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Robot Snatches Rifle From Barricaded Suspect, Ends Standoff (latimes.com)
Slashdot reader schwit1 quotes the L.A. Times:
An hours-long standoff in the darkness of the high desert came to a novel end when Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies used a robot to stealthily snatch a rifle from an attempted murder suspect, authorities said Thursday.
Officials said the use of the robot to disarm a violent suspect was unprecedented for the Sheriff's Department, and comes as law enforcement agencies increasingly rely on military-grade technology to reduce the risk of injury during confrontations with civilians.
"The robot was a game changer here," said Capt. Jack Ewell, a tactical expert with the Sheriff's Department -- the largest sheriff's department in the nation. "We didn't have to risk a deputy's life to disarm a very violent man."
It was only later when the robot came back to also pull down a wire barricade that the 51-year-old suspect realized his gun was gone.
"The robot was a game changer here," said Capt. Jack Ewell, a tactical expert with the Sheriff's Department -- the largest sheriff's department in the nation. "We didn't have to risk a deputy's life to disarm a very violent man."
It was only later when the robot came back to also pull down a wire barricade that the 51-year-old suspect realized his gun was gone.
What happened to sending in the robot with a bomb to kill the suspect?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
I see Cyberdyne Systems shares are up today.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
No, it's really not obligatory. It's old and tired.
The robots have begun to steal weapons. It's only a matter of time before the uprising starts.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
The boring short version: So they noticed the idiot left his gun at his feet while laying flat on his belly in a small dune with a wire fence. The operator extended the arm through the wire fence and yanked it out. With the police up front and a helicopter above, he didn't notice.
I guess ExtendaReach to the rescue? I feel sorry for the operators who don't get any credit. I wonder if those firefighter axes got similar treatment. "Firefighter Ax clears way out of burning building for trapped firefighter and baby."
Next logical step: Violent offenders using Robots to stage remote assaults.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
It seems every time someone discovers how to do old thing on a new medium and it makes news. Put missiles on a drone, bully someone online, use a new technology to commit a heinous crime? All of these things received widespread news coverage, when they are really nothing more than pencils with erasers:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09...
In reality these are human nature stories, not technology stories. There is nothing new here, just the combination of things that have already been invented. I want to hear about innovation and invention, not pencil erasers. This is a technology site and should be better than this.
Of course, they would have sent in the DEPUTY instead of the robot to disarm the suspect. Wouldn't want to risk anyone with seniority...
http://images.protopage.com/im...
Fortunately for the suspect, arming a robot isn't a criminal offence or they'd probably charge him for it.
Log in or piss off.
Next logical step: Violent offenders using Robots to stage remote assaults.
It's been feasible for quite some years to load a remotely controlled vehicle up with explosives, and drive/fly it into a target. You can buy an off-the-shelf FPV rig that will function over a substantial distance, or you can use the cellular network. Yet, this is not happening. Why?
It's been feasible for basically forever to cut the chain and walk into any power substation, set some explosives, and walk away. Many towns and even cities in this country are fed by only one or maybe two lines which are easy to take out. Yet, this is not happening. Why?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
We got a robot that is stealing stuff, we are finally making progress on creating bending units and robot personalities.
It also took his clothes, his boots and his motorcycle.
You'll get my gun when your robot takes it from me.
Where's Waldo? Everywhere.
Where's the robot? Still trying to climb stairs.
When robots finally do arrive we won't realize that it happened, because the word 'robot' will have been applied to every device out there to which no human is presently attached, but yet is attached through the miracle of radio.
PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN squinting into a video display with a joystick in his hand... THIS... IS... A... ROBOT!
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
At least the robot wasn't carrying a bomb this time.
What ever happened to the second amendment! This is just the cops over-reaching and infringing on my constitutional rights again!
I'm guessing he started shooting because his construction work wasn't killing enough people.
Well, of course! It's the only way to be sure...
...you have 20 seconds to comply."
Yeah, now if WE were nefarious Dr. Evil types, WE would be able to fill full sized buses with the name of your favorite rental car company on the side right up to the pickup area of any major metropolitan area, loaded not with a single drum of witchbrew nitro but with dozens of them, with walls lined with preformed shrapnel on the terminal side and with a concrete wall on the other to direct the explosion (and likely with heavy heavy duty shocks:-). Then sure, we could remote pilot it into place in any terminal in the country with an Airplane-style inflatable driver on the front seat and detonate it on Thanksgiving weekend at peak travel hours. Even if there IS somebody literally sitting on a camera watching, they'd have to be monitoring EVERY large vehicle that EVER enters the main airport, and the only monitoring that would work worth a damn is something fully automated (transponders on every permitted vehicle?) and then you have to defend the automation!
