An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from BGR: Elon Musk is changing the world one idea at a time. First, with Tesla, the man so many people call the real life Tony Stark has done an incredible job of bringing electric vehicles to the mainstream. Second, Musk has been doing an impressive job over at SpaceX in the realm of space travel. And third, Musk's effective rough draft of a high-speed transportation system known as the Hyperloop is being contemplated and conceptualized in a very real way by some extremely smart people. So where does Musk go from here? Why, Mars of course. Recently, Musk said that he plans to unveil SpaceX's Mars roadmap next September. But on another front, Musk has also been thinking about developing an electric airplane capable of taking off and landing vertically. While answering a few questions during a Q&A session at the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Award Ceremony last week, Musk was asked what his 'next great idea' was. The answer? Electric-powered air travel.

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MojoKid writes: Not long after Apple unveiled its Siri personal assistant to the world, it took very little time before people began asking her outrageous questions, sometimes inappropriate or just humorous, if for no other reason than they just could. When creating Cortana, Microsoft was well-aware of what its digital assistant was going to have to deal with, so, believe it or not, it was designed in such a way to handle abuse in a specific manner. According to Microsoft's Deborah Harrison, who is one of eight writers for Cortana, a chunk of the earliest queries were about Cortana's sex life. A specific goal was to make sure Cortana wasn't treated as a subservient. If she's insulted, she doesn't apologize or back down. She handles it with tact, so as to reduce the chance of further abuse.

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backend for searching www.ebay.com

Automatically creates a GraphViz2 visualisation of a Metro::Map map

search for auctions at European eBay sites

searches for mp3 on vkontakte.ru, also known as vk.com.

Israeli PM announces bill to remove three Palestinians from Knesset over visits to relatives of alleged attackers.

New wave of social entrepreneurs employs refugees by utilising their Arabic language skills and cooking talents.

turkeydance writes with a link to an article at Nature exploring the squishier side of robots research. Rather than conventional (and rigid) materials and architectures for robots, soft robot researchers are building bots that employ materials that fluidly bend, stretch, roll, and squeeze, more along the lines of an octopus than an industrial claw; some of the ones featured in the article (and shown in an accompanying video) are explicitly based on octopus movement. "Think about how hard it is to tie shoelaces," says Daniela Rus, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. "That's the kind of capability we'd like to have in robotics."

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