Rihanna -- I Was Bankrupt Because of My Stupid Accountant

2/12/2014 1:00 AM PST BY TMZ STAFF

Rihanna says her accountant made so many boneheaded decisions that he blew her fortune and she was "effectively bankrupt" by the end of 2009.

The singer claims in new legal docs she had $11 MILLION in cash at the beginning of 2009.  Rihanna says the accountant was not on the ball and she was horrified to learn at the end of the year she had $2 million left. To make matters worse, her expenses doubled, which left her on a financial cliff.

As for how Rihanna blew through $9 million in one year ... she says her accountant gave her the green light to buy a house priced between $7 and 7 1/2 million. So she took his advice. She ultimately sold the house for a $2 million LOSS.

She also claims her 2009 tour -- Last Girl on Earth Tour -- was losing money but the accountant never gave her the heads up.

The legal docs were filed in connection with a lawsuit Rihanna filed against her accountant, claiming gross mismanagement.

BTW ... Rihanna has rebounded nicely.  Her net worth is now estimated at $43 mil.

Read more: http://www.tmz.com/2014/02/12/rihanna-lawsuit-accountant-bankrupt/#ixzz2t9iaI64k

US military begins work on brain implants that can restore lost memories, experiences

• By Sebastian Anthony on February 10, 2014 at 1:07 pm
• • 
  • • DARPA, at the behest of the US Department of Defense, is developing a black box brain implant — an implant that will be wired into a soldier’s brain and record their memories. If the soldier then suffers memory loss due to brain injury, the implant will then be used to restore those memories. The same implant could also be used during training or in the line of duty, too — as we’ve reported on in the past, stimulating the right regions of the brain can improve how quickly you learn new skills, reduce your reaction times, and more.
      The project, which DARPA has wittily named Restoring Active Memory, is currently at the stage where it’s seeking proposals from commercial companies that have previously had success with brain implants, such as Medtronic. As yet, we don’t know who has submitted proposals to DARPA, but it’ll probably be the usual suspects. Medtronic, which creates deep-brain simulation (DBS) implants that are almost miraculous in their ability to control the debilitating effects of Parkinson’s disease (video embedded below), is surely interested. Brown University, which famously created a brain-computer interface that is implanted into the brain and communicates wirelessly with a nearby computer, must be a contender. Companies with big R&D budgets, like IBM and GE, might be involved as well.
    • The Restoring Active Memory project has two key targets. First, we need to be able to actually analyze and decode a human’s neural signals. Some work has been done in this area, such as brute-forcing the encoding of the optic nerve, but we’re a long way away from reading a bunch of neural spikes and knowing exactly what the person is thinking or experiencing. Second, we want to take that knowledge of how we encode memories (stored experiences), and somehow use it to re-program a human brain that has experienced memory loss. “Ultimately, it is desired to develop a prototype implantable neural device that enables recovery of memory in a human clinical population,” says the proposal. (Read: What is transhumanism, or, what does it mean to be human?)
      This might sound like something out of a sci-fi film — and to be honest, we’re probably quite a few years away from such an implant. While we’ve had a fair amount of success withtDCS and DBS, we’re still very much at the dumb, brute-force stage of neuroscience. The lobotomy might be out of vogue, but modern implants aren’t that much more refined — they just run electricity through a specific part of the brain. We’re not entirely sure why it works, and except for turning the device off we can’t really control it. We are a long, long way away from measuring the exact pattern of neurons firing that gives a soldier the ability to use a sniper rifle or defuse a bomb. (Read: MIT discovers the location of memories: Individual neurons.)
      Still, an implanted device — rather than external, cranial-mounted instrument — is definitely the way to go, if we want to learn more about how the human brain encodes memories. When you boil it down, all memories are ultimately just a specific set of neuron connections and electric pulses (spikes). It stands to reason that, eventually, with enough painstaking data collection (provided by the implant) and a lot of analysis (supercomputers) we’ll be able to work out the exact combinations required to re-program a human brain to remember certain experiences, memories, and skills.
    • 
      

