In vaguely related news, sitting too long can be bad for you. Who could have imagined that?

Ah, remember the days when it was hand to hand combat with steel swords and axes and shields, blood spurting everywhere, making a man who survived feel like a man? Good times, good times…

When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, they had no robots as part of their force. By the end of 2005, they had 2,400. Today, they have 12,000, carrying out 33,000 missions a year. A report by the US Joint Forces Command says autonomous robots will be the norm on the battlefield within 20 years.
[...]
Every time you hear about a “drone attack” against Afghanistan or Pakistan, that’s an unmanned robot dropping bombs on human beings. Push a button and it flies away, kills, and comes home. Its robot-cousin on the battlefields below is called SWORDS: a human-sized robot that can see 360 degrees around it and fire its machine-guns at any target it “chooses”. Fox News proudly calls it “the GI of the 21st century.” And billions are being spent on the next generation of warbots, which will leave these models looking like the bulky box on which you used to play Pong.
[...]
This is “one of the most fundamental changes in the history of human warfare,” according to PW Singer, a former analyst for the Pentagon and the CIA, in his must-read book, Wired For War: The Robotics Revolution and Defence in the Twenty-First Century. [...] The earlier technologies made it possible for humans to decide to kill in more “sophisticated” ways – but once you programme and unleash an autonomous robot, the war isn’t fought by you any more: it’s fought by the machine. The subject of warfare shifts.
[...]
While “we” will lose fewer people at first by fighting with warbots, this way of fighting may well catalyse greater attacks on us in the long run. US army staff sergeant Scott Smith boasts warbots create “an almost helpless feeling…. It’s total shock and awe.” But while terror makes some people shut up, it makes many more furious and determined to strike back.

Imagine if the beaches at Dover and the skies over Westminster were filled with robots controlled from Torah Borah, or Beijing, and could shoot us at any time. Some would scuttle away – and many would be determined to kill “their” people in revenge.

And what about the day captured robots start being reprogrammed to attack the attacker?

It may just be me, but I’m a tad skeptical about this.

Amid the mass of aid agencies piling in to help Haiti quake victims is a batch of Church of Scientology “volunteer ministers”, claiming to use the power of touch to reconnect nervous systems.

Clad in yellow T-shirts emblazoned with the logo of the controversial US-based group, smiling volunteers fan out among the injured lying under makeshift shelters in the courtyard of Port-au-Prince’s General Hospital.

A wealthy private donor provided his airplane to fly in 80 volunteers from Los Angeles, along with 50 Haitian-American-doctors, in a gesture worth 400,000 dollars, said a Parisian volunteer who gave her name as Sylvie.

“We’re trained as volunteer ministers, we use a process called ‘assist’ to follow the nervous system to reconnect the main points, to bring back communication,” she said.

“When you get a sudden shock to a part of your body the energy gets stuck, so we re-establish communication within the body by touching people through their clothes, and asking people to feel the touch.”

Apparently the “wealthy private donor [providing] his airplane” is John Travolta.

YAHOO! News

VATICAN CITY – Pope Benedict XVI has a new commandment for priests struggling to get their message across: Go forth and blog.

The pope, whose own presence on the Web has heavily grown in recent years, urged priests on Saturday to use all multimedia tools at their disposal to preach the Gospel and engage in dialogue with people of other religions and cultures.

And just using e-mail or surfing the Web is often not enough: Priests should use cutting-edge technologies to express themselves and lead their communities, Benedict said in a message released by the Vatican.

Cripes!

