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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=-
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.