Originally Posted by etherealme

BHUBANESWAR: A woman, who claimed to have fallen in love with a snake got married to the reptile as per Hindu rituals at Atala village of Orissa's Khurda district, 14 km from here.

The unusual marriage took place on Wednesday with over 2,000 people taking out a procession to celebrate the event.

Attired in a silk saree, 30 year-old Bimbala Das was seen sitting for around one hour as priests chanted mantras to complete the ritual.

The snake which lived in an ant hill near her home, however, was not around and a brass replica of a serpent was kept by the side of the woman instead.

Bimbala said: "Though snakes cannot speak nor understand, we communicate in a peculiar way. Whenever I put milk near the ant hill where the Cobra lives, it (the snake) always comes out to drink."

"I always get to see it every time I go near the ant hill. It has never harmed me," she claimed.

When Bimbala disclosed her idea of marrying a snake, villagers reportedly appreciated it saying the marriage will bring good fortune to the area. They also came forward to offer a grand feast for those who came to attend the marriage.

Originally Posted by Apryl

Originally Posted by *Dawn*

Um Yay? Old Yeller dog food? Does it come with extra rabies? And a free loaded shotgun as a prize? Because that'd be handy.

Originally Posted by By Ed Habershon and Richard Woods

THE race is on to keep humans one step ahead of robots: an international team of scientists and academics is to publish a "code of ethics" for machines as they become more and more sophisticated.

Although the nightmare vision of a Terminator world controlled by machines may seem fanciful, scientists believe the boundaries for human-robot interaction must be set now, before super-intelligent robots develop beyond our control.
"There are two levels of priority," says Gianmarco Verruggio, a roboticist at the Institute of Intelligent Systems for Automation in Genoa, northern Italy, and chief architect of the guide, to be published next month.

"We have to manage the ethics of the scientists making the robots and the artificial ethics inside the robots."

Verruggio and his colleagues have identified key areas that include ensuring human control of robots, preventing illegal use, protecting data acquired by robots and establishing clear identification and traceability of the machines.

"Scientists must start analysing these kinds of questions and seeing if laws or regulations are needed to protect the citizen," Mr Verruggio says.

"Robots will develop strong intelligence and in some ways it will be better than human intelligence - but it will be alien intelligence. I would prefer to give priority to humans."

The analysis culminated at a recent meeting in Genoa of the European Robotics Research Network (Euron) to examine the problems likely to arise as robots become smarter, faster, stronger and ubiquitous.

"Security, safety and sex are the big concerns," says Henrik Christensen, a member of the Euron ethics group. How far should robots be allowed to influence people's lives? How can accidents be avoided? Can deliberate harm be prevented? And what happens if robots turn out to be sexy?

"The question is: what authority are we going to delegate tothese machines?" says Ronald Arkin, a roboticist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

"Are we, for example, going to give robots the ability to execute lethal force, or any force, like crowd control?"

The coming code is a sign of reality finally catching up with science fiction. Ethical problems involving machines were predicted in the 1950s by the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, whose book I, Robot was recently turned into a Hollywood film. The Terminator and Robocop films also portrayed mechanical law enforcers running amok.

Present robots perform more mundane tasks, but far more sophisticated machines are being developed.

The National Health Service has used a robot called da Vinci to perform surgery at Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in London.

In Japan, human-like robots such as Honda's Asimo and Sony's Qrio can walk on two legs.

More advanced versions are expected to be doing everyday domestic tasks and helping to care for the elderly in as little as 20 years.

"I would hope they would always be subordinate," says science fiction writer Brian Aldiss. "But one will no doubt come to rely on them deeply."

Aldiss's short story Supertoys Last All Summer Long was the basis for the Steven Spielberg film A.I., which addressed the subject of whether androids that have become as intelligent ashumans should be denied equal rights.

Other dilemmas may arrive sooner than we think, says Christensen: "People are going to be having sex with robots within five years." So should limits be set on the appearance, for example, of such robotic sex toys?

The greatest danger, however, is likely to lie with robots that areable to learn from their "experiences". As systems develop, robots are likely to have much more sophisticated self-learning mechanisms built into them and it may become impossible to predict exactly how they will behave.

"My guess is that we'll have conscious machines before 2020," says Ian Pearson, futurologist-in-residence at telecommunications and information technology group BT. "If we put that in a robot, it's an android. That is an enormous ethical change."

To critics who scoff that intelligent robots are a long way off, the roboticists easily riposte that machines can already exert surprising influence over our lives - think about the influence of the internet.

The Sunday Times