Company Developing A Drone Umbrella That Follows Your Head
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These are a couple preliminary test videos of Asahi Power Service’s freeParasol, a DJI Mavic Pro drone with an umbrella attachment that, with the eventual addition of an artificial intelligence tracking system, will allegedly be available for sale next year and be able to follow your head and keep you dry, hands-free. Will it stop other people from swatting at your dronebrella? No. Will it stop dronebrellas from bumping into one another and causing pandemonium? I doubt it. Does the test dronebrella in the second video crash into the floor? Yes. How practical will dronebrellas actually be? No. “That wasn’t a yes/no question.” Yes. “No.” For you, anything.
Keep going for three videos, the second featuring a crash, the third entirely CG.
Thanks to blue16, who agrees the easiest way to stay dry is to take a page from your good friend GW’s book and never leave your apartment, not even for a fire.
Company Developing A Drone Umbrella That Follows Your Head
https://ift.tt/2LXE2Lh
These are a couple preliminary test videos of Asahi Power Service’s freeParasol, a DJI Mavic Pro drone with an umbrella attachment that, with the eventual addition of an artificial intelligence tracking system, will allegedly be available for sale next year and be able to follow your head and keep you dry, hands-free. Will it stop other people from swatting at your dronebrella? No. Will it stop dronebrellas from bumping into one another and causing pandemonium? I doubt it. Does the test dronebrella in the second video crash into the floor? Yes. How practical will dronebrellas actually be? No. “That wasn’t a yes/no question.” Yes. “No.” For you, anything.
Keep going for three videos, the second featuring a crash, the third entirely CG.
Thanks to blue16, who agrees the easiest way to stay dry is to take a page from your good friend GW’s book and never leave your apartment, not even for a fire.
What The?: Custom Chevy Truck With Two Front Ends Confuses Other Motorists
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Hot on the heels of yesterday’s reverse driving expert, this is a video captured on Interstate 93 in Massachusetts of an old Chevy pickup truck that was heavily modified to appear to have two front ends so you can’t tell if it’s coming or going. There’s even a passenger riding in a rear-facing seat so she looks like she’s driving, and a custom ‘WHT THE’ license plate. Very cool, but I’m fairly certain the last thing you want to do is confuse other motorists on the road. They already have a hard enough time not crashing into things, why give them another reason to not pay attention to the road or try to film and drive? That said, you need to pull up right behind this truck then wake up your passenger yelling HOLY SHIT THEY’RE HEADED RIGHT FOR US!
Keep going for the video. Also, the wake-up prank performed in real life HERE.
Thanks to Corncorn, who may or may not still be on the cob.
To celebrate Father’s Day, this is the limited edition pizza box created by Boston Pizza and John St. Advertising with two legs that fold out like a breakfast-in-bed tray for eating pizza in the sack. Cool, but aren’t ALL pizza boxes made for eating pizza in bed? What’s wrong with just resting one on your belly like I do? “Besides making you look like a gluttonous monster?” My girlfriend happens to like the look, thank you very much. Isn’t that right, honey? Honey?! Wait — what’s this note? Can you read it to me? “It says ‘My dearest love, despite your penis being the absolute perfect specimen, I have to leave — the pizza in bed has just become too much for me to bear.'” I’m heartbroken. “The rest looks like you practicing your girlfriend’s signature.” Give me that!
Keep going for a brief video.
Thanks to marnie, who knows what I like, and I like eating in bed. Actually I like doing everything in bed.
A 3D-printed house you can actually live in should be ready by 2019
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In The Netherlands, a company called Van Wijnen is working with the city of Eindhoven to build the world’s first community of 3D-printed houses. The planned community will have five houses, all printed with concrete. Each subsequent house will build on the ones that came before; the first house will be relatively simple, just one story. The fifth house will be two stories and incorporate what the team has previously learned.
At the beginning, the houses will be printed offsite and brought to their final location in the Meerhoven district of Eindhoven. The aim is to make the futuristic-looking houses a work of art in and of themselves, so the final community looks like a sort of sculpture garden.
Van Wijnen is embarking on this project for multiple reasons. According to The Guardian, there are a shortage of bricklayers in The Netherlands. The craft is becoming more expensive as a result. In contrast, concrete is relatively in expensive and versatile. What’s more, 3D printing it is economical because none of the material goes to waste, and the method allows printing different types of concrete (reinforced with insulation or coated with dirt repellant) at once. Additionally, it can be easily customized according to the wishes of the person who will live in the home.
The real key here is that these homes aren’t just models; they will actually be lived in. And if this project is successful, more 3D-printed concrete homes will follow. The first home of Project Milestone should be ready sometime in 2019. For now, the homes are being printed offsite, but the company hopes that by the fifth house, the work will be done at the Meerhoven site. And apparently, the waiting list for the first house is already 20 people long, so it’s clear that Van Wijnen won’t have trouble finding someone to rent their 3D printed homes.
Anheuser-Busch pulls millions from controversial NIH alcohol study
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Beer giant Anheuser-Busch InBev is pulling millions of dollars in funding from a controversial study overseen by the National Institutes of Health that aimed to assess the health effects of moderate alcohol consumption, according to a report by The New York Times.
The 10-year, $100 million study had faced mounting criticism and was recently halted over concerns about how large beverage makers, including AB InBev, came to provide such financial support. A series of media investigations suggested that lead researchers and NIH officials had inappropriately wooed drink makers, getting them to pour millions into the work, while strongly hinting that it would end in their favor—i.e., showing that a daily drink is safe and could lower the risk of common diseases.
