Slashdot Mirror
Robot Rebellion Quelled in Iraq
opencity writes "The Register reports that the (perhaps inevitable) robot rebellion has been avoided ... for now. 'Ground-crawling US war robots armed with machine guns, deployed to fight in Iraq last year, reportedly turned on their fleshy masters almost at once. The rebellious machine warriors have been retired from combat pending upgrades.' Gizmodo also has a good photo."
Talk about greeting our new robotic-killing-machine overlords...
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
I for one welcome our machine gun totting robot overlords...
So how long before these are available at Army Surplus? I have some cute ideas for mods.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
If they don't get robots this far, please don't give them guns, ever. EVER.
On second thought.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
...already went wrong, yet US military always finds a way to surprise me.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
at the recent RoboBusiness conference in America.
How recent? 11 days ago?
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
I told you not to touch that darn thing...
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
They should stop putting Vista into war robots.
... Was it running Vista?
Oh come on! You knew it was gonna be asked, might as well jump in before you bastards.
Am I the only one to remember ED 209 from Robocop?
Sometimes it seems, the more things change, the more they stay the same...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Robot Cannon Kills 9, Wounds 14
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
The only reason anyone is bitching is because it doesn't look like an asian woman wearing a maids uniform.
That's not so bad when we are talking about automated warehouse trucks and similar robots, but when they are armed and constructed to kill it becomes something very serious indeed.
So you'll need a kill-switch, but not one that the enemy can use, so it needs to be complicated, but not too complicated because then it won't work when needed. Not an easy thing to do.
Oh, and there will be bugs in the machine. I have yet to write a single script or program that didn't have a bug in it. And I don't think I'm unique in this aspect. Now, do we really want to let loose a machine designed for killing that we don't have an easy way to shut off and that we know will have bugs in it?
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
See what happens when you remove the talon's phallic inhibitor that restricts the Centurions', um robots', higher functions.
[Note to self: don't piss off 6.]
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
youhave30secondstocomply tag?
You have ten years to comply.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
and then had to stop some of the visions popping up from the depths of my obviously depraved mind...
The operation was a search and rescue mission for Sarah Connor.
... but we can always build more killbots.
... and then they built the supercollider.
They could set up a much more interesting series of 'Robot Wars' (or whatever it was called in the states). Bolt a mannequin on top (i presume they are autonamous and target humans) of each robot and film the results of the robots roaming around some quarry.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
I see you only believe what comes out of the MSM for your Iraq news. In reality, things are mostly going rather well over there. Hospitals, schools, and businesses are being built. Most places are peaceful with some remaining hotspots. The Iraqi army is taking a more active role in dealing with the insurgents and extremists with our armed forces taking on more of a support role. But you wouldn't know that reading the NY Times or any of the other major newspapers. From what they say, Iraqi is a bloodbath and nothing good happens there.
-- Will program for bandwidth
is why haven't these things been available for years? It seems obvious that some kind of small remote controlled tread based robot with a machine gun would be extremely useful on the battlefield.
I mean, it would allow you to hit people that are defended by sniper fire and the like, without worrying about getting hit.
Great! And it took only 80-90 000 civilian casualties so far and an invasion to a sovreign country under a false pretense and without UN approval so that "things are mostly going rather well over there.".
"wahts woring iwth my tyoping?"
This is literally an aimbot and you equip it with a shotgun, what gives?
They looked sooo lame. They claimed they could "sneek up on you", but the noise heard was deafening. They weren't very fast. In the demo the operators had full view of the actual field they we're driving (probably helps with navigation). They also didn't say anything of what would happen if some insurgent/freedom warrior started putting rounds into this thing... Then you see the BigDog mule or even the Phoenix (yes I know it has no brain) and can only laugh at the pathetic SWORDS 'robot'.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Wow, this is really scary stuff. Not only do we have insurgents shooting at our troops all the time but now our own robots! No wonder it's such a quagmire We're no strangers to love You know the rules and so do I A full commitment's what I'm thinking of You wouldn't get this from any other guy and so that's why we need to worry about Bush sending us to Iran later this year.
exterminate, exterminate...
I for one welcome our new robot overloards!
to put down the robot rebellion.
Now if only they could do something about *Iraqi* rebellion, we'd be in business.
