Tag: Alexandria

Boston Dynamics Is Selling its 70-Pound Robot Dog To Police Departments

The New York Times reports on what the city’s police department calls Digidog, “a 70-pound robotic dog with a loping gait, cameras and lights affixed to its frame, and a two-way communication system that allows the officer maneuvering it remotely to see and hear what is happening.”
Police said the robot can see in the dark and assess how safe it is…

AOC, Ted Cruz Slam Robinhood for Freezing Some Trades Amid GameStop Volatility

With Reddit’s interest in sending some stocks soaring showing no sign of slowing down, the trading app Robinhood started restricting some transactions Thursday morning. Reddit wasn’t happy — and neither are some lawmakers. From a report:The incident apparently struck an unusual bipartisan chord, with Texas Republican Ted Cruz throwing his weight behind progressive Democrats who called out the company. Rep. Rashida…

A Massive Spam Attack Is Ruining Public ‘Among Us’ Games

Just days after US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez played Among Us to an audience of more than 435,000 viewers, InnerSloth, the developer of the popular multiplayer title, is struggling to contain a spam attack that is affecting most of the game’s community. Engadget reports: The hack started to spread through the game’s userbase on Thursday evening. It causes players to spam their…

Should the US Military Be Recruiting On Twitch?

The U.S. military has for years been using streaming channels and video gaming to recruit people. “Several branches of the military — with the exception of the Marines — have had esports teams since 2018,” reports The Verge. “And according to Military.com, the Army’s esports efforts alone generated 3,500 recruiting leads in fiscal year 2019.” But the question is… should they…

‘The Matrix’ Co-Founder Slams Ivanka Trump and Elon Musk

Andrew Pulver writes via The Guardian: Film-maker Lilly Wachowski has responded to Elon Musk and Ivanka Trump after the pair bantered on social media using a phrase from the Wachowskis’ hit 1999 film, The Matrix. After Musk tweeted “Take the red pill” — referring to a key scene in The Matrix, which subsequently gave rise to the phrase “redpilling” as an…

Is Support Now Growing for a Universal Basic Income?

Economist Tyler Cowen and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov (now the chairman of the nonprofit Renew Democracy Initiative) co-authored an opinion piece this week in Bloomberg arguing that “a pandemic is providing a tragic preview of some of the conditions UBI was conceived to address.” Though they worry about the cost of such a program, “And, though there are some…

4 amazing astronomical discoveries from ancient Greece

The ancients made some jaw-dropping discoveries without modern technology. For example, the size of the moon. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/4-amazing-astronomical-discoveries-ancient-greece…

An Investigation Into the Smartphone Tracking Industry

Every minute of every day, everywhere on the planet, dozens of companies — largely unregulated, little scrutinized — are logging the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones and storing the information in gigantic data files. The Times Privacy Project obtained one such file, by far the largest and most sensitive ever to be reviewed by journalists. It…

Two Mathematicians Solve Old Math Riddle, Possibly the Meaning of Life

pgmrdlm shares a report from Live Science: In Douglas Adams’ sci-fi series “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” a pair of programmers task the galaxy’s largest supercomputer with answering the ultimate question of the meaning of life, the universe and everything. After 7.5 million years of processing, the computer reaches an answer: 42. Only then do the programmers realize that nobody…