robocop

Chris Knight's avatar

Way, waaaaay back in 2011, I posted about how a bunch of good-hearted geeks pitched in more than $50,000 to crowdfund a statue of RoboCop for the city of Detroit.  I’ve wondered about this project at various times over the years (mostly whenever I’ve watched RoboCop, which hasn’t been too many occasions) and I certainly did wish them well.  But it still seemed like one of those great ideas that linger around but ultimately get nowhere.

Leave it to nerd-dom to prove this cynic wrong.

Behold the brand new $60,000 bronze statue of electric fuzz in stainless steel:

Click to enlarge.  Photo credit: Lee DeVito

Detroit Metro Times has more here about the RoboCop statue.  Maybe they should invite Paul Verhoeven and Peter Weller for the official dedication?  I’d buy that for a dollar!...

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Chris Knight's avatar

I guess if Philadelphia can have a Rocky Balboa statue, and if New York City has one of Ralph Kramden and if Milwaukee has the Fonz as a landmark, then Detroit should get a lasting monument to its own… hero?

(Oh yeah, I almost forgot : nearby Mount Airy – the model for Mayberry on The Andy Griffith Show – has that life-sized bronze statue of Andy and Opie going fishing! So I guess the precedent has already been set for fictional lawmen. Law-cyborgs. Whatever…)

Earlier this week a flood of support coalesced across Facebook and Twitter to erect in Detroit a statue of… RoboCop. The titular “part man, part machine, all cop” hero of the 1987 sci-fi action smash-hit movie. Somebody forwarded the idea to Detroit mayor Dave Bing, who responded with “There are not any plans to erect a statue to Robocop. Thank you for the suggestion.”...

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Chris Knight's avatar

According to this story on Wired (which I first found via Slashdot), a robotic cannon being tested by the South African military went haywire last week and started shooting at everything on its own. Nine people died and fourteen others were wounded.

Here’s some of the account…

SA National Defence Force spokesman brigadier general Kwena Mangope says the cause of the malfunction is not yet known…

Media reports say the shooting exercise, using live ammunition, took place at the SA Army’s Combat Training Centre, at Lohatlha, in the Northern Cape, as part of an annual force preparation endeavour.

Mangope told The Star that it “is assumed that there was a mechanical problem, which led to the accident. The gun, which was fully loaded, did not fire as it normally should have,” he said. “It appears as though the gun, which is computerised, jammed before there was some sort of

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