Archive for the 'Rise of the Machines' Category
Pentagon Looks to Breed Immortal ‘Synthetic Organisms,’ Molecular Kill-Switch Included
February 6th, 2010Via: Wired:
The Pentagon’s mad science arm may have come up with its most radical project yet. Darpa is looking to re-write the laws of evolution to the military’s advantage, creating “synthetic organisms” that can live forever — or can be killed with the flick of a molecular switch.
As part of its budget for the next [...]
U.S. Plans Crewless Anti Submarine Warfare Ships
February 3rd, 2010Via: Register:
Those splendid brainboxes at DARPA – the Pentagon’s in-house bazaar of the bizarre – have outdone themselves this time. They now plan an entirely uncrewed, automated ghost frigate able to cruise the oceans of the world for months or years on end without human input.
The new project is called Anti-submarine warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned [...]
Quadrennial Defense Review: Melee Mode, Cyberwar, More Killer Robots, Environmental Catastrophes
February 1st, 2010Via: CNN:
The Pentagon will no longer shape the U.S. military to fight two major conventional wars at once, but rather prepare for numerous conflicts and not all in the same style, according to a draft of a new strategic outlook the Pentagon is announcing on Monday.
The new mantra for military planners will replace the almost [...]
Nanosecond Trading Strains Infrastructure: Firms Failing to Control Their Algorithms
January 26th, 2010See: Trading Shares in Milliseconds
Via: Financial Times:
An explosion in trading propelled by computers is raising fears that trading platforms could be knocked out by rogue trades triggered by systems running out of control.
trading-thumb.jpgTrading in equities and derivatives is being driven increasingly by mathematical algorithms used in computer programs. They allow trading to take place automatically [...]
Britain: Police Plan to Use Military-Style Spy Drones
January 24th, 2010Via: Guardian:
Police in the UK are planning to use unmanned spy drones, controversially deployed in Afghanistan, for the ”routine” monitoring of antisocial motorists, protesters, agricultural thieves and fly-tippers, in a significant expansion of covert state surveillance.
The arms manufacturer BAE Systems, which produces a range of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for war zones, is adapting the [...]
Israeli Military Robots
January 12th, 2010Via: Wall Street Journal:
Israel is developing an army of robotic fighting machines that offers a window onto the potential future of warfare.
Sixty years of near-constant war, a low tolerance for enduring casualties in conflict, and its high-tech industry have long made Israel one of the world’s leading innovators of military robotics.
“We’re trying to get to [...]
Houston Police Department UAV
January 9th, 2010Robotic System Makes a Novel Scientific Discovery
January 8th, 2010Dress up brute force real pretty and put lipstick on it.
Via: Wales Online:
IT was hailed as taking artificial intelligence to a new level.
Now, the creation by Welsh scientists of the first robot in the world to make an independent scientific discovery has been named the fourth most significant discovery of 2009 by one of the [...]
Trading Shares in Milliseconds
December 23rd, 2009I like the part about how NASDAQ is looking at requiring all brokers to use a specified length of network cable on the links to the exchange’s servers. HA.
The article assumes the reader will get it, but just in case you don’t, the point is that the length of the cable affects the latency. A [...]
Nuclear-Powered Transponder for Cyborg Insect
December 12th, 2009Via: IEEE:
This week at the International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM), in Baltimore, Md., Cornell University engineers presented research that shows progress in powering cybernetic organisms with a radioactive fuel source.
Electrical engineering associate professor Amit Lal and graduate student Steven Tin presented a prototype microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) transmitter—an RF-emitting device powered by a radioactive source with [...]