The large study, which was designed to include 7,800 participants at 16 sites worldwide, would be “necessary if alcohol is to be recommended as part of a healthy diet,” researchers wrote in a slide presentation provided to alcohol makers.
The study’s lead investigator, Kenneth Mukamal of Harvard Medical School, described his role in early discussions with industry as educational. The NIH’s George Koob, director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, forcefully insisted in media interviews that nothing inappropriate took place and that the study could “completely backfire on the alcoholic beverage industry.” (Koob has ties to the alcohol industry and was recently accused of nixing other studies that were seen as hostile to the industry.)
In the end, five of the world’s largest alcoholic beverage makers pledged a total of $67.7 million to the study. AB InBev had committed $15.4 million of that. All the money would be provided indirectly through a nongovernmental foundation that raises funds for the NIH.
Last month, the NIH announced that it had suspended enrollment in the study while it conducted two investigations. One would look into the claims of inappropriate fundraising and determine if any officials had violated federal rules, which prohibit NIH employees from soliciting funds or donations to support NIH’s activities. The other would review the scientific merits of the study, which have also been called into question.
While the results of the investigations are due out this month, it seems AB InBev didn’t want to wait. In a letter to the foundation that collects funding for the NIH, Andrés Peñate, AB InBev’s global vice president for regulatory and public policy, said his company was withdrawing its funding pledge.
“Unfortunately, recent questions raised around the study could undermine its lasting credibility, which is why we have decided to end our funding,” he wrote.
But that conclusion was not before Peñate defended the company’s involvement, writing that Ab InBev had not interfered with the study’s design or execution. He emphasized that “stringent firewalls were put in place” to “safeguard the objectivity and independence of the science.”
Ajit Pai’s FCC lied about “DDoS” attack, ex-chair’s statement indicates
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There was no DDoS attack against the Federal Communications Commission comments system in 2014, former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said this week. Wheeler’s statement disputes claims made by the FCC under current Chairman Ajit Pai, who is under fire for unproven claims about DDoS attacks.
The controversy began in May 2017 after Pai unveiled an early version of his plan to eliminate net neutrality rules. The FCC system for accepting public comments on Pai’s plan failed just as many net neutrality supporters were trying to submit pro-net neutrality comments on the urging of comedian John Oliver.
The FCC claimed the May 2017 outage was caused by “multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS)” rather than by the volume of legitimate pro-net neutrality comments or by a simple failure of the system. To bolster its case, Pai’s FCC claimed that a similar outage during the 2014 net neutrality proceeding was also caused by a DDoS attack. But Wheeler, who was chairman at the time and led the implementation of strict net neutrality rules, says there was no such attack in 2014.
“FCC officials who were there at the time said it didn’t happen,” Wheeler said in a C-SPAN show that will air this weekend, according to Axios. “The independent IT contractors that were hired said it didn’t happen. So if it didn’t happen, it’s hard to have a coverup for something that didn’t happen.”
The notion of a “coverup” comes from statements made to reporters in 2017 by then-FCC CIO David Bray. Bray was the commission’s CIO in both 2014 and 2017 and claimed that both outages were due to DDoS attacks. In 2017, Bray told reporters that the 2014 DDoS wasn’t revealed publicly at the time because “the Chairman” wanted to keep it quiet.
“[T]here was a similar DDoS attack after the 2014 [John Oliver] clip,” Bray told reporters from FedScoop in May 2017, according to recently released emails. “At the time, the Chairman did not want to say there was a DDoS attack out of concern of copycats.”
“The Chairman,” but not Wheeler
A statement about “the Chairman” in 2014 could only refer to Wheeler. Yet Bray now says he wasn’t referring to Wheeler and acknowledges that Bray himself was the one concerned about “copycats.”
Reached by Gizmodo, Bray walked back his accusation that the FCC’s silence over the non-existent 2014 cyberattack was Wheeler’s decision, saying that the concerns over potential “copycats” were actually his own, and that he would “not ascribe them to the former Chairman.” Further, Bray said that the phrase “the Chairman,” as used in his emails to reporters, was actually “shorthand” for his own work with the agency’s media relations department. (During the C-Span interview, Wheeler said he accepted Bray’s explanation.)
Bray confirmed this version of events to Ars as well last night. But he didn’t answer our other questions about why he attributed his own concerns to the FCC chairman and whether he still believes the 2014 and 2017 comment system disruptions were caused by DDoS attacks. Bray referred us again to a blog post from earlier this week that describes his own observations from the two incidents without definitively saying whether those incidents were DDoSes.
“I do still think there were odd events that denied resources to the commenting system in 2014 and there should be email records of these observations and concerning events,” Bray wrote. “It was a turbulent time and we were trying to do our best to make sense of what was happening.”
Of 2017, Bray’s blog post says that “something odd happened” that time as well, “with the API being flooded abnormally” beyond the level expected from legitimate commenters alone. “Whether the term could have been bot swarm or API spam flood or something else, I do believe the reported observations from [the May 2017 incident] supported the analysis of something odd happening that looked like a distributed denial of service to the commenting system,” he wrote.
The FCC hasn’t responded to requests for comments this week.
Net neutrality advocates have accused the FCC of making false DDoS claims to distract from its failure to process all pro-net neutrality comments. The May 2017 outage is still under investigation, while the FCC’s net neutrality repeal is scheduled to take effect Monday. The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) is investigating the FCC’s DDoS claims at the urging of Democratic lawmakers.
Separately, the New York state attorney general’s office is investigating fraud in the net neutrality comments system and accused Pai of refusing multiple requests for evidence.
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