Nearly a decade ago, Comcast promised liberation from the tyranny of the cable box. But today its control seems here to stay--as does big cable's control over how you consume the programming you pay for. This week, the Federal Communications Commission met for the first time under its new chairman, Ajit Pai, a Republican. The original agenda for the meeting included consideration of the agency's latest proposal--advanced under former Democratic chairman Tom Wheeler--to force cable companies to make their services a bit more open. That item disappeared from the agenda--and with it the likelihood that much of anything will change in the world of cable, at least as far as government regulation is concerned.

Abe and Trump are expected to meet on Feb. 10. Major Japanese newspapers cited a draft of the proposal that calls for cooperation on building high-speed trains in the U.S. northeast, Texas and California. Japan would share technology on artificial intelligence, robotics, small-scale nuclear power plants, space and Internet technology.

The Orangutan looked quite magnificent. From her inquisitive eyes to her distinctive orange fur, she was just the sort of creature nature lovers adore watching on TV. But a closer inspection revealed something a little different about her. That's because she is actually an undercover robot, fitted with high-definition cameras behind her glass eyes and used to infiltrate the animal kingdom. The orangutan, as well as an adorable wolf-cub, an utterly convincing meerkat and an incredible floating otter are among 34 animatronic beasts created for the BBC's new series, Spy In The Wild.

VR/AR and Voice-Activated AI are hot topics at 2017 DEW! The panel will focus on what is available in the market today. What are the available apps, content, devices, and head gear? What is the current state of consumer adoption? Mr. Lelyveld will present an overview and update on the state of art, technology, and business of AR.

Cosmologist Stephen Hawking and Tesla CEO Elon Musk endorsed a set of principles this week that have been established to ensure that self-thinking machines remain safe and act in humanity's best interests. Machines are getting more intelligent every year and researchers believe they could possess human levels of intelligence in the coming decades. Once they reach this point they could then start to improve themselves and create other, even more powerful AIs, known as superintelligences, according to Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom and several others in the field. In 2014, Musk, who has his own $1 billion AI research company, warned that AI has the potential to be "more dangerous than nukes" while Hawking said in December 2014 that AI could end humanity. But there are two sides to the coin.

Ubisoft finally managed to release their Assassin's Creed movie this past December, but their Splinter Cell movie has been sitting in development hell for quite a long while now. That said, the project still exists, and Collider spoke with producer Basil Iwanyk about it and things got…a little weird. The strangest part comes when Iwanyk is asked about the difference between Assassin's Creed and Splinter Cell, and if the financials of the former will affect how the latter moves forward. The story of the financial success of Assassin's Creed is yet to be told because we do live in an international world; it's still rolling out. Assassin's Creed had a very specific world to it and a very specific storyline, character, all that stuff.

The action camera company launched Karma, its first consumer drone, to great fanfare in late October. But shortly after, GoPro voluntarily recalled all 2,500 shipped drones after some owners reported their quadcopters were inexplicably losing power and falling out of the sky. At CES 2017, GoPro revealed a bad latch mechanism that was used to secure the drone's battery in place was to blame. On Monday, GoPro announced the return of Karma with a redesigned battery latch that fixes the issue. Karma's is available once again at GoPro.com and select U.S. retailers; international markets will have to wait until the spring.

George Orwell's novel "1984" is hitting the bestseller lists again, having been moved in bookstores from the "dystopian science fiction" shelves to the "current affairs" section. But today let's talk about another iteration of "1984": Ridley Scott's television commercial that year for the then-new Apple Macintosh. As we reported in 2014, on its 30th anniversary, the "1984" ad aired on national television in its full 60-second form only once, during Super Bowl XVIII on Jan. 22, 1984. It became a legend almost immediately. More to the point, it established Super Bowl TV commercials as a thing, garnering almost as much PR attention as the game itself.

You might think it would be easy for political appointees to rally against something as unpopular as the monthly fees that cable and satellite TV services charge for their converter boxes -- particularly when federal law requires them to do something about it. Sadly, the opposite has been true for the Federal Communications Commission, which was instructed by Congress in 1996 to develop rules that would end the effective monopoly that pay-TV providers hold over set-top boxes. Years of work produced a klugey and poorly supported "CableCard" system to allow devices to perform the functions of a cable set-top, but it certainly hasn't produced the explosion of choices that lawmakers had hoped to create. Good luck finding a TV set with a CableCard slot. In the latest turn of the screw, new Chairman Ajit Pai put the commission's most recent (and highly controversial) set-top box proposal in limbo, which in this case appears to be a way station on the road to eternal damnation. That proposal would have required pay-TV providers to make their services available through a standardized app that could run on a variety of major consumer-electronics devices.

Sky and Discovery have reached a last-minute deal to keep the likes of Animal Planet and Eurosport on Sky TV. However, they unexpectedly reached an agreement shortly before the 31 January deadline passed, meaning Sky customers still have access to Animal Planet, Discovery HD, Discovery History, Discovery Home & Health, Discovery Science, Discovery Shed, Discovery Turbo, DMAX, Eurosport1, Eurosport2, Investigation Discovery, Quest and TLC. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London ...