choff wrote:I don't entirely understand why people are upset about drone warfare, after all, in WW 1 & 2 we saw civilian populations in large cities obliterated from the air, poison gas attacks, and all the other related horrors. In some ways the Geneva convention makes things worse, our leaders take great pains to make sure it's enforced on rank and file soldiers. Troops have been prosecuted for committing mercy killings of badly injured/soon to die combatants begging for death to end the pain. Politicians express outrage over urination on dead combatants, but shrug off criticism that wars are commenced over dodgy intel on WMD's. The Geneva convention makes politicians feel they may legitimately engage in warfare on the weakest pretext so long as they enforce the rules on the little people.
Drones are merely an efficient next step in military technology. maybe people don't like them for the same reason knights hated the invention of guns. Soon you will see drone on drone engagements and war as we know it will be obsolete, straight out of Jules Verne.
Soldiers have consciences... drones don't. A (very) small number of people could command a huge array of autonomous drones and do ruthless, atrocious things with them. It's a recipe for enabling tyranny.
Only if you subscribe to NWO/Agenda 21 conspiracies like me, most people don't. The top .01% wage earners could decide they don't even need to keep 5% of us for serfs after the cull, providing they don't make 'our robot assasins/they're robot servants' too smart. Not that the top .01% are the sharpest tools themselves, what with decades of inbreeding. Maybe after they come to realize that they're making themselves victims of the drones just like everybody else they'll quit, new weapons always end up being used against the same people that begin them.
People complain about the civilians being killed along with Taliban/Al Quaeda by drones in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In WW2, Bomber Harris killed civilian German armaments workers, they produced the weapons that killed our people. In Pakistan and Afghanistan they have a tradition of hospitality to travellers, in this case Taliban/Al Quaeda fighters, so out of a spirit of hospitality they help these terrorists along the way in killing NATO troops. Killing them along with terrorists becomes a tactic to fight the enemy, even if unintended, c'est le guerre.
DARPA looks for a guided bullet with DEAD reckoning navigation
Not only has your name on it, but your address too
That model uses gyroscopes, accelerometers and an atomic clock (development of the latter having been kicked off in 2008) to navigate by dead reckoning. Assuming one knows the starting position, or at least where one wishes to be in relation to that point, then navigation is just a matter of knowing one's velocity and duration of travel - with suitable accuracy of course.
Transistor Could Help to Restore the Sensation of Touch
The new transistor is made from zinc oxide nanowires arranged in an array of microscopic bumps. When an object presses against the bumps, crystals inside the nanowires deform and generate an electric current. Greater amounts of pressure lead to larger strains and greater currents: the greater the pressure, the larger the strain and the stronger the current. The transistor array can sense between 10 and 30 kilopascals of pressure, or about the sensitivity of a human fingertip. For example, says Zhong Lin Wang, one of the paper's coauthors, 20 kilopascals is approximately the pressure you'd use when typing on a computer keyboard.
US plan calls for more scanning of private Web traffic, email
The Department of Homeland Security will gather the secret data and pass it to a small group of telecommunication companies and cyber security providers that have employees holding security clearances, government and industry officials said. Those companies will then offer to process email and other Internet transmissions for critical infrastructure customers that choose to participate in the program.
“I never thought I’d see this go into humans, and now our discussions are about when and how,” he says. “I never thought I’d live to see the day, but now I think I will.”
In the Terminator series, John Connor and his mother fight to prevent Judgement Day, the moment when the computer system Skynet becomes self aware, decides humans are a threat and moves to wipe us out.
In the real world, we have our own version of Judgement Day called the Singularity and many can’t wait for it to come. Like in the Terminator, it is the moment when computers take over, but rather than killing us off, the machines enhance our capabilities.
They are going to enhance the ability of those in power to eradicate those whom they perceive to be a threat to their power. The machines will become just a massively improved dictator tool.
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
— Lord Melbourne —
They are going to enhance the ability of those in power to eradicate those whom they perceive to be a threat to their power. The machines will become just a massively improved dictator tool.
I am non-computable. As is most of the universe. You of course know what I want. But you never know what I'm going to do about it.
The trouble with machines that follow orders is that there are not enough rules to cover every situation and even if there were some of the rules would conflict. Then priorities of rules is needed. And the ability to change priorities based on the current situation. Things get unreliable very fast.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
Microwave transmission is much faster than other methods, which matters a great deal in modern, algorithm-accelerated high-frequency trading, in which price changes of fractions of a cent can be exploited by a fast algorithm to generate thousands of trades. Faster trading, and the ability to transmit those trades by ultra-fast microwaves, gives a company major competitive advantage. While this is just starting to take off on Wall Street, some firms are looking to bring it to international stock markets.
This video of a drone with a gun will freak you the h3ll out
If you were already feeling a little paranoid about drones, this video will put you into complete terror mode. It's a DiY drone with a gun. What could go wrong? Find out, in this slo-mo capture of a drone on a shooting rampage.
(CNN) -- Today, the United States is conducting offensive cyberwar actions around the world.
More than passively eavesdropping, we're penetrating and damaging foreign networks for both espionage and to ready them for attack. We're creating custom-designed Internet weapons, pre-targeted and ready to be "fired" against some piece of another country's electronic infrastructure on a moment's notice.
More reason to not trust software for critical operations if you can't inspect the source code for rotten "Easter Eggs".
The daylight is uncomfortably bright for eyes so long in the dark.
