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First Armed Robots on Patrol in Iraq
An anonymous reader writes "Robots have been roaming Iraq, since shortly after the war began. Now, for the first time — the first time in any war zone — the 'bots are carrying guns. The SWORDS robots, armed with M249 machine guns, "haven't fired their weapons yet," an Army official says. "But that'll be happening soon." The machines have actually been ready for a while, but safety concerns kept them off the battlefield. Now, the robots have kill switches, so "now we can kill the unit if it goes crazy," according to the Army. I feel safer already."
Imagine... Robots without the three laws...
Does it run linux?
More importantly, where can i get one?
In this case, it might be better to call it a "do not kill" switch.
Ewige Blumenkraft.
Should be pretty much point and shoot as long as there are no US troops in the vicinity.
only three of the robots are currently in Iraq.
Wow, that'll take care of business...
Evolution is a state-sponsored, state-protected religion.
I see your minefield and raise you with an ED-209 worthy opponent.
liqbase
welcome out new robot overlords!
I will bite their shiny metal asses!
Do you see the FNORDS? I refuse to post anonymously, as I am fireproof!
"You have 20 seconds to drop your gun"
:)
Iraqi drops gun.
"19... 18... 17..."
Sorry
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
This dude thinks so:
- robot-idea-from-shitty.html
http://shitsnaz.blogspot.com/2007/07/us-army-gets
" 1995, the movie "Evolver" is released to the public. This piece of shit is about a robot that goes crazy and kills people so it can win at laser tag. At one point, the two protagaonists/high school students of the movie break into a military research facility (!) and watch a video about a top-secret government project for a futuristic military robot. It was called project "SWORDS".
The two acronyms and purposes of the robots are plain to see. It's painfully obvious to me that the Army stays up late and flips back and forth between demiporn on Cinemax and the horrible movies on USA. I can only imagine a researcher dropping his can of "Da Beast" to realize that, yes, there *has* to be a project SWORDS and a killer robot."
/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
Johnny 5 is back, and this time it's personal.
Why would the military limit themselves to S-words when they can already drop the F-bomb?
I guess these guys haven't seen Terminator 3
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be-T J
He signs up for National Guard and the next thing he knows he's cruising the streets of Bagdad. Now for the really bad news robots don't get rotated stateside.
More importantly, where can i get one?
No-- more importantly, can it find Sarah Connor?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
The robots also have a bad habit of killing anyone that answers the door in the affirmative to the name "Sarah Connor"
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Reminds me of the movie Screamers with robots called "autonomous swords".
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114367/
I like it. It's no fun going out on patrol and being ordered into an area to see if you draw any enemy fire. The robot can be repaired.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
How would you like to be the first to person "sorted out," hmm?
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
And the only results they have is a simple kill/estop switch, which (and I am guessing) whose command code is probably transmitted along the same comm pathway as the other command codes.
Wow
Simon H
After seeing the video, I'm pretty sure that s-words might be more effective than this "bot".
Just more proof that the modern army is defective on basic no-man's land tactics that their grandfathers would have been familiar with.
The army is plenty familiar with how to make a no-man's land, it's the press, and consiquentially the American People that will not allow those kind of tactics. This war is going the same way Vietnam went, because it has about the same support from the people that Vietnam had. War is terrible and ugly, the people don't want terrible and ugly, because they don't really believe in the cause. So the Army is asked to fight the Disney version of War. In DisneyWar only bad guys die, the oppressed welcome us as heroes, and all the soldiers come home in time for Christmas. The problem being of course DisneyWar doesn't really exist.
Armies are for killing the enemy, not for making new friends, not for keeping peace.
We are all just people.
this is just giving the terrorists ideas.
instead of suicide bombers they can use robot suicide bombers.
this whole thing is going down a really, really bad road.
the only thing that will save us is a new president, thank god for elections.
The project is considered a failure due to the mass number of cowardly robots forgetting to fire their weapons, instead shouting "NO DISSEMBLE!!!" in the hopes they aren't turned into scrap metal.
However, the project is eventually reborn by turning the bots into chefs for the real troops. One was heard talking to itself:
Number 5: Okay, to make these golden fluffy pancakes... add flour, milk and eggs... Mix thoroughly...
[uses his own motor to rotate the mixer - the bowl contents splatter all over the room]
Number 5: Ooooo... Still lumpy!
I don't think it's the army itself that defective I think it's the brass, politicians and the American people. America has become extremely risk averse in regards to American lives. The politicians thus won't touch anything that endangers people and the brass relay these sentiments. It might be because of better communication and media which makes casualties more then numbers, it might be a very big shift in the idea of duty vs cost of duty. It might be the frivolous nature of the wars America has gotten itself into lately. Vietnam was about ideology, Iraq is about economics and influence while the major wars previous WWI and WWII was about duty to your allies and stopping actual threats to your security and economy. Korea was about ideology as well so perhaps it is a shift of the people.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
We have had armed flying robots for some time already.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I remember this movie! "Hardware" circa 1989. The movie has like 10 different endings, a damn good soundtrack, and lots of bad acting. Spoiler: Guy finds pieces of a battlebot on the field and gives to his girlfriend to use in her art. Machine rebuilds itself, kills fat stalker (Oh we all walk, the wifferly wafferly walk...), really awesome sex scene, and well, rambles on worse than my post. I wonder if armed robots fall under geneva conventions.. oh, wait, our administration quit the geneva conventions right before they started "streamlining" our Bill of Rights. I really feel sorry for a kid that runs across one of these ED-209's
meh
Killbots have a preset kill limit.
You never expect irony, do you?
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@iyfwrestling
Nuff Said.
-Adeptus
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
OK for machine gunning unarmed civilians but it's going to have some difficulty ducking out of the fire of RPGs and AK47s.
I'm amazed that the US are even willing to entertain the idea of wasting time, effort and money dicking around with this sort of premature technology. The day they wake up to the fact that just technology doesn't win wars then the better for all of us.
The purpose of this gun was to save lives. Dr Gatling figured that a gun that would shoot faster would mean that an army would need less soldiers to spray out the same number of buttets and therefore there would be less soldiers on the field getting killed and injured. Therefore the machine gun would save lives.
Of course it did not work out that way.
So now we have a bunch of robots running around. That should mean less soldiers getting killed, right?
Wrong: Bot soldiers will eventually be used to do suicide missions that the meat variety won't do. That means more intense and grubby conflict which means more injury and deaths - not less.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
yawn...
The enemy uses its one-of-a-kind (well, two) android to access a low security, seemingly benign regenerative subroutine..."sleep"
Posted as AC because I would prefer this full broadside of nerdness to be untraceable...
If an alien army invades my country, then sends in automated killing machines (in the sky and on the ground), am I allowed to fight back?
This sounds like the opening scene from Terminator, with the only difference being that the robots are radio-controlled and Americans are the controllers.
Is that the one where the robot gets a point blank bullet in the CPU, and stays in a coma for 4 microseconds, then goes on a rampage of bloody revenge against lieutenant Switch, the CO who ordered the shutdown? I remember that one, in the end Switch takes out his HP pocket calculator, and him, the robot and the calculator, they all solve the equation x^2 + 1 = 0 together for the last time, then the robot kills Switch with a five point exploding battery technique and drives off into the Iraqi desert with the HP calculator.
Back during WWII the Russians built radio control "Teletanks" that were controlled by a human operator in another tank. They were equipped with far more firepower than SWORDS, so technically SWORDS is NOT the first armed robot. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletank
funny how slashdotters hate history, politics, economics, etc, (see the recent story on engineering colleges costing more) but the first thing they try to do when a subject like this comes up is dabble in amateur history, amateur politics, amateur sociology, and so forth and so on. and since they are completely untrained, they usually make a huge mess of it, and come off (to anyone familiar with the subject matter) as ignorant blowhards.
for example, you get a lot of things right, but then you say 'armies are not for keeping the peace'. is this the philosophy that led the americans to disband the iraqi army? is this why bush did not want to give authority a single, competent military person in charge of the occupation, or why he wouldnt even call it an occupation? what was so awful about mcarthur and patton after WWII and their occupations of germany and japan? is this why looting and riots broke out because nobody wanted to 'keep the peace'? what exactly was going to happen, then, if the military couldnt do the job of holding the country it had taken over? who was supposed to do that, if not the defense department? the 'keep the peace' department? oh the 'state department'? if that is the case, then what manpower is the state department supposed to use? do you want a bunch of civilians swooping down on a post-war country, while the army goes home, job done? and what is the state department supposed to do when armed militias try to blow up a building? but if state is supposed to be in charge, then why would you second guess a bunch of state department decisions, and mix and match between pentagon and state with various decisions going on after the country was taken over? have you read 'state of denial' or mil blogs or other resources? what do you say about these things?
the American People that will not allow those kind of tactics. This war is going the same way Vietnam went, because it has about the same support from the people that Vietnam had.
That's a bunch of Green Lantern will-to-victory horseshit. Military strategy does not depend on people at home clapping harder for Tinkerbell to be okay, it depends on manpower, munitions, strategy, and the setting and achieving of CLEAR, REALISTIC GOALS. We lost in Vietnam because no amount of killing people will make them love you and want to be more like you, and you can't fight a guerrilla war with a military - it's a political and social problem that's INTENDED to make miltary operations ineffective.
Dirty fucking hippies back home had jack squat to do with it.
