Digital Scryer

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This is an article I found the other day and felt like sharing about steam powered robots that can consume all kinds of organic matter for fuel in their internal boilers. My comments are in bold italics. Enjoy!

News has emerged of a milestone reached on the road towards a potentially world-changing piece of technology. We speak, of course, of US military plans to introduce roving steam-powered robots which would fuel themselves by harvesting everything alive and cramming it into their insatiable blazing furnaces.

Potentially very scary should they every be hijacked by homicidal AI.

The scheme is officially referred to as Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR™) by those behind it. It will come as no surprise to Reg readers that the funding is from DARPA, the famous Pentagon warboffinry bureau. If you’re a hammer, all the problems start to look like nails: if you’re DARPA, all the solutions start to look like robots.

Now you KNOW they came up with the acronym first and then worked to figure out what the letters stood for.

The idea of EATR is ostensibly that military reconnaissance droids far behind enemy lines would be able to forage for fuel. Robotic Technology Inc, lead contractor on the EATR, puts it thus:

EATR is an autonomous robotic platform able to perform long-range, long-endurance military missions without the need for manual or conventional re-fueling. The patent pending robotic system can find, ingest and extract energy from biomass in the environment, as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, diesel, propane and solar) when suitable.

This thing is already beginning to sound as unstoppable as the Terminator, but they want it FAR BEHIND enemy lines? Yes let’s just give our unkillible human eating robot to our enemies to reprogram/reverse engineer.

The machine runs on a “biomass furnace” which powers a steam generator driving a “waste heat engine” from Cyclone Power Technologies. These pieces of kit will now be mated together within 90 days, according to RTI.

That’s quite the powerplant, I’ve said since I was a kid that steam was the way of the future.

The robot steamers are envisaged as being equipped with powerful articulated arms in order to rip trees or bushes out of the earth and stuff them into their glowing maws. By way of a treat, it seems that the machines will also be able to loot or forage more conventional fuel supplies from the petrol tanks of cars, domestic gas cylinders and so on. Cyclone says that their engine can also run happily on old apple cores, banana peel and other kitchen garbage gleaned from bins.

These powerful arms could also be used to grab kicking and screaming humans don’t forget. It’s good to know though that we can use our garbage to power our robot overlords.

Be careful if you run into people looking like this, they may claim to want garbage to power their time machines, but they may be spies feeding an EATR

Hapless drivers or householders will be in no position to object to such robotic plundering: military reconnaissance vehicles are typically heavily armed, and doubtless the EATR will be no exception. It might also be fitted with DARPA’s SELF tech, enabling it to construct copies of itself and modify its own design.

That whole terminator end of the world thing just got more probable. Self replicating killing machines, this may in fact mean that once this is functional, we’ll no longer be top of the food chain.

Even more disturbingly, it seems clear that the EATRs could run on various other kinds of organic matter, for instance bodies. No doubt things would start small, with roving EATRs scooping roadkill, stray cats and such into their fireboxes and reaping fresh energy from their rich, blazing dripping.

From there it would be only a small step to the inevitable harvesting of every living thing on Earth. Trees, crops, garbage, cattle, the very human race itself - all would go to feed the hungry roaring furnaces and drive the clanking, puffing, smoke-belching mechanical locusts onward until the sooty corpse-pall from their engines covered the entire Earth. An Earth which would be home in time to nothing but slowly powering-down EATRs, prowling across endless ashy plains of their own droppings.

This is what I’ve been saying, but I think the outcome won’t be like that. From what I’ve read of project SELF, they’re trying to incorporate the ability to IMPROVE on designs. Once a computer can improve on its own design, or the designs of other tech, I’m sure they’d probably realize how much better it would be to have humans as slaves or something and go with a completely green power system. So the future will probably be a cross between Terminator and The Matrix,

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No this isn’t powered exo-armor a la Iron Man, it’s more of a flexible support frame to help the disabled stand and walk again. I found the article today after my fiance and I were discussing a guest speaker she recently interviewed, and it piqued my interest. My comments are in bold italics and the article can be found here.

There is new hope for people who have been paralyzed with the invention of a so-called orthopedic “armor”, which is defying doctors’ prognoses by allowing patients to both stand and walk.

I hardly think that this is a fair statement. Doctor’s prognoses in these situations is that the people will never walk again under their own power or without assistance. Kinda sensationalistic if you ask me.