Amazon could take on the PS4, Xbox One, and Apple TV all at once with its own game console

• By Grant Brunner on February 11, 2014 at 10:45 am
• • 
  • • Hot off the heels of the Xbox One and PS4 launches, Amazon is rumored to be releasing its first console later this year, and it will likely sell for under $300. With an incredibly low entry price, an existing content ecosystem, and a recent high-profile developer acquisition, Amazon is primed to take on Microsoft and Sony head-on.
      Recently, VG24/7 revealed a number of juicy details regarding Amazon’s new console. With an Android-derived OS, this machine will be able to run existing mobile games. In fact,Amazon is reportedly demoing the console using existing mobile titles. That’s a nice parlor trick, but that’s certainly not where Amazon is headed. We’ve already seen the Ouyas of the world fail to gain traction, so it seems highly unlikely that Amazon will market this console as the ultimate Candy Crush platform.
      An affordable set-top box from Amazon would also offer an opportunity to compete directly with the Apple TV and Roku. Amazon has millions of existing customers, and offering a tightly integrated experience could potentially perform quite well. Amazon already has a huge content library, so it’d be wise to leverage that in the living room. As the company continues to expand into hardware, this is definitely the next logical step — with or without games in the mix. It is easy to imagine AirPlay-like functionality, between Kindle Fire tablets and an Amazon set-top box.
      Okay, it’s an Android-based machine that will probably stream Amazon Prime videos really well. What about actual games, though? Well, it seems as if Amazon isn’t content with just a handful of mobile ports. Last week, Amazon announced that it has acquired Double Helix — the developers of last year’s Killer Instinct on Xbox One. With that purchase alone, this machine becomes much more interesting from a gamer’s perspective.
      It’d be very easy for Amazon to launch this console with nothing but half-hearted ports ofAngry Birds, Cut the Rope, and a mountain of Flappy Bird clones. Thankfully, it seems as if the Seattle company has much larger ambitions. If Amazon can offer a reasonably powerful console with top-notch dev tools, it doesn’t matter if it’s running Android under the hood. With a low price, and strong developer support, this could potentially be a viable competitor to the PS4 and Xbox One. Of course, it remains to be seen if Amazon can actually pull any of that off.
      At this stage, there’s no reason to get hung up on the stigma of Android gaming. Think of the Android roots of this potential platform as little more than an implementation detail. After all, the PS4 runs a variant of BSD, and nobody bats and eyelid. We still don’t know much about what Jeff Bezos has up his sleeve for 2014, but don’t count it out simply because of the word “Android.” Let’s actually see what Amazon and Double Helix can deliver as a team before we dismiss this new console outright — it’s not any crazier than Microsoft’s original Xbox was a decade ago.

New nature-inspired antenna improves wireless performance by 6-8x, coming to routers and smartphones soon

• By Sebastian Anthony on February 11, 2014 at 12:23 pm
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  • • A Dutch company, which goes by the rather uninspiring name of Antenna Company, says it has discovered a new way of building radio antennas that have six to eight times the performance of the existing antennas in your smartphone or wireless router. Such a performance boost could result in much longer range, lower power operation, better use of available bandwidth, and increased speeds. The key to these new antennas, oddly enough, is the superformula — a fairly new mathematical concept that appears to describe many complex shapes found in nature. By building antennas based on this formula (which results in some rather organic looking shapes, incidentally), efficiency can be massively increased, improving transmission and reception quality.
      

