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The 20 Wildest Webcams

PCWorld – I just watched a wedding, went deep-sea diving, and checked out a crowded karaoke bar–all without having to lift my keister off my cushiony desk chair.

I may be lazy, but I’m not alone. Reality TV has exposed us as a nation of voyeurs. Whether the subject on screen is people behaving naturally in the city or animals acting out in the wild, we love watching the parade go by–and these days, you don’t even have to get dressed to get your peep on.

We’ve tracked down 20 of the wildest Webcams awaiting your eyes on the Internet. Some are amusing, some are adorable, and some are just plain unusual. But each is interesting in its own unique way. (Note: Webcams are notoriously flakey. Proceed at your own risk!)

So go ahead–take a look. You know you want to.

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Kindle 2 first hands-on! (updated with video and impressions)

Engadget – The Kindle 2 is here folks — it should look pretty familiar at this point! Feast your eyes on the photos. We’re building out with more photos and video, so stay tuned. We played for the unit for the briefest of moments, but it really does feel great in hand. The brushed metal back is great, the device is incredibly light and comfortable to hold, and the keyboard is fairly usable. We’re not convinced the five-way joystick is the best they possible could’ve worked into this space — a d-pad seems much more logical — but it’s responsive and comfortable enough to twiddle with for what it is. Here’s some thoughts:

* The five-way rocker is definitely a step up in terms of navigation — it makes getting around page way eaiser by allowing you to skip through individual words, and you can actually navigate simple web pages the way you’re used to.
* The new dictionary pop up (it brings up your definition on the bottom of the screen as you’re scrolling through text) is a huge win. It was a pain before, but looking up words is now super easy. Unfortunately — according to Ross Rubin — footnotes are still handled in the slow, laborious way they’ve always been.

* Text-to-speech is a nice touch, but it’s still hard to get over that computer voice. We can see using this to hear a recipe or short news article, but we’re not convinced it’ll be enjoyable for a full novel.
* Screen refresh is way, way faster than the old model (they say 20 percent). The difference is welcome and noticeable. Moving through documents and back and forth between pages is a snap now. If you’ve been frustrated with the slowness before, this will be a big relief.

* The size difference is pretty remarkable. If you loved the crazy old design, you’ll be disappointed, but the tradeoff in thickness is probably worth it. Furthermore, the new button placement is a big improvement, one which will likely make those accidental page turns a thing of the past.

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Burning Question: Why Can’t We Control Gadgets by Voice Alone?

Wired – It’s a recurring pipe dream for technophiles and luddites alike: computers that not only listen but understand our every command. And each year, like clockwork, someone claims this day is upon us—that we can toss out our keyboards and warm up our larynges for a new relationship with our machines.

Press or say “1” for a cold, hard dose of reality.

Despite being crammed into nearly every imaginable electronic receptacle—from cell phones and desktop operating systems to cars and aircraft cockpits—speech-recognition software remains light-years away from tackling the general- purpose applications that would change the way we interact with computers. Sure, we’ve seen modest improvements, but breakthroughs have been rare. One of the most recent occurred more than a decade ago: Rasta, developed at the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley, enabled different kinds of hardware to use the same speech-recognition software. It was widely implemented in mobile phones in 2001, and nothing game-changing has happened since.

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Cognitive Computing Project Aims to Reverse-Engineer the Mind

Wired – Imagine a computer that can process text, video and audio in an instant, solve problems on the fly, and do it all while consuming just 10 watts of power.

It would be the ultimate computing machine if it were built with silicon instead of human nerve cells.

Compare that to current computers, which require extensive, custom programming for each application, consume hundreds of watts in power, and are still not fast enough. So it’s no surprise that some computer scientists want to go back to the drawing board and try building computers that more closely emulate nature.

“The plan is to engineer the mind by reverse-engineering the brain,” says Dharmendra Modha, manager of the cognitive computing project at IBM Almaden Research Center.

In what could be one of the most ambitious computing projects ever, neuroscientists, computer engineers and psychologists are coming together in a bid to create an entirely new computing architecture that can simulate the brain’s abilities for perception, interaction and cognition. All that, while being small enough to fit into a lunch box and consuming extremely small amounts of power.

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6 New Web Technologies of 2008 You Need to Use Now

Wired – Every year, we see scores of innovations trickle onto the web — everything from new browser features to cool web apps to entire programming languages. Some of these concepts just make us smile, then we move on. Some completely blow our minds with their utility and ingenuity — and become must-haves.

For this list, we’ve compiled the most truly life-altering nuggets of brilliance to hit center stage in 2008: the ideas, products and enhancements to the web experience so huge that they make us wonder how we got along without them.

Nitpickers will notice that a couple of these technologies arrived two or three years ago. Others aren’t even fully baked yet. But each innovation on our list reached a level of maturity, hit the point of critical mass, or stepped in to fill a burning need during 2008 that resulted in it significantly changing the landscape of the web.

Here’s to the technologies currently making the web a better place than it was 12 months ago.

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