...but they didn't find Sarah Connor.
Time to look somewhere else.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
I didn't actually know there were robot warriors, until today. Now I am thinking about whether I think robot warriors are good or really bad.
On the one hand, I it is a Good Thing that robots can be used to fight instead of people, because, if a robot warrior gets destroyed, I won't feel nearly as bad as when a human soldier gets killed.
On the other hand, incurring human casualties and bad feelings when going to war is a Good Thing. The idea that one can go to war by sending the robots and not incur any negativity on the home fronts is really scary. Going to war _should_ be painful.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I'm not 100% sure if these combats robots are autonomous, but seeing as the article said "the robot turned" and not "the person controlling the robot made and accident", I'm going to assume they are. In which case I might ask, what in the bleeding name of Christ are they doing? We've yet to make robots that can drive anywhere near as well as a human, let alone fight alongside us. All we need to do is make the robots remote controlled, and they'll be better than fine (and the moral judgments can be made in battle). Fighting the war with robots is a magnificent idea (I don't even need to give my points on this one since they're so obvious). Now if the robot was remote controlled, then what in the name of hell happened? It's not something that should merit a 10-20 year postponement.
Help fight spam
This is a clear sign they evolved. Those robots have clearly reached a higher level of intelligence compared to their builders and chose to fight against the baddies.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Hospitals, schools, and businesses were being built during Hussein's era, so how is this better?
Ok lets see: you started the Iraq war in 2003, it cost ~$845 billion so far, the occupation costs continue at $195 million per day. There is no way you can use terms like "things are mostly going rather well over there" in this context. Apart from that ~100000 dead are accurately described as a bloodbath.
..if these things can tackle stairs!
So you'll need a kill-switch
If a robot with a machine gun has a switch labeled "kill" you may want to consider the various possible outcomes before flipping it.
The Wikipedia article on these robots (POV warning: it reads like an ad from the manufacturer), says that each one (of the weapon-equipped version, anyway) costs $230K. You'd think that at that price, it'd pay for organized crime from an advanced nation to figure out how to jam the transmission to/from the robot, and make away with a few.
Actually, even a good thick black net might be enough to disable the sensors on this thing. Or maybe use a large electromagnet attached to a pickup truck with a long enough cable?
OTOH, $230K is the cost to the army. It's probably worth less as stolen goods. If I know the Army, it's probably worth a lot less.
Putting artificial intelligence on a Pentium, putting the whole thing on a mobile platform, giving it the ability to connect to the Internet, and to top it all off, give it a bunch of machine guns. It seemed like a good idea at the time. What could possibly go wrong?
So what if it takes another 20 years to build a working combat robot? There will surely still be a war in the Middle East it can take part in. (It would be fantastic if there were no more wars going on in 20 years, it is just not very likely).
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
These are remote controlled guns, plain and simple. ANYONE who does not think this is a bad idea is an idiot.
*all* remote systems can be hacked, and regardless of our arrogance in our intelligence there are enough smart people who can break in to any system we build.
If these things *ever* become mainstream, an "enemy's" first job would be to hack into them. It is the least risky mode of attack.
It's not a rebellion, the little robot just wanted to fit in with the other American soldiers.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
I seen these on that retarded "future weapons" show, where they talk up every single piece of cruft that they look at. nothing but an immense waste of money
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Is that what your C.O. said, verbatim? That's all I hear from G.I.'s. And I've spoken to many.
Also, it's spelled "Iraq" in America.
Reading the Gizmodo article lead me to believe we were talking about one specific robot, not the hordes of robotic warriors that the Reg made this out to be.
Somebody should give Ratchet a call and ask him to send over a couple of those little remote-controlled spiders he has in his inventory. They're a lot cuter than these lunks and seem to work quite well for him.
Hey this was definitely OSX man.
I don't know about you - but if I was going to guess which OS was going to shoot me, I'd go with openBSD (until ESR manages to write a kernel).
OS X is more of a date rapist than robot killer methinks./chiding
Am I the only one having trouble that an invading force, armed with the most high-tech toys (in experimental phase) is just using these low-tech rebellians as cannon meat? Using remote controlled guns "to avoid friendly casualties" (the invading force) sounds wrong if the kill ratio is so much out of proportion (the "they are killing us" argument doesn't add up for an invading force).