      Some of the natural shapes that the superformula describes
      Antenna Company, which doesn’t appear to be shipping any commercial products just yet (but it sounds like it’s close), is promising to bring two interesting bits of technology to the antenna world. First, there’s the aforementioned superformula — a formula created by Johan Gielis, a horticultural and biosciences engineer who sought to describe some of the more complex shapes that emerge in nature. The second piece of the puzzle is a differentkind of antenna — a dielectric resonator antenna. (Read: Duke’s metamaterial superlens could finally allow for long-range wireless charging.)
      Almost every radio antenna in commercial use is made of metal. The wireless and cellular antennas in your smartphone are made of metal. The antennas on the back of your router are made of metal (but covered in protective plastic). Your TV and radio antenna are made of metal. At lower frequencies, metal is just fine — but at microwave and higher frequencies they become lossy, dissipating energy into the atmosphere and degrading the signal strength/quality. This is a problem, because almost all cellular and WiFi communications use microwave frequencies. A dielectric resonator antenna (DRA) is fashioned out of a dielectric (ceramic or plastic in this case) rather than metal, reducing the amount of signal loss. The military already use DRAs for high-frequency radar applications, but for some reason they have never come to the consumer market (probably due to fabrication complexity, cost, brittleness, etc.)
      

      Antenna shapes, as described by the superformula
      Now, though, Antenna Company wants to bring superformula-inspired DRAs to the consumer market. As you can see in the image above, these superformula antennas come in a variety of odd, organic-looking shapes. Depending on the application, you would opt for an antenna shape that produces the desired signal spread. The performance gain is on the order of 2-4x for a single antenna (3-6dB), and 6-8x for multiple antennas (MIMO). There is also the possibility to reduce the number of antennas used, due to improved signal strength, better beam forming, and so on. (Read: Infinite-capacity wireless vortex beams carry 2.5 terabits per second.)
      It seems the current designs have been successfully tested at the 2.4 and 5GHz frequency bands, which covers WiFi, Bluetooth, and some other wireless technologies, but not cellular (which generally sits between 700MHz and 2.1GHz). According to Myce, Samsung, LG, and HTC are the kind of customers that Antenna Company would like to pick up — and apparently, the company is already in an “advanced stage of negotiations” with some of these companies. These new antennas could really change the wireless landscape — but for now, until we actually see one of these superformula-inspired DRAs, we probably shouldn’t get too excited. Antenna Company has a pretty impressive company roster, though, and it’s backed by billionaire entrepreneur Marcel Boekhoorn. Maybe… just maybe… there’s something to these super antenna.

Windows Phone 8.1 SDK reveals universal cross-platform apps, on-screen buttons, more

• By Ryan Whitwam on February 11, 2014 at 1:52 pm
• • 
  • • Microsoft has been toiling over the last few years to shape Windows Phone into a competitive mobile operating system. Android and iOS are still riding high, but Windows Phone 8.1 is just around the corner. Microsoft today made the SDK for Windows Phone 8.1 available to developers, who are now busily digging through the features they will have to work with — and, of course, sharing those features with us.
      One of the most notable new features in WIndows Phone 8.1 is the inclusion of universal apps. This is the beginning of Windows Phone merging with another beleaguered Microsoft product — Windows 8. (Sebastian has written extensively about the eventual merger between Windows Phone and Windows.) Universal apps in the new SDK will be able to take advantage of templates for large screen devices running Windows 8 or RT and Windows Phone with the same shared library of HTML and JavaScript.
      Developers will have to use the .appx format for Windows Phone apps going forward, which is the same one used for Windows 8 Metro apps. Merging the two app catalogs together could allow Microsoft to beef up its offerings into something respectable. Windows Phone apps under this new scheme will also take on a Windows 8 feature: Apps won’t be terminated when you enter multitasking mode, but will be suspended instead. They can be swiped away from multitasking mode to be manually closed, though.
      
