Drone Society
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Re: Drone Society
Argos looks awesome!
But let's put that in perspective. A million TB/day. Or a month's bandwidth for Netflix, every day. I'm sure we have a few server farmers who can put that into perspective.
This is not coming to a police dept near you in the next decade. Yeah, we can link cameras, and we can beam data, and we can make big, cheap hard drives, but this application is way out there.
What I thought was cool was the tagging moving objects, and near real time video. This could nearly end premeditated violent crime. Tag all motion within x feet of a 911 call, ID possible perp, fast forward to present location,roll!
Of course, then the adaptation would be to leave to coverage area, steal a car, commit the crime, and leave the coverage area again. But this has possibilities for good, someday.
But let's put that in perspective. A million TB/day. Or a month's bandwidth for Netflix, every day. I'm sure we have a few server farmers who can put that into perspective.
This is not coming to a police dept near you in the next decade. Yeah, we can link cameras, and we can beam data, and we can make big, cheap hard drives, but this application is way out there.
What I thought was cool was the tagging moving objects, and near real time video. This could nearly end premeditated violent crime. Tag all motion within x feet of a 911 call, ID possible perp, fast forward to present location,roll!
Of course, then the adaptation would be to leave to coverage area, steal a car, commit the crime, and leave the coverage area again. But this has possibilities for good, someday.
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Re: Drone Society
The persons shadow + angle of sun = person's height. If points on arms, shoulders, hips, and feet can give length of limbs and their movement gives the type of gait. This would make easier to spot a specific person in a crowd. Once a list of candidates have been found all you need is some webcam on some building or a random cellphone zombie holding the phone 20 inches from the face while walking around---seems to be every other person these days---who doesn't know that their camera has been switched on for the face id and you're locked in.Chad wrote: A decent hat, because of the angle of the cameras on the drones (it would be steep), would defeat the facial recognition.
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Re: Drone Society
From a technical standpoint, there's no reason your drones need to fly for facial recognition / target identification.
and once skynet becomes self aware...
and once skynet becomes self aware...
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Re: Drone Society
If I were building the assassination drone, foam mold of the aircraft body, cell camera/com system, garage build ak-47, 2014 price, about $1k plus my time.
But in the end, the drone can't do much that I can't do, and there's alot of things I can do better. This makes for a good movie plot, a halfassed murder plot, and a pretty lousy war strategy.
The places they are currently using drones, other options include tanks, artillery and air strikes. In that case, there's a case to be made for drone strikes. I'm not holding my breath waiting for the first drone assassination on USA territory.
There's possibility here, but nothing I'll lose any sleep over.
But in the end, the drone can't do much that I can't do, and there's alot of things I can do better. This makes for a good movie plot, a halfassed murder plot, and a pretty lousy war strategy.
The places they are currently using drones, other options include tanks, artillery and air strikes. In that case, there's a case to be made for drone strikes. I'm not holding my breath waiting for the first drone assassination on USA territory.
There's possibility here, but nothing I'll lose any sleep over.
Re: Drone Society
Riggerjack wrote:If I were building the assassination drone.....
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Re: Drone Society
Oh, the flashbacks!Riggerjack wrote:If I were building the assassination drone, foam mold of the aircraft body, cell camera/com system, garage build ak-47, 2014 price, about $1k plus my time.
But in the end, the drone can't do much that I can't do, and there's alot of things I can do better. This makes for a good movie plot, a halfassed murder plot, and a pretty lousy war strategy.
The places they are currently using drones, other options include tanks, artillery and air strikes. In that case, there's a case to be made for drone strikes. I'm not holding my breath waiting for the first drone assassination on USA territory.
There's possibility here, but nothing I'll lose any sleep over.
Wasn't it in an episode from "The Magician" (Bill Bixby after "Courtship of Eddie's Father") where an R/C car rigged with bomb was used for murder?
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Re: Drone Society
@ gtoo: oh, i was thinking "dead pool"!
i'm not saying it can't be done, just not much of a serious threat. if it were a serious threat, FAA plus manned fighter aircraft should pretty much resolve it.
@ego: trust me, my garage built ak-47 trumps your photoshop any day! but yours looks cooler!
i'm not saying it can't be done, just not much of a serious threat. if it were a serious threat, FAA plus manned fighter aircraft should pretty much resolve it.
