Hasta La Gadget!

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday clarified limits the Constitution places on police officers who seek to measure blood-alcohol level following a drunk-driving arrest.

In a fractured ruling that commanded a five-justice majority, the court said police officers need a warrant if they want to test the blood of a motorist who gets pulled over for driving under the influence, but not if they want to conduct a breath test under similar circumstances. The court issued the decision Thursday alongside major rulings on immigration and affirmation action.  

The drunk-driving decision was prompted by three separate appeals — two from North Dakota and one from Minnesota — involving men who had been arrested for drunk driving and threatened with criminal penalties if they refused to submit to an alcohol test.

All three refused, were tested anyway — one via a breath test, two by getting their blood drawn — and found to be extremely drunk. And because of their refusal, all three were charged separately for declining the tests.

But the men appealed, arguing that criminalizing their refusal to submit to testing violated the Fourth Amendment, which generally prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. Their respective state supreme courts didn’t buy it.

But the Supreme Court did agree with part of the argument, at least with respect to direct blood testing. Justice Samuel Alito explained that these tests “are significantly more intrusive” on privacy, so states cannot conduct them unless they obtain a warrant first.

Not so with breath tests. “The impact of breath tests on privacy is slight,” Alito explained, which means their use by police officers is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment and thus exempt from the warrant requirement.

“Because breath tests are significantly less intrusive than blood tests and in most cases amply serve law enforcement interests, we conclude that a breath test, but not a blood test, may be administered as a search incident to a lawful arrest for drunk driving,” Alito wrote, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who earlier this week issued a potent dissent in this same area of law, would’ve gone further than Alito, and also would’ve required officers to obtain a warrant for breath tests.

To her, the administrative inconvenience or impracticality of requiring officers in the field to get a warrant doesn’t justify dispensing with that mandate, for which the Supreme Court has created a number of exceptions over the years.

I fear that if the Court continues down this road, the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement will become nothing more than a suggestion.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor

“I fear that if the Court continues down this road, the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement will become nothing more than a suggestion,” Sotomayor wrote in a partial dissent joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Perhaps proving Sotomayor’s point, Justice Clarence Thomas chastised the court’s “compromise” ruling and would have found that the cops implicated in all three cases here acted constitutionally under yet another exception to the Constitution’s warrant requirement.

The upshot of all this back-and-forth: The two men from North Dakota who refused to get their blood drawn got their convictions reversed, but the breath-test-refusing man from Minnesota wasn’t so lucky.

Perhaps Orin Kerr, a legal expert on the Fourth Amendment, put it best: “It was like a criminal procedure exam in which the problem raised a bunch of different doctrines without obvious ways to work through the thicket of them. I think the majority did a pretty good job dealing with a very hard problem.”

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Smithsonian Channel’s Secrets of Shark Island is a wonderful documentary about the ecosystem in the waters around the Revillagigedo Islands, a group of four volcanic islands 240 miles off of Mexico. Because it’s “the only natural juncture for miles” in the Pacific Ocean, there’s a lot going on around there. Most scarily, a shit ton of migrating sharks. My God, just look at all them.

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YouTube just announced its second round of original series at VidCon 2016, and the biggest new series is a bit of a surprise. That would be Step Up, which will bring a “heart-pounding, sexy, music-filled and dramatic look at dancers in a contemporary…

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was announced in 2013, but was later delayed to 2015 before being pushed to 2017. Nintendo offered an explanation as to why there was such a huge delay, but it has been noticed that in the past, almost every Zelda game Nintendo planned was eventually delayed.

So what gives? In an interview with Kotaku, Zelda’s series producer Eiji Aonuma said, “When we think about the release period for any Zelda game, we really want to get it out as soon as possible so that everybody can play and experience it. But every time we make a Zelda, we want to make something new. It’s hard to gauge how long that’s going to take. And it’s also hard to gauge at what point whatever we consider to be new is done.”

Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto adds that sometimes it’s because the direction of the game has yet to be determined, and when it has, implementing that direction has its own set of challenges. “One could be that the direction just hasn’t been decided, which is probably the worst kind of delay. And the other is that the direction has been decided but putting that into reality—implementing that—is taking time. So it might have taken us six months to do this much. It’ll take us a year to do that much.”

In any case we suppose from a gamer’s standpoint, this is both good and bad. Delaying the game to get it right is obviously welcome, but since it would result in only playing it much later isn’t that great either, but better late than never, right?

Nintendo Explains Why Zelda Games Are Rarely Released On Time , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

By now a good many of you guys should be familiar with the company Boston Dynamics. In case you’re not, they are a company that Google acquired in 2013 that specializes in creating robots, and while they have put out two-legged humanoid models, the company has been known more for their four-legged creations, like Spot.

That being said, the company is back with its latest creation which is essentially a smaller and more nimble version of Spot that they are calling the SpotMini. Like we said, this is a smaller version of the company’s robots and instead of using a hydraulic system, the SpotMini will rely on electric motors to help get itself around.

It comes embedded with a host of sensors so that it can find its way around without walking into objects like walls. The SpotMini even comes with an arm on the top that allows it to grab objects like cups, cans, and it can also use that arm to prop itself up in the event that it falls over, like when slipping on banana peels.

The arm itself can also act as a gimble of sorts where it will be able to stabilize itself while the rest of the robot is moving around, making it useful for scouting missions where you could get some pretty steady footage instead of the shaky ones we’ve come to expect. You can check out the SpotMini in action in the video above where you can see it do the dishes, climb stairs, and bring drinks to its user.

Boston Dynamics Unveils Its Latest Robot, The SpotMini , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.