British to supply robot spider droid army to U.S. Military
Having written the headline before reading the actual story, and finding it thereafter to be false, it must remain as-is because it's what should have happened. In truth, the "spider" is but one design offered to illustrate the proposed "miniature robots" for the Micro Autonomous Systems and Technology (MAST) program, which will be funded to the modest tune of $38m.
BAE Systems gets to guzzle up the lion's share, heading an alliance of local academies to build the horde. Here's Dr. Joseph Mait of the US Army Research Lab, quoted in The Register:
“Robotic platforms extend the warfighter's senses and reach, providing operational capabilities that would otherwise be costly, impossible, or deadly to achieve."
I think that it still boils down to killing the other poor dumb bastard before he kills you—but now there will be small-scale aeromechanical and ambulating microdevices to help you do it.
BAE lands US Army minidroid horde contract [The Register]
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...anyone else play Red Alert 2?
Better yet, anyone see Runaway?
But don't the British already supply the U.S. with an army?
I'd put a link here to Patrick Farley's utterly brilliant alternate-history Afghan War web comic The Spiders, in which President Gore deploys an army of citizen-telecontrolled robot spies to Afghanistan after the attacks of 9/12.
But I can't, because Farley let the domain for his site expire.
#4, My first thoughts were of the same thing, but wikipedia points me to archive.org:
It may not be a perfect copy, but http://web.archive.org/web/20070221233757rn_1/e-sheep.com/spiders/
Brilliant story, not yet completed, but Mr. Farley says that he has some big stuff going on in his life, so I can only hope it means good stuff, and eventually he has the time to complete the story. I'd pay for it if I could find how.
@2 That movie scared the shit out of me as a kid. But yeah, that was my immediate thought,.