4.2 million surviellence cameras hasn’t reduced crime in the UK.
“Massive investment in CCTV cameras to prevent crime in the UK has failed to have a significant impact, despite billions of pounds spent on the new technology, a senior police officer piloting a new database has warned. Only 3% of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV images, despite the fact that Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe.”
30th Anniversary of Spam was May 3rd.
According to a story in the Wall Street Journal, Gary Thuerk, who at the time worked for Digital Equipment Corp., sent what is believed to be the first spam message, an invitation to an open house for a new DEC computer (a VAX 11/780?) that he sent to 400 of the 2,600 or so people who had email accounts on the ARPANET at the time.
Thuerk claims that his email generated about $12 million in new sales. However, many people who received his email also got highly irritated, complained to US Defense Department (which operated the net) which in turn told him never to do it again. Thuerk says he never did, either.
Thuerk also said in the story that “people have one of three reactions when they meet him: Some are excited to meet someone with an unusual claim to fame; some want to beat him up on the spot; and others just avoid him like the plague.”
Robotic Suit for the Army Being Tested
There was an AP story last week on the Army’s “exoskeleton” robotic suit being developed by Sarcos Inc (now owned by Raytheon) that potentially will “multiply a person’s strength and endurance as many as 20 times.”
“Jack Obusek, a former colonel now with the Army’s Soldier Research Development and Engineering Center in the Boston suburb of Natick, foresees robot-suited soldiers unloading heavy ammunition boxes from helicopters, lugging hundreds of pounds of gear over rough terrain or even relying on the suit to make repairs to tanks that break down in inconvenient locations,” according to the story.
The suit is still not practical: it is very expensive, and the suit’s battery life currently lasts only 30 minutes.