The Americans actually have a surprisingly high number of robots in service in Iraq. They have been heavily utilizing robots bomb disposal robots to good effect.
Wired has an article saying that the first armed robots are now to be deployed. There are already 3 of these deployed in Iraq and they haven’t yet fired the attached M249 machine guns.
Pretty scary that we are already at this point.
This site calculates running counts of different things happening around the world. For instance while I have been writing this post there have been (and counting):
I have seen plenty of these things in the past but this is the most thorough so far.
You’re the man!
In South Africa criminals have taken to blowing up ATM’s in order to make off with the cash in them. This Financial Mail article discusses the trend:
In the first five months of this year, 148 ATM blasts were carried out across SA – an average of one a day, and nearly three times the number in all of 2006.
Security analysts are growing increasingly concerned at the ease with which the bombers are able to obtain the mining explosives used in most bombings.
The Economist has another article on the South African economy. Although they say things are going well right now, not everything is looking up in the long run.
The country’s infrastructure is creaking—roads are overcrowded, cement and refined fuels are having to be imported, and power outages are a growing problem
At present the deficit is being funded comparatively easily, but an emerging-markets sell-off—which many analysts believe to be inevitable over the next year—would hit South Africa hard, putting first the rand and then domestic interest rates under pressure.
According to the country’s largest bank, ABSA, managers are battling to cope with “severe shortages of skilled labour and production capacity constraints”
Several factors are mentioned as contributing to the skills shortage but emigration is specifically talked about.
The South African Institute of Race Relations estimates that some 850,000 whites have left the country since 1995, reducing the white population (which, for historical reasons, is still the most skilled segment) to around 4.3m people from more than 5m a decade ago. ABSA believes that “the vast majority” of those who have left the country—or are contemplating doing so—are skilled people between the ages of 20 and 40. This white exodus is being compounded, according to the bank, by the increasing emigration of mixed-race, Asian and black professionals, especially from the public sector, which is losing medical, technical and engineering skills very rapidly.
This is a predictable situation for a group of self interested parties. The government wants to save money, the workers want more money, and the trade unionists want to push their own careers. Makes sense and you can’t really blame any of the parties involved (although I despise those who prevent others from working – especially in essential services).
The public – including me – also have a stake in this argument. We need those government workers to deliver services to us – something they they are not always very good at. I heard a guy on the radio speaking about this – he reckons that the solution is for the state to ‘outsource’ as many of its functions as possible. For instance, the state pays for the roads but doesn’t actually build them itself. Similarly the state should pay for prisons, but there is no reason for the state to actually run the prisons.
The idea is that competition in any arena would:
I am a fan of this kind of thinking in general. Systems should be flexible, goals should be set, and competition should allow the best solutions to float to the top. The government could set the goals and pay the best people to meet those goals. Government’s role should be to select goals and to allocate financial resources to those goals, but competing companies should be doing the work.
This would also help to avoid a situation where hundreds of thousands of people are striking. Wages would be more flexible and reactive, and agreements could be negotiated for specific situations. We certainly wouldn’t land up in the situation we are now in.
The unionists would argue that this would put too much power into the hands of the capitalist business owners. I don’t agree.
Check out this link to some satellite photos showing atrocities happening in Africa. They show before and after satellite photo’s proving that some villages are getting hammered. I suppose this could be as a result of accidents, but I doubt it.
This example is a village in Chad. You can use the old village outlines or the river in the top left to see that this is the same area.
Some mad stuff is going on in the world…
There is an interesting article on the South African road network in the Financial Mail of June 1. Here are some highlights:
All of this paints quite a scary picture. Then there is the fact that Spoornet is also not keeping pace (for instance road now carries 82% of freight between Johannesburg and Durban instead of the other way around).
Thank heavens the guys are putting money and effort into it now (there really are road works everywhere), I just wish they hadn’t left it so late. And while they are at it, put money into the power grid too…
That said, I know that we are not alone. Whenever I go to New York I am shocked by the state of some of their roads.
This guy is using a sledgehammer(!) to break open some of the thousands of unexploded artillery shells in Iraq! He spends his day breaking the shells open and extracting the propellant which he sells to his neighbors as cooking fuel.
Entrepreneurial sure, but also possibly the most insane business idea around!
There is a well known and pretty cool site called Digg. This is how it works:
Digg can generate enormous traffic and when smaller sites get ‘Dugg’ their servers often go down due to all the traffic.
Recently someone posted a link to a code which could be used to unlock new HD-DVD encryption schemes. The HD-DVD companies were rather chipped off about it and threatened Digg with legal action if the link was not removed. So the Digg management team got worried and started removing all links to the unlock code.
What happened then was cool, scary and a significant first: people noticed their Digg entries being deleted and fought back! Soon Digg users were going NUTS and posting hundreds and hundreds of links to the unlock code. Thousands of people became involved and links were posted faster than they could be removed. Eventually Digg realised that their site had been taken over by the user community – they had a choice:
So they surrendered. The co-founder posted the code himself and said:
“After seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.
If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.”
They made a brave and perhaps foolish choice. It’s a win in the war building up against censorship – and a significant point in the history of the web. The code is probably going to become an icon of the anti-censorship movement (see the T-Shirt above).
Also see a BBC news story about the whole thing.
UPDATE:
There are now more than 1.2million sites referencing the code! You can check the current Google count by going to this link. The AACS reckons they are going to sue each of those sites! Idiots…