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If I had a dime for every time someone writes "I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords," I'd have enough money to bribe my future robot master into sparing me from the meatsack ghettos.

Our dystopian robot future is always good grist for lame jokes. Unless it might actually happen.

Human Rights Watch seems very serious about a new campaign it has launched against what it calls "killer robots." … Read more

RadarCast is the newest weather app from the people who developed the popular NOAA Hi-Def Radar, but this app brings you future weather predictions along with several other features.

Built for checking the weather around you or at another specific location, RadarCast gives you the latest data from local radar sites using real-time animated weather overlays. There's a lot of room for customization as well. You have the option to look at map, satellite, and hybrid views, and you also can control the weather pattern loop speed, the interval between individual frames, and change the number of frames in … Read more

GameStop reported its earnings yesterday, but perhaps the biggest news came from its earnings call, in which it said that demand for the PlayStation 4 is already showing signs of strength.

According to GameStop President Tony Bartel, "nearly 900,000 members have already signed up for the PlayStation 4 First to Know List." That list provides all of the latest details on the PlayStation 4 to customers and is usually a strong indicator of the number of people who might preorder the device when it goes on sale in the fourth quarter.

Bartel went on to tell investors … Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Jeff's review: Using Appetize at a concert.

- The end of "just browsing:" Australian store charges $5 browsing fee.

- How the P2P era of SEO-baiting, intentionally mislabeled MP3s changed our taste in music.

- Hollywood embraces the Tweaser on Vine.

- T-Mobile finally gets the iPhone.

- T-Mobile launches 4G LTE network.… Read more

The opposition will congregate in dark corners.

They will whisper with their mouths, while their eyes will scan the room for spies wearing strange spectacles.

The spies will likely be men. How many women would really like to waft down the street wearing Google Glass?

It won't be easy. Once you've been cybernated, there's no turning back. Which is why the refuseniks are already meeting in shaded corners of the Web.

One site is called "Stop The Cyborgs." It claims to be "fighting the algorithmic future one bit at a time."… Read more

For whatever reason, the iPad originally lacked a handful of features included on the iPhone, including a calculator and a clock function, both of which are extremely useful. A Clock app with a stopwatch option became available as part of iOS 6, but in the meanwhile to fill the gap arose hundreds if not thousands of basic apps in the App Store -- some free and others premium. One such free tool is Stop Watch Free. Available for the iPad, Stop Watch Free mimics the basic interface and functions of the stopwatch included with the iPhone's operating system. With … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO -- A fruitless Capitol Hill meeting to discuss digital copyright legislation prompted the late activist Aaron Swartz to launch the Demand Progress advocacy group, his former roommate said at a gathering here last weekend.

Swartz was so frustrated with congressional willingness to break the Internet on Hollywood's behalf that he created a group to channel online outrage into political activism, said Peter Eckersley, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's technology projects director.

Eckersley said Swartz had met with Aaron Cooper, who works for Protect IP author Patrick Leahy as the chief intellectual property counsel for the Senate Judiciary … Read more

It was one year ago today that an unprecedented outcry against the Stop Online Piracy Act proved to Washington officialdom that sufficiently irritated Internet users are a potent political force. After Wikipedia, Google, Craigslist and other major sites asked their users to contact their representatives, the deluge of traffic knocked some Senate Web sites offline, and votes on both bills were indefinitely postponed.

The massive public outcry that, by some counts, involved more than 10 million Internet users concerned about the proposals' impact on free expression has turned the protests into a cautionary tale on Capitol Hill. Aides now worry … Read more

Refurbishing is an art, as well as a craft. The whole point is to make a gadget feel pristine, even when it used to be owned by a cult leader, a scout leader or an exhibitionist.

Sadly, someone in a Colorado GameStop stopped refurbishing before the job was complete.

So much so that 5-year-old Braydon Giles opened his Xmas gift -- a Nintendo 3DS -- and discovered images of naked people doing less than pristine things. As Channel 9 News tells it, Braydon showed the 3DS to his brother Bryton. He wanted his help to remove these weird pictures.

Bryton … Read more