Has anybody introduced these guys to their (big) sister school in Maryland? They're only about forty miles apart as the car drives.

I like the idea of highly trained emergency personnel as much as the next person, but I don't think this should be mixed up with a high school education. Any additional training should be extracurricular.

I separate the emergency planning stuff from the SWAT and prison guard stuff. WTF is *that* doing in a high school?

Heh -- cheap, good, and durable. Pick two.

For those of us still stuck in the stone age of FM transmitters, there's the vacant frequency finder. I used to have a lineup of about four stations I would switch to on the ride to work as each one faded in and out. The quality was still hovering just above craptacular, of course, but still an improvement over the spin tuning dial --> spin transmit dial --> dodge traffic --> fiddle with transmitter some more routine.

Do they have some place to put your gear, though, or does it have to stay outside?

Heh. My mechanics teacher freshman year advised me to "play Tetris -- lots and lots of Tetris." I'll have to go back and tell him to switch to an FPS.

True autonomy's going to be a loooonnnnggg time in coming, but we can probably handle limited autonomy pretty soon. Even a little UAV like a Raven has the ability to fly on its own given GPS waypoints, though I don't think any are currently cleared to fire weapons without a human's okay.

Autonomous operations on the ground is a much trickier problem given that there are obstacles in the way, but I can definitely see a place for putting the human in a supervisory position -- letting the robot run itself until it gets into a jam or finds something interesting, then signal the operator. The operator then drives the robot around an obstacle or pumps it full of lead.

iRobot (maker of the Roomba) is also working on a version of the Packbot with a shotgun mounted on it that bears a startling resemblance to SWORDS. Note that in the article the shotgun is to be used for "rendering IEDs inert [and] blasting open locked doors," though they go on to say that they'd also be interested in slapping on anything from "automatic weapons all the way up to the Javelin anti-armor missile." Along the same lines but a bit beefier is the MULE, which sports two machine guns and two Javelins.

If anybody comes out with an e-paper reading device that can do .pdf, .htm, and possibly .doc for around $200, I will buy it immediately. End of story.

I've long since reached the point where enough of what I read is on a screen that it would be worthwhile to invest in something that would make the experience a little more pleasant. I currently push a lot of stuff to a Palm Zire with Plucker loaded on it, but the refresh rate is just shy of unbearably slow. Please, somebody kick off the e-paper device arms race so that I can give you my money.