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The report, Visualizing the Tactical Ground Battlefield in the Year 2050, was the result of a workshop held with leaders from the US Defence Department, Army Research Lab, Institute for Defence Analysis and a select number of academia. In the world envisioned, armed drones will patrol the skies searching for enemy targets to eliminate. The use of drones in the current military landscape dictates it is always a human that decides to pull the trigger, but the report suggests soldiers may only have limited control over the smart-robots of the future. “The difference being that in the former, human decisions...

I awoke with a start at the loud noise. I thought it might be early revilers when I realized it was just my tenants stomping their displeasure at the lack of hot water. I had hoped to be able to sleep later on my day off from my rotating shift at the Rite-Aid medical clinic. As my mind began to clear I realized today was the Fourth of July. In my youth it was known as Independence Day. Since it was removed from the list of federal holidays for its racist past not many people find reasons to celebrate. Even...

Back in the olden days, when I first joined FRee Republic; when I no longer could stand to lurk anymore and had to comment, I chose afraidfortherepublic as my screen name. We were in the heart of the Clinton impeachment scandals (1998). Also the Elian Gonzalez saga. The screen name seemed appropriate. Some people thought it was too long, and they call me AFTR for short. After W was sworn in, a number of other FReepers encouraged me to change my screen name, but I declined because I still feared for the future of the Republic. Jes' sayin' that the...

The Reichstag has passed the following law, which is, with the approval of the Reichsrat, herewith promulgated, after it has been established that it meets the requirements for legislation altering the Constitution. Article 1. National laws can be enacted by the Reich Cabinet as well as in accordance with the procedure established in the Constitution. This also applies to the laws referred to in Article 85, Paragraph 2, and in Article 87 of the Constitution. Article 2. The national laws enacted by the Reich Cabinet may deviate from the Constitution as long as they do not affect the position of...

Luciano Fontana: I would like to start with a question concerning Russian-Italian relations. This relationship has always been close and privileged, both in the economic and political spheres. However, it has been somewhat marred by the crisis in Ukraine and the sanctions. Could the recent visit by Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi to Russia and your upcoming visit to Milan somehow change this trend, and if so, what is needed for that? Vladimir Putin: First, I firmly believe that Russia was not responsible for the deterioration in relations between our country and the EU states. This was not our choice;...

THE FUTURE OF THE FAMILY What, then, has changed? Here’s one way of putting it. I wrote a book a few years ago about religion and science and I summarized the difference between them in two sentences: “Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.” And that’s a way of thinking about culture as well. Does culture put things together or take things apart? What made the traditional family remarkable, a work of high religious art, is what it brought together: sexual drive, physical desire, friendship, companionship, emotional kinship and...

The aircraft that air-launches the Pegasus rocket has been repainted with new livery to mark the recent corporate merge that formed Orbital ATK. The L-1011 jet, named Stargazer, carries the light-class Pegasus launchers to an altitude of 39,000 feet and releases the booster to fire into space. Pegasus has flown 42 times and the 32 using the XL version. The rocket weighs 51,000 pounds, stretches 55 feet long and is comprised of three solid-fueled stages for boosting small satellites into orbit. Launches have occurred from California, Virginia, Florida, the Canary Islands and the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Stargazer...

Caltech's David Boyd has done what scientists have been struggling to do for years: He says he's figured out a cheap, easy way to make graphene, and to make a lot of it. The kicker? He's using technology from the 1960s. Cooking up graphene Graphene was a wonder material first theorized in 1947 and not actually proven in the real world until years later, when scientists did it in the strangest of ways in 2003: by rubbing a pencil across some Scotch tape. Made of sheets of carbon just one atom thick, the stuff is tough, durable, and conductible. It's...

In 1949, George Orwell received a curious letter from his former high school French teacher. Orwell had just published his groundbreaking book Nineteen Eighty-Four, which received glowing reviews from just about every corner of the English-speaking world. His French teacher, as it happens, was none other than Aldous Huxley who taught at Eton for a spell before writing Brave New World (1931), the other great 20th century dystopian novel.

Bill Maris, head of Google's investment arm, says humans will live to be 500-years-old in the future, while today's cancer treatments will soon seem "primitive" as scientists continue to hunt for cure. Humans will live to be 500-years-old, according to a top Google executive, who said the company was investing millions of dollars in life sciences to ensure this vision became a reality. Bill Maris, a venture capitalist and the managing partner of Google Ventures, the internet giant's investment fund, said it had hired scientists as partners in order to identify start-ups that could cure cancer and make chemotherapy "seem...