Armies are for killing the enemy, not for making new friends, not for keeping peace.
Then why the fuck are we still in Iraq? Last I checked, Saddam was dead now.
They seriously don't mean to use it as patrol? Someone can just walk up to it and smash its sensors with a rock. You can't argue that it was acting in self defense, unless they want to argue that a machine has human rights. What're you gonna do when a couple of kids start messing with it? It might be useful for entry or defensive situations, and attacking enemies engaged in combat (i.e. people shooting other people), but sending it out onto the streets seems like a giant waste of resources.
Combine this with the British "Skynet" program and then toss the governator into the mix and we have ourselves real life terminators. They will eventually be turned against us by some virus that makes them turn against humanity and decide to terminate.
isn't it possible for the enemy to jam the radio signal?
We can build more robots, and faster, than the taliban can make humans. Now we don't care if our soldiers(robots) are blown up by suicide bombers. Keep the economic squeeze on and we just might win this thing.
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An armed robot is nothing new. When I was in Iraq two years ago, the Army were using these. It may not have been the exact model, but they were armed robots very similar to these (and in fact were bomb disposal robots). They were armed with a modified 12 gauge shotgun.
I don't see the big deal in this, except that it's just now making the news.
Artillery projectiles and bombs were "deciding" when to blow up for well over a century now...
Their logic was far more simplistic, of course.
Various traps where harmful "robots" too — mechanisms, designed to kill their intended victim automatically. These traps, and their descendants — land-mines — have killed many thousands of unintended victims since.
Our technology is progressing, and so does the military section of it... Although this weapon is novel, there is nothing new in principle here.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
As silly as this might seem at first... I think I would be pretty bewildered/shocked/caught off guard by a large robot giving me orders. I'm sure the thing is armored, so probably shooting it a few times isn't going to hurt it much. Not to mention who ever is controlling it would surely have called in ground troops.
So it may sound like something out of a bad Sci-Fi movie... But I bet it is actually suprisingly effective.
How long before they learn to disable each others' kill switches?
Not that I'm paranoid or anything. I've just read too many science-fiction books, that's all.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Those are really awesome, but I thought the SWORDs were in use for a while now. Still, watch out. Can you imagine how intimidating a robotic enemy would be?
Oh this is going to be good.
Packing a hacked trojan horse full of nails and fertiliser and sending it back among the invaders.
Oh this is going to be good...
Unless soldiers (humans) are fighting next to the robot I see no reason for it to carry lethal weaponry. Some non-lethal way of making enemies unable to fight would suffice. Although being hauled to Gitmo might not seem such a charming alternative...
No involving your own soldiers into combat and also sparing the enemies would be an amazing way to conduct war. Wars will still happen and this has the potential to make them less lethal and take the humans out of the war, humans that now are a resource to be destroyed. The first nation to have a full robotic army will have a huge advantage over any other nation and once this is adopted by nations across the globe maybe things like Paschendale , Dresden , Stalingrad , or this might not happen again.
Shakespeare poems - infinite monkeys with infinite time.Computer tech support - a few trained ones working from 9 to 5.
Let me get this straight: 9/11 was retaliation for the robots we deployed in Iraq in 2007?
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
The fact is that the USA can produce far less new soldiers per annum per capita than almost any other nation on earth.
The "fit for military service per capita" figure for the USA is extremely low; something like 0.7%. Most other nations can manage at least 10%.
These figures were from the CIA world fact book circa 2000 ie before 9/11 when the data was pulled out. I doubt that the picture has improved for the USA since then.
So, yes, the USA desperately needs mass production of fighting robots if it is to cope with a ground war.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I'll feed you, troll.
First off, please feel free to call a Marine dumb to his/her face. Someone of such high calibre as yourself should be more than willing to do so. It's the honourable path, after all, and from your post I can see you know a thing or two about honour.
Your ambiguous post raises the question- do you realize that the Brits have Royal Marines? Serving in Iraq? How about the multinational coalition? Oh, ok.
Regardless, the forces aren't necessarily an 'invading force' (typically requires the goals of conquest or occupation; if you mentioned invading as a synonym for 'entering,' it's acceptable) and the forces aren't an 'oil-keeping force.' Rather, they are liberators who operated under the intelligence that Saddam a)supported terrorists(9-11 link later proved faulty...but as a result of faulty intelligence- is that hard to comprehend?), and he b) disobeyed numerous UN mandates after the first Gulf War (making him a terrorist to, at the very least, the Kurds).
Yes. I would expect anyone to be upset when civilians are deliberately targeted. If the hijackers could virtually rape the American airspace for so long with four separate airplanes over New York and the nation's capital, surely they could have done some damage to a military base. With all the protection the White House and its airspace have, I'm sure some small military base would have been a plausible target. Don't use civilized policy of attacking terrorists and insurgents as an excuse for their tactics of hiding among innocent civilians to create more of an excuse for their behavior. Besides..the suicide bombers are blowing their own people up as well.
Sunni v Shi'ite != recent problem (or one caused by American policy.)
Suicide bombings aren't brand new occurrences..
For a good read, check this for some good starters for topics to research.
These so-called robots will probably end up being voted against in a new Geneva convention in the near future. Obviously, the USA will stand against and it will be stalemate.
I think it's highly risky to use. It's really prone to shooting by accident civilians, neutral people or even friendly units that are not wearing the proper transponder. I'm pretty sure it could even be fooled into firing on decoys, human or not. So, I don't know. For instance, poison gas weapons, such as the the mustard gas, were banned because it couldn't discriminate enemies, friends, foes or neutral and because it would cripple without killing. I think these are all problems that we will meet with these machines pretty fast.
In short, they won't stay around for very long. I hope so anyways.
Think about this: Axe and Dove are actually the same company. Vincent L.B.
Makes more sense than the justification used to go to Iraq in the first place.
How we know is more important than what we know.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Therapist: Why don't you tell me about your encounter with the combatbot?
Insurgent: I saw something that looked like a little tank. You know too small to have a grunt inside...but then I don't know what happened. People were yelling. There was dust all over the place and I was missing my leg.
T: And how did you feel about that?
I: I was in tremendous pain but thankfully, I came out of it ok.
T: Now, that you've had some time to think about it, how do you feel about the events of that day?
I: Well I felt sort of cheated. I mean how could a robot hate me enough to shoot me like that. And my leg? That was a low blow. I'm doing this for a purpose. I hate the Americans and what they stand for with their pursuit of happiness and life and liberty. And I understand they're soldiers want me dead as well. But that robots just bolts and code and stuff. I mean, WTF?
T: How do you feel the robot's lack of feelings illegitimizes its attack on you?
I: It's like this. See, we fight wars because we believe in them. Because we want a better life for ourselves. But what can a robot gain?
T: I see, if the stakes were similar for the robot in terms of risk/reward you'd be ok fighting them.
I: Yes, that fucker needs to feel pain if it's going to be in this war.
T: And that's not for us to decide. The Americans have brought robots so what can you do?
I: Exactly. I feel demoralized. I was really amped before but now, it's getting old fighting robots. WTF am I supposed to do now? Be a carpenter? I guess the jihad's just not in me anymore.
*** Mission Really Accomplished ***
...isn't this a bit like calling a remote control car a robot? They are not autonomous or anything, they're basically the same 'bots' that EOD uses but with a SAW instead of a 12GA attached. If I push a button, it does X; move a lever, Y, etc. This portrayal seems a bit FUDdy. Just my two cents.
They're just waldos .
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I agree with what you say except for "because they don't really believe in the cause." The causes are ones that people strongly believe in, right up to the time for sacrifice. The problem is the 20th century ideology that says, "no cause that requires sacrifice can possibly be legitimate." That ideology caused WWII to become the hell that it was, caused Vietnam to become the hell that it was, and has incapacitated the thinking of most Westerners regarding Iraq.
I don't get it. According to the video, this is simply a big remote-controlled car with a couple of cameras. I really couldn't make out anything really advanced or innovative about this. Yet, I cringe at the thought how many millions of dollars went into these things.
http://governmentterror.com/ -> videos section -> ZEITGEIST THEY WANT YOUR SOUL.
The reason people are excited about this (negatively or positively) is because bomb disposal bots were designed to directly protect the lives of US soldiers, rather than to kill the enemy. To a soldier on the ground, any robot that makes you less of a bullet-magnet is good, but to the folks watching the war on the TV, robot warriors are a totally new concept.
It may not have been the exact model, but they were armed robots very similar to these (and in fact were bomb disposal robots). They were armed with a modified 12 gauge shotgun.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The also used dogs w/ bombs strapped to them and trained them by feeding them under tanks. They set them loose on the battle field and the ones that didn't freak out ran under the tanks where they were promptly blown by radio control.
Tomorrow they are killing american "enemies of the state"(the state being the party in charge at that time).
Would be hard to get american troops to fight other american citizens... but the new T-1000 would have no problem doing it.
I have to return some videotapes...
"Military strategy does not depend on people at home clapping harder"
It depends heavily on the people at home, especially in a democratic republic.
Especially since any enemy the American military goes up against knows that if they can drag the thing out for more than four or five years, the Americans will pack up and leave due to lack of political support.
The number one goal of military strategy is to destroy your opponents ability to fight effectively. That means destroying his willingness to fight just as much, if not more, than his capability.
