Archive for the 'Rise of the Machines' Category
IBM’s Watson Goes to Medical School
November 1st, 2012Via: New York Times: Next up for Watson, I.B.M.’s clever question-answering computer? A stint as a medical student at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University. The collaboration, announced on Tuesday, includes a bit of controlled crowdsourcing, with the Cleveland clinicians and medical school students answering Watson’s questions and correcting […]
Most U.S. Drones Openly Broadcast Secret Video Feeds
October 30th, 2012Via: Wired: Four years after discovering that militants were tapping into drone video feeds, the U.S. military still hasn’t secured the transmissions of more than half of its fleet of Predator and Reaper drones, Danger Room has learned. The majority of the aircraft still broadcast their classified video streams “in the clear” — without encryption. […]
U.S. Navy Tests Armed Drone Boat
October 28th, 2012Via: Wired: Killer robots have officially gone out to sea. For the first time, the Navy has fired missiles from a remote-controlled boat, as shown in the video above. The firing came as part of a test off the Maryland coast on Wednesday. Six of Rafael’s anti-armor Spike missiles got fired off a moving inflatable […]
U.S. Expands Secretive Drone Base for African Shadow War
October 28th, 2012Via: Wired: The Pentagon’s secretive drone and commando base in the Horn of Africa is getting a lot bigger and a lot busier as the U.S. doubles down on its shadowy campaign of air strikes, robot surveillance and Special Operation Forces raids in the terror havens of Yemen and Somalia. Camp Lemonnier, originally a French […]
President Romney Can Thank Obama for His Permanent Robotic Death List
October 25th, 2012Via: Wired: It’s a good thing that Mitt Romney endorsed President Obama’s counterterrorism agenda. Should he win the election in two weeks, Romney will inherit an institutionalized, bureaucratic machine for using lethal robots to target and kill suspected terrorists and their allies. Killing Osama bin Laden was a one-time event; this “Disposition Matrix” is Barack […]
DARPA’s Pet-Proto Robot
October 25th, 2012Via: DARPA: In this video, the Pet-Proto, a predecessor to DARPA’s Atlas robot, is confronted with obstacles similar to those robots might face in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC). To maneuver over and around the obstacles, the robot exercises capabilities including autonomous decision-making, dismounted mobility and dexterity.
U.S. Navy: Laser Arsenal Is Just Two Years Away
October 24th, 2012Also, click through for a must-see picture of the BIOSwimmer, which looks like it was invented by SPECTRE. Via: Wired: “On directed energy” — the term for the Navy’s laser cannons, “I’d say two years,” Rear Adm. Matthew Klunder, the chief of the Office of Naval Research, told Danger Room in a Monday interview. The […]
‘You’re not going to hear about the Windows 8 upgrade cycle. This is the end of Windows.’
October 20th, 2012I run IT for a small business here in the Far North of New Zealand as a favor to family members. While it’s a small business, it’s one of the largest employers in the region. The employees are decentralized and I thought about establishing the right kinds of network connections and remote access systems, servers, […]
Brain-Controlled Full Body Suit to Be Used In Fukushima Cleanup
October 19th, 2012Via: Neurogadget: Japanese company Cyberdyne announced today an improved version of HAL (Hybrid Assistive Limb), the exoskeleton which we wrote about almost two years ago, when a tech journalist took a few steps at CES 2011 wearing the brain-controlled cyber-trousers. The latest version of HAL has remained brain-controlled but evolved to a full body robot […]
DHS Request for Information: ‘Robotic Aircraft for Public Safety’
October 11th, 2012Via: Federal Business Opportunities: The Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate is the Department’s primary research and development arm. The S&T Directorate provides federal, state and local officials with the technology and capabilities to protect the homeland. The Directorate’s mission is to protect the homeland by providing Federal and local officials with state-of-the-art technology and other […]
