Woman Sues Match.Com After Date Attacks Her

A Las Vegas woman is suing Match.com for $10 million, after the online dating service allegedly paired her with a man who stabbed her 10 times in the face and chest in an attempt to kill her.

Mary Kay Beckman, 50, claims in a lawsuit filed earlier this month that she joined the website looking for a "healthy loving relationship," but instead was nearly killed.

Beckman says she went on a few dates in October 2011 with Wade Ridley, but after ending the relationship came home one day to find him in her garage with a knife.

Ridley "brutally stabbed [Beckman] 10 times with a knife about her head, face and upper body, until the overwhelming force he applied to the stabbing caused the knife to break," according to court documents.

According to her lawsuit, Ridley then "stomped and kicked" her in the head until she "stopped making the gurgling noise" and left her for dead.A neighbor found Beckman and she was rushed to the hospital where she endured multiple surgeries over several weeks.

While Beckman was in the hospital, Ridley was arrested for the murder of an Arizona woman, also an ex-girlfriend. Many of the details of Beckman's attack came from Ridley himself when police later questioned him.

He told police he waited for Beckman in her garage and had killed the other woman because he felt they had both jilted him, according to an arrest report.

Ridley, who had no prior record of dangerous crimes, was convicted of the other murder and died in jail last year while serving a 70-year sentence.

Match.com argues the lawsuit is frivolous and says it offers tips for safe dating on the site. Online dating is no less safe than meeting someone "at a bar or at church," said Match spokeswoman Eva Ross.

"What happened to Mary Kay Beckman is horrible, but this lawsuit is absurd," Ross said in a statement. "The many millions of people who have found love on Match.com and other online dating sites know how fulfilling it is. And while that doesn't make what happened in this case any less awful, this is about a sick, twisted individual with no prior criminal record, not an entire community of men and women looking to meet each other."

In her suit Beckman says the tips posted on the Match.com site do not go far enough and the company needs to overtly warn users of potential dangers.

Police: Las Vegas officer kills wife, son and then himself in burning home

Even for stone-faced, seen-it-all-before officers, the act that took place at a police lieutenant's Las Vegas-area home Monday was deeply distressing.

The 52-year-old lawman, police said, killed his wife and child, called 911 to say he was burning his house down and warned he would take the life of anyone who tried to stop him.

Then he waited.

When a SWAT team arrived at the lieutenant's Boulder City home, they found Hans Pieter Walters outside with what looked like a handgun.

Officers asked him to drop the weapon -- commands the lieutenant must have screamed many times before in his 20-year career. He ignored them and ducked back into the blazing home.

It was then, police believe, that he killed himself.

Once firefighters put out the blaze that tore through the home, they found Walters's body, his 46-year-old wife's, and their five-year-old son's.

The lieutenant worked for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, where he supervised patrol officers, CNN affiliate KVVU reported.

The station had interviewed him before about other crimes.

The wife, Kathryn, worked for some time as a Las Vegas police officer, the Las Vegas Review-Journal said.

She won a community service award and a lifesaving award before leaving the department in 2004.

"Anyone involved with law enforcement for any amount of time is usually prepared for any scenario, but nobody can prepare for something like this," Las Vegas Metro Sheriff Doug Gillespie told reporters.

Last year, 126 police officers killed themselves, according to the National Study of Police Suicides by the nonprofit The Badge of Life.

It's a steep drop from the other two years the survey was conducted: 143 in 2009 and 141 in 2008.

Yet, it's cause for concern.

"In spite of this encouraging news, the fact is that police suicides continue at a rate much higher than the number of police officers killed by felons," the group said.

Folks who knew Walters were also trying to make sense of it. The soul-searching was agonizing for some.

Retired Las Vegas lieutenant Randy Sutton told KVVU he had worked alongside Walters for years.

"There's no rhyme or reason," Sutton said, saying the lieutenant was hard-working and seemed well-adjusted.

This is "the most unconscionable, dishonorable thing to do I can ever imagine," he added.

"The memories I have of him, they mean nothing to me anymore."

The scattered, futuristic world of home automation

The world of automated home gadgets is young and exciting, filled with an abundance of promising new products. It's also a bit of a mess.

At the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, there were devices and smartphone apps to control everything in your home. But there are so many conflicting approaches, setups, standards and systems that the real dream of a fully connected home is still a ways off.

