I'm not going to say I don't love the look of these proposed buildings—they are a noble attempt to put environmental relevance and soulfulness in front of sheer density and speed of construction—but damn if they don't appear to be freakishly devoid of privacy.

The building that MAD itself designed barely has so few enclosures, they must be planning to install bathrooms in the elevators. You can see it in the foreground above, and in the gallery below, along with three equally transparent concepts from BIG (which looks like a Wii), Emergent (which looks like it was designed by the Master Control Program) and Rojkind Architects (which looks like it was drawn by a Parkinson's sufferer).

You only start seeing some semblance of privacy when you get to this would-be Podling village by Serie:

There are 11 buildings total, all with seductively nouveau designs, some even fit for people who are modest, mecha fat and/or coyote ugly. To get a better sense of how they harmoniously fit together, hit the links. [MAD via designboom and Dezeen]

The bill states that "Congress finds that children and adolescents have been exploited by photographs taken in dressing rooms and public places with the use of a camera phone," a fact which I doubt many would challenge. What many will challenge are the notions that the main purpose of silent camera modes is to perv on Kindergartners and that banning these modes would stop anyone from doing so.

There is a practically unlimited supply of existing, silent-mode-enabled cameras that are available to anyone who wants them, not to mention the fact that many cameraphones have video modes, which present a problem that couldn't really be solved short of requiring handsets to scream "HEY NAKED KIDS, I'M TAKING A VIDEO RIGHT NOW SO YOU SHOULD PROBABLY GO GET YOUR PARENTS" on loop for the duration of the recording.

The measure wouldn't be effective at solving the problem it set out to, but it would certainly be effective at stripping a useful feature from phones for regular, law-abiding users who just don't want a tacky fake mirror slap every time they take a picture. Update: This kind of thing has been happening in Japan for some time now, so make of that what you will. [Crave]

The researchers claim that the technology is designed for people like forensic detectives and fashion designers, but I can see through that pretty easily. That's like Google claiming that private browsing is used for buying people gifts: unless those gifts are gifts of porn, that's not what anyone will use it for.

So I guess we can look forward to a future where perverts can snap pictures of people on the street and then take them home to their computer, converting the pictures into accurate naked 3D models. We're way beyond just using binoculars from across the street; it's the 21st century, after all. [Eurekalert]

It's got a 1.5-inch LCD screen, can do video, and plugs into your computer via USB. Not too shabby. It's available now for $236, pervs. –Adam Frucci

Product Page [via Crave]

The process, called passive millimeter-wave technology, currently provides "somewhat fuzzy" grayscale images, but the researchers are working to get the quality up so you can really see those nipples stand out. –Adam Frucci

The Inquirer [via Ubergizmo]