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Spy Fly
opencity writes "CNN (and AP) reports on the 'Spy Fly' project. "Biologists and technologists at the University of California, Berkeley have spent the past four years developing a tiny robot, called the Micromechanical Flying Insect, that they say will one day fly like a fly." Good technical stuff on the Cal Berkeley page. The Pentagon likes the idea for spying and battlefield deployment but their page has no info about weaponization or command / communication technologies."
SuperFly in a battle?
Who run Barter Town?
actually this can be used for anti-insect works too.
fp. clit?whats that
I bet they got the idea after seeing the movie "Richy Rich".
gives new meaning to the phrase.
All the people that are into personal security or echelon/big brother people are just going to love this.
sig.
Berkely researchers are close to actually getting their models to fly, but according to a source within the university, there were still some bugs to work out.
Actually, this is pretty damn cool, these things weigh less than 1/24th of a penny, have a wingspan of a quarter. The propulsion system on this thing is pretty interesting / amazing.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Any votes for FLI? (We can work out what this is an acronym for later).
80N
The new, improved X-10? /me fears the new onslaught of pop-up adds....
If they choose Linux as their OS will it be called Stay-off-my-food-you-damned-fly Linux? Wait, should we GNU/ that?
Or wait, what if windows runs on them... will it be called Win AT (Annoying technology?)? Now when I swat them out of the air, a BSOD will take on a whole me meaning.
Wait... will it run OS-X? Then maybe apple will sue the flys around the swamps for having a Aqua theme?
Or wait... will it run FreeBSD? Does that mean the flys will be dying a slow death?
The "bad guys" resort to ... this?
Once they perfect the fly, next it's ants, cockroaches etc.
Ants completely immune to insecticide, crawling into people's houses, looking and listening to everything happening in every room.
Ants crawling into keyboards and sensing keystrokes; into monitors and recording displays;
Insects in cars, flying around the sky, networking and collecting data.
Once the prototypes are worked out, and production is tooled up, it'll be viable to implement 100% surveillance of a entire resident populations.
Or, with extreme micromechanical advances, it'll be devices smaller than a human cell, resistant to human antibodies, that can enter via the nasal passages, travel through the bloodstream, sneak past the blood-brain barrier, and embed into various centres around the brain, including the speech centre. Thus such devices will have the ability to read a portion of human thought (the verbal compenent at least), encode verbal thoughts into a data stream, and use the brain's electricity to power a transmitter, sending the encoded thoughts out to external surveillance insects for collection into government databases.
George Orwell's coined word 'thoughtcrime' will take on a much more literal meaning.
This is one of the most frightening developments I've ever seen. The only thing that might hold it in check is an underground movement of people developing technological counter-measures.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
They set us up the fly!
It seems that the rest of the world is around 20 years behind the Department of Defense.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
could be a great weapon once they figure out how to attach the big friggin' laser to it's head.
What kind of payload / application would there be for such a device?
- Germ warefare
- Surveillance (Little Brother)
- Assassination (with a Sarin filled hypodermic)
- Military/battlefield Intelligence
Hm, can't think of many good uses for it.80N
Well, I've seen a house fly,
And I've seen a horse fly,
Hell, I've even seen a dragon fly,
But you know what?
I been done seen 'bout everything when I see a robot fly
"The unicode stuff in the latest version is working fabulously well. My russian mafia friends are ecstatic."
A long time ago they had a series of kid's science fiction books about a kid inventor named Danny Dunn, and one book, Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy was about a robotic dragonfly that could fly around and spy on people. He flew it with a helmet and gloves that foretold of modern virtual reality, because he could feel in his gloves whatever the dragonfly landed on. He ended up destroying it in fears the technology would land in the wrong hands and be used for sinister (Orwellian?) purposes. Anybody else remember reading this one?
don't click on that link, it's a disgusting self-portrait that you don't want to see
I can imagine the flybot being life savers
in rescue operations. Given the mine collapse
in the news in the last few days (congrats
all around for the successful rescue), I'm
surprised there isn't a more humanitarian spin
to promote this type of technology.
But then, talking about rescuing people doesn't
generate as much buzz as "oh my god! the
government is onto my pr0n collection!!"...
