Former boxing champ Mike Tyson to take one-man show on the road

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson plans to take his one-man theater show on the road across the United States early next year.

Tyson, 45, made the announcement on ABC’s late-night show “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on Tuesday.

“Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth” is an autobiographical monologue performed by Tyson in which he reflects upon his tough childhood in Brooklyn, the absence of his father and his self-described “reckless and destructive” behavior. It premiered in Las Vegas in April and had a run on Broadway.

Tyson, whose reputation was boosted by a cameo in the 2009 hit comedy “The Hangover,” told Kimmel that his inspiration for the show came from a one-man performance of “A Bronx Tale” in Las Vegas.

The 23-date tour, which features the Broadway show directed by Spike Lee, is scheduled to begin on February 12 in Indianapolis, Indiana, the city where Tyson was convicted in 1992 of raping then 18-year-old beauty queen Desiree Washington.

Tyson, who at the age of 20 became the youngest world heavyweight champion, served three years in prison before restarting his boxing career in 1995.

He later became better known for his erratic behavior than for his prowess in the ring. Tyson notoriously bit off portions of opponent Evander Holyfield’s ears in a 1997 bout and publicly said he wanted to eat British champion Lennox Lewis’ children.

Tyson retired from boxing in 2006.

(Reporting By Eric Kelsey; Editing by Patrica Reaney)

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Well: Weight Loss Surgery May Not Combat Diabetes Long-Term

Weight loss surgery, which in recent years has been seen as an increasingly attractive option for treating Type 2 diabetes, may not be as effective against the disease as it was initially thought to be, according to a new report. The study found that many obese Type 2 diabetics who undergo gastric bypass surgery do not experience a remission of their disease, and of those that do, about a third redevelop diabetes within five years of their operation.

The findings contrast with the growing perception that surgery is essentially a cure for Type II diabetes. Earlier this year, two widely publicized studies reported that surgery worked better than drugs, diet and exercise in causing a remission of Type 2 diabetes in overweight people whose blood sugar was out of control, leading some experts to call for greater use of surgery in treating the disease. But the studies were small and relatively short, lasting under two years.

The latest study, published in the journal Obesity Surgery, tracked thousands of diabetics who had gastric bypass surgery for more than a decade. It found that many people whose diabetes at first went away were likely to have it return. While weight regain is a common problem among those who undergo bariatric surgery, regaining lost weight did not appear to be the cause of diabetes relapse. Instead, the study found that people whose diabetes was most severe or in its later stages when they had surgery were more likely to have a relapse, regardless of whether they regained weight.

“Some people are under the impression that you have surgery and you’re cured,” said Dr. Vivian Fonseca, the president for medicine and science for the American Diabetes Association, who was not involved in the study. “There have been a lot of claims about how wonderful surgery is for diabetes, and I think this offers a more realistic picture.”

The findings suggest that weight loss surgery may be most effective for treating diabetes in those whose disease is not very advanced. “What we’re learning is that not all diabetic patients do as well as others,” said Dr. David E. Arterburn, the lead author of the study and an associate investigator at the Group Health Research Institute in Seattle. “Those who are early in diabetes seem to do the best, which makes a case for potentially earlier intervention.”

One of the strengths of the new study was that it involved thousands of patients enrolled in three large health plans in California and Minnesota, allowing detailed tracking over many years. All told, 4,434 adult diabetics were followed between 1995 and 2008. All were obese, and all underwent Roux-en-Y operations, the most popular type of gastric bypass procedure.

After surgery, about 68 percent of patients experienced a complete remission of their diabetes. But within five years, 35 percent of those patients had it return. Taken together, that means that most of the subjects in the study, about 56 percent — a figure that includes those whose disease never remitted — had no long-lasting remission of diabetes after surgery.

The researchers found that three factors were particularly good predictors of who was likely to have a relapse of diabetes. If patients, before surgery, had a relatively long duration of diabetes, had poor control of their blood sugar, or were taking insulin, then they were least likely to benefit from gastric bypass. A patient’s weight, either before or after surgery, was not correlated with their likelihood of remission or relapse.

In Type 2 diabetes, the beta cells that produce insulin in the pancreas tend to wear out as the disease progresses, which may explain why some people benefit less from surgery. “If someone is too far advanced in their diabetes, where their pancreas is frankly toward the latter stages of being able to produce insulin, then even after losing a bunch of weight their body may not be able to produce enough insulin to control their blood sugar,” Dr. Arterburn said.