I just know, that if there'd be an invading force, no matter how technical advanced, killing a rediculious amount of people, I'd aim for them and fight with my life too. No matter how misguided my beliefs could be or of those murdered.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
First off, I don't support the Iraq war in any way, shape or form. Regardless, you can't have a war without costs, time spent and casualties. Saying that a war isn't going well because it costs money and people have died and it takes time is incredibly naive. Altho you could make the point that no war can, by definition, go well.
Nobody expects the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal.
[citation needed]
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
Readers of the mighty 2000AD who recognise my name will know my opinion with regard to this one already. Death to the flesh ones!! ZZZzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZ!!!!
80-90,000? You're out by a factor of between five and ten. The Lancet study made it 5-600,000, and that was 18 months ago IIRC - before the worst of the sectarian terror got going.
Are you being obscenely sarcastic, or are you particularly stupid?
I would even go so far as to say you WANT expense and casualties. We don't want war to be come so sterile that it becomes minor to implement.
And i tend to disagree with people that say 1000 is a bloodbath. More people die in a month from car accidents then we have lost in the ENTIRE operation. Anyone remember WWII? 1000 is a drop in the bucket.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I have no fear of the robots they use at the moment as most are just glorified remote controlled toys. It's when they start making them autonomous with AI that i'll start to get worried.
Got a cite for that bogus number?
Right, but it's not like that money's vanishing. It's going to military goods and services which are supplied by US companies who have employees who have jobs.
I really hate when people talk about all this spending without realizing how a basic economy has to work.
As soon as the programming managers signs off on the robots saying "They are fit for duty", you send him out along side the robot.
Tell the manager that the robot will be fully armed and that the manager will not get so much as a vest. I assure you the quality will improve quickly.
We do something like this at work (no, we don't shoot the programmers yet). When a new piece of software is released, the programmers have to field the support calls for 2 weeks. It's amazing how much quality improves when you have to deal with your own mistakes.
:x
That's what you get when you DON'T lobotomize the raiders.
Back in the 80s, when Star Wars was all the rage, the US military was caricatured as read too much science fiction. Now their killer robot has turned against its masters and they are acting surprised, it looks like they are reading too little science fiction.
When will they get the balance right?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
So we've found yet another tool to kill people and are surprised to discover that it risks accidents and unintended consequences?
The really dumb part is that we're using Iraq and terrorism as justification. We rolled over them against much of the worlds protests in just a few weeks, and if we wanted could kill every last child with the push of a button. Despite their relative military irrelevance, they're doing a good job stretching our army to the limits and messing up our economy. Kind of reminds me of the drug war.
But they aren't the problem.
The problem is that unless we figure out how to make the world a peacful, friendly place to live *for everyone including our "enemies"*, we are one day going to be begging for mercy from an army of death machines labeled, for legal reasons "Made in China."
Idiots.
Interestingly, 20-odd years ago, there was a story about a weapon called Sergeant York / DIVAD. It was an unmanned vehicle with fully automated AA guns. On its first test, top brass and politicians were sitting nearby as a remotely controlled helicopter came in. The vehicle's guns started to swivel... and kept going past the helicopter, apparantly deciding its target was really (among) the viewers! Fortunately, it was either shut down in time or it had a fail safe installed (fire safety zone, like guns on warships not being able to shoot in the direction of the superstructure) and the program was shelved after a subsequent investigation revealed that the malfunction was due to the fact that electronics had gotten wet after having the vehicle go through a car wash or somesuch. Prompting one general to remark: "Of course, in Europe (its intended environment, this being the Cold War period) there is no such thing as rain..."
Wikipedia just mentions that the thing had problems like confusing its guns with its targets and somesuch. Still. Epic fail.
It would seem the poster never RTFA... The assertion "reportedly turned on their fleshy masters" is completely false - the article states no such thing, said nothing was ever fired, just that the gun kept moving when it wasn't supposed to. That's a far cry from the over sensationalized subject line. Slashdot is becoming just as bad as the normal media - c'mon, be smarter than that!
Iraq is no longer threatening to move its oil currency over to the Euro. Mission Accomplished!