---

Following the report earlier this week that the FBI regularly broke the ECPA law, in obtaining information from telcos without going through the proper process (and, in some cases using just a post it note!), some interesting details from the full report have come to light. The two key ones? First, “the Obama administration issued a secret rule almost two weeks ago saying it was legal for the FBI to have skirted federal privacy protections.” And, second, the original idea to use these bogus “exigent letters” didn’t come from the FBI, but from an AT&T employee. We noted in the original report that no one seemed to be placing any blame on the telcos for allowing this, and why they’re clearly abusing the law, in giving out such info without the proper rules being followed, seems like a big question:

The telecom employees were supposed to be responding to National Security Letters, which are essentially FBI-issued subpoenas. But those Patriot Act powers say the target must be part of an open investigation and that a supervisor has to approve it. While they require some paperwork, FBI agents have been issuing about 40,000 such NSLs a year.

[via No Agenda News]

---

A demonstration of a full-body scanner on German television last week revealed that the device, which uses infrared technology, was able to detect little more than a cellphone, a knife, and the girth of the man walking through it.

The problem? He was also packing a bomb.

“Admittedly, he only faced the scanner from the front and not from the side,” wrote computer security pro Bruce Schneier. “But he also didn’t hide anything in a body cavity other than his mouth — I didn’t think about that one — he didn’t use low density or thinly sliced PETN, and he didn’t hide anything in his carry-on luggage. Full-body scanners: they’re not just a dumb idea, they don’t actually work.”

Second Largest Newspaper Holding Company Hits Skids — Another company that cheapened its product and wound up broke. The end is near for a lot more papers.

Affiliated Media Inc., the holding company for MediaNews Group Inc., which owns the Denver Post, on Friday filed a plan for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization, the company announced.

MediaNews Group CEO William Dean Singleton had said on Jan. 15 that a filing was imminent.

Affiliated Media is the holding company for the MediaNews Group family of newspapers, the nation’s second-largest newspaper publisher by circulation. The company owns 54 daily newspapers — including the San Jose Mercury News, Salt Lake Tribune, Detroit News, St. Paul Pioneer Press and Los Angeles Daily News — and more than 100 non-daily newspapers, as well as websites, television and radio broadcasters that serve markets in 12 states.

Pilot diverts plane over teenager’s prayers — FYI.

A teenage airplane passenger using a Jewish prayer object caused a misunderstanding that led the captain to divert a Kentucky-bound plane to Philadelphia and prompted a visit from a bomb squad.

A 17-year-old boy on US Airways Express Flight 3079 from New York to Louisville was using tefillin, a set of small boxes containing biblical passages that are attached to leather straps, said Philadelphia police Lt. Frank Vanore.

When used in prayer, one box is strapped to the arm while the other box is placed on the head.

“It’s something that the average person is not going to see very often, if ever,” FBI spokesman J.J. Klaver said.

Found by Aric Mackey.

Global Warming Fraud — This should be interesting.

Finally, efforts are being made by the founder of the Weather Channel, John Coleman, to sue Al Gore and his cohorts for perpetrating “the greatest scam in history” — the fraud of global warming. Thirty thousand others, comprised of scientists and experts, are also willing to join in that lawsuit.

So how did this fraud all get started? It all started in Chicago shortly after Earth Day, April 17, 1995, when Al Gore went to Fall River, Mass., to give his green sermon speech. He was soon joined by Maurice Strong and Peter Knight, a registered lobbyist and Gore’s former top Senate aid.

It didn’t take long before the Chicago Climate Exchange was formed and “a veritable rat’s nest of cronyism” was formed. The largest shareholder in the Exchange is Goldman Sachs, and Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley is its honorary chairman. The Joyce Foundation, which funded the Exchange, also funded money for John Ayers’ Chicago School Initiative. John is the brother of William Ayers who was one of the founders of the Weathermen.

Obama, at the time, was active in this scam and knew darn well what was going on, but three years later that did not stop him from funding these leaders in the man-made global warming movement. The first attempt to improve the environment was a grant of more than $25 million in U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for research and development. That turned out to be a failure, so they were awarded another $8 million in federal taxpayer’s cash. That, too, was a failure. Present major funding is courtesy of Edward Rothschild’s World Bank.

Found by Mike Hutchins.