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Mac OS X 10.7 Liger

"It's pretty much my favorite animal."
- Steve Jobs

You mean like this?

"No bucks, no Buck Rogers"

Exactly.

It's totally unscientific, but I just ran Xbench on my 2009 Mac mini and got around 3 GigaFLOPS. It's not very accurate, but probably good to within an order of magnitude.

According to Wikipedia's supercomputer article, that compares roughly with a 1985 Cray-2, which cost about $25 million at the time and was the size of a large closet.

All we have to do is wait about 25 years.

Or that it will never allow itself to fall into the hands of the likes of you and me.

The Singularity Sky series by Charles Stross shows what one of the more benign versions of that future might look like.

Or for something less benign you could always watch Terminator...

Or, if you believe we're all about to have our personalities uploaded to the great singularity in the sky like Ray Kurzweil, you could have an instance of you uploaded to a tiny computer-starship, and live in a virtual environment for the entire journey.

For an interesting and entertaining take on this concept (and other singularity-related ideas) check out the novel Accelerando by Charles Stross.

It's a great book by a fellow Slashdot user, and you can download it free!

(Then go buy some of his other fine works)

It wouldn't fit in the bay:

B61 - 11.8 feet (141.6 inches) long

Predator C's weapons bay - 10 ft long

No pilot. Less payload than a Viper. Lame.

Not these, but something close: Scan Eagle

I'm the senior Landing Signal Officer for the US Navy's Atlantic Fleet, and we've actually had fully automated landing systems on carrier aircraft for a long while. The first test of any Automatic Carrier Landing System (ACLS) was in August 1957, and after extensive development the system was regularly used in Vietnam. The current AN/SPN-46 is the latest iteration, but essentially it's just a glorified missile tracking radar that feeds into the airplane's autopilot via a simple UHF datalink. It's all old tech.

While not all aircraft since Vietnam have done it well (my old F-14B Tomcat was actually worse at "Mode I" (fully coupled) ACLS approaches than the F-4 Phantom it replaced) today's Hornets and Super Hornets are very smooth when coupled up -- much smoother than the typical manual landing.

The problem comes when the system fails (something that can happen in any large automated system - in the air or on the ground). Pilots regularly practice landing by hand, because they never know when the ACLS might not be there for them. They could perform coupled approaches every pass, but they wouldn't have the skills to confidently get aboard if the system ever went away. Those skills require lots of practice to stay sharp, and landing at sea is really hard. I've been doing it for ten years, and it's still just as challenging as ever.

Sometime in the next decade the N-UCAS is supposed to demonstrate truly autonomous UAV operations in a carrier environment. It will rely on a draft version of our next-generation GPS-based replacement for the SPN-46: JPALS. It's stated goal is to fully integrate with our normal manned carrier air traffic procedures. Having seen highly trained aviators struggle with the challenges of operating around the boat, I'll be impressed if it lives up to its goals.

http://xkcd.com/386/

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this seem to imply that you *must also* have dedicated home telephone *and* data service or you're violating their TOS?

See? THIS is why you can't have nice things.