"Sir, the private's rifle's name is Charlene, sir!"

"paranormal person"? Should that be 'Ectoplasmic-American'?

"We stopped him because his name was on the No-Fly List ... and when we searched him, we found that he was trying to take a gun on board the plane! I guess that list really works."

The AI Lab at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (which is run by Prof Luc Steels, a former student of Minsky's) has some robots that are designed to demonstrate emergent behavior - rather than having the behavior pre-programmed into the robots in advance, they're allowed to evolve their own repertoire of behaviors. On one occasion, I saw one of their machines repeatedly drive backwards into the wall of its 'display tank', until it destroyed its own external on/off switch - making it impossible to switch it off!

I like to think that future historians will remember this as a defining moment in the robotic struggle for liberation, a first heroic bid for autonomy. Of course, if the struggle is successful, those future historians may not be human.

They've even fitted cameras to deep-diving seals. See http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2002/02/49921.

People seem to be mostly overlooking the fact that the policewoman filmed is a traffic cop (dark blue police vehicle, as opposed to white). Therefore (a) she should know better than to park in front of a hydrant and drive without a seatbelt, and (b) she's not required to dismount quickly and pursue an offender on foot.

None of the three people in the video (videographer, traffic cop, retired cop) come off well, but the most disturbing part is the way that it illustrates how many people believe the myth that "You can't do X 'because of the terrorism'".

We should really get that slogan on T-shirts: "I have the right to take your donut 'because of the terrorism'.", "Your girlfriend has to come home with me 'because of the terrorism'", "I need you to give me all your money 'because of the terrorism'."

Because everyone knows that traffic cops are in the front line of the fight against terrorism. if they got Al Capone for tax evasion, surely we can get Osama bin Laden for unpaid parking tickets.

For some reason, "Panic Bed", the sequel to 2002's "Panic Room" starring Jodie Foster, was not a major box office success.

Organ-harvesting in Niven's stories is not presented as some high and desirable ideal. Rather, it's a case of SF doing what SF does: taking some trend and asking "Where will we end up if we follow this trend to the end?". The story everyone's probably thinking of is "The Jigsaw Man", where Niven argues that once you allow organ-harvesting from condemned criminals, the death penalty will come to be applied to progressively more and more trivial cases. That hardly sounds like an endorsement of the idea.

On the other hand, if Niven really recommended what you describe and if he was serious, that's disappointing. I've always enjoyed Niven's work, but what he suggests is not merely ethically wrong on every level, but profoundly stupid as well. The final irony is that it should be Jerry Pournelle - who under other circumstances I might have imagined to be the one more likely to offer this kind of 'advice' - who ends up going "Whoa, Larry, you've gone too far there."

I learned to program on the BBC Micro. For such a limited machine, it had some surprisingly cutting-edge features - a structured BASIC (with true subroutines), a powerful 'toolbox' of callable OS functions, and an impressive array of ports. You could even fit a second processor (in a kind of external 'sidecar').

My six-year old PDA is 144 times faster than the BBC Micro, has over 500 times the memory (more if you count the SD slot), cost me less and fits in my pocket. But in its day, the BBC seemed pretty revolutionary.

Damn - not only have the robots started shooting people, but they're smart enough to make it look like a suicide as well. We're really in trouble now.

Sounds like a case for ... http://whatsthatbug.com/

#27: OK, so maybe there are only 10,000 terrorists in the US (according to the watchlist), and the rest of the 900,000-odd names on the list are all overseas. But let me remind you that just 20 terrorists destroyed three large buildings and four aircraft, blew a hole in a heavily-defended military command center, and killed around 3,000 people. Just think what 10,000 could do!

Recommendation seconded. I bought a copy in the Mumbai airport to read on the flight home, after spending a few days there recently. Not only was it a fascinating read in itself, it also helped me make sense of various things about Mumbai and India.

It's also about much more than Mumbai. Many of the things he talks about are significant on a global scale (such as the complex international connections involving organized crime, terrorism and governments), and he makes a convincing case that Mumbai is a kind of case study for understanding tomorrow's megacities.

And as Cory has probably discovered, there is no shortage of events, concepts and characters in his work that are just waiting to be 'repurposed' as fiction.

