Category: To be used for Evil

Near Me – ????????????

Near Me

Sure, it looks like a possessed doll, but if you can’t have a real pet cat a robotic one might work for you. These should be out some time in August for about $350US (apx.). If this is like the Sony Aibo, it will take a data card but you don’t want to think of where it goes, if you know what I mean…
It walks, makes cat noises, looks like it will play with you, and will sit on a chair and blankly stare out a window for hours and hours just like a real cat does. If you ask me, a robot cat is a much better gadget than a robot dog. You expect a dog to be bounding all over the place at the drop of a hat. Getting a robot to do that is tough, you need to plug it into the wall or it will have a 10 min. run time. A cat on the other hand is in a perpetual natural power saving mode. Brilliant!

Near Me Robotic Cat
Video of the cat in action
(robot,cat,Sega,Japan)

Owning a Hybird Car is Like Stealing from the State!

Gas Pump
You know, it looks good on paper but will it work?
California is faced with a dilemma, it has been pressing fuel efficient cars in order to reduce the pollution and to use less gasoline. That is fine, a car thats gets 60 MPG is better than one that gets only 20 MPG, but that means the citizen is buying less fuel and therefor the state is not getting as much tax revenue as they would like. D’oh! So, as officials are pretty keen on squeezing all the tax money out of its people as they can, the idea of a ‘tax by the mile’ system have come up. That would mean that when you did have to fuel your car a GPS unit built in to your vehicle would transmit information on how many miles you have driven and the times you drove them and charge you accordingly.
So if you think your going to save money by getting one of those gasoline/electric hybrids and you live in California think again.
I wonder how they will charge people that have all electric cars. Same system but the reader is in your house? Sometimes I wonder if it would just be better to fork over 90% of our paychecks and just let the state house and feed all of us. I hear soylent yellow is quite good if you serve it warm.
States Mull Taxing Drivers By Mile

(taxes,green,California)

One – You lock the target

As cool as interceptor missile defense technology sounds I wonder if the road the program has gone down is the right one. It’s been proven that the system can work, but the reliability is of some question. Also, the threat of an incoming missile attack has been reduced greatly in the last few years thus bringing into question if the system is needed at all. I am not in favor of scrapping the program out right, but I’d like to see more positive results before a large number of these are built. I think that the airborne laser systems have a better chance of knocking a bird down but the deployment of these are more of a local determent and not a global one.
But what would happen if the system were to work without fail? If the US would pledge that it would disable any missile fired from a nation how would that change the world political climate? Would there now be a rush to secure new kinds of weapons platforms? A move to a robotic or nanotech army? Would the suicide bomber become the standard weapon of small nations?

US missile defence test flounders again

MAKE: Blog and Website

MAKE Magazine
In this day of disposable phones and electronics so cheap that you don’t bother to fix even the most minor of problems with them, the entire notion of the fix-it guy is in real danger of becoming a thing of the past. Not so if O’reilly publishing has anything to do with it. With the sucsess of books like ‘Hardware Hacking Projects for Geeks‘ they may be trying to breath new life into the spirit of “Buy a new one? Heck no, hand me that JB Weld and an old coat hanger!” This is so the magazine for me. I can see these bound on my bookself along with my 50’s edition of Scientific American’s “The Amateur Scientist” and my equaly vintage copy of Forrest Mims Engineer’s Notebook. I can’t wait until the first copy arrives! I’m looking forward to reading about kite photography and the magstripe reader projects.

MAKE: Blog