Nonetheless, he said it might be the case that obese diabetics, even those whose disease is advanced, can still benefit from gastric surgery, at least as far as their quality of life and their risk factors for heart disease and other complications are concerned.

“It’s not a surefire cure for everyone,” he said. “But almost universally, patients lose weight after weight loss surgery, and that in and of itself may have so many health benefits.”

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State of the Art: Tablets Are Hot Holiday Gifts, but Which One to Buy? — Review

From left: J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times, Jim Wilson/The New York Times, Everett Kennedy Brown/European Pressphoto Agency

From left, the Kindle PaperWhite, the iPad Mini and the  Nexus 7.

The other day, I joined NPR for a segment about high-tech holiday gifts. I was ready for the calls from listeners. I’d brushed up on cameras, phones, laptops, music players and game consoles. I was prepared to talk about limiting screen time, digital addiction, cyberbullying. I knew where to get the best deals.

But all six callers had the same question: “What tablet should I get?”

There were variations, of course. “— for my kid?” “— for my elderly father?” “— just for reading?” “— for not much money?” But in general, it was clear: the gadget most likely to be found under the tree this year is thin, battery-powered and flat.

No wonder people are confused. The marketplace has gone tablet-crazy. There’s practically a different model for every man, woman and child.

There’s the venerable iPad, of course. And now the iPad Mini. There are new tablets from Google, also in small and large. There are Samsung’s Note tablets in a variety of sizes, with styluses. There are $200 touch-screen color e-book/video players. There’s a new crop of black-and-white e-book readers. There are stunningly cheap plastic models you’ve never heard of. There are tablets for children (and I don’t mean baby aspirin).

So how are you, the confused consumer, supposed to keep tabs on all these tablets? By taking this handy tour through the jungle of tablets 2012. Keep hands and feet inside the tram at all times.

DIRT-CHEAP KNOCKOFFS You can find no-name tablets for $100 or even less. You can also find mystery-brand Chinese tablets in toy stores, marketed to children.

Don’t buy them. They don’t have the apps, the features, the polish or the pleasure of the nicer ones. The junk drawer is already calling their names.

E-BOOK READERS The smallest, lightest, least expensive, easiest to read tablets are the black-and-white e-book readers. If the goal is simply reading — and not, say, watching movies or playing games — these babies are pure joy.

Don’t bother with the lesser brands; if you’re going to get locked into one company’s proprietary, copy-protected book format, you’ll reduce your chances of library obsolescence if you stick with Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Each company offers a whole bunch of models. But on the latest models, the page background lights up softly, so that you can read in the dark without a flashlight. (These black-and-white models also look fantastic in direct sun — now you get the best of both lighting conditions.)

The one you want is the Kindle PaperWhite ($120), whose illumination is more even and pleasant than the equivalent Nook’s.

Of course, plain, no-touch, no-light Kindles, with ads on the screen saver, start as low as $70. But the light and the touch-screen are really worth having.

COLOR E-READERS/PLAYERS Amazon and B.& N. each sell a seven-inch tablet that, functionally, lands somewhere between an e-book reader and an iPad. They have beautiful, high-definition touch-screens. They play music, TV shows, movies and e-books. They can surf the Web. They even run a few handpicked Android apps like Netflix and Angry Birds.

They’re nowhere near as capable as full-blown, computerlike tablets of the iPad/Nexus ilk, mainly because there are so few apps, accessories and add-ons. But they cost $200; you’re paying only a fraction of the price.

The big two here are, once again, Amazon and B.& N. If you’re not already locked in to one of those companies’ books and videos because you owned a previous model, the Nook HD is the one to get. It’s much smaller and lighter than the Kindle Fire HD. It has a much sharper screen. And the $200 price includes a wall charger (the Fire doesn’t) and no ads (the Fire does). Or get the classy Google Nexus 7, also $200. Although its book/music/movie catalog is far smaller, its Android app catalog is far larger (but see “iPad versus Android,” below).

BIG COLOR READERS/PLAYERS This year, both Amazon and B.& N. have introduced jumbo-screen (9-inch) versions of their HD tablets. Here again, B.& N. offers a better value than its 9-inch Kindle Fire HD rival. For $270, the Nook HD+ offers a sharper screen, lighter weight, no ads, a memory-card slot and a wall charger.

