The Drones Are Here

[We Come In Peace]

Tell me about due process in a hostage situation.

There are well documented procedures and protocols for how police and other law enforcement agencies handle hostage situations. Each one differs based on municipality, but each are governed by state and local laws, regulations and all shootings are subject to a thorough review by either IAD or civilian boards (most times both).

 

SWAT doesn't drive around, constantly on call just in case there's a call. They're also humans and have the ability to think, reason, prioritize and communicate. Drones have none of those capabilities and none of the guidelines, restrictions or review mechanisms in place.

 

This was a silly comparison to make.

[GG]

There are well documented procedures and protocols for how police and other law enforcement agencies handle hostage situations. Each one differs based on municipality, but each are governed by state and local laws, regulations and all shootings are subject to a thorough review by either IAD or civilian boards (most times both).

 

SWAT doesn't drive around, constantly on call just in case there's a call. They're also humans and have the ability to think, reason, prioritize and communicate. Drones have none of those capabilities and none of the guidelines, restrictions or review mechanisms in place.

 

This was a silly comparison to make.

 

So drones fly on their own, without any human control?

 

Wow, robotics are truly advanced.

[3rdnlng]

 

 

So drones fly on their own, without any human control?

 

Wow, robotics are truly advanced.

 

Yes, haven't you seen how far John Kerry has come?

[meazza]

So drones fly on their own, without any human control?

 

Wow, robotics are truly advanced.

 

To be fair, he was probably thinking of another timeline he visited.

[ICanSleepWhenI'mDead]

The Terminator had to shed his clothes to travel through time - - maybe analytical abilities must be left at home to travel through interstellar space, or simply aren't a prerequisite for civilizations to leave their home systems.

 

Then again, maybe drones are a potential threat to his plans to enslave the human race. Come in peace my a$$!

[....lybob]

So drones fly on their own, without any human control?

 

Wow, robotics are truly advanced.

getting there http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/01/16/taranis_neuron_militaries_moving_closer_to_truly_autonmoous_drones.html

[DC Tom]

getting there http://www.slate.com...ous_drones.html

 

We're getting closer to drones that fly without any human control, except for having to be controlled by humans.

 

You're an idiot. But in your defense, the editors of Slate are worse.

[ICanSleepWhenI'mDead]

getting there http://www.slate.com...ous_drones.html

Thanks for posting that link - - it also has hyperlinks to several other interesting articles, including but not limited to this one:

 

http://www.technewsd...ml?cmpid=492405

 

Past flight tests for the X-47B include taking off and landing from a Navy air base and testing the drone's software "brains" that would allow it to conduct midair refueling on its own. The drone is also expected to have the ability to take off and land from a carrier without direct human control.

 

Still, a human drone operator would still stand by even if he or she is not controlling the drone directly. The operator also has an arm-worn joystick controller that can guide the X-47B drone as it taxis on the deck of an aircraft carrier.

It appears I was too harsh on We Come In Peace - - my bad. Check out this video. It deals mainly with civilian drones controlled by a "pilot" on the ground, and the interviewer seems to refer to drones operated by ground "pilots" as autonomous just because they contain some auto-correcting flight-leveling features. But around the 2:38 to 3:15 marks, an interviewed civilian "pilot" talks about what sounds like truly autonomous civilian drones that he saw actually used in a DARPA-sponsored drone competition. Since he only mentioned it briefly, it's hard to tell exactly what he meant by "autonomous" - - he might have been referring to flying the drone without goggles rather than a truly autonomous, totally pre-programmed flight plan. But that's not what he actually said.

 

http://www.technewsd...more-video.html

 

In any event, no reason to think the police have anything autonomous yet, but it's just a matter of time. And who knows what the military already secretly has.

Edited March 7, 2013 by ICanSleepWhenI'mDead

[B-Man]

FTA:

 

There are a few things about this debate worth considering. One is that we are too much focused on the instrument of these killings rather than on the moral and political context of them. “Drone” is a scary-sounding word, and the prospect of remote-control killings via robots circling invisibly overhead is of course ominous. But the technological means here are of no particular importance or interest — we could as easily be talking about slitting throats, tossing hand grenades through windows, or any other old-fashioned means of ending a life. The question is not about using unmanned aircraft to carry out killings, but about drawing up lists of Americans greenlit for assassination and then acting upon them, first abroad and now, according to Attorney General Eric Holder, at home, if the president judges doing so to be necessary.

 

 

 

We are suffering from the conflation of rhetoric and reality. Our “War on Terror” is not a war in any conventional sense of the word, and our insistence that in this war the “battlefield is everywhere” takes literally a phrase that is not literally true. Al-Qaeda and its sympathizers are savages who will kill when and where they can; they could strike anywhere, but it does not follow that everywhere is therefore a field of battle subject to the law of war. The Museum of Modern Art and the Mall of America might be possible targets for terrorists, but martial law is not in effect in those locations, nor should it be. If John Walker Lindh had been killed during a shootout at Tora Bora or during the prison uprising at Qala-i-Jangi, that would have been of no special concern. There is no question that killing an American citizen under arms in the course of battlefield combat is easily within the bounds of acceptable national-defense action.

 

But that is not the question before us. Instead, we are faced with an arrangement by which the president may designate any American, at home or abroad, as an “enemy combatant,” and place him on a list of people to be killed — not in the course of combat, but in targeted operations indistinguishable from assassinations. The legal justification for this is derived from the penumbras of the 2006 Military Commissions Act — but Congress has passed no law specifically authorizing the premeditated, targeted killings of American citizens abroad, to say nothing of American citizens at home. I very much doubt that such a law could pass Congress, even as defective and unreliable as our Congress can be. Passing such a law would not make these killings any less problematic, but it would introduce a much-needed balance-of-powers element to the situation.

