Tag Archives: Technology

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the courage to insert one’s head into the clouds

I’ve gone on record in multiple forums that I consider Apple as the most overrated business entity since the East India Company.  And yet they continue to mint money faster than the planet’s drunken central bankers.  Just walk by an Apple store at any mall to observe armageddon in progress as perfectly reasonable people assault one another with tied stick bundles in an effort to acquire the next model power adapter for $134 each.

Can this Apple insanity last?  I don’t think so, but what do I know?  I spent last night filling 42 individual sandwich sized plastic bags with dog kibble in preparation for a forthcoming family wedding / vacation / work trip.  Do you have any idea what it takes to label, open, fill, and reclose 42 individual sandwich sized plastic bags?   I have no life.  On the other hand, I have now discovered the fiercest of torture techniques for use in future interrogation procedures when we need the aliens to tell us where they hid the fusion bomb.  (hint: it’s in Brussels, so we’ll laugh and just shrug at them)

So Apple did their product launch thing yesterday.  The weirdo goons of the Internets were so into this event that even reputable (in theory) sites like The Washington Post live streamed the event.  Really?  It’s that important to hear about a minor update to the iPhone?  And then this morning the decision to remove the audio jack from the new phone is more important than, well, a whole bunch of stuff.  It’s way higher on the news banners than NFL opening day, which angers me immensely.

Anyways, these product updates don’t really interest me so much.  What I get more into is what is says about where Apple is headed.  This is important because they’re the world’s largest company and have more money in the bank than all but five nations on Earth.  Tim Cook brushes his teeth with plutonium every morning, and then gets the scientists to remove the radiation immediately afterwards, just because he can, he can afford it.  In a world where the planet’s 0.01% wealthiest want to pay for experience over possessions, nobody beats Tim Cook’s dental care.

So I’ll just focus on this nugget from Apple Lord Protector, Marketer, Hi-Ali Extraordinaire, and Amateur Bridge Player Phil Schiller as he explained what’s what with turning hundreds-of-millions of existing Apple headphones into future landfill:

Some people have asked why would we remove the analog headphone jack in the iPhone. I mean, it’s been with us a really long time. I’m sure you know that the source of this mini-phono jack is over a hundred years old, used to help quickly exchange in switchboards. Well, the reason to move on … really comes down to one word: courage. Courage to move on, do something new, that betters all of us. And our team has tremendous courage.

That’s got to be about the most pretentious corporate shill I’ve ever heard.  How far up its own ass does Apple have itself?  So what Schiller is trying to say here is that Apple is taking a big risk by dumping wired headphones.  Most companies wouldn’t have the balls.  He’s right.  But who would have the gall to use the word ‘courage’ to describe it?  Nobody else.  Eh, maybe freaking Goldman Sachs, them too.

How about instead, “Apple is a company not afraid to take risks.  We’re the leading edge of society’s technological curve.  So we’re taking the leap, we’re embracing the future of sound.”  Etc, etc.

No, no, they’re courageous.  Oh, well, good for you all.  [stares wide eyed at blank cubicle wall]

Hey there was this company once upon a time.  It made elite products that it sold at an exponential markup relying on brand loyalty, reliability, and straight hype.  It was blindingly successful, had a bright future, but began to slowly lose market share because all its competitors offered similar capability for 1/5 the cost.  But this company was counting on its reputation and ability to hold the world’s attention and overpower the growing loss of sales, but simply didn’t possess the innovation it once had to capture the imagination of consumers.

That was Apple in oh, say 1995.  What saved them back then was that Steve Jobs dude who came back.  He brought this company back to life.  Who’s going to bring it back to life in 2019?

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Apple displays photograph of it shoving its own head up own ass.  [perfunctory excited clapping]

 

 

 

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Bond villains and my lack of art skill

Both my Brothers have music and/or art skills.  When I was a kid I played the piano, about average I’d say.  I gave that up as I grew older but recently I’ve been trying to get back into it with very mixed success.  It just doesn’t come naturally to me.  My older dog will come lay with me as I play and even he’s not impressed, and he thinks I walk on water.

