Archive for the 'Technology' Category
Japan Wants Flying Cars Within a Decade
August 26th, 2018Via: Bloomberg: Japan is making a push to develop flying cars, enlisting companies including Uber Technologies Inc. and Boeing Co. in a government-led group to bring airborne vehicles to the country in the next decade. The group will initially comprise 21 businesses and organizations, including Airbus SE, NEC Corp., a Toyota Motor Corp.-backed startup called […]
Skim Reading Is the New Normal, the Effect on Society Is Profound
August 25th, 2018Via: Guardian: Look around on your next plane trip. The iPad is the new pacifier for babies and toddlers. Younger school-aged children read stories on smartphones; older boys don’t read at all, but hunch over video games. Parents and other passengers read on Kindles or skim a flotilla of email and news feeds. Unbeknownst to […]
Tech Companies Are Gathering For A Secret Meeting To Prepare A 2018 Election Strategy
August 24th, 2018The article mentions a Russian, “Troll factory.” How about American troll factories? Here’s what the U.S. Air Force wanted back in 2011: Software will allow 10 personas per user, replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly consistent. Individual applications will enable an operator to exercise a […]
Japan: Drones Helping Aging Rice Farmers
August 23rd, 2018Via: Reuters: The next generation farmhand in Japan’s aging rural heartland may be a drone. For several months, developers and farmers in northeast Japan have been testing a new drone that can hover above paddy fields and perform backbreaking tasks in a fraction of the time it takes for elderly farmers. “This is unprecedented high […]
Bank of England Chief Economist Warns on AI Jobs Threat
August 22nd, 2018Via: BBC: The chief economist of the Bank of England has warned that the UK will need a skills revolution to avoid “large swathes” of people becoming “technologically unemployed” as artificial intelligence makes many jobs obsolete. Andy Haldane said the possible disruption of what is known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution could be “on a […]
Robots Can Effectively Brainwash Children
August 22nd, 2018And now, children, we’ll learn how jet fuel can melt structural steel. Via: SHTFplan: “People often follow the opinions of others and we’ve known for a long time that it is hard to resist taking over views and opinions of people around us. We know this as conformity. But as robots will soon be found […]
Study Reveals Great Pyramid of Giza Can Focus Electromagnetic Energy
August 21st, 2018Book from 1998: The Giza Power Plant: Technologies of Ancient Egypt Paperback by Christopher Dunn. Via: PhysOrg: An international research group has applied methods of theoretical physics to investigate the electromagnetic response of the Great Pyramid to radio waves. Scientists predicted that under resonance conditions, the pyramid can concentrate electromagnetic energy in its internal chambers […]
Stacking Concrete Blocks Is a Surprisingly Efficient Way to Store Energy
August 19th, 2018I like to follow these relatively low-tech methods of energy storage, even though they don’t seem to catch on. It’s interesting to see a modern take on old ideas. The Energy Vault (below) is a similar concept to the Ares, which stores energy by moving a mass up a hill on rails. The Energy Vault, […]
Jeff Bezos Is Gobbling Up The Swamp
August 17th, 2018Via: Vanity Fair: The controversy involves a plan to move all of the Defense Department’s data—classified and unclassified—on to the cloud. The information is currently strewn across some 400 centers, and the Pentagon’s top brass believes that consolidating it into one cloud-based system, the way the CIA did in 2013, will make it more secure […]
Senate Democrats Are Circulating Plans for Government Takeover of the Internet
August 17th, 2018Via: Reason: A leaked memo circulating among Senate Democrats contains a host of bonkers authoritarian proposals for regulating digital platforms, purportedly as a way to get tough on Russian bots and fake news. To save American trust in “our institutions, democracy, free press, and markets,” it suggests, we need unprecedented and undemocratic government intervention into […]