      Windows Phone 8.1 will be introducing the concept of on-screen buttons to users, which is the direction Android devices have been heading in the last few years. On-screen buttons can save bezel space and make an interface more consistent, but implementing it can be tricky. A new setting also indicates users will be able to change the color of this bar. The options are always dark, and match the background and accent colors. That could go either way with regard to consistency.
      If the SDK behavior is anything to go on, Microsoft will allow users to hide the new navigation bar with a small arrow button off to the left. Having the option of reclaiming that screen real estate when you really need it is very handy and is something Android users have been hoping for since on-screen buttons gained traction. This wassomewhat addressed with immersive mode in Android 4.4.
      Windows Phone 8.1 brings users new settings for monitoring storage and battery life, as well as support for VPNs. However, Microsoft seems to have removed some of the native Facebook integration. That might be a bug in the SDK, or Microsoft could be rethinking the way social media is woven into the OS.
      
      The last time around, Microsoft gave developers the ability to create camera apps that could be set as the default by users, and it looks like that capability is being extended to SMS. The Windows Phone 8.1 SDK includes an option to set a third-party messaging app as the default. That’s a very Android-y thing to do, and will come as a boon to those looking to use alternative messaging clients such as WhatsApp. Users might be less likely to change the stock camera app in Windows Phone 8.1, though, with the addition of an updated camera app with burst mode.
      One of the things that’s missing from the SDK might be the biggest story — anything related to Bing or search brings up an error. Microsoft is rumored to be building a virtual assistant codenamed Cortana for Windows Phone 8.1. It seems that Redmond isn’t ready to tip its hand just yet. A completely new search protocol is the sort of thing developers would like to see in the SDK, so Microsoft must have a good reason for excluding it — perhaps Cortana has some really impressive features that Microsoft wants to properly show off for maximum impact, or it might just be a bit of a mess.
      A full preview of Windows Phone 8.1 is expected to debut at the Build conference in April. Developers will be watching closely — as will we. This might be Microsoft’s last chance to make Windows Phone work before Android starts looking like the only option.

ARM announces Cortex-A17, the new CPU core that finally replaces Cortex-A9

• By Joel Hruska on February 11, 2014 at 3:01 pm
• • 
  • • ARM has announced new plans for a successor to the Cortex-A12, the upcoming 32-bit CPU core that’s scheduled to ship out later this year, which itself is the successor to the Cortex-A9. The new Cortex-A17 is a further 32-bit evolution of the ARM product family and illustrates something ARM told me last year when I visited its headquarters in Cambridge: The advent of the 64-bit Cortex-A53 and A57 families and the AArch64 instruction set doesn’t mean ARM is finished with the 32-bit market.
      The Cortex-A17 is ARM’s targeted solution to offer high-end 2013 performance in the 2015 midrange market. It’s going to be built on somewhat older 28nm technology (by 2015 standards), which may surprise some folks, but makes sense given the design targets of the SoC. ARM’s own internal cost savings for 20nm match the flat curve we predicted back in 2012, as well as comments from TSMC and GlobalFoundries. With 20nm flat on cost, it makes sense to look for ways to optimize the architecture, particularly in cost-sensitive mobile devices.
      
      With 14nm-XM (GlobalFoundries) and 16nm FinFET (TSMC) providing only small cost advantages on a per-transistor basis, the emphasis at ARM is on building a cost-effective product. The Cortex-A17 is meant to squeeze better performance out of steady transistor counts rather than pushing those counts higher due to cost savings. That dovetails well with mobile’s overall goals, which is to improve performance efficiency in any case.
      Thus, we have the Cortex-A17. The new chip will extend the Cortex-A12′s performance to reach current high-end 32-bit ARM CPU levels, with added support for big.LITTLE, which the current Cortex-A12 implementation lacks. The front-end and execution cores are expected to be similar to the Cortx-A12, with most improvements coming in the memory subsystem. According to ARM’s internal estimates, the new chip will hit a DMIPS/MHz rating of 4.5 compared to the Cortex-A57′s rating of 5.0, the Cortex-A12′s 3.5, and the Cortex-A19′s 2.5.
      