In previous years, the connected, or "smart," home world was mostly aspirational, with prototypes of fridges with Internet-connected displays and elaborate home security systems. But this year the Jetson's home is a finally a reality, with major vendors peddling real, usable products, almost all controllable from a smartphone.

There are home security cameras you can monitor from anywhere, motion sensors that trigger lights or send you a text message. A product called Plant Link monitors your plants' moisture levels and texts you when they need water. There is a sensor you can put on your grandmother's teapot that will alert you if she forgets to have her morning cuppa. You can control blinds, check air quality, see if windows are open, unlock your house from halfway around the world for a visitor, or use GPS to have your heater turn on when you're a certain distance from home. The possibilities are endless.

How does something as low-tech as a light connect to your smartphone? Typically, the "dumb" end devices (light switch, electrical outlet, thermostat) are outfitted with wireless modules. They communicate using Wi-Fi or other wireless technology with an Internet-connected hub device, which collects the data and bounces it to the cloud. That information is then accessible from a computer or smartphone app, the light controllable with the tap of a finger from anywhere in the world.

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Explaining the 'Internet of Things'

Unfortunately, with the excited rush to get out new products and try new things, most devices or systems don't yet play well with others. Consider the Philips Hue, a cool, color-changing smart light bulb that's sold in Apple Stores. The bulbs connect to a Philips Hue hub, and you change their colors with the Philips Hue stand-alone app.

You can't add a third-party pet door opener or radio controller to the Philips hub, or control them from the Philips Hue app. That means you can't program the kitchen lighting to turn blood red and set the stereo to play "Eye of the Tiger" every time your tabby saunters in for dinner.

"Theoretically, they should all work together," said Daniel Moneta, chief executive of MMB Networks, a company that helps equipment manufacturers transform their analog products into smart devices. "But innovation tends to happen at a faster pace than standards."

The trend of individual devices and sensors having their own smartphone apps and cloud infrastructure is unsustainable. Imagine having to sort through 50 apps to find the right lock, or opening each app one at a time to set up vacation settings before a trip to Death Valley.

Big companies such as Comcast, Time Warner and Lowe's have taken a stab at consolidating smart home technology with their own connected home solutions. They have convenient pre-packaged systems that include the central hub, the smartphone app, and starter devices like security cameras or energy monitors.

China to lead in automation

These systems have their drawbacks. Many charge a monthly fee. They will sell approved additional devices to add on to the network, so it's expandable, but you are still locked into their ecosystem.

Then there are the standalone devices that pack the computing power into the object itself, such as the popular Nest programmable thermostat. There's no hub, it just uses Wi-Fi and the Nest app, and it can't connect to other home management systems.

"At the end of the day, putting the intelligence into a single device misses the bigger picture," said Jeff Hagins, chief technology officer of SmartThings, a startup working on its own platform for smart homes. For Hagins, who has 95 smart devices connected in his own house, the real power of connected devices is in the apps and writing programs that link objects together. The air conditioner that doesn't turn on because it knows a window is open.

To complicate things further, current smart devices don't all speak the same language. There are competing short-range wireless technologies for connecting smart object. In addition to Wi-Fi there's ZigBee and Z-wave, which use less power and are easier to connect. Unlike Wi-Fi, they can be used to create a network of devices that communicate with each other, passing on signals from objects in far off areas of the home.

SmartThings will release its own starter kits this Spring, $299 boxes that include a hub and five or six devices that connect to SmartThings app. But the company is planning an open platform that supports all three wireless standards, doesn't charge monthly fees and allows any third-party device to jump on the system and app. Developers can write smaller apps that work inside the main mobile application, coming up with creative ways to link objects together. The startup raised $1.2 million on Kickstarter last year and is backed by some big-name venture capitalists.

Whatever the future of smart homes looks like, it will need to be dead simple, affordable and easy to use. There are still potential security and privacy issues that have to be worked out. But the options will narrow down, the technology will become more consistent and a smaller number of remote control apps will crowd your smartphone. Next up, flying cars.

PS4 is 50% more powerful than Xbox 720'

Sony Playstation 4

A new batch of rumours has surfaced surrounding the next generation games machines from Sony and Microsoft - you'd better get used to this from now on. Gaming site VG 247 has spoken to developers returning from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where they claim to have been briefed on the hardware at secret meetings.