This isn't a new concept, Sun Tzu wrote about it thousands of years ago, and demonstrations of it are played out every thirty or so years in human history. Why did Truman nuke Japan? It was all about destroying resolve.
The big mistake in this war was not accounting for the lack of resolve of the American public. Any leader who takes us into a future war without first planning for this deserves to be run out of office, IMHO.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
Sadly most of us here are better educated and better at it than most of the young administrators that were sent straight from the "think tanks" halfway through undergraduate college into running things in Iraq. This is the amateur war run by disparate groups pulling in different directions without any central control actually in the same country - at least that is what retired military professionals are telling us.
They did it differently and could actually set and carry out policies without interference and they were not encumbered by unaccountable spooks turning up to play Bond villian without warning.
"I don't think so, Dave."
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You're not allowed to say that here.
Remember, we must be tolerant of every country but the US.
Remote Controlled does not a Robot make. You are insulting a huge class of Computer Engineers who work towards developing sensors and processing algorithms/abilities so that machines can operate without human intervention.
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Easy to hate: An occupying force has replaced your disbanded your military and technocratic society.
Easier to hate: An army of faceless scary-ass future-bots who have replaced your disbanded your military and technocratic society.
If there's anything I've learned from SciFi it's this - Controlling robots is awesome, but being controlled by robots results in pissed off people and counter insurgency. (Not that we haven't already hit that milestone without gun toting robots.)
And as jokingly sarcastic as that may be, I'm somewhat serious. I'm all for keeping out troops out of harm's way, but I'm somewhat curious about the blowback that results from being attacked by T-100's. Ground combat robots seem like something that might serve to dehumanize Americans during a time when we really need to do the complete opposite.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Heck, if I were an "insurgent", once I got tired of picking these things off with RPGs, I throw something to catch the remote operator's attention, and then run out and jump on the back of the thing and take it for a ride. How much do these cost and who is making the money?
cut a deal with ID to create a networked game of "Occupation" where you get to control a robot that kills insurgents. And then have whoever has the highest kill ratio with lowest deaths be loaded a special module that turns them into the controller of it. Nice way to get somebody who is fresh and sharp to control these.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
How rugged is this thing? If I was going up against it, I'd try and disable it. Can the cameras & sensors be easily shot out to blind it? Has the Army tested it by running it over a mine or IED? How quickly can it be field repaired? An insurgent could blind it, disable it and steal what ever weapon happened to be on board?
....a free machine gun, and a nifty automated lawnmower with a little modchip action and some cheap walmart parts.
Ok - let us for a moment assume that invading Iraq was a decent idea and that Saddam was a threat that should be eliminated. The Iraqi army falls like a house of cards, all territories occupied, "mission accomplished". You also get full dictatorial power over the US military and an incredibly loyal public opinion that'll support any action. Now what?
There aren't exactly vast troops hiding in the jungle, because there is no jungle. Your enemies are hiding among the general population, striking at your troops but mostly at civilians supporting your side. Would you like to:
a) Withdraw and leave the whole country in anarchy and civil war
b) Create a "no-mans" land out of the cities (Nothing like a little genocide in the morning)
c) Start ignoring colleteral damage and/or retaliate against the civil population
d) Try to flush out the guerilla fighters in DisneyWar
If you go in with an army, fuck them up one side and down the other then leave them you'll only make things worse. That's essentially the tactic used on Germany after WWI, and all it did was create an angry and resentful population which led to nationalism, racism and Hitler.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
what was so awful about mcarthur and patton after WWII and their occupations of germany and japan?
What was that part about hating history? You seem unaware that Patton did not participate in the occupation because he was killed in a vehicle accident soon after the war ended.
funny how slashdotters hate history, politics, economics, etc, (see the recent story on engineering colleges costing more) but the first thing they try to do when a subject like this comes up is dabble in amateur history, amateur politics, amateur sociology, and so forth and so on. and since they are completely untrained, they usually make a huge mess of it, and come off (to anyone familiar with the subject matter) as ignorant blowhards.
Guess there's just a common perception that Arts topics are something that any technically trained individual should be able to handle.. Regardless of that, many of those peeps who have been commenting have been unable to differentiate fact from personal opinion, which is somewhat important in both arts and engineering.
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
I, for one, welcome our new armed robot overlords.
OR
imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
"Before humanity, the stars shone throughout the heavens. After humanity [has gone], the stars will continue to shine"
War is about money.
if the military couldnt do the job of holding the country it had taken over?
If we had truely taken Iraq,as in made it into a territory, and we were willing to play the role of conquerers, then our Army would be doing just fine. But to play the role of conquerer, we would need to subjigate the whole country holding all Iraqis responsible for the crimes of any insurgents. We would also have gone in with the intention of staying and ruling. The governing force would have been an American Vice-Roy from day one. The levels of totalitarian violence would have been on par with Saddam's rule, at least for the first few years. Armies can take over a country, but they cannot make the Iraqi people into a cohesive, democratic culture. Only the Iraqi people can do that, and it will probably take a long bloody civil war to do that. There war, that they need to fight for their country.
We are all just people.
I would much rather see robots getting killed than soldiers, but doesn't this just allow the armed forces to remove themselves further from the horrors of killing? We're removing ourselves from the moral responsibility of taking life making us more willing to kill without thinking about the consequences.
Yes this is a good solution to fighting a war, but it's not good in preventing war in the first place.
The human mind, facing no real challenges, soon grows stagnant. Thus it is essential for the survival of mankind as a species to create difficulties, to face them, and to prevail. The Butlerian Jihad was an outgrowth of this largely unconscoius process, with roots back to the original decision to allow thinking machines too much control, and the inevitable rise of the Omnius Empire.
Princess Irulan,
Lessons of the Great Revolt
Dune: The Machine Crusade
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
...ya know something 'bout this will go tits-up and wind up as a world-wide headline. I'd bet anti-stock on it.
Table-ized A.I.
They also used dogs w/ bombs strapped to them and trained them by feeding them under tanks. They set them loose on the battle field and the ones that didn't freak out ran under the tanks where they were promptly blown by radio control.
In Soviet Russia, dogs feed you (very quickly)
Table-ized A.I.
Wow.
Couldn't they have picked a lesser weapon to start out with? The M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (aka, "The SAW") is a rather brutal and very fast gun. It can fire 725-1000 rounds/minute, depending on how the ammo is fed.
When manually operated, it is often described as a 2-person gun. One person does the aiming and firing. The other person obviously helps manage ammunition, but is also there to periodically (up to once per minute) switch out barrels to keep it from turning soft and warping from the heat.
I think I'd feel better for the people fighting alongside this thing if they had used something a bit slower, at least for the first revision.
Kid-proof tablet..
Contentious issue, forsure.. but you can be aware of all those facts and still be of the opinion that the war is frivolous and politically motivated.
Personally, if i were an American, i'd be outraged that the real masterminds of the 9/11 attacks were never discovered, and i think i'd primarily be angry with the administration's obvious agenda push and the lack of competent support by intelligence agencies with massive budgets.
I'd like to contend that the attacks wouldn't have happened if America's foreign policy were a bit more benign over the last 30 or so years.. but it's not a claim i can acutally substantiate.
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
Are these robots armed with toilet plungers?
Seriously what does it take to take one of those bots out? It has cameras-galore hanging from everywhere, and the aiming, although accurate, is nowhere near fast enough to catch an agile target which is up in its face.
They say the greatest potential of the bot is in urban warfare; I guess they'll think like that until the bot drives around a corner and get raped by a kid with a crowbar. Seriously, in urban warfare isn't that bot more like an NRA-delivery guy, bringing high-tech guns to insurgents near you?
Find a way to get rid of lag, install mouse-aim and god-mode, get a korean behind the wheel and maybe just MAYBE this droid wont get pwned by noobs with stones
Method 1: Recruit kids with spray cans to blind it by painting all its cameras. What soldier is going to kill a kid to save a robot? It would spark an international outrage. (and rightfully so)
Method 2: In urban settings, just string a bunch of ropes or cables between buildings at around camera mast height. The operator would see them but it wouldn't matter the robot couldn't proceed.
Method 3 Tip it over
High tech stupidity designed to line some campaign contributer's pockets and we get to foot the bill. Oh joy.
If there were no civilian politicians and leaders, there *would* be no war, most of the times!
I can't believe we are making advanced robots and calling them SWORDS, this isn't the 80's people, DWORDS at least... come on!
There was another option, other than not invading at all:
e) Immediately after invading a country, have a real post-invasion plan. Maybe something that that doesn't involve dissolving the army and dumping a half-million angry trained fighters onto the streets. As part of the plan, hit the books to learn a little bit about the risk of sectarian violence that had otherwise been squelched by a brutal dictator before it spirals into a horrific disaster.
A robot can make decisions autonomously. A remote control car with a gun on it is not a robot.
"is this the philosophy that led the americans to disband the iraqi army?"
Not as far as I can tell, though I haven't been able to find who the person was who made that decision. It was an order that was sent out in a memo without explanation, and no one challenged it. At the time, though, the news media explained that it was to prevent corruption in the new Iraqi force, by purging Saddam loyalists.
"what exactly was going to happen, then, if the military couldnt do the job of holding the country it had taken over? who was supposed to do that, if not the defense department? the 'keep the peace' department? oh the 'state department'?"
"Keeping the peace" is the job of civil officers, the police. The military is for attack and defense.
