E-Eats: Play Gourmet To Perfect Real-Life Cooking Skills

Do you want to create diverse, healthy meals, but don't think you have the skills? Don't want to risk expensive meal mistakes burning money? New software is poised to usher in a whole new means of cuisine: the CyberCook.

With elegant renderings, a vast array of ingredients, and realistic cooking technique motions involved, the game is as advanced visually as it is conceptually. Yet the technological breakthrough it symbolizes could reach outside the world of food and create greater educational methodology.

The CyberCook was developed by tech company Starship, whose CEO told www.factor-tech.com that,“It will change the way education is done, it will change the way the format is done of teaching people – and that’s the real clever bit, it’s not the 3D simulation, which everyone thinks is amazing, it’s actually the structure of what we allow people to do with it,” he said.

And perhaps with the dawn of 3-D printing (and maybe baking?), the social-media favorite word of "sharing" will take on a whole new meaning if your friends spot cookies in your e-oven.

But how do you throw a virtual pie?

No Pizza Blitzkrieg Yet: Delivery Drones Deemed Illegal

The Federal Aviation Administration wants to remind everyone that delivery-via-drone, whether for commercial for private purposes, is currently still illegal.

Although the rules regarding the airborne robots are set to be reassessed in 2015, the FAA has allowed drone usage in a limited amount by police and scholars who hold proper "Certificate Of Authority" documentation. They also allowed one company, BP, to use a drone in Alaska to monitor oil pipelines in the deep wilderness.

Regardless of what the rules become in 2015, major businesses that could benefit from drone delivery remain undeterred in their quest to utilize the flying delivery droids. Paul Misener, Vice President of Global Public Policy for Amazon, claims the ruling "has no effect on our plans...this is about hobbyists and model aircrafts, not Amazon."

Drone dogfights to follow?

Birdwatching in 2015 is going to get weird.

"'The Truth At Any Cost' Lowers All Other Costs": Former US Spy Robert Steele's Admirable Advocacy For "Open Source Everything"

After organizing a major CIA intelligence conference, the highly-respected Marine intelligence officer and CIA agent Robert Steele tried to explain that open-source information (the idea of using freely-accessible knowledge to implement policy, rather than secretly-obtained information) is the means to true freedom. The CIA promptly banned him from organizing further conferences. Now, he's taking his wisdom to the masses.

"Sharing, not secrecy, is the means by which we realize such a lofty destiny as well as create infinite wealth. The wealth of networks, the wealth of knowledge, revolutionary wealth - all can create a nonzero win-win Earth that works for one hundred percent of humanity. This is the 'utopia' that Buckminster Fuller foresaw, now within our reach," states Steele.

With this attitude firmly in mind, Steele writes, lectures, and advocates for the concept of "Open Source Everything": taking the power of knowledge from an elite few and making sure it is disseminated throughout all the world, with a focus on long-term goals that benefit all of humanity. Steele advocates truth as currency over violence, using international stewardship councils of experts in varieties of topics to check, balance, and spread information, looking far down the road on the effects that humanity's decisions of all sorts will have. An Open Source Agency, he claims, would collaborate to share this wisdom, with information coming and going from many elements, particularly including the expanse of information-sharing options available to the average computer user.

As Steele told www.theguardian.com, "We have over 5 billion human brains that are the one infinite resource available to us going forward. Crowd-sourcing and cognitive surplus are two terms of art for the changing power dynamic between those at the top that are ignorant and corrupt, and those across the bottom that are attentive and ethical. The open source ecology is made up of a wide range of opens – open farm technology, open source software, open hardware, open networks, open money, open small business technology, open patents – to name just a few. The key point is that they must all develop together, otherwise the existing system will isolate them into ineffectiveness. Open data is largely worthless unless you have open hardware and open software. Open government demands open cloud and open spectrum, or money will dominate feeds and speeds."

On the homefront, Steele maintains that the massive national "security" infrastructure we currently have in place is too big, too expensive, too unaccountable, too nonproductive concerning "terrorism" (which he claims has never been thwarted by the NSA), and ultimately bound to fail (though he admits properly-maintained surveillance should certainly remain in place for issues like corruption, pedophilia, and other crimes.) With intelligence out of the pocket of banks and politicians, citizens can better decide what will truly be of help for themselves and others. If a professional spy is willing to show how this is currently all going wrong, surely America and maybe the world can eventually learn to realize and remedy this?

