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Summit Up

Summit Up
AP PhotoIn this scary picture, Thai and U.S. soldiers look at the display of a robot called 'Big Dog' at the Cobra Gold military exercise in northern Thailand, Thursday. Remember this when Big Dog turns on us and slobbers motor oil on our pants.
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Good morning and welcome to Summit Up, the world’s only daily column that’s scared of peanut butter, robot warriors and chimps.

The peanut butter thing goes without saying: They’re finding salmonella in peanut butter products all over the place, which means we can no longer return to our college diet of Austin-brand peanut butter crackers, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and those awful little Combo things which are, like, pretzels stuff with a peanut-butter-like substance.

As for robot warriors, we’re getting more and more concerned about how the U.S. military’s forays into robotic stuff is pushing “Terminator 17 Run Like Hell Day” ever closer to reality. With unmanned drones, warbots and who-knows what else, is the day coming when we’ll skip the real fighting stuff and just send robots to do the dirty work? And then when the other side gets them, it’ll just be all out robot war.



We were reading someting on wired.com about a report from the Ethics + Emerging Technologies Group at Cal Poly and funded by the Office of Naval Research (which sounds scary enough). One of the issues discussed in the report (which, of course, we have not actually read because it’s probably really long and boring) is whether these robots will have rights. We’re guessing that will come into play when robots get feelings, which we’ll say right now is something they should leave out. As explored in the Will Smith film I, Robot, it can pretty sticky when you’re trying to determine at what point a robot-like critter has the right not to be treated like, say, a can opener.

Our brain hurts. Moving on …



MILLIONS OF SUMMIT UP READERS: Wait! You didn’t follow up on the chimps?

Oh, right. We just mentioned that because chimps have always been scary and will continue to be so, even in a world full of warbots. Imagine robotic chimps, trained to invade an enemy’s camp and fling some kind of toxic poo at everyone.

MSUR: Yeah, that’d be bad.

***

A friend over at our sistah newspaper the Vail Daily sent us the headline of the day yesterday: NETA to Exhibit at IEEE IAS ESW Conference. We have no idea what this means, but we know what can happen at those nutty trade shows. Like remember that time we TAWBOP and GAFHACFITHT at IEEE IAS ESW? (see translation at the end of column)

***

OK, speaking of indecipherables, we here at Summit Up want to apologize to millions of readers for messing up the statement in Tuesday’s edition in which we wrote:

“Boken, som publicerades någon månad före sextioårsdagen, följer en 200-årig utveckling av kvinnors deltagande i gymnastik och idrott i Danmark.”

As everyone knows, the REAL punchline should read:

“Ik ben enkel hier voor de gefiltevissen.” (I’m just here for the gefilte fish.)

We certainly did not mean to slight the King of Denmark nor insult his mother-in-law with the ill-advised reference to a walrus, and any mention of the “jowls of Arthur Godfrey” was purely incidental and an unfortunate misinterpretation.

***

With thanks to Zally over in Vail, here’s the acronym translation: Took a whole bunch of peyote got arrested for having a cock fight in the hot tub.

We out.


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