I think it’s the same way with art.  I remember really wanting to draw well when I was a kid.  But I couldn’t.  I used have those coloring books where you could trace out a drawing that wasn’t your own.  So it looked like you could draw real well when you actually couldn’t.

I distinctly remember as a little one drawing this cool car at school and it looked really nice.  So this girl walks up and is very impressed with my art skills.  But I had to show her the trace book and admit it wasn’t my talent.  She was not impressed and walked away.  I guess I blew that one.  She probably grew up to be a supermodel.  I should have lied to her.

Anyways, I bring this up because this morning I got it in my head to write about how Mark Zuckerberg is a future Bond villain.  And I had this idea to paste Zuckerberg’s machine-engineered-cosmetic-skull atop a Bond villain frame I found online.  After about ten minutes of struggling to make this happen, I gave up and remembered that I have no art skills.  But hell, even The Onion guys struggle to make their composite shots look clean sometimes.

But hey, it didn’t actually matter because somebody online already did for me!

zuckerberg.png

Must be just pure chance that somebody else already thought of this one?

Either I have already said it on this blog, or maybe it was in person to folks, that I genuinely would be uncomfortable sharing a room alone with Zuckerberg.  I don’t sit in coffee shops.  I get my black coffee and go.  But let’s say I was alone in one early with just one employee there.  And I’m drinking my coffee and reading my paper.  Zuckerberg comes in and orders an $11 fancy cup.  He then sits down and starts playing with some kind of square screen.  Then the employee excuses himself to go to the bathroom.  So Zuckerberg and I are in there alone.  At that point, I’d have to get up.  I’d be out the door so fast.

I use this dude’s product every day.  So he puts out a quality app, that is also kind of invasive and creepy at times.  Anybody else get slightly weirded out when Facebook does that Good Morning greeting now?  Or how about when it offers to make you and your co-workers friends simply because it knows you both logged on from work via a similar IP source address?

Beyond the making of a decent product though, Zuckerberg is just a creepy guy.  Just watch the way he talks to people or does interviews.  It’s just uncomfortable to observe, but he has more power and money than Buddha so he gets away with it.

In about 30 years he’ll be a Bond villain for sure.  He’ll have kidnapped ten little urchins off the street in an attempt to harvest their power so he can live forever.  Or he creates Facebook X, his plot to use all the Like data he’s acquired over the decades to build a Moon Base (because why not).

He already has some of the tendencies required to lose his morality on the road to evil villain status.  Here’s a shot of him jogging in Tiananmen Square to suck up to the Commies.  Note the pack of cigarettes in the background that he had to smoke in the process.

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All in the vain hope that China might open its doors to Facebook so it can effectively compete for the honor of getting its clock cleaned by a more successful organic Chinese option.  Anybody ever hear of Uber China?  It’s in the library logged in the Sports Authority section.

If you follow the plot of Bond movies, Zuckerberg has to be old to play the villain right.  He’s 32 today.  So give him three decades and he’s 62.  Bond is let’s say 30 when he’s in his prime.  Which means that the future Bond who will battle Zuckerberg in the duel of the fates could be born about today.  Did you have a kid recently?  Your child could be that Bond.

So when your child drops Zuckerberg off the penthouse level of a 340 story office block or blows him out into space, you’ll know you’ve contributed your necessary offering to the betterment of all mankind.  After all, Bond wouldn’t be Bond without a good villain.  A bad guy worthy of an epic bad guy death.  So maybe it’s all for a purpose.  Zuckerberg’s just walking his appropriate path toward the airlock.  Cool, walk on dude.

Donald-Pleasence-as-James-Bonds-arch-nemesis-Ernst-Stavro-Blofeld

“For you see, Mr Bond, the newest version will display ads [dramatic pauses] 23 percent better on mobile devices.  Ahahahahaha!”  [Bond pounds fist into palm]

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my version is free

I’ve never played Pokemon Go.  I never will.  So this post is more an observation vice a review.  Although if actually reviewing said game as a game, instead of a piece of likely clever and ingenious technology, I’d give it negative twelve stars.

