Free Republic

A new set of laws has been proposed to govern operations by killer robots. The ideas were floated by John S Canning, an engineer at the Naval Surface Warfare Centre, Dahlgren Division – an American weapons-research and test establishment. Mr Canning's “Concept of Operations for Armed Autonomous Systems” presentation can be downloaded here (pdf). Many Reg readers will be familiar with the old-school Asimov Laws of Robotics, but these are clearly unsuitable for war robots – too restrictive. However, the new Canning Laws are certainly not a carte blanche for homicidal droids to obliterate fleshies without limit; au contraire Canning...

Enough has come out about the failure of the 9/11 Commission to include critical information about Mohammed Atta and other 9/11 attackers, to suggest a new Commission to investigate the original Commission. The cure may not be that drastic, but it is that important. In short, a special Army intelligence operation known as “Able Danger” identified Atta and four of his accomplices, and identified Al-Qaeda cells in Hamburg and Brooklyn and elsewhere, a year before the 9/11 attacks. They offered then to share that information with law enforcement agencies including the FBI. Those offers were cut off by Clinton Administration...

All Four StanzasBy Isaac Asimov I have a weakness--I am crazy, absolutely nuts, about our national anthem.The words are difficult and the tune is almost impossible, but frequently when I'm taking a shower I sing it with as much power and emotion as I can. It shakes me up every time.I was once asked to speak at a luncheon. Taking my life in my hands, I announced I was going to sing our national anthem--all four stanzas.This was greeted with loud groans. One man closed the door to the kitchen, where the noise of dishes and cutlery was loud...

God Is the Machine IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS 0. AND THEN THERE WAS 1. A MIND-BENDING MEDITATION ON THE TRANSCENDENT POWER OF DIGITAL COMPUTATION At today's rates of compression, you could download the entire 3 billion digits of your DNA onto about four CDs. That 3-gigabyte genome sequence represents the prime coding information of a human body — your life as numbers. Biology, that pulsating mass of plant and animal flesh, is conceived by science today as an information process. As computers keep shrinking, we can imagine our complex bodies being numerically condensed to the size of two tiny...