The Machines Will Kill Us All.

Here's one for your conspiracy theorists out there. Remember in the Terminator movies there was a fictional computer system called Skynet that was intended to coordinate US military assets and make strategic decisions which became sentient and took over the world by using America's nuclear arsenal to basically kill off most of us.

Well, (gulp) there really is a Skynet. Actually, there are several. The biggest is a series of military communications satellites used by the British Ministry of Defense. The Brits wouldn't have been my first choice to cause the apocalypse, but life is full of surprises. There are others as well, listed on Wikipedia's disambiguation page (among other places). They include:

- Belgacom Skynet, a Belgian ISP
- Loral Skynet, a commercial satellite operator
- A private intranet operated by United Airlines.

So we have two satellite systems and two large networks called Skynet. This is starting to get creepy. We can only hope that no one links these systems together to get one big Skynet, with the inevitable result of a huge human-machine war. Or, at least, that we have a Dune-like future in which we defeated the machines and then only had to worry about fighting each other.