Australian company pin.net.au now refuses to process payments for VPN users. The software used by the pin.net.au rejects payments originating from a known VPN IP address as it is "high risk" and may be an attempt to conduct fraud. A pin.net.au representative has stated that users need to disable VPN software to make online purchases. The Australian government recently started logging internet and phone activity. Australian politicians have recommended using a VPN and other secure technology to ensure privacy online.
Researchers have observed the process of evolution by natural selection at work in robots, by constructing a 'mother' robot that can design, build and test its own 'children', and then use the results to improve the performance of the next generation, without relying on computer simulation or human intervention.
Researchers led by the University of Cambridge have built a mother robot that can independently build its own children and test which one does best; and then use the results to inform the design of the next generation, so that preferential traits are passed down from one generation to the next.
Without any human intervention or computer simulation beyond the initial command to build a robot capable of movement, the mother created children constructed of between one and five plastic cubes with a small motor inside.
Full article:
http://robotglobe.org/a-mother-robot-that-can-design-build-and-test-its-own-children/3D printing Technology is growing very fast upto the level of printing a building itself. A professor is working on technology named as Contour Crafting which can print an entire 2,500 sqft house in 20 hours.
Behrokh Khoshnevis is a professor of Industrial & Systems Engineering and is the Director of Manufacturing Engineering Graduate Program at the University of Southern California (USC). He is active in CAD/CAM, robotics and mechatronics related related research projects. He was able to make a printhead that can extrude wet cement in such a way that the cement is able to keep its form as each successive layer is printed.
Using the Contour Crafting (CC) developed by Behrokh Khoshnevis , a single house or a colony of houses, each with possibly a different design, may be automatically constructed in a single run, embedded in each house all the conduits for electrical, plumbing and air-conditioning.
The professor believes that his technology would make the construction of efficient buildings so cheap and efficient that we could print houses for Millions of poor people living in slums across the world. And, this kind of building process will avoid the killings and injuries related to construction accidents.
http://3dprinting.com/news/future-talk-3d-printing-entire-house-less-20-hours/