Archive for the 'Rise of the Machines' Category
Army Readies Its Mammoth Spy Blimp for First Flight
May 23rd, 2012Via: Wired: Sure, it took an extra year or so, but Northrop Grumman has finally penciled in the first flight of the giant surveillance airship it’s building for the U.S. Army. The Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle — a football-field-size, helium-filled robot blimp fitted with sensors and data-links — should take to the air over Lakehurst, […]
And Now… Software Will Allow a Single Professor to Deliver, ‘Meaningful Education to Hundreds of Thousands of Students at Once’
May 23rd, 2012In ten or twenty years, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the majority of paid work in companies, that is, work that isn’t done by machines, being done by these “certificate” holders. They’ll live in ever expanding slums, autonomously policed by RoboCops and drones. They’ll have fast Internet and there will be Superbowl commercials about […]
Iraqi Military to Buy U.S. Drones to Monitor Oil Fields
May 22nd, 2012Via: The Hill: American military drones are returning to the skies above Iraq more than five months after U.S. troops withdrew from the country. But this time, the drones will be operated by members of the Iraqi navy and will provide overwatch for the country’s oil platforms off its southern coast, U.S. officials in Baghdad […]
Robert Reich to New College Graduates: ‘You’re F*cked’
May 20th, 2012I’ve excerpted what I think are the key sentences. Via: Robert Reich: So much of what was once considered “knowledge work” – the kind that college graduates specialize in – can now be done more cheaply by software. Or by workers with college degrees in India or East Asia, linked up by Internet. Related: The […]
Facebook IPO
May 19th, 2012Warning: This is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument. Some emails have been coming in about the Facebook IPO. I don’t ever trade IPOs. As a 100% technical trader, there’s nothing to go on with an IPO. The values associated with the IPO are arbitrary and there is often VERY […]
Apple Sends Siri to Re-Education Camp Over Double Plus Ungood Statements
May 17th, 2012Via: BBC: The debate over “what is the best smartphone ever?” took an unexpected twist after Apple’s voice-activated assistant Siri appeared to favour the iPhone’s rival. Over the weekend, users of Siri were told the answer was Nokia’s Lumia 900. But Siri now responds to the same question with a jovial: “Wait… there are other […]
Google’s Bots Now Running Javascript They Encounter
May 17th, 2012Via: Ars: Google feeds its search engine’s index with site data from a virtual army of “bots”—Web-crawling applications that scour sites for content. But in the past, Google’s bots hit a wall when they ran into interactive content that was loaded through JavaScript—especially on pages that use Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) to allow users […]
Canon: Fully Automated Digital Camera Manufacturing by 2015
May 15th, 2012Via: AP: Canon Inc. is moving toward fully automating digital camera production in an effort to cut costs — a key change being played out across Japan, a world leader in robotics. If successful, counting on machines can help preserve this nation’s technological power — not the stereotype of machines snatching assembly line jobs from […]
U.S. Air Force Can ‘Accidentally’ Spy On American Citizens for 90 Days
May 9th, 2012Via: Wired: As long as the Air Force pinky-swears it didn’t mean to, its drone fleet can keep tabs on the movements of Americans, far from the battlefields of Afghanistan, Pakistan or Yemen. And it can hold data on them for 90 days — studying it to see if the people it accidentally spied upon […]
Google’s Self-Driving Car Licensed to Hit Nevada Streets
May 9th, 2012Via: PC World: Google’s self-driving car is growing up right in front of our eyes: The fledgling autonomous vehicle program recently passed its driver’s license test in Nevada, the first license of its kind in the United States. Obtaining Nevada’s self-driving car license clears the way for Google to test its technology on public roads […]
