GameStop is diving into the video game publishing business. The retailer best known for selling games announced plans Monday to launch a new division called GameTrust that will help distribute and market them. GameTrust will initially publish games from a lineup of developers that includes the creators of the "Trine," ''Deadlight" and "Ratchet & Clank" series. Mark Stanely, vice president of internal development at GameStop, said that unlike a traditional video game publisher relationship with a game creator, GameTrust's developers will retain creative control over their work. "Clearly, from the pedigree of these first four partners that we've signed on, they're not going to let a bad game go out the door," said Stanely in an interview.

A silver BMW 5 Series is weaving through traffic at roughly 120 kilometers per hour (75 mph) on a freeway that cuts northeast through Bavaria between Munich and Ingolstadt. I'm in the driver's seat, watching cars and trucks pass by, but I haven't touched the steering wheel, the brake, or the gas pedal for at least 10 minutes. The BMW approaches a truck that is moving slowly. To maintain our speed, the car activates its turn signal and begins steering to the left, toward the passing lane. Just as it does, another car swerves into the passing lane from several cars behind. The BMW quickly switches off its signal and pulls back to the center of the lane, waiting for the speeding car to pass before trying again.

Humans have always had a complicated relationship with new "technologies." From awe to fear, centuries ago, Plato even worried that writing would adversely affect people's memories. Modernity has had a particular curiosity regarding artificial intelligence (AI). From Terminator-style killer robots to emotive humanoids, the mention of AI brings to mind the many silver screen renderings of some future civilization. More likely than any of these, however, is the reality that AI will probably turn out to be another commonplace technology that, while novel at first, will end up integrated into our everyday lives.

LONDON – A British Airways plane struck an object believed to be a drone on Sunday as it was coming in for landing at Heathrow, Europe's busiest airport, police said. An investigation has been launched into the incident, which follows a string of near misses involving drones and is believed to be the first case of a collision in Britain. The plane, an Airbus A320 with 132 passengers and five crew on board, was on its final descent into Heathrow when it was struck. "A pilot on an inbound flight into Heathrow Airport from Geneva reported to police that he believed a drone had struck the aircraft," a spokeswoman for London's Metropolitan Police said. "The flight landed at Heathrow Terminal Five safely. It transpired that an object, believed to be a drone, had struck the front of the aircraft."

The Metropolitan Police have opened an investigation into reports that a drone struck a commercial passenger plane as it approached London's Heathrow airport. On Sunday, the pilot of a British Airways flight from Geneva, Switzerland, reported that a drone had struck the front of the Airbus A320, which was carrying 132 passengers and five crew members. British Airways inspected the plane but found it was undamaged and deemed safe for its next flight. No one has been arrested following the incident and it is not known who owned the drone or why it was being flown in an area with so many passenger planes. In the U.K., airports and their surrounding areas are controlled airspace where the flying of drones is prohibited.

Embedded Python/NumPy/Scikit-learn functions in MonetDB to perform machine-learning tasks on a real business case.

The threat from such machines is real enough for 100 states to come together and debate the matter of their ban for three consecutive years now. The use of autonomous machines could potentially change the vocabulary of warfare, just like gun powder and nuclear arsenal upon their entry into the battlefield. In April 2013, NGOs associated with successful efforts to ban landmines and cluster munitions got together in London and issued a call to governments urging the negotiation of a treaty preventing the development, deployment and use of what are known as'Killer Robots' in popular parlance. In July 2015, some of the world's leading Artificial Intelligence (AI) scientists including Apple co-founder Steven Wozniak, Skype co-founder Jaan Tallin and Professor Stephen Hawking signed a letter with nearly 21,000 signatures asking for an outright ban on these autonomous weapons systems (AWS). "Autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow," states the letter.

Janicza Bravo makes short films about loneliness. In one, Michael Cera plays an abrasive paraplegic who can't get lucky. In another, Gaby Hoffmann plays a phone stalker for whom the description "comes on too strong" is not strong enough. Bravo's shorts employ the visual grammar of art-house cinema: over-the-shoulder shots representing a character's point of view, handheld tracking shots depicting urgent movement, lingering closeups to heighten intimacy or unease, carefully composed establishing shots with an actor in the center of the frame. In March, 2015, Bravo went to Venice, on the western edge of Los Angeles, to meet with a production company called Wevr. The name is pronounced "weaver," but it can also be thought of as a sentence, with "We" as the subject and "V.R." as the verb. As anyone who has read a tech blog within the past five years, or a sci-fi novel within the past five decades, knows, "V.R." stands for virtual reality--a loosely defined phrase that is now being applied to several related forms of visual media. You put your smartphone into a portable device like a Google Cardboard or a Samsung Gear--or you use a more powerful computer-based setup, such as the Oculus Rift or the HTC Vive--and the device engulfs your field of vision and tracks your head movement. The filmic world is no longer flat. Wherever you look, there's something to see. The producers at Wevr invited Bravo to write and direct a V.R. project. "I said no," she told me. "It sounded like a technical thing, and I'm not into technical. But then I talked to my husband, and he said, 'How often do people just hand you money in this business?' So I changed my mind." She thought about what kind of story might be told most effectively in the new medium. "The two words I kept hearing about V.R. were'empathy' and'immersion,' and I wasn't sure that being immersed in one of my dark comedies would be all that useful."

We live in an age of disruption -- and that's a good thing. Old systems will collapse as entrepreneurs figure out how to optimize and reinvent inefficient businesses, products, and services to provide consumers (us) with all things better, faster and cheaper. According to the Olin School of Business, 40% of today's Fortune 500 companies will be gone in the next 10 years. This post is a quick look at three industries (healthcare, finance and insurance) that are ripe for disruption this decade due to big data and artificial intelligence. Clearly big data and AI will change almost every industry this decade...but none more than these. Healthcare is so massively broken, that its disruption will come easy and happen fast.

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.