United States Air Force
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The Air Force and IBM are building an AI supercomputer
Supercomputers today are capable of performing incredible feats, from accurately predicting the weather to uncovering insights into climate change, but they still by and large rely on brute processor power to accomplish their tasks. That's where this new partnership between the US Air Force and IBM comes in. They're teaming up to build the world's first supercomputer that behaves like a natural brain.
The Air Force will have combat lasers on its war planes by 2020
The Army has its HEL-MD (not to mention is working on GI Joe-style rifles and minesweepers); the Navy put a battleship-mounted railgun aboard the USS Ponce; and within the next five years, the Air Force expects to have laser weapons of its very own. These armaments, dubbed directed-energy weapons pods, will be mounted on American warplanes and serve to burn missiles, UAVs -- even other combat aircraft -- clean out of the sky. "I believe we'll have a directed energy pod we can put on a fighter plane very soon," Air Force General Hawk Carlisle said at a Fifth-Generation Warfare lecture during the Air Force Association Air & Space conference earlier this week. "That day is a lot closer than I think a lot of people think it is."
Boeing tests microwave missile that knocks out electronics, represents our worst nightmare (video)
Forget bombs or the robopocalypse. In our minds, the most fearsome weapon is the one that disables our gadgets. That's what makes Boeing's newly tested Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project (CHAMP) scarier than most projectiles. The missile bombards targets underneath with microwaves that shut down computers, power systems and just about anything electrical in their path. Thankfully, CHAMP's invisible payload arrives in discrete bursts and arguably makes it the world's most advanced (and likely expensive) non-lethal weapon: the prototype can target multiple individual buildings without ever having to detonate and hurt someone. Boeing is still developing CHAMP in a multi-year program and doesn't have guarantees that it will become military ordnance, which gives us enough time to accept that saving lives is far, far more important than the risk we'll have to stop fiddling with our technology.
How a physical copy of Bastion wound up in Afghanistan
"He told me they had no plans of releasing a physical copy in the future, but if I gave him my address then he would see what he could do," one lucky Reddit user and Afghanistan-stationed United States Air Force officer wrote on the social news site earlier today. User "bolivar-shagnasty" was speaking about Supergiant's multi-award winning Bastion -- a game only available digitally for both Xbox 360 and PC.But "shagnasty's" internet connection while stationed in Afghanistan is ... let's call it less than ideal. "My internet connection is disgustingly slow and it costs so much that it seems like price gouging," he wrote. And despite his best efforts to snag Bastion via both Direct2Drive and Steam, he was rebuffed at both stops. Rather than give up, however, he decided to shoot an email to Supergiant and see if the studio had plans to release a retail version of the game at some point.Supergiant isn't a big studio by any means. Beyond creative director Greg Kasavin, six other folks can refer to themselves as full-time Supergiant-ers. So when the Air Force officer emailed what he expected to be customer support, he actually got a direct response from the aforementioned studio head, Greg Kasavin.