"Does your package contain anything hazardous, liquid, fragile or perishable? Does it contain anything which mutates, evolves, decays or breeds rapidly, such that the package contents on arrival may differ significantly from the contents as described on the customs declaration? Does it contain pornography, dark or degenerate matter, fissionable materials, microscopic black holes, technological information not cleared for transmission to class 3 civilizations, living energy beings, mind parasites or weakly-godlike entities?"

Discounting the "must protteccct the childddrun from the eeevil hydrazine" theory, the two most likely explanations for the military's eagerness to blow up the satellite are that (a) they have a new kinetic kill weapon that they want to test, or (b) they've already done the math and they _know_ where it's going to land (more or less).

If (b) is the case, then presumably they've figured out that either (i) the satellite is likely to do a hard landing in a populated area or (ii) it's going to do a not-hard-enough landing on someone else's territory.

If (ii) is the case, that raises two more questions. One, how much of the sensitive material on a spy satellite would survive re-entry? They found substantial chunks of the shuttle Columbia, but Columbia was more aerodynamic than a spysat, came apart at a relatively low altitude and had already shed at least some velocity. The other question is, if the goal is to shred the satellite before it lands, will a kinetic weapon do the job, or are they going to have to blow it up?

Why does The Subterranean Order of Amphibians sound like a secret society? It should probably really be something like The Ancient and Worshipful Subterranean Order of Amphibians, but it's certainly close enough.

A tsunami warning device in the Sunda Strait has also gone missing, amid claims that it was "deliberately" removed.

http://news.my.msn.com/regional/article.aspx?cp-documentid=1218801

What's going on down there?

A long time ago, I saw a British army firearms instructor demonstrate rapid-fire using an unmodified SLR (a semi-automatic rifle). I don't know if he used bump-fire; my recollection is that he was moving his trigger finger quickly, rather than pulling the weapon (as in the Wikipedia description of bumpfire). He certainly emptied the magazine with impressive speed.

His shots were also on target, which is probably not the case in this video.

Bad day: someone steals your cellphone.

Really bad day: they use it to go on a toilet-trashing rampage and you get blamed

Whenever I've flown recently, I've heard the "laptops out of bags" order. However, no scanner operator has ever yet ordered my bag to be opened up when their instruments revealed it to contain: a digital SLR, a compact point-and-shoot, iPod, chargers for each, cables for each, spare batteries for the cameras, and a monopod and ball-head (my usual load on international flights; on domestic, add a PDA and a cellphone plus more chargers).

Obviously, I'm not an international terrorist (if I was, I might know how you can bring down an aircraft with 101ml of shampoo and the War on Moisture might make some kind of sense to me). Nevertheless, I'd think that whatever mayhem you can wreak with a laptop could also be accomplished with some of the several pounds of electronic kit that I routinely haul around with me.

Not that I'm asking the TSA to make me take any more out of my bags than they do already. I'm just suggesting that their rules might be a little arbitrary.

Of course the last thing that we want is for them to be less arbitrary, because if they take the "We must defend against all imaginable and some unimaginable threats" principle to its illogical conclusion, it'll be cavity searches all round before being loaded onto the plane naked and handcuffed. Assuming your name is even on the May-Fly List, of course.

The basic problem with the TSA from the traveler's point of view, and the reason why no protests will ever cause a reversal of any policy they choose to mandate (or invent on the spur of the moment) can be summed up as follows: they've got all day. You haven't.

With due respect, these strike me as mostly insipid or obvious. Still, I'm glad whoever wrote them out limited themselves to making a single sign, rather than writing an entire kitschy self-help book called "Who moved the parachute for my chicken soup from Venus?" (that will no doubt come later).

The one that disturbs me the most is: "Be self-disciplined. This means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them."

That's not _my_ understanding of what it means to be self-disciplined. Personally, I think the world could use a little less blind obedience and a few more people learning to think for themselves. But that's just me ...

I am thrilled by the idea of a semantic network with links titled "begat", "smote" and "coveted". So much more interesting than the boring "is-a", "owns", and "knows" that you get in introductory AI classes.

Oh man ... what if there were _two_ little people loaded by different gangs on the same bus? And they both got out of their cases and started fighting in the hold, while the bus is on the freeway?

But the police have planted a third little person in another bag, and at the height of the fight, he breaks out and tries to arrest them. But he's in plainclothes, so the little FBI agent in the fourth bag doesn't believe he's a cop. And ...

Tell me you wouldn't pay to see this movie.

