Clothes maketh the man, and this could not be more true when it comes to crushing rebel scum. As one of the most iconic baddies in Hollywood history, Darth Vader is a menacing presence but without his glossy black space suit, it is unlikely he would have instilled the same level of fear. For those in the market for the Sith Lord's garb - it now has a real-life price tag - 18.3 million ( 12.9 million) Darth Vader's suit is one of the most iconic outfits in Hollywood history, and it has a real-world price tag. Bury-based Shade Station calculated the price for the infamous Sith Lord's suit, based on current pricing of components, putting the grand total at a staggering 18.3million ( 12.7million). From the specialist breathing apparatus, to the prosthetic limbs, the meeting of space age tech sartorial style does not come cheap.

The consumer drones that opened the skies to the public may one day be giving a bird's eye view to Chinese authorities. Chinese drone maker DJI -- the world's largest maker of small drones -- said it was in talks with Chinese officials who want access to the data collected by its products, Bloomberg reports. That data could include flight records, GPS information and even video. Whether this applied to Chinese customers only, or customers in Europe and the U.S., has not been made fully clear. "Should DJI receive a valid legal request from a government agency," spokesperson Oliver Wang said in a statement to media, "we may provide user information to that agency, just as other companies do. That is the case in the U.S., China or anywhere in the world."

As cloud computing continues to disrupt traditional business models and big data continues to grow exponentially, techies and investors alike are looking for the top trends that will change how we do business in 2016 and beyond. Hybrid and public cloud services continue to rise in popularity, with investors claiming their stakes. Venture capital firms are investing most heavily in SaaS companies, proving that cloud solutions will be even more lucrative in the future. Some of the biggest names in tech are coming to TNW Conference in Amsterdam this May. While some have doubted Dropbox's ability to go public based on its 10 billion valuation, the fact that this leading SaaS company has raised 1.1 billion in six rounds of funding is pretty impressive.

In this post, I discuss a possible new approach to teaching Programming for Data Science. Programming for Data Science is focussed on the R vs. Python question. Everyone seems to have a view including the venerable Nature journal (Programming – Pick up Python). Here, I argue that we look beyond Python vs. R debate and look to teach R, Python and SQL together. To do this, we need to look at the big picture first (the problem we are solving in Data science) and then see how that problem is broken down and solved by different approaches.

Prof Stephen Hawking, one of Britain's pre-eminent scientists, has said that efforts to create thinking machines pose a threat to our very existence. He told the BBC:"The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race." His warning came in response to a question about a revamp of the technology he uses to communicate, which involves a basic form of AI. The theoretical physicist, who has the motor neurone disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), is using a new system developed by Intel to speak. Machine learning experts from the British company Swiftkey were also involved in its creation.

Norwegian authorities have violated the human rights of mass killer Anders Behring Breivik by holding him in solitary confinement in a three-cell complex where he can play video games, watch TV and exercise, a court in Oslo ruled Wednesday. In the surprise decision, the Oslo district court said the isolation that Breivik faces in prison for killing 77 people in a bomb-and-gun massacre in 2011 is in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights. "The prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment represents a fundamental value in a democratic society," the court said. "This applies no matter what -- also in the treatment of terrorists and killers." The court ordered the government to pay Breivik's legal costs of 331,000 kroner, about 41,000.

This article could involve spoilers, if you believe an algorithm can accurately predict who will be killed off in the Game of Thrones. Of course if you were to believe the Game of Thrones season 6 poster and trailers, then it looks like all the big players are dead and in the Hall of Faces. After being curious enough to check out the algorithm's predictions, I thought, No! Say it isn't so! The first thing I saw was that Daenerys Targaryen, Mother of Dragons, "got a pair of cement shoes." Clicking through though, shows a page explaining why she might win the Game of Thrones and sit on the Iron Throne.

A new center to study the implications of artificial intelligence and try to influence its ethical development has been established at the U.K.'s Cambridge University, the latest sign that concerns are rising about AI's impact on everything from loss of jobs to humanity's very existence. The Leverhulme Trust, a non-profit foundation that awards grants for academic research in the U.K., on Thursday announced a grant of 10 million ( 15 million) over ten years to the university to establish the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. The new facility will be directed by Professor Huw Price, the university's Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy. Others on the team include political scientists, lawyers, psychologists and technologists, said Prof. Gordon Marshall, the director of the Leverhulme Trust. The Trust sprang out of a company that now is part of Unilever.

In this special guest feature, Vasco Pedro, CEO and Co-Founder of Unbabel, discusses the importance of machine translation for natural languages and how it currently lacks the quality companies demand for their content. Dr. Pedro' company is Unbabel, the Y Combinator-backed startup that combines crowdsourced human translation and machine learning to deliver fast translation services to businesses with human tone and nuance. Vasco previously worked for Google helping to develop technology for data computation and language at scale, and served as a research faculty member at the Technical University of Lisbon. Vasco holds a PhD in Language Technologies from Carnegie Mellon University in the field of computational semantics. Additionally, Vasco is a Fulbright Scholar, mentor, and advisor to a number of startups on top of being a serial entrepreneur.

The terminators from Skynet, the agents of the Matrix, the Decepticons…Hollywood has done a good job portraying artificial intelligence (AI) as an existential threat to the human race. The scary thing is that this idea may not be purely science fiction. In fact, many leading technologists today seem to share the concern that at some point in the not-too-distant future, human kind could be beholden to super-intelligent computer overlords. That is a scary thing to think about, and even if the worse does not come to pass, AI will certainly impact everyone's life in some form or another. So let's look at some history of AI, its current state, and potential risks and possible outcomes.