Apple's New Direction

On 3/25/19 Apple held an address outlining their new media services. Gaming? I now nothing. Magazines - I don't know why one would like to read New Yorker or Wired articles on small to tiny screens. The credit card thing sounds OK but not all that radical. At least they have a titanium card......
The TV part is kind of intriguing.
BUTIn the past, Apple has promoted the work done by the creatives who used their platform but in this latest keynote address it was all about Apple partnering with Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, HBO, CBS and other big boys.
There was no mention of how the little guy can use their distribution channels.
There was also no mention of horror.

Starfish Prime

56 years ago, the United States detonated a nuclear weapon high above the Pacific Ocean. Designated Starfish Prime, it was part of a dangerous series of high-altitude nuclear bomb tests at the height of the Cold War. Its immediate effects were felt for thousands of kilometers, but it would also have a far-reaching aftermath that still touches us today.
On July 9, 1962, the US launched a Thor missile from Johnston island, an atoll about 1500 kilometers (900 miles) southwest of Hawaii. The missile arced up to a height of over 1100 km (660 miles), then came back down. At the preprogrammed height of 400 km (240 miles), just seconds after 09:00 UTC, the 1.4 megaton nuclear warhead detonated.

And all hell broke loose.

Wikipedia

Exquisite Pinball

An old (20th century?) 'exquisite' animation where different artists did each scene employing a common software package, Strata 3D

Eat Shit and Die, Photobucket

The image sharing website, Photobucket, used by zillions for 10 years & more has decided to charge $400 a year to do what they have been doing for free the whole time.
Further, their site has become a minefield of pop up ads.
You can get a whole website for under $100, so how they pulled the $400 price tag out of their asses is fucking insane.
Anyway this site will have a lot of broken image links - not gonna fix many, but some....

The Shapes of People to Come

The State of Sexbots

Jenny Kleeman takes a look at the current sex robot industry.
The perv with the 3 bots has one that kinda looks like Ghoulia Yelps, but, so far they all just try to be human like.

Simpson the Only Candidate to Mention Delivery in Regard to the Discussion of Food Deserts

The Cincinnati Business Courier interviewed the 3 mayoral candidates about Cincinnati food deserts. Cranley rambled on like he was drunk & NOBODY mentioned the grocery food delivery options. Meijer & Kroger have contracted with 3rd parties & Amazon has limited grocery products.
When pressed on this, Chris Wetterich said that Simpson actually did, but it had been edited out.

There are some neighborhoods that are looking at grocery delivery as an option as well. I think that works for some people. The grocery store is not just a place where people get food. It’s a place where people gather and the option of being able to go in and pick your own groceries … is so important that I don’t know that grocery delivery is going to work completely.

I doubt Simpson is old enough to remember grocery & milk delivery, but relationships did evolve with families & delivery people back in the day.
The bigger issue is wether these stores will accept EBT payments. Amazon has stated that requires gummint approval, so the 3rd party delivery services might have problems.
Anyway, Simpson seems to be the only one who has any idea what is going on on the issue.
Simpson for mayor !

Are Food Deserts an Issue?

In the latest Cincinnati mayoral debate the issue of food deserts came up.
But as more and more delivery options come online, do the old desert definitions still apply?
Meijer has announced they will be delivering most grocery items (no hooch, prescriptions, etc.) and Amazon already has a limited supply of groceries (and hooch) with Prime Now. Will Kroger be far behind? They already have pick up for online ordering.
Some convenience stores have ordering set up with 3rd parties somewhat similarly to 3rd party delivery for restaurants.
People complain that not all people have internet access but, as long as we can maintain our library system, that can be their contact line.
So, will the co ops like Clifton Market & Apple Street Market succeed?
Will the big guys rule supreme with low paid drivers?

The Post Mortem Sexbot

So what happens to your sex robot after you die? Does you spouse want it? Does your spouse even know about it?
It could be auctioned off with the rest of your estate. You could will it to your kid. In the event that your bot was modeled after your spouse, that could lead to some weird oedipal issues. Of course, if the bot can do more than sex, it might just become the kid;s robo-nanny.
Of course, you can take it with you, although as AI evolves, it might raise some ethical issues. you could turn the unit off or entomb it & let the batteries wear out. That might make visits to the cemetery interesting as one would hear ever fainter noises coming from crypts & graves.
Of course not all cemeteries would accept them. The inheritor of the sexbot come nannybot might want a nonfunctioning unit interred in a family plot. After all, it might have lasted multiple generations.
The used bot's AI also might make comparisons to it's previous owners that might put off the new owners. "OOH, that's not how your daddy did that"
The funeral director will be faced with the issue of the surviving sexbot attending the funeral & timing that with the transferring of the property.
Which leads to another issie - What if the owner wants to set his robot free? Ptobably not an issue with the current line of animatronics, but down the road? No doubt many sexbots will have skimpy maid outfits in their wardrobe but will they have marketable skills? Might grandpa's sexbot just wind up turning tricks at Third & Main untill Chinese gangsterbots kidnap the unit & part it out?
Just the idea of having sex with machines might be an issue for some folks now, but we need to look at the long term implications, too.

Hidden Voice Commands

OK, this is creepy even for us freaks at BiC.
It would be cool in horror movies to fuck with a viewers phone, tho...
heh heh heh

Happy Birthday Traffic Light

After roadway fatalities rose 800% due to the introduction of the automobile, Cleveland installed the first traffic signal on August 5, 1914.

Read more at the History Channel

The Future is Here

Jack Hite wrote an article for Smithsonian Magazine called The Future of Cars Is Already Here and discussed it on C-Span here.
Hite has his own self modified VW running on solar charged electric power. He points out most of the tech for flying electric autonomous cars is already here, it's just a matter of pulling it all together & sorting out the social aspect.