OR, we could do pretty much the same thing with any of a number of small planes -- turn them into de facto cruise missiles and direct them straight at the containment vessel of a nuclear power plant, or better yet, at its spent fuel dump. Or turn a 21 foot power boat into an enormous remote control "torpedo" and take out a cruise ship. The most nefarious of WE could probably figure out the laser enrichment trick, beg borrow buy steal a few dozen tons of Uranium, enrich our own U235 in our basement, and build a REAL bomb and simply drop it in the middle of any random city, anywhere. Or, if Uranium is all locked down maybe we could buy up less-controlled Thorium and cook it down into bomb grade U233. Yes, these require a really big basement, but plenty of countries, all drug lords, and lots of billionaires all have "big basements". The drug lords already have fully debugged means of delivery that don't even require electronics!
All of these things are why Homeland Security people get ulcers. They aren't stupid, or at least some of them aren't stupid, and they probably have whole spreadsheets of identified pathways for bad people to do bad things (and activities that "might" serve as a signal for these bad things in preparation). And they know that all of this is really pissing into the wind -- just as 9/11 came out of the blue, the next attack will come out of the blue, and EVEN if it follows one of the identified scenarios, they ultimately rely as much on luck as anything else to detect it and successfully intervene. They just haven't been too lucky, recently. Too much dike -- a UNIVERSE of dike, all rotten and crumbling in the storm -- and not enough fingers.
Ultimately, one has to hope that smart people are too smart, usually, to want to mass-murder their neighbors. Admittedly, history doesn't provide a whole lot of support for this hope, but in the end, anybody who really IS smart, and patient, and who has the resources to invest in it (big tour bus sized buses aren't all that cheap, and it isn't that easy to buy the materials to make good explosives or to make GOOD chemical explosives, defined to be ones that blow up when you want them to instead of when you are halfway through making them and get crystallization of unstable nitrates on the lips of your reaction vessels) can probably figure out a bunch of ways to kill people hundreds to thousands at a time, especially if they don't care WHO they kill or WHEN it happens and can just target any old event where large numbers of people are concentrated in a comparatively small space.
There was a science fiction short story I remember reading (but I cannot remember who wrote it, or when) where somebody discovered a way of basically destroying the world using the moral equivalent of household cleaners from under the sink. The "recipe" was widely disbursed so suddenly everybody -- everybody -- knew how to kill every other person in the world (and themselves). The story explored whether suddenly every human alive would instantly become moral and treat everybody else as if they co
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
So are you.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Maybe it's time to start building a system that is 3 Laws Safe?
More than feasible:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It's been feasible for quite some years to load a remotely controlled vehicle up with explosives, and drive/fly it into a target.
It IS a problem that flying Drones are being used by criminals, though, to do things such as smuggle drugs into prisons. So remote controlled small vehicles are used for a crime, but those are commodities widely available to everyone.
As far as I know, the use of explosives and complex systems in the commission of a crime are pretty rare, and requires technical
skill and knowledge that most violent offenders don't have. Remote controlled vehicles of significant size are highly-expensive or require specialized knowledge to configure, also, most people wouldn't have access to instructions and materials to make a large explosion; certainly not commodities that are within the capability of the average person to setup.
Also, violent offenders are probably in most cases not driven to murder as many people as possible as quickly as possible;
Offenders have either become mentally unstable, OR want to accomplish something by targeting individual people for different reasons, these are not the kind of crimes that have an executive plan made out months in advance, with the acquisition of large bill of materials and implementation of bespoke devices to support their crime; If it's not sold at Wal-mart, a local store, or some popular Website ready to go, then it's probably not really going to be used in crimes.
Does this get the Robocop joke? Terminator? Jonny 5? Robot overlord?
Wait....Go-Go Gadget Extendo.......no. Forget it. I'm not funny.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
You are an idiot or an ignorant.
Possibly both at the same time! Let's see:
http://newatlas.com/silex-lase...
Hmmm, 1/5th the cost already affordable by nearly any "kitchen pot" dictatorship around the world. And this isn't new technology -- rumor in the physics world has it that this is how Israel has been making its bombs for decades. So right, not quite in my kitchen with my pots, but in a small warehouse somewhere? Maybe, if I have a few million and access to uranium 238 (which is, one profoundly hopes, not THAT easy to arrange, actually). In a small production facility in (pick a place loosely controlled by your favorite world group that you really don't want to have nuclear devices)? Without question. It's just a matter of time, although frankly centrifuges are already more than sufficient to build uranium bombs with or to enrich fuel-grade uranium to where you can cook out plutonium. Plutonium is, no argument, hard to squeeze off in a bomb, but enriched Uranium is laughably easy.