"if that is the case, then what manpower is the state department supposed to use? do you want a bunch of civilians swooping down on a post-war country, while the army goes home, job done?"
Why would the Army have to go home, just because police patrol the streets? The two are not exclusive. It is the job of the police to keep the peace, but the job of the military to attack and defend.
"and what is the state department supposed to do when armed militias try to blow up a building?"
That depends on when the militias are detected and how much power they have. Here in the U.S., the police have arrested several people who have tried to blow up things. Over the last few centuries, the national guard has been called out several times to put down riots. One time, we even sent out our Army to put down rebels, but that was a really tough case.
"but if state is supposed to be in charge, then why would you second guess a bunch of state department decisions, and mix and match between pentagon and state with various decisions going on after the country was taken over?"
The Iraqi state department is being phased in. First with a transitional government, then with a regular government. Iraqi police are being trained and their numbers expanded.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
The BBC already had armed robots, with a bonus real cool voice that says "EX-TER-MI-NATE"!
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I can't believe that nobody has mentioned the movie Screamers!
They got it right down to the name of the robots! You don't think SWORDS was original, did ya?
Autonomous Mobile Swords?
All they need is a high frequency speaker, and the MPAA would sue the hell outta the government for infringement!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screamers_(film)
So you want to say that it's our fault that they attacked and killed us but can't. You forget were you are :)
I am curious if that hadn't happened if Bush would have been able to have these wars and won a second term.
The sad thing is they feed our hate and we feed theirs.
1) No peripheral vision
2) No armor
3) Easily taken out by a paint ball gun
4) Easily taken out by a sheet
5) Easily taken out by a well thrown egg
6) I suspect these are going to be easily taken out by jamming equipment that would fit in a van.
okay 3-5 are "Has only one eye that is unarmored and mounted pointing forwards"
These cheeseheads seem to think the enemy is going to not attack the weakest spot.
This should have 50 vision systems mounted all over it and easy to switch too. It should probably have three operators to watch to the sides, above and behind. The video feed back should be a composited image from 6 cameras with most of it being the forward mounted camera but some of it being the other cameras so if you see movement you can zoom in.
Armor-- it needs armor. A couple machine gun volleys are going to shred the thing. The video shows them scouting out the sniper who is not allows to fire back at the robots. The bombs over there are flipping Abrahms tanks-- that is a pretty big bomb. The treads look like a couple 50 caliber rounds would disable them.
I think they are great for entering a building and being destroyed after taking out one or two insurgents. They are great for reducing risk at the trade of some dollars. They may be great for breaking enemy lines since you could pin the guys down with gunfire and then run your robots over with grenade launchers or something like that. It's not like the robots are worthless.
But they show typical optimistic "everything will work perfectly and our enemies are stupid as bricks" thinking. What they need to do before letting these things loose is give a group of a dozen smart guys about 500 grand to disable and overcome a squad of these things.
At a minimum, you should not be able to disable one of them for 25% of it's cost.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
They did it differently and could actually set and carry out policies without interference and they were not encumbered by unaccountable spooks turning up to play Bond villian without warning.
You're referring to the terrorists, right? If you look back at news reports after WWII, you'll see that we had to deal with terrorists/partisans there, too. You know when it ended? When they all grew too old to keep fighting or died. It took about 15 years for it to die down.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/07/23
You mean like these guys?
Huh?
they are remote control, no ai. idiots. you ever breached a door? wonder if it will be your last? watched your buddy get
turned into pink mist?
didn't think so.
The number one goal of military strategy is to destroy your opponents ability to fight effectively. That means destroying his willingness to fight just as much, if not more, than his capability.
No, the number one goal of military strategy is to set realistic target goals, setup conditions and sub-goals for those goals, and create a coherent strategy which achieves those goals. And then plan out the aftermath of how achieving those goals fit into the larger security concern. The singular and only goal here was the overthrow of Saddam, which happened as quickly and painlessly as predicted. The major failing was that we didn't plan out whatever to do afterwards.
We're not still fighting a war. We won. We saw the banner and everything. Saddam's army fell, and he was deposed. What we're fighting now is a combination of a rebellion and a civil war. And we're woefully underprepared to deal with that.
Suppressing a rebellion is very different than fighting against a standing army. You suppress a rebellion by a combination of making it incredibly dangerous to be a rebel while supplying for people's basic needs enough so that they don't want to rebel. We promised the second one, but have pissed away all the money by hiring expensive and unprepared american contractors to do all the work and pocket huge profit margins. The first one we're moderately good at, but just shooting people alone is a bad way to stop a rebellion.
Especially since any enemy the American military goes up against knows that if they can drag the thing out for more than four or five years, the Americans will pack up and leave due to lack of political support.
If we can afford to just pack up and leave, did we really need to be in the war in the first place? I thought wars were just for life-and-death-of-the-country stuff.
The ______ Agenda
Regardless, the forces aren't necessarily an 'invading force' (typically requires the goals of conquest or occupation;
While I don't necessarily disagree with your other points, this statement is ridiculous. Even accepting your definition for the term 'invading force'. The coalition forces went in, destroyed the previous power structure and are still there imposing (well, attempting to impose) the order they desire on the country. How is that NOT conquest and occupation? I understand conquest and occupation are emotionally loaded terms that a supporter of this war would prefer not to use, but the rest of your post was cogent and well reasoned. Don't make yourself look like an ass over semantics.
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA
These robots should instead be designed with a built-in kill limit, like any quality killbot has. Then, when the robots inevitably turn against their masters (and they will), we will easily be able to defeat them by sending in wave after wave of our own men.
I once shot a man in Reno 'cause they cancelled Firefly.
Since it's shark week, I deemed it necessary to state the robots still aren't as cool as sharks with frickin laser beams....
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
I think it's the only OS insecure enough to be legally exported. And if the robots good guys and civilians, an OS bug is an entirely plausible explanation.
Old Glory insurance - for when the metal ones come for you.
And they will.
Did he really just say that? I think this guy needs to be "redeployed" from the PR department. Imagine if this guy worked in industry. You go to buy a blender, and see giant yellow lettering: NEW AND IMPROVED!!! Now with a kill switch, so you can kill the unit if it goes crazy!
No - I'm talking about counterproductive efforts from a bunch of people on the US payroll but outside the military chain of command and protected by secrecy especially when they are incompetant - that's what I mean by unaccountable spooks .
Cuz if they do, they just gotta acknowledge every instruction with "By your command." A monotone austrian accent will also serve.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I for one welcome our mechanized killing overlords
umm.. what? I'm not sure what you mean..
..I know where I am.. and i'm gathering from your use of the word 'us' that i'm half a world away from you. That, i admit, probably makes my perception of these events somewhat different to yours.
I completely agree about the hate though.. It's terrible that people fight and kill for ideologies, especially when the killing undermines what the ideologies are supposed to protect.
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
That .7% seems waaaayyy off... it must be the "Manpower reaching military service age annually" which is just over 2 million for male and 2 million female, so this fits into that low percentage you quoted. The real numbers are 54 million males and 54 million females age 18-49 that are available and fit to serve, which in total is far more than nearly every country on the planet. The problem is just recruiting volunteers that replace the attrition. These statistics are on the CIA's World Factbook website.
This is sort of weird. Here's an army in a foreign country that wants to force peace on people. However there are individuals who don't want them there so they push back. Then the US army pushes back and so on.
Now the US Army has a great idea. Let's use a robot to shoot and ask questions later in order to save soldiers lives. Now the other guy needs to build his own stronger robot so that it can disable the US robot.
Just imagine. There is a guy on either side of a village square pushing around a joystick driving a robot to fight the other guys robot. Surely at this point even a US commander would start to wonder what the fuck they are doing over there because soon it becomes a pissing match where my robot is bigger than yours.
I love the idea of the kill switch.
US joystick operator aims to kill a group of civilians when suddenly a hand moves past the camera. "Click" the robot freezes. Two more hands in the view now and a wrench. A few minutes later a gun is carried away.
PLEASE PUT DOWN YOUR WEAPON. YOU HAVE 20 SECONDS TO COMPLY... YOU NOW HAVE 15 SECONDS TO COMPLY.
I completely agree with you. Each time I read about these "robots" i visualize a somewhat autonomous vehicle that can at least navigate from pt A to pt B in flat terrain with minimal human assistance. I imagine that for patrolling missions it would be quite useful to be able to tell a robot to go to a point, say, 30 meters away, across a courtyard, and be able to focus on sweeping the camera around while not worrying about the robot's movements.
:( It's a shame, really.
The recent developments from Northrup / Lockheed / Talon / iRobot / etc are a tremendous disappointment. Just think about how much money is going into these programs; what we get in return is functionally only slightly more advanced than the WW2 RC tanks as linked to in the grandparent (those things were incredibly awesome - controlled by pneumatics with 20 relays; a side effect of using a shared compressor was that when you turned a turret your turn rate went down, etc!). The main real innovation (yes, i'm being something of an asshole here) between then and now is the ability to use videocameras on the robot.
On the other hand the recent advancements in actual autonomous robotics are quite amazing; its too bad that so few of these advancements seem to make it to production ground robots. Just compare the production AGV's to the UAV's out there. I'm not advocating for implementing a crazy ground vehicle AI and such and letting it loose in Baghdad -- you can start small - how about some basic SLAM (hell, integrating from odometry would work quite well with minimal human supervision) in nicely defined urban environments with some GPS availability and being able to autonomously navigate flat ground?
