ISTR something like this was developed in Great Britain about 20 years ago, called "starlite", and could be painted onto objects to protect from intense heat radiation.

I suspect we shall see them by the year 2002!

Motherboard containing FPGAs combined with dedicated hardware, allows downloadable FPGA cores to emulate CPU models, "chipsets" and architectures: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-One

> This seems to be the first time robots are used as tools for combat

Not quite. Combat robots were first used in World War 2, on the Eastern front - the "Goliath" anti-tank weapon. The Germans used a remote control (wire guided) tank-buster robot which was, essentially, an armoured box with tracks and a bucketload of explosives. It was about 1.5m in length and about one half metre in height.

The idea was that it be guided against Russian tanks then detonated. Although many hundreds were produced, it was not very successful, and the engineers could be found by soviet infantry who simply followed the cable trailing from the back of the machine.