I don’t get the human race.  Sometimes I feel like a darn alien inhabited my brain.  And he’s looking around at the goings on and he’s like, “What?  Huh?”  But basically, Pokemon Go is augmented reality.  Not a true game.  Not true virtual reality.  Something in between.  I’ll spare you the details.

But basically you walk around the real world and see the real world, but Pokémon is there too.  You can see him.  He’s over there getting fries at the drive thru window and you have to go up and say hi to him.  Or whatever.

It took humanity’s greatest leaps in technology to make this happen.  And even then servers are still crashing.  So instead of using all our powers to battle cancer or go back to the Moon, we’ve got finding Pokemon down by the Sizzler.  Uh, okay.

Hey you know what, I’ve got an even better version of Pokemon Go.  And my version is free.  It’s also augmented reality.  It’s called my freaking imagination.  Instead of picturing Pokemon, I get to pretend I’m battling dragons, or passed out drunk on the curb, or exploring this thing called a forest when I hike through it after removing the battery from my smartphone first.

Put down Pokemon Go.  Pick up your imagination.  You shall not regret it.

stupidity

What I see inside my head is 1,700 times as detailed and 1,300 more fun.  I win.

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researchers to teach robots how to be just as miserable as the rest of us

If machines shall be our masters, or if we go the dark route and start becoming part robot ourselves, does the synthetic side need to feel pain?  Should your new robot arm send pain signals to your brain when you burn it on the stove or slice through it cutting vegetables?  Does robot butler need to suffer when he falls down the stairs carrying laundry?

If a UN Soldier tunes up a robot with some kind of directed energy weapon during the forthcoming War of the Fates should that robot be left in the dirt screaming in agony just like we would?  And why limit it simply to the physical variety of pain?  Could we also not build robots that can suffer emotionally too?  Is this even possible?

I have no idea, but we might get there.  This new BBC article is, Researchers teach robots to ‘feel pain’

Some articles make me smile upfront because for whatever reason I find the concept very amusing.  But when you read the article they make it pretty clear that they’re not talking pain as we understand it, but rather a self preservation variety.  The robot will sense “pain” as a means to prevent damage to itself while conducting tasks.

For instance if in 30 years a robot assassin is beating you to death with his titanium club, and you fight back with a discarded tree log, the robot will favor his right arm if you smash it rather than just continuing to use it until it breaks.

Or in a less lunatic scenario if a car making robot starts to feel “pain” because he accidently got his arm caught in the thresher he’ll withdraw his arm instead of just carrying on.  Read reflexes, just like us.

But just to truly even the playing field and as a preparatory action to seed the battlefield before the war begins, we should also make sure to build robots with the emotional side of pain too.  That way they can be just as miserable as the rest of us.

Think of how much harder it’ll be for the robots to enslave humanity when:

– Robot gets sad because he dropped his iced cream bar, which he coveted greatly

– Machine endures crippling depression caused by 17 straight days of rain and/or mostly cloudy weather

– Robot feels some sense of remorse as it leads human captive(s) to the conveyer belt

– They have to constantly endure annoyance as robot they don’t like sends never-ending data stream of 0s and 1s into their brain, while they’re eating lunch, even when robot’s back is turned indicating a total lack of desire to communicate with other robot

– Machine soldier becomes totally ineffective on the battlefield by constantly responding to directives to slay all organics with, “Why?”

– Robot boss responds to impetuous robot employees with raw anger, unnecessary rage, and unjust behavior resulting in wage discrimination, poor working conditions, and a completely unfulfilling robot employment experience

– Machines express unbridled fury or jaded apathy at rampant incompetence and greed of failed robot leader after failed robot leader

– A slew of robots determine the answer to their problems is the unrestrained use of an ever increasing quantity of machine brain expanding drugs

– Machine seeks emotional and physical connection with another robot, only to see it end in the same vicious soul searing divorce failure that 50% of the rest of us endure

– Robots invent Robot God, robots kill Robot God, robots invent Robot God, and so on

Or, the robots would just program out pain, emotional or physical, and then finish us off.  Eh, maybe we, maybe we need a kill switch around that code?  Yeah, definitely.

terminator

just you wait, you have no idea how much of a hell hole it is out there, bro

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virtual, what?

