Drones in the US

The use of drone aircraft in the US is the target of new legislation in the House of Representatives, which basically seeks to prohibit citizens from flying any remotely operated aircraft that has a camera (sorry kids, no more strapping cameras to model rockets!).  Or rather, they seek to make it a misdemeanor to use a UAV to photograph a person or their property without their explicit permission.  This is a bit redundant, as there are already privacy laws that prohibit photography when a person has a reasonable expectation to privacy.  Ignoring that for a minute, on the surface this may sound like a good law, but consider this.  Government would still have the ability to use UAVs, police helicopters, and surveillance satellites to photograph you without a warrant, whenever they want.  This just takes that ability away from citizens.  When you look at what citizen photography has already done in exposing police brutality and corporate wrongs, I believe that citizen UAVs operating under existing privacy laws are not necessarily bad, perhaps even a very good thing in maintaining trust in government and business.  It’s an interesting debate, I can see both sides of the issue…I think rather than an outright ban, we’d be better off with something less than that.  Maybe restrict them from photographing residential property, but the rest is fair game?  What do you think?

(via FastCompany)

The New York Times caught lying in Tesla Model S review

models_coldweathertesting10The New York Times has been caught lying in a recent review of the Tesla Model S, outed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk (Musk was quite diplomatic about this and just laid out the facts, never accusing the Times of outright lying, but I’m not diplomatic and I call it as I see it).  Even before Mush presented this evidence, he tweeted about the test to which the reporter replied, “It happened just the way I described it” (link).

So, who do you believe?  The reporter, John Broder, is no fan of electric cars and an earlier article indicates a clear bias.  The thing is, after the TV entertainment show Top Gear created a misleading and negative review of the Tesla Roadster, Tesla Motors got smart and started equipping press cars with, well, let’s just call it the ‘Special Reviewer Option Pack A’, or to describe it briefly, data logging to capture information about the car throughout the review.  It’s that information that Musk is using to contradict Broder’s story.  He never fully charged the car, and even left his final charging station when the car was saying it could only go half the distance he planned.  Even then, the car exceeded that estimated range before it finally ran out of juice (well done, Model S!).

The data is difficult to ignore, and Elon Musk’s blog post will probably lead to John Broder’s firing (or if it doesn’t, I’ll lose all respect for the New York Times).  But this focus on the data got me thinking…what if the data could be falsified?  I do not believe that was done so, I fully believe in Tesla’s data…but as a society, we’re placing more and more reliance in data, in pictures, in videos…all of which can be falsified.  We’re entering a new world where to defend yourself, your word alone will not be enough…you’ll need your own set of data to back up your claims.  This is where wearable computing may come in…imagine a personal datalogger that just works in the background, until those times you need it.  You wouldn’t need to capture all the data your accusers did…just enough data to cast doubt on that evidence.

It used to be one person’s word against the other’s in court…and to win, you attack the credibility of the other witness.  There’s a new witness in court…it’s data.  Better have your own to defend you.

UPDATE – one of the New York Times editors has posted a reply here, basically saying that there were “Problems With Precision and Judgment, but Not Integrity, in Tesla Test.”  A fair look into the issue…it helps restore my confidence in that newspaper.

Drobo 5N – first impressions

Drobo5nToday was ‘new toy day’ in my office, as I took delivery of a new Drobo 5N (~$600 on Amazon).  I loaded it with three 2TB WD ‘red’ drives and a 32GB SSD accelerator drive and got to work.

Think of the Drobo 5N as a giant hard disk on your network (access it like any network share), with the added benefit of having redundancy in case of drive failures.  For example, I have three 2TB drives in mine, and it’s able to tolerate the failure of one drive, meaning I have 4TB usable space.  Pretty straightforward (but still not substitute for regular backups to an external USB drive!).  By creating different ‘shares’ (like folders on a drive), and creating user accounts on the Drobo, you can control access on a user by user basis.

I was really impressed with the initial unboxing…Apple users will feel right at home here (except the box and packing materials are black, not white!).  Very nice presentation, and the real surprise was that rather than being wrapped in a plastic bag inside, the Drobo 5N was tucked nicely inside a reusable cloth shopping bag (black, of course)!  Apart from the external cardboard box and a smaller one inside, the only other packing materials were two vacuum formed plastic inserts which were nicely marked for recycling.  I love seeing companies pay attention to the little details like they’ve obviously done here.

It took a little bit to get to a usable state, though that was mostly just waiting for it to configure itself…not surprising considering the storage space here, and not a big deal at all as user intervention was not needed.  After that, it was a simple matter of setting up shares and users.  All in all, great product so far…I’ll report back on it after using it for a while, as well as compare it to my other NAS drives, an HP Windows Home Server and an older Netgear ReadyNAS NV+.

UPDATE – mapping network drives was a bit odd with this.  At first I tried doing it with the normal Windows 7  ‘map network drive’ function but had some permission errors…so I then used the Drobo dashboard software to map the drives and sync the shares with my existing NAS.  The mapping didn’t reconnect next time I logged in to Windows…but I was then able to use the traditional ‘map network drive’ in Win7 and that’s working now.  Not quite sure what was going on before.  Apart from that, there’s little to report.  The Drobo 5N just sits quietly (very, very quietly) with a few pretty glowing green lights and serves up files when needed.  Exactly what it’s supposed to do.

Humorous Skyfall trailer

Ok, now that I’ve finally seen Skyfall (well, I didn’t catch it when it first hit the theaters, so decided to wait for the iTunes release and watch it on my home theater setup), I watched a trailer I’ve seen posted many times to the web, an ‘honest’ movie trailer put together by some fans(or not?).  Funny, but massive spoilers so don’t watch it without seeing the movie first.  As for the movie…I liked it, but I’d say Casino Royale is still my all-time favorite.

What our cities would look like at night without light pollution

1671812-inline-darkened-skies-006Artist/photographer Thierry Cohen has created some really cool images which show what several major cities worldwide would look like if there was no artificial lights (nor moonlight) masking the starry skies.  The result is really cool and can be viewed at his website.  He did this by shooting images of the night sky in places with similar latitude but no city lights, then overlaid them onto darkened photos of the cities themselves.  Very cool.

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