-- I have enough stupid gadgets to know that I can do without -- http://www.modestneeds.org
The Diamond Age is a great book and everyone should read it right now to know where this stuff is headed.
Picture the Berkeley scientists, eyes glued to the monitor, excitedly following the maiden flight...
rrrrrRRRRRrrrrrrRRRRRRrrrrrr
Scientist: "Oooh, look at that!"
rrrrrRRRRRrrrrrrRRRRRRrrrrrr
Scientist: "Let's land over there."
Speaker: "Whadda..?"
rrrrrRRRRRrrrrrrRRRRRRrrrrrr
Speaker: "Damn bugs!"
rrrrrRRRRRrrrrrr SPLAT!
Speaker falls silent.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
Just release a few videocamera insects into the sorority house next-door! It will be like revenge of the nerds all over again!
Imagine a spy fly with a injection system which infects people with serious deseases like Hepatitis A/B/C or AIDS.
Goodbye, Mr. President/Chancellor/King/Gran Genernalissimo.
On the other hand the Mossad can use this system to take out these mad bombing bastards. (The CIA would as usual too lame to kill these retards.)
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
Look out slashdot conspiracy theoists & big brother fighters, they have a new spy device ;)
Look at the mockup; it looks like they used zippers for a wing. Reminds me of the Hoover Car they were developing back at UC Davis 20 years ago; and are still developing there. Grant Money.
ENVISIONED DELIVERABLES (5/2003): 2.5 cm MFI capable of laboratory flight
I guess, they were way too optimistic about the schedule. Not to mention that their server runs Windows.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Im sorry but there is absolutely no way in hell this technology could ever be used for anything good.
The people developing this technology should NOT be praised, and people should be protesting this technology along with the nano dust spy technology.
Why the hell do we want to lose all privacy? This absolutely sucks, its as bad as the atomic bomb was to humanity.
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Paraniod or not, do you honestly believe we can use this technology responsibly? All of these war weapons and spy technology shouldnt be developed, due to the fact that humanity cannot use them responsibly.
Insect spy technology would be almost unstopable, and has the impact on society that the atomic bomb once had, how is this a good thing? How could it ever be a good thing?!
Too much money is spend on stupid shit like this and not enough money is spent on educating the masses.
What good is spending 350-400 billion a year on the military if you only spend 20 billion a year on public schools? You end up with a nation of irresponsible morons who are going to be controlling weapons of mass destruction.
What the hell? If Nano Technology weapons start to appear, I have absolutely no faith that humanity will be able to handle it.
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That you cannot invest all this money and effort, into destruction, without destroying the world as the result.
"CNN (and AP) reports on the 'Spy Fly' project. "Biologists and technologists at the University of California, Berkeley have spent the past four years developing a tiny robot, called the Micromechanical Flying Insect, that they say will one day fly like a fly." Good technical stuff on the Cal Berkeley page. The Pentagon likes the idea for spying and battlefield deployment but their page has no info about weaponization or command / communication technologies."
This basically means, like with the atomic bomb, the government is using technology for evil purposes.
Why do we need a 350-400 billion military budget yet only a 20 billion dollar school budget?
Please tell me what would happen, if I gave some monkeys, a button, and told the monkey not to push the little red button which ends the world, wait lets take it a step further, lets say I give this power to thousands, millions of monkeys.
How long until one of the monkeys pushes the button?
For scientific minds reading this, the second law of thermodynamics clearly explains in a very logical way, that unless humans are educated and evolve mentally as a whole, expect things to collapse, with technologies like this here, the atomic bomb, soon nano technology, just wait until it gets in the hands of bin laden, the next hitler, hell i wouldnt even trust these technologies in the hands of george bush or the average american.
So why are we busy creating technology after technology without educating people in how to responsibly use these technologies we create? Are we supposed to be proud of our technology which will be used to spy on millions of people, ruin millions of lives, get people killed etc?
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Of course it should be weaponized. A little pincer or something of the kind, a tiny camera, some image recognizion software, and I could use it to hunt down those d****d mosquitoes. I sure could use one of those, following me everywhere!.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
the fluid-dynamical problems in insect flying are a hard, very much still in research physical problem.
/. responses overlook the serious stuff.
this is the most interesting aspect of this project, and it's a pity
for those interested, there was a Sci. Am. article on robotic insect-flight several months ago.
