buttons-and-bits
How to Make Flying a Drone Less Boring: Get Distracted
You're sitting in an air-conditioned trailer somewhere in Nevada, one hand clutching a joystick, the other tapping out commands on a keyboard. You're a US Air Force (or CIA) Predator drone pilot. You're about two hours into a 12-hour spy- and kill...
The Ghost Drone That Turns Itself On
Here's a warm blanket for you to nestle into this weekend. The Washington Post has been running an investigative report on the U.S. military's shadow wars throughout the Horn of Africa. These special operations have become the preserve of hulking, so...
Gold Is Now Congo's Top Conflict Mineral
How much gold could you cram into a pocket? Or into a briefcase?
Foxconn Thinks the iPhone 5 Is a Pain in the Ass
China's largest and eminently loathable electronics manufacturer Foxconn is taking the fall for the iPhone 5 shortage that's annoyed consumers and worried investors in recent weeks. What's the holdup? They don't have enough parts? They're training new...
A Swiss Railway Might Sue Apple Over the Clock in iOS 6
For all the arguing over design minutiae in Apple's ongoing _thermonuclear patent war_ -- rounded corners this, unlock slider that -- you'd think the company would be obsessing internally over making sure any new product development is clean as a...
Robots Want To Compete In the 2050 World Cup
When I was younger I played soccer this time of year, every year. One of my earliest memories of the sport was being confined to playing indoors, where my brother and I shared a similar disdain for the sealed environment which was that, "Indoor soccer...
Substitutional Reality Is the Acid Trip You Never Had
If a man in a white coat put a camera-equipped helmet on your head and told you to trust everything you saw as reality, wouldn't you feel a little funny? And then wouldn't you be a little tripped out when they took it off and try to distinguish what...
How to Store a Bit of Data on a Single Molecule
It's not news that technology is getting smaller, faster, but once things start happening on a molecular level, it starts to get kind of ridiculous. Scientists at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology just published breakthrough research in Nature...
Hack This $99 Android Game Console
Up until now, multi-billion dollar electronics companies like Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft have dominated the video game industry. With the help of hundred-person video game studios and massive marketing campaigns, they've been consistently successful...
The Stark Beauty of DIY Fireworks
It's sunny, 93 goddamned degrees, and in a matter of hours I, along with millions and millions of my fellow countrymen and women, get to cut loose and for 24 hours maybe not feel totally awful about being 'Mericans, for once. It'll be a whirlwind of...
The U.S.'s Middle East Drone Wars Are Going Suicidal
It's "never been a good look":http://motherboard.vice.com/2011/9/19/the-bad-omen-of-america-s-falling-drone-syndrome when American drones plummet, for reasons known or unknown, into remote, tribally held areas across the Middle East, or over the U.S...
The Potentially-Alien F-22 Raptor Wasn't Designed for Oxygen-Breathers
Notice a pattern? The weak link in the next gen of manned military aircraft is invariably the man (or nowadays, woman). Pilots need oxygen. They need information fed to eyes that never stay in one place, in heads that come in a maddening array of...