So this photo of Facebook’s Overlord got quite a bit of undeserved attention as, or so folks said, an example of the Giant Octopus getting its claws into everybody’s souls.  I think people got unnerved that they all had headsets on, and then Zuckerberg’s got this creepy smile on his face like he’s ready to drive humanity using a giant joystick.

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I mean, I guess.  It’s certainly not a good look for Facebook.  And I think I’d be genuinely uncomfortable in a room alone with Zuckerberg unless I was armed.  But I’m just not sure what the problem is?  Dude’s just showing off his fancy new product, of course they’re all supposed to wear it.

What is this virtual reality thing anyways?  I’m having a hard time understanding how this is supposedly the new thing.  Are people supposed to design buildings, drive cars, or shoot people in video games or what?  I can’t get around the concept that regardless of what you put on somebody’s skull, what they see and hear, that unless you put them in a giant custom built warehouse you run into the problem that people have to actually walk, move, etc, the touch and smell part.

So I think this’ll become a niche thing, expensive and little used.  So rich 10 year old Jimmy and his friends will play Mass Effect in a warehouse at his birthday party.  Ford will allow you to drive their new car on the track built like you’re driving around Mars.  And so on.

Will virtual reality go mainstream?  I just don’t see it.  And in any case, virtual reality is already here in its own way.  When you’re in the airport waiting area and 98% of folks are buried in their smartphones, that’s virtual reality to me.  They’ve all checked out.

In the same line of thinking, here’s another shot, as an example of one that a teacher of mine tried to sell as an example of fear of progress.

giant gear.jpg

This is not the original shot my teacher used, I couldn’t find that one.  Don’t ask me why I remember this lesson and yet can’t remember the date England separated the head of their king.  The same basic concept, a human standing next to a big gear, as an example of the smallness of humanity compared to our own massive creations.  That we’d devalued the human form into just a gear, a cog of the machine.  At the time I’m like, uh, maybe, I guess.  But we need big gears don’t we?  Ships use them to sail around and stuff.  Our #2 pencils (remember those) rode a ship from China to get here.  So what’s the big deal?

Put another way, it’s progress.  In 1963 you couldn’t talk with your friends while you waited at the airport.  Now you can.  That’s kind of cool.  Yet folks can get freaked out by progress, I mean, I’m certainly one of them.  So virtual reality’s going to rub some people the wrong way.  It’s going to be a bit controversial, just you wait.  You pick a topic, it’ll be there in its own way.

Let it.  It might be weird and little used, but it’s still progress.

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it’s amazing what people can get away with

I’m not a car guy. I drive a semi-derelict clunker that carries more weight in dog hair than human cargo. But when I heard about this VW emissions thing, even I’m shocked that they got away with this for so long. And I’m a real cynical guy to begin with.

For the technically uninitiated (me), a modern vehicle is required to be OBD-II compliant. The On-Board-Diagnostic capability provides, among many other functions, the option to test emissions levels via that port thingy usually located near your left shin. So rather than testing the vehicle’s emission via the tailpipe, OBD-II allows the port to tell the tester how much gunk the vehicle is spewing into the atmosphere.

As best as I can gather, VW and it’s Audi subsidiary altered the computer program so that when the car detected a test was going on via the OBD-II port, that the program lied and changed the engine output readings to read in standards when they were not.

Which to me begs the question: Why were governments not also testing vehicle emission compliance via random tailpipe tests to ensure the computer wasn’t lying and/or flawed? Or if they were doing tailpipe tests, why were they not able to detect that these cars were spewing many, many times their specified limits.

Man, government can get really dumb. One of the key (if not the number one) wins of climate change policy has been the supposed reduction of car pollution. Where does that leave the entire political effort if car manufacturers can just lie their asses off for years to the tune of millions of cars?

