Connecticut Considering Use of Drones Outfitted with Deadly Weapons for Police
March 31st, 2017Via: AP:
Connecticut lawmakers are considering whether the state should become the first in the country to allow police to use drones outfitted with deadly weapons, a proposal immediately met with concern by civil rights and liberties advocates.
The bill would ban the use of weaponized drones, but exempt police. Details on how law enforcement could use drones with weapons would be spelled out in new rules to be developed by the state Police Officer Standards and Training Council. Officers also would have to receive training before being allowed to use drones with weapons.
“Obviously this is for very limited circumstances,” said Republican state Sen. John Kissel, of Enfield, co-chairman of the Judiciary Committee that approved the measure Wednesday and sent it to the House of Representatives. “We can certainly envision some incident on some campus or someplace where someone is a rogue shooter or someone was kidnapped and you try to blow out a tire.”
SpaceX Successfully Launches, Lands Recycled Falcon 9 Rocket
March 30th, 2017Via: NBC:
SpaceX successfully launched and landed a recycled rocket on Thursday, a first for Elon Musk’s company and a move that could help slash the cost of cargo transport into space.
It was a one-two punch that went according to plan. After lifting off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida and carrying an SES-10 communications satellite into space, the rocket booster separated and barreled toward Earth, slowing down and sticking a landing on a drone ship parked at sea.
“It’s an amazing day I think for space as a whole,” Musk said after the landing. “Something can be done that many people said was impossible.”
The launch was particularly special since achieving rocket reusability is a development that is expected to usher in a new era of launches at a reduced price.
Musk, who said this day was 15 years in the making, compared using a rocket once to throwing away an airplane after one flight.
‘Samsung’s Galaxy S8 Can Turn Into a PC with Its DeX Dock’
March 29th, 2017*sigh*
Via: The Verge:
Samsung, like Motorola and Microsoft before it, is trying to turn a phone into a PC. Samsung’s Galaxy S8 will pair with a new Samsung Desktop Experience (DeX) dock accessory to morph into a desktop PC-like environment. The specialized dock, that looks like a candle holder, supports a monitor connection via HDMI, keyboard, mouse, and two USB ports to help expand the Galaxy S8’s capabilities. Samsung’s dock even has a special embedded cooling fan to help keep the Galaxy S8 cool when you’re using it to display Android apps on a monitor, and a USB-C connection to power it.
Related: Apple Investigating Accessory that Turns iPhone, iPad Into Full-Fledged Touchscreen Laptop
Britain Begins Historic Exit of European Union
March 29th, 2017Via: CNBC:
Wednesday marked a historic day as British Prime Minister Theresa May announced that Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty had been signed, commencing the formal process for Britain to withdraw from the European Union.
Britain is the first country in the EU in more than 60 years to seek a divorce from the union.
In her address to Parliament on Wednesday, May said, “There is no turning back.” Outside Parliament, mixed reactions marked the day as pro-EU protesters gathered and the world tries to figure out what the move will mean for the future of Britain.
The 265 Members of Congress Who Sold You Out to ISPs, and How Much It Cost to Buy Them
March 29th, 2017Hint: Not much.
Via: The Verge:
Republicans in Congress just voted to reverse a landmark FCC privacy rule that opens the door for ISPs to sell customer data. Lawmakers provided no credible reason for this being in the interest of Americans, except for vague platitudes about “consumer choice” and “free markets,” as if consumers at the mercy of their local internet monopoly are craving to have their web history quietly sold to marketers and any other third party willing to pay.
The only people who seem to want this are the people who are going to make lots of money from it. (Hint: they work for companies like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T.) Incidentally, these people and their companies routinely give lots of money to members of Congress.
So here is a list of the lawmakers who voted to betray you, and how much money they received from the telecom industry in their most recent election cycle.
Daimler Moving Electric Car Plans Forward by Three Years
March 29th, 2017Via: Reuters:
Mercedes-Benz owner Daimler (DAIGn.DE) is accelerating its electric car program, it said on Wednesday after announcing that it had failed to cut fleet emissions in Europe for the first time since 2007.
