ryusage

A friend of mine sent me this video just yesterday, showing the feed from a FPV quadcopter:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrVLh6r8hd8&feature=player_de...

Because it wasn't clear to me at first, I'll just point out that the pilot for this thing is using a VR headset similar to Oculus Rift, and the video is sent back to him over wifi. Supposedly the range is on the order of a mile or so.

I didn't even realize this was a feasible thing already! Looking into it, you can get these things for only $1500 or so. And so suddenly I've just realized, 10 or 20 years from now, it's not just the police who will be flying these things around. Why not buy one to use for your own neighborhood watch, right?

Hell, I'd love the chance to fly one of these around just for fun.

> clarifying the precedent so there's a better, more concrete understanding of how our state democracies relate to the federal democracy

I think that's been a somewhat fuzzy, ongoing debate all the way back to the beginning, so I'm not really holding out too much hope on it being clearer any time soon.

I saw that lecture also. Wish I'd had more time to go further with the Modeling class, it was really cool.

Anyway, the equally interesting alternative to what you explained is what happens when everybody actually is super racist. If every person's requirement is that they refuse to live near anyone that is different, then you actually get a weird pattern where things are as mixed as they could be. The neighborhoods never stabilize, because there's always going to be border areas where each group can't help living next to a different group.

Actually, it just occurred to me that the model might not be accurate at that point, though, because people can't always move away like the model implies. Instead of people moving around chaotically, I wonder if the real result is violence intended to force the others to move.

EDIT: changed 'counterpoint' to 'alternative'

I don't really see why it would be any different from taxing a cash currency?

Eh, I don't think they said that at all, and that doesn't make sense anyway. They would need to add an extra 3D model or two obviously, so sure, that's a bit more work, but in the big scheme of things it's very straightforward. By "modeling and movement" algorithms, I assume you mean animations, and I don't see any reason at all that they couldn't just use the same skeleton as the male characters, which negates the need for new animation work.

I'm not sure what the point of your second statement actually is, but I disagree with that too lol. I feel like you're making the easy parts sound very difficult and then completely trivializing the part that's actually a lot of work.

Okay, so this is a dumb article, but it's not quite as idiotic as it sounds.

Kotaku makes it sound like the devs are saying female characters are just somehow more complex technically than male characters, and they literally didn't have the technology before to create them. That's just obviously flat-out stupid.

What they're actually saying here is that their previous engine wasn't able to support custom characters, and so they never thought to try and make characters who would be representative of their full audience. When they made personalizing the character a focus, they realized they needed females to be an option, and that prompted them to add it.

It's still obviously sexist that it never even occurred to them there should maybe be a female in the game. There's no reason they couldn't have put one or two as options in the game before. But they never actually said it was impossible to do it. That's Kotaku's own not-very-generous interpretation.

Those are great points. I hadn't considered the ability to jam signals at all. That seems like a pretty huge challenge to overcome actually.

To be honest, I'm surprised they haven't started switching to air-to-air drones yet. They seem to be using them for everything else these days.

You're right. I think he was referring to himself as being a spy before all of this, as in working for the US intelligence agencies. Probably? I'm not sure what else that could mean.

It seems pretty clear from the way they talk about it that they're tracking who sees each ad on each bin in exactly the same way google tracks who sees each ad on each web page. The obvious next step for such a technology is to show specific ads only when people who might care about them are nearby. It's pretty genius really - it would put them miles ahead of other physical ad companies, at least until the rest started doing it too.

But yes, the obvious downside is that instead of worrying about google knowing everywhere you go on the internet, you now have companies that know everywhere you go physically as well.

> There is a healthy level of meat intake and we far exceed it

Why do you think that? I definitely eat a lot of meat, but I've never really seen any reason to think it was an inherently bad thing.

That's a fair point. I would think that it's a bit of both, rather than either/or. It's worth pointing out though that just because it's less scary doesn't mean it's less problematic.

I think keevie's comment was referring more to a situation in which two strangers meet, one buys many drinks for the other, and then, once very drunk, gets them into bed. If you ask 100 people if that's wrong to do, I'm pretty confident that you're going to get much more conflicting answers than if you ask them about either of your two examples.

On the one hand, it's basically what a lot of people just take as the norm. They think that's what you're supposed to do at bars. On the other, it also just happens to be a way to make someone much less resistant to doing things they would never do otherwise.

There's a 43 year gap between those stats. You've got the beginnings of a hypothesis, but I think you need a lot more data if you want to support it at all.

That really is awesome. I just shared it on my Facebook page, and there were people talking about downloading it within minutes. Seems like marketing this thing should be relatively easy.