Working for necessity's mother.
All technologies start of cool, because technologies are usually created by very intelligent enlightened people.
But why should intelligent enlightened people create technologies which dumbass hawks in government will use irresponsibly, to spy on people, harrass, control, and kill people with?
Oh and lets not forget it will eventually spread to people like bin laden, and the next hitler.
Look, geeks in slashdot may be intelligent enough to handle these technologies, but the average idiot, would destroy the world with it.
Governments invest hundreds of billions in weapons, but next to nothing in education, the US government spends less than japan in educating the masses yet spends 350-400 billion on its military.
Look, with the trillion dollar tax cut, and plans for smaller government, what people seem to forget, even with smaller government, you'll still have a country filled with idiots unless you educate the masses on how to use this technology.
The average person cant even use the internet properly, I'm betting george bush doesnt know how to write a program, or do anything more than the average joe who just checks his mail and surfs the web, but this is the guy whos supposed to decide how this new fly technology will be used?
We will let Bush decide who gets nuked? The world is doomed as long as we have leaders who arent as intelligent as the creators of the technology.
The solution? More education, raise the budget on education, and worldwide, so that hopefully we can have a war on ignorance like we have a war on terrorism. Terrorism is caused by ignorance, Hate is caused by ignorance, and both of these are usually results of poor education, lack of knowledge, low intelligence, etc.
Building more weapons, and spy technology only means, the dumb asses of the world will be able to do more damage.
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This will be a great "fun" when the army's worst nightmare becomes birds and spiders eating their spies ;-). I can already imagine them having to produce a flock of electronic eagles to protect the flies...
One shall speak only if what one has to say is more beautiful than silence
I for once agree with you heretic, I dont think humanity is prepared for this technology at all. With our current leaders, our USA would be as fucked up as the way the taliban was.
Oh and even if USA isnt turned into a taliban like stay, China, and the rest of the world will have access to these technologies and some of them will try to enslave its citizens with it.
Whoever is developing this technology and hopefully reads our posts should think about what they are bringing forth into the world. I've thought about this technology, it sounds good and appeals to all geeks in terms of its use, but this kinda technology should be used for us to explore space or an alien planet, not used to be used on us.
Does humanity hate itself? We invest more money and effort trying to create weapons to destroy ourselves than we do educating ourselves!!
We claim to fight to protect freedom then develop technologies which by design remove it?
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Oh yippee! At least *real* insects only carry diseases. I'm scared the government wants to turn me into a borg.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
The department of defense (should be offense) is spending hundreds of billions per year developing weapons and spy technologies.
What the fuck is the purpose of spending so much money on technologies which are bad for humanity, but not spending any money on education.
Do they expect a bunch of typical people like bush and others to be able to make the right decisions in using this technology?
This is 2002! I think its time USA stopped trying to be the king of weapons and war and started promoting education to the third world.
All of these terrorists, they dont get any education, all they know is islam, they do whatever their leader says, its all they know in life, and thats the problem
Islam is fine, but people need to understand that War is not fine, and spying on people is not good.
I'm sure people will say "but we have to spy on the good, to stop the bad" and thats true, but if we are going to spend all this time effort and money on spy technology to stop the bad, we should also be spending just as much money to provide education to the masses.
Most people arent bad, most are just ignorant, most Nazis and KKK who hate certain races do so in ignorance, sure the leaders like hitler or bin ladens may be smart, but their followers usually are ignorant sheep instead of free thinkers, perhaps letting some of these ignorant sheep on to the net would be more effective than spying on them and blowing them up, and fighting fire and fire.
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The technology is a very good technology, but most humans are like apes and monkeys, they go around having wars, hating each other, and doing evil crap.
True theres some good people who will use the technology for good, but if just a handful use this technology for bad, it could ruin it.
Create this technology and let some of the dumbasses in the government get a hold of it and you'll see what I mean.
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Just giving another weapon to evil people in the world.
You see, creating more weapons to destroy evil, ALWAYS ends up helping evil in the long run.
The atomic bomb is a good example.
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I would only asume windows.... as its so *buggy* I couldn't resist :P
Steve Austin, a fly barely alive...thump-thump...
We have the technology...beep-beep...
