The Underwriter - Slashdot User

What If the Apollo Program Had Continued? 389

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday July 16, 2009 @12:27PM from the man-that-would-be-a-cool-trip dept.

proslack writes "The die had been cast years before Apollo 11 had even reached the moon. In the late 1960s, the Vietnam war was straining US finances. A fatal fire on the Apollo launch pad in January 1967 had blotted NASA's copybook. The Soviet moon effort seemed to be going nowhere. In the budget debates during the summer of 1967, Congress refused NASA's request to fund an extended moon programme. What if things had been different that summer? Suppose Congress had granted NASA's wish, then fast-forward 40-odd years..." A nice little what-if sort of story that makes sorta nostalgic for a non-existent present.

DARPA Sponsors a Hunt For Malware In Microchips 106

Posted by timothy on Thursday May 01, 2008 @09:23AM from the double-barreled-microscope-loaded-for-vermin dept.

Phurge links to an IEEE Spectrum story on an interesting DARPA project with some scary implications about just what it is we don't know about what chips are doing under the surface. It's a difficult problem to find invasive or otherwise malicious capabilities built into a CPU; this project's goal is to see whether vendors can find such hardware-level spyware in chips like those used in military hardware. Phurge excerpts: "Recognizing this enormous vulnerability, the DOD recently launched its most ambitious program yet to verify the integrity of the electronics that will underpin future additions to its arsenal. ... In January, the Trust program started its prequalifying rounds by sending to three contractors four identical versions of a chip that contained unspecified malicious circuitry. The teams have until the end of this month to ferret out as many of the devious insertions as they can."

Comment Gives new meaning to the term "standing army" (Score 1) 193

by The Underwriter on Wednesday March 19, 2008 @11:01AM (#22795576) Attached to: New BigDog Robot Video

Excuse the bad pun, but seriously people, somewhere far off the Founding Fathers are shaking their heads.

- Imagine a garrison of third-gen "Big Dogs" in every major US city, with assault rifles and thermal vision. "Don't like martial law or the new curfew? Stay inside after 8:00 pm and you'll be safe, citizen! The recession will be over soon."
- Like someone else said, shoot-to-kill orders on any human-sized heat signature.
- If the only remaining witness of an atrocity is a platoon of robots, and they have no video recording units installed, did the atrocity really happen?
- Once the cheap and "bloodless" bombing from afar is over, the REAL fighting takes place on the ground in the rubble. This is the infantry equivalent of the ariel bomber.
- Imagine waves of these floating over from China. Like the Sherman tank in WWII, you don't have to make them better than the opposition, just make them in large enough quantities.

If you don't see the use for these things, try thinking like a politician, The uses are ENDLESS. Too bad American schools don't teach Civics anymore.

Two AI Pioneers, Two Bizarre Suicides 427

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday January 20, 2008 @01:04PM from the unfortunate-losses dept.

BotnetZombie writes "Wired tells the quite sad but very interesting stories of Chris McKinstry and Pushpinder Singh. Initially self-educated, both had the idea to create huge fact databases from which AI agents could feed, hoping to eventually have something that could reason at a human level or better. McKinstry leveraged the dotcom era to grow his database. Singh had the backing of MIT, where he eventually got his PhD and had been offered a position as a professor alongside his mentor, Marvin Minsky. Sadly, personal life was more troublesome for them, and the story ends in a tragic way.

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