Thorium is arguably more of a challenge. For one thing, making U233 involves the Pa chain and a breeder reactor that makes lots of gamma rays and neutrons, so it probably isn't a good candidate for basements unless one's basement has thick lead and concrete walls and one has a degree in nuclear engineering. OTOH, separating out U233 is just chemistry once you get there. So far, it has been easier and cheaper to stick to U235 and plutonium for reasons that are well described and discussed elsewhere:
https://whatisnuclear.com/arti...
but there is little doubt that one can make bombs from Thorium, and further, that the bombs you make are the nice, easy to manage Uranium bombs and not the nasty, prematurely detonating fizzling fissioning (unless you build them just right) plutonium bombs. You can store the bomb grade material without any particular precautions other than keeping it subcritical and our borders are totally porous (a nation's worth of heroin addicts agree!) so again, a terror group in any country that has access to e.g. Monazite sands -- India, Australia, Madagascar, Western North Carolina... can if they wish follow this alternative route to a Uranium bomb that doesn't even require a laser OR a centrifuge (although it does require building a breeder with a chemical separation step, plus some fuel grade material to get it started). Basement stuff? I was kidding -- or being sarcastic if you prefer -- because while no, one cannot do it in a literal garage, it is still a technology well within the reach of middle-tier proliferation risks who might have a comparatively hard time getting their hands on Uranium.
Best of all, nowadays they could trumpet to the world that they were fixing Global Warming by building thorium based nuclear self-sufficiency and all it takes in a MSR is to divert the breeder-enriched salts into a chemical extraction step and siphon off a steady supply of bomb-grade material. Material that you can even show that you NEED (in at least some capacity) to restart your reactor after fuelling or start a new one...
The point is -- to repeat myself -- that killing large numbers of people is easy enough to be nearly impossible to prevent if:
a) You don't care if you die yourself in the process;
b) You don't care who you kill, and are perfectly happy to take the lowest hanging fruit you can find if people take steps to protect one possible target (say, the super bowl). Are people going to be able to provide the same protection to every football, soccer, basketball game, forever? How about airports, train stations? How about high-profile, expensive, human filled skyscrapers in every city?
c) You have at least some money to put towards the project. To kill more than 100 people at a time will likely require some investment and a co
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
"The robot was a game changer here," said Capt. Jack Ewell, a tactical expert with the Sheriff's Department -- the largest sheriff's department in the nation. "We didn't have to risk a deputy's life to disarm a very violent man."
More importantly, nobody had to die. They were able to diffuse the situation without filling the guy with bullets, he gets his day in court, and there's no police scandal surrounding his death. This is a win; now, if every other PD would follow suit and use some of their "urban tank" budget on these instead.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Dead or alive, you're coming with me!
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Sure beats all to hell those cowardly idiots that strapped a bomb to a robot and blew up an armed suspect.
U-233 bombs are theoretical and the handful of times it has been tried were failures. The "failures" didn't mean they didn't explode since the conventional explosives used to initiate the nuclear reaction is sufficient to cause considerable damage and turn the core into a dirty bomb. Those that did achieve fission with U-233 did so only with a mix with another fuel, U-235 or Pu-239, and with a yield lower than expected. The value of U-233 to "boost" the yield of a weapon is debatable because of the results of these tests. Other materials and methods, like common natural uranium as a second or third stage, are much more feasible. This still leaves the value of U-233 as a primary fission source as theoretical.
Another problem with using U-233 as a weapon core is dealing with U-232 contamination. U-232 has a bad habit of decaying with it's (relatively) short half life and sometimes doing so with spontaneous fission. The radiation from the weapon core might be dealt with by using heavy shielding or by not caring if the laborers get potentially lethal doses of radiation. Another way to deal with it is to allow the U-232 to decay away but that requires lengthy planning. By "lengthy" I mean waiting out the ~70 year half life long enough that the unwanted isotopes decay away. If one is dealing with U-232 by simply not caring about the radiation load then there is still the problem of the spontaneous fission. I'm not sure what those effects would be but I assume it means a short shelf life for the weapon, a potential "fizzile" (extremely low yield), and possibly premature detonation. None of those effects can be good.
Use of U-233 as a weapon core is so far from practical that it may as well be considered impossible. Obtaining useful quantities of sufficiently pure U-235 and/or Pu-239 is so much easier that weaponizing U-233 will likely never be attempted again. If it is attempted then it will be by some people that are very desperate or people with enough experience in making nuclear weapons that the U-233 bomb would be more of a theoretical exercise than anything considered as viable weapon research.