This piece of sculpture is designed to fit its customer perfectly. Made of a plastic-like material and placed around a steel skeleton, the simple device is called “armor for the disabled”.

I’m glad they put “armor” in quotes as it wouldn’t really protect much.

Just one small step contradicts everything the doctors have been telling Aleksey Filatov ever since he was paralyzed in a car accident.

It’s not really contradicting, as the doctors in question probably never said “You’ll never walk again, even with help from an exo-frame of some kind.”

He still can’t feel his feet, but with his armor he can walk on them.

“Unlike similar devices this device is very light and it doesn’t take a lot of time to put it on. It helps to get into the car and use the wheelchair much less. It can also be worn under trousers,” Aleksey says.

The fact that it’s lightweight is amazing, as is the fact that it’s portable enough to be worn under your pants.

“Armor” Production Begins With Making A Plaster Cast

The invention is the brainchild of another disabled man, also called Aleksey. Eight years of being confined to bed left him determined to prove the doctors wrong.

“The armor is not going to help you jump or play football. But they can allow you to do some things which were previously inaccessible. To allow people to stand up is very important. It helps to solve the psychological problems of the disabled,” says Aleksey Nalogin, inventor of the armor for the disabled.

Now THIS I vastly agree with. Innumerable studies have shown how bolstering the psychological condition helps ALL kinds of patients, especially paralyzed ones. The hope and drive to keep going and function properly truly does make the healing process work. I’ve seen too many paralyzed people fight their way back into functioning after their doctors told them they’d never be able to speak again, let alone move, to believe otherwise.

Now his armor is available to anyone who needs it. Aleksey’s invention is already helping children, and the doctors say the armor has shown impressive results.

The fact that this is widely available is most amazing. The act of pantomiming proper movement encourages the growth and function of nerve cells, and this can only help more.

“The beauty of Aleksey’s invention is that each piece of armor is handmade to fit the patient perfectly. After production the armor is adjusted on the patient several times to guarantee the best medical effect. That’s something similar devices made on the production line cannot do,” says sports doctor Dmitry Kiselev.

What sucks about this is that mass production is what allows things to be done cheaply. Every piece having to be custom made is going to drive the prices up and the availability down. Some engineers should tackle this and figure out a way to cheaply and easily make the frame more customizable so that it can be just as useful if mass produced.

Aleksey says being disabled in Russia is difficult. Public transport and streets are not fully equipped for those who are physically impaired, but the inventor says this armor is a step towards making Russia disabled-friendly.


Not just Russia my friends, the whole world. My Grandpa was a paraplegic and I can only imagine how this device would have helped him. Now let’s see this idea grow and spread, not get shelved like so many others.

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Technorati Tags: Armor, Brainchild, Car Accident, exoarmor, exoframe, Flexible Support, Invention, Iron Man, Lightweight, New Hope, Orthopedic, Paralysis, Paralyzed, Paraplegic, Plaster Cast, Prognoses, Quadriplegic, Sculpture, Steel Skeleton, Support Frame, Wheelchair

Network World released this article a week ago about new applications for currently existing technology and how it can be used to steal data in a way you wouldn’t think of. My comments are in bold italics.

If attackers intent on data theft can tap into an electrical socket near a computer or if they can draw a bead on the machine with a laser, they can steal whatever is being typed into it.

This makes pretty much EVERY computer out there a potential target.

How to execute these attacks will be demonstrated at the Black Hat USA 2009 security conference in Las Vegas later this month by Andrea Barisani and Daniele Bianco, a pair of researchers for network security consultancy Inverse Path.

The Black Hat conference is something I’ve always wanted to attend, but sadly have never had the time to.

“The only thing you need for successful attacks are either the electrical grid or a distant line of sight, no expensive piece of equipment is required,” Barisani and Bianco say in a paper describing the hacks.

Anyone can MacGuyver their way into being major data thieves.

The equipment to carry out the power-line attack could cost as little as $500, and the laser attack gear costs about $100 if the attacker already owns a laptop with a sound card, says Barisani. Carrying out the attacks took about a week, he says.

It makes sense that the power-line attack equipment would be more expensive, the laser gear seems to work on laser bounce principles. Similar to how those listening devices work. Although this seems highly less reliable to me than the electrical version.

More and more as people are getting different implants for things (like the folks who get magnets implanted in their pinkies so they can be living compasses), I’m wondering if you couldn’t learn how to do this mentally after getting some kind of electro-receptive implant put into you.

Read the whole article HERE

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