Aug 11
Singularity Hub is reporting that dozens of underwater drones have been deployed to waters near Iran: As US talks with Iran over their nuclear program began to sour and the possibility of sanctions against the country rose, Iran responded by threatening to cut off the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway and the only way …
Jun 17
Bio-mimicking MAV (micro aerial vehicles) are nothing new. (Been blogging about them almost as long as I’ve been blogging.) But, if you’re new to this, these are drones, that is, flying robots, that look and act like natural creatures. Insects, birds, whathaveyou. There’s some new work being done out of John Hopkins university –funded by US Defence agencies– that …
May 26
IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects) is working with torture-tool manufacturer Raytheon to develop a metaphorical language analysis system: The system will automatically find, identify and categorize large numbers of linguistic metaphors in foreign language texts. Under the contract, Raytheon BBN will: Develop tools and techniques to identify, qualify and categorize metaphors; Build a metaphor repository that identifies and links …
Feb 10
Looks like this drone fad is catching on. From Singularity Hub: According to a recent report from the Congressional Research Service, nearly one in three US warplanes are drones…and those machines are changing the way the world wages war. US soldiers in Afghanistan rely more and more upon intelligence gathered from drones, and President Obama recently …
Sep 24
Ineke Malsch, with the support of nanopodium, has put together six, five minute interviews with opinion makers as part as the nanorights and peace project. They’re meant to be part of the Dutch public’s conversation about nanotech. I’ve posted one here, about nanotech and defense, and the rest can be viewed here. The others are about water purification, solar …
Apr 07
YouTube – Collateral Murder – Wikileaks – Iraq. “WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters news staff. Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since …
Apr 05
During a bungled night-time raid in Afghanistan, NATO troops killed two pregnant ladies, dug the bullets out of their bodies, poured alcohol on the wounds then claimed that Afgan militants had bound and murdered them before NATO ever got there. Our enemy is so very inhuman. Oh wait, that inhuman shit was done by us. …
Jan 21
Nature has done our dirty work. We are now free to invade Haiti. (Again.) Within a few years we’ll have turned the whole place into Cuba circa 1955. Complete with puppet dictator and resort hotels. If oil just so-happens to be there, then all the better. We will, after all, need to be repaid. Not …
Dec 18
File this one under asymmetric warfare: Those predator drones that the American government uses to slaughter women and children can be hacked for $26. Each drone costs 4.5 million dollars. But it’s just $25.95 to buy a piece of off the shelf software, like Skygrabber, that will allow you to see what the drones are …
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