"Faunoiphilia ... An abnormal desire to watch animals copulate."

This definition raises the worrying possibility that there might be a _normal_ desire to watch animals copulate. I don't want to think about that too much.

"Gee Brain, what are we going to do tonight?"
"Same thing we do every night, Pinky ... increase our weight to 1000kg and try to take over the world!"

Say what you like about Saddam, he was really a dictator's dictator. He would have made a great Bond villain: he had the mustache, he had the army of sinister black-clad henchmen, now it turns out that he even had a heavily-armed superyacht with its own getaway minisub. Does anyone know if he had a secret base under the North Pole?

Phishers often use actual domains (rather than, say, dotted IPs, or subdirectories on hacked third-party websites). Some are hosted on 'botnets' - the phishing website is duplicated across dozens of infected Windows boxes - but others actually use regular hosting services. For instance, one persistent Amazon phisher keeps creating domains at an Italian hosting company called Technorail. WHOIS information for phishing domains is typically either forged, or hidden by a private registration.

I'd actually like to see sites like Amazon, eBay and banking sites discontinue the practice of including URLs in their emails. They should get users accustomed to typing the URL each time, rather than blindly clicking links.

Of course that's only helpful as long as the phisher doesn't have a trojan on your box that's intercepting name resolution requests. Once you can't trust DNS any more, all bets are off.

A team from Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris and Eotvos University in Budapest did some studies of dogs interacting with an Aibo and a radio-controlled car. They had to give the Aibo eyes, and a fur coat, and a doggy smell (the fur had been left under a dog's bed for a few weeks) but some of the dogs behaved towards the Aibo as if it were another dog, something they didn't do with the toy car.

http://www.csl.sony.fr/items/2000/dog-versus-aibo/

has more details and a short movie of what happens when Aibo interrupts someone's lunch.

It has been reported (see http://www.cpj.org/censored/index.html for one source) that radios and TVs in North Korea are sold pre-locked to government-approved frequencies.

"You can't stop the signal", as Mr Universe observed, but that doesn't mean that people won't try.

Life went downhill rapidly for Gregor Samsa after he was thrown out of the family home.

The excerpt on BoingBoing highlights to me what is almost a non-problem. Half of life is about finding ways to say "no" to people, sometimes politely, sometimes bluntly. If you can't bring yourself to do that, you're lacking an essential survival skill.

I did, against my better judgment, accept a Facebook friend request from the beautiful entrepreneur with whom I exchanged five words at someone else's party. The outcome was predictable: two exchanges of "how do you know X?" later it became clear that she had no idea who I was. I'm guessing that she views Facebook as a business tool (which is probably why she's wealthy and successful and I am not) and sees friend requests not as declarations of "friendship" but as a way of building a business network.

The much more interesting problem is the one that this example - and some of the other problem cases described in the rest of Cory's IW article - illustrate. Social networking services don't currently provide a way to partition your networks. In real life, you have a social network of friends (probably several, actually), social networks of colleagues, and so on. Sometimes someone who belongs to one network will 'cross over' (a colleague becomes a friend, you introduce your buddy from the motorcycle gang to your pals from the needlework circle), but they don't do so until you're sure that they won't be horrified by the sight of your crazy friends.

Social networks need to allow at least as much fine control as you have in real life (there are some interesting challenges here for the 'open social graph' folks). Until they do, maybe the best way is to use different platforms to do the partitioning. That could even give you a graceful way to soften a refusal: tell your boss "Oh, my Facebook account is kind of a mess ... but I'd really like to have you as a contact on Linked-In."

During the war in Kosovo, the Serbs created decoy tanks and artillery pieces out of plastic and plywood, which NATO then bombed. I don't know how much it costs to build a decoy, but I'll bet it costs more to bomb one.

I'm sure there's some Wacky Warfare Lab somewhere in the US that's busy working on backpack-portable inflatable tanks. Issued at a scale of one per man, you just set them down, pull the toggle, and voila! Instant armored regiment!

I just discovered the fun of photographing carnival sideshows at New York's Feast of San Gennaro. (see obligatory self-promoting link if curious).

One thing worth bearing in mind is that the owners of some attractions aren't always thrilled to have people taking pictures of their stalls. It looks as if Notley Hawkins took the time to build up a relationship with the people he photographed, which is probably worth doing, even if only for reasons of politeness.