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Networked Landmines Work Together
crazedpilot writes "New landmines will soon communicate via a radio network, and move from place to place in order to be most effective." Termed the "self-healing minefield", the individual mines are capable of detecting an enemy breach and then moving to seal the gap.
These fucking mines HOP.
I swear I use the same things in Half-Life 2.
from the site though, the best part has to be:
Technical Support for your hopping mines!
I really want to know what happens when they run out of power though?
Are they inert or do they revert to a dangerous stepper?
The inert option would seem the best since they can be tended to for the duration of the war then afterwards no children will lose their legs or anything.
liqbase
They do reduce civilian casualties.
But first can I say: holy crap! I was one of the main software engineers on this project (heck I still have the source code on my laptop) but that was like 5 years ago. NOW we get slashdotted?
In any case, the story we got was: normally, anti-tank mines are surrounded by anti-personnel mines. Anti-tank mines have magnetic triggers and are (relatively) safe for people: they are vulnerable to simply being picked up and moved out of the way. So the anti-tank mines are surrounded by APLMs to prevent the enemy from trivially disabling the field.
APLMs are the nasty ones that kill kids decades later. So in an effort to reduce the number of APLMs deployed DARPA tried this crazy idea of making self-healing anti-tank mines. in other words, since the anti-tank mines can protect themselves by moving, the anti-personnel mines are no longer necessary. And the world gets a little better.
This was a heck of a project to work on. I got to FIRE ROCKETS! Under software control! Super cool.
How about when a hacker starts sending bad "mine blown" messages to the grid, making the mines reconfigure? Maybe they keep detonating off each other, maybe they start all hopping (with some nice navigational hacking) back towards the ones who deployed them?
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
People bring this up to explain the US refusing to sign the treaty but it's not really a valid point. The US could, if it wanted to, do numerous things:
1)Stop selling mines to other countries(!!!)
2)Stop using mines unilaterally, except at the DMZ in Korea
3)Negotiate a waiver for the DMZ field
The first and second options are no-brainers, the fact that the US has not done either of these and is in fact developing these new mines is utterly disgusting. We stand with the scum of the earth when we stand up for the use of mines.
The last option would involve some kind of quid pro quo where the US kicks in some significant capital for mine removal, but we have no money spending billions per week in Iraq and mine removal will save a LOT of people from dying or spending their lives horrifically disfigured. Of course this will never happen since the warmongers at DOD resist all restrictions on what toys they get to play with, from mines to nuclear bunker-busters to White Phosporous to Napalm... is it any wonder the world thinks so poorly of us?
I asked the same question; can't you just keep grabbing one at a time, wait for them to hop in, and clear it for you?
The answer was: the minefield is not designed to kill people, its purpose is to be an obstacle. The threat of deadly force, unfortunately, is required for it to be an effective obstacle. If you want to spend the next 6 hours fucking around with the minefield as if it's a toy while there's a war going on around you, you're not going to live long. A ranger who cleared mines for a living stopped by our demo site during one of our live-rocket demos and said, "If I saw this in the field I'd tell the unit to just mark it on the map and go around." Which is its purpose.
I'm not surprised, but still dismayed, at the "dude you're a monster!" venom that was unleashed at my original post. That's too bad. Was I uncomfortable with the project? Yes, a bit, and that was part of the reason I left the company. But I find it amusing that everyone on here claims to have such a clear-cut moral compass. "Don't work on anything that could possibly have a bad use" covers an awful lot of ground. Our SHM prototype used Linux; have you ever contributed to the kernel, and if so does that make you an accessory too? Why do you write open source software when some of it can, conceivably, be used for doing evil?
But even without that option, I guess those mines are much easier to find by just looking for their radio wave communication. After all, in order to cooperate, they have to transmit their location.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.