The Orange County Sheriff's Department insists it has been working hard to comply with a judge's long-standing orders to divulge records concerning its handling of jailhouse informants. On Tuesday, however, a 24-year veteran of the department testified that he did not know whether anyone in the department had gone through 68 banker's boxes worth of files -- including informant-related material -- dating from the 1980s. Lt. Andrew Stephens testified that he took possession of the boxes -- each containing 100 files -- in late 2016, when he took over the jail's Custody Intelligence Unit, which handles informants. "I am underwhelmed at this moment by the diligence of the search, based on what this witness said," Orange County Superior Court Judge Thomas Goethals said after Stephens' testimony. The Sheriff's Department's repeated failure to turn over informant-related evidence to the defense team of mass murderer Scott Dekraai is central to hearings underway this week before Goethals.

SPOKANE, WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump's proposed budget includes a cut of about $120 million for the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, despite two recent incidents that raised concern about worker safety at the former nuclear weapons production site. Hanford for decades made plutonium for nuclear weapons, and it now is engaged in a massive environmental cleanup that costs more than $2 billion per year. "The Tri-Cities community sacrificed a lot to help our country win World War II and the Cold War," said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Washington, a member of the appropriations committee, on Tuesday. "The president's proposed budget for Hanford, despite urging from both sides of the aisle, is a real disappointment." The 2018 budget proposal still must go through Congress.

This paper presents the Speech Technology Center (STC) replay attack detection systems proposed for Automatic Speaker Verification Spoofing and Countermeasures Challenge 2017. In this study we focused on comparison of different spoofing detection approaches. These were GMM based methods, high level features extraction with simple classifier and deep learning frameworks. Experiments performed on the development and evaluation parts of the challenge dataset demonstrated stable efficiency of deep learning approaches in case of changing acoustic conditions. At the same time SVM classifier with high level features provided a substantial input in the efficiency of the resulting STC systems according to the fusion systems results.

Drone owners may not have to register their machines with the Federal Aviation Administration, but users of a DJI model will experience restrictions if they do not verify their craft with the manufacturer. The China-based firm has announced it will introduce a new application activation process for users that provides the necessary information to power the drone. For those who do not comply, their unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) will experience camera malfunctions and flight will be limited to a 164-foot (50m) radius up to 98 feet (30m) high. Anyone who owns or purchased a DJI drone'will have to log in once when you update the new version of DJI GO or GO 4 App,' DJI said. 'If this activation process is not performed, the aircraft will not have access to the correct geospatial information and flight functions for that region, and its operations will be restricted if you update the upcoming firmware,' the firm continued.

But modern tools are helping to revive Ireland's national language. An Irish proverb advises that it is often wise for one to hold his tongue. An té is ciúine is é is buaine, or "he who is silent is the stronger." But that ancestral wisdom isn't the best policy when the very language it comes from is threatened. The Irish language, Gaelic, is one of more than 40 percent of the world's 6,000 spoken languages that are endangered, according to UNESCO.

Everything from a new accessibility toolkit for smart cities, to an AI assistant, to a patrol car prototype were part of Microsoft's presentations at Smart Cities NYC '17. First on the agenda was Microsoft's announcement about its Smart Cities for All Toolkit to help city officials and urban planners design cities with inclusive features to assist people with disabilities. The toolkit was developed by G3ict and World Enabled as part of the Smart Cities for All initiative to give city leaders a strategic guide to benefit all citizens, including the approximately 1.2 billion people in the world with disabilities. The toolkit is the first step toward what Microsoft plans to be a long road to help cities become more inclusive. It's comprised of four new tools to address priority challenges and alleviate the top barriers for disabled individuals in smart cities. "The toolkit is meant to be guidance for city leaders to think about how to make the business of becoming a smart city accessible to everyone. They don't know where to start," said Kathryn Wilson, director of cities solutions worldwide public sector for Microsoft.

The orb's segmented pedestal, which looked as if it might have come from the bridge of a science-fiction starship, added to the mystery. And an illuminated floor, not directly visible in the most widely circulated images, intensified the dramatic underlighting. Critics of Mr. Trump, some of whom seem eager to see something nefarious in anything he does, appeared especially agitated. Some projected onto the images their dismay about Mr. Trump's playing down of human rights and about the authoritarian Egyptian and Saudi governments. Bill Kristol, a prominent conservative critic of Mr. Trump, likened the group to the conclave of witches in "Macbeth."

On January 22nd, two days after President Trump was inaugurated, he received a memo from his new Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, recommending that the United States launch a military strike in Yemen. In a forty-year career, Mattis, a retired Marine Corps general and a veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, had cultivated a reputation for being both deeply thoughtful and extremely aggressive. By law and by custom, the position of Defense Secretary is reserved for civilians, but Mattis was still a marine at heart. He had been out of the military for only three years (the rule is seven), and his appointment required Congress to pass a waiver. For the first time in his professional life, he was going to the Pentagon in a suit and tie. Mattis urged Trump to launch the raid swiftly: the operation, which was aimed at one of the leaders of Al Qaeda in Yemen, required a moonless night, and the window for action was approaching. Under previous Administrations, such attacks entailed ...

LAS VEGAS – "Mark Minevich didn't mince words in his Rise of the Autonomous Enterprise presentation here at Interop last week: "Whoever doesn't get involved in AI will die and get phased out." Minevich, a senior advisor to the government's Council of Competitiveness in Washington D.C., ticked off several examples of companies that have transformed industries by leveraging AI technologies, including Amazon with its personalized recommendations and Tesla. "Tesla has accumulated over 750 million miles of data to make cars smarter," said Minevich. The good news is that the U.S. is widely viewed as a leader in AI. Minevich said there's more AI investment in Silicon Valley, for example, than anywhere else in the world and it's growing. Last year estimates put AI investments at $2.5 billion, a figure that's forecast to double to $5 billion 2017. Pointing to forecasts by consulting giants Accenture and McKinsey, Minevich said "AI will deliver a massive trillion-dollar economy and the U.S. ...

In 1937, robot hobbyist "Bill" Griffith P. Taylor of Toronto invented the world's first industrial robot. It was a crude machine, dubbed the Robot Gargantua by its creator. The crane-like device was powered by a single electric motor and controlled via punched paper tape, which threw a series of switches controlling each of the machine's five axes of movement. Still, it could stack wooden blocks in preprogrammed patterns, an accomplishment that Meccano Magazine, an English monthly hobby magazine from the era, hailed as "a Wells-ian vision of'Things to Come' in which human labor will not be necessary in building up the creations of architects and engineers." In the 80 years since, Gargantua's progeny have revolutionized how we work.