A different cluetrain By Charlie Stross Right now, I'm chewing over the final edits on a rather political book. And I think, as it's a near future setting, I should jot down some axioms about politics ... 1. We're living in an era of increasing automation. And it's trivially clear that the adoption of automation privileges capital over labour (because capital can be substituted for labour, and the profit from its deployment thereby accrues to capital rather than being shared evenly across society). 2. A side-effect of the rise of capital is the financialization of everything—capital flows towards profit centres...

Giulio Meotti, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio, wrote an interesting Op-Ed which I share here because it portends what is coming to America. It's only a matter of time. This because, like Belgium, America is committing spiritual and intellectual suicide. Giulio Meotti: Belgium is Committing Suicide As the capital of the European Union goes, so goes Europe. And the details are worse than you can imagine. Belgium has the highest per capita number of Islamic terrorists gone to fight in Syria and Iraq than any other European country. Brussels is the capital of the holy war, as well as...

The NSA's mass surveillance is just the beginning. Documents from Edward Snowden show that the intelligence agency is arming America for future digital wars -- a struggle for control of the Internet that is already well underway. Normally, internship applicants need to have polished resumes, with volunteer work on social projects considered a plus. But at Politerain, the job posting calls for candidates with significantly different skill sets. We are, the ad says, "looking for interns who want to break things." Politerain is not a project associated with a conventional company. It is run by a US government intelligence...

Akin Oyedele January 5, 2015Blackstone Group vice chairman Byron Wien just released his list of the ten biggest surprises for 2015. Among the notable calls: the S&P 500 surges 15%, brent oil falls into the $40s, and junk bonds come back big time. This is the 30th such list this Wall Street veteran has published. His predictions for this year are in the press release below: New York, NY, January 5, 2015. Byron R. Wien, Vice Chairman, Blackstone Advisory Partners, today issued his list of Ten Surprises for 2015. This is the 30th year Byron has given his views on...

I grew up watching Star Trek and believing that by the time I became an adult we would all be using communicators, replicators, tricorders, and transporters. I was optimistic that the world would be a much better place: that we would have solved humanity’s problems and be exploring new worlds. That’s why my first career choice was one of astronaut. I thought it would best prepare me for Starfleet Academy. Needless to say, I was disappointed. I grew up into a world filled with hunger, poverty, and disease—in which we fight wars over dwindling natural resources. It is a world...

How do you think 2015 will be for you? If you’re typical, you’ll be pessimistic; and, if you’re typical, you’ll be wrong. Only 21 percent of Americans agree with the proposition that “life for our children’s generation will be better than it has been for us” — 76 percent disagree. Well, barring some unforeseeable calamity — what Nassim Taleb would call a “black swan,” or Donald Rumsfeld an “unknown unknown” — the 76 percent are mistaken. The next generation of Americans will lead healthier, happier, more fulfilled lives than the present one. That sentence could have been written at any...

When the media looks back on 2014 it will be portrayed as an awful year, mostly because progressivism took major hits throughout the year. But for everyone else, 2014 wasn’t all that bad. Sure, it had its low points, but even "Breaking Bad" and "The Wire" had a few less than stellar episodes in an otherwise outstanding run. Perfection is for God and the less than two-dozen pitchers who retired the 27 men they faced in order. So lets look back at just a few events from the year that soon will be “was,” shall we? First: The Midterm Elections....

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"You are calling me from paradise to hell." Paul Bhatti recalls this comment from a phone conversation with his brother Shahbaz, who would later be murdered for his insistence on speaking out against blasphemy laws in Pakistan. Paul was living as a doctor in Italy, the "paradise" as opposed to the "hell" of violence-torn Pakistan. But as bad as things got in that troubled land, his brother insisted: "The way to paradise lies in Pakistan." Shahbaz's point was, as summed up by Bhatti: "Non-involvement is not an option; we are obligated being one human family to struggle for those who...

Have you noticed that in most science fiction movies the aliens are almost always biological entities – often obsessed with eating us or sucking our blood or possessing us or at least conquering us.That’ extremely unlikely. If we are ever visited by aliens they are almost certain to be mechanical. They will be intelligent robots.Biological entities evolve on planets. They depend on the atmosphere and the food sources those planets supply. When humans go into space, for example, we need to take oxygen, food and water with us. That’s one reason human space travel is so much more expensive than...