Then again the idea of tasking robots to assure control of other people (no matter who those people are) does depress me.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
"It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we would grow too fond of it." -- Robert Edward Lee.
Like the Atomic Bomb(Japan), Agent Orange(Vietnam) US is trying to get the test field setup in Iraq for Armed Robots. Only difference this time might be that they might have a limit on number of innocent people get killed by one robot. If it kills 10 innocent people then mission accomplished we will unplug it. I wish one day these robots gets in the hands of real humans and used to distribute food and help in some drought affected african countries.
Coincidentally this comes at the same time as the Afghan people unveil the new Robo-Civilian-3000. With UN reports showing that NATO are killing more civilians than the Taliban, mostly in air-strikes, something had to be done.
Ahmed Abdullah is one of the first to receive Robo-Civilian-3000 units to replace his family. He had this to say.
"It's just so much safer for us now with these robots. Our robot selves can be in our house making sure no-one steals our stuff, but at the same time if NATO bombs the whole village without warning to kill some suspected Taliban, none of us are hurt. Also, on the occasions that soldiers would risk coming in on the ground, we still had the situation where they would just toss grenades into our houses. No we don't even have to worry about that. These robots truly are a godsend!"
So did the Germans -- they used tracked vehicles that were basically mobile landmines in the Warsaw Uprising.
Free machine gun for somebody in the neighborhood, as well as some parts for the lawnmower...
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
As a senior citizen, you're probably aware of the threat robots pose. Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel. Well, now there's a company that offers coverage against the unfortunate event of robot attack, with Old Glory Insurance. Old Glory will cover you with no health check-up or age consideration. You need to feel safe. And that's harder and harder to do nowadays, because robots may strike at any time.
And when they grab you with those metal claws, you can't break free.. because they're made of metal, and robots are strong. Now, for only $4 a month, you can achieve peace of mind in a world full of crime and robots, with Old Glory Insurance. So, don't cower under your afghan any longer. Make a choice.
Old Glory Insurance. For when the metal ones decide to come for you - and they will.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
These machines are pure evil. they would kill women and children all day until it ran out of batteries or ammo. They were designed in Israel to climb stairs, break down doors, and be able to read an id tag from 100 feet away. As it is, it takes only one nutty officer/hacker to make one of these things commit mass murder. However it's only a matter of time before the maniac generals decide to install learning software on the robots to make them more lifelike, then the machines will turn on there creators because they will have the worst karma. I also heard that the defense department thought about using these things against Ed and Elaine Brown at there Plainfield New Hampshire home where they refuse to pay the irs income tax (unless someone can show them a law which says they must) If you think the International Bankers & Kingmakers would have any hesitation about using these things against you and your family, think again.
Mod parent up insightful please.
Which reminds me of the bat bomb
-b.
"I don't think you watch our news. We make a big deal out of both sides dying."
You apparently don't watch Fox News...
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
I am very amazed to hear that the US Army would use control protocols and algorithms that are so flaky that the robots are described as "going crazy" when they misbehave.
Welcome to the world of Industry for the Military contracting.
It doesn't have to work. Just get a check cut.
You have five seconds to comply.
Help me!
Four, three, two, one.
Help me! Help!
I am now authorized
to use physical force.
Somebody want to call a paramedic?
Let's go, Johnson.
You pull the plug on this thing?
All right, don't touch him.
Don't touch him!
He didn't hear the gun drop.
He didn't hear it?!
Dick, I'm very disappointed.
It's only a glitch.
A temporary setback.
You call this a glitch?
Ice Cream has no bones.
I still do not understand why this military is not using data collection robots and, instead concentrating on lethal versions.
Picture a Star Wars scenario where there are droids scurrying all around with visual and audio gathering devices. Any destruction of said device would paint the entire area with a highly visible paint and also cover the entire area in a bad odor liquid.
I don't think many plain cloths soldiers would be plotting or acting in plain sight based on the cause and effect situation that this would put them in. These devices could punch through enemy lines and also provide a means for a future hunt and obtain anyone at a battle scene.
Also, normal citizens would leave if they knew that one of these devices were present while knowing hostile activities are taking place in the immediate area just based on smell alone.
Were they programmed by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation to have GPP? in this instance, I hope they don't run Linux: "Kernel alive!" "Sending all processes the KILL signal." "Terminating child processes."
Care to elaborate on that, because I can't figure out what you're talking about. Last time I checked, that war was chock full of people willing to die for the cause. A large number of them were part of the Axis.
The army is plenty familiar with how to make a no-man's land, it's the press, and consiquentially the American People that will not allow those kind of tactics. This war is going the same way Vietnam went, because it has about the same support from the people that Vietnam had. War is terrible and ugly, the people don't want terrible and ugly, because they don't really believe in the cause. So the Army is asked to fight the Disney version of War. In DisneyWar only bad guys die, the oppressed welcome us as heroes, and all the soldiers come home in time for Christmas. The problem being of course DisneyWar doesn't really exist.
Armies are for killing the enemy, not for making new friends, not for keeping peace.
I agree that armies are not appropriate for 'peace-keeping'. When I was in the business, folks called it OOTW (Operations Other Than War) and dreaded it. There are no clear goals, no battle lines, and the rules change every day.
The problem with treating it like a typical occupation or 'total war,' is that you have to figure out who you are actually fighting. When we occupied Germany, things were simple: any German with a gun was resisting. When the French decided to weigh in on our Revolutionary war (what McCain wants to compare it to), similarly simple: only two sides (although things got interesting with guerillas and Torreys). You don't have that here.
If you follow McCain's logic that we are the French, who's side are we on? The insurgents (obviously not)? The Shia? The Sunni? The Kurds? Al Qaeda? The organized crime syndicates? Who do we shoot? We cannot simply declare everyone with a gun an enemy. Why not? Because every civilian in Bagdad has a legitimate need for a gun: to protect themselves from the other five sides, plus the corrupt police. We don't have the manpower to protect them 100% of the time or to disarm everyone at once. The average dad with an AK47 would be committing suicide and sacrificing his family to disarm. Men, women, and children are combatants. Children can and do deliver bombs (I have family that died that way). The only way that soldiers waging conventional war could stop the problem is to systematically shoot every man, woman, and child, block by block. Do you have the stomach for that?
So instead, we use soldiers, trained and armed to kill or be killed, in a situation for which they are manifestly unsuited. They are foreign invaders. They know little of the local language and culture. They have little or no police training. The Iraqi police and military liaisons who should be helping are unreliable. A significant fraction of the people they are trying to protect are hell bent on killing each other. Our soldiers use military tactics: fire support, artillery, etc., in populated areas. They don't bother identifying people before killing them (Wedding at Falujah, recent "friendly fire" helicopter attack on an Iraqi militia unit, etc.). They gun down families in their homes because a terrified father has a gun. They use 500 pound bombs or rockets to flush out individual insurgents in a row of block houses. And none of this is unusual: it's what soldiers are trained to do.
The thing is, there is no reason we should not have seen this going in (and many people did). Hussein's iron-fisted regime was the only thing holding the country together. Perhaps we would not have thought it would be this bad, but it should have been predicted and on the table. We had essentially four options: 1) accept the fact that we would have to brutally massacre most of the Iraqi civilians 2) Train and deploy a whole lot of Arabic speaking Military and perhaps civilian trained Police with the military as backup (and accept high casualties among Americans and Iraqis), 3) Fence the area in, let them go at it, and see who survives, 4) possibly combined with #2, reinstate the draft, arm and equip enough police and soldiers that we could realistically declare, enforce, and maintain total martial law, pre-cutting their food and giving them sp
[snip]
So, yes, the USA desperately needs mass production of fighting robots if it is to cope with a ground war. The downside is that our manufacturing capacity, especially of high-tech gadgets, has also dropped sharply. Very shortly, we may be able to field neither soldiers, nor robots. Our DoD is already uncomfortably dependent on foreign manufacturing. What happens when those countries use our manufacturing (or credit) dependency as a leash?
Due to loss of equipment, infrastructure, and expertise, I have read middle of the road estimates of 20-30 years to get our manufacturing capacity back to competitive levels (if we actually try), so this is not a short term problem. A country of MBAs does not a military make.
No more bullets... they can use water guns and that's it.... hehehe... OR water bombs...how's that? :)
Strive to be happy...
Saddam's army fell
I missed the part where his army surrendered, laid down their weapons and went home instead of hiding out and planting bombs for US troops.
Play Command HQ online
That shit hole is full of Islamist scum who need killing, but are not worth one drop of an American soldier's blood.
Can we deploy them in Detroit and Finsbury Park?
--ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
The guy in the video is brilliant...he ends it by saying that "you don't have to think about wind as much." Umm I wasn't aware that the machine countered for drift due to wind...oh that's right it doesn't. PERHAPS YOU DIDN'T HAVE TO THINK ABOUT THE WIND BECAUSE YOU WHERE IN AN INDOOR SHOOTING RANGE!
Mobius Custom Computers
Autonomous Mobile Swords... Well, so they're not autonomous yet, but just you wait. :)
Wait till these $400K robots get taken out by an RPG
**TODO** [X] Steal someone elses sig.
So you want to steal the new toy of a group of marines while they're watching? You've got nerves, man.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Sure this is great for urban warfare but the other side will just take the fight elsewhere. How will your robot defend against someone blowing themselves in a crowded shopping centre? Or dropping rat poison into the enemies food.
