Podcast Episode 121 – Dan Farr

This podcast episode has something a little different for you instead of the normal "Talking Point"; we have the immense pleasure of interviewing Dan Farr from Salt Lake Comic Con. Be sure to head on over to their site and get your tickets today! Correction from last week: The intern that confirmed the offensive asian names was from the NTSB not from KTVU. (But the names themselves were from KTVU) Headlines: Blackberry launched a new flagship phone without telling anyone? Apple to Samsung: “Hey mind if we just forget about all those lawsuits?” HTC and Sony smite patent troll in court Verizon attempts to bring the ability to spy like the NSA to all its customers! Yahoo! may have been the ‘good guy’ in regards to PRISM (Microsoft says “Me too!”) Marissa Mayer thinks that Yahoo! is awesome with mobile EFF is suing the Obama administration? You can do that? Industry fighting piracy by going after the money Aquaman just can’t catch a break X-Men Movie: Oh I can’t wait to hear Squishy tear this a new one! AT&T and Verizon are dirty Even the SimCity creative director doesn’t like EA And now the NCAA won’t work with EA Something seems very wrong about this . . . but I’ll watch anyway. Fast Lane: Researchers have given MIT’s newest AI, ConceptNet4, a comprehensive IQ test to see how well it performs. Though they found that it could access a lot of data very quickly, it couldn't draw on that data to make conclusions. Overall, they said that current AI is at about the same level as a four year old’s intellect. Considering how moody my four year old was, that doesn’t make me feel real great about the coming robot apocalypse! Dreamworks is releasing a new movie about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange called “The Fifth Estate” that looks rather boring and uninteresting. It probably won’t do very . . . oh, wait. It stars Benedict Cumberbatch? OK, yeah I’ll probably go see it. California’s Department of Transportation lost over $2 Million in a scam by one person. In a deal to reduce his sentence, the thief made a deal to give back everything he could that he got from the money including two homes, two cars, and . . . $10,000 worth of Star Wars gear. No one knows what the DoT plans to do with all those action figures, but people in the area might want to start watching the classifieds for awesome deals! Every year, North Korea attacks South Korea in some sort of way as a way to “commemorate” the start of the Korean War. After hacking South Korean sites for awhile (and not getting very far), they decided to blame Anonymous for the attacks. The problem with this is, everyone knows that Anonymous typically attacks North Korea instead. Isn’t it time someone took away North Korea’s “computer time”? Talking Point: Interview with Dan Farr of Salt Lake Comic Con Zuke’s Favorite: I’m just waiting for EVERY news outlet to do this! Zohner’s Favorite: Shark week is almost here! Stark’s Favorite: Demo reel for The Doomsday Machine documentary Schmidty’s Favorite: Darth Winnie