Archive for May, 2014
Brazil Unveils ‘Robocop’ Suit to Protect Elite Police Unit During World Cup
May 15th, 2014Via: National Post: There will be a RoboCop style to the face of policing in Rio when football fans turn up for the World Cup in Brazil next month. Members of a special unit set up for the tournament and the 2016 Olympics in Rio have been given 200 sets of the 22lb “RoboCop” protective […]
Skygate 911
May 15th, 2014Via: Pilots for 9/11 Truth:
Ocean Confetti
May 15th, 2014Via: MinuteEarth:
‘Now The Military Is Going To Build Robots That Have Morals’
May 14th, 2014Via: DefenseOne: The Office of Naval Research will award $7.5 million in grant money over five years to university researchers from Tufts, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Brown, Yale and Georgetown to explore how to build a sense of right and wrong and moral consequence into autonomous robotic systems.
Pervasive Monitoring Is an Attack
May 14th, 2014Via: Tim Bray: That’s the title of RFC 7258, also known as BCP 188 (where BCP stands for “Best Common Practice”); it represents Internet Engineering Task Force consensus on the fact that many powerful well-funded entities feel it is appropriate to monitor people’s use of the Net, without telling those people. The consensus is: This […]
Hunter Biden to Ukraine Gas Board
May 13th, 2014Via: Politico: Hunter Biden, the younger son of Vice President Joe Biden, will be joining Ukraine’s largest private gas producer, the company announced in a statement “The company’s strategy is aimed at the strongest concentration of professional staff and the introduction of best corporate practices, and we’re delighted that Mr. Biden is joining us to […]
Human Consciousness Probably Can’t Be Modeled On A Computer
May 13th, 2014Via: Medium: The central part of their new work is to describe the mathematical properties of a system that can store integrated information in this way but without it leaking away. And this leads them to their central proof. “The implications of this proof are that we have to abandon either the idea that people […]
Robotic Arm Catches Objects On The Fly
May 13th, 2014Via: EPFL: A robot developed by EPFL researchers is capable of reacting on the spot and grasping objects with complex shapes and trajectories in less than five hundredths of a second.
Is Your Job at Risk from Robot Labor? Check This Handy Interactive Chart
May 13th, 2014Via: Quartz: In the second machine age, robots will perform tasks once thought to require uniquely human abilities, like driving our taxis and filleting our fish. But not all jobs will be equally affected by automation. The interactive plot above attempts to sort out the differences. We compared three variables related to the American workforce: […]
Document Establishes NSA’s Involvement in COINTELPRO
May 13th, 2014Via: The Guardian: One document from the Snowden files, dated 3 October 2012, chillingly underscores the point. It revealed that the agency has been monitoring the online activities of individuals it believes express “radical” ideas and who have a “radicalising” influence on others. The memo discusses six individuals in particular, all Muslims, though it stresses […]