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[Max™]

A box of parts disassembled down to unscrewing panels and such would be a dick move but amusing.

Though in "police and robots" discussion I became aware recently of something about Dallas and trendsetting, where in many cases there's a sort of odd pride "oh, those, yeah, we got them a year or so ago" with fads and such... but this time I'm hoping it isn't a case of trendsetting.

See, the thing with the shooting there, where he was holed up at the end of a defensible corridor in a community college so they sent in a bomb disposal robot with C4 and detonated it?

That is apparently the first time police have specifically used a robot to kill someone. There are lots of cases of stuff like using a robot to snatch weapons from people while they were distracted, or investigate up close to discern the abscence of weapons, and there is no argument that they've saved lives like that... the ethics of doing that are simple as hell: reduced risk to officers, nobody ended up getting shot, fuck yeah!

It's still a bit alarming though that, while nobody really minded the death of the dude who was opening fire on officers while they're shielding civilians with their bodies, we all just kinda took it in stride that it was a bomb disposal robot which carried the explosives in and blew him up. When the chief mentioned that they sent in a "bomb robot" he meant "bomb disposal robot" but many people seemed to be ok with the idea that it might have been a literal robot bomb used for just that purpose.

[Reelya]

Another fun thing is police using IP address services to decide to raid houses:
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/09/22/1819256/cops-are-raiding-homes-of-innocent-people-based-only-on-ip-addresses

The biggest story related to this, is a specific farm in Kansas was in the geographic center of the USA, so the biggest IP mapping company pointed all "unknown address" IP addresses there.
http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/
The company involved pointed over 600 million IP addresses at these people's farm. As a result ...

For the last decade, Taylor and her renters have been visited by all kinds of mysterious trouble. They’ve been accused of being identity thieves, spammers, scammers and fraudsters. They’ve gotten visited by FBI agents, federal marshals, IRS collectors, ambulances searching for suicidal veterans, and police officers searching for runaway children. They’ve found people scrounging around in their barn. The renters have been doxxed, their names and addresses posted on the internet by vigilantes. Once, someone left a broken toilet in the driveway as a strange, indefinite threat.

The week the family moved in, two sheriff’s deputies showed up looking for a stolen truck. This was the first of many unexpected and unwanted visits they would receive. According to a federal complaint filed Friday (available below), they “were repeatedly awakened from their sleep or disturbed from their daily activities by local, state or federal officials looking for a runaway child or a missing person, or evidence of a computer fraud, or call of an attempted suicide.” James Arnold was accused of “holding girls at the residence for the purpose of making pornographic films.” The Arnold family was accused by police and Internet vigilantes of hacking people’s email, stealing identities, committing tax fraud, harassing people, and stealing bitcoin. All in all, the residents of the Taylor property have been treated like criminals for a decade. And until I called them this week, they had no idea why.

“The first call I got was from Connecticut,” Taylor told me by phone this week. “It was a man who was furious because his business internet was overwhelmed with emails. His customers couldn’t use their email. He said it was the fault of the address at the farm. That’s when I became aware that something was going on.”

"My family has always been beloved in this community,” she told me by phone later. “We’ve never had enemies.” But over the next several months, the calls and visits intensified. When law enforcement agents asked companies like Google and Facebook for the IP addresses used by suspected criminals and then mapped them using tools like this that relied on the MaxMind database, it pointed at the Taylor house. Amateur sleuths who spotted IP addresses used by visitors to their websites or on message forums were so convinced that the Taylor house was the source of their various problems that they created reports about it on Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, the Ripoff Report and Google Plus. (Even today, if you Google the house’s address, it returns a series of websites detailing nefarious activities.)

“That poor woman has been harassed for years,” Butler County Sheriff Kelly Herzet told me by phone. Herzet said that his department’s job has become to protect the Taylor house from other law enforcement agencies. “Our deputies have been told this is an ongoing issue and the people who live there are nice, non-suicidal people.”

Last year, I discovered a young couple in Atlanta that suffered from a similar, but less severe, issue: Since the couple moved into their home a year ago, dozens of strangers have visited looking for lost and stolen smartphones. The visitors are led there by Find-My-Phone apps that say the phones are located inside the house. (They aren’t.)

I googled to find the actual address, and it's 8653 NW 120th St, Potwin, KS 67123, USA. There are a ton of crazy conspiracies linked to the house now.

[Frumple]

"The House of the Thousand Nigerian Princes." Latest novel by the acclaimed H.Q. Novecraft. Based on a true story.

[Max™]

Oh god I can imagine the search algorithms lighting up with speckles across the globe, and then this gigantic "HERE BE CRIMINALS YO" spotlight on... a little farm in the middle of nowhere, commonly known as Kansas, which also happens to be the middle of the US.

[Reelya]

Dudes in Turkey building Autobots for real. Out of BMWs.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/a-turkish-company-is-building-real-world-transformers

Guy in Kentucky shoots down a drone with a shotgun. Kentucky.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/09/24/2250210/kentuckys-shotgun-drone-slayer-gets-sued-again

Uber researching VTOL taxis
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/09/26/145200/uber-is-researching-a-new-vertical-takeoff-ride-offering-that-flies-you-around
I think they've officially lost the point of why they got a start as a company: moving to robot cars, cutting off the people who grew their company, acting like a centralized tech giant.

[WealthyRadish]

The Drone Slayer was originally charged with felony counts of wanton endangerment and criminal mischief. But all of those charges were dismissed in October when a district judge ruled he "had a right to shoot at the aircraft."

[Max™]

"Wabbit season!"
'Duck season!'
"Wabbit season!"
'Duck season!'
*vrrrrrrrnnnnnnn-CHBLAM!*
*both simultaneously*
"Drone season!"
'Drone season!'

[Reelya]

https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/09/28/0552231/nissan-debuts-propilot-self-driving-chair
Uhh, Nissan has made a robot chair that you can lounge in while waiting in queues, the thing automatically moves up the queue - as long as the person in front of you is also in a robot chair. Very useful stuff.

[Starver]

the thing automatically moves up the queue - as long as the person in front of you is also in a robot chair. Very useful stuff.

Bootstrap error!

(Unless it's turtles chairs all the way down forward...)

[Max™]

Well, given two points on a sphere...

[Starver]

But don't forget your hairy balls...

[Max™]

But don't forget your hairy balls...

THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE PILLOW TALK YOU... oh wait, you meant the theorem... well this is awkward.

[x2yzh9]

But don't forget your hairy balls...

THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE PILLOW TALK YOU... oh wait, you meant the theorem... well this is awkward.

I laughed so hard at this.

[Starver]

But don't forget your hairy balls...

THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE PILLOW TALK YOU... oh wait, you meant the theorem... well this is awkward.

I laughed so hard at this.

You were there as well?  Sorry, I was obviously preoccupied at the time.

[Max™]

...that's it, I'm shaving them.