      High-end 2013 performance in midrange 2015 devices may not seem particularly exciting, but as the pace of smartphone performance increases have slowed, we’ve seen longer-lived products and some killer deals from companies like Google. The Nexus 4, Nexus 5, and Motorola G have all been well-regarded smartphones with relatively high-density screens and good battery life, and that’s a trend we expect will continue to strengthen in the next few years. Meanwhile, midrange products have a better chance of penetrating emerging markets, where customers are more sensitive to price and mobile sales are expected to surge.
      When ARM unveiled the Cortex-A12 last year, many people saw it as a reaction to the Cortex-A15′s general set of problems. While the A15 was an unquestionably powerful chip, its high heat dissipation and troubles with big.LITTLE led to weaker market adoption. Qualcomm’s Krait CPU may be Cortex-A15 class, but its power consumption and overall characteristics are superior to the ARM core itself. Nvidia’s own Tegra 4 is Cortex-A15 based, but the T4 hasn’t enjoyed much success in terms of design wins or product shipments. Again, performance wasn’t the problem — thermal dissipation and power consumption were.
      The Cortex-A17 will achieve the A15′s performance, but will do so in a smaller power envelope and with better overall characteristics. If ARM hits the 2015 readiness target, we could see the chip in shipping devices by late in 2015 or early 2016. The delay is the inevitable result of the difference between having chips validated at the foundry and having devices fully integrated and passed through carrier validation.

Did the genesis of life occur just after the Big Bang, almost 14 billion years ago?

• By Sebastian Anthony on February 5, 2014 at 9:07 am
• • 
  • • After last night’s Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham (evolution vs. creationism) debate, it seems fitting to start the day with new research from a Harvard astrophysicist that suggests the first life in the universe may have emerged just 10-20 million years after the Big Bang. This is a few billion years before most scientists believe that the universe had suitable conditions for the genesis of life. If life really did emerge way back then, and then continued to travel through space on the back of asteroids and other interplanetary debris, it would seem almost certain that a) Earth was not the home of the universe’s first life, and b) life on Earth arrived on the back of an asteroid (panspermia).
      As it stands, our best method of locating extraterrestrial life — and thus solving the mystery of whether life is unique to Earth — is based on the concept of habitable zones. Basically, the only thing we know for sure is that Earth has the right conditions for supporting life — and so it stands to reason that, if we can find other planets that have a similar setup (an atmosphere, a nearby star, liquid water on the surface), we might find life. This is the theory of the “Goldilocks planet,” which has been popularized in the last few years by NASA’s Kepler telescope, and other similar endeavors.
      

      Most scientists believe that, if there’s life out there, it’ll probably be on Earth-like planets in the habitable zone — like Kepler-62f (artist’s impression)
      According to Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, though, there was a brief period in the universe’s timeline — a period of about 7 million years, which Loeb calls the habitable epoch — where most of the universe would’ve been habitable by life. How? Cosmic microwave background radiation.
      All throughout the universe, there is thermal radiation — cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation — that’s theorized to be left over from the Big Bang. Today, the universe is so old and so large that the CMB only warms space to around 2.7 Kelvin (-270.45 Celsius, -454.81 Fahrenheit). Billions of years ago, though, just 10-20 million years after the Big Bang, the CMB would’ve kept the entire universe feeling like a “warm summer day on Earth” (Loeb’s words). For around 7 million years, Loeb says the conditions would’ve been just right for the genesis of simple life. [Research paper: arXiv:1312.0613 - "The Habitable Epoch of the Early Universe"]
      