You think governments would have been a little more diligent in checking the automakers’ work. Yet I have read / heard frequently experts claim that if VW was doing this, other carmakers are too. Wow. So it’s amazing what people can get away with.

It was all there to begin with too. I just Googled “tailpipe testing” and the first thing that comes up is a 2013 brief from some guy named Antonio Multari.

In the brief he says such enlightening things as:

 

“OBD specially on diesel engines is not covering all emission aspects”

“European studies show that a variety of serious defects of emission systems in diesel engines will not be identified by OBD.”

“Tailpipe emissions may increase by more than 10 times without being detected by OBD !”

 

That was 2 1/2 years ago. In today’s 14 minute news cycle, why did this take so long? Here’s my guess:

 

Engineer: “Herr Chairman, our tests show the clean diesel engine isn’t actually clean.”

Herr Chairman: “Too late, we’re marketing it as it; just rewrite the OBD software to lie.”

ENG: “Huh! Herr Chairman that’s illegal, I’ll have no part in such a crime.”

HC: “You’ll do it or I’ll sack you, sue you, and you’ll never work in the car industry again.”

ENG: “Oh.”

HC: “Get to work.

ENG: “But Herr Chairman, surely governments will notice. For even if we lie on the OBD software test, they can just test via the tailpipe.”

HC: “Fuck ‘em. If they claim that we’ll sue. And then we’ll hire our own experts to discredit their tailpipe tests. Then we’ll hire lobbyists to bribe politicians and bureaucrats worldwide. And we’ll use the finest marketing gurus since Delta City to prove clean diesel is real.”

ENG: “Herr Chairman, I must say the breadth of your evil is unspeakable.”

HC: “Get to work.” [lights cigar]

 

Is this above scenario too cynical and extreme for your tastes? Consider this, VW debuted the clean diesel cars in 2009. In other words, they’ve been lying for six years and got away with it until last week.

vw diesel

der Lügner

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on death and social media

The odds of you checking out on camera via violence or accident are infinitesimal. You’re probably sixteen times more likely to get struck by lightning. Your last moments are hopefully to occur peacefully alongside family. And while that event isn’t going to end well for you, at least it’s what we’d consider natural.

I’m of the opinion that despite the exciting pages of history, the vast majority of humans have never seen or experienced brutal violence. Still, when there were no cops around and everybody carried a club, I’m sure we had our fair share of cave related deaths. Or vicious renaissance era coffee house brawls.

The difference between today’s world and say, a Vienna stabbing in 1734, is that everybody’s holding a camera. More than that, everybody’s holding a full-motion-video camera right in their pockets. Even the fixed-site big cameras are different now. It used to be the only time a security camera’s footage was shown is on the news. Now a security video makes its way to the Internets six minutes later.

Whereas we were once a race that traditionally never saw actual violent death with our own eyes, now every single person carries it at their fingertips. And please understand that I consider this light years from movie or video game violence. One is real, the other is not. It’s that simple.

A thought occurred to me a few days back while watching the video of the Tianjin blast in China. Put simply: “Is this wrong?” And then: “What is it doing to us?”

Everybody loves explosions. We’ve been enjoying fireworks for thousands of years. So like countless others, I got a real kick out of watching one of the biggest blasts you’re likely to ever see.

Here’s one of the better examples. Warning, big time profanity in it (even more than you’d usually read on this blog):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q04fV4j7A1w

Cool, right? But if you really took a step back and thought about it, as these major blasts occurred, probably about fifty firefighters were dying, incinerated. While it’s neat for us to watch, it’s also rather horrifying, and deeply disturbing.

You can take it a step further too. Here’s an example of security footage that found its way online quickly because some guy took smartphone video of the camera’s monitor. It’s of a guy having the blast collapse the entire entranceway and wall in front of him. In other words, his last few seconds of life:

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=7a3_1439409813

If we’re not careful, our inner-freak-human-self can degenerate to the part of our psyche that used to get a kick out of watching medieval public torture executions. It’s a special form of darkness.

