Month: August 2017

Enlarge (credit: Carolco Pictures)

Dozens of AI-focused technology executives, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, are urging a United Nations working group to push forward with a plan to ban killer robots.

"Lethal autonomous weapons threaten to become the third revolution in warfare," the group of CEOs and CTOs wrote in an open letter organized by the Future of Life Institute and released Sunday. "Once developed, they will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend. These can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways."

It's easy to imagine the potential nightmare scenarios here. You only have to think about the Terminator's Skynet, or that Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where Enterprise crew members are hunted down by an automated weapons system that turns out to be a sales demo by a long-defunct arms merchant.

Enlarge / It's the Sony U-Matic in all its analog glory. This device was used in the early 1970s to stream X-rated video to hotel rooms, often using a closed-circuit broadcasting device on the hotel roof. (credit: Wikimedia)

In 1973, a young Roger Ebert reviewed the movie Deep Throat. He was not yet a household name or a Pulitzer Prize winner, but he was a respected film critic. The fact that he and his peers regularly reviewed pornographic films suggested that we’d entered a new era in film—an era in which pornography might be viewed as art.

Turns out that wasn’t the case. More than 40 years later, people are still arguing about whether porn can be art. But that doesn’t mean the early '70s weren’t a turning point for porn. The year before Roger Ebert saw Deep Throat, the Hotel Commodore in New York City shocked the nation by announcing that it had installed a system which would let viewers watch X-rated titles in their hotel rooms. It might not be art, but porn had become a testing bed for new kinds of on-demand video technologies.

The United States was not the nation to lead the world into this new era. Japan got there first. Technology-friendly Osaka had hotels built specifically for many different combinations of sex and video. Some hotel rooms came equipped with video cameras, as well as, presumably, both an overworked technical staff and an overworked cleaning staff. Other rooms simply had a television that picked up the signal of a closed-circuit broadcasting device on the roof, creating an early form of streaming video. In 1971, one hotel's device made contact with a steel safety railing. This considerably increased the broadcast range and gave surrounding houses a glimpse of movies that not everyone appreciated.

Enlarge / Prepare yourself...

Last night's pre-Gamescom Microsoft press presentation was light on major announcements. But the event did include some details about how current Xbox One owners will be able to move their games and settings over to the new, 4K-capable Xbox One X when it launches on November 7.

The easiest way to get all your games to the new system, as outlined by Microsoft Vice President Mike Ybarra, will be to just put them on an external USB hard drive and then plug that drive into the new console. "All your games are ready to play" immediately after this external hard drive move, he said, and user-specific settings can also be copied via external hard drive in the same way.

If you don't have an external drive handy, "we're going to let you copy games and apps off your home network instead of having to manually move them or redownload them off the Internet," Ybarra said. It's unclear right now if Microsoft will mirror the PS4 Pro and allow this kind of system-to-system transfer directly using an Ethernet cable plugged directly in to both consoles.

Final Fantasy XV is coming to PC in the form of Final Fantasy XV: Windows Edition in "early 2018," Square Enix announced today.

To make up for the delay following the release of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of the game in November of 2016, Final Fantasy XV: Windows Edition includes all the DLC and updates previously released on console, as well as some PC-exclusive graphical enhancements.