Samsung: Galaxy S 4 mini Available in U.S. in November

Samsung Telecommunications America (Samsung Mobile) said that the Samsung Galaxy S 4 mini, a compact smartphone featuring some of the Galaxy S 4 experiences, will be available in the U.S. beginning in November.

In a release, Samsung noted:

The Galaxy S 4 mini is just 4.9in x 2.4in and is packed with Samsung flagship experiences like WatchOn, S Beam and advanced camera features.

"Samsung continues to provide a wide range of products to fit consumers' needs," said Gregory Lee, president of Samsung Mobile. "The Galaxy S 4 mini continues that commitment by bringing the paramount features of our flagship Galaxy S 4 smartphone to a smaller, more compact form factor."

Outstanding Galaxy Features:

The Galaxy S 4 mini has some of the best software features from the Galaxy S 4 in a compact form factor to enrich the user experience.

-Intuitive Camera Interface: The Galaxy S 4 mini's 8-megapixel camera has zero shutter lag allowing users to document special moments without delay. The Galaxy S 4 mini is equipped with the familiar and easy-to-navigate user interface found on the Galaxy S 4 and supports numerous shooting modes such as Beauty Face, Best Photo, Sound & Shot, Panorama and more to enhance photos taken by even the most novice photographer.

-WatchON: Control your television using the Galaxy S 4 mini as a remote control. Discover a rich TV viewing experience with a Smart Remote that is functional with any IR capable TV or Set Top Box. Users can share content from the Galaxy S 4 mini to a TV effortlessly, as well as look for something to watch in a new way that lets you browse by genre, search by title or receive recommendations based on your interests.

-Easy Mode: Helps smooth the transition for first-time smartphone owners by simplifying the home screen layout, camera, calendar, messaging and the internet browser to make the phone easy to navigate. Once a user is more comfortable with their Galaxy S 4 mini, they can easily switch back to the standard home screen interface.

-Simple Sharing: Quickly and easily transfer large files, such as videos and documents, to other Galaxy phones with S Beam. Touch the back of the Galaxy S 4 mini to any S Beam enabled phone and share without needing a Wi-Fi connection or cell signal. Users are able to simultaneously enjoy music, photos, documents and games with friends through the Group Play function.

The Galaxy S 4 mini is designed with a beautiful 4.3-inch qHD Super AMOLED (960 X 540) display with 256DPI. The Galaxy S 4 mini will run on Android 4.2.2 (Jelly Bean) and includes a 1.7 GHz dual- core processor and 1.5GB of internal RAM. It is powered by a removable 1,900 mAh battery and features an expandable memory of up to 64GB to complement the 16GB of standard onboard storage.

The Galaxy S 4 mini will receive a software update soon after launch and will be compatible with Galaxy Gear, Samsung's first wearable smartphone experience. Galaxy Gear extends the Galaxy S 4 mini experience to your wrist and enhances everyday moments with real time updates for quick and convenient access.

The Galaxy S 4 mini comes in Black Mist and White Frost color options, and will be available beginning next month. Wireless carriers will announce their specific availability, colors and timing. AT&T, Sprint, Verizonand U.S. Cellular will carry the Galaxy S 4 mini.

Accessorize the Galaxy S 4 mini with the S-View Flip Cover, a specially designed flip cover that has a clear window to view a text message or missed call notification, answer or reject a call, and view the battery status. Sold separately, the S-View Flip Cover comes in black and white color options to add style - while protecting the device and providing privacy. Flip Covers are also available without the S-View window in an array of colors including black, white, light blue, and pink.

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Computer cracks CAPTCHAs in step toward artificial intelligence

Oct 28 (Reuters) - A technology start-up said on Monday that it had come up with software that works like a human brain in one key way: it can crack CAPTCHAs, the strings of tilted, squiggly letters that websites employ to make users "prove you are human," as Yahoo! and others put it.

San Francisco-based Vicarious developed the algorithm not for any nefarious purpose and not even to sell, said co-founder D. Scott Phoenix.

Instead, he said in a phone interview, "We wanted to show we could take the first step toward a machine that works like a human brain, and that we are the best place in the world to do artificial intelligence research."

