...O_o Ok, now you've flicked my Paranoid Mode switch back on. (And it took me a while to get it off, too, after that armed robbery a block away from my dorm...>>;;

Dragonflies sew your mouth shut if your not careful *nods sagely*

That is cool. Yes, the obvious abuse of the technology would need to be restricted against closely (I mean, I don't want some perv in the government sending a robot fly into my bathroom to watch me naked), but there were other possibilities mentioned for the robot fliers, like rescue work.

I'm a tiny bit more worried about the cybernetic components being grafted into insects for that hybrid project. Insects reproduce really quickly, and anything that goes wrong will be spread too fast for us to effectively react.

"I'm a tiny bit more worried about the cybernetic components being grafted into insects for that hybrid project. Insects reproduce really quickly, and anything that goes wrong will be spread too fast for us to effectively react."

I'm really not sure what you're not getting at here. I can't see the offspring of a cyborg beetle and another bettle, cyborg or otherwise, being anything other than an ordinary beetle with no cybernetic parts. The reasons for this are two fold. For a start, it sounds like they're just taking chips and inserting them into larval creatures and letting them grow around them rather than altering the genetic make up of the creature (I sincerely doubt our knowledge of genetics is advanced enough to encode anything other than the most basic of electronic circuitry), so no genetic information of the chip is passed on to the young. Secondly, computer chips are made out of exotic semi-metals such as silicon and germanium, which generally do not occur in living organisms (actually, silicon does, but only in compound) and so even if you could encode blueprints for a chip into something's genes it wouldn't be able to get the raw materials to actually grow the chip. It'd be like giving a chef the plans to a house and asking him to built it with the stuff in his pantry.

Hence why I said a tiny bit more worried. But the installation of chips may alter the bugs in other ways, polluting and mutating their systems and passing on these traits to offspring. And what about dead bugs that have potentially polluting substances in their bodies that get into the ecosystem? Or what about erratic behavior that becomes hostile or at least annoying to humans? There are more dangers than just the one that I alluded to about cyberbugs replicating themselves.

But again, I agree that it won't be a real issue. Just my active imagination at work. 😛

...why would the robot dragonflies fly in formation? @ one of the last sentences

As for the rest, it said what I was going to, about the CIA doing something like this back in the 70s. Also, a good rule of thumb concerning military technology, always place it 10-15 years ahead of what people see as military high tech. Remember how long the F-117 or B-2 were in service before they were officially announced? Do you really think that things like that don't happen today?