I'm not advocating for recording devices, audio or video, to be installed at every street corner. A device specifically engineered to detect gunshots is something else entirely. If it's streaming continuous audio that's passed through a speech recognition algorithm on a government supercomputer and scanned for red-flag keywords it is no longer a gunshot detector, it's a nightmare, and the same goes for facial recognition cameras, chip implants, barcode tattoos, NSA hijinks, etc. The problem with privacy loss isn't technology, it's an overbearing and intrusive government and an apathetic citizenry. Technology is ethically agnostic; politicians and voters not so much.

Well considering the context of my suggestion is a discussion on swatting, if the police receive an anonymous tip of gunshots but no gunshots were heard by neighbors or the detectors they can slow their roll a bit and not act like they're in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban. Didn't think I'd have to spell that out, AC, but so be it.

Same old story...a few bad apples ruin it for the rest. They should just put gunshot detectors on light poles and be done with it. They use them in the military to detect the discharge vector using triangulation. Three mics and a Raspberry Pi running off the bulb's current, transmitting to reserved bandwidth on the nearest cell tower. Of course if they actually did this it would cost ONE MILLION DOLLARS per device...

This is probably a really stupid question, but if light has a maximum speed but is also affected by gravity, what would happen if you shined a flashlight/torch into a black hole? It's going the speed of light at the flashlight but should increase in speed as it approaches the black hole's gravity well. Does the light just keep the same speed until it joins the black hole?

It's just one big circle-watch.

You'd have to ask God/evolution that one. Part of it is cultural, which is a shame, but a lot of "distasteful" media is designed to appeal to our baser natures. I don't think there's anything wrong with indulging in violent fantasy, whether or not sex is involved, as long as you're responsible enough to recognize what's happening and don't hurt people. To attempt to purify your mind will make you crazier than you are already biologically programmed to be and isn't necessary to control oneself. As our technology allows us more and more to indulge every dark whim, it becomes increasingly important to recognize the difference between what's okay to feel and what's okay to do. Our biology won't catch up for a long time, and most likely never will unless we begin engineering ourselves.

So games and movies don't make people kill but they make them fuck? That's a new one for me. Content ratings are a reflection of culture and some notion of political correctness, as in the ratings board doesn't want to find itself the target of negative media coverage. The best way to handle it would be to enumerate a game's content based on x number of controversial/sensitive topics as deemed by common cultures and let the parent decide which ones they care about with respect to their children. To say a game is "M" or 18+ is making the decision for the parent and should be outside the scope of an impartial ratings system.

You had me at nuclear. That is what is necessary, along with exploiting the environment's flow, to establish stations on bodies.

Wikipedia awaits your edit. It wouldn't surprise me if it was false, not because it's unlikely or anything, but once a person's actions reach a certain level of horror and depravity truly anything is possible and believable. You could say Mengele was launching people out of cannons to see if they could orbit the moon and it would sound completely plausible.

Yeah, sorry. Sometimes I think just because I know something that everyone does...I'm weird like that. Here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...

"Mengele's experiments with eyes included attempts to change eye color by injecting chemicals into the eyes of living subjects and killing people with heterochromatic eyes so that the eyes could be removed and sent to Berlin for study."

I heard from other sources that blue was his target color.

I don't argue that it isn't cool, but the German I'm referring to is infamous for the cruelty of his experiments, thus the creepiness. It reminds one of the other.

I started with Linux in 2007 experimenting with Debian and later using Ubuntu. Switched to Kubuntu for several years and just recently to Mint. I think at some point Mint is going to drop its dependence on Ubuntu for its main distro and use Debian exclusively. They're already well-positioned to do so with their Debian variant, and have a rock-solid understanding of what a desktop computing experience should feel like to the average user. To systemd or not to systemd is not the question for most people, the quality and intuitiveness of the user experience is, and I think the Mint team understands that as well as the importance of sane underpinnings. There will come a time when all of us thank Ubuntu for what it has done before letting it go forever.

Using forged steel axes instead of stone axes. Fucking hypocrites. I'd have jumped up and down howling and beat it with animal bones.

I was thinking he looked more like Briareos from Appleseed: http://collectiondx.com/files/... Those rabbit-ear antennae and all.

There was a certain asshole in Germany back in the 40's who did similar research. It creeps me out a bit that people are attempting (and apparently have succeeded at) the very same thing.