As a prank, students from local high schools have been taking advantage of the county’s Speed Camera Program in order to exact revenge on people who they believe have wronged them in the past, including other students and even teachers.
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students duplicate the license plates by printing plate numbers on glossy photo paper, using fonts from certain websites that “mimic” those on Maryland license plates. They tape the duplicate plate over the existing plate on the back of their car and purposefully speed through a speed camera, the parent said. The victim then receives a citation in the mail days later.
Students are even obtaining vehicles from their friends that are similar or identical to the make and model of the car owned by the targeted victim, according to the parent.
On May 24, 1844, the line was officially opened as Morse sent his famous words “What hath God wrought” from the B&O’s Baltimore station to the Capitol Building along the wire.
Interesting…he was a Preacher’s Kid (like yours truly) and an artist.
Researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor, it was announced on December 11. According to the researchers, further development of the technology may soon make it possible to view other people’s dreams while they sleep.
The scientists were able to reconstruct various images viewed by a person by analyzing changes in their cerebral blood flow.
Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, the researchers first mapped the blood flow changes that occurred in the cerebral visual cortex as subjects viewed various images held in front of their eyes. Subjects were shown 400 random 10 x 10 pixel black-and-white images for a period of 12 seconds each. While the fMRI machine monitored the changes in brain activity, a computer crunched the data and learned to associate the various changes in brain activity with the different image designs.
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ATR chief researcher Yukiyasu Kamitani says, “This technology can also be applied to senses other than vision. In the future, it may also become possible to read feelings and complicated emotional states.”
The next step would be to go in the other direction – planting images in the brain – and then we’d pretty much have the foundation laid for the Matrix.
Japan, a country that can’t take care of it’s old people, is laying the groundwork for turning us all into batteries.
Luxo Jr. is the first film produced in 1986 by Pixar Animation Studios, following its establishment as an independent film studio. It is a computer-animated short film (two and a half minutes, including credits), demonstrating the kind of things the newly-established company was capable of producing.
It is the source of the small hopping desk lamp included in Pixar’s corporate logo. In a subsequent re-release after Pixar became popular, a pretext was added to the film reading, “In 1986, Pixar produced its first film. This is why we have a hopping lamp in our logo.”
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It was Pixar’s first animation after Ed Catmull and John Lasseter left ILM’s computer division and was also John Lasseter’s directorial debut. Lasseter’s aim was to finish the short film for SIGGRAPH, an annual computer technology exhibition attended by thousands of industry professionals. Catmull and Lasseter worked around the clock, and Lasseter even took a sleeping bag into work and slept under his desk[1], ready to work early the next morning. The commitment paid off, and against all odds it was finished for SIGGRAPH.
“Luxo Jr. sent shock waves through the entire industry – to all corners of computer and traditional animation. At that time, most traditional artists were afraid of the computer. They did not realize that the computer was merely a different tool in the artist’s kit but instead perceived it as a type of automation that might endanger their jobs. Luckily, this attitude changed dramatically in the early ’80s with the use of personal computers in the home. The release of our ‘Luxo Jr.,’ … reinforced this opinion turnaround within the professional community.” Ed Catmull, Computer Animation: A Whole New World, 1998.
Here’s an excerpt from an Scientific American interview with Levy:
And, as you mention in Love and Sex with Robots, brothels in Japan and South Korea already offer sex with dolls for the same rates they would charge for human prostitutes. So in studying sex with prostitutes, you figured you might begin to understand what the thinking behind sex with robots would be. I started analyzing the psychology of clients of prostitutes. One of the most common reasons people pay for sex was that people wanted variety in sex partners. And with robots, you could have a blonde robot today or a brunette or a redhead. Or people want different sexual experiences. Or they don’t want to commit to a relationship, but just to have a sexual relationship bound in time. All those reasons that people want to have sex with prostitutes could also apply to sex with robots.
But sex with robots won’t just be a guy thing? When I started, the research was almost entirely on male clients, but the number of women who pay for sex is on the increase, although there’s not much published on the subject. That shows both sexes are interested and willing and desirous to get sex they paid for. Heidi Fleiss is proposing to open a brothel in Nevada where all the sex workers are male and the clients are female. You already have something similar in Spain.
If people fall in love with robots, aren’t they just falling in love with an algorithm? It’s not that people will fall in love with an algorithm, but that people will fall in love with a convincing simulation of a human being, and convincing simulations can have a remarkable effect on people.
When I was 10, I was in Madame Tussauds waxworks in London with my aunt. I wanted to find someone to get to some part of the exhibition and I saw someone, and it didn’t dawn on me for a few seconds that that person was a waxwork. It had a profound effect on me—that not everything is as it seems, and that simulations can be very convincing. And that was just a simple waxwork.
And if you or others could be taken in just by a wax figure, even for a moment, imagine what a realistic robotic simulation of a person would do. But if people are aware that a robot’s just electronics, won’t that be an obstacle to true love? By 40 or 50 years, everyone of a marriageable age will have grown up with electronics all around them at home, and not see them as abnormal. People who grow up with all sorts of electronic gizmos will find android robots to be fairly normal as friends, partners, lovers.
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This dude is pretty creepy but I think he might be right. Dudes in Japan are already spending fortune on girlfriend dolls. It won’t be long before the dolls are talking and doing other stuff.
If you haven’t seen Lars and the Real Girl, it gets into some of these issues of intimacy and is a movie I’d highly recommend.
