Just when I read about the Los Angles police department getting all reved up to deploy it’s latest new toy, the ‘SkySeer‘, they get shut down by the Federal Aviation Administration. What’s all the rhubarb about you ask? Well its over a 2.3 Kg bundle of high tech joy. The SkySeer is a unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that can loiter for over an hour and send back live video feeds to a laptop. It can also be programmed to fly a set course, navigating on an internal GPS. The ‘eye in the sky’ is being tested to see if it can be used in every day policing of the streets.
You know, to test an airplane you have to fly it. And when you fly an aircraft you have to obey the rules set forth by the FAA so you play nice with the other kids and don’t end up getting ingested by a commercial jet liner or smack into a traffic plane. Especially if on your big demo for the press your UAV crashes into the ground a few hundred yards from a group of reporters. I guess that didn’t impress the feds as they grounded the program citing air safety concerns and lack of authorization. Oops! Bad cops, no donuts!
Category: To be used for Evil
Driv-e-moticon – LED Message Screen For Your Car
Nice one there, for about $20USD you can have an LED sign in your car that will display the handy messages "thanks" and "back off". It will also display a happy face and a sad face. Just the thing to let other drivers know how your feeling. It would be cool if it used a big LED matrix that you could program but the chances of someone pissing off people with language that was, shall we say less than clean, is a sure thing.
Helps you improve communication with other drivers & express yourself. Fix display module to rear windscreen & use remote control in the front of the car. Battery operated – No Wires – Single and Multiple message options.
[via MAKE]
PXL2000 – Alive and Well
Any one remember the Fisher-Price PLX2000 video camera? Yeah, it’s the one that recorded a smaller than normal sized video image (gutter boxed) onto regular audio cassette tape. It was meant for kids but it soon found a following with video artists all over the place. I used to have a few of them, one I even modded to have a direct video out so the picture quality would be better because it could feed into a regular VTR directly. Anyway, I was tooling around the backwaters of YouTube yesterday and discovered that some people have uploaded and tagged footage from these cameras. I have a link here so you can see the classic camera in action. If you have any footage, and you can still play the tapes back on your camera, you should upload them and join in the fun.
ESG Personal Flying Wings
Perfect for those long cross country stealth military insertions that some governments love so much. With this modern ‘bat suit’, once you exit the plane the wearer can glide up to 40 km before landing on the dime. This and a pair of jet boots and your about halfway to a new Olympic sport. Stunt planes are for wimps.
Swann Mobile Viewer
Here is a handy little gem, a 2.4 GHz video sniffer. Just the perfect thing use if your up for a little bit of war warspying and you don’t want to get your hands dirty.
[via gadgetmadness]
StreetWars is Coming…
This sounds exactly like a game my friends and I used to play when we were in high school called ‘Killer‘ by Steve Jackson Games. We used everything from eggs filled with Snap Caps (grenades) to rubber dart guns to the dreaded disc gun (high rate of fire but low accuracy). Nowadays the game Killer is heavy on the Nerf weapons, I’m glad of that. Today if your running around with a a rubber dart gun your likely to spend a whole lot of time in jail and pay huge fines for having the cops use all of their cop gear to cordon off an entire city while they look for your sorry butt.
This modern version looks to be limited to only a few plays, a hundred or so. And only water is to be used take out your target. I’m sure as this hits the mainstream more and more people will be trying this for themselves and end up getting in the news. Not in the good way either.
I’d like to know if this new version has any ties to the Jackson game, other than the premise. It’s clear that the people that run this are worried about copy cat (or lawsuits)s, you only get the rules once you have been screened and approved to play. This is about all you get from the web site:
At the start of the game you will receive a manila envelope containing the following:
- A picture of your intended target(s)
- The home address of your intended target(s)
- The work address of your intended target(s)
- The name of your intended target(s)
- Contact information of your intended target(s)
Upon receipt of these items, your (or your team’s) mission is to find and kill (by way of water gun, water balloon or super soaker) your target(s).
You can hunt your target down any way you see fit; you can pose as a delivery person and jack them when they open the door, disguise yourself and take them out on the street, etc.
If you are successful in your assassination attempt, the person you killed will give you their envelope and the person they were supposed to kill becomes your new target. This continues until you work yourself through all the players and retrieve the envelope with your (or your team’s) picture(s) and name(s). Then you win. Cash…but first live in fear.
There is nothing like knowing that your being hunted to make you alert and aware of everything. Quite exhilarating, like playing paintball for weeks on end. Except that you never know when that ball is going to strike and you only get one shot.
[via Wonderland]