…or if you have ear buds in.
4 Likes
I bet he was actually a ninja cosplayer, so he could have attacked them in reverse while running away.
Ninjas are truly awesome and inspiring machines of death, so when one of them is running away from you they could very well be attempting to skewer you at any moment. The only way to be safe at that moment is to run after the ninja, in the almost vain hope that by matching the Ninja step for step you can throw them out of sync - if you can actually outrun the ninja then they won’t be able to stab you with their powerful backwards stab while running forwards technique.
So that’s what happened I’m betting and then one of those cops said, wait how do we even know this guy is a ninja? What if he’s a samurai and we get in front of him I bet we’d be fucked then. So then they decide let’s shoot him - if he dissolves a cloud of dust and shadow he’s a ninja and will come upon us in the dead of night and skewer us when we least expect it but if he is a Samurai he will die with honor and so the other guy said “puf puf uh I’m really out of breath with all this running, I don’t think it will work because he is definitely a ninja only a great ninja or a guy dreadfully terrified for his life could run this fast” and the other guy said “no I bet he is a samurai, they were in great shape because they had to run towards ninjas all the time!” So then the first guy was like whatever and the second guy was like bang bang and then you know what happened? The guy was dead and he wasn’t even a ninja or a samurai - boy those guys felt pretty silly about it, I bet if you ask them about it they will just blush and with a sheepish grin admit gosh darn it, he wasn’t a ninja, who’da thunk it?
3 Likes
actually when I was 18 in SLC I used to carry a sword and a sword cane but I never got killed. I guess I was playing at the easiest setting is what I’m implying.
2 Likes
The police, they kill you
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the bullets they have
and reload the gun just for you
3 Likes
Easy. If you have a problem with ninjas, send pirates.
1 Like
About as easy as wiring a magnetic switch to a bluetooth transmitter.
1 Like
You don’t even need Bluetooth. Other, smaller, simpler, less power-hungry, cheaper wireless modules can be used. And you don’t even need a special gun-camera pairing; when your or your colleague’s gun is drawn, all the cameras in range should start up.
Yeah. I was just thinking in lay-man’s terms, which probably can be exempted in this case since we’re on BoingBoing. Probably all you need is a very, very small inductive coil, hooked up to some kind of minimum powered NFC or RFID system hosted by the cop’s phone. When the magnetic permeability or permissivity changes in the holster, the cop’s standard issue phone could pick it up automatically and switch on all the involved cameras.
Or we could just do away with all that crap and just issue body cameras that can’t be turned off and are always on. This kind of evidence isn’t publicly available until after the trial usually anyway, so the judge can decide whether or not to include footage “2015-06-17 Duration 13:01:23F12 - 13:48:11F5 GMT-7 Coordinates UTM 12T 426043.16 4512340.35 Elevation 1307, Badge#1729 spending a lot of time on the toilet with explosive diarrhea from making the poor choice of eating Tacobell for lunch.”
2 Likes
A cellphone is just adding complexity and another thing that can be switched off or run out of batteries “conveniently”.
Use e.g. the nRF line of chips, transmitters in holsters, receivers in cameras. If the cameras in range get “empty holster” message, they will switch on. No other action needed from the cops, nothing to manually switch on or off, and if the holster switch is at least somehow tamper-evident (so they wouldn’t e.g. glue a magnet over the sensor), could be rather hard to disable. (Smearing a donut filling on the camera lens is of course always a sabotage method.)
Not having the camera running during a weapon-unholstered confrontation could then be a dismissal-grade offense, and a strong court argument against the cop. The equipment-reliability issue can be addressed by nonpairing of the cameras and holsters, so in case of two cops with cameras and drawn guns either holster can switch either camera, and failure of any won’t lead to loss of recording. In case with more cops, even higher redundance is achieved. Short distance and possibly using a licensed frequency band that’s not clogged by wifi then mitigates the EMI-related issues. (Plus the holsters continuously (few per seconds) sending a “empty holster” message, so at least some would punch through even a lossy link.)
2 Likes
I included a little math joke in there if you didn’t notice.
Listen man, I’m a PC repair tech, not an engineer. It ain’t my job to know what modules are on your mobo, or to design and build you an appliance. I’m there to figure out what’s wrong with Windows, and failing that, if your PSU, RAM, HDD/SSD or MOBO’s gone bad.