People spreading the FUD of U-233 as possible weapon grade material do so out of ignorance or by knowing that such weapons are effectively impossible but don't like nuclear power for one reason or another. The reasons to oppose nuclear power in all it's forms may again be based on ignorance but I'm starting to believe that there are political reasons to oppose it even though it is worthless to produce weapons.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Shotguns generally don't have rifled barrels, thus this was not a rifle.
Basement stuff? I was kidding -- or being sarcastic if you prefer -- because while no, one cannot do it in a literal garage, it is still a technology well within the reach of middle-tier proliferation risks who might have a comparatively hard time getting their hands on Uranium.
I'd call it hyperbole. That's just me though.
but there is little doubt that one can make bombs from Thorium, and further, that the bombs you make are the nice, easy to manage Uranium bombs and not the nasty, prematurely detonating fizzling fissioning (unless you build them just right) plutonium bombs.
There is a lot of doubt that anyone can build a thorium bomb because no one has done so yet. Even using thorium to breed U-233 for a bomb is theoretical.
Your claim that someone can "simply" extract U-233 from a breeder is idiotic. Thorium breeders operate on slim margins of neutrons, extracting too many neutrons risks the reactor going sub-critical. Going sub-critical means the reaction stops. Removing U-233 means removing neutrons.
Thorium reactors require a fissile starter fuel to operate. This usually takes the form of enriched U-235 but Pu-239 and U-233 have been used and proposed as well. If one has the means to obtain the U-235 or Pu-239 to start their thorium reactor then why would they bother with the U-233 to make a bomb?
I've communicated with real nuclear engineers online about the proliferation resistance of thorium breeder reactors and while using them to produce weapons grade material is theoretically possible it is highly impractical. If one has a breeder reactor and chemical separation facilities capable of handling radioactive materials then it would be much easier to get weapon grade plutonium than use the much more dangerous to handle U-233 to make a weapon.
You seem to claim that one can just dig up thorium from beach sand, run it through a breeder reactor, and weapon grade U-233 poops out. What is missing is the starter fuel, which needs to come from a particle accelerator, some other kind of reactor, or some kind of enrichment process. That starter fuel for the thorium reactor, whatever it's form, would be much more useful for a weapon than the U-233 that comes out of the thorium breeder.
What is more probable is using a thorium breeder to produce weapon grade plutonium. The problem is that the rate of production would be very slow but the purity would be very high. How slow? How pure? It depends on the reactor. The benefit with this reactor is that one can start with a low quality fuel, like low enriched uranium, and end up with a high quality fuel, weapon grade plutonium.
Read your source citation again. They claim it is theoretically possible but they make no claims on its practicality compared to other materials. They also show no evidence of a successful test.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Ultimately, one has to hope that smart people are too smart, usually, to want to mass-murder their neighbors. Admittedly, history doesn't provide a whole lot of support for this hope,
The other problem is that the "missing pieces" from the puzzle are all basically toy technology. Anybody who can understand basic (and I mean really basic) electronics and follow a howto can build a GPS-guided drone. And since IEDs are a thing, we know that "they" know how to blow stuff up real good. In fact, we gave many of "them" the training. It's very like how we know that Saddam did at one time have WMDs: We kept the receipts.
Personally, I think that if you put a magic button that would destroy the entire world in front of every person on Earth, the button would be pressed almost instantly by millions of people worldwide. It isn't a story that would end well.
This general train of thought, coupled with the one I expressed earlier, is why I think that terrorists are incredibly rare. Doing this stuff is trivial on the scale of things they're already doing.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Could it be because the terrorist threat is massively exaggerated? Maybe?
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
We don't have robots that know what 'humans' or 'harm' are yet, though.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Since the government is also monitoring our emails, maybe we could send robots out to help people write their emails? Help them know what is okay and what isn't, etc.
And since DHS wants to control all the voting machines, maybe we can send the robots to help that get going and stop people from voting for opposition candidates.
And since the IRS is charging taxes based on political views, maybe we could send robots out to vote on behalf of other people or take the guns away from people who don't have the correct political views?
And maybe the robots can help the EPA "crucify" people?
And maybe the robots can help NASA with their muslim outreach?
Maybe we could use the robots to help the NEA popularize the Affordable Care Act (i.e. Obamacare)?
Human life is too precious to be doing these things (like making choices, etc). Robots should be doing those things. Government and robots can work together to protect us!
Then you do agree to take the Blue Pill?!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.