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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
I'd be much more impressed if, rather than moving to seal a breach, they were capable of recognising the difference between enemy combatants and civilians who have wandered into the field (usually long after the war has finished).
It's official. Most of you are morons.
This is the list of the 40 countries that have not signed the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty as of 26 Apr 06. The 3 that have signed the treaty but not ratified are show in bold.
These signatory states have made a political commitment to joining the treaty, and they have a legal obligation not to take actions that would violate the treaty.
1. Armenia
2. Azerbaijan
3. Bahrain
4. Burma
5. China
6. Cuba
7. Egypt
8. Finland
9. Georgia
10. India
11. Indonesia
12. Iran
13. Iraq
14. Israel
15. Kazakhstan
16. Korea, North
17. Korea, South
18. Kuwait
19. Kyrgyzstan
20. Lao PDR
21. Lebanon
22. Libya
23. Marshall Islands
24. Micronesia
25. Mongolia
26. Morocco
27. Nepal
28. Oman
29. Pakistan
30. Palau
31. Poland
32. Russian Federation
33. Saudi Arabia
34. Singapore
35. Somalia
36. Sri Lanka
37. Syria
38. Tonga
39. Tuvalu
40. United Arab Emirates
41. United States
42. Uzbekistan
43. Vietnam
reads like a whos who of third world countries and banana republics, what good company USA keeps
if we could spend billions of dollars perfecting self-healing civilians. Maybe splice some lizard genes into them so they can regenerate their lost limbs...
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Microsoft has finally come up with a new feature to be packaged with the next version of the popular Microsoft Windows operating system, commonly known as "Windows Vista." Apparently, Microsoft plans to include a new game called "Minesweeper 2" with Vista. A Microsoft spokesman described it as "original Minesweeper, except now the mines can move around and stuff. Really, it'll be cool! We promise!"
The gaming community has had a divided response. One camp is not impressed with the new offering, and is quoted on their blog as saying, "Well, [expletive deleted] that! Where the [expletive deleted] is our [expletive deleted] Halo 2 for PC?" Other gamers were enthused about the new game, praising its innovative style and promise of quality gameplay. Says one independent reviewer, "Well, it will be here before Duke Nukem Forever, right?"
~ C.
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.
An old comment of mine from when someone mentioned this a few years ago:
> The mines decide as a group what configuration is best and then move to fill the gap.
I wonder how they go about deciding...
"Okay, Frank...hop over into that gap right there."
"Shit, no! Larry just got run over by a TANK! Did you see that shit? You hop into the gap, asshole!"
The goal of a minefield is not to be secret. It's supposed to be an obstacle which requires you know where it is.
I wrote about half the code for these mines (and we're slashdotted 5 years later...). I'm sure you'll be tickled to know they use Linux.
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!
Self terminating mines already exist in a much simpler version - a timed deactivation mechanism preset for the estimated end of conflict. The problem is that the failure rate, i.e., the failure to deactivate, is around 5%-10%. This makes it almost as good as nothing - would you want to plow a field knowing that "only" 10% of the original mines are still active? Cluster bomb bomblets, basically small touch-sensitive tactical mines, are even worse with an estimated failure-to-explode rate around 25%-30%. The only safe minefield is a non-existant one.
self-deactivating timers in a few months, with explosives that decay in a few years, and casings that bio-degrade in a few decades would be better. (for the winners)
Nah, costs too much.
"I'll take 100,000 dumb-mines for my $10mil, instead of only 50,000 'treehugger' mines"
Power to the Peaceful
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
There's an international ban on the use of bowling balls in any context in warfare. Don't you know about the great bowler rebellion of '03? :-P
Actually, "the fastest way to clear a minefield is to march troops over it" according to a famous WWII era russian commander.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
We already have ~way~ too many landmines, and way too many innocents being killed or disabled by them.
But its not American Innocents. Until a problem hits home, we tend to not care. What greenhouse gases? What oil shortage? Terrorism?
ROI today, not tomorrow, is the American Motto.
Case in point: A century ago, there were those who thought the airplane would make war obsolete because neither side would be able to plan attacks without the other side knowing. Then someone put a gun on a defensive plane to shoot down the reconnaisance planes. Then someone else put a gun on an offensive plane to shoot down the defensive planes. Then someone else said "To hell with reconnaisance; let's drop bombs on the enemy." ...and so on.
This strategy, while it means well, will probably lead to the development of anti-personnel land mines that attack approaching soldiers by homing in on the magnetic signature of their weapons... or the farm implement some poor soul is toting across the field after the war.
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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?
And while he does that, your artillery and tanks blow him up.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
Do the mines come with source code?
Imagine a Beowulf cluster... hey, wait, you have a self-healing Beowulf cluster!
Note to self: taunt NetBSD crowd about not having a "landmine" port.
Didn't Theo say something about OpenBSD being free to use for operating a baby mulching machine? Linux can do it!
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.