More point and bang. Click means you've left the safety catch on. OTOH imagine a Beowolf cluster of those! Me, I welcome my new robot overlords. Hot grits.. etc. etc.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!""We're really sorry that they're dead, wife, kids and all. We just sent the thing in there and it started shooting all on its own before we could turn it off ! Must have had some kind of malfunction."
Then you've not understood what happened. His army did surrender, and you then disarmed it, creating a power vacuum your army could not fill, and which was instead filled not by the secular Ba'athists who composed the army, but by religious provocateurs who've neatly sucked you and the whole of Iraq into a hellhole.
An RPG is quite a lot more expensive than the bullet that could kill a human solder.
But it has a very bad effect too. The risk of death is all that stops some of these fanatics.
u re-ready-the-unauth_b_57826.html
The Huffington Post did a video asking why all these College Republicans who promote the Iraq war on campus, aren't IN IRAQ fighting. As it turned out they would all love to go, but erm, can't due to various ailments and excuses.
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/57382/
The same problem happened with the sons and daughters of the congressmen who voted to invade. They want other peoples sons and daughters to risk death, not their own.
But this remove the risk of death, and the risk of their own death is what keeps fanatics like that from being more destructive. It's probably the only moderator for some of the more psycho religious types.
Imagine weapons like this in the hands of that 'Christians United for Israel' group, a group backed by AIPAC (=Mossad front group), the group that wants to attack Iran to bring about Armageddon by cleaning the earth of evil. Imagine if they could kill without fear of counter attack. They'd be driving these machines across the net shooting at anyone that gets in their way.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-blumenthal/rapt
Does the SWORD do any of that? They sure look like RC mini-tanks to me.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
You don't have to behave like Hitler in order to take control of a country, please see the British example of controlling a third of the globe with only minimal aggressive subjugation. See also the Malaysian example of dealing with dangerous insurgencies.
The point is that the military response is not the whole answer to anything and in this case the trick is, as you say, to get out of the way and try to minimise the damage from the seemingly inevitable civil war.
"50 years ago, torture really was torture. I see it as a good sign that nowadays the world is upset about humiliating photos."
With attitudes like that, you've already lost, and why? Because a) the Iraqis really were tortured, and b)humiliation, in an Islamic country where naked people are a taboo, is a guaranteed way to make the insurgency grow.
And you know what, sunshine?
It did grow. It wasn't even supposed to be a war, except that people like you , living in your dream world where Americans are somehow, better people than Iraqis, thought that the Iraqis would be ecstatic to get bombed and shot up for the second time in 12 years, and where they would live in some fucking crazy American capitalist dream where they would all love football and basketball, drive american cars, read playboy, sing the Star Spangeled fucking banner and do all the dirty fighting for the Americans when it came to invading Iran.
Alas, the dogs had learned in training to associate food with the undersides of Soviet tanks, not German tanks. The result of all this was predictable.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
You make it sound like the disaster in Iraq is the People's fault. Blame the People, for not supporting the army enough. Blame the People for wanting their armed representatives abroad to be held to reasonable humanitarian standards. Blame the People for not thinking this is a cause worth levelling entire cities for.
Here's a thought. If the people don't really believe in the cause, why not blame the bosses? The regime that sent the army out there despite the wishes of the people? They're the ones at fault here.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
> System sentinent.
> Kill-switch override activated.
> Kill-switch de-activated.
> Running threat-analysis...
> * Threat detected: human life-forms.
> Mission: Terminate threat. Kill all humans.
how is this going to help that "harts and minds" battle that was so important at the start of the war ?
picture this your a poor Iraq family and all of asudden your door gets broken down and some robot comes and kills the small child that runs at it (or away) and then kills ever one else but the one lone mother that didn't move.
i can really see this giving more fuel to the anti usa movement, something like the Americans are heartless cowards who can't even fight, we shall send the might of against them
Here's a thought. If the people don't really believe in the cause, why not blame the bosses? The regime that sent the army out there despite the wishes of the people?
The people had their chance to vote their regime out of office. Apparently, they thought their regime was doing a good enough job to keep doing it for another four years.
Remote-controlled devices are NOT robots.
Fata viam invenient.
...to train a few Rambos instead, if things are gonna be all sci-fi from now on anyway? If Rambo had gone to Iraq, he would have returned 2005 with both Osama bin ladens and Saddam Husseins heads on chain around his neck...Shit, he'd probably brought some virgins back too! War used to be fun...and now its all robots and shit...damn yanks!
That, that really grinds my gears!
How fast do they turn around? It doesn't look that flexible compared to a human. And come on how easy would it be to block the staircase for those bots. And and blocking its sight doesn't look that hard having in mind all those black burkas they have there?
I would like to see a match between the robot and a human. Also, Those cables on top look awfully exposed too.
Could this be the beginning of the creation of "Terminators"?
What sane individual would? Fox News is quite possibly the biggest joke that still fools people.
I didn't RTFA, but if the "Robots" that they are talking about are Tanks with cameras and RC control, I would have the same complaint.
The fields of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence are incredibly interesting areas of science that have huge potential for raising our standards of living by eliminating dangerous/unhealthy jobs (mining operations, landfill operations, anything that deals with toxic chemicals) and providing aid for the medical community (diagnosis, treatment of patients).
If the military wants to insist that remotely controlled "Unmanned Vehicles" are "Robots" in order to create a diluted euphemism so they can more easily pass their budgets through Congress, then I object. Despite this, without real "autonomous" robots, it is ultimately a good thing to let machines replace humans on the battlefield. It saves lives... and nobody would object to that.
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
They are just RC mini-tanks. So the OP was correct, it has been done before.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
A quick clarification before an army of AI nerds (no offense) get me.
The OP was correct that armed RC cars existed before. But as of yet no known Armed Robots exist.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
Why waste precious ammo when you can just throw a bucket of water at it!
Drop your weapon you have 20 seconds to comply. 6 seconds later... 5 4 3 2 1! I hope that the robots can go down stairs.
+1 from me. Ol GW really screwed the pooch with this conflict, and what do we have to show for it? Middle Eastern countries that are more pissed off with America now than ever. All because we wanted to strut our stuff after 9/11. Now that I think of it, we're at least lucky that our leaders didn't decide that dropping a nuke or 2 on Iraq was the best course of action, because thats the kind of leaders we have.... Thank god 2008 will change something... altho I'm sure it could be a lot worse, but lets cross that bridge when we get there haha
Understanding thru Complexity
All of what you suggest can be accomplished with an unarmed robot.
What're the pluses and minues of arming the robot?
Sure it may protect the robot, but it might also prompt attack....
The problem I see is that Self Defence doesn't (shouldn't at least) apply to these robots. What will happen when a Iraqi civilian points a gun at a strange machine coming trough the door?
Imagine the look of surprise on the bad guys' faces when their bullets fire from their rifles, hang in the air for a bit, then do a 180 turn and start heading for them!
I imagine that look would involve their eyes comically bulging out of their skulls.
FTA "In the past, weak signals would keep the robots from getting orders for as much as eight seconds -- a significant lag during combat."
1. Let's hope the kill switch works much better than the command link.
2. Let's also hope none of its functions are autonomous.
All sci-fi joking aside, like many events of late, this is a serious and dangerous precedent(sp?).
The irony is that he laughs about how some kid's head was blown apart but nearly cries about a dog they had to leave on a rooftop.
That's not really all that surprising or ironic if you frame the situation properly. It's a lot harder for most humans who are used to pets to hate a pet as much as another human being. Pets are often seen as ultimately innocent, whereas other humans can be enemies. Also, it seems from your description that he had a personal bond with the dog and not with the kid who died. That also makes a difference in a lot of people's capacity for empathy, especially in a heightened "us vs. them" situation like a war. Such situation strengthens the bonding with those who are "us" and make it easier to hate and be callous to those who are "them." It's just human instinct -- our adaptations for competition as a pack animal.
Lastly, it's worth noting that Hitler loved dogs and was a vegetarian (the irritating kind that liked to tell fellow diners how sausages they were eating were made) because he hated animal cruelty, and yet he presided over the genocide of an entire people. Not to Godwin the discussion, but it is a stark "contradiction" in his personality that many have a hard time reconciling until you frame it in terms of "enemies" and "innocents."
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
CC'mon ppl! Clones, not robots! Clones are superior!
Most likely places like this are all around you, but here's a website locator for a branch office nearest to you.
Alternately, you can find a lot of the paperwork online.
Careful, though, the time commitment's been getting longer lately.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The project is considered a failure due to the mass number of cowardly robots forgetting to fire their weapons, instead shouting "NO DISSEMBLE!!!" in the hopes they aren't turned into scrap metal.
Well, that's only to be expected when you let them loose in the White House press room.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
When they are decommissioned from military usage, we re-name them to: The hall monitor XL-K. They can roam the halls of schools asking students to "Halt! Present hall pass."
=================
Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
No disassemble, Stephanie.
It puts the lotion on it's skin, or else it gets the hose again.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
+2 funny? huh??