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

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Alleged WikiLeaks source says he was illegally punished in jail

A key pretrial hearing for Pfc. Bradley Manning, accused of giving classified material to the website WikiLeaks, which then made it public, began Tuesday in a case that highlights the government’s resolve to keep war and diplomatic material secret.

Manning, who has been charged on 22 counts, faces life in prison if convicted of aiding the enemy, the most serious charge. His court-martial is scheduled for February.

A former intelligence analyst in Baghdad in 2009 and 2010, Manning is accused of sending hundreds of thousands of logs about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and more than 250,000 diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks.

The hearing at a military court at Ft. Meade outside Baltimore is scheduled to run through Sunday. Manning is expected to testify at some point. It would be the first time he has spoken publicly about the case and the conditions of his detainment since his arrest in 2010.

The defense will argue that all charges should be dismissed because Manning was subjected to “unlawful pretrial punishment,” according to a post on the website of his supporters, the Bradley Manning Support Network.

Manning will get a chance to testify about his treatment. His lawyers argue that he was illegally punished by being put alone in a cell for nine months at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Va. Military judges can dismiss all charges if pretrial punishment is particularly egregious, but that rarely happens, though the time in incarceration can be credited toward the sentencing.

“At this extremely important hearing, Bradley’s lawyer David Coombs ... will present evidence that brig psychiatrists opposed the decision to hold Bradley in solitary, and that brig commanders misled the public when they said that Bradley’s treatment was for ‘Prevention of Injury,' " his supporters said.

Manning has offered to take responsibility by pleading guilty to reduced charges. The military has not ruled on that offer.

Manning was in the brig from July 2010 to April 2011. The military argues the treatment there was proper since he classified as a maximum-security detainee. He was later moved to Ft. Leavenworth, Kan., where he was reevaluated and given a medium-security classification.

A United Nations investigator called the conditions of Manning's imprisonment cruel, inhuman and degrading, but stopped short of calling it torture.

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Siri 'Eyes Free' Hops Aboard Chevy Spark

Voice activation in automobiles for the most part sucks. You push a button on the steering wheel, ask for the nearest gas station and the system asks if you want to find a Chinese restaurant. (That’s a real-world example.) Apple wants to make it all better — while also making a sly play to control search on the road — by integrating Siri into the car.

Apple announced in June that it’s officially becoming an automotive supplier. The company is working with nine car companies to make their vehicles essentially serve as a pass-through for Siri via a feature called Eyes Free, which allows drivers speak to the quirky “virtual assistant.” Chevrolet is the first to market with Eyes Free integration in the Spark and Sonic via the MyLink system. It’s the perfect platform because, except for an embedded AM/FM tuner, it is basically a pass-through head unit that gets all of its content from a connected smartphone.

We received a hands-on demo of Siri Eyes Free in a 2013 Chevy Spark with MyLink during an L.A. Auto Show preview. While Siri won’t answer all queries, it can help drivers with tasks like reading and replying to text messages, checking weather conditions and stock prices or determining the date of Thanksgiving 2013, all without taking their hands off the wheel or eyes off the road.

“We thought this would be a particularly good fit for the Spark and Sonic,” GM engineer Sara LeBlanc told Wired. “When you think of the demographic of these customers, they have the highest penetration of smartphones across our entire vehicle line-up.”

LeBlanc said that Siri Eyes Free will be available in the first quarter of 2013. “Customers that have already purchased a Chevy Spark or Sonic with MyLink can return it to their dealers to get this free upgrade,” she adds.

Just don’t expect Siri to be at your beck and call while behind the wheel, since it won’t answer questions that require displaying a webpage. “We’re limiting that because driver distraction was our number-one concern,” LeBlanche said. “When we worked with Apple we were in agreement on what Siri could and could not do.”

Like finding a gas station, since Siri works independently of the MyLink-approved BringGo navigation app. And it also can’t help you find a Chinese restaurant, unless you pull over.

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Turkish PM fumes over steamy Ottoman soap opera

ISTANBUL (Reuters) – A hit TV show about the Ottoman Empire‘s longest-reigning Sultan has raised a political storm in Turkey, with Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan urging legal action over historical inaccuracies and the opposition accusing him of artistic tyranny.

Erdogan tore into the weekly soap opera “Magnificent Century”, which attracts an audience of up to 150 million people in Turkey as well as parts of the Balkans and Middle East, in response to criticism of his government’s foreign policy.