We can make him stronger...crunch-crunch...
We can make him faster...whoosh-whoosh
Don't miss The $6 1/2 Dollar Fly
Berkely teams up with virtual voyeur, in what is claiming to be the first robotic pr0n bot.
the *cool* kind of weapons unless they are mounted on sharks.
Either that or maybe some dogs that bark and when they bark bees fly out.... maybe put some lasers on those suckers.
well, TDA is one of the greatest, most imaginative, SF books ever, but maybe they got the idea from researching insect flight
Working for necessity's mother.
Sound's like they ought to have a requirements review meeting...
80N
crawling into people's houses, looking and listening to everything happening in every room
...
...
I'm going to risk some karma here, and suggest you're barking up the wrong tree here:
surveilance devices allready exists, they are very cheap and use realy old-fashioned technology (remember Orwell's 1984 was written >60 years ago )
and to the extent the (any) goverment wants to control the ordinary people's lives they can allready do this technologically and financially.
IMHO, the issues of privacy and citizen-state relationship are not technological by nature, but are political issues, and technology rarely changes them.
the only possible exception to the above is of encryption technology. But as for being afraid of miniature mechanical bugs listening to our conversations / sexual activities / whatever I say nothing has changed. The goverment allready has practically indetectable bugs
so, contrary to common geek belief, technology will nither greatly help nor greatly impede you in your civil-rights struggle. It's not a technology issue.
but that's just my non-expert oppinion, lets wait and see
Working for necessity's mother.
In any case, a centipede would be a lot stealthier than a bee and probably does more miles to the gallon.
80N (Learn to crawl before you can walk)
A laser cannon could deflect the astriod, the laser could literally beam the astriod and deflect it off its course.
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You all are maudlin + Naive saying "This is Evil".
Just becasue its designated purposes are spying, assasination, and distributing bio-warefare agents.
Why do I claim the alarmists are naive.... well its because the us military has FAR FAR more evil research projects that would stupefy you if you ever saw proof that such projects were ever persued.
This is a goddamned childs playtoy compared to the stuff that has been researched in the past.
I say : more power to them. any possible way of getting funding is useful in the long run to all mankind.
That is not true of various designer virrii that attack specific "races" of people, or DMSO4 delivered "senility" car doorhandle swabs, or highenergy "confusion" rays, crowd cooking helicopter deployed microwave beams, M1A1 artillery shell N-Bombs that leave hard assets intact but kill humans, Dirty-Cobalt-Jacketted W87 "goodnight kiss" warheads, injectable drugs for prisoners that create physical temporary blindness for weeks, nausea gasses, various ultra-lethal nerve agents far more potent than Sarin, spy agencies like the NRO, and NSA-backed Echelon, etc. etc.
Hell.... this Dune-Dart stuff is just a playtoy fit for sentient-Furby style toys of 2025AD for Xmas stuffers or cereal box prizes.
the stupid thing and disable it
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WASHINGTON DC (AP) - Attorney General John Ashcroft has just announced that the terrorist organization known as 'Slashdot' has launched an internet based attack against the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Details are sketchy at this point, but security analysists say the attack is similar to a DoS or Denial of Service attack used by malicious hackers. DARPA is the Department of Defense's main research organization. It is credited with the creation of the internet itself. More to follow...
Aerostats, here we come!
"Man in the Moon and other weird things" - wfmh.org.pl/thorgal/Moon/
I got a real laugh out of this paragraph:
"Michelson said he is developing a flapping robot, called the entomopter, that will use bursts of gas, a byproduct of the device's chemical propulsion system, to adjust the amount of lift provided by each of the robot's twin sets of wings."
What's the fuel? Chili?
This stuff has been going on with the 80s but it looks like they've finally gotten close to some results.
A giant order for flysquatters has just come in from Iraq
-
The first confirmed case of HIV is from 1959. We did not have the technological means to manufacture a new virus at that time. It's amazing how ill informed so many people are.
Cat
Search engines are not just a technological demonstration.
"Hey Huck, fly it over to that branch to have a look at the bikini-clad al Qaeda operatives!"
"Look at those guys worshiping them Jethrow, those must be female jihadists"
"Damnit Huck, that there varmit must be a Muslim fundamentalist too"
It'll be swatted like all the other damn flies that come my way if I see it - spy fly or not!