According to these off-the-record discussions, the Playstation 4 processor, apparently based on the AMD A10 APU, will have a run-capability of 1.84 teraflops. In comparison the next Xbox will be capable of hitting 1.23 teraflops – giving PS4 a raw computational advantage. However, it seems that while the PS4 (or Orbis as it has been codenamed) will feature 4GB of system RAM, the 720 (or 'Durango', or indeed 'Infinity) will squeeze in 8GB, 4-5GB of which will be solely for games. This contradicts various rumours the Guardian has heard that both systems will feature 4GB of RAM.

There are also strong indications that both Microsoft and Sony will run their own events this spring, possibly as early as March, to announce their new hardware. It may then be shown off in more detail at the vast E3 exhibition in June. This would seem to make sense, allowing the manufacturers to corner the gaming news agenda without having to compete against the madness of a major trade show.

Other reports have also mentioned that the two machines will be able to read 100GB Blu-ray discs. This would represent a major turnaround for Microsoft, having attempted to compete against Blu-ray in the last generation with an Xbox HD DVD player. It's also likely that we'll see some innovation in the user interfaces. Microsoft is rumoured to be building a new version of its Kinect motion control device into Xbox 720, while Sony may well be experimenting with touch controls, basing its next Dual Shock controller on the Vita, complete with a centrally placed touch pad.

While there's likely to be plenty of truth in all of this, specifications rarely tell the full story, and computing power is only part of the architectural equation in games machines. Just as important tends to be the pipeline between processors, and the way in which memory is managed by the system. Speaking to the Guardian about these performance figures this morning, one developer told us, "that's like asking someone to choose a Lamborghini over a Ferrari, just on top speed."

Richard Leadbetter of Digital Foundry agrees. "The rumours are certainly plausible, but we're essentially looking at singular components in isolation and not in context of the system as a whole. The PlayStation 3 has a graphics core that is basically an entire generation behind that in the Xbox 360, yet no one can deny that it's Sony's first party games that have led the way in the visual arts."

Also, developers the Guardian has talked to have told us that the software and services side will be far more important in the next generation. Which machine will be able to download or stream digitally distributed games the fastest? Which will have the most stable, secure and reliable online infrastructure? With retail sales of physical goods falling, the emphasis is likely to be on downloadable titles – and providing a compelling service rather than raw processing grunt, could be the key to success.

Another factor, of course, is price. In a competitive consumer electronics marketplace filled with desirable gadgets, the Xbox and PS4 machines will need to aim as low as possible. Some analysts have predicted $400 (L250) a piece, which matches the 'pro' Xbox 360 at launch, but is $200 less than the 60GB PS3 when it premiered.

A lower price is realistic though, as it seems both consoles are based on off-the-shelf kit this time round, rather than proprietary hardware that's expensive to design and manufacture. Based so closely on known PC components, however, some will want to compare the systems directly against gaming PCs.

"On a general level, we're looking at medium-level enthusiast PC hardware," says Leadbetter. "My guess is that you could build a PC with equivalent parts for around L400-L450. But the magic of console architecture is that those parts are incorporated into a fixed platform, built principally for games. Just like the PS3 and Xbox 360 before them, these machines will live on for many years – far more than the current-gen PC parts they share equivalent performance to."

Tobii’s Rex Turns Your Eyes Into a Mouse

LAS VEGAS — We had the mouse. Then we had the trackpad. Then we had the touchscreen. And now we’ve got the eye. OK, we always had the eye, but a company named Tobii has figured out a way to use your eyes as the navigation tool on computers.

Here at CES 2013 the company announced the Rex, a computer accessory about the length of a straw that attaches to any computer display. It then brings eye-tracking to that computer, allowing you to open a document by just looking at it or scroll down the page just by looking down. It’s pretty amazing stuff. After a short calibration process, look at a slide in a PowerPoint, press the spacebar as you are looking at it and it opens. Look at a location on Google Maps, use your mouse to zoom and it will zoom right in on that location — not somewhere to the east or west, which happens more often than not.

Tobii’s technology is groundbreaking, but not new. The company has been showing this functionality off for a while. In fact, ABC News took at look at the company last year at this very time.

But this time around the company has the Rex, the add-on it is selling to software developers so they can start to build software that works with the hardware. The Rex will cost $995, but Tobii says it will be available for consumers for a more digestible price before the end of the year. Then the goal for the company is to get it built directly into laptops or desktops. You know what that means? For now, we’ve still got the trackpad and the touchscreen.

Secret Olimpian's Life As Las Vegas Escort

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