I couldn’t tell ya what any of the soldered on bits are for beyond pointing out which ones are capacitors, which ones are resistors, which ones are diodes, which ones are ICs.
1 Like
Get a liiittle bit deeper in. The DC-DC converters in the CPU power supply area are fairly trivial, are what often dies, and a replacement FET or couple caps (the caps die most often, then the FETs) can heal a motherboard of high value. The other things going wrong are usually too much effort to pay for. Unless it’s an industrial controller made from gold-plated unobtainium and no longer manufactured.
Or you can at least salvage good buck converters out of 'em if something else died.
Didn’t, today I have The Dumbz. 
Explained jokes are like reheated pizza. Still pretty good! 
Yeah, I ought to learn that stuff, just because it’s valuable personally. I managed to ruin my fingertips in highschool trying to figure out soldering on my own. If you burn and shock them often enough, badly enough, you can ruin the nerve endings forever. Nowadays when I touch cold things, they feel slimy, regardless of how dry they are, and I have trouble registering how much pressure I apply when I grab stuff. So I’ve gone from being a a clumsy guy with butterfingers who is able to actually tell how hard he’s holding onto stuff, to the incredible hulk just to make sure I stop dropping everything. You should see me drinking beer out of a can. By the time I’m done, it’s not water-tight anymore, and it’s not even like I’m trying to crush it. I just don’t wanna waste my beer.
It feels less like this: 
and pretty much has become this: 
But with zero force feedback.
Not dumb, bad joke. It’s really just a reference: “…Badge#1729…”
1729 is the smallest non-trivial taxicab number. That is, a number that can be expressed as the sum of two positive cubes in two different ways. Futurama referenced it [improperly] too when Bender first met Flexo. They read out their serial numbers and laughed, then when Fry asked what was funny, Bender indignantly replied that “we’re both expressible as the sum of two cubes!”
It was maddening to me, so I searched and asked my math teachers over the years about the significance of those serial numbers until finally, in college, my Linux System Admins teacher (who also ran the post-doc mathematics program) laughed out loud and told me I was a simpleton, then explained both basic and generalized taxicab numbers as well as cabtaxi numbers, then said it’s only useful for numerologists and other woo-meisters, in addition to number theorists. I don’t know if he’s right or wrong on that last point, but he was definitely very adept with applied and practical mathematics. He had a pretty strong disdain for his own definition of number theorists, who he called “syphilitic navel gazers.” I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of useful stuff in pure mathematics, but he was convinced that what mathematicians discover is interchangeable with what they’ve invented, and he’d rather get to the useful parts directly via invention than discovery and work out the details later.
1 Like
ARRRRGH! How could I miss that one? (rather easily, with my lousy memory…)
You read that yellow Simpsons math book, didn’t you? 
Good one! 
Theoretical mathematicians are fun. Their lingo is rather impenetrable but it at least looks logical from the outside and feels like making sense. And number theorists are good for crypto stuff.
(Do vector monkeys dream about Bananach spaces?)
As of the hand issue, this sounds rather unpleasant. Not having the finest haptic feelings when making stuff would drive me insane. Map where you have remaining pressure sensors working, find out the way to grip things to utilize those? (Maybe use the presumably unaffected palm as a reference? Sides of fingers?)
For tools, maybe plastic tweezers that bend under load? A thick silicone or foam sleeve on the soldering iron handle that deforms under excessive pressure and provides a visual reference, or something similar? Get any other sort of data that can be used as a proxy instead of the missing fingertip haptics? Glove with rubber foam fingertips to mediate/spread the pressure while providing additonal nonslip interface?
1 Like
These save my life. At times I just turn my fingertips in and use the skin next to the nail bed to grip things because that has plenty of feeling. Problem there is that I’m a life-long nailbiter, and have failed to kick that habit since I was a baby. I’ve even learned to enjoy that bitter nail polish clearcoat stuff. So half the time, anything further out than that last knuckle is going through some the inflammation cycle, which is great for telling if you’re touching something, even barely whisperish, just not how hard you’re touching something because all those signals get modified to some kind of mild pain/irritation. Yes, I know I’m a wreck. At least I can type. That’s pretty simple and easy.