Daimler put its emissions numbers down to customers increasing preference for sports utility vehicles (SUVs), which tend to be more polluting than sedans, making it more difficult for carmakers to hit a European target for each new car to produce no more than 95 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometer by 2020.
The company said it expects Mercedes-Benz Cars to bring more than 10 new electric cars to market by 2022 through 10 billion euros ($10.8 billion) of investment, having previously aimed to achieve the target by 2025.
Domino’s Will Begin Using Robots to Deliver Pizzas in Europe
March 29th, 2017Via: Bloomberg:
Starship Technologies, the London-based company that has created six-wheeled self-driving delivery robots, will begin taking customers Domino’s pizzas in Germany and the Netherlands.
Starship, launched in July 2014 by two former Skype co-founders, Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis, will whisk pizzas to customers’ doors if they live within a one-mile radius of certain Dominos pizza shops in “select German and Dutch cities,” the company said in a statement.
‘We Are the Biological Boot-Loader for Digital Super-Intelligence’
March 27th, 2017While centered around Elon Musk, this piece also takes a broader look at where AI is headed, and some of the personalities involved. Everyone has heard of AI, but superintelligence is where the crazy comes out. If you don’t know what superintelligence is, and you like stuff that straddles the line between sci-fi and fantasy, read on.
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom goes deeply into the the types of mistakes that might be made with AI that could cause humans to lose control of it.* In short, if humans manage to create a superintelligence, it will almost certainly (much more likely than might) wipe us out. It might not be so much because it has any particular hatred for us, or anything like that. We could simply become irrelevant to it.
Can you tell by my italicizing of the weasel words above that this whole superintelligence thing is mostly about a bunch of whiteboard speculation at this point?
Ok, good.
Now, are you aware of running over insects as you speed along an open highway in your car?
For a superintelligence, exterminating all of humanity could be like that.
Have a nice day.
Via: Vanity Fair:
Musk believes that it is better to try to get super-A.I. first and distribute the technology to the world than to allow the algorithms to be concealed and concentrated in the hands of tech or government elites—even when the tech elites happen to be his own friends, people such as Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. “I’ve had many conversations with Larry about A.I. and robotics—many, many,” Musk told me. “And some of them have gotten quite heated. You know, I think it’s not just Larry, but there are many futurists who feel a certain inevitability or fatalism about robots, where we’d have some sort of peripheral role. The phrase used is ‘We are the biological boot-loader for digital super-intelligence.’ ” (A boot loader is the small program that launches the operating system when you first turn on your computer.) “Matter can’t organize itself into a chip,” Musk explained. “But it can organize itself into a biological entity that gets increasingly sophisticated and ultimately can create the chip.”
Musk has no intention of being a boot loader. Page and Brin see themselves as forces for good, but Musk says the issue goes far beyond the motivations of a handful of Silicon Valley executives.
“It’s great when the emperor is Marcus Aurelius,” he says. “It’s not so great when the emperor is Caligula.”
* Note: Read the 1-Star reviews of this before purchasing, because they’re quite valid. In addition to the topic mentioned on the cover, I think this book provides a glimpse inside the mind of someone who is well into the Autism Spectrum. I used to have to work with people like that, so it wasn’t too unusual for me. It’s at various times maddening, hilarious, tedious and insightful, but, understandably, not everyone’s cup of tea.
Populism Is the Result of Global Economic Failure
March 27th, 2017Via: Guardian:
The rise of populism has rattled the global political establishment. Brexit came as a shock, as did the victory of Donald Trump. Much head-scratching has resulted as leaders seek to work out why large chunks of their electorates are so cross.
The answer seems pretty simple. Populism is the result of economic failure. The 10 years since the financial crisis have shown that the system of economic governance which has held sway for the past four decades is broken. Some call this approach neoliberalism. Perhaps a better description would be unpopulism.
Unpopulism meant tilting the balance of power in the workplace in favour of management and treating people like wage slaves. Unpopulism was rigged to ensure that the fruits of growth went to the few not to the many. Unpopulism decreed that those responsible for the global financial crisis got away with it while those who were innocent bore the brunt of austerity.
The Privacyless, Freedomless Smart City of 2030 the Elite Are Engineering
March 27th, 2017Via: Truthstream Media:
Research Credit: rb