Well, I seen a horsefly. I seen a dragonfly. I seen a housefly. See, I seen all that too.
But I've never seen a spy fly.
There are spy flies in PKD's book A Maze of Death (which, along with Ubik, seems to have inspired the Matrix movie as well).
Funny that you cite the atomic bomb in your example...
Tell me, when was the last time 2 world powers took up arms against each other?
Seems to me there hasn't been any massive loss of life (say, even close to a world war) since we droped the bomb on Japan.
You do realize, theres alot more solar energy in space than there is on earth? You do realize there are particles in space, waves carrying these particles allow solar sails to travel as such great speeds.
In space, you should in theory be able to create a laser thousands of times more powerful than it would be if its on earth, due to the fact that if done right, the suns energy could be harnessed.
Also theres other ways, you could simply use more than one laser aimed at the same target to increase how effective the laser is.
Airforce
current plans to deflect astriods
you can see two sites there with lasers currently in the works which are said to be powerful enough to do it.
See picture
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I mean ignorant because they dont understand that when you hate others you also hate yourself, when you kill someone else you are actually killing yourself, they dont understand we are all connected, and we are all one species, and you cant just go around killing people.
This is why I call them ignorant, murder is ignorant.
You cannot harm someone else on purpose, and not be considered ignorant, you purposely do harm to others, you actually are doing harm to yourself, your children, its like a ripple effect.
You can claim they do it because they are evil, but evil is ignorant, the nature of evil, not just the effects.
You think knowledge and intelligence equals enlightenment? hell no, alot of sheep have knowledge. But without proper understanding, you'll use your knowledge to destroy yourself instead of to help yourself.
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The United States knew That Nazi Germany had an Atomic Bomb program, but didn't know how far along it was. It was also known that the first nation to develop the bomb would win the war, even if they were on the verge of defeat. Considering Hitler's goals, it would have been pretty fucking stupid to take a chance that Hitler would get the Bomb first.
They did not need to build as many bombs as they did, with the amount of power they had. The bomb being built was mainly a symbol of power at first, but tell me why we kept making these bombs, and making them more powerful all the way through the 80s?
You see, what you are saying is, the USA in self defense, had no choice but to develop the atomic bomb, and this makes sense. But it doesnt make sense why we developed, I dont know how many thousands of these nuclear bombs, and of unbelieveable power, what was the point? Who needs thousands of nuclear bombs? Its enough to destroy the whole world.
The fact that we didnt destroy the world was pure luck. You see, the technology was a bad technology, you can argue the fact that we developed it in self defense at first in response to others, however we did not need to have the cold war, that was bullshit. Where do I put the blame? Not just on the USA, but on all of the ignorant (yes ignorant) leaders of all of these countries, who were either filled with hate (hitler) or just couldnt get along with the USA (Japan and Russia).
You can try to claim the USA was the victim, and that the ignorant leaders in these other countries were responsible for all of this, but it was the USA who used the bomb first, it was the USA who pushed the cold war competition to see who could build the most bombs.
Back then, there was no UN, so it was impossible to stop rogue dictators, like hitler. Today we dont need to develop such massive weapons to stop one guy, you see if bin laden were around back then he could have been as dangerous as hitler or even more so, its not the technology I'm blaming, I'm blaming the people who happen to control it. The people who control it arent the people who make it, and if all of the intelligent genius scientists decide not to make any more weapons, that would be it.
If scientists decide not to make any more spy technologies, none would be made. It cant happen without einstiens and teslas of the world, hitler wasnt smart enough to develop a nuclear bomb, and neither were his soilders, and this is what we must remember.
Why build technologies which we know for a fact, that our leaders cannot handle?
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I was going to post, but realized what I'm thinking of is Hawaiian...
Sure these could be (and probably will be) used by government to snoop on people. For the record, my uncle was investigated by the FBI for starting a union and foiling one of LBJs hare-brained schemes in the early 1960s; wire tapping, neighbors and friends asked a lot of questions, etc. So I have no love for those power hungry idiots.
