Design it to last

eWaste and the toxic pollution it produces.

Via Ms Fahrenheit.

2012 in 2013!!11! OMG!11/

Space Storm!!! Starring Bruce Willis and Will Smith ....

Dr Fisher, 69, said the storm, which will cause Sun to reach temperatures of more than 10,000 F (5500C), occurred only a few times over a person’s life.

Every 22 years the Sun’s magnetic energy cycle peaks while the number of sun spots – or flares – hits a maximum level every 11 years.

Dr Fisher, a Nasa scientist for 20 years, said these two events would combine in 2013 to produce huge levels of radiation.

He said large swathes of the world could face being without power for several months, although he admitted that was unlikely.

A more likely scenario was that large areas, including northern Europe and Britain which have “fragile” power grids, would be without power and access to electronic devices for hours, possibly even days.

He said preparations were similar to those in a hurricane season, where authorities knew a problem was imminent but did not know how serious it would be.

Creepy or playful?

A baby doll that imitates nursing. The child wears a vest with flowers where the nipples would be. Comments on the site have been turned off because of the rudeness.

My memories of childhood and my years of being a parent make me blase about this. Creepy if you think nursing is a somehow a sexual activity dealing with nipples and breasts. Playful if you can remember that children are not blank slates but already hardwired humans with a built-in curiosity. They will nurse teddy bears and dolls on their own. Is this doll any different? Is it the pretend nipples that send people over the edge?

All electronic toys (not GameBoys or Computers but toys) become boring after a while. The teddy that told stories, the robot that walks... I've seen them all dumped in boxes at garage sales. Children do not want to be passive, where they sit and watch a toy go through its paces. They want to PLAY with it, make it do things their imagination demands, so after a while they will turn them off.

I will bet the child will lose the vest halter thing very quickly and play with the baby doll by itself. Easy enough to make your own sound affects....

By the way, read the post by the blogger who noticed this toy in the first place.

Kinda like the Terminator?

What could possibly go wrong with a big push to electronic warfare?

FORT LEAVENWORTH, Kan. – For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the Army is updating its plans for electronic warfare, calling for more use of high-powered microwaves, lasers and infrared beams to attack enemy targets and control angry crowds.

The new manual, produced at Fort Leavenworth and set for release Thursday, also is aimed at protecting soldiers against remote-controlled roadside bombs and other nontraditional warfare used by increasingly sophisticated insurgents.

"The war in Iraq began to make us understand that there are a lot of targets that we should be going after in the offensive or defensive mode to protect ourselves," said Col. Laurie Buckhout, chief of the Army's electronic warfare division in Washington, D.C.

The 112-page manual, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press before its release at the Association of the United States Army meeting in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., doesn't offer specifics on new equipment or gadgetry but lays out in broad terms the Army's fear that without new equipment and training, U.S. forces may be at a deadly disadvantage.

Maybe they should read this article by Nicholas Carr, The Artificial Morality of the Robot Warrior:

Related major research efforts also are being devoted to enabling robots to learn from experience, raising the question of whether we can predict with reasonable certainty what the robot will learn. The answer seems to be negative, since if we could predict that, we would simply program the robot in the first place, instead of requiring learning. Learning may enable the robot to respond to novel situations, given the impracticality and impossibility of predicting all eventualities on the designer’s part. Thus, unpredictability in the behavior of complex robots is a major source of worry, especially if robots are to operate in unstructured environments, rather than the carefully‐structured domain of a factory.

Troubling Failures.

The authors also note that “military robotics have already failed on the battlefield, creating concerns with their deployment (and perhaps even more concern for more advanced, complicated systems) that ought to be addressed before speculation, incomplete information, and hype fill the gap in public dialogue.”

They point to a mysterious 2008 incident when “several TALON SWORDS units—mobile robots armed with machine guns—in Iraq were reported to be grounded for reasons not fully disclosed, though early reports claim the robots, without being commanded to, trained their guns on ‘friendly’ soldiers; and later reports denied this account but admitted there had been malfunctions during the development and testing phase prior to deployment.”

They also report that in 2007 “a semi‐autonomous robotic cannon deployed by the South African army malfunctioned, killing nine ‘friendly’ soldiers and wounding 14 others.” These failures, along with some spectacular failures of robotic systems in civilian applications, raise “a concern that we … may not be able to halt some (potentially‐fatal) chain of events caused by autonomous military systems that process information and can act at speeds incomprehensible to us, e.g., with high‐speed unmanned aerial vehicles.”

I guess if your name isn't Sarah Connor, you don't have anything to worry about....

GPSing your wandering hubby?

Keeping track of your teenager and the family car? Keeping control of which employee can get into a security room? What on earth could go wrong?

...the news that Americans had, for the first time, been injected with electronic identifiers to perform their jobs fired up a debate over the proliferation of ever-more-precise tracking technologies and their ability to erode privacy in the digital age.

To some, the microchip was a wondrous invention — a high-tech helper that could increase security at nuclear plants and military bases, help authorities identify wandering Alzheimer's patients, allow consumers to buy their groceries, literally, with the wave of a chipped hand.

To others, the notion of tagging people was Orwellian, a departure from centuries of history and tradition in which people had the right to go and do as they pleased, without being tracked, unless they were harming someone else.

Chipping, these critics said, might start with Alzheimer's patients or Army Rangers, but would eventually be suggested for convicts, then parolees, then sex offenders, then illegal aliens — until one day, a majority of Americans, falling into one category or another, would find themselves electronically tagged.

Gee, I wonder if Cheney has stock in this company too?

All this electronic gadgetry

Is making us ... uh...

"The less you use of your memory, the poorer it becomes," Trinity neuropsychology expert Professor Ian Robertson told the U.K.'s Telegraph newspaper. As a result, up to 30 percent of people under the age of 30 resort to their phone's directory or notes to recall phone numbers.

Age makes a difference in how well you can remember items. While only 40 percent of 30-year-olds could remember family birthdays, 87 percent of people over 50 years of age could recall birthdays. Researchers believe the gap is due to older people growing up memorizing more information.