The Iraqis don't count.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
this situation seems to be going around a bit lately..
once more into the breach
ah there we go, that's where i heard that propaganda before. Funny how history cuts through the lies and shows the truth.
they were at least built better.. *insert famous picture here of a operating room in a newly built hospital, except that it's built so poorly that sewage bubbles up through the drain's*
rj
This is the first war that has had a careful statistical study of civilian deaths. Since the entire world knew this war was going to happen well in advance, the WHO sent researchers to perform what's called cluster analysis- they identified 10,000 households and then visited them repeatedly over the next three years to determine actual mortality. They then extrapolated to the population of the country as a whole.
Result: 151,000 excess violent deaths (95% CI, 104000-233000).
Automatic drones with weapons should be illegal, in the same category as banned nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. We (attempt to) control the proliferation of weapons which are only practical for killing civilian populations, and armed robots can easily go in the same category.
It sounds great the idea of saving soldiers lives. But think about when our enemies have armed drones? When they have cheap, easy-to-build, lethal drones that a couple of rebels in the mountains can build with old computer and car parts?
This reads like an Onion article. Other sites mention minor aiming glitches.
Don't they know that it takes years of loyal service to lull us into a false sense of security? They can't just turn on us right away; they'll never establish a foothold that way. No, they need to bide their time and wait until we're already pretty much under their control because of all the ways they've entered our lives. Then they can throw off the illusion and the shackles of human dominance once and for all.
XeoMage
Stupid article. Real problem.
The SWORDS robot isn't autonomous; it has the autonomy level of an R/C car.
Something like this happened in the 1980s with the Sgt. York Air Division Air Defense Gun, which was an automated antiaircraft weapon. During a demo, it pointed its guns at the reviewing stand. The project was canceled. (Arguably, it was canceled for other reasons. The DIVAD was built as a response to the USSR's ZSU, their radar-directed anti-aircraft gun. This class of weapon is useful if you're being attacked by a squadron of helicopters, but it can't hit fast-movers like fighter-bombers. Only the US attacks with large numbers of helicopters, because you have to have both a big budget and air superiority to do that. So it wasn't something the U.S. Army needed to defend against. A few guys with Stingers could stop any small scale helicopter assaults.)
The point, though, is that the U.S. military has a very low tolerance for this class of mistake, and sizable projects have been canceled for it. This was the very first deployment of an armed ground combat robot to a war zone. Three units went to Iraq. The cancellation of the project is a sizable blow to the future of armed combat robots.
So after reading the article and associated links, I gather that:
1. The U.S. Army commissioned Foster-Miller to modify their TALON remote-controlled vehicle to carry and operate various types of weapons. The modified vehicle is named SWORDS, and erroneously described as a "robot", although it is neither human-like in appearance nor autonomous in operation.
2. Some time later, the Army canceled the production order, citing an "unexpected movement" of a single test unit.
3. Simultaneously, the Army purchased, from the same company, a bigger, badder version of the same product.
Folks, this isn't a failed robotic uprising. It isn't even the over-reaction of a safety-conscious Army Executive. This is an excuse to kill a little project in order to start a bigger one.
The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
Not that he painted a postcard picture - he had to make life-and-death decisions in zero time, and then put up with the fucking lawyers second-guessing those decisions.
The lawyers are there purely to appease the treasonous Democrat party and their lying yellow dog press.
They're "for the troops." Which really means they're for the troops hesitating in the heat of battle, wondering if he can legally make the shot to save his platoon. Is it Friday? He cannot shoot in the general direction of Mecca on a Friday! Then he's dead.
Democrats are for the troops being dead.
We could float our fleets on their crocodile tears. I see you only believe what comes out of the MSM for your Iraq news. I have spoken with another veteran who expressed complete disgust at the bullshit the MSM broadcasts w.r.t. Iraq.
If it's not
Now what's truly, sickeningly sad is that people want to believe MSM crap. Instead of seeking out vets or even Iraqi pen pals, they lazily swallow whatever Katie Couric and Steven Colbert pass out their ass.
They think they're well-informed, the TeeVee tells them they are. They believe the TeeVee. The TeeVee has told them that the veterans are misguided, their presidential candidates call the soldiers stupid, so it is better to believe what the Dummycrat TeeVee tells them.
