The United States is planning to invest in a military air base in the Northwest African country of Niger. The base will have the capacity of deploying drones and the investment reportedly stands at at least 50 million. The development of the new military base is expected to see the transfer of U.S. assets in the region from the U.S.'s shared air base with France's anti-Islamist force -- Operation Barkhane -- in Niger's capital city of Niamey to the new facility in the city of Agadez. This includes the MQ-9 Reaper drones. The new base, which will provide the U.S. greater access to Islamist extremists in neighboring countries like Libya, Mali and Nigeria, will cost the country an estimated 50 million, BBC quoted Michelle Baldanza, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon, as saying.

Earlier this week, a Tesla car crashed into a tourist bus on a motorway in northern Germany with the driver claiming he had activated the car's autopilot system. But the firm says that autopilot was not to blame for the crash. Instead, it says that the collision was unavoidable because the bus swerved into the vehicle's lane. Earlier this week, a Tesla car crashed into a tourist bus on a motorway in northern Germany with the driver claiming he had activated the car's autopilot system (stock image) The US Department of Transportation may propose requiring all new cars to have vehicle-to-vehicle communication, known as V2V, as early as this autumn. The federal government estimates that V2V connectivity could ultimately prevent or reduce the severity of about 80 percent of collisions that don't involve a driver impaired by drugs or alcohol.

In the early 1990s, Iris Murdoch was writing a new novel, as she'd done 25 times before in her life. But this time something was terribly off. Her protagonist, Jackson, an English manservant who has a mysterious effect on a circle of friends, once meticulously realized in her head, had become a stranger to her. As Murdoch later told Joanna Coles, a Guardian journalist who visited her in her house in North Oxford in 1996, a year after the publication of the book, Jackson's Dilemma, she was suffering from a bad writer's block. It began with Jackson and now the shadows had suffused her life. "At the moment I'm just falling, falling … just falling as it were," Murdoch told Coles.

I doubt that any phenomenon, real or imagined, has inspired more perplexing, convoluted, and ultimately futile philosophical analysis than time travel has. In his classic textbook, An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis, John Hospers tackles the question: "Is it logically possible to go back in time--say, to 3000 B.C., and help the Egyptians build the pyramids? We must be very careful about this one." It's easy to say--we habitually use the same words to talk about time as we do when talking about space--and it's easy to imagine. "In fact, H. G. Wells did imagine it in The Time Machine (1895), and every reader imagines it with him." Hospers was a bit of a kook, actually, who achieved the unusual distinction for a philosopher of having received one electoral vote for President of the United States. But his textbook, first published in 1953, remained standard through four editions and 40 years. His answer to the rhetorical question is an emphatic no. Time travel à la Wells is not just impossible, it is logically impossible. It is a contradiction in terms. In an argument that runs for four dense pages, Hospers proves this by power of reason. "How can we be in the 20th century A.D. and the 30th century B.C. at the same time? Here already is one contradiction … It is not logically possible to be in one century of time and in another century of time at the same time."

At the Hotel Parco dei Principi in Rome, in September of 1973, the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erd?s approached his friend Richard Guy with a request. He said, "Guy, veel you have a coffee?" It cost a dollar, a small fortune to a professor of mathematics at the hinterland University of Calgary who was not much of a coffee drinker. Yet, as Guy later recalled--during a memorial talk following Erd?s's death at age 83 two decades ago--he was curious why the great man had sought him out. Guy and Erd?s were in the Eternal City for an international colloquium on combinatorial theory, so Erd?s--who sustained himself with espresso and other stimulants, worked on math problems 19 hours a day, and in his lifetime published in excess of 1,500 papers with more than 500 collaborators--most likely had another problem on the go.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Che Voigt believes his company has solved problems that have plagued the working world since the advent of typing. It's a solution to hunched backs, stiff necks and tight shoulders. It's a workstation that, with a push of a button, transitions from a standing desk to a seated table to a fully reclined platform like a dentist's chair. Its seat expands and retracts, supporting the whole body from head to heels. There's a screen and mouse and keyboard that follows the user's eyes and hands.

What are some good uni level textbooks to learn the underlying fundamentals and architecture or functions of GPU based deep learning or AI development as shown In GTC Europe recently, I want to use the Dev kits like tensor flow or MS CTNK (I do prefer the CTNK because of it's scalability and flexibility) with Nvidia's GPU acceleration to develop new Cognitive Applications based on Deep learning and AI but before I do that I want to understand the underlying processes and architecture to properly understand what's going on and what I'm doing.

I like to watch long-term technology and business trends and watch as they shape the products and services that I get to use and to write about. As I was preparing to write today's post, three such trends came to mind: As the industry pushes forward in accord with these trends, a couple of interesting challenges have surfaced over the past decade or so. Again, here's a quick list (yes, I do think in bullet points): The GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) was born of these trends, and addresses many of the challenges! Processors have reached the upper bound on clock rates, but Moore's Law gives designers more and more transistors to work with. Those transistors can be used to add more cache and more memory to a traditional architecture, but the von Neumann Bottleneck limits the value of doing so. On the other hand, we now have large markets for specialized hardware (gaming comes to mind as one of the early drivers for GPU consumption).

BRATISLAVA (Reuters) – The European Commission wants to reduce national restrictions on where some types of commercial and health data can be stored, Vice-President Andrus Ansip said on Thursday. BRUSSELS (Reuters) – U.S. software company Salesforce called on EU regulators on Thursday to investigate antitrust issues related to Microsoft's 26 billion bid for social network LinkedIn. SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – A bill signed into law on Thursday by California Governor Jerry Brown allows a self-driving vehicle with no operator inside to test on a public road, a key step enabling a private business park outside San Francisco to test driverless shuttles. NEW YORK (Reuters) – Unocoin, a Bangalore-based bitcoin startup, has raised 1.5 million in funding from a mix of Indian and U.S. investors, the company announced on Thursday. Silicon Valley is diving into artificial intelligence (AI)and machine learning research, an industry estimated to zoom to 70 billion by 2020 from just 8.2 billion in 2013, according to a Bank of America report that cited IDC research.