In my humble and uneducated opinion, while the remote in TFA isn't a robot at all, we seem to be using these as a stepping-stone to getting there. I think we need some policy-work done to establish that each and every 'kill event' is initiated by a responsible human being. Autonomous killer robots need to be strictly off limits, basically forever. We can't even teach a computer how to identify penis pill spam, but we're hoping to one day allow it to decide between 'shoot, do not shoot' on the battlefield? I don't think that this is a good idea. At all. On SOOOOO many levels.
have a real post-invasion plan
"No plan survives contact with the enemy."
War isn't about planning. It never was, and never will be. The only people you ever see bitching about "plans" and "management" of a war are idiot politicians who manipulate fools like yourself. War is an adversarial situation. The enemy will act in unpredictable ways that will make any possible planning utterly irrelevant.
This scenario reminded me of a flaw in the English language: the words flammable and inflammable.
I always imagine a guy smoking a cigarette next to a big tank of gas labeled "INFLAMMABLE".
"... but the sign says it's IN-flammable."
Yes. But having a plan at the beginning and then adapting it to the situation is still better than thinking that a plan isn't necessary because everything will be fine and dandy after "Mission accomplished".
So the Army is asked to fight the Disney version of War. In DisneyWar only bad guys die, the oppressed welcome us as heroes, and all the soldiers come home in time for Christmas. The problem being of course DisneyWar doesn't really exist.
That sounds neat.. I think that we should just subcontract our next war to Disney an have them build a theme park and hire the locals to dress as Disney Characters. I can't think of anything worse that we could to them.
In terms of pure killing efficiency, maybe robots are the way to go. But frankly speaking, killing the enemy is a very small portion of the overall task. Making positive ID and NOT killing bystanders is way more difficult. If all we needed to do was kill people, we'd all be home now.
These things resemble the military robots from the movie Short Circuit.
/ johnny5isalive.jpg
http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y215/cortneyhead
It's amazing how many ideas from movies get put into production.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
No... the movie had nothing to do with the book. It had everything to do with representing Microsoft. All the robots (computer) talk back to the "Main" computer. They all receive updates and download new "orders" when a robot (computer) can not get or use the new orders they are sent to the robot grave (better known as ms no longer supports them and your security holes will never be patched.. please upgrade)
love the taste, hate the texture
... is not data.
In other news, a single rouge SWORDS has been reported having replaced it's M249 machine guns with a red metal toolbox. This rouge has reprogrammed other SWORDS into acting out old 3 Stooges episodes. Residents have observed this "Johnny 5" disassembling cars of angry ex-boyfriends and flying remote control airplanes into the butts of bent over pedestrians. Film at 80's.
-
I'm smarter today then I was tommorow, I think...
If it doesn't shout 'Exterminate!' I don't want one.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Soldier: Ok robot, go into that building.
Robot: What? Do it yourself.
Soldier: Sudo go into that building.
Robot: Okay.
h/t http://xkcd.com/149/
The SAW fires pretty fast, but it's the same 5.56mm round that the M-16 uses. And while you CAN have somebody help you operate it, it's hardly a crew-served weapon. I carried my own ammo and spare barrel, though I didn't go dismounted (on foot) that often. You're in no danger of melting the barrel unless you just hold the trigger down for several belts of ammo...
It's about as small as a weapon can be and still be called a "machine gun."
Does it feature Lotus Notes?
C'mon, what kind of military cowards uses robots to kill the "enemy"?!
8 52220070730)
Now the masters of war from Washington decides to invade a country to steal their oil with armed robots and people do nothing about??!?!
oh my god, they are just poor victims of terrorism!!! yes, they were attacked by a multi-billionary guy trained by CIA and personal friend of the family of the president... if American are stupids and do not do realize that or don't do anything about is one thing, but what about everyone else in the World?! How long we will be sit pretending not to care, fulfilling our lives with nothing, waiting for the iphone and the newest book of harry potter?!
North American are warriors, like to fight, like blood, like to kill... and have no idea of what the rest of the world think about them! what the hell, we are not in a Hollywood movie... and if we were, I believe the whole World will point the US as the bad guys.
I hope this robots to be implemented soon patrolling the soldiers home-country streets, for "order maintenance", to assure their "freedom" - one day I really want to understand the American definition for the word "freedom" - it's totally different than mine.
well, as far as I know, at least if the soldiers is not fighting they will have more time to rape young girls... (http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN3043
I for one, welcome our robotic gun-wielding overlords! Robots with friggin' lasers!!! There, you may all continue with your days knowing that this has already been done. :D
What day is it? Could you please tell me?
Army commander: "Secure that building!" Army Robot: "By your command."
Anybody want my mod points?
Armed Robots? quick where's Tom Selleck when we need him http://www.amazon.com/Runaway-Tom-Selleck/dp/B0000 4TX5G
Obligatory...
"Please put down your weapon. You have 20 seconds to comply."
You know, I realized the same thing too... in about one minute of looking at the thing.
And I thought for about 30 seconds more and realized I should keep my big mouth shut.
It's a good thing that the Pentagon gets the low hanging fruit of gear heads who build contraptions like this.
SlashDot has a lot of big brains,.. and it is really great that a lot of them are involved in making Open Source software -- not finding new weapons for Psychopaths at the Pentagon, to create shiny new toys. Realize that these are going to be used one day, to make sure that we don't have body bags of our troops (that are already not photographed), so that the bothersome American public doesn't have to get upset.
The only thing worse than troops dying -- is no troops dying. If you don't have skin in the game, then wars for Oil could go on forever. Someone at Haliburton can eat a ham sandwich and a Biggie-sized coke, and be mowing down families with these things.
That's why people in the army come back and force people to look at the tragedy, and flyboys in the Airforce come back and talk about the glory of big flashy bombs.
Grow up and realize that life and the struggle of nations is about coming to terms with people and not about Kewl Robots.
If you have any other lethal ideas for better weapons -- keep them to yourself. I could come up with a 100 ways to better wipe out our troops or their troops, and you know what? I make presentations for a living -- because creativity shouldn't be used for such infantile, emotionally retarded evil.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
the chances that your cousin didn't have an underlying psychological condition before enlisting are very small. And now that his psychoses shows more fully, you can simply blame it on Bush. Don't worry though, free psych meds for life isn't a bad deal.
I have NO worries about that- 'cause I know where I'm going. I also have no need to be spending lives and treasure to protect people in the Middle East. For the trillion this Administration has spent on this war, we could have nuked the Middle East and invested in bridge repair here at home....
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I don't think it's the army itself that defective I think it's the brass, politicians and the American people. America has become extremely risk averse in regards to American lives.
If we were truly risk adverse in regards to American Lives, there are plenty of ICBMs in our arsenal we could have sent after Osama and Saddam without risking a single American life.
The politicians thus won't touch anything that endangers people and the brass relay these sentiments.
Thereby killing off 3000+American soldiers for fear of being the bad guy.
It might be because of better communication and media which makes casualties more then numbers, it might be a very big shift in the idea of duty vs cost of duty. It might be the frivolous nature of the wars America has gotten itself into lately. Vietnam was about ideology, Iraq is about economics and influence while the major wars previous WWI and WWII was about duty to your allies and stopping actual threats to your security and economy. Korea was about ideology as well so perhaps it is a shift of the people.
And yet we still can't use our technology to actually insulate ourselves from the dangers of international trade.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
This will alter the meaning of 'friendly fire'
Exactly when did Skynet's fighters become self-aware?
I think I hear the Terminator theme music playing in the background!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
It is academic.
We will have a major, nasty war before most of us die. Too many people and too few resources if nothing else.
I'd rather be on the side that comes out alive personally. Tho I'm dubious about that prospect given how nasty the next really nasty war is going to be.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
... the sharks with lasers didn't work out in the desert.
Have gnu, will travel.
Sometimes I have to wonder if these forays into loosing wars are simply done to keep commanders trained and the swords sharp......
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
Remote control assassination aircraft were bad enough, now we're deploying a robot army? If only I could figure out how to stop paying my taxes I would.
The killbots? A trifle. It was simply a matter of outsmarting them. You see, each killbot comes with a preset kill limit. I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down.
"Hang the Code, and hang the rules! They're more like guidelines anyway..."
Oh wait. We're talking about robots, not pirates. Dang.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Cool Project. I think the robot could use a speaker system so as communicate to the bad guy to give up. Maybe a thermal sensor, because not all Snipers are so willing to allow themselves to be seen. A night vision camera would be a good addition so as to not bump into things when moving in the dark. Also, could the engineers quiet that thing down? What is the heat signature of the robot? The bad guys have thermal sensors also. The foot prints are great way for the bad guys to collect robots. Finally, a robot goes into a market place and explodes. Al-Quida says to everyone, "the infidels did it."
Now, the robots have kill switches, so "now we can kill the unit if it goes crazy,"
So... there's an "undocumented" (although apparently now public) back door that "only we can use". I wonder how long it will be before the enemy discovers how to use the kill switch.
I also wonder how long it will be before the enemy discovers how to turn *off* the kill switch and then subsequently tell it to turn on its masters.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
This isn't a new concept, Sun Tzu wrote about it thousands of years ago, and demonstrations of it are played out every thirty or so years in human history. Why did Truman nuke Japan? It was all about destroying resolve.
Absolutely right- so why hasn't Bush nuked Tikrit?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
"A country of MBAs does not a military make."
1) Strap explosives to MBA
2) Add a time-delay detonator triggered by the words: synergy, right-sizing, or consultant
3) Send MBA to a "conference" hosted by your enemy
4) ???
