Also on today’s menu:
Remote Learning For Students
Terminator — The Prequel
As I prepared to open the doors of this virtual News Café this morning, I got an urgent phone call, and one I had been waiting for. Dalton Mountain Motorsports of Lancaster was able to send a driver to assist me in removing our pontoon boat from the water. It being the last day of summer, and with foul — or at least unpleasant — weather predicted for the remainder of the week, today was the perfect day to pull the boat, and with the low water levels in the Magalloway River, it was none-too-soon. The water by the boat launch at the Errol Dam was already too low to be of use, but, fortunately, the ramp at the Lake Umbagog Wildlife Refuge headquarters still had enough water to make a take-out possible.
I needed the help because this was the first season we’ve had a pontoon boat, and I had never done a take-out before. It turned out that even seasoned sailors had trouble today because of heavy breezes over the water. Nevertheless, with help from Wayne the driver and Alan our neighbor, we got the boat successfully onto the trailer and sent it on its way to its winter quarters.
The trip north on the last day of summer also provided a glimpse into what’s in store in a few weeks: beautiful fall foliage. A few individual trees, and some groups of them, were prematurely turning color, and the bright sunlight brought out the yellows and reds and oranges that mixed with the greens, in front of blue, hazy mountains. It was a lovely drive.
Remote Learning For Students
“Instructional Guidance for Responding to COVID in the Learning Environment,” a message to superintendents from Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut, emphasized that, “With the cessation of the state of emergency, and to be compliant with the State Board of Education’s recently advanced remote instruction rules, all schools must offer in-person instruction, five days per week. This offer of in-person instruction extends to all families that want that option and the new advanced rule provides no flexibility in that requirement.”
As to students who “have contracted COVID-19, are a household contact of someone with COVID-19 required to quarantine, or have other family circumstances that prevent them from participating in in-person instruction,” remote instruction is permitted, as long as it is “on a temporary basis, only until the circumstances resolve (e.g., students recover from COVID-19).”
Some teachers already are offering remote instruction to students who are forced to stay home, but other students are missing out on instruction while being quarantined, and some of those quarantined are kept out of school not because they are sick but because someone in their family has tested positive for the coronavirus.
Terminator — The Prequel
The “Terminator” franchise has been a boon to Hollywood, but its message about intelligent machines becoming hunter/killers has not gotten through to the military. The United States and other countries are continuing to pursue artificial intelligence in order to avoid sending humans to fight their wars.
Last week, a U.S. Central Command investigation concluded that an aid worker and nine members of his family, including seven children, died in a drone strike on Aug. 29 during the evacuation effort following the Taliban's sudden return to power. U.S. intelligence had tracked the aid worker’s car for eight hours, believing it was linked to IS-K militants, General Kenneth McKenzie said.
Drones came into widespread use during the Obama Administration, with The Daily Beast attributing 186 drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia to Obama in his first two years. The Associated Press and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism counted 1,878 drone strikes during the eight years of Obama’s presidency.. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, President Donald Trump launched 2,243 drone strikes in the first two years of his presidency. In January 2020, Trump’s drone strike that killed Iranian general Qasem Soleimani and nine other people prompted the UN’s expert on extrajudicial killings, Agnès Callamard, to call out the attack as a violation of international law because the U.S. had not provided evidence that Soleimani presented an imminent threat to justify the attack.
Now The New York Times reports that Israeli operatives carried out an assassination mission with an AI Sniper Rifle in November 2020. The Israeli military used a “souped-up, remote-controlled” rifle to kill Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, whom the military had been chasing “for at least 14 years”. The Rifle is said to have been remote operated “at an undisclosed location more than 1,000 miles away.”
Is the T-1000 that far away?
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