John Connor: No, you shouldn't exist. We took out Cyberdyne over ten years ago. We stopped Judgment Day.

Terminator: You only postponed it. Judgment Day is inevitable.

...can some Eastern European hackers get access to this and get it to redesign itself so that it says "Hasta La Vista" and travels back from a post-apocalyptic future...

In fact, no, please don't. Destroy it now before it destroys us!

You're all doomed, doomed I tell you

Mines the one with the Alsatian puppy in the pocket

Just when you thought the whitecoats had completely lost it at the point they're considering creating mini black-holes to find particles that might not even exist because "they'll give us the answers to everything!", someone's actually trying to develop the tech that's going to invetibly kill us all!!!

Well at least we needn't worry about climate change, terrorism etc etc just Gov sponsored, runaway boffins who must be more than a few disks short of an array. If ever there were more worthy candidates for a good old fashioned nuke strike they're top of my list.....once I've looted the place of course!!!

Mine's the one with Conspiracy Theorist Weekly in the pocket

Any bets on this programmes' unofficial name?

*cough*

SkyNet

*cough*

Mines is the one with the slightly weather-damaged poster of Kristian Loken in the pocket.

Darpa exists is to employ the mad scientists who in any other reality would build world destorying weapons in their basement before they either

A. Set them off to see what would happen, or

B. Sell them to an evil meglomaniac so he can threaten to the destroy the world

PS I'm now stocking my bunker with grenade launchers, M16's, several 1000 rounds of ammo and a minigun

I think that about sums it up, doesn't it? If part of its program is to build more like it, and it hits that bit on the checklist as its building itself... then it has to stop building itself to build more like it, and it hits that bit.... uh oh.

And why are we surrounded by bits of solenoid and wire humping each other?!

..Someone's been playing KOTOR!

At the risk of not being in on the spirit of the thing, self construction is very close to self repair, which is probably what they are after.

After all, what good are they if they _stay_ smashed by fleshlings?

... look, this one can build stuff and on his front it says "Call me Kenneth"!

(Link for those who don't remember their old Dredd stories...)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minor_characters_in_Judge_Dredd#Call-Me-Kenneth

I'd be even more worried if its tasks included "destroy all moving objects within 100 miles not designated as 'frienldy'". Never underestimate the power of a typo in the wrong place.

@Dr. Mouse" Shirley you aren't saying they should go f*ck themselves?! But if so, I wanna watch.

just turn off the power point and they're helpless (unless they decide to enslave us all as meat powered battery banks)

Paris because she knows how to use a battery..

> DARPA seeks to construct systems that can participate in their own construction...

> The system might know the requirements for various tasks in its repertoire, and

> it may try to perform those tasks to verify functionality.

Translation: We're still virgins, please send funds for hookers ;)

Oh and for the tinfoil hat brigade; anyone notice that the ABL was due to be tested soon, and that a *French* airliner has vanished near the USA? Hmmm.

Now that's a recursive acronym worth the name! After the desperately-contrived GNU's Not Unix, PHP Hypertext Preprocessor, and WINE Is Not an Emulator, we finally see a recursive acronym whose first word is a real word that is actually relevant to the title, not one that was contrived for the sake of creating a recursive acronym. Kudos to the boffin who came up with that one!

NASA have been running programs for decades with the idea of either optimising an existing structural design or having software generate a structural design to meet specified loads. AFAIK the idea was to (at least partly) to sidestep FEA and break a design automatically into sections then apply an optimisation algorith to each section, then re-combine the lot. Hardware's got a lot better since they started this. A UK company uses a similar approach to design turbine components. Instead of desgin part, study flow, tweak its a case of specifiy loads, program design blades to meet them. Lucien A Schmidt seems to be the main mover at NASA on this.

Mines the one with Structural Analysis for Dummies in it.

"It might also be rather difficult to stop the process of building the SELF, once it had advanced beyond a certain point. Frankly the only way to be sure it can be stopped would seem to be to stop it now."

I say we take off, nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Oh, hang on, wrong film...

"mines the one with the phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range."

I've got one of those at home too - except I call it a torch ;)

Admit it - it's a lightbulb taped to a stick, isn't it?

I will be going to see Terminator Salvation on tips on how to survive our future mechanical overlords...

Now where's John Connor to stop this nonsense?!?

Cool, if the US doesn't lead in robotics tech, then somebody else will to Americans disadvantage. Bill Gates is quoted comparing the robotics industry to what computers were in the 1980's. Still in its infancy but destined to revolutionize the world. Japan led the world in robotics up until the Iraq war, which consequently, (Bush's only good descision but by accident) has spawned a vibrant robotics industry in the US. Like I said, these assholes that think they're making a difference by delaying US technological advances are digging their own graves because if America doesn't develope it, then you still have billions of Asians with no moral hang-ups ready to take the mantel. Then all Americans lose. Thanks fuckers.