Recently, when trying to find out about films I’ve wanted to rent, I’ve forgone the usual paganistic blogs, flesh-worshiping review sites, upside-down crucifix-wearing DVD listing books and also IMDB.com (which I’ve heard eats aborted human fetuses). I’ve cleansed my palate, and opened my eyes to a whole new way of thinking when it comes to the art of film, while using the ChildCare Action Project: Christian Analysis of American Culture (CAP) movie review database. With it’s highly detailed reviews of 100s of titles, it’s a refreshingly different look at every movie I’ve ever loved. The key? It filters every title through it’s biblical-based value rating system and “society influence density” scoring chart while it theorizes, theorizes, theorizes away about how almost every movie is just plain wrong, wrong, wrong. It’s all some of the most refreshing film criticism I’ve ever read
Stupid kills. In this case, being uneducated about the various states of carbon
Adding to the pot-stirring that De Beers and others incited, a single page ad appeared in Variety a few months ago, paid for by the Kalahari Bushmen of Botswana, who were driven from their land by the government to make way for diamond mining. Their ad directly addressed DiCaprio, asking for help which then came in the form of several Survival International advocacy efforts.
Designer Wong makes engagement rings that can kill you. The razor-sharp diamond point is set into the ring so it can’t get knocked out when you smash someone’s face in, and the edges of the ring are really soft so it won’t cut into your skin during the pounding. It’s romantic because it means, “Will you marry me” but it also means, “I can’t always be there to protect you so if some jerk won’t stop bothering you, puncture him with this.” The diamond sharp edge will also cut skin down to the bone (with a minimum 1 karat stone – but the larger the better). Or it may simply be used to tag hard surfaces, like cars and windows for S.O.S. messages or that last will and estimate when pen or paper (or lawyers) aren’t conveniently around.
2008-06-16: Extremely cheap diamonds will hopefully do away with the “diamonds are forever” crap this country’s brides are infatuated with.
“This is a virtual diamond mine. If we were in Africa, we’d have barbed wire, security guards and watch towers. We can’t do that in Massachusetts.”
2008-10-27: Can’t wait for those to be done in volume, and the retarded engagement ring industry to die.
The most exciting aspect of this new annealing process is the unlimited size of the crystals that can be treated. The breakthrough will allow kilocarat diamonds of high optical quality
2012-09-18: That’s a lot of engagement rings. Diamond rings are now even more broadcasting your status as an idiot to the world.
Russia has just declassified news that will shake world gem markets to their core: the discovery of a vast new diamond field containing “trillions of carats,” enough to supply global markets for another 3 ka.
2015-01-07: No more Diamonds, with the exception of the engagement ring nonsense, of course.
Even my own diamond-business owning, non-millennial father is turning away from jewelry when it comes to gift giving. Sure, he’s made my mom a handful of statement pieces over the years, but at the same price point, he’s more likely to gift something that has actual purpose, aside from aesthetic value. The last few birthdays and Christmases have yielded vacation getaways, iPhones of every generation, even a smart home thermostat. What hasn’t shown up under the Christmas tree in the last 5 years? Diamond anything.
We were called hip-pocketers, because we lived from one deal to the next: Your business could fit in the wallet in your pocket. You bought a used Rolex at a pawnshop for $1000 from the kid who’s just paid $500 for it, hurried it over to your watch guy to hit it on the wheel and make it look new, replaced the old worn buckle with a South American counterfeit for $50, and resold it to your friend who owned the jewelry store a few blocks over for $2200, $2275 if she wanted a counterfeit leather box. She could retail it the same day for $3500. We “worked the float” back then, in the ’80s and ’90s—that meant the few days you had between when you paid for something with a check and the check actually hit your bank account. If you flipped the gold you’d bought with a check the same day, you had a few days of free money. Of course, you tried to make money on every deal, but often you were moving so fast that you had to lose money here and there, waiting for the bigger score that ought to come if you just kept hustling fast enough.
On the icky details of this criminal hustle
I’ll tell you how it’s done. Let’s say you have a 14-karat gold ring that weighs 15 grams. First you weigh it and show the customer that it’s 15 grams. “Now we multiply that by 14 for 14 karat and divide it by 24 for 24 karat, which is what it would be if it were 100% gold,” you explain to the seller. “That gives us the price for your 14-karat gold. Multiply that by 15, for 15 grams. Now, 14 karat is 56% gold and 44% base metal, which burns off at the smelter, so we multiply that by 0.56. Finally, we deduct 10% for the smelter, and 15% for my profit. Most gold buyers will charge you 20 or 25%, which is a reasonable profit margin, but we do such high quantity of gold-buying here that we can afford very low margins. That gives us a final figure of…” You get the picture. The customer’s ring is worth $280 in real gold value. But you just offered $120, with a seemingly sound mathematical justification. And you’ve left yourself plenty of wiggle room if they want to haggle your profit down from 15% to 10% or even 7.5%. The real key to this scam is that you’ve deducted for the impurity of 14 karat not 1x but 2x: first, when you calculated the per-gram price and again when you “deduct for the base metal.”
2016-06-07: Time for a 1M carat synthetic diamond to end this silliness
Lesedi La Rona could, if skillfully cut, yield an even larger stone—the largest polished diamond in history. He described the Lesedi La Rona, a single piece of rough some 3 ga old, as “almost ungraspable.”
2023-05-06: It’s happening. Too slowly because people are dumb, but still.
33% of all engagement rings with center stones purchased last year were created in a lab. That’s 2x the number from 2020. As the technology to make lab-grown diamonds has improved, production has increased and retail prices are falling. Their growing popularity, especially among younger consumers, has caught the attention of jewelers and watchmakers — and is challenging traditional diamonds that are mined from the earth.
South Korea just unveiled the first generation of autonomous robots armed with lethal weapons. They’ll eventually be deployed to help secure their 250 km border with North Korea, and they come equipped with rubber bullets and machine guns.
2007-04-15: Mr Carr is suddenly tackling a lot meatier subjects than the latest web 2.0 bore
we’ve come to an important juncture in the history of warfare in which military robots will increasingly have the ability to autonomously select and destroy targets without human guidance.
soldiers who award “purple hearts” to their bomb-defusing robots that get injured; soldiers who describe in details the personality quirks of their ‘bots; soldiers that take their robots on furlough, to give them “rest”.
Throw it through a window or over a wall, then remotely maneuver it using the portable operator control unit. You’ll get immediate real-time video that will let you plan and act with confidence. Before you send in your team, send in your Recon Scout.
2008-01-12: iRobot Army Contract. The same company that builds the cuddly roombas also builds combat robots.. When the revolution comes, it might come from hello kitty lookalikes brandishing weapons 2009-04-11: The state of military robots, drones and UAVs, and their consequences.
An Assassination List.
Drones make it easy to rapidly find and kill people. As a result, assassination of threats has become the easy solution to many problems. It has become so popular that the process has become automated through an assassination list. The US President has one, and he can put US citizens on it via a simple, non-judicial, bureaucratic process.
Signature Strikes.
The current practice of the CIA in Pakistan is to kill groups of people that “look” like terrorists or guerrillas. Exactly what a group of people needs to do, wear, or be to trigger the signature of a terrorist/guerrilla group is unknown.
Borders melt.
Nearly every country in the world can be penetrated with drones. In most cases, they don’t know they’ve been penetrated. In others, there’s nothing they can do to prevent it.
there is no single person who has oversight over the whole program, including the president. and you have contractors needing to make quota for target identification… what could possibly go wrong?
2011-12-17: The first manhunt/arrest of a US citizen via a Predator drone
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The design, prototype implementation, and demonstration of an ethical governor capable of restricting lethal action of an autonomous system in a manner consistent with the Laws of War.
a decentralized apparatus carries out summary executions of people we’re assured are bad and who are sometimes US citizens, and the president knows about this but chooses not to exercise oversight or control of the process.
2012-02-17: Once drones are fully autonomous, what are you gonna do with all the type 2 diabetes pilots in nevada? Perhaps you repurpose them as front-line grunts.
“the Avatar program will develop interfaces and algorithms to enable a soldier to effectively partner with a semi-autonomous bi-pedal machine and allow it to act as the soldier’s surrogate.”
2012-11-30: UAhelicopters. Maybe this can make the manhattan heli tours affordable?
Autonomous piloting of an Apache helicopter.
2013-05-16: Self-aiming Rifle. Here, have some future shock on this nice day.
This device is sure to provoke controversy, but it doesn’t seem fundamentally novel to me: rather, it’s the compact, portable version of something we’ve seen for years in naval point gunnery systems such as AEGIS and PHALANX. Basically, this is an almost entirely automated gunnery platform: you look through the scope and select a target, and pull the trigger to tell it to fire on its own mark; then it waits for a clean shot and takes it. A first-time shooter can reliably hit targets at a range of 450m, which is no big surprise, since the shooter isn’t actually doing much of the work at all: this is an automated gun system.
Thinking of this in the range of applications: for hunting as a sport, it kind of defeats the purpose of the “sport” aspect. (Especially if you added just a bit more logic to help it identify deer or whatever on its own, and just ping the operator for confirmation before taking a shot) It’s basically an automated killing device. For hunting for survival, it would certainly be effective, although if you’re using a device this fancy then perhaps you have more efficient means at your disposal of getting food.
Its main application, AFAICT, is as a sniper’s weapon, where this could be tremendously powerful. A system like this could likely improve the single-shot accuracy of even an experienced scout/sniper, and combined with an even longer-ranged weapon like a BMG, it could become robotic death at a distance.
What’s perhaps more alarming is that it would turn absolutely any random person into the equivalent of a moderately skilled sniper, and I cannot think of any chain of events that begins with this that doesn’t end really, really, badly.
The other important thing about this is that there are obvious extensions possible with this technology: with just a bit more AI logic to identify candidate targets (and, presumably, check with a human before taking shots), you could turn this into a fully autonomous point defense platform that just sits there and kills any targets of a certain category that it sees. It would be awfully effective at it, too. The delayed-triggering technology could be combined with high-ROF-capable guns to produce a sort of deadlier version of a machine gun: rather than firing rounds off as fast as possible, and losing significant accuracy due to the motion of the gun, it has an eye strapped to the barrel which means that it only fires each round when it’s pointed at a target. A weapon of this sort could be as much deadlier than a machinegun as a machinegun is deadlier than a repeating rifle. Combined with a base that can move itself to improve shooting vantage, you have a killer robot. (Imagine mounting this device on, say, a Boston Dynamics BigDog, or a small UAV) But even without that, it could make infantry motion through surveyable spaces as impractical as massed infantry charges against machine-gun posts, by simply picking off anyone who is visible for even a moment.
The key innovation is that the sort of advanced tracking technology we saw decades ago with the AEGIS is now mountable on a single rifle, rather than on a large weapons system. This allows unprecedented accuracy and versatility of mounting.
As a military weapon, this could reshape the battlefield, and possibly be the start of the end of the use of infantry. This is a weirdly mixed development; if sending individual people to kill people becomes impractical, it means that warfare will focus instead much more on mass weapons such as bombs and chemicals. But infantry is where most of the people involved in a war get killed, so this could have the perverse result (after, perhaps, one or 2 wars in which people learn just why infantry doesn’t work as well) of greatly reducing the human cost of war.
As a civilian device, OTOH, this is completely insane. I’d rather have people walking around with hand grenades. This is alarming enough on the battlefield; having cities full of people with automated sniping platforms is a spectacular disaster waiting to happen.
(As a side note, this thing has WiFi on it. How thoroughly has its system security been vetted? On the list of things that I do not want unauthorized access to, “automated sniper rifle” is pretty close to the top.)
Advanced Tactics Inc, released details about its AT Transformer vehicle technology and announced that a full-scale technology demonstrator has completed its first driving tests.
More than 1000 leading AI and robotics researchers and others, including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, just signed and published an open letter from the Future of Life Institute today calling for a ban on offensive autonomous weapons.
FLI defines “autonomous weapons” as those that select and engage targets without human intervention, such as armed quadcopters that can search for and eliminate people meeting certain predefined criteria, but do not include cruise missiles or remotely piloted drones for which humans make all targeting decisions.
The researchers believe that AI technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is feasible within years, not decades, and that the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.
The diverse set of workshop participants painted a vivid picture of the battlefield of 2050, one that brought reality more in line with the science fiction and fantasy the public is accustomed to viewing in the cinema and reading about. A time traveler from today would be immediately taken with the “over-crowding” of the battlefield of 2050 populated by all manner of robots, robots that greatly outnumber human fighters, and robot-looking humans
I decided that if Westerners wanted to kill me without bothering to come to speak with me first, perhaps I should come to speak to them instead. I’ll tell my story so that you can judge for yourselves whether I am the kind of person you want to be murdered.
2016-09-06: on the likely futile efforts to ban fully autonomous weapons via un talk shops.
Forget about drones, forget about dystopian scifi — a terrifying new generation of autonomous weapons is already here. Meet the small band of dedicated optimists battling nefarious governments and bureaucratic tedium to stop the proliferation of killer robots and, just maybe, save humanity from itself.
2017-01-11: Glimpses from our grim meathook future
The test consisted of 103 Perdix drones launched from 3 F/A-18 Super Hornets. The micro-drones demonstrated advanced swarm behaviors such as collective decision-making, adaptive formation flying, and self-healing.
A pair of Islamic State fighters in desert camouflage climbed to the top of a river bluff in northern Iraq to demonstrate an important new weapon: a small drone, with swept wings and a small bomb tucked in its fuselage. The 2 men launched the slender machine and took videos from a second, smaller drone that shadowed its movements. The aircraft glided over the besieged city of Mosul, swooped close to an Iraqi army outpost and dropped its bomb, scattering Iraqi troops with a small blast that left 1 figure sprawled on the ground, apparently dead or wounded.
The Ukrainian SBU now believes that the destruction of an arms depot at Balakliya that did $1b in damage was carried out by a small drone armed with a thermite grenade. That’s an ROI of $500k for every $1 invested
2017-08-17: Dubstep works surprisingly well for killer drones.
2017-09-20: Yes, lasers shooting down drones are now a thing. I’m very amused by all the physics-challenged people in the comments who suggest that you can dodge the lasers.
Speaking at a hastily called White House press conference Friday, a visibly tense and perspiring President Barack Obama confessed that the United States’ fleet of 700 armed drones have been conducting airstrikes entirely on their own for the past several years.
Future war could like a lot like Ender’s Game. This would be billions of tons of hypersonic drones combined with a variety of super-weapons. There will not be the million fold chasm between chemical weapons and nuclear weapons. There could be a smoother range of power using magnetic power storage, kinetic weapons, nanotechnology enhancement to achieve and eventually exceeding nuclear energy and nuclear weapon systems.
Despite these and other advantages, Scharre does not want the military ever to turn over judgment to computers. To make his case, he offers compelling real-life cases in which human judgment was essential for preventing needless killing, such as his own experiences in Afghanistan. “A young girl of maybe 5 or 6 headed out of the village and up our way, 2 goats in trail. Ostensibly she was just herding goats, but she [was actually] spotting for Taliban fighters.” Scharre’s unit did not shoot. Yes, it would have been legal, but he argues that it would not have been morally right. A robotic sniper following strict algorithms might well have opened fire the second it detected a radio in her hand.
Video footage captures the moment when an explosive drone, loaded with shrapnel, piloted by Houthi rebels, exploded over a military parade in Yemen. It killed 6 soldiers and injured at least 20 more, including the army’s chief of staff. “Very effective attack. Houthi drone tactics are fascinating. Commonly used to blind Saudi/Coalition radars to cover missile launches (tactic pioneered by Hezbollah vs Israel), sometimes as impromptu cruise missile itself.”
DARPA is automating air-to-air combat, enabling reaction times at machine speeds and freeing pilots to concentrate on the larger air battle and directing an air wing of drones. Dogfighting will still be rare in the future but it is part of AI and automation taking over all high-end fighting. New human fighter pilots learn to dogfight because it represents a crucible where pilot performance and trust can be refined. To accelerate the transformation of pilots from aircraft operators to mission battle commanders — who can entrust dynamic air combat tasks to unmanned, semi-autonomous airborne assets from the cockpit — the AI must first prove it can handle the basics.
In a 5 to 0 sweep, an AI ‘pilot’ developed by Heron Systems beat one of the Air Force’s top F-16 fighter pilots in DARPA’s simulated aerial dogfight contest today.
Behind this, there is the military argument. If AI-controlled weapons can defeat those operated by humans, then whoever has the AIs will win and failing to deploy them means accepting defeat.
Debate still swirls around this topic. The emergence of drone swarms and other types of weapon that cannot be defeated by humans alone will crystalize it. However, it is not clear whether the legal argument will be able to keep up with technology, given how long it has already been going on. At this rate, large-scale AI-powered swarm weapons may be used in action before the debate is concluded. The big question is which nations will have them first.
2022-11-26: While not autonomous, this is the most lethal & effective yet.
LANIUS is a highly maneuverable and versatile drone-based loitering munition, designed for short-range operation in the urban environment. The system can autonomously scout and map buildings and points of interest for possible threats, detecting, classifying and syncing to Elbit Systems’ Legion-X solutions. LANIUS can carry lethal or non-lethal payloads, capable of performing a broad spectrum of mission profiles for special forces, military, law enforcement, and HLS.
2023-02-23: DARPA program for massive drone swarms
the goal of AMASS is to develop the capability to launch and command 1000s, perhaps 10000s, of autonomous drones, working together to destroy a multitude of an enemy’s defenses, including air defense, indirect and precision weapons, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance platforms. The AMASS program is expected to include swarms of multi-domain autonomous vehicles, including Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs), and Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs).
Written from the heart, not from the brain, this definitive autobiography takes readers on a journey through the 43rd President’s life, including his hardscrabble beginnings as the child of West Texas oil millionaires, the remarkable academic performance that earned him entry into the finest East Coast schools, and his proud service to the country as an occasional member of the National Guard sometime around 1972 or 1973.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 