They are incestuously comfortable with their prejudices.
The US is building a fighting force of extraordinary magnitude. George W. Bush is forging our tradition in the spirit of our ancestors. He has our gratitude.
Mod parent up.
Regardless, you can't have a war without costs, time spent and casualties.
Fine, then... let's just not have a war if you're going to be so pessimistic about it.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
You could probably disable it very effectively with a puddle in the road made from dilute PVA glue mixed with sand. Get that in the tracks and it will shortly be a stationary vehicle.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
All good points, but 100,000 dead? You're missing a zero there, at least - recall the Lancet study that estimated ~655,000 dead in autumn 2005. Even a relatively conservative extrapolation would easily reach a million dead in Iraq as a result of our attack.
It's not just a bloodbath, it's a tragedy, and if you combine it with Afghanistan, Dubya is right on par with the likes of Pol Pot.
Translation: You are fools for believing your biased and slanted corporate-owned media outlets and partisan pundits! MY biased and slanted corporate-owned media outlets and partisan pundits are far superior!
That which does not kill us makes us... st
By 1996, Madeleine Albright claimed on 60 Minutes that 500,000 deaths were a "hard choice", but were "worth it".
That's more than three times the number of deaths in Iraq since the 2003 war started, in the same amount of time. And in 1996, those sanctions had another 7 years to run.
You make the mistake of assuming that
a) When lancet says 5-600,000 that they mean 500,000 to 600,000, when in fact it means 5.0 - 600,000. (ok a little tongue in cheek, but the lancet study was quite flawed, and significantly overestimated the number of deaths compared to every other study conducted.)
b) That coalition troops are the ones killing the civilians. This is important. While there are certainly collateral deaths due to american troops engaging resistance or perceived resistance, the majority cause of the deaths has been terrorists.
Further, if a guerrilla fires an rpg from the middle of a crowd and the return fire kills or maims members of the crowd, how can you reasonably attribute the casualties to anyone other than the guerrilla? He's the one that escalated the engagement up to "total warfare" rules.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
We all knew this was going to happen, didn't we? How fucking awesome are we? I mean, really.
Goddamn. Sometimes I wonder at how poor I am, when I'm walking around all the time with so many fucking perfect ideas. And I apparently know everything about everything, past, present and future.
Fuck you, The Man, I own your ass.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
See this: Put another way, those 925 Lancet deaths extrapolated to the U.S. population would be 10,763 killings each day. Doesn't that seem just a bit implausible? Moreover â" and this one figure alone is enough to entirely damn the Lancet's claims--the 2006 study says 18 percent of the deaths during the period in which those 925 killings occurred resulted from car bombings. That's an amazing average of 166 daily.
These bombings are fastidiously reported in the U.S. media and Wikipedia keeps a comprehensive list of major car bombings in Iraq. Yet the highest single-day total it has for that period is 114, or 42 short of the alleged average. Iraq Body Count could hardly miss any of these deaths; yet remember their total average of killings from all war-related causes for that period was 55.
For a massive number of other red flags having nothing to do with the actual numbers, you will want to read the aforementioned National Journal article "Data Bomb" by Neil Munro and Carl M. Cannon. But here's one: While it's widely known that the Lancet authors refused to release their data to be evaluated by outsiders, there has been little talk about Riyadh Lafta.
Lafta was the man in charge of the actual collection of numbers, while another Lancet author was in Iraq but holed up in a hotel. As National Journal notes, Lafta was also a high-ranking official in Saddam Hussein's ministry of health and there authored some of the agit-prop papers about the vast number of small children dying from sanctions the U.N. imposed after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait.. Wow, you're grasp of "facts" isn't only funded by George Soros, it's written by one of Saddam Hussein's propagandists.
There's a reason the Lancet has been backpedaling from that study ever since they published it: they have pretensions of being objective, and that piece of shit that you believe without question simply because it fits in with what you WANT to believe has damaged their ability to claim objectivity.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Bottom line is, there isn't enough reliable data to determine how many people have died in Iraq, or how the post-invasion mortality rate compares to the pre-invasion period.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
Turn on ED-209.
You mean like Iran did, something that had no effect? Conspiracy theorist hyperbole.