 

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/342382/stand-rand-kevin-d-williamson

 

 

.

[We Come In Peace]

So drones fly on their own, without any human control?

 

Wow, robotics are truly advanced.

This is my point.

 

We're getting closer to drones that fly without any human control, except for having to be controlled by humans.

 

You're an idiot. But in your defense, the editors of Slate are worse.

(Didn't look at the Slate article, just speaking in general)

 

You know better than most on here about the rapid advance of technology, especially governmental/military grade hardware. If the old cliche is true that the military has tech 10-15 years ahead of what the public knows about, then how confident are you that we won't develop fully autonomous drones in the near future?

 

This is the problem with the slippery slope. Human controlled drones are just the beginning.

[....lybob]

This is my point.

 

 

(Didn't look at the Slate article, just speaking in general)

 

You know better than most on here about the rapid advance of technology, especially governmental/military grade hardware. If the old cliche is true that the military has tech 10-15 years ahead of what the public knows about, then how confident are you that we won't develop fully autonomous drones in the near future?

 

This is the problem with the slippery slope. Human controlled drones are just the beginning.

I remember the first outcry about drones it was like "why all the fuss it's not like they're armed they're just doing surveillance "

[We Come In Peace]

I remember the first outcry about drones it was like "why all the fuss it's not like they're armed they're just doing surveillance "

It's a continuation of the all out assault on our right to privacy. It's bad enough police cruisers are being equipped with heat sensors that allow them to "see through walls" on their patrols, now we have drones with that same capability, constantly in the air monitoring everyone, everywhere, without any sort of legal construction to assure due process.

 

And people's reaction is, "meh". ESPECIALLY the younger generations which is the most terrifying part.

 

The beginning of the end.

[....lybob]

It's a continuation of the all out assault on our right to privacy. It's bad enough police cruisers are being equipped with heat sensors that allow them to "see through walls" on their patrols, now we have drones with that same capability, constantly in the air monitoring everyone, everywhere, without any sort of legal construction to assure due process.

 

And people's reaction is, "meh". ESPECIALLY the younger generations which is the most terrifying part.

 

The beginning of the end.

Look we live in a surveillance state that the cold war commies would have creamed themselves over, political bribery is legal, corporations are people with superior rights, a two tier justice system where if you are laundering billions of dollars of money from drug cartels, terrorists, or rouge states your corporation gets a piddling fine, average Joe hacks his phone so he can use a different carrier and that could be 20 years in jail - I don't think most people can wrap their head around it

[We Come In Peace]

Look we live in a surveillance state that the cold war commies would have creamed themselves over, political bribery is legal, corporations are people with superior rights, a two tier justice system where if you are laundering billions of dollars of money from drug cartels, terrorists, or rouge states your corporation gets a piddling fine, average Joe hacks his phone so he can use a different carrier and that could be 20 years in jail - I don't think most people can wrap their head around it

There's no going back. Not without a massive and shift in the political and social zeitgeist -- which only comes from pain and catastrophe. And by then it might be too late.

[ICanSleepWhenI'mDead]

We're getting closer to drones that fly without any human control, except for having to be controlled by humans.

 

You're an idiot. But in your defense, the editors of Slate are worse.

My middle brother Darryl thinks that you should relinquish the rights to "You're an idiot" and trademark "Get off my lawn" instead. He explained why, but I couldn't follow it. He's a bit of a moron (runs in the family), so hey, what does he know? He's probably wrong. Roll Tide!

 

The technology here appeals to my geek side, and I was curious about just how autonomous these things can be, so I did a little searching. I found a link to the DARPA "crowd-sourced" Unmanned Aerial Vehicle ("UAV") competition that encouraged "hobbyists and citizen scientists" to compete for a $100,000 prize. DARPA wanted a small, cheap surveillance UAV that could be carried in a rucksack and covertly flown remotely beyond the ground pilot's line-of-sight, perched, and returned, but with some autonomous flight capabilities:

 

http://www.uavforge.net/

 

That's mildly interesting, but it's clearly the minor leagues of autonomous drone development. Reading the observer's field evaluation reports reminds me of the old films that show people trying to fly in crazy contraptions - - lots of crashes. Here's an overview of the results in a Wired article:

 

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/06/darpa-uavforge/

 

But I also found some pretty high-tech stuff elsewhere. There is a series of 3 YouTube videos that show some pretty astounding computer-controlled drone maneuvers performed in a Univ. of Penn. research lab. We could quibble about whether the videos show truly "autonomous" drone flights (are they using some sort of motion capture technology?), but they demonstrate the ability to rapidly control drone flight in amazingly tight spaces (at least in a controlled environment). I'll grant you that weaponizing the platform and making it do similar manuevers in my backyard looks like it's a ways off, but keep in mind that the first of these videos is almost 3 years old, and this is just the unclassified stuff. My oldest brother Darryl thinks that the drones are executing computer-controlled flight commands, rather than flight commands sent by a "human ground pilot" based on what the "ground pilot" sees.

 

I think there's a limit on how many videos I can post in one day, so here's the first one from May, 2010 (other two will follow) - - the more recent ones are even more impressive:

 

[ICanSleepWhenI'mDead]

From 9/15/10:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geqip_0Vjec

Edited March 8, 2013 by ICanSleepWhenI'mDead

[BringBackFergy]

it was a little more complicated that....and certainly more complicated then our President sticking his dick in an intern

Depends what your definition of "in" is.

[ICanSleepWhenI'mDead]

From September 16, 2011:

 

[GG]

I just had an attack helicopter fly right over my house. My privacy was invaded.

[We Come In Peace]

I just had an attack helicopter fly right over my house. My privacy was invaded.

You really don't see the issue?