The company has not submitted a paper describing its methodology to an academic journal, which makes it difficult for outside experts to evaluate the claim. Vicarious offers a demonstration of its technology atshowing its algorithm breaking CAPTCHAs from Google and eBay 's PayPal, among others, but at least one expert was not impressed.

"CAPTCHAs have been around since 2000, and since 2003 there have been stories every six months claiming that computers can break them," said computer scientist Luis von Ahn of Carnegie Mellon University, a co-developer of CAPTCHAs and founder of tech start-up reCAPTCHA, which he sold to Google in 2009. "Even if it happens with letters, CAPTCHAs will use something else, like pictures" that only humans can identify against a distorting background.

CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. They are based on the standard set in 1950 by British mathematician Alan Turing in 1950: a machine can be deemed intelligent only if its performance is indistinguishable from a person's.

CAPTCHAs serve that function: in order to sign up for free email, post comments, buy tickets or other online activities, more than 100,000 websites require users to prove they are human by deciphering the squiggly letters, which are often blurred, smeared and cluttered with dots and lines.

In practice, someone trying to break CAPTCHAs in order to do what a site is trying to deter - sign up for umpteen email accounts, for instance - can easily hire someone to accomplish that. "Most CAPTCHAs now are broken by paying people in Bangladesh to do it manually," said computer scientist Greg Mori of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, an expert on machine learning and computer vision. "For 50 cents an hour, you can get someone to break seven per minute."

DIGITIZING BOOKS?

Developing software to break CAPTCHAs would in theory speed that up exponentially. Vicarious said its algorithm achieves success rates of 90 to 97 percent, depending on the difficulty of the CAPTCHA; a CAPTCHA scheme is considered broken if a machine can break just 1 percent of the ones it generates.

That makes "text-based CAPTCHAs no longer effective as a Turing test," the company said in a statement, meaning that CAPTCHAs can no longer be used to tell human from machine.

That might be beneficial, experts said. Google's reCAPTCHA uses words from old books and other publications that have been optically scanned but are difficult to digitize because they are so degraded. "If you can actually solve reCAPTCHAs, you can digitize old books more easily," said Mori.

In addition, the algorithm Vicarious uses to break CAPTCHAs might be deployed more widely.

"If they've done it, it could improve the reliability of optical character recognition like that used in banks to scan checks and by the IRS (Internal Revenue Agency) to read scanned documents," said Karl Groves, an independent website developer who for years has tracked claims about breaking CAPTCHAs.

The feat required relatively tiny amounts of data and computing power, Vicarious said, instead using algorithms that mimic the perceptual and cognitive abilities of the human brain.

The company has described only in general terms what it hopes to use artificial intelligence for, describing its goals as building a vision system modeled on the human brain and developing human-level artificial intelligence based on what it calls a "recursive cortical network," for applications in robotics, medical image analysis, image and video search, and other fields.

That has been sufficient to attract more than $15 million in funding from investors including Facebook co-founder and Vicarious board member Dustin Moskovitz. In a statement, he said, "We should be careful not to underestimate the significance of Vicarious crossing this milestone," adding that the company is "at the forefront of building the first truly intelligent machines."

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Nexus 5 Release Date Tipped For Nov 1

New White Model Teaser In Latest Leak

The release date of Google’s Nexus 5 is still a mystery, and according to the latest rumor, the device is only three days away.

From tech specs to a possible price tag, a lot of "details" about Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) upcoming Nexus 5 have been leaked over the past few weeks. The only thing about the handset that still remains a mystery is its release date and that too may well be put to rest, according to a new leak on Sunday, which predicts the phone may arrive as early as this week.

Thanks to recently leaked photos and details that were claimed to be of the Nexus 5, with even Google accidentally publishing product shots of the device on the Google Play Store, it can be assumed that the new handset is coming sooner than later. And, if @evleaks, the usually reliable tipster on Twitter, is to be believed, the wait for the Nexus 5 could be over by Friday, Nov. 1.

In a tweet on Sunday, @evleaks posted a new rendering of the Nexus 5, showing the device with a white back cover and a short but tantalizing message: “In white. 11/1.” However, it is unclear whether Nov. 1 would be the announcement date or the smartphone's retail launch.

