Friday, March 27, 2009
Monday, February 9, 2009
MERCILESS ROBOTS WILL FIGHT THE WARS OF FUTURE;RESEARCHER
Peter Singer, who has authored books on the military, warned that while using robots for battle saves lives of military personnel, the move has the potential to exacerbate warfare by having heartless machines do the dirty work.
"We are at a point of revolution in war, like the invention of the atomic bomb," Singer said.
"What does it mean to go to war with US soldiers whose hardware is made in China and whose software is made in India?"
Singer predicts that US military units will be half machine, half human by 2015.
The US Army already recruits soldiers using a custom war videogame, and some real-world weapon controls copy designs of controllers for popular videogame consoles.
Attack drones and bomb-handling robots are already common in battle zones.
Robots not only have no compassion or mercy, they insulate living soldiers from horrors that humans might be moved to avoid.
"The United States is ahead in military robots, but in technology there is no such thing as a permanent advantage," Singer said. "You have Russia, China, Pakistan and Iran working on military robots."
There is a "disturbing" cross between robotics and terrorism, according to Singer, who told of a website that lets visitors detonate improvised explosive devices from home computers.
"You don't have to convince robots they are going to get 72 virgins when they die to get them to blow themselves up," Singer said.
Robots also record everything they see with built-in cameras, generating digital video that routinely gets posted online at YouTube in graphic clips that soldiers refer to as "war porn," according to Singer.
"It turns war into entertainment, sometimes set to music," Singer said. "The ability to watch more but experience less."
Robotics designer David Hanson offered hope when it comes to making robots a little more human.
Hanson builds robots that have synthetic flesh faces and read people's expressions in order to copy expressions.
"The goal here is not just to achieve sentience, but empathy," Hanson said.
"As machines are more capable of killing, implanting empathy could be the seeds of hope for our future."
Hanson demonstrated a lifelike robotic bust of late genius Albert Einstein that makes eye contact and mimics people's expressions.
"I smiled at that thing and jumped out of my skin when it smiled back," TED curator Chris Anderson quipped. "It's freaky."
Thursday, February 5, 2009
OG NINTENDO CONSOLE WITH SUPED UP CPU BRAIN
Some man in France stuffed a PC into an old NES console and packed the thing with emulators for NES, SNES, N64 and PS2. The computer has "a 1GHz CPU, 256MB of RAM and 40GB hard drive." The man claims he spent over $1,200 and 50 hours of labor on the unit. It's for sale on eBay France, and is currently at about $920 with 4 days remaining. Included in the auction are all the controllers for the various systems, along with the connectors necessary to hook them up to the PC. Pretty cool, but too rich for my blood. Although I do have a fondness for PC based emulators. They really helped pass the time in college classes, particularly Ocarina of Time. I remember a professor called on me to answer a question once when I was in the water temple and I had to scream at him for disturbing my concentration at such a critical moment. I think he failed me. What a dick.
Two more pictures and a video after the jump.
HELICOPTER WITH AUTOMATIC 12 GUAGE SHOTGUN
The AutoCopter Gunship is the toy I always wanted growing up. It's a helicopter with a freaking Auto Assault-12 Full-Auto Shotgun by Military Police Systems attached.
The AutoCopter uses patented "intelligent neural network-based flight control algorithms" for automated flight control, and "utilizes a system that reduces recoil by 90 percent, thus the helicopter doesn't go into an instant tailspin the second the gun is fired.
Hot dog! I need one in a bad, bad way. This thing is going to jack up my paintball matches several degrees. Yep, probably right up to the first degree. Murder. Because I forgot to replace the shotty with a paintball gun.
Cool video of the thing firing after the take-off.
PAC MAN LIGHT UP LED XMAS TREE
The Pac-Man Christmas Tree is stunning. It's "a fully-animated version of the classic arcade game, rendered across thousands of colored LEDs." Granted "fully-animated" in this case means the characters barely move. Allegedly it's somewhere in downtown Madrid, so if anyone goes to see it, let me know. Just looking at it really makes me understand the true meaning of Christmas. Which is, of course, video games.
A video of Pac-Man doing his best to scarf grimace proportions (and failing) after the chomp.
TV SCREENS IN YOUR TIE...
ETRI has been showing off their flexible little OLED displays lately sewn into a number of different pieces of clothing.
In the future, applications of flexible display will be expanded to our daily life ranging from a tie, a hat, a wallet and other small lifestyle products. According to ETRI, this flexible display can be available at affordable price by using ‘Roll-to-Roll’ production method. It is ultra thin and light and offers outstanding natural color reproduction. It is also claimed to consume less power.