But this tech will work both ways. I believe David Brin said it in Transparent Society. The problem isn't the spying itself so much as the onesidedness of it all, in that only the rich and powerful have been able to spy, and avoid being spied upon. Once these things are mass produced, they will get into civilian hands, and the rich and powerful will be more susceptible to them, not less. Similar to Diamand Age, also.
I'd say the tech will be as great an equalizer as the gun was -- all previous weapons required lots of personal time for training which only the rich and powerful could afford. Just as spying on my uncle took lots of manpower, previous weapons required lots of resources and commitment -- armor, the longbow, swords. The revolver in particular was a revolution in personal weaponry. These bugs will be just as revolutionary, and the rich and powerful won't be able to hide from them nearly as well.
Infuriate left and right
Makes me think of the cockroach in The 5th Element that had a camera and mic on it.
The dude had headphones on and was listening to the conversation intently, and then one of the targets sees it, grabs a shoe and WHAMMO!!
Of course, the listener gets a nice surprise to the ears.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
they'll get this going and it be the swarm of locusts from the apocalypse!!! everyone run for the hills, the end is near...
uhm, well it was fun while it lasted
- adam
P.S.
"Excuse me for being curious," he said, "but are you Alusz Iphigenia Eperje-Tokay?"
"I am Alusz Iphigenia Eperje-Tokay," she said, correcting his pronunciation.
Isn't the whole idea to BUILD a bug????
I'm saying we should have a nation of scholars instead of a nation of warriors.
We should be spending equal amounts on both, not almost all our money on the military.
Defense is to defend ourself from assholes, the current government seems to like to bully other countries and try to police the world. This is a bad idea.
We only need enough money to defend our country, you dont need 350-400 billion to defend the country, thats the budget needed to police the entire planet.
I'd say 100 billion is needed to defend the country, and 100 billion to educate the masses.
Why do you assume that throwing money at schools will magicly cause students to become more intrested in learning than in the next album by their favorite band, or if their favorite team will make it to the Super Bowl, or if they can get some good pot this weekend, or if they will get a piece of ass or......
throwing money at the military is no smarter than throwing money at school.
Who said I agree with how schools currently work? Schools need to be completely reformed, and made modern.
Reform the school, currently schools are designed for the 1800s, this is 2002, get rid of chalkboards, replace them with electronic displays, allow programmers to write more interactive learning software, install a touch pad palm style display into all of the desks, no more need for paper, use electronic paper if there is a need.
Internet connect all of this, so the work a person does at school can simply be uploaded to a central server, then when they get home they can continue their learning experience.
Oh, and the reason we should use computers and technology to educate our children, its proven that one teacher can not teach 30 kids properly, and reducing class sizes which is what the government is currently trying to do, is just not going to work.
Accept the fact that public schools will be big, give teachers the tools required to teach a big class.
electronic paper, interactive assignments, complete with videos,students should be taught teamwork and work as a team using the technology provided,homework should be downloadable from the net etc, teachers should be able to use animations to explain things to students on a digital board, an animation should show students how to do their math, show them how the atomic bomb works, etc
Kids dont like school because of how its designed, its not very modern, kids want school to be fun, so why not make it fun, connect the school to the web.
I'm sure some older people here will say "too much technology in school is bad, kids will play and chat, and not learn a thing"
However statistics prove that kids learn more from TV, Games, and Movies than they do from books. Of course before The net, TV, etc exsisted and there were only books, people all learned from books.
Now people learn from the web, they chat, but chatting should be allowed as long as A, everything you say is displayed in public on the teachers electronic board, the teacher can moderate, or should be able to turn this off.
Basically, just like we have the PC designed to help you learn and gather information at home, special devices and tools should be designed to aid in teaching.
Currently its not helping, because people are just throwing PCs at schools, with generic software like microsoft windows, AOL chat, etc.
With a 100 billion dollar budget, a whole industry could form, to develop hardware and software DESIGNED for schools.
This is why the budget should be increased, of course I cant control how the money is spent, and if schools just want to throw money at microsoft and dell, well thats their stupidity.
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PLAY TO WIN!
Soon every company will have their own blurb flys and we'll never be able to escape their flying advertisements.
--
Experimental music
d. Taylor Singletary,
reality technician techra.el
Early attempts at heavier than air flight involved designs featuring flapping wings like birds. We now have heavier than air flight, but no planes with flapping wings. Nature is full of amazing designs, but unless we're also using her materials and processes, success will come from designs that exploit the materials and processes we have available to us.