Speculations about the Nexus 5’s availability have been around for quite some time now. For a while it looked like the device would be made official on Oct. 15, a date which eventually turned out to be a dud. A small Google Play event, scheduled for Oct. 24 in New York, was thought to take the wraps off the Nexus 5, but that too did not happen.

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622 Mbps broadband FOUND ON MOON – NASA

NASA has successfully tested a broadband communications system built into its Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) probe, firing data to and from the Moon at rates of up to 622Mbps.
LADEE, launched last month (to the detriment of an unfortunate amphibian), houses a number of instruments designed to measure the state of the Moon's scarce atmosphere while orbiting the space rock.

But it also has NASA's Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration (LLCD) built in, which is a series of lasers on the outer hull designed to shoot back data to three base stations here on Earth much faster than traditional radio data links – and the agency reports the first tests have been a roaring success.
"LLCD is the first step on our roadmap toward building the next generation of space communication capability," said Badri Younes, NASA's deputy associate administrator for space communications and navigation (SCaN) in a statement.

"We are encouraged by the results of the demonstration to this point, and we are confident we are on the right path to introduce this new capability into operational service soon."

NASA has been facing the same problems with space communications that bedevil us here on Earth – too much data and not enough bandwidth. Radio communications have been used ever since the agency first lofted objects into space, but it is stymied by limited spectrum and capacity.
The LLCD system uses lasers mounted on the outside of the LADEE probe to send back bytes to Earth, where base stations in the US and Spain can pick up its signals. These stations use pivoting 15cm telescopes to act as transmitters and four 40cm reflective telescopes as receivers.

Sadly the LLCD system won’t be up and running for much longer. After the LADEE probe has spent 100 days sampling the Moon's atmosphere the craft will be sent on a kamikaze dive into the lunar regolith to avoid cluttering up the dusty globe's orbital paths.

But by 2017 NASA hopes to launch its successor, the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD). This will put new hardware for the space communications system through its paces, and see how well it survives the long-term rigors of space travel to test if it would be suitable for probes going much further than the current relatively short distance of journeying to the Moon and back.

The LCRD will be capable of shifting 1.25Gbps of encoded traffic, or 2.88Gbps of uncoded data using laser equipment that is just four inches long and which uses considerably less power than a radio communications system. The mission will last two years and, if successful, will let a new generation of probes send back petabytes of information about our neighbors in the Solar System. 

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72% Of Americans Holding Back On Spending

NEW YORK, Oct. 22, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Almost three in four Americans are holding back on spending, according to a new Bankrate.com(NYSE: RATE) report. Stagnant income is the most frequent reason (32%), followed by the need to save more (24%) and worries about the economy (20%). Just 27% of Americans say they are not holding back spending at all.

"With hundreds of thousands of government employees furloughed and many government contractors reeling from the shutdown, feelings of job security plummeted to the lowest level in nearly two years," says Greg McBride, CFA,Bankrate.com's senior financial analyst. "Seventy percent of the economy relies on consumer spending, so when this many consumers are cutting back, it's going to be hard for the economy to get out of first gear."

Almost twice as many employed Americans are feeling less secure in their jobs now than those who are feeling more secure. Every age and income bracket feels less secure, led by the 50-64 age group.

Bankrate's Financial Security Index ticked lower for a fourth consecutive month and fell to its lowest point since February, as Americans feeling worse about their overall financial situations outnumber those feeling better for only the third time this year. The Financial Security Index currently stands at 97.4. Readings below 100 indicate deteriorating financial security compared with one year previous.

Additional Findings:

• Every age and income bracket is feeling less comfortable with the savings they have now compared to one year ago.
• Among 50-64 year olds, those less comfortable with their savings outnumber those more comfortable by a three-to-one margin.
• Every age and income bracket reports higher net worth than one year ago, except households with income under $30,000.
• Americans under age 50 are more likely to say their overall financial situation is better now than one year ago, while those 50 and older typically say it is now worse.

The survey was conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International (PSRAI) and can be seen in its entirety here:

http://www.bankrate.com/finance/consumer-index/financial-security-charts-1013.aspx

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