I remember a friend was up in arms a couple years ago about their phone number being exposed on Facebook. When I pointed out that's exactly what the phone book had done for decades, he suddenly didn't care much.

If this counts as "Little Brother", then I would argue that we've already reached that point. A year or two ago, I recall seeing many stories of outrage that police were confiscating phones after people filmed arrests. Fights like this get filmed all the time in high schools.

Granted, people don't recognize Glass as a film device at the moment, but I'm sure there was a short time where people didn't recognize phones as filming devices either. Once they recognize Glass too, is there any difference?

I'm not trying to say that Glass doesn't raise privacy issues, but I think this is a poor/insignificant example.

Consider this: the whole point of his huge sacrifice was to get people to talk about the information he revealed. If we expend too much of our energy talking about him and the way he got the information to us, rather than the information itself, then doesn't that just make his sacrifice kind of a waste? People don't have infinite attention and energy for these discussions.

> Healthy, well-adjusted people just don't say things like that.

Unless they're doing this on an extremely regular basis, I don't even think this is a sign of someone having a problem. I think I'm normal enough, and I know for a fact there have been moments where I've made a comment that was meant to be a little over-the-top or shocking, and ended up being much worse than it seemed in my head. I really think this happens to everyone at some point, don't you? This kid just had the bad luck that the people he was talking to thought he really meant it.

In this particular case, I think it was understandable that they might not see his statement as sarcastic and under that belief, it makes sense for them to call the police. But I agree with you, that to convict him there really needs to be some other evidence besides a single off-the-cuff statement in the context of trash talk.

I don't even think this kid should get community service. His attempt to be sarcastic on the internet didn't communicate what he thought it did, and that's it.

I feel like I'm a fairly open-minded guy, but I've just always taken it for granted that Intelligence agencies exist entirely for the purpose of keeping tabs on what other countries and their citizens are doing, in order to know about threats before they become problematic.

I'm curious, do you think it would be unethical for British Intelligence to spy on someone in, say, Pakistan?

That's a great point. Whether that's his intent or not, it seems to be how it's progressing. An alternative explanation: he's obviously been following the news about the whole thing very closely, and so he knows what questions the media and/or general public are asking. He can just release whichever documents answer those questions as the questions arise, and thus avoid leaking any more info than he feels is necessary (since that seems to be a goal of his).

Maybe it's a bit of both.

I think that's part of Schneier's point though. This spending seems to be primarily on cyber "weapons", not cyber "shields". We DO need to spend money on making our networks more secure and redundant. But instead of that, we seem to just be taking more of a MAD-style first strike approach to things. Glass cannons, essentially.

The problem I have with it is that, in all cases, any synthetic DNA could exist in nature. We can't even verify with 100% certainty that any given sequence doesn't already exist in nature. If it doesn't exist already, it could in the future, naturally, through evolution.

To be fair, part of the US government's job is to protect its citizens against outside threats. Given that, I can't imagine anyone inside the US arguing that they should stop spying on other countries' citizens. I'm pretty sure that's the NSA's actual job.

And anyway, there's a huge difference between being spied on by a foreign government versus your own. My own government actually has some amount of authority and influence over me and my community, whereas some place like the UK has little to none, so it's less of a big deal.

The richest country in the world, by far, and you think we lack the resources to give fair trials and humane prison conditions to the people we accuse of crimes? You do know that innocent people get arrested sometimes, right?

> As in all things in life there's a tradeoff between "justice" and "security"

Some amount of tradeoff between freedom and security, I will grant you. But I can't see how strong security precludes us from actually bothering to properly investigate, try, and incarcerate people. That's just laziness, if not pure malice.

That implant seems like a pretty serious surgery, though. Hopefully the trials go well and they get this figured out without too many mistakes.

Reminds me of the book How To Win Friends And Influence People. All the way back in 1936, Dale Carnegie was trying to teach people that explaining why they should want something gets far, far better results than explaining what you would like about it.

When I try to think of scifi that really seems like "the future", I have a hard time thinking of any movies. But I can think of some novels that fill the role. The one that comes to mind most immediately is Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, which revolves quite a bit around super advanced nanotechnology and AI. I could see a film adaptation of that being fairly awesome.

The article itself is actually just being reprinted from U of M's own site, which is much less ad-congested and even includes video. Would've been a much better choice for OP to post.

http://www.uofmhealth.org/news/archive/201305/baby%E2%80%99s...

I don't know, it looked to me like you literally just walk in the room, say "Xbox, turn on. Go to Netflix." and you're good to go.