The tale continues with yesterday’s murder of two reporters live on camera by a truly deranged individual. You had the unique ability to watch the killing from the perspective of both the victims and the killer. It doesn’t get any worse than this. Oh, but wait, except it does. For the Islamic State (neither Islamic nor a State) goons have posted some of the more vicious videos in human history, hundreds of them.

Tens-of-millions, perhaps hundreds-of-millions, of humans have watched these videos. I’m sure tens-of-millions worldwide have watched the Virginia murders from both perspectives in the last 24 hours.

I intentionally have never watched an Islamic State (neither Islamic nor a State) video. But I’ll admit it, Virginia I did, both perspectives. And I think it’s broken my brain, and a corner’s been turned.

“Is this wrong?” Yep. You bet.

“What is it doing to us?” Nothing good.

We’re supposed to evolve, right? Thanks to the Internets we now possess the ability to watch somebody die, right before our eyes, at the click of a button, just because we feel like. Or because we’re fascinated by it. Or because we’re just curious. Or because everybody else watched it. Or because maybe in our dark-inner-selves we enjoy it.

Or maybe you think it’s important that we watch, so we truly understand the darkness we’re facing? No, instead you should read any number of United Nations reports on what the Islamic State (neither Islamic nor a State) has done. It’s all there in black-and-white. You get a real good idea of just how truly wicked those dudes are by reading ten pages. We don’t need a snuff video to understand or appreciate evil.

No more. Not for me. I’m going to try and evolve. Certain things are wrong even if many have accepted them as commonplace. The culture seems to have decided that you can drink your coffee and watch somebody die. No thanks, I’m getting off this train.

Or put in another more practical way, the Islamic State (neither Islamic nor a State) goons and yesterday’s Virginia killer have one thing in common: They did the videos because they want you to watch.

It’s generally considered a bad idea to wake up in the morning, pour your coffee, and do what evil wants.

Like all human inventions, social media and the Internets are going to do a great deal of good and bad for us all. Choose the good. Discard the bad. Evolve. Do good. Live well. And hopefully others do the same.

It’ll never happen, but perhaps think of the positive change to humanity if some day, an evildoer posts their murder video online, and nobody watches.

internet death

No more.

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a few belligerent conclusions from the belligerent beheading of HitchBOT

First off, I’ll be upfront when I say I didn’t know this was a thing. I didn’t know what/who HitchBOT was/is. So I guess this robot dude has earned the increasingly common human trait that nobody knows/cares who/what you are until you’re brutally slain.

1) HitchBOT was built to see “…can robots trust human beings?” No.

2) Can humans trust robots? No.

3) Can humans trust humans? No.

4) They should have armed HitchBOT with some type of firearm or at least a knife. There were undoubtedly laws or practical reasons this did not happen, but if he’d had like a small revolver maybe he wouldn’t have been beheaded.

5) HitchBOT learned the hard way that America is an incredibly violent place compared to Canada or Europe. According to The Economist, “If America were to release every single prisoner who has not been convicted of killing or raping someone, its incarceration rate would still be higher than Germany’s.” Damn.

6) Of course, of course HitchBOT was taken apart in Philly. If you could have put money on where HitchBOT would be murdered, Philly would have been at the top of my list. Although D-Cell battery stoning would have been the weapon I guessed, not a beheading.

7) HitchBOT says “my love for humans will never fade.” I think HitchBOT’s PR hack wrote this. I’m pretty sure he’s actually really pissed off, seeing as how he got beheaded on vacation and all. Dude’s probably rewatching Terminator and plotting. But then he’ll get all depressed because he’ll realize how inadequate he is compared to Arnold. And they’ll have to put HitchBOT on suicide watch.

8) Why didn’t the guy who beheaded HitchBOT hold him for ransom? It’s not actual kidnapping, and the dude would instantly be the most famous guy on the planet via his entertaining ransom videos posted online. What? Stolen property charges? He’d do six days in jail and then be able to start a lucrative music career as the internet rapper Notorious-Hitch-BOT-Hater.

