Do you have a right to shoot down a drone hovering over your property? Does the drone’s altitude matter? The Washington Post quotes Jeramie Scott, national security counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, as saying, “There is gray area in terms of how far your property rights extend. It’s going to need to be addressed sooner rather than later as drones are integrated into the national airspace.”
From September 2014 through November 2015, Google self-driving cars operated for 424,331 miles on California public roads, according to a report filed by Google, with the autonomous functionality disengaging 272 times. Drivers initiated 69 disengagements of the self-driving functionality, and Google indicates 13 events would have led to unsafe contact with another object. Reasons for disengagements included weather conditions and other vehicles being operated recklessly.
GE is moving its headquarters to Boston. Shirley Leung, a Boston Globe columnist who had supported the failed effort to bring the 2024 Summer Olympics to Boston, writes of GE’s move, “This is better than hosting the Olympics.” She may be overstating it when she adds, “The world can now mention Boston in the same sentence as Silicon Valley when talking about where the future is being built.” But GE is making big moves related to the Industrial Internet of Things, or IIoT. Writes Leung, “GE could make the region an epicenter for smart-connected products.”
“BBC Research and Development has released the details of verification tests on the H.265/HEVC video-compression standard,” writes Julian Clover at Broadband TV News. The results, published in the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT), January 2016, show HEVC offers a 59% bit-rate saving over AVC.
