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A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that a useful predictor of how long older adults live is how fast they walk. According to the report, people who walked 1 meter per second (about 2.25 mph) or faster consistently lived longer than others of their age and sex who walked more slowly.

Unfortunately, you can’t reach a ripe old age by changing your walking speed. According to researcher Dr. Stephanie Studenski, a professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh:

“Your body chooses the walking speed that is best for you, and that is your speed, your health indicator,” Studenski said. “And that’s what it really is: an indicator. Going out and walking faster does not necessarily mean you will suddenly live longer. You still need to address the underlying health issues.”

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The HDR images on this page are simply stunning. It’s amazing the way a photograph of a real world location can look just like something you’d find in a CG movie or video game.

Holy cow, BitTorrent has 100 million active users a month!?!? That’s a whole lot of Linux distros being shared!

uTorrent’s parent company BitTorrent Inc. just announced that the BitTorrent Mainline client and uTorrent combined have hit the milestone of 100 million monthly users. On an average day 20 million users from over 220 countries fire up one of the two BitTorrent clients. If that’s not enough, the company also reports that 400,000 new clients are downloaded every day.

Veltrobot is controlled by a Microsoft Kinect as master/slave. The robot is based on a Kondo KHR-1HV. The software uses ROS to run the robot and the NITE package for the Kinect.

Over the last few years, casinos around the globe have been using increasingly high tech slot machines, but with high tech slot machines come the usual bugs. And that raises some interesting legal questions. In the past, we’ve noted numerous examples of casinos blaming software glitches for slot machine awards, and refusing to pay them out. And, usually, they’re being allowed to do this. That seems a little troubling, but it can get a bit more complex, as in one case a few years ago, where a guy used a slot machine that had faulty software — and was arrested for doing so. Each time he put in $1, it was credited as $10. Now, once he realizes this is happening, perhaps you can consider that fraud, but it does seem a bit dangerous to blame the guy for what was really a software glitch by the casino or slot machine vendor.

The latest such case, found via Slashdot, might not be quite as troubling. In this case, a guy more or less figured out a software glitch in a variety of slot machines that would enable a series of button presses that would lead to larger awards, and then he used that to win a lot of money. Now, I can definitely see the case for fraud here (and the guy has now been arrested). He didn’t just spot a machine with a glitch, but he then actively exploited that glitch, knowing it was a glitch, and took steps to enable that glitch on various machines (to make it work, he apparently had to have casino staff change some settings on the machines, which they would do since he was a “high roller.”)

Given that he was knowingly abusing this glitch, the fraud claims seem much more reasonable. However, there is still something worrying about charging someone for a crime for doing what a computer system allows them to do. He didn’t technically hack the system — he just figured out a bug in the software and used that to his advantage. There is at least some gray area, concerning whether or not some of the liability should fall back on the maker of the slot machine for leaving such a glitch in their software.