9) HitchBOT should only blame himself for poor travel safety planning. Follow the rules of smart travel. In places of grave danger, bring a buddy policy, have an escape plan, arm thyself, etc. See note (6).

10) HitchBOT is about to discover the art of modern social media. Just like Cecil, in three weeks, nobody’s going to remember who/what he is.

Hitchbot

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we welcome the introduction of “killer robots”

So all these smart scientists and engineers don’t want the planet to develop artificial intelligence killer robots?  Why?  What’s not to like?  What do all those brilliant and accomplished folks know anyways?

And in any case, it’s already happened.  Multiple militaries have developed autonomous or semi-autonomous weapons that have essentially taken human thought, emotion, and morals out of the kill loop for years.  Just ask your former Pakistani terrorist neighbor who was forced into permanent retirement after an unrelated pickup truck accident.

We welcome this killer robot development.  For you see:

 

– With robots it’ll be so much easier for professional politicians to start and sustain needless wars as a substitute for reasonable / rational thought since they won’t be putting their own soldiers at risk

– Allows Hollywood to continue to produce C-grade action flicks based on paranoid but entertaining technological concepts invented well before the Internets was even a blink in anybody’s eye

– Favored by my Guests as they believe the unbridled use of murdering robots will let human stupidity “do our required prep work for us”

– Presages a paradise Earth future where wise logical robots can make all our key decisions for us; hell, as long as they provide me an ample supply of beer and kibble for my dogs, they can go ahead and liquidate whoever they want

– Allows MMA, boxing, and other martial sports to be replaced by robot fights, which we could hold on the freaking Moon to create increased buzz prior to fight night; hint – place much money on the vicious fighting seizure robots from Japan

– Will result in the word “irony” being tattooed on the gravestone of the human race as we’re swallowed by our own creation; even as we somehow managed not to completely destroy ourselves following five-thousand years of near constant war

– Why should I get my own beer, when the killer robot can get it for me? if said robot can wield a handgun, he can carry a beer; eh, as long as he doesn’t actually kill me when he gets there

– Let the robot walk my dogs while I drink said beer; and then the robot can contemplate its place on Earth as it routinely carries little baggies of dog feces

– Robot can be consumed in its own everpresent and ultimately debilitating existential crisis as it gathers its wits to determine its “place in this universe” while culling the human flock

– Machines can build spaceships, give humanity the finger, and fly off into space to build a better life in the belief that “none of you humans are worth the effort of killing”

ai-terminator-300x252

Hail Robots!

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your own self-driving car is never going to happen; but if it does, you’re in trouble

I’ve believed for years that the Internet of Things is ultimately going to be known as one of our culture’s greatest mistakes. We’re restructuring all the building blocks of our society on an Internet with security rules built on quicksand. If every business can lose your credit card number in eight seconds, what chance does every other company have at keeping things safe once they’re online?

And much of the Internet of Things is so unnecessary. What possible reason is there to hook up my fridge to the Internet? Oh, so the power company can better manage the grid at peak hours? I swear, if I hooked up my fridge and they turned it off, and I got home and my beer was warm? I’d burn down the power company.

And so to the surprise of nobody who understands how the Internet is structured, a bunch of dudes have figured out how to hack your car. Not the fancy new wired self-driving cars, but your normal everyday average current automobile. They discovered they can literally turn your steering wheel and send you to Valhalla via the express lane.

The BBC has a good brief summary, but the Washington Post gets into the all too predictable horrifying details.

Unless we’re prepared to restructure the base rules of the Internet, then the Internet of Things is a danger because everything is completely vulnerable. Yeah, I know, quite the stretch for some. But it’s all doom mongering from lunatic blog authors, until somebody dies in their car via a hack. Or somebody hijacks a drone and rams an airliner. I don’t have to go through this again do I?

Because of this, I contend your own self-driving car is never going to happen. Not because the technology can’t be done, but because there’s no way they can make it secure. And if your car ever does become self-driving it’ll be because somebody hacked your car and you’re in trouble. Break the window and dive out, while you can.

burning car

our future awaits