1. The FBI doesn't think it needs a warrant to place a stingray cell-tower spoofer in 'public places.'

"Without going into the full scope of the program, the senators explain that the FBI's policy requires a search warrant to use a stingray, unless the case poses 'an imminent danger to public safety,' involves a fugitive, or in cases where 'the technology is used in public places or other locations at which the FBI deems there is no reasonable expectation of privacy.'"

+ The ACLU's guide to stingrays.

2. While the global Internet got a chuckle at an amateurish (and unfinished!) restoration of a portrait of Jesus, the 84-year-old widow on the other end of the viral circuit suffered.

"Reporters told the world the story of the old woman who couldn’t paint and had ruined a painting. That’s not true. It is true that I haven’t done many portraits. But if it hadn’t been for me, the painting would have probably disappeared long ago. A week after the scandal, I received flowers and a card with a message of support. It was little gestures like that kept me going during the first month. It was so hard. I lost six kilos. I had to take medication for anxiety."

3. Kitty Horrorshow makes videogames.

"'That felt very profound, this idea that gameworlds built in computers were still technically REAL places, almost like dreams—they aren't physical, but they do happen to us, and we remember them. But these were dreams you could go back to whenever you wanted, and EverQuest in particular was a collective dream shared by hundreds of people at once,' said Kitty.... 'Now that I've learned to make actual 3D first-person games I feel like I've been given the tools and powers of some half-crazed architecture-goddess, and I can reify any weird dream or vision I have. And I intend to.'"

4. When we look back on how robots came to understand the physical world, this 2012 competition might be a milestone.

"Olga Russakovsky at Stanford University in California and a few pals review the history of this competition and say that in retrospect, SuperVision’s comprehensive victory was a turning point for machine vision. Since then, they say, machine vision has improved at such a rapid pace that today it rivals human accuracy for the first time. So what happened in 2012 that changed the world of machine vision? The answer is a technique called deep convolutional neural networks which the Super Visison algorithm used to classify the 1.2 million high resolution images in the dataset into 1000 different classes."

5. The US military's inflatable antennas.

"Inflatable ground satellite antennas are aiding in the expeditionary nature of U.S. and coalition forces, enabling them to achieve high-bandwidth network connectivity anywhere in the world from small deployable packages. 'Many of the conventional satellite terminals previously fielded aren't suitable for some of the more agile transportation requirements of today's deployed Joint Forces,' said Lt. Col. Leonard Newman, Army product manager for Satellite Communications, which is assigned to Project Manager Warfighter Information Network-Tactical, known as WIN-T. 'The inflatable satellite antenna is transforming how Special Operations forces and now airborne and other conventional forces deploy high-bandwidth SATCOM around the world.'"

dead letter, apart from its theological & post-office uses, is a phrase for a law that has still a nominal existence, but is no longer observed or enforced (e.g. the blue laws). The application of it to what was never a regulation but has gone or is going out of use, as quill pens, horse traction, &c, or to regulation that loses its force only by actual abolition (the one-sex franchise will soon be a dead letter), is a SLIPSHOD EXTENSION.

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