The lavish television production, which grips audiences with tales of power struggles and palace intrigue, is set during the 16th century reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, when Ottoman rulers held sway over an empire straddling three continents.

Bristling at suggestions that Turkey was meddling too much in its neighbors’ affairs, Erdogan recalled Turkey’s heritage, and said Suleiman had been a proud conqueror rather than the indulgent harem-lover portrayed in the show.

“(Critics) ask why are we dealing with the affairs of Iraq, Syria and Gaza,” Erdogan said at the opening of an airport in western Turkey on Sunday.

“They know our fathers and ancestors through ‘Magnificent Century’, but we don’t know such a Suleiman. He spent 30 years on horseback, not in the palace, not what you see in that series.”

Scenes that showed Suleiman with women in the harem have prompted calls from viewers in the mostly Muslim and largely conservative country for the broadcasting regulator (RTUK) to ban the series. But it tops the viewing charts each week.

Erdogan said the director of the series, which has been on air since January 2011, and the owner of the channel that broadcasts it had been warned, but also said he expected the judiciary to act, without elaborating.

Erdogan’s opponents accused him of authoritarianism.

“The prime minister must be jealous of the series’ popularity. He thinks there’s no need for another sultan when he’s in power,” said Muharrem Ince, the deputy chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP).

“Erdogan wants to be the only sultan.”

Elected a decade ago with the strongest majority seen in years, Erdogan has overseen a period of unprecedented prosperity in Turkey. But concerns are growing about his increasingly authoritarian rule.

Hundreds of politicians, academics and journalists are in jail on charges of plotting against the government, while more than 300 army officers were given prison terms in September for conspiring to topple him not long after he swept to power.

Turkey has been increasingly assertive in regional politics, most notably over the crisis in neighboring Syria, where it has led calls for international action and scrambled war planes in a warning to Damascus not to violate its territory.

“I think the prime minister’s aim here is to change the agenda. I can’t think of any other reason to discuss an imaginary television series when there are so many problems in a country,” Nebahat Cehre, who played Suleiman’s mother during the first two seasons, told Turkey’s Birgun newspaper.

(Editing by Nick Tattersall and Jon Hemming)

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Global Update: Investing in Eyeglasses for Poor Would Boost International Economy

BSIP/UIG Via Getty Images

Eliminating the worldwide shortage of eyeglasses could cost up to $28 billion, but would add more than $200 billion to the global economy, according to a study published last month in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization.

The $28 billion would cover the cost of training 65,000 optometrists and equipping clinics where they could prescribe eyeglasses, which can now be mass-produced for as little as $2 a pair. The study was done by scientists from Australia and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The authors assumed that 703 million people worldwide have uncorrected nearsightedness or farsightedness severe enough to impair their work, and that 80 percent of them could be helped with off-the-rack glasses, which would need to be replaced every five years.

The biggest productivity savings from better vision would not be in very poor regions like Africa but in moderately poor countries where more people have factory jobs or trades like driving or running a sewing machine.

Without the equivalent of reading glasses, “lots of skilled crafts become very difficult after age 40 or 45,” said Kevin Frick, a Johns Hopkins health policy economist and study co-author. “You don’t want to be swinging a hammer if you can’t see the nail.”

If millions of schoolchildren who need glasses got them, the return on investment could be even greater, he said, but that would be in the future and was not calculated in this study.

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Jeffrey Zucker Expected to Be Next President of CNN

In the days to come, when Time Warner appoints a new leader of CNN Worldwide for the first time in a decade, he or she will face an identity crisis unlike any other in corporate America.

Though CNN over all is on track to have its most profitable year ever, its flagship channel in the United States is seemingly rudderless, run by layers of producers and executives — many with competing visions. The channel’s low prime-time ratings are the stuff of punch lines and a journalism school case study in the damage wrought by the digital age.

Then again, the channel also has tremendous potential, an enviably popular Web site and countless people rooting for it to succeed.

Throughout a four-month search process for the person to succeed Jim Walton, the departing president, attention has centered on Jeffrey Zucker, the former chief executive of NBCUniversal, who was replaced when Comcast took over the company last year. Mr. Zucker currently produces Katie Couric’s daytime talk show.

Several news executives close to Mr. Zucker said this week that they believed he had been chosen to run CNN and expected the appointment to be announced soon. People close to the Time Warner chief executive, Jeffrey L. Bewkes, also identified Mr. Zucker. A Time Warner spokesman declined to comment.

