3D-Printed Gun's Blueprints Downloaded 100,000 Times In Two Days (With Some Help From Kim Dotcom)

I found this article to be controversial, and it made me question my stance on current gun laws and regulation at the moment. So there's this gun that can be printed by using a 3D printer. Now its been downloaded over 100,000 times. This is amazing in the sense that there essentially downloading a weapon. A weapon that they can print. What's more weird is that this is legal in the U.S. you can legally print a gun in the United States. Now where the problem comes in is in other countries where guns are not a common occurrence. For example it is illegal to print a gun unless you are a registered firearms seller, but this could potentially put guns in peoples hands through illegal means. Though the whole argument about government and its regulation of guns could come down to some biased point of views, I think that some gun regulation is necessary. Now whether I believe people should print their own guns? No. I don't think that should really be necessary. In the United States it is all too easy to get a gun. The further south and east you go it only gets easier. Why allow that to become even easier. If not for liberals, there would be guns in every house in the United States without question. Now granted guns don't kill people, human error and stupidity does. I therefore propose that it is the result of Darwinism via human stupidity that results in gun deaths. How should we combat this problem? You fix it with the younger generation via education. Donate to your public school system *hint*.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/05/08/3d-printed-guns-blueprints-downloaded-100000-times-in-two-days-with-some-help-from-kim-dotcom/

The Geography of U.S. Hate, Mapped Using Twitter

This article dealt with hate. These geography students at Humboldt University California took tweets from the tweets were from June 2012 - April 2013 and the results are shocking. The total amount of tweets was a hundred and fifty thousand tweets. There were homophobic, racist, and other mean and hateful words being tweeted on twitter. The map is interactive and open to the public, and I implore you to check it out! Just a little quick tip. When you look up that bad word about black people, the results are shocking. The whole east coast is lit up! I noticed with the map that most of the hate is in the eastern part of the United States. I wonder why this is. Could it be that the older generation's sentiment of hate has had a trickle down affect to the younger generation, and that makes them want to vent online? Regardless one thing is for certain: Everything you put online has repercussions, this definitely includes social media. The record may not be categorized correctly, but it is available for smart people to collect and represent in nice pretty graphs that express (in this instance) where hate filled people live per capita in the U.S. (in concern with users who use twitter). An informative and provocative article to say the least. 

Source:

http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/05/20/the-geography-of-u-s-hate-mapped-using-twitter/

and here's a link to the map!

http://users.humboldt.edu/mstephens/hate/hate_map.html#

Student Engineers’ Skin Patch Warns When It’s Time to Get Out of the Sun

I found this article to be very exciting in terms of technological advancements this century! "Michigan Technological University Senior Design team has devised a sensor that tells you when it’s time to seek shelter, long before your skin gets red and tender." It's the size of a nickel. It has a smiley face on it, and when it vanishes you need to get out of the sun. This is just so amazing! This has the potential to stop a venue of skin cancer right in its tracks! No longer will tourists be bombarded with requests to by confusing sun screen (I’m not even going to go into the variable spf scale those brats have devised to confuse the consumer). It received " Best Overall Award in the Invention Disclosure Competition at Michigan Tech’s 2013 Undergraduate Expo." The best part about it is how cheap it is to make. The prototype costs about 13 cents each. This is amazing! I can't express fully in words how cool this is. It's like inventing the toaster oven all over again!

Source: http://www.mtu.edu/news/stories/2013/april/story89011.html

Five unanswered questions about the Xbox One

I was really excited for this article, or rather I was really excited for what it was about, the famous new Xbox, the Xbox One. Something that did bug me about the whole Xbox event was the way they avoided addressing the current selection of games. The stuff they showed in the presentation was all pre-rendered crap. You can't play cut scenes, you want to know what the hard real aspects of the game really are, and Microsoft seems to have dodged the bullet on this one. Another thing that is different is that with the new Xbox you get a new device, like an upgraded Kinnect. This draws two questions: is Microsoft trying to spy on us, and two, will it work? The Kinnect has been for all intensive purposes: a cute toy. It is impractical for real gaming at its current developed level, but hopefully the new Kinnect will be a little more practical. I highly doubt it, but one can hope. The worst part about it is the misinformation floating about used games. At first we were told that the new Xbox one would not require a connection to the Internet, and that used games could be played on the console. Now through an interview we can piece together that the Xbox will need to be connected to the Internet to be checked at least once in a 24-hour period, even if you are playing a first person shooter. This is total BS! I get the piracy concerns, but there are gamers that do not have an adequate Internet connection, and this will totally mess up your bandwidth! 

Source: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-9020_7-57585390-222/five-unanswered-questions-about-the-xbox-one/

The Sequester

The sequester is an arbitrary date picked by the conservatives that allocates that if we do not hit a compromise on government spending, we will have spending cuts across the board of the U.S. What these government spending cuts will do is cut government jobs for teachers, air traffic control, jobs allocated to government personnel across the U.S. This is bad because Hundreds of thousands of people could be out of work, or be mandated to take more days off, ergo making less money, ergo funneling less money into an already dwindling economy that is trying to recover. Now in this article, the author trys to paint the concept that the entire problem lies on Congress and Republicans. I can contend that both of these partys are at fault, but even if the majority of Congress is in control of the Republicans, Democrats need to grow a backbone. There needs to be more meeting across the isles and better communciation outside of congress. These days the senators just fly in for a joint session, then fly back home next week. There is no longer a sense of respect between the partys. These tax cuts will have a dentrimental effect on the economy, and the only people who are going to be influenced are the American people. Congress is not getting pay cuts or layoffs. By not having a stake in the big picture, again, they are showing how little they care for the country as a whole.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jimcamp/2013/03/07/the-sequester-congressional-negotiation-shows-its-greedy-side/

NASA funds attempt at 3D food printer for pizza

In all honesty, when I read this article, I was a bit mystified. I can't believe were in the future where future could potentially be printed for human consumption! Granted it’s just a 125k grant to a mechanical engineer named Anjan Contractor. Granted the whole concept behind it is that it would allow astronauts to print food that would have a shelf life of 30 years. But the creator behind it is thinking long term. The commercial use of this product has no bounds! Granted at its current state you wouldn't be able to print real food in the since that we categorize real food, it would be like cubes or tubes of hard stuff that doesn't look like food, but has all the nutrients that your body needs to survive. That's another amazing thing about it! You could program the machine whether you were sick or fat, or whatever, and with the right calculations, you could make the food contain enough nutrients necessary for your survival. That is amazing. Too bad I hate math with a conviction stronger then newton’s laws of motion. Regardless, I can’t wait for the future!

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57585502-1/nasa-funds-attempt-at-3d-food-printer-for-pizza/

Drama as Alarm Sirens Wailed

Just a bunch of bad news as of late. So this tornado on Monday whipped through Oklahoma City and it could have caused maybe over 2 billion dollars in damage. That is a lot of money, and unlike human damage, the government can't sue anyone to pay for it because you can't sue Mother Nature. So in the aftermath, at least 24 people have died, and at least 200 injured. The tornado took over 50 minutes, wrecking havoc over a school, as well as a medical facility. Also the co-owner of the daily show made a joke in poor taste about the situation, and I have to say it was in poor taste, and that it was too soon. Budget cuts could pose a problem in the future for preventing the government from successfully notifying people that a catastrophe such as a tsunami or a tornado would be coming their way. This is unacceptable, and if we are to believe that we live in a democracy that doesn't even have standardized healthcare, we should at least be able to give ample time to people in concern with warning them about natural disasters. 

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/22/us/oklahoma-tornado.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0