Danger Room reports here on a growing defense industry tendency for integrating gaming gear with military machinery. According to the post, Raytheon’s control system for drone aircraft is based on “the same technology that drives Halo and Splinter Cell,” Wiimotes are helping soldiers dispose of roadside bombs in Iraq, British troops are using knockoff Xbox controllers to pilot robotic recon planes, and nuclear security may soon be outsourced to “a very souped-up Sony Playstation 3.”
That’s just the stuff in the field. There’s no doubt that the mad geniuses at DARPA have other stuff in the skunkworks. Looks like we’re a hop, skip, and a leap from blowing up bugs like Ender — doubtless an encouraging prospect for millions of geeks everywhere.
BoingBoing points to this map of Baarle-Hertog, a Belgian exclave in the Netherlands that contains seven Dutch exclaves of its own:
Each little patch of sovereign soil contains only a few houses, and some buildings straddle the border between two jurisdictions. A walk across town can mean crossing between countries several times. It’s not quite a burbclave in action, but the commingled countries come close. Pregnant women in the small town can choose their child’s citizenship by picking the room in which they give birth. When restaurants are required to close under Dutch law, their patrons can simply move to the Belgian side. Each town even has its own government, schools, police, and fire department, who determine which homes to serve by checking the flag on their address placards.
It may not be a portent for the future of the nation-state — the elaborate exclaves are the result of an obscure 12th century treaty — but Baarle Hertog is an interesting example of elements of polycentrism and the distributed republic in the real world.
The intrepid Internauts at Something Awful recently discovered Isaac Asimov’s other 27 laws of robotics. The most useful:
11. A robot, specifically a big, wide robot, may not pretend to be a refrigerator and then make a scary noise when a human being opens it.
I hate it when that happens.