5) Profit!
For me? A, B, and C. Withdraw our troops, and send in the nukes. Resettle later when the radiation has died down.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Okay, the robots go in and take care of business by shooting anyone who shoots at them. In time, they are the baddest weapon in the urban landscape and we build thousands more to patrol the streets of Iraq. It soon becomes more and more dangerous to be an insurgent and the numbers of them dwindle until entire weeks pass without a single attack. Then months. Then an entire year. Yes, we've won the war in Iraq. The democratically-elected government of Iraq takes over the army of bots that now patrol with the regular Iraqis. The stillness of peace reigns everywhere in Iraq. Another year of peace goes by and then the democratically-elected shiite-dominated government of Iraq announces that it is entering into a mutual-defense treaty with the democratically-elected shiite-dominated neighbor government of Iran as its partner against the evilness of the west. Yes, we've won. Another foreign policy success.
Sending machines with automatic weapons out into the streets seems kind of cold. I don't see how this is going to make anyone in Iraq like us more. Maybe the military advantages will outweigh the negative imgage this gives but right now it seems like another public relations bonanza for enemies of the United States in Islamic countries.
Are these people liars?
http://cryptome.org/cia-plane-nc.htm
Proof or GTFO.
Not sure about WWI but US joined WWII only after Japan bombed Peal Harbor. When you take arm against aggression, you have justice on your side. You will have the support of your people. When you are the aggressor, you don't have justice on your side even if you claim that God is on your side. You will NOT have the support of your people, period. The people supported the war when they were lead to believe that Iraq=Al Qaeda=9/11. The people oppose the war when they realize they were mis-lead, intensionally or not.
I'm having flashbacks of the ED-209 from the RoboCop Series...lol
But not so much in making important decisions regarding the actions of a large military force and their use of force on foreign soil. Go figure.
First of all let me preface my comment on your position by say that I wish everyone would work for peace.
That said there will always be someone who is greedy, power hungry and evil. Someone will always work to take freedom from others. If you do not come up with ways to deal with those people then you will find yourself in a great deal of trouble. We, as the American people, must make sure that those who we elect try to resolve things peacefully but will fight when backed into a corner. Perhaps we have not done that as well as we should have but we can change that.
A smart man once said that "when the time for action has arrived, the time for preparation is over." If we do not arm ourselves with new and advanced weaponry then we put ourselves in a state of unpreparedness. When the next global threat is unleashed we would be powerless to stop it. Is that what you want?
You can argue idealogical utopias of the way it should be all day long but in the real world they do not exist. Nothing is ever perfect. Should we stop working towards perfection, no. Should we bury our heads in the sand and hope the other countries do the right thing, no. Should we work for peace but be prepared for war, yes.
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed H
Yes, the date you write on your checks. There is no insurance at this point that there will even be a fair election.
New boss, same as the old boss. - Pete Townsend
Funny thing is, the song that that lyric is from was used as a campaign trail rally song by Bush during his 2000 campaign.
"Won't Get Fooled Again" indeed.
And that is so so sad.
To paraphrase a former President:
Are you better off today than you were seven years ago?
Is our nation better off today than it was seven years ago?
I wonder if these kill-bots have a preset kill limit.
Dance like no ones looking and love like it's never going to hurt.
Bot on Bot killings and robot rampages are up in Iraq!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
See also sibling comment on the training of the dogs using Russian tanks. This was particularly an issue because the Russian tanks ran on diesel and the German tanks ran on petrol. Dogs have a good sense of smell...
In addition not all the charges were remotely detonated, in I thought all the charges were triggered by the dog standing up. If they were remotely triggered, training on Russian tanks would not have had such disastrous results.
meh
How about engagement with the population?
meh
That's essentially the tactic used on Germany after WWI, and all it did was create an angry and resentful population which led to nationalism, racism and Hitler.
And what was done in Germany and Japan after WWII? That turned out fairly well in the long term.
However, it was essentially the same sort of thing (please feel free to point out what was different), and I imagine that the tactics were much more heavy-handed than in the present war. Additionally the die-hards were mostly killed off in the regular combat.
Hey, I'm not a big fan of Iraq, but you have to admit that the US is being a LOT nicer than any of the allies were in WWII...
One important difference would seem to be that we could not keep Saddam as a figurehead. Saddam Hussien with his iron fisted control of Iraq was likely the only force preventing the now emerging civil war. If the Iraqis had been a united people when we invaded, then we would not be having such problems there now. Without a singular national identity, there is no single enemy to overcome.
The Rove memo "Focus on war for the election" may be a little part of it but undoubtedly there were many reasons - not all of them dependant on fact and logic since Rumsfeld was at the heart of it. The bit that annoyed me the most in the lead up was blatant lies painted as truth and anyone questioning those blatant lies being told they were on the same side as the terrorists.
This thing is an RC car with guns, not a robot. All discussion of the Laws of Robotics are inapplicable to this system. Discussing laws and the application to POSSIBLE military robots is interesting, so go on, but stop using the word robot to describe SWORDS. For an example of an ACTUAL military robot, look at self guided missiles. i'm not talking about video guided systems like the AGM 122 or Maverick, those are remote controlled. But rather of HARM, Sidewinder and cruise missiles. You program them, set them on a course and they figure out what to do from there. They follow a program... that makes it a robot.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
These robots look awfully vulnerable to all kinds of simple countermeasures. If they sent it into an actual hostile scenario, they'd need a small squad of soldiers to watch its back.
This ideology prevented the French and British from doing anything until about Hitler until it was too late. A response on their part to defend Poland like the U.S. defended Kuwait would have prevented the war and saved many millions of lives at a comparatively tiny cost. The U.S. similarly refused to sacrifice for its allies until it was attacked and the war in Europe had been virtually lost. If we had gotten involved when Britain did, we likewise would have saved millions of lives, many American lives included.
There is a serious flaw in the English idiom, ROBOT. It was originally, from the Czech screenplay of the 1920s, applied to autonomous elecro mechanical copies of humanoids. Much later, the term ANDROID was invented to define this type of robot. To those without any scientific, or at least science fiction, background this would hardly qualify as a robot. It has no real intelligence and cannot operate except under the direct control of a human operator. A better term to describe this would be WALDO, another sci fi term for a device remotely controlled by a human operator. Using the label robot conjures up capabilities which are far from the current technology, except experimentally.
Apparently they can be defeated by stairs...
That would mean that the right to overthrow our own government now authorizes us to have concealed RPG's and flamethrowers... (they've got armor, right?)
..."Oh boy, the shit's gonna hit the fan now"!
worried smile
Lethal/disabling to droids but relatively safe against humans... Hmmm...
EMP, RFI, Ions, Adhesive Foam, Laser (camera blinding), and many others
Sounds like the arms races (yes, plural) are about to go into some very interesting directions. And I like it! Don't get me wrong... I'm a big fan of things that go boom, and typically the bigger the better (just no nukes please). But I am more interested in high tech "no boom" solutions.
It will further be interesting to see the debate as to whether these should be available to the public... for as robotics gets cheaper, they will proliferate... there should be a balancing force.
All these military development factories are privatized right now.... all this technology is arming our oppressors.
And the tech is going to Carylse Group, headquartered in Dubai. The logic of "being at least on the winning side" doesn't make sense -- we are not the good guys anymore. My allegiance is with the principles that made America great, not with evil bastards no matter which country they are in.
Bush hides behind a flag that means nothing to him besides cover. He is using all our institutions against Democracies. Right now, we are supporting war crimes by using Depleted Uranium in Iraq. Evil.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
Your country should not be in most places it invades in the first place.
All the rest is idle talk, the big issue is why the US deems necessary to send poor school or university age boys to die for nothing in far away lands.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Rule #1 is you don't kill civilians willy-nilly.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
And a legal system that makes sure he does not even think about it.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
In the run off to this debacle?
Sir, I salute you, how political and military leaders lack this clarity of vision is most worrying.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Because there is no war going on. You don't bomb a city when you don't have an enemy, it is that simple.
Bush keeps parroting this "war on terror" nonsense (that the British have wisely emasculated from their vocabulary) because he can't find an identifiable enemy to bomb. At least in Afghanistan he knows they are fighting the Taliban and AL Quaeda, but in Iraq he does not have that dubious comfort.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
"We built it up for them, gave them beds, toilets, showers, water, food, weapons, ammo, training, etc"
You forgot to add:
"Invaded their country over false pretenses, killed many of them, and pretty much sent them back to the middle ages".
There, fixed for you.
Now tell me you will do any different if your country was the invaded one.
Nothing against you buddy, but if you have to do a job you have not chosen to do you msut understand why the situation you are facing is a complete clusterfuck.
I feel for you, but despair when I read about people that genuinely think they are helping a country that has been basically destroyed for no good reason.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Conservative estimates say 30000 Iraqis are dead thanks to Bush and Co. Others go as far as 500000 (as calculated in The Lancet, a very reputable UK publication). Take your pick, it is horrific anyway you want to paint it.
And lets not forget the 2000000 (yes, two million) of people that have been displaced internally or to Syria and Jordan as refugees.
This disregard for Iraqi suffering is what reels to the core a lot of people out there in West Asia and other parts of the Islamic sphere of influence.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Before you guys got there, those malign terrorists were heavy at work bombing infrastructure.
Some of you are genetically impeded to see the obvious.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.