In considering candidates to run one of the world’s best-known, but beleaguered, news organizations, Mr. Bewkes and his deputy Phil Kent have also been considering their own legacies. They are cautious about not undermining CNN’s journalistic heart and soul, even as they strive to resuscitate the channel’s prime-time lineup, according to people who have met with them about the search. That means the channel’s programming will remain nonpartisan in nature.

“They want someone who has programming and management and cable expertise; someone who can be credible to the staff and to the business community,” said one of these people. “They know that this is a pretty tall order.”

Mr. Zucker could check off all those boxes. As a young NBC News producer, he helped start what became a 16-year winning streak for the “Today” show. He had mixed results as he moved up the rungs of NBC, but he can point to cable programming successes even as the NBC broadcast network struggled. He did not respond to requests for comment, and people with knowledge of the search insisted on anonymity to preserve friendships and business relationships.

But many others in and around CNN spoke on the record about the challenges ahead. Getting the top-heavy 4,000-person company — spread among New York, Washington, Atlanta and bureaus around the world — to row in the same direction will be one of the toughest tasks, many said.

The company’s many channels and sites net roughly $600 million in annual profits, through advertising revenue and subscriber fees. But the channel is leaving ad dollars on the table, as one executive put it, because its prime-time ratings are lagging, and it’s putting future fee increases at risk by appearing irrelevant in the eyes of some cable subscribers.

One problem dates back to CNN’s creation in 1980: when there is a lack of news, there is a lack of viewers. Kiran Chetry, a CNN morning anchor from 2007 to 2011, said her time there was like being on a news treadmill: “We were running, sweating, doing the work, but never getting anywhere ratings-wise,” she said. This stemmed, she said, from uncertainty about “what we were, who our audience was and how we best served them.”

As Fox News and, later, MSNBC put on confrontational political programs with partisan points of view, CNN sold itself as proudly nonpartisan, but fell from first to second to third place in the cable news wars along the way. This should have been an “up” year for the channel, thanks to the presidential election; but through mid-November the channel had drawn 412,000 viewers at any given time, down 16 percent from the previous 12 months.

Bill Carter contributed reporting.

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Congress returns as 'fiscal cliff' talks slow

WASHINGTON – Congress returned in a lame duck session with no signs of quick compromise to prevent a tax hike for most Americans early next year.

Talks between the White House and Republican leaders in the House continued behind closed doors. Current tax rates expire Dec. 31.

Emboldened by his re-election, President Obama took his case for raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans to the public on Monday. He warned that the threat of higher taxes on middle-class Americans could dampen the Christmas shopping season.

"The President has called on Congress to take action and stop holding the middle class and our economy hostage over a disagreement on tax cuts for households with incomes over $250,000 per year," the White House said in a statement.

Quiz: How much do you know about the fiscal cliff?

The White House got a boost from billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who said the wealthy – himself included – should pay more. Noting the nation’s growing gap in income disparity, Buffett dismissed the Republican argument that tax hikes would hamper investments.

“In recent years, my gang has been leaving the middle class in the dust,” Buffett said. “So let’s forget about the rich and ultrarich going on strike and stuffing their ample funds under their mattresses if — gasp — capital gains rates and ordinary income rates are increased.”

Key Republicans, including House Speaker John A. Boehner, have signaled they are willing to put new tax revenues on the table, creating the outlines of a possible deal. Several Republican lawmakers used the Sunday talk shows to distance themselves from their party’s anti-tax pledge, publicly breaking with conservative stalwart Grover Norquist, although they insisted any agreement must include spending cuts.

A so-called grand bargain of tax hikes and spending cuts has eluded Washington in the past, but both political parties are wary of rattling the financial markets and sparking a crisis in consumer spending. Wall Street has signaled a bold deficit-reduction plan is needed to prevent a credit downgrade.

PHOTOS: 2016 presidential possibilities

No talks between the president and congressional leaders have been scheduled. The parties had agreed to meet this week to put the framework of a two-part deal on the table.

If Republicans continue to fight higher tax rates for the wealthy, Boehner will face pressure to propose an alternative way to raise new revenue – either by closing individual loopholes or capping deductions in a way that produces new money.

“Congressional and White House staff continue to work to find common ground that is consistent with the ‘balanced approach’ the White House says it wants – with significant spending cuts, and without job-killing small business tax hikes,” said a senior House leadership aide.