... like a banana?
Miko O'Sullivan
All the girls say hes pretty fly for a spy guy!
What good is spending 350-400 billion a year on the military if you only spend 20 billion a year on public schools?
Easy.
There's 270 million Americans. Most of them have already graduated school. So throw out a rough guess of maybe 50 - 75 million kids in school for that 20 billion dollars to look after.
On the other hand, there's about 6 BILLION non-americans out there. It should be fairly obvious that it costs more to babysit 6 billion sub-standard people than it does 50 million superior Americans.
Our kids can be taught to behave with simple measures like writing "My butt is not a work of art" on the chalkboard, or detention, or extra homework. Those sub-Americans aren't as sophisticated as our noble children, and tend to require more direct forms of discipline such as the careful application of Cruise Missiles, satellite guided precision strike bombs, and new solid state aircraft mounted 100kw Laser weapons.
If the commie bastards in that lesser, barbarian china, and the peace loving democratic society of the Republic of China, can ever learn play nice together, or if the backwards and violence prone theocracies of southwest asia ever realize there is no santa claus, boogie man, etc, and get with the whole 20th century thing (hell if they even caught up to the 19th, I'd be impressed) then maybe we wouldn't have to beat the living hell out of them as much and could devote more of our true American Greatness towards more worth matters, like falling attendance at Major League Baseball games. Seriously, that IS the national pastime, and it's unthinkable that dealing with the inferior citizens of lesser nations should distract us from it.
would you bother to inflict someone with a virus this way?
Evil Men in Black Gov't Headquarters
7pm Meeting
Evil #1: The king of Kuwait is refusing to buy Microsoft software! We must assassinate him!
Evil #2: But how?
Evil #1: I know! Let's do it in such a way that it requires years and years for him to die, if ever!
Evil #2: Someone shoot this man.
Evil #3 (shoots Evil #1 in the back of the head).
Evil #4: How about we just put naurotoxins on the stupid fly like we usually do?
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
SKARO - The familiarity of the moon laser pods seen in recent coverage of the proposed NASA Comet/Asteroid Protection System is "merely a coincidence," say Langley Research Center officials.
In a written statement, CAPS project lead Dr. Alan Davros staked his personal assurance that CAPS pods are capable "only of routine extermination," given their advanced Thal technology.
- Edward Johnson; Dow Jones Newswires; 202-862- 9200
Snickersnee3: Build your own 3-watt Luxeon Star headlamp from scratch
Yesterday evening, John Fisher, a middle-aged, South London bachelor was led away from his house after he was found to have swatted a bionic fly-like creature which was buzzing around his kitchen. Neighbours looked on in surprise as Fisher shouted in confusion when a SWAT team broke down his front door and rushed into the house. The suspect was allegedly busy making popcorn and running a plastic fly swatter under the tap.
"Huh? What the hell are you arresting me for? Let me go!" he cried as he was bundled into a waiting police car. "All I did was swat a damn fly!" Curiously, the police failed to tell him that what he had destroyed was not actually a fly, but an electronic insect costing $40 million being tested by the US military. The electromechanical creature was spying on Fisher to test out its televisual capabilities, relaying images to the nerds controlling it over at DARPA.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
... one of the profs who is designing this thing.
You people are so paranoid.
He spent a class session talking about his research, and when he discussed applications, the big thing on his mind was using the flies for search and rescue operations. Put CO2 sensors on 'em, let 1000 of them fly into, oh, I dunno, a collapsed building, and they'll fly towards living humans stuck in the building (by finding the CO2 from their breathing). Then rescue crews go in and look for concentrations of flies. Bingo, you've got your victim.
Nothing as insidious as you freaks are conjecturing.
During the Civil Rights era the idea grew that there was a "Right" to an education. There is NO right to a tax payer supported education. That is a privillege to be earned. Dumping the notion of a "Right" to a tax payer supported education will allow the schools to dump the worst trouble makers who don't intend to learn any thing, and won't cost a cent.
I understand the frustration. I went to a public school in a small city in the midwest... still, I ask, why shouldn't this be a right?