Maybe those chopstick pincers that were featured on BB a month or so ago would be useful. I could use them to get a solid grip on most things (since they’re anchored at the wrist) then very carefully concentrate using visual cues to do the fine work.
If it were up to me, and if we lived in the same universe as Ghost in the Shell, I’d just insist on chopping off all those damned defective, broken, and under-performing bits and pieces and replace them with cold, re-calibratable, completely replaceable cybernetic parts. In fact, I’d probably just go the full cyborg route and get a robotic copy of my body made up (with the obvious perks, like a figure that doesn’t show that my biological original has 40kg of extra belly fat and has skin about the color and opacity of tissue paper) and just be happy to live in a completely prosthetic body.
4 Likes
The keyword is “neuroprosthetics” and “neural prostheses”. Books with this in their titles will be helpful here. The rest is just mechatronics.
With the increasing proliferation of CNC machines and other garage shop machinery, and shops-for-hire places that can make a part from a drawing, the mechanical aspects aren’t that impossible even today.
The problem I see is mainly in the interfacing to brain, for bidirectional signals. Quite some work could be also outsourced to the “body” (or its parts) itself, with e.g. self-balancing electronics (think simple reflexes).
Another challenge is in integration. If the upgrade parts should be detachable, or attached fixed; if fixed, the passes through the skin will be a weak spot, prone to inflammations, infections, injuries and all other unpleasantnesses. Even the connectors would be better done as through-intact-skin, infrared or EM coupled.
Depending on the extent of available neuroplasticity, you may even be able to get a totally different body, not just a copy of the somewhat poor human design with too few limbs and senses worth crap.
That all is a stopgap solution, buying time before the nature of consciousness is solved and mind upload becomes possible.
I’m with you there on a full brain backup to my own personal cloud.
I believe the way Ghost in the Shell solves the issues of interfaces and integration, IIRC, is nanotech. Basically, you get injected with a ton of self-replicating nanites designed and programmed to go and interface directly with your brain as an auxiliary computing and memory resource. The nanites themselves are a little bigger than a virus, and even though there’s a moderate rate of die-off (malfunction that makes the nanites shutdown) there’s so many of them and they’re so small that it’s best to just leave the nanites in-situ when they break. Since they’re self-replicating, and so small the chaff doesn’t pose too much of a problem (caveat, in the GITS universe, a very small percentage of people have a biological reaction to the little guys called Cyberbrain sclerosis, where their neural tissue hardens up and causes neurological disease when the nanites are injected. This plays the main role in the first season of the serialized anime.)
Once your brain is properly interfaced with the nanites into a collective cyberbrain, you have all the abilities of a rack mounted server or even better integrated into your regular brain, and you’re connected to the ubiquitous wireless network. If you think “2+2” the number “4” is automatically computed and offered up to your consciousness. If you generally wonder about what the GDP Mexico might be, the little nanites do a web crawl, find it, and present it to your consciousness seamlessly so that you don’t even notice that you didn’t know that info before. It’s like the whole internet is part of your memory. Furthermore, the jacks in the back of your neck are patrolled by these virus sized self-replicating nanites and are automatically cleaned and such if you still have an unmodified body. What’s really cool is, if you have a prosthetic body, the parts have drivers. If you want to be a great diesel mechanic for instance, there’s a software package you can download and install that gives you the knowledge necessary to do the work, an API for programming that type of troubleshooting, a bunch of pre-programmed actions like setting up your workspace and choosing the correctly sized sockets and such, as well as the curated memories of other mechanics who did the work IRL to become great diesel mechanics. The Armed forces also have driver packages for things such as operating a .50 cal Barrett from the hip to reliably shoot a target 20 meters away without using the sites, since the exact spec of your body including the length and position of your arms and the acuity of your eyes are already documented.
In GITS, people hyper-suited to this tech end up with a kind of “autism” called "closed shell syndrome: where they lock themselves away in their brain and become mostly unresponsive IRL because the feed of their senses is (contrary to real life autism) too dull to contemplate.
Aaaaanyway, I think we’ve gone off-topic enough on this thread and should PM or start a new one to discuss this if we want to speak further about transhumanism
2 Likes