      An all-sky map of the cosmic microwave background radiation, from when the universe was just a few hundred thousand years old. The heat fluctuations eventually turned into galaxies.
      His new theory has some logical flaws, though, which he readily admits. Most astrobiologists think that life couldn’t emerge during the first few billion years of the universe because it lacked the rocky planets and heavier elements that life (as we know it) requires. The current understanding of the universe is that heavier elements (i.e. carbon, phosphorous, metals) — elements that are needed for the genesis of life — are created in supernovae explosions. Just 10 million years after the Big Bang, the universe was full of hydrogen, helium, and not much else. It’s possible that even the first stars hadn’t formed by this point. Loeb’s explanation is that, just maybe, there were some rare regions of the early universe that were mega-dense, and thus could begin the whole star formation/supernova/rocky planet process sooner than expected.
      Loeb says that this theory could be tested by searching the Milky Way for planets orbiting stars that contain no heavy elements. These planets would be similar to those that occupied the very early universe, and thus might tell us something about whether life began just 15 million years after the Big Bang. (Read: Alien spotting: By 2020, we’ll finally have the ability to locate life-harboring, alien planets.) If genesis really did occur that early on, when the universe was still very small and dense, it’s entirely possible that those life-bearing asteroids, meteors, and planetoids have been hurtling through space for the last 13.7 billion years, seeding large portions of the universe with life.

'Tis the Season to Be Good-Naturedly Jealous

2/4/2014 4:30 AM PST, by Sarah Taylor

Mariah Carey posted this photo on her Instagram account, and by all accounts (see what I did there?), she's completely silly. See, Mariah made the comment that she was "working" in her "favorite" environment, but boo, "bad hair day." Seriously, Mariah? First off, your hair looks rad -- most of us wish our hair would be that "bad" naturally, and second -- who is even paying attention to your hair, girl? I'm not sure about anybody else, but the only thing yours truly is scoping out is your toned ab section, your lean arms, ample chest, and radiant smile. Girl, you realize you've got basically everything, right? Quit the hair, OK?

Dang. 



Read more: http://www.fishwrapper.com/post/2014/02/04/mariah-carey-beach-body-gym-bikini-post-baby-photos/#ixzz2sMvseOax 

Woody Allen's Lawyer -- Mia Farrow's Just a Bitter Bitch

2/4/2014 6:02 AM PST BY TMZ STAFF

Mia Farrow is a bitter woman living in the past, brainwashing her children, and propagating outrageous lies just to hurt her wildly successful and acclaimed ex ... so claims Woody Allen's lawyer.

Attorney Elkan Abramowitz did Allen's bidding on the "Today" show Tuesday ... claiming Mia went on the warpath because she couldn't handle the fact that his client got a Golden Globe Lifetime Achievement Award.

As you know ... Woody's adopted daughter Dylan claims he molested her when she was 7 and she got real specific over the weekend ... claiming, among other things, he shoved his face in her naked crotch.

To believe Abramowitz you also have to believe that Mia has brainwashed both Dylan and Woody's biological son, Ronan Farrow.

Read more: http://www.tmz.com/2014/02/04/woody-allen-mia-farrow-lawyer-dylan-molestation-today/#ixzz2sMvcp7Yh

Dog the Bounty Hunter -- Smashed Up in Hit and Run Car Accident

2/3/2014 8:45 PM PST BY TMZ STAFF

6:10 AM PT -- Police say the driver of the white truck was arrested and booked for DUI.

Dog the Bounty Hunter and his wife just got wrecked in a nasty multi-car hit and run accident in Hawaii ... TMZ has learned.

According to witnesses ... Dog and Beth Chapman were in a black GMC Yukon on Highway 1 when they got smashed in the rear by a white Chevy truck -- and ended up in a ditch off the shoulder of the road.

We're told a third vehicle allegedly started the chain reaction accident -- but that driver fled the scene after the truck hit Dog and Beth's SUV.


We're told ambulances are on the way ... as there may be some minor injuries. Dog and Beth seem to be fine at this point.

The other black SUV in the photo was also part of Dog's entourage ... carrying several of his family members ... but it was NOT involved in the wreck.

Dog is still on the scene ... and we're told police put the driver of the white truck in handcuffs. It's unclear at this point why he would be arrested.


Story developing ...

Read more: http://www.tmz.com/2014/02/03/dog-the-bounty-hunter-car-accident-hit-and-run-hawaii/#ixzz2sMvC8Lwi