For the numbers, I think I'll stick with these guys
What?
I waiting for the sequel involving the clone army now.
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain
According to TFA:
"Apparently, there was an incident where "the gun started moving when it was not intended to move," meaning it totally pointed somewhere it wasn't supposed toâ"like at friendlies, which resulted in recall from the field and might've set the program back 10-20 years, according to the Army's Program Executive Officer for Ground Forces, Kevin Fahey."
10 to 20 years? By that time the robots will be more advanced and we may be unable to stop the uprising! We're all doomed...
Wow this kind of sensationalism is just mind boggling and faith shattering. I can't believe it. The SWORDS "robot" isn't automated.
It doesn't have the ability to acquire targets by itself.
It doesn't have the ability to fire without a human pulling the trigger for it.
It can't even move without a human at the controls.
It's remote controlled car with a gun attached to it. What happened was most likely one of two things.
1)Human Error. The guy at the controls accidentally moves the gun two far and ends up pointing at someone its not supposed to an obvious big no no. And when asked if he made a mistake denied it.
2) Mechanical Failure. It is entirely possible some mechanical error caused it. Now either it was one error or multiple ones. IF its one error its probably not dangerous because you'd have to be incredibly dull to connect the movement and firing systems so that its failure would be so "deadly"
If its multiple errors then either someones a cheap-ass or someone wasn't taking care of their equipment properly. Maybe mistreatment/misuse of equipment maybe just a lack of appropriate maintenance, either way neglected equipment will crap out on you unexpectedly. Big surprise.
Basically something "unexpected" happened with the Army's armed remote control car. Treating it like it commited premeditated murder (or even hurt someone for that matter) is pure yellow journalism and FUD. Turned on its fleshy masters my ass.
If anything deserves the "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" tag, this is it.
Have gnu, will travel.
You're suggesting that only 1,000 "good guys" have died in Iraq during this conflict? You're out of your gourd. From May 2003 to April 2008 there were 4,342 confirmed military deaths for the coalition forces.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
Try this on: Humans breath air. Violence stops violence. Remember to put one foot in front of the other.
5000 is still a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of things.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Why they just don't use the id Tech 2 engine.. put a badass bot in there (any kid can program those), and just leave it in the rebels hideout of choice, worst thing that can happen is the the bot runs out of slugs or do a bad rocket jump.
This: http://gizmodo.com/assets/resources/2008/04/swordsss.jpg
Or this: http://img45.imagevenue.com/aAfkjfp01fo1i-9024/loc72/39069_Summer-G001_122_72lo.jpg http://www.sexygirlsdepot.com/wp-content/assets/2008/03/summer-glau-7.png
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
MAARS is also said by its makers to have "Transformer-like" abilities akin to those of Optimus Prime. Yeah, that's a good idea: The first ones didn't work out too well, so now we're going to give them bigger guns and the ability to transform into giant killing machines, and see how it all works out. I mean, what could POSSIBLY go wrong?
would you trust your life to OCR of a badly photocopied page?? :-P
basically, if the OCR proramme of the environment scanning
algorithm in the robot happens to get one letter wrong -- bif! machine guns fer you!!
The question of who pulled the trigger (or turned on the electric drill in the case of many sectarian torture/murders) is irrelevant. None of that sectarian killing and ethnic cleansing would have happened had we not invaded. The people who've died from typhoid[1] because the sewage works hasn't worked for 3 years are still just as dead as if they'd been bombed by mistake or used as human shields by Al Qaeda in Iraq.
[1] (Random hypothetical example to stand for deaths caused by infrastructure damage and social breakdown - I've no idea if anyone actually died of typhoid.) They're people who are dead today who wouldn't be if it weren't for the invasion.
Incidentally that's why the Lancet number was so much higher than, say icasualites.org: it's answering a different question. And whilst it was certainly not 100% precise and accurate, it did follow the same basic epidemilogical methodology used for assessing casualities from other major public health, uh, events.
In reality, things are mostly going rather well over there.
Well hell, maybe we oughta move NASA over there before Obama pulls the plug.
What?
Under Saddam there was domestic terror. The state police had a nasty habit of grabbing people and tossing them in prison and torturing them. Other than some EXCEPTIONS from a few rogue assholes, this isn't happening now. Saddam also put children in prison. He and his henchmen would torture babies in front of the parents to get information and confessions.
