Saturday, January 23, 2016
LucasFilm to toy vendors: No Rey Michael Boehm at Sweatpants and Coffee: The insider, who was at those meetings, described how initial versions of many of the products presented to Lucasfilm featured Rey prominently. At first, discussions were positive, but as the meetings wore on, one or more …Thursday, January 14, 2016
U.S. DOT paving way for self-driving cars
Chris Ziegler reports at The Verge:
DOT and NHTSA will develop the new tools necessary for this new era of vehicle safety and mobility, and will seek new authorities when they are necessary to ensure that fully autonomous vehicles, including those …
Tuesday, January 5, 2016
More than 13,000 untested rape kits in Florida This bit sent shivers down my spine: After Detroit processed a backlog of 11,000 rape kits, police identified more than 100 serial rape suspects. Why shivers? Because it instantly prompts me to wonder how many women were raped who wouldn’t have …Thursday, December 31, 2015
Bill Cosby charged with sexual assault in Pennsylvania The TV legend is accused of drugging and sexually assaulting former Temple University employee Andrea Constand when she visited his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004. A probable cause affidavit filed by investigators this week alleges that …Tuesday, December 29, 2015
Is sending porn illegal in Pennsylvania? Dave Davies writes on his WHYY blog, Off Mic: It's right there in the state crimes code; it's a third-class misdemeanor to "sell, lend, distribute, transmit, exhibit, or give away or show any obscene materials to any person 18 years of age or older..." …Thursday, December 24, 2015
Katie Floyd’s 3 Tips For Family Tech Support Great advice for every geek dreading the holiday “Can you help me with my computer?” conversations.Friday, December 18, 2015
Laser-armed fighter jets by 2020 Thom Patterson writes for CNN: Here's how Air Force special ops might use them: The commander of USAF special ops, Lt. Gen. Bradley Heithold, said last September that by 2020 he wants them on C-130J Ghostrider gunships for landing zone protection. The laser weapons …Monday, December 14, 2015
Machine Intelligence In The Real World [...] Textio is a text editor that recommends improvements to job descriptions as you type. With it, I can go from a 40th percentile job description to a 90th percentile one in just a few minutes, all thanks to a beautifully presented machine learning …Thursday, December 10, 2015
“A slower-track school where they do well” I’m just going to leave this Justice Scalia quote right here: There are those who contend that it does not benefit African Americans to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a …Thursday, November 26, 2015
Israeli Supreme Court Rejects Family Petition To Bury Trans Woman As Their “Son" Peleg, who was 31, had long been concerned about a battle with her ultra-orthodox family after her death. Their beliefs forbid cremation, and she worried they would attempt to have a religious burial under her …Wednesday, November 25, 2015
Adele’s ‘25’ on Pandora Pandora confirmed to Entertainment Weekly that every track from Adele'e new album is available through its radio service. That's not going to be a particularly great way of listening to 25 — because Pandora is a radio service, it means you can't choose what …Thursday, November 19, 2015
Vizio TVs spy on you, here’s how to disable it Vizio’s technology works by analyzing snippets of the shows you’re watching, whether on traditional television or streaming Internet services such as Netflix. Vizio determines the date, time, channel of programs — as well as whether you watched …Thursday, November 12, 2015
Is the Russian kamikaze sub misinformation or an inadvertent warning to the West? Apparently, The screen capture depicts a project called "Ocean Multipurpose System 'Status-6.'" The weapon would apparently be delivered by a nuclear-powered underwater drone, carried externally by a nuclear …Thursday, November 12, 2015
Russian Ships Too Close to Data Cables for U.S. Comfort The first of two this-is-really-concerning posts you’ll find here today: The role of the cables is more important than ever before. They carry global business worth more than $10 trillion a day, including from financial institutions that …Tuesday, November 10, 2015
Apple has learned nothing from Microsoft’s Surface - The Verge iPad sales are indeed down, but it does not follow from that fact that iPad use is down. This Time article did the yeoman’s work of aggregating some data about iPad sales. The bottom line is that in the five years since the …Monday, November 9, 2015
When is time to take antitrust action against Comcast? It’s hard to read about U.S. comeptition law without wondering when Comcast is going to face consequences for its clear abuse of its market power.Monday, October 19, 2015
China hack attacks on US continue despite commercial spying pact If this surprises you, I’ve got a real-life, fully functional totally Back to the Future hoverboard to sell you…Wednesday, October 14, 2015
Hackers Can Silently Control Siri From 16 Feet Away Well this is concerning: A pair of researchers at ANSSI, a French government agency devoted to information security, have shown that they can use radio waves to silently trigger voice commands on any Android phone or iPhone that has Google Now or …Tuesday, October 13, 2015
Axel Springer bans adblock users from Bild online According to the report by Reuters at The Guardian: More than 30% of Germans online use such software, many more than the 5% of internet users globally in 2014, according to Dublin-based analytics and advisory firm PageFair, which develops “ad …Wednesday, October 7, 2015
CFPB proposes ban of class action prohibitions in arbitration clauses The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said in a press release today: In the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, Congress required the CFPB to study the use of arbitration clauses in consumer financial …Thursday, September 24, 2015
‘Happy Birthday’ copyright held invalid Until now, Warner has asked for royalties from anyone who wanted to sing or play "Happy Birthday to You" --- with the lyrics --- as part of a profit-making enterprise. Royalties were most often collected from stage productions, television shows, …Wednesday, September 23, 2015
The Government Is Selling Thousands of Homes to Hedge Funds Without Their Owners' Knowledge
Jared Bennett reports at The Atlantic:
It was a great deal for Oaktree. The fund bought the pool of mortgages for about two-thirds of the $105.7 million HUD estimated the homes were worth. [Julius] Uwansc, …
Monday, September 21, 2015
Video gamer hunts down, stabs man who killed his online ‘Counter-Strike’ character Michael Sheridan reports at NYDailyNews.com: Julien Barreaux reportedly spent six months looking for the person who killed his online character in a virtual knife fight, and eventually found the foe …Thursday, September 3, 2015
Tom Brady’s Four-Game N.F.L. Suspension Erased by Judge Tom Brady is now set to play in the Patriots' opener. I don’t care, but I know my parents, my siblings and most of my friends might. Here’s what the presiding judge said: "The court finds that Brady had no notice that he could …Wednesday, September 2, 2015
Missouri Teenagers Protest a Transgender Student’s Use of the Girls’ Bathroom I can’t blame the students for protesting. Kids can be cruel, and kind of dumb. I certainly was. But parents and attorneys like Derrick Good display a shameful vacuity in couching their bigotry in terms like …Thursday, August 27, 2015
Alison Parker, Adam Ward of WDBJ remembered by friends It’s inappropriate to use these tragic murders as fodder for the never-ending Second Amendment debate, and people on both sides of the isle are already guilty of that. If the killer’s intent was to terrorize, are those people who are …Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Lewis James Fogle Free, 34 Years After His Wrongful Conviction The case against Mr. Fogle itself was never a strong one – it was based entirely upon the testimony of so-called jailhouse informants, including a man himself suspected of the crime. It was only years after the 15-year-old victim’s body …Friday, August 14, 2015
What’s better for free speech on reddit, saving a single thread or getting the whole site unbanned in Russia? If the choice is between all of reddit remaining banned in most of Russia and IP-blocking access to one thread about mushrooms, I’d block access to the thread. I think …Thursday, August 13, 2015
Facial Recognition Software Moves From Overseas Wars to Local Police This is troubling: Lt. Scott Wahl, a spokesman for the 1,900-member San Diego Police Department, said the department does not require police officers to file a report when they use the facial recognition technology but do not make …Wednesday, August 12, 2015
The ethics of modern web ad-blocking Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper and, more recently, Overcast: This won’t be a clean, easy transition. Blocking pop-ups was much more incisive: it was easy for legitimate publishers to avoid one narrowly-useful Javascript function to open new windows. But …