Nice ETRI, but I've had an OLED tie for awhile now. I would download a funny clip to it every day before work and brighten my coworkers' days. It worked well -- until my roommate uploaded a video without my knowing. It turns out you can be fired for sexual harassment by wearing a porn video tie! Can you believe that? What the hell is the matter with this country? Next thing you know they'll tell me that calling your female coworkers "sugar" and playing grab-ass isn't considered a team building exercise.
HUGE TETRIS GAME PLAYED ON DORM BUILDING
Large tetris games have been seen here before, but this one is actually real. The old one was a bunch of Russian students (probably drunk on potato vodka) running around their dorm flipping lights on and off. This one was actually programmed professionally and is being played by a person on a cell phone. It's called the Mikontalo Lights Project and was "created by the students of Tampere University of Technology in Finland to gain global visibility for the university and highlight its rich student culture." Now I'm not totally sure how this is displaying a "rich student culture". I could think of better ways of displaying a rich student culture. Like, oh, I don't know, a chili eating contest.
UPDATE: It turns out the video is so damn shaky because the crazy bastard filming has it attached to his head. There's another video of Space Invaders being played after the jump.
ERAZER ERASES YOUR NAUGHTY FILES FOR GOOD
The Drive eRazer is a stand alone device (so you don't need a functioning computer to use it) capable of erasing all the files on a drive by writing a data pattern over the entire disk. It costs $100 and can clean a 250GB drive in just short of two hours. For an extra $50 you can get one that makes multiple passes on the disk and writes random characters over the whole thing. You know, I'd consider one if I my current girlfriend was any smarter and I was worried about her discovering any of the "private pictures" I have on the computer. Fortunately for me she doesn't know what the hell a computer is. Just yesterday she mistook my laptop for a waffle maker. Luckily I caught her before she poured any batter.
WiebeTech Drive eRazer [ohgizmo]
AVAILABLE NOW..CELLPHONE WATCHES FROM THE FUTURE
You may recall the Hyundai Cameraphone Watch we reported on in October. Well this isn't it. But it is a cell phone watch. Available from thinkgeek for $200, it's an unlocked GSM cell phone and PDA all packed into a package you wear on your wrist. You'll need service with AT&T/Cingular or T-Mobile for the little guy to work (sorry for now Verizon and Sprint users). It comes with a whopping 60MB of built in storage, with no extended memory supported. Read: Suckage. But for those of you that are itching for a phone to wear on your wrist, maybe you can look past that. I'm holding out though. I had a guy that runs a clinic out the back of a local Chinese restaurant offer to install a cell phone in my brain for only $400. I've just got to remind him to clean off his instruments before operating. Because when he fixed up my broken leg last time I think he left part of an eggroll and a few wontons in there.
A picture of the included accessories and a huge list of specs and features after the cut.
WORLDS HIGHEST TENNIS COURT IS IN DUBAI
Yes the picture's real. Burj Al Arab in Dubai is home to the world's highest tennis court (at times). At 210 meters (about 690 feet), it's pretty far up there. Way higher than I'd feel comfortable running around hitting a ball. The court doubles as a landing pad when there aren't any matches being played, and as a place to shit your pants the rest of the time.
Video of Andre Agassi and some other guy playing tennis up there after the jump. I like how at the end they just start wailing balls off of the side trying to hit things. Because that's what I would do
USB BUSINESS CARDS MAY BE COMING SOON
The M++CARD is no ordinary business card. No sir, this thing has memory storage on the back, allowing a potential employer to attach a USB adapter and peruse all the information (resume, portfolio, etc.) stored on the little bastard. They're definitely slicker than the portfolio DVDs I was handing out to companies last year. Of course it didn't help I was giving out the wrong disks the whole time. Portfolio and Pornfolio really look similar when you're reaching into your briefcase for a DVD. Luckily the puffy-paint I used to decorate the tops made a lot of them unreadable.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Thursday, October 2, 2008
SCIENTISTS DESIGN GIANT ELEVATOR TO THE STARS
Wed, Oct 1, 2008
Image: Splorp
Written by new contributor Cole Hendricks
Since time immemorial, we have imagined what it would be like to climb to the heavens. With the advent of modern rocketry, a few brave souls, and many more brave robots, have managed to slip the surly bonds of Earth.
