Thursday, November 15, 2018
The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #441
You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?
It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,
from the beautiful to the repugnant,
from the mysterious to the familiar.
If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,
you could be inspired, you could be appalled.
This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.
You have been warned.
Wednesday, November 14, 2018
China Recruits ‘Patriotic’ Children to Design Killer Robots For Domestic and Foreign Warfare...
As the South China Morning Post reported on Thursday, brains are not enough for this cutting-edge program. Political reliability and a passion for warfare are also essential:
“These kids are all exceptionally bright, but being bright is not enough,” said a BIT professor who was involved in the screening process but asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the subject.
“We are looking for other qualities such as creative thinking, willingness to fight, a persistence when facing challenges,” he said. “A passion for developing new weapons is a must … and they must also be patriots.”
Each student will be mentored by two senior weapons scientists, one from an academic background and the other from the defense industry, according to the program’s brochure.
After completing a short program of course work in the first semester, the students will be asked to choose a speciality field, such as mechanical engineering, electronics or overall weapon design. They will then be assigned to a relevant defense laboratory where they will be able to develop their skills through hands-on experience.
BIT said it has recruited 27 boys and four girls so far, a gender mix that social justice warriors would consider highly problematic if the Chinese Communists had to worry about such things. One of the male recruits rhapsodized about his lifelong fascination with guns on the BIT website and said he “couldn’t resist the attraction” of the A.I. weapons program.
The A.I. warfare curriculum is expected to last four years and lead into a full Ph.D. program, creating a new generation of combat cyber experts. Observers outside China found the prospect of recruiting such young people into A.I. warfare programs disturbing:
Eleonore Pauwels, a fellow in emerging cybertechnologies at the Centre for Policy Research, United Nations University in New York, said she was concerned about the launch of the BIT course.
“This is the first university programme in the world designed to aggressively and strategically encourage the next generation to think, design and deploy AI for military research and use.”
While the US had similar programmes, such as those run by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, they operated in relative secrecy and employed only the cream of established scientists, Pauwels said.
Pauwels imagined the young recruits combining A.I. technology with cutting-edge research in other fields to produce such horrors as nanobot swarms seeding enemy food supplies with chemical and biological weapons, or killer robots that can “target, with surgical precision, specific populations” using facial recognition technology. The Chinese have lately developed a keen interest in...
Wisconsin business gifts entire staff with guns for Christmas
Instead of giving the guns to its employees directly, the company passed out gift cards that allowed staffers to pick out which one they wanted, WISN reported. This also allowed for background checks to be run on all employees before any purchases were made.
The small company, called BenShot, is no stranger to the concept of guns. It manufactures "bulletproof" glass mugs with a bullet wedged into the side that gives them the appearance of being shot by a gun.
One of the company's co-owners, Ben Wolfgram, told WBAY the guns were meant to improve the safety of their staff.
"I want to make sure all (of our) employees are safe and happy – a handgun was the perfect gift," Wolfgram said to WBAY.
Among BenShot's small staff of 16 were several veterans, but there were also some who had never shot a gun before, The Post Crescent reported.
The unusual Christmas gifts were accepted by most of the company's staff, but there were at least two employees who...
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