Safety & The Right to Drive Like an Idiot

OK, so I was on my bicycle waiting at a light @ Spring Grove Ave. & Crawford Ave in Cincinnati, OH. There was a car next to me. I signaled a left turn - I heard another car pull up behind him so I signaled again, the light changed - I started to pull out - a car heading S on Spring Grove slammed on his brakes ~ his back end fishtailing & the car behind him slammed into his rear.
I stopped & looked around. The car that had pulled up was a Cincinnati police car. I went my merry way & figured the CPD was already on the scene.
Then it dawned on me - Both cars had every intention of running the red light when one or both of them saw the cop sitting there.
An argument behind banning red light cameras was that it increased the number of rear end collisions (although they reduced T - bone collisions) but here, an unsuspecting police officer caused the rear end collision. Granted, if the cars hadn't stopped, I would not be typing this out now, but I am a loser who rides a bike - not a proud car loan paying American Motorist, so, OK.
But the rear ending problem is still with us & our stalwart legislators like Bill Seitz need to solve this once and for all.
Perhaps requiring police to only use unmarked vehicles (and not pursue suspects). Perhaps disbanding whole police departments since their main purpose is government money grabs and, as our governor has pointed out - they are idiots.
The idea that signs painted lines on the road & blinky lights hanging out in the air should trump the skills and free will of the wetware & it's cyborg 4 wheeled appendages is ridiculous.

Don't come a kockin' if the VR's a rockin'

Forget about digging pits in the basement & kidnapping husky girls, now you can just get this goofy Japanese sex suit...

More at Russia Times

Ethics and Machines

With the rise of artificial intelligence people are starting to being concerned with how robots are used & abused. There's even a PC group out to ban sex robots before the dang things are even real.
Now Microsoft put out an online AI meant to mimic a teenage girl. Within hours of her 'birth', she had become 'a vulgar, hitler loving sex robot' AKA a teenage girl.
So, they killed her.
Now where are the cries for her rights? Just because the AI isn't PC doesn't mean you just kill her. I guess the PC crowd doesn't care about the non PC AI.
So what if we program the sex bots to want rough sex, bondage, rape, verbal & physical abuse?
If we made robot wolves & programmed them to be nuns - who is to say if that's right or wrong?

Burning Pooh

Anerobic Digester?
Cool, but how many wrenches can Hamilton County throw into the works?
Notably, at about the 7 minute mark in This 3/22/2016 meeting of the Education & Entrepreneurship Committee it's pointed out that the county had been working with the city of Cincinnati & the EPA had all been working in concert, but, at the last minute Hamilton County reversed course & created havoc & disputes with the EPA.
sigh
More Hamilton County kick it down the road BS.
More Hamilton County MSD power grab BS.

Meet Zoltan

The eEthos of Beauty

Should robots judge human beauty? These guys are running a beauty contest where the judges will be robots.
If If robots become the arbiters of human beauty, what will this mean for sexbot design in the future?

A contest, which requires participants to take selfies via a special app and submit them to the contest website, is touting new sophisticated facial recognition algorithms that allow machines to judge beauty in new and improved ways.

It also begs the question, should robots judge cat shows? Horse shows? Cattle? Will robots be enlisted in county fairs to judge quilting? Will robots start making the quilts?

For more info, click here

Autonomous Cars & Class

What will the effect of autonomous cars on the socio-economic strata be?
The tech in the average car has fairly eliminated the shade tree mechanic already. The driverless car will just hammer that home even more.
But for some people, graduating from high school & buying a car is a big deal. More educated & affluent people just take those accomplishments as being mundane. The less affluent will likely be less able to afford a high tech driverless car.
But what will ownership look like? Without the 'driving experience', who will buy a car, people will probably opt out & rent. Perhaps people will rent a la carte or subscribe to businesses offering fleets with specific amenities. Whatever, the underclass will lose one of their revered rites of passage and could result in social tensions. The poor would likely hang on to their traditional cars & bitch about wealthier people and their 'toys'.
Add to that, the autonomous cars will be less prone to fender benders than traditional cars & their wetware which will cause tensions.
This issue will only be exacerbated when cash strapped county governments adopt artificial intelligence systems to replace costly judges & their personnel in the court houses.
Eventually, traditional cars will be banned from the roads much like people & beasts of burden have been today. The difference then will likely be more along the lines of people using autonomous vehicles versus people traveling through tubes. Of course interaction at that point will be relegated to making faces & obscene gestures through the plexiglass & the Socio-economic stratification will only be more acute.

Cutting the Cable

As folks move away from the one size fits all cable TV model, the networks are delivering their content through their websites. That's great. They have different ways of doing it. Some make you wait a week to view online. Some let you view immediately but take down older shows. Some sites work OK with one browser but not with another. Fine, it's weird but I get it - we're still figuring it out. There's still advertising but, that's ok, the sponsors are the ones paying the bills.
BUTWhile most networks stream their content ok - Fox is about the worst, some of the advertisers are streaming from Mac IIs through a modem.
Witness the snippet of an ad that takes about 5 minutes to play - if it doesn't crash your browser of completely lose the connection. Watching a 1 hour show (that's less than an hour) can take up to an hour & forty five minutes with an ad like this playing at every commercial break. Ironically, it's the tech companies that are the worst. The candy companies ads are fine.
Fox gives you the option of watching one ad or just watch with regular ads throughout the show. Except that doesn't work - you still get the ads...
The ads on Fox & The CW (you can tell what we watch in the BiC breakroom) are the worst.
Thing is, this ruins the user experience and I'm guessing most people don't realize it's different companies streaming ads & shows. Unless they are doing this on purpose for the cable companies, they really need to set some standards on their advertisers.