But what if, instead of an expensive and perilous ship that only a few could find passage on, we built a bridge to the stars that anyone could cross. Imagine that, instead of having to strap yourself to thousands of tons of rocket fuel, getting into orbit was a simple as boarding a train, albeit a train that goes straight up for over 100,00km (62,000 miles) and happens to be by far the most ambitious structure humanity has ever imagined creating, but a train nevertheless. For the last several decades, this is exactly what many scientists, engineers and futurists have been not only imagining but designing and even, to a certain extent, testing.
Image: Superm401
The first complete description of the possibility of a modern tower of Babel is attributed to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a nearly deaf Russian rocket scientist who is considered by many to be not only the progenitor of the idea of a space elevator or as he called it, the ‘heavenly funicular’ but also the father of the entire field of manned space-flight.
In his 1895 paper, ‘Day-Dreams of Heaven and Earth’, he wrote regarding his Funicular:
“As one went up such a tower, gravity would decrease steadily, without changing direction; at a distance of 36000 km, it would be completely annihilated, and then it would be again detected . . . but its direction would be reversed, so that a person would have his head turned towards the earth…”
Image: NASA
Since the publication of Tsiolkovsky’s ideas, the concept was generally accepted as a fascinating thought but an engineering impossibility. No known material was strong enough to withstand the astronomical forces that such a structure would be exposed to. However, as material science has progressed enormously even to the point that we are able to build custom molecules and materials on an atom by atom basis, and particularly with the discover of the immense strength of fullerene carbon nanotubes, the difference between what we know how to do today, and what we would need to know in order to build the Heavenly Funicular, are small enough that engineers and scientists and governments around the world are taking a serious second look at what it would take to build a train to space.
Image: Superm401
The main reason that a space elevator is so compelling is the dramatic reduction in energy costs it would provide. It currently costs about $20,000 USD to put 1 kilogram into orbit, a space elevator could lower that cost down to an estimated $250/kg essentially opening the door to space wide open. Understanding this value, one nation has even taken the very recent step of claiming that it will build a space elevator and is setting aside a significant amount of money to do so. The Japanese government, has very recently stated that they are budgeting $9 Billion USD towards a concrete proposal to overcome the theoretical obstacles to elevator construction and eventually begin the assembly of the 100,000 kilometer tall device. This announcement is highly significant in that many experts estimate that a functioning space elevator with a budget of $10-$15 billion could be completed in as little as 12 years. The Japanese have scheduled a conference in November 2008, bringing together experts from around the world to further develop their plans for an elevator to the stars.
Friday, May 30, 2008
VIRTUAL REALITY GLASSES
The future isn’t all rosy. Increasing pollution, overpopulation, poverty, and climate change – society’s impact on the earth is reaching a breaking point. And while we may work to slow the onset of these catastrophes, reversing them is no longer an option. The question becomes, how do we live with the troubles we’ve already caused?
What if we used technology to not only combat this dangerous new environment – but also to escape from it? We already use mobile devices to provide on-demand escapism, channeling movies, music, and other distractions. Increased processing power and emerging technologies will enable holistic computing systems to be stored in wearable devices, providing a more immersive personal media experience. In a troubling future, these augmented reality devices would offer a new dimension - a virtual layer that could be used to “re-skin” the troubling outside world. A boundary between the wearer and the world around him, the device would become a sort of visual drug, used to make the world appear a better place – even if just for a moment.
The device itself acts as a mask between the user and the outside world, expressing the internality of the human-device interaction. It offers a physical distinction between those moving in the real world and those who are “plugged in” to their private dimensions, the world as they wish to see it.
The visual design casts the mask as a lifestyle product of the future, as it plays with a glaring, exaggerated coolness of the wearer. It gives an almost robotic appearance, and suggests a diversion from what we define today as “normal” physical human interaction.
Within the mask, smells, sounds, even air quality would be imitated to create a full sensory experience. The facial expressions of those wearing the device would be detected and projected onto personal avatars visible to others also living behind the shield of the mask.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
ROBOCOP MEETS UNIVERSAL SOLDIER
OTHER EXOSKELETONS_
Wearable technology may sometimes come off as little more than a gimmick (consider the video belt buckle). But for some people, it can mean something entirely different--regaining abilities lost to injury or illness.
This prototype "power jacket" from Matsushita Electric Industrial (parent of consumer electronics company Panasonic) is designed to help patients recover from partial paralysis. Sensors at the elbow and wrist allow a healthy arm to control the eight artificial muscles, which are powered by compressed air, on the paralyzed side. The 4-pound robotic jacket was on display Wednesday at the Home Care and Rehabilitation Exhibition in Tokyo.
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