Military planning is a complicated endeavor, calling upon experts in logistics and infrastructure to predict resource availability and technological advancements. Long-range military planning, deciding what to invest in now to prepare armed forces for the world in thirty years time, is even more difficult. One of the most interesting tools for thinking about future defense technology isn’t big data forecasting and the use ofsynthetic training environments, but narrative and imagination. And we get this from science fiction....

Update at the end of post. According toreportsthatwe’reseeingon Twitter, a military coup against the Ben Ali regime and President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali has erupted in Tunisia. However, it appears that mainstream media attention to the events of the past few weeks in the embattled country have been minimal, with the notable exception of a26 year old protestorwho set fire to himself and later died. It’s worth noting immediately, however, that every bit of information that we have here is based on reports via Twitter and thus not confirmed by any official source, government or otherwise....

A pair of military experts recently penned an article with a simple warning to the Pentagon: winter is coming. In this case, said winter is an artificial intelligence winter, and said AI winter is an artificial AI winter. To put it another way:the Pentagon’s shooting itself in the foot while everyone else is aiming down-range. [Read:Judge says Amazon suit alleging Trump interfered in Project JEDI can go ahead] Calling all Scaleup founders!...

It appears that the increasingly popular independent building game will get a period of exclusivity when it comes to Android, launching initially on Sony Ericsson’s Xperia Play to take advantage of the smartphone’s customised controls and dedicated joypad. Xperia Blog reportsthat the developer of the Android port Mojang, has confirmed that the Xperia Play game will be tweaked slightly make use of the integrated controller and will also be customised so that it can run on mobile devices, meaning gamers will need to expect the game won’t be an exact port of the PC version....

You might say that Gmail is already pretty minimalist, compared to some other services. That’s part of what I love about it. But with the addition of new features (which Gmail seems to do almost every month) comes a weakening of that minimalist overview.Minimalist Suiteis a plugin for Chrome that’s helping you to get rid of the things you don’t want, while emphasizing the things that you do. Once you’ve loaded up the extension, you’re taken to an Options page....