Cash-strapped and somewhat adrift in terms of missions, the U.S. Army is in the midst of an existential crisis . Once ballooning in budget and size, the Army now says it wants to be “a smaller, more lethal, deployable, and agile force.” And it’s going to need robots to do it right. Read more…
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The Army Wants to Replace Up to 25 Percent of Its Soldiers with Robots
A woman who valet-parked her car at Rochester airport returned to find a notice informing her that the valet had searched her car, on orders from the TSA.
Most helicopters are built for hovering, not for speed. But the Eurocopter X3 is built for both. The demonstrator tilt-rotor aircraft proved as much when it set a pair of air speed records earlier this month. Read more…
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The New Fastest Helicopter on Earth Can Fly at an Insane 300MPH
Illinois-based Superior Joining Technologies is “a Woman-Owned Business,” as they proudly point out; for several years they’ve also been the owners of an incredibly bad-ass machine called the Trulaser Cell 7040 , a 5000-watt beast manufactured by Germany’s Trumpf. The Trulaser 7000 series are multi-axis laser cutting and laser welding machines that run off of CAD file input. What can these machines do with metal? A better question is what can’t they do. Observe their sheer majesty: By the bye, while I rate this video highly for the machine’s kick-assery, I still think the cat guy would’ve made this video awesome. (more…)
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Video of Trumpf’s Trulaser 7000 Series: The Most Bad-Ass Manufacturing Machine Ever?
At the latest San Francisco Drone Olympics (now called DroneGames, thanks, no doubt, to awful bullying from the organized crime syndicate known as the International Olympic Committee), there were many fascinating entries, but the champion was James “substack” Halliday’s Virus-Copter (github), which made wireless contact with its competitors, infected them with viruses that put them under its control, sent them off to infect the rest of the cohort, and then caused them to “run amok.” Many people have written to point out that Virus-Copter shares some DNA with one of the plot elements in my novel Pirate Cinema , but I assure you the resemblance is entirely coincidental. Drones, after all, are stranger than technothrillers. Here’s the $300 drone the competitors were flying. The payload virus.tar includes: node cross-compiled for the ARM chips running on the drones * felixge’s ar-drone module * some iwconfig/iwlist wrappers in lib/iw.js * open wireless networks in nodes.json (gathered by the deployment computer) Report from the DroneGames (formerly Drone Olympics ;-))
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Flying malware: the Virus Copter