor that Elon Musk might say “compelling.” Gesse isn’t plugging style or promising to awe your neighbors like Musk and Tesla Motors. In fact, the styling of the Bolt is so ordinary the people next door may not even notice the hatchback in your driveway. What Gesse and General Motors want consumers to see is a car that will cater to their everyday needs - commuting, shopping, transporting children and gear - all on one charge of the battery. It’s the first electric to get more than 200 miles per charge (238 to…

W:/2016ALBUM/ Deadmau5 Once again showcasing his eclectic brand of progressive house music, deadmau5 returns with an 80s sci-fi inspired new album. FIVE FACTS: 1. deadmau5’s real name is Joel Zimmerman, and the name ‘deadmau5’ derives from an incident where Joel found a dead mouse inside his computer while he was changing the video card. 2. At one time, Disney was trying to sue deadmau5 for his mouse helmet’s likeness to their popular cartoon character, Mickey Mouse. 3. deadmau5 once finished a song by using a vocal track sent to him over Twitter. Chris James, the vocalist who sent the track to him, became the featured artist on the track “The Veldt”. 4. W:/2016ALBUM/ will mark the eighth album for the artist, despite concerns from his fans that he would be…

Engineers in San Francisco have tunneled underground to try and understand the sinking of the 58-story Millennium Tower. Now comes an analysis from space. The European Space Agency has released detailed data from satellite imagery that shows the skyscraper in San Francisco’s financial district is continuing to sink at a steady rate - and perhaps faster than previously known. The luxury high-rise that opened its doors in 2009 has been dubbed the Leaning Tower of San Francisco. It has sunk about 16 inches into landfill and is tilting several inches to the northwest. A dispute over the building’s construction in the seismically active city has spurred numerous lawsuits involving the developer, the city and owners of its multimillion dollar apartments. Engineers have estimated the building is sinking at a rate…

Workers completed a massive shelter over the Chernobyl nuclear plant’s exploded reactor on Tuesday, one of the most ambitious engineering projects in the world that one expert said had closed “a nuclear wound.” The half cylinder-shaped shelter was locked in place over the plant’s reactor No. 4 after being moved in on hydraulic jacks for two weeks. It marks a significant step toward containing the consequences of the world’s worst nuclear accident, which occurred 30 years ago in what is now Ukraine. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko described the new shelter as “the biggest moving construction that humanity has ever created.” Workers will now begin dismantling unstable parts of the original cover, the so-called sarcophagus, which was built over the reactor shortly after the disaster to contain radiation. The April 26,…

There are already a few online services that aim to replace cable, but they haven’t attracted many users yet. AT&T’s DirecTV hopes to change that. While just about any person you meet on the street will tell you cable costs too much, the vast majority of Americans don’t think it’s bad enough to cancel. Cheaper online live-TV services, like Dish Network’s Sling TV and Sony’s PlayStation Vue, remain relatively unknown compared with Netflix, Hulu and Amazon. And while they’re easy to order and cancel online and fairly simple to use, they still have drawbacks. “No one has really delivered the right combination of content, price and ease that will get people to make that call to their current provider and say sayonara,” said Forrester analyst Jim Nail. It’s unclear if…

LESSONS FROM THE NEW MACBOOK PRO AND EXTERNAL MONITOR While Macs have become formidable productivity machines for many people around the world, you might not have realized just how easily the professional experience they offer can be even further enhanced. What are we referring to here? The ability to connect a Mac to multiple monitors, that’s what. In fact, the new, redesigned MacBook Pro makes such expansion especially straightforward. In this article, we look at why this is the case, as well as how a wide range of professional users can benefit. IMPRESSIVE FUNCTIONALITY UNLEASHED WITH THE NEW MACBOOK PRO There are obvious reasons for professionals of various types, including musicians, filmmakers, artists and designers, to like the new MacBook Pro models. As Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing,…

“Starboy,”The Weeknd’s latest release, sees the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter picking up where he left off from 2015’s surprisingly pop-friendly “Beauty Behind the Madness.” The Weeknd has expanded his vocal range - almost unrecognizably so on the opening to “Secrets” - and his sound and lyrics push the envelope in areas where he’s previously dabbled. He reconnects with previous collaborators, including hit-maker Max Martin, whose hand in 2015’s “Can’t Feel My Face” made it a wedding-DJ favorite. And while that sort of crossover sound may have alienated fans of the languishing, spacey, pill-and-alcohol drenched vibe of the singer’s previous releases, he retains his identity as the somewhat self-absorbed, unreliable rock star and cruel lover he has long represented himself to be. As he sings on “Reminder”: “I am not a Teen Choice.”…

“Moana,” Disney’s animated voyage to ancient Polynesia, sailed away with the Thanksgiving box office, debuting with $82.1 million over five days and $56.6 million over the weekend, according to final ticket sales figures Monday. That was the second best Thanksgiving debut following Disney’s 2013 hit “Frozen.”‘’Moana” pushed Warner Bros.’ Harry Potter spinoff “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” to second. The J.K. Rowling-scripted fantasy grossed $45.1 million in North America in its second week of release. The Brad Pitt, Marion Cotillard World War II romance thriller “Allied” stumbled. The $85 million film, directed by Robert Zemeckis, opened with a mediocre $17.7 million over the five-day holiday. The top 20 movies at U.S. and Canadian theaters Friday through Sunday, followed by distribution studio, gross, number of theater locations, average receipts…

President Barack Obama took on the problems of a lack of access to health care and high cost, but he and Democrats paid a political price. President-elect Donald Trump has promised to undo much of what Obama put in place, and pledged to make the system better. Although Trump is lacking in specifics, he seems to want to make costs his priority. States, insurers, businesses, and individuals would get more leeway to sort out access. Health care keenly reflects the country’s deep political divide. A look at some lessons Trump might learn from Obama’s rough ride: THE PERILS OF PROMISES Obama promised that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” But then several million people were threatened with the loss of policies that didn’t conform to…

Clean energy and environmental interests usually go hand in hand. But in western New York, they are battling over plans to build dozens of wind turbines that could be among the nation’s tallest, rising 600 feet above the scenic shores of Lake Ontario. Apex’s proposal to plant 70 propeller turbines amid the farms and towns east of Niagara Falls is still in its early stages, but it has already generated thousands of pages of comments, studies and legal documents considered by state regulators. Wildlife groups are concerned the turbines could disrupt a major flyway for migrating birds. Local lawmakers worry about flight operations being compromised at a nearby military base. Residents fret about potential health threats from noise, which are still being studied, and say views could be dominated by…