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Spy Fly
opencity writes "CNN (and AP) reports on the 'Spy Fly' project. "Biologists and technologists at the University of California, Berkeley have spent the past four years developing a tiny robot, called the Micromechanical Flying Insect, that they say will one day fly like a fly." Good technical stuff on the Cal Berkeley page. The Pentagon likes the idea for spying and battlefield deployment but their page has no info about weaponization or command / communication technologies."
Berkely researchers are close to actually getting their models to fly, but according to a source within the university, there were still some bugs to work out.
Actually, this is pretty damn cool, these things weigh less than 1/24th of a penny, have a wingspan of a quarter. The propulsion system on this thing is pretty interesting / amazing.
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The "bad guys" resort to ... this?
Once they perfect the fly, next it's ants, cockroaches etc.
Ants completely immune to insecticide, crawling into people's houses, looking and listening to everything happening in every room.
Ants crawling into keyboards and sensing keystrokes; into monitors and recording displays;
Insects in cars, flying around the sky, networking and collecting data.
Once the prototypes are worked out, and production is tooled up, it'll be viable to implement 100% surveillance of a entire resident populations.
Or, with extreme micromechanical advances, it'll be devices smaller than a human cell, resistant to human antibodies, that can enter via the nasal passages, travel through the bloodstream, sneak past the blood-brain barrier, and embed into various centres around the brain, including the speech centre. Thus such devices will have the ability to read a portion of human thought (the verbal compenent at least), encode verbal thoughts into a data stream, and use the brain's electricity to power a transmitter, sending the encoded thoughts out to external surveillance insects for collection into government databases.
George Orwell's coined word 'thoughtcrime' will take on a much more literal meaning.
This is one of the most frightening developments I've ever seen. The only thing that might hold it in check is an underground movement of people developing technological counter-measures.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
could be a great weapon once they figure out how to attach the big friggin' laser to it's head.
A long time ago they had a series of kid's science fiction books about a kid inventor named Danny Dunn, and one book, Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy was about a robotic dragonfly that could fly around and spy on people. He flew it with a helmet and gloves that foretold of modern virtual reality, because he could feel in his gloves whatever the dragonfly landed on. He ended up destroying it in fears the technology would land in the wrong hands and be used for sinister (Orwellian?) purposes. Anybody else remember reading this one?
Picture the Berkeley scientists, eyes glued to the monitor, excitedly following the maiden flight...
rrrrrRRRRRrrrrrrRRRRRRrrrrrr
Scientist: "Oooh, look at that!"
rrrrrRRRRRrrrrrrRRRRRRrrrrrr
Scientist: "Let's land over there."
Speaker: "Whadda..?"
rrrrrRRRRRrrrrrrRRRRRRrrrrrr
Speaker: "Damn bugs!"
rrrrrRRRRRrrrrrr SPLAT!
Speaker falls silent.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
Imagine a spy fly with a injection system which infects people with serious deseases like Hepatitis A/B/C or AIDS.
Goodbye, Mr. President/Chancellor/King/Gran Genernalissimo.
On the other hand the Mossad can use this system to take out these mad bombing bastards. (The CIA would as usual too lame to kill these retards.)
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
That you cannot invest all this money and effort, into destruction, without destroying the world as the result.
"CNN (and AP) reports on the 'Spy Fly' project. "Biologists and technologists at the University of California, Berkeley have spent the past four years developing a tiny robot, called the Micromechanical Flying Insect, that they say will one day fly like a fly." Good technical stuff on the Cal Berkeley page. The Pentagon likes the idea for spying and battlefield deployment but their page has no info about weaponization or command / communication technologies."
This basically means, like with the atomic bomb, the government is using technology for evil purposes.
Why do we need a 350-400 billion military budget yet only a 20 billion dollar school budget?
Please tell me what would happen, if I gave some monkeys, a button, and told the monkey not to push the little red button which ends the world, wait lets take it a step further, lets say I give this power to thousands, millions of monkeys.
How long until one of the monkeys pushes the button?
For scientific minds reading this, the second law of thermodynamics clearly explains in a very logical way, that unless humans are educated and evolve mentally as a whole, expect things to collapse, with technologies like this here, the atomic bomb, soon nano technology, just wait until it gets in the hands of bin laden, the next hitler, hell i wouldnt even trust these technologies in the hands of george bush or the average american.
So why are we busy creating technology after technology without educating people in how to responsibly use these technologies we create? Are we supposed to be proud of our technology which will be used to spy on millions of people, ruin millions of lives, get people killed etc?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Of course it should be weaponized. A little pincer or something of the kind, a tiny camera, some image recognizion software, and I could use it to hunt down those d****d mosquitoes. I sure could use one of those, following me everywhere!.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
crawling into people's houses, looking and listening to everything happening in every room
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I'm going to risk some karma here, and suggest you're barking up the wrong tree here:
surveilance devices allready exists, they are very cheap and use realy old-fashioned technology (remember Orwell's 1984 was written >60 years ago )
and to the extent the (any) goverment wants to control the ordinary people's lives they can allready do this technologically and financially.
IMHO, the issues of privacy and citizen-state relationship are not technological by nature, but are political issues, and technology rarely changes them.
the only possible exception to the above is of encryption technology. But as for being afraid of miniature mechanical bugs listening to our conversations / sexual activities / whatever I say nothing has changed. The goverment allready has practically indetectable bugs
so, contrary to common geek belief, technology will nither greatly help nor greatly impede you in your civil-rights struggle. It's not a technology issue.
but that's just my non-expert oppinion, lets wait and see
Working for necessity's mother.
No, it will run FlyBSD. Or FlyRIX. Maybe even BeeOS, but it was discontinued.
*runs*
Whats the good of having a well educated population that is unable to defend itself? Some power mad asshole decides "Oh boy! Suckers ripe for the plucking!"
Why do you assume that throwing money at schools will magicly cause students to become more intrested in learning than in the next album by their favorite band, or if their favorite team will make it to the Super Bowl, or if they can get some good pot this weekend, or if they will get a piece of ass or......
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
The USA responed to the Soviet attempt to outflank Nato through control of areas that were not part of the NATO alliance. Failure to respond to the threat of Soviet Imperlism would have been as suicidal as The UK and France's attempts at appeasing Hitler almost turned out to be.
Standing Idly by while a hostile state that has made it's intentions to amass enough power to overcome you clear is an incredible act of foolishness.
The USSR's policies started the Cold War. It's insistance on attempts to export it's form of government made ending it impossible.
The "end the Cold War" nonsense in the west was seldom anything other than a attempt to end any attempt to foil Soviet Imperalism without even pretending to ask for anything in return from the Soviet Union, and ammounted to a call for an abject surrender to an Expansionist Power.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est