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INCREASINGLY autonomous, gun-toting robots developed for warfare could easily fall into the hands of terrorists and may one day unleash a robot arms race, a top expert on artificial intelligence says.

"They pose a threat to humanity," said University of Sheffield professor Noel Sharkey ahead of a keynote address today before Britain's Royal United Services Institute.

Intelligent machines deployed on battlefields around the world – from mobile grenade launchers to rocket-firing drones – can already identify and lock onto targets without human help.

There are more than 4000 US military robots on the ground in Iraq, as well as unmanned aircraft that have clocked hundreds of thousands of flight hours.

The first three armed combat robots fitted with large-calibre machine guns deployed to Iraq last year, manufactured by US arms maker Foster-Miller, proved so successful that 80 more are on order, said Prof Sharkey.

But up to now, a human hand has always been required to push the button or pull the trigger.

by Patrick Metzger
Feb 21st 2008 @ 4:43PM

Before you take a big mouthful of that organic peanut butter on whole wheat, consider this - worldwide stocks of grain are down to 53 days worth of supply, the lowest since record-keeping began back in 1960.

William Doyle, CEO of fertilizer giant Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan said in an interview this week that growing demand for grain from people and livestock could lead to famine in the near future. Doyle said "We need to have a record crop in 2008 just to stay even with this very low inventory situation'', and further noted that a failure of grain crops on the part of any major producer, such as the US, would be disastrous for the world food situation.

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A personalized license plate in the United Arab Emirates fetches $14 million dollars at a charity auction.

Apparently, a businessman from the United Arab Emirates purchased a license plate with the number 1 on it for a record $14.3 million dollars. That’s one hell of a vanity plate. You’ll be comforted to know that the previous record was $6.8 million for Plate Number 5 sold last year to a stock broker. From the article,

It is not huge compared to my family’s fortune,” Saeed Abdel Ghaffar Khouri said after bidding 52.2 million dirhams (14.2 million dollars) for an Abu Dhabi license plate bearing the single number “1″.

“The price is fair. After all, who among us does not want to be number one,” Khouri told AFP.

[snip]

Khouri conceded to AFP that he would have been willing to pay up to 100 million dirhams (27.4 million dollars) to get his hands on the number “1″.

I'm kinda sick of making these guys richer. 

See the hilarous video that produced with the National District Attorneys Association telling U.S. prosecutors why they should bust music pirates: Because it'll lead them to "everything from handguns to large quantities of cocaine [and] marijuana," not to mention terrorists and murderers!

It is amazing that RIAA and MPAA are even taken seriously.  But, just like the Big Pharma, they gots the money that the lawyers flock to like crach hoes. 

[ frickin' sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their frickin' heads ]

A recently unclassified report from the Pentagon from 1998 has revealed an investigation into using laser beams for a few intriguing potential methods of non-lethal torture. Some of the applications the report investigated include putting voices in people's heads, using lasers to trigger uncontrolled neuron firing, and slowly heating the human body to a point of feverish confusion - all from hundreds of meters away.

A US citizen requested access to the document, entitled "Bioeffects of Selected Non-Lethal Weapons," under the Freedom of Information Act a little over a year ago. There is no evidence that any of the technologies mentioned in the 10-year-old report have been developed since the time it was written.

The report explained several types of non-lethal laser applications, including microwave hearing, disrupted neural control, and microwave heating. For the first type, short pulses of RF energy (2450 MHz) can generate a pressure wave in solids and liquids. When exposed to pulsed RF energy, humans experience the immediate sensation of "microwave hearing" - sounds that may include buzzing, ticking, hissing, or knocking that originate within the head.

Studies with guinea pigs and cats suggest that the mechanism responsible for the phenomenon is thermoelastic expansion. Exposure to the RF pulses doesn´t cause any permanent effects, as all effects cease almost immediately after exposure ceases. As the report explains, tuning microwave hearing could enable communicating with individuals from a distance of up to several hundred meters.

"The phenomenon is tunable in that the characteristic sounds and intensities of those sounds depend on the characteristics of the RF energy as delivered," the report explains. "Because the frequency of the sound heard is dependent on the pulse characteristics of the RF energy, it seems possible that this technology could be developed to the point where words could be transmitted to be heard like the spoken word, except that it could only be heard within a person´s head. In one experiment, communication of the words from one to ten using ´speech modulated´ microwave energy was successfully demonstrated. Microphones next to the person experiencing the voice could not pick up these sounds. Additional development of this would open up a wide range of possibilities."

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USDA Orders Nation's Largest Beef Recall

By GREG RISLING 

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Sunday ordered the recall of 143 million pounds of frozen beef from a California slaughterhouse, the subject of an animal-abuse investigation, that provided meat to school lunch programs.

Officials said it was the largest beef recall in the United States, surpassing a 1999 ban of 35 million pounds of ready-to-eat meats. No illnesses have been linked to the newly recalled meat, and officials said the health threat was likely small.

The recall will affect beef products dating to Feb. 1, 2006, that came from Chino-based Westland/Hallmark Meat Co., the federal agency said.

Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schafer said his department has evidence that Westland did not routinely contact its veterinarian when cattle became non-ambulatory after passing inspection, violating health regulations.

"Because the cattle did not receive complete and proper inspection, Food Safety and Inspection Service has determined them to be unfit for human food and the company is conducting a recall," Schafer said in a statement.

A phone message left for Westland president Steve Mendell was not immediately returned.

Federal officials suspended operations at Westland/Hallmark after an undercover video from the Humane Society of the United States surfaced showing crippled and sick animals being shoved with forklifts.

Two former employees were charged Friday. Five felony counts of animal cruelty and three misdemeanors were filed against a pen manager. Three misdemeanor counts — illegal movement of a non-ambulatory animal — were filed against an employee who worked under that manager. Both were fired.

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