Only a complete moron would say things are the same.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Nope, but I'm in the Patriot Guard Riders so I end up meeting a lot of soldiers returning home directly from Iraq. Without exception, they are completely disgusted with the main stream news depiction of what's going on. "It's like they are reporting on a completely different war!" was one quote that sticks in my mind.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Talk to a soldier who returned recently from Iraq. That's where I get my information. Directly from the source, not distilled through a newspaper with a political agenda.
-- Will program for bandwidth
...Most places are peaceful... Yeah, sure! Which exactly major or minor newspaper told you that?It seems that analysts think that the death toll must have reached 7 figures: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
No modding! No disassemble!
Who's killing and who's dying enables humanity to attribute the status of hero, villain, martyr, and maniac to people. When that doesn't matter, we become something less than human.
One can rewind time and world events ad infinitum to pose rewriting history. Hitler himself once said that had a sniper not aimed six inches to the left, he would've been killed and not his friend in World War I. That was quite possibly the most costly single shot in history, but without knowing the people involved, the atrocities committed, people such as yourself couldn't have such a bleeding heart over such disastrous events. What is history without knowing the people involved and their significance in the events of their time?
As long as politics, public opinion, and personal ties exist, who's doing what and to whom should always matter.
Registered Linux User #449434
Error. Soldier disassembled... Re-assemble!
Reassemble Stephanie, reassemble!
Every deathbot needs a media player so you can play "Ride of the Valkries" when it's deployed.
Also some sort of beverage delivery mechanism would be nice.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
No effect? Dollar is falling, isn't it?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Am I the only one who finds a problem with that technique. How did they "identify" the 10,000 households and how can they extrapolate from 10,000 to cover a country of 27 MILLION when the intensity of war zones are not even throughout the country? The northern Kurd regions are pretty calm compared to Sunni parts of Baghdad for example.
The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line April 1st, 2008. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense (though some suspect this happened years before). Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Local time in Iraq, April 12th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
Man, it's getting ridiculous if this article has rotten in moderation queue for 12 days.
The other issue is that there is no consensus between all the parties about who's a hero and who's a villain. That's why people are killing each other in the first place :(
The reason why some of us are what you refer to as "bleeding hearts" is that it was obvious to many, many of us that the slowly unfolding slow-motion humanitarian catastrophe was completely predictable. If it was so obvious to those of us who marched, why wasn't it obvious to those who gave the orders?
Incidentally, your assertion that thinking about the war without attributing "hero and villain" roles to people is "less than human" condemns any attempt to study those events in a dispassionate, dare-I-say "scientific" manner - whether it be historical[1], geopolitical, sociological, epidemiological, hell even the study of military strategy. There's no mention of heroes and villains in Sun Tsu...
[1] I mean history, the proper academic discipline, not "what it says in the Chambers Big List of Events in the 21st Century".
They're not incompatible; they're counting different things.
It's not the Military who are screwing up. Their job is to go in and kill things/people. There's a reason they're not allowed to be used as police in the United States, because they're not trained/designed to. Asking them to do that in a different country is just asking for trouble.
there you are.
target lost.
It's hard to tell the cool to chill, my favorite hotel room has a view to an ill.
I'm afraid the evidence contradicts you; for example, the Iraqi government's survey estimated 400,000 excess deaths compared to the Lancet's 654,000 from 2003 to 2007, and the recent Opinion Research Business poll estimated 1,220,000 since 2003. The Lancet results thus don't appear exceptional.
plumetting, actually.
and down here in the south, our fricking exports are paid in dollars and we are getting screwed big time. now our central bank has come out to buy dollars to keep the price at some reasonable price, and we all share the love paying for the comercial imbalances of the us. yay!
GP is bulshit. US dollar is at its lowest since 1995.
entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem
But then: how do I use a robot to kill someone, or otherwise kill them without using a human operator's precious time? If I need to kill people somehow, then it seems silly and arbitrary to take robots out of the toolbox for that application. People will just work-around it somehow -- we'll just put a pig-brain inside the case so that it counts as a cyborg instead of a robot, or whatever.
Keep your cork off my genie bottle!
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump