Foreboding.

Conditions: Shaky.


Progress.

Looks like the robot drones racked up another kill this week with the assassination of Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Taliban in Pakistan.

The U.S. had offered a reward of $5million (£3million) for information leading to Mehsud's location or arrest. The Pakistan government put an additional $615,000 bounty on his head.
[...]

He and his wife died when a U.S. drone missile hit his father-in-law's house in the lawless tribal area of South Waziristan. Pakistani and U.S. intelligence officials said the CIA was behind the strike.

A local tribesman said Mehsud was being treated for kidney pain, and had been put on a drip by a doctor, when the missile struck.
[...]

Diplomats in Islamabad say Mehsud's death would mark a major coup for Pakistan, but many doubt it will help Western troops fighting the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan as most of his focus has been on attacking Pakistan's government and security forces.

I wonder what benefit killing Mehsud's wife brings to the war on terror? But, more than it not helping in the war in Afghanistan, is the point that it's not going to help in the war in Pakistan, either.

Karin von Hippel, a security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, doubted whether the removal of one Taliban leader would have a lasting impact.

'What happens... is another comes in and takes their place pretty quickly,' von Hippel said.

She reckoned there were more than 40 militia commanders among the Pakistani Taliban, and their relationship with the Afghan Taliban was sometimes hazy.

'I'm not sure we have a very good understanding of how all these these militia groups operate within Pakistan and with the networks across the border in Afghanistan,' she said.

- dailymail.co.uk/

So. Yet again we have news that a pilotless drone has blown some people up in Pakistan, one of them being someone important, and that this probably won't really make any difference. Of course this isn't going to make any difference, when has assassination in wartime ever made a difference? All this does is make the Taliban even more militant, more secretive and less willing to talk. How does that help anyone except the companies that manufacture the drones?

In fact, a leading professor of artificial intelligence has come out with a warning of how the nature of war is changing, heading towards a future where war is even more inhuman than it is now.

Professor Sharkey, a professor of artificial intelligence and robotics, has long drawn attention to the psychological distance from the horrors of war that is maintained by operators who pilot unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), often from thousands of miles away.

"These guys who are driving them sit there all day...they go home and eat dinner with their families at night," he said.

"It's kind of a very odd way of fighting a war - it's changing the character of war dramatically."

The rise in technology has not helped in terms of limiting collateral damage, Professor Sharkey said, because the military intelligence behind attacks was not keeping pace.

Between January 2006 and April 2009, he estimated, 60 such "drone" attacks were carried out in Pakistan. While 14 al-Qaeda were killed, some 687 civilian deaths also occurred, he said.

687 civilian deaths to 14 enemy deaths. And since these are being done by drones you have to put a large question mark behind the 14 Al-Queda kills.

That physical distance from the actual theatre of war, he said, led naturally to a far greater concern: the push toward unmanned planes and ground robots that make their decisions without the help of human operators at all.

The problem, he said, was that robots could not fulfil two of the basic tenets of warfare: discriminating friend from foe, and "proportionality", determining a reasonable amount of force to gain a given military advantage.

"Robots do not have the necessary discriminatory ability," he explained.

"They're not bright enough to be called stupid - they can't discriminate between civilians and non-civilians; it's hard enough for soldiers to do that.

But that's not stopping countries from embracing the bright clean future promised by robot warfare.

However, he warned that work toward ever more autonomous killing machines is carrying on, noting the deployment of Israel's Harpy - a fully autonomous UAV that dive-bombs radar systems with no human intervention.

He cautioned that an international debate was necessary before further developments in decision-making robots could unfold.

- news.bbc.co.uk/

A fully autonomous weapon, that will fly around in the sky? Are you kidding me? This has to be some kind of joke. Surely we're not that stupid.




Is There Something Wrong With The Sun?

Sunspots, the bane of international communications and satellite-builders, are for some reason appearing less readily than usual. Natural process, or ominous indicator?

In the latest lull, the Sun should have reached its calmest, least pockmarked state last fall.

Indeed, last year marked the blankest year of the Sun in the last half-century — 266 days with not a single sunspot visible from Earth. Then, in the first four months of 2009, the Sun became even more blank, the pace of sunspots slowing more.

“It’s been as dead as a doornail,” David Hathaway, a solar physicist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., said a couple of months ago.

Of course in our technology-dependent lifestyles, this is a good thing. But what does it mean for the future?

A panel of 12 scientists assembled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration now predicts that the May 2013 peak will average 90 sunspots during that month. That would make it the weakest solar maximum since 1928, which peaked at 78 sunspots. During an average solar maximum, the Sun is covered with an average of 120 sunspots.

But the panel’s consensus “was not a unanimous decision,” said Douglas A. Biesecker, chairman of the panel. One member still believed the cycle would roar to life while others thought the maximum would peter out at only 70.

Among some global warming skeptics, there is speculation that the Sun may be on the verge of falling into an extended slumber similar to the so-called Maunder Minimum, several sunspot-scarce decades during the 17th and 18th centuries that coincided with an extended chilly period.

Most solar physicists do not think anything that odd is going on with the Sun. With the recent burst of sunspots, “I don’t see we’re going into that,” Dr. Hathaway said last week.

- nytimes.com/

So the sun is calmer than it traditionally should be, and mighty science has no answer. History suggests at this point we start building large flat-topped pyramids. You know, just to be sure.


- Peace out