Steele's revolution pre-conditions checklist.  We qualify, now how do we quell it?

Greenhouse Powerhouse: Cleaner, Stronger Batteries Energize Organically

Power sources of the future will be a lot more eco-friendly thanks to recent discoveries in the fabrication of batteries. New water-based batteries developed by a team at USC last longer than traditional lithium-ion batteries and can be created at a tenth of the cost.

The batteries will be particularly useful as alternative forms of energy become more popular, as the charge gathered from various natural sources requires retaining. Sri Narayan, a USC chemistry professor and co-inventor of the new batteries, explained to www.phys.org that, "'Mega-scale' energy storage is a critical problem in the future of the renewable energy, requiring inexpensive and eco-friendly solutions."

Narayan and his team, after much experimentation, discovered that oxidized organic compounds called "quinones" that naturally aid plants, fungi, and bacteria in photosynthesis and cellular respiration. Their capability for energy transfer is critical to the new battery design, which enables the quinones to become electroactive after being dissolved in water.

The batteries have an estimated lifespan of 15 years and can be built in a variety of sizes. Despite being organic, they are still likely not safe to lick.

Your Phone Is Your Own: Supreme Court Forbids Warrantless Phone Searches

In a major breakthrough for privacy rights, the Supreme Court of the United States has decided that cell phones are among the effects that are Constitutionally protected against warrantless searches.

Yesterday in a unanimous ruling, the court made it abundantly clear that warrants are required before any search of a citizen's cell phone can take place, with some speculation as to what will follow if a person was arrested on charges not pertaining to the vast amount of information a cell phone could contain. Justice John Roberts was quoting as saying, “A phone not only contains in digital form many sensitive records previously found in the home; it also contains a broad array of private information never found in a home in any form—unless the phone is.”

The Constitutional verbiage of the Fourth Amendment, partially reprinted here via www.msnbc.com, guarantees that citizens shall be “secure in their persons, houses, papers or effects." Phones of all types (from brick to smart) are covered under the ruling.  

Image courtesy www.aclu.org.

Monkey In The Middle (Of My Parking Space): New Parking-Spot Auctioning App Banned In San Francisco

The new "sharing economy" sounds like a feel-good, community-building idea, but some elements of San Francisco have turned it into a very capitalistic marketing ploy. The new app MonkeyParking is designed to auction off soon-to-be-vacated parking spaces, which has given the wealthy a new societal edge but given middle-class communities a headache.

Claiming the app fosters a sense of community and "sharing", MonkeyParking is slated to park itself in New York, Rome, Seattle and Chicago soon.

The craziness of auctioning off publicly funded parking spaces is not lost to the sane media. Reporter Will Oremus of Slate notes, "I know this is Silicon Valley, where words have no meaning, but it takes a special brand of Ayn Rand–spouting nincompoop to try to pass off the unilateral privatization and scalping of public services as a new form of 'sharing.'"

Fortunately, citing a local statute that bans buying or selling of public parking spaces, San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera has issued a cease-and-desist letter to MonkeyParking. But will the monkey be on your neighborhood's back soon?

Too much Monkey business.

After The Automatons: Could A Robot Take Your Job Soon?

With 47 percent of the world's jobs poised to become automated in the next twenty years, what is half of humanity going to do when it is retired by robots?

While creative endeavors and skilled jobs still maintain their value for labor, automated jobs are quickly being phased out by those with the means to reap more capital by building machines to do so. As www.motherboard.vice.com reports, "last year Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook were worth over $1 trillion combined, but employed just 150,000 people." With labor jobs dwindling and information jobs not escalating, what will workers do when their careers and cash all vanish thanks to the rich and their robots?

According to the Oxfam report "Working For The Few", "those richest 85 people across the globe share a combined wealth of £1 [trillion], as much as the poorest 3.5 billion of the world's population." With 85 people controlling the same amount of money as 3.5 billion, it is no surprise that ideas like wealth redistribution and possibly guaranteed minimum income may become serious social issues in the coming years.

How safe is your livelihood in the robot revolution?