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Twitter: @LisaMascaroinDC

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Pentagon: A Human Will Always Decide When a Robot Kills You

The Pentagon wants to make perfectly clear that every time one of its flying robots releases its lethal payload, it’s the result of a decision made by an accountable human being in a lawful chain of command. Human rights groups and nervous citizens fear that technological advances in autonomy will slowly lead to the day when robots make that critical decision for themselves. But according to a new policy directive issued by a top Pentagon official, there shall be no SkyNet, thank you very much.

Here’s what happened while you were preparing for Thanksgiving: Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter signed, on November 21, a series of instructions to “minimize the probability and consequences of failures” in autonomous or semi-autonomous armed robots “that could lead to unintended engagements,” starting at the design stage (.pdf, thanks to Cryptome.org). Translated from the bureaucrat, the Pentagon wants to make sure that there isn’t a circumstance when one of the military’s many Predators, Reapers, drone-like missiles or other deadly robots effectively automatizes the decision to harm a human being.

The hardware and software controlling a deadly robot needs to come equipped with “safeties, anti-tamper mechanisms, and information assurance.” The design has got to have proper “human-machine interfaces and controls.” And, above all, it has to operate “consistent with commander and operator intentions and, if unable to do so, terminate engagements or seek additional human operator input before continuing the engagement.” If not, the Pentagon isn’t going to buy it or use it.

It’s reasonable to worry that advancements in robot autonomy are going to slowly push flesh-and-blood troops out of the role of deciding who to kill. To be sure, military autonomous systems aren’t nearly there yet. No Predator, for instance, can fire its Hellfire missile without a human directing it. But the military is wading its toe into murkier ethical and operational waters: The Navy’s experimental X-47B prototype will soon be able to land on an aircraft carrier with the barest of human directions. That’s still a long way from deciding on its own to release its weapons. But this is how a very deadly slope can slip.

It’s that sort of thing that worries Human Rights Watch, for instance. Last week, the organization, among the most influential non-governmental institutions in the world, issued a report warning that new developments in drone autonomy represented the demise of established “legal and non-legal checks on the killing of civilians.” Its solution: “prohibit the “development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons through an international legally binding instrument.”

Laudable impulse, wrong solution, writes Matthew Waxman. A former Defense Department official for detainee policy, Waxman and co-author Kenneth Anderson observe that technological advancements in robotic weapons autonomy is far from predictable, and the definition of “autonomy” is murky enough to make it unwise to tell the world that it has to curtail those advancements at an arbitrary point. Better, they write, for the U.S. to start an international conversation about how much autonomy on a killer robot is appropriate, so as to “embed evolving internal state standards into incrementally advancing automation.”

Waxman and Anderson should be pleased with Carter’s memo, since those standards are exactly what Carter wants the Pentagon to bake into its next drone arsenal. Before the Pentagon agrees to develop or buy new autonomous or somewhat autonomous weapons, a team of senior Pentagon officials and military officers will have to certify that the design itself “incorporates the necessary capabilities to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment in the use of force.” The machines and their software need to provide reliability assurances and failsafes to make sure that’s how they work in practice, too. And anyone operating any such deadly robot needs sufficient certification in both the system they’re using and the rule of law. The phrase “appropriate levels of human judgment” is frequently repeated, to make sure everyone gets the idea. (Now for the lawyers to argue about the meaning of “appropriate.”)

So much for SkyNet. But Carter’s directive blesses the forward march of autonomy in most everything military robots do that can’t kill you. It “[d]oes not apply to autonomous or semi-autonomous cyberspace systems for cyberspace operations; unarmed, unmanned platforms; unguided munitions; munitions manually guided by the operator (e.g., laser- or wire-guided munitions); mines; or unexploded explosive ordnance,” Carter writes.

So in other words, the Pentagon doesn’t have to build similar safeguards when developing, perhaps, a worm released into the wild that disrupts the industrial controls on a centrifuge system is fine. (SkyNet no; Stuxnet yes?) Nor when the Navy’s carrier drones one day decide to snoop on vast swaths of ocean, with cameras even more powerful than the existing ones that can spy on 36 square miles in the blink of an eye and recording the equivalent of 80 years’ worth of video in a single day. Nor when a piece of code starts collecting the computer usage history of a Defense Department employee suspected of being the next Bradley Manning. While everyone’s worried about preventing the Rise of the Machines, the machines are getting a pass to spy on you, under their own power.

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