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Originally posted by lithos:
Killing brown people by day, whores and poker by night.

Is that the American Dream I've heard so much of?

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Originally posted by lithos:
whores and poker by night.

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Attach a piece of velcro fabric fastener to the remote control boat and the other side to your fishing line. The boat carries your line out further than a normal cast might do and into areas that might be otherwise unreachable. Once a fish bites the hook the line falls away allowing you to reel in your catch.

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There's something about drones that makes me queasy. Maybe it's the whole robots-with-guns thing. We're a long ways away from the day when machines programmed to kill fight wars so human Americans don't have to, but I think the following principle is important to keep in at least the back of our minds going forward: war is something awful, serious, and dangerous enough that real people should have to do the bulk of it. Assassinating evildoers in remote locations is one thing; getting in the habit of outsourcing death and destruction to the bots is another.

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Originally posted by fuldog:
I wonder of the ethical issues that widespread use of drones and semi-autonomous, armed equipment in warfare will bring about. Aside from still struggling with the enormity of the action of soldiers aiming a joystick and taking down combatants a continent away, what about if (when) there's a malfunction? When the predator changes course and slams a busy city center instead of a desert bunker? When the aerial drone gets confused and goes on a friendly-fire rampage? When a weaponized BigDog gets lost in the aftermath of a battle and ends up in an enemy civilian area but with no one to give a stand down command? Who will be responsible of those mistakes and deaths: programmers, technicians, soldiers, commanders?

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The army of the future may rely as much on WiFi as they do on weapons. To that end, iRobot has built the diminutive Ember, a mobile robotic platform that can work in a group to establish a wireless network anywhere. The pocket-sized tank is part of DARPA’s LANdroid program which aims to create a fleet of these bots, each hopefully costing less than $100. [...]

Once the Ember fulfills its LANdroid destiny of autonomously establishing networks in warzones, it will grant unprecedented connectivity to soldiers in the field. Humans would be able to access vital data streams that may contain everything from battlefield surveillance to first aid medical guidance. With such data soldiers will be able to see where they shouldn’t be able to see, know what they haven’t been trained to know, and strike in with coordination that humans couldn’t accomplish on their own.

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Originally posted by editengine:
I have heard of remote sensing being used to locate marijuana fields, and google earth to get an idea of the layout of a property prior to a raid, but you've got to wonder at the way drones would be used in regular law enforcement. Drug deals don't really look like anything from above I would assume. Other than using them in place for more expensive police helicopters as mobile lighting and camera platforms. In fact is there really a difference? Police helicopters have been used in this way for decades, does the unmanned portion make them more threatening in a law enforcement capacity?

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The nice thing about unmanned warfare is the lack of emotional content for soldiers. They are not prone to my lai style massacres however the real worry about them is that the lack of cost in soldier's lives makes them more likely to be used before a diplomatic solution. Drones don't return to Andrews AFB.

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More and more police forces and government agencies are exploring the potential of unmanned drones for covert aerial surveillance, security, or emergency operations across the UK, the Guardian has learned.

The Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca), which works closely with police forces and MI5, published an unusually detailed public tender notice in the summer requesting submissions from suppliers of airborne observation "platforms" that can be adapted for "target acquisition" and intelligence-gathering.

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CBP officials credit the drones with helping interdict 39,000 pounds of narcotics and capture more than 7,000 illegal border crossers since their debut with the agency five years ago.

"I'm humbled by the power of this technology," Bersin said. "It's a powerful force multiplier."

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Mexico has purchased Israeli-made unmanned drone aircraft, the government said, which may be used for spotting remote drug fields as officials fight powerful cartels.

Mexico's defense ministry said it bought an unspecified number of Hermes 450 drones last year from Israel's Elbit Systems Ltd for $23.25 million, according to a filing seen by Reuters on Tuesday.
The defense ministry declined to say how it would use the drones.

But Javier Oliva, a security analyst at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, said the military was likely using the remote-controlled drones, which can fly for 20 hours and are equipped with cameras, to locate marijuana and opium in the northwestern states of Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua.

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Originally posted by lithos:


Pot grows hot, so IR sensors are great for finding it.

Is there a difference? Panopticon, I suppose. Police choppers are fucking expensive to run, to maintain, and they've got guys in them. You can't run them 24/7, and a major city's not gonna have enough more or manpower to keep a full-time chopper force in the air, all the time, covering the entire city. Drones make it easier, cheaper, and simpler to run omniscient surveillance. That's the problem.

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Originally posted by jbx:

Omniscient surveillance sure seems like internet boogey man to me.

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Originally posted by oddmanrush:
Assassinating evildoers in remote locations is one thing; getting in the habit of outsourcing death and destruction to the bots is another.

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Originally posted by fuldog:
I wonder of the ethical issues that widespread use of drones and semi-autonomous, armed equipment in warfare will bring about. Aside from still struggling with the enormity of the action of soldiers aiming a joystick and taking down combatants a continent away...

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Originally posted by fuldog:
...what about if (when) there's a malfunction? When the predator changes course and slams a busy city center instead of a desert bunker? When the aerial drone gets confused and goes on a friendly-fire rampage? When a weaponized BigDog gets lost in the aftermath of a battle and ends up in an enemy civilian area but with no one to give a stand down command? Who will be responsible of those mistakes and deaths: programmers, technicians, soldiers, commanders?