@ego: trust me, my garage built ak-47 trumps your photoshop any day! but yours looks cooler!
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Re: Drone Society
Well, here's another one then. High altitude balloon (think many of them), crowbar, camera at the pointy end, guiding fins. Think darts. Air superiority can't fix this one.
But we're getting away from the original observation of how drones take away the public/mass/people equalizer of the gun. Ordinary citizens don't have access to fighter jets to eliminate any untoward drone threats. If guns are the dominant technology, a war requires convincing a mass of people to pick them up. Admittedly, the US is already quite a bit away from that requirement. American wars don't really require the people behind them anymore, very much, at least in the short run. Anyhoo ... the issue with drones is that you no longer need a mass of people. You just need a lot fewer skilled operators and some off the shelf hardware. This removes the otherwise strong link between war and the entire public. In short, it changes the landscape.
But we're getting away from the original observation of how drones take away the public/mass/people equalizer of the gun. Ordinary citizens don't have access to fighter jets to eliminate any untoward drone threats. If guns are the dominant technology, a war requires convincing a mass of people to pick them up. Admittedly, the US is already quite a bit away from that requirement. American wars don't really require the people behind them anymore, very much, at least in the short run. Anyhoo ... the issue with drones is that you no longer need a mass of people. You just need a lot fewer skilled operators and some off the shelf hardware. This removes the otherwise strong link between war and the entire public. In short, it changes the landscape.
Re: Drone Society
Satellites. Unmanned and hovering constantly:)George the original one wrote:where do people think the google earth images come from?
Re: Drone Society
Some of your scenario doesn't deal with drones, which is what I was focusing on. The mounted cameras and cell cameras would definitely get around the hat. The zombie cellphone worries me more than drones.jacob wrote:The persons shadow + angle of sun = person's height. If points on arms, shoulders, hips, and feet can give length of limbs and their movement gives the type of gait. This would make easier to spot a specific person in a crowd. Once a list of candidates have been found all you need is some webcam on some building or a random cellphone zombie holding the phone 20 inches from the face while walking around---seems to be every other person these days---who doesn't know that their camera has been switched on for the face id and you're locked in.Chad wrote: A decent hat, because of the angle of the cameras on the drones (it would be steep), would defeat the facial recognition.
Would the programs be able to take into account what the person was wearing to determine actual height, arm length, and gait change? My gait in dress shoes is different than it is in sneakers, as is my height. My arm length probably looks different in a suit than it does in a t-shirt, as my shoulder looks higher in a suit (2 shirts and a jacket add some thickness). Now it's quite possible programs could be written to factor this all in, but I don't know how reliable it is.
- jennypenny
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Re: Drone Society
Yes. Current programs use markerless motion capture combined with IR to ID and track people based on certain measurements. A sophisticated set of measurements is combined to produce a (hopefully) unique mark. For fun, check out ... http://www.xsens.com/ . That's just what availble in the affordable, commercial market.
Re: Drone Society
Crowbar? It's interesting that the link for the "drone war" novel I put in this thread earlier actually had a weapon called the "crowbar." Instead of balloon based it was satellite based and they would just drop hundreds of them over the battlefield. The author made them just steel rods with sensors and small guidance fins that would kill with just kinetic energy provided by gravity.jacob wrote:Well, here's another one then. High altitude balloon (think many of them), crowbar, camera at the pointy end, guiding fins. Think darts. Air superiority can't fix this one.
But we're getting away from the original observation of how drones take away the public/mass/people equalizer of the gun. Ordinary citizens don't have access to fighter jets to eliminate any untoward drone threats. If guns are the dominant technology, a war requires convincing a mass of people to pick them up. Admittedly, the US is already quite a bit away from that requirement. American wars don't really require the people behind them anymore, very much, at least in the short run. Anyhoo ... the issue with drones is that you no longer need a mass of people. You just need a lot fewer skilled operators and some off the shelf hardware. This removes the otherwise strong link between war and the entire public. In short, it changes the landscape.
While I have pointed out that current drone tech is really just remote controlled aircraft, I do agree with Jacob that it still changes warfare drastically. Probably more psychological now (for the user) than a drastic increase in capability. The increase in capability will come when they can be autonomous and cheap (a predator is cheaper to operate right now than F-16, but it needs to drