General Exception

Home made high-altitude UAV

, ,

One of the neat things about the ever-dropping price of technology is how people end up using off-the-shelf parts to create things that just a short time ago were the domain of government-funded organizations or large corporations.

Last year, one such project prompted governments into action as a man in New Zealand started to document his homemade cruise missle project.

A bit more on the benign side of things is this high-altitude unmanned glider project. Capable of being released from the edge of the atmosphere, such a glider could be used for all sorts of research, including a very cheap way of performing aerial surveys of remote areas.

Security officials realize that putting explosives in people's baggage is maybe a bad idea…

,

So, you’re managing security at an airport. How do you train your bomb sniffing dogs? Well, you might just set up some dummy luggage at a remote site and let the dogs check them out. Or, you could actually put explosives in people’s bags, just to give the dogs something to find…

Which works nicely, in theory… train like you work is a good idea. But what happens when they don’t find the explosives? Right, they get loaded on aircraft, and present a rather nasty surprise for the unsuspecting airline passenger.

Put on your thinking cap

,

Neurologists at the Wadsworth Center in Albany have designed a cap that allows people to manipulate a cursor on a screen by just thinking. Previously, this has been achieved only by invasive methods where small wire arrays were placed within the brain to monitor individual brain regions.

The focus of the research is on helping the disabled be able to control computers and by extensions, lights, robotic arms, etc. Personally, I can’t wait until they just release the cap for general use. Not having to push a mouse around would be a big relief to my wrist, but I wouldn’t want to have brain surgury just to be free from the threat of carpal tunnel syndrome.

Living rat brain in a jar controls flight simulator

,

Well, this one is just…. out there. Researchers at the Univeristy of Florida managed to grow neurons from a rat’s brain in a jar, and have it control a flight simulator.

It appears the primary goal of the research was to determine how the brain processes information. So, this really isn’t a mad scientist trying to create a race of rat-brained killer robots. At least, not yet.

(Link lifted from BoingBoing.)

FDA approves RFID chips for human implantation

, , ,

Oh boy! The FDA has approved the same RFID technology that is used to identify pets for human implantation. This particular take on the technology over at Ars Technica is a bit off the mark, though… all an RFID does is broadcast an ID number. It’s up to whoever is doing the scanning to figure out what that ID number is for, and what database the ID number is a key to. It wouldn’t give someone a copy of your medical records unless they could look up any and all medical records in the first place. And if they can do that, they can probably look up your medical or financial records without the RFID ID number anyhow.

Continue reading

Judge overturns ISP provisions of PATRIOT act

, , , , ,

A judge has struck down a portion of the PATRIOT act which requires ISPs to hand over records on their customers and keep silent about the handover. The ruling means the FBI can no longer use National Security Letters to demand an ISP’s record on a customer without any sort of recourse.

The enforced silence is one of the more nasty aspects of the PATRIOT act… in fact, we covered one aspect of this earlier when the ACLU was prevented from discussing a lawsuit they filed against the NSL provisons of the PATRIOT act itself.



Read more over at News.com.

More Artificial Stupidity, Coming Up…

,

Hey, whattaya know… they held another Turing Test, run by the man the A.I. cognoscente love to hate: Hugh Loebner. You of course know Lobner from John’s story at Salon about Loebner’s fight with the A.I. community.

And… surpise! A program that sucked at pretending to be a human being won… but as is the nature of these schemes, it was the program that sucked the least that took home the prize money. According to the Slashdot story, the bronze medal and $2000 boobie prize was awarded to ALICE, which has won three times in the past.

They're after our precious BBQ!

,

In a sinister move hastening the day that we all have govenment chips implanted in our heads to monitor ThoughtCrimes,

CNN is reporting about a chip being implanted in pork butts.

OK, so the chip was (allegedy) accidentally lost in some meat packing plant. But I don’t buy this for one moment. I encourage you all (well, OK, those of you who aren’t wisely keeping kosher) to use preventative measures normally reserved for your own person to secure your precious BBQ supply from the sinister secret government!

(link shamlessly stolen from boing boing)