I understand what you are saying, but you have the right to free speech, until you use it to infringe on others rights. Rights are often revoked all the time due to infringement or criminal acts.
Same with education. It should be a right, until your actions revoke it. There are many ways to do it, but I understand your statement.
I agree, the school system in America stinks. It is a miracle that our system turns out anyone with a brain, fit for anything other than US military duty. However, the real problem with schools is that most of the money spent on schools comes in from local property taxes, allowing rich neighborhoods to get olympic size pools, and poor neighborhoods don't get enough cash for books. Middle class neighborhoods in cities. They get the worst of both. They lose their money to poor children whos parents can't feed them because they are alcoholics, and they also get their asses kicked by all of the affluent kids who have nothing but time on their hands. Lower the money to rich schools? Then they go private. Lower the money to public schools, then they can't afford the metal detectors.
Should we spend less on military? NO. Should we spend less on education? HELL NO. Should we spend money propping up other nations food and healthcare programs while we cannot solve our own? DOUBLE HELL NO.
We need to take our money back, and spend it on our children, because there is not a nation in the earth that has ever paid a dollar to the US to help them out, short of when Jefferson went slumming for fleet money around France. To the rest of the world with the only hand out that doesn't have a knife in it, I say, "SORRY. TOO BAD."
What about the bats and other birds that may eat them?
First we had bees as mine detectors then came the ratbots and now the spyfly-report on CNN gets slashdotted. These are just small pieces in a bigger puzzle, obviously released one after the other. To get the larger picture at once, you have to go to the DARPA site about the Controlled biological systems and see, what will be promoted next...
The cold was was pointless
Maybe theres no denying nuke had to be made at some point, but the cold war?
Why were we competiting with Russia and China in the first place? Why not let them control their country, and we control ours. Why get involved in world affairs? As long as they dont attack us or our allies?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
technology rarely changes them
I would agree with you but for one thing. Money.
At the moment it costs the state a measurable amount of cash to monitor what I say today. They have to get someone to actually plant a bug, or tap a line, or track me down and follow me.
If you have a 'practically free' method of doing this the state is no longer impeded by availability of funds - and can bug everyone 'just in case'. The auto processing, pattern recognition technology that spots stolen cars / repeat shoplifters, can be used on these feeds to flag up people who say the words 'I'm a baddie' more than twice.
Just by releasing a swarm of flies/ ants they can have a bug in every room in the country. If its okay to use them to stop Bin Laden - why not use them to stop wife beaters, and drug dealers, and tax dodgers, and litterers, and over-eaters. If the costs are low enough then it makes sense.
They can already listen to all phone calls. Anyway, like I said on another post, this is just an easier less risky way of planting a bug. They could still do it the old fashioned way, it would just be harder.
Precision of weapons is good (I mean: precise weapons can be tolerated easily than those with broad destructive effect). But what I found the main part of HanzoSan's post is:
How long until one of the monkeys pushes the button?
US now has a lot of weapons, a lot of very destructive weapons and also very precise weapons. But is increased risk of missusing destructive weapons addressed? (even if such weapons are very precise)
hany
I would agree with you but for one thing. Money.
... "
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you have a point there, but IMHO it is limited in scope.
why ? because just like in biology, when a parasite is very successful, the infected population usually devellops cheap and effective counter-measures.
so, if these super-bugs will be percieved as a large-scale injustice, as an illegitimate thing, it is not unlikely to predict large-scale, cheap solutions develloped and widely deployed, giben enough time.
so I reiterate my original point: the problem is of preception of legitimacy , i.e. it is political in nature.
this is even implicit in the your post: to quote:
"If its okay to use them to stop Bin Laden - why not use them to stop wife beaters, and drug dealers, and tax dodgers, and litterers, and over-eaters
note everything you said in last paragraph relates to the perception of the public of what is legitimate what is not.
-- but then again, my predictions could be wrong
Working for necessity's mother.
Many years ago I saw someone (on tv?) who had made really tiny planes (3-10cm wings) out of some kind of clear plastic. He would then put a drop of glue on top and stick a common house fly to the glue. When the fly tried to get away, it ended up flying away with airplane - however the plane had static control surfaces so the demonstrator could force the plane to stay in a holding pattern and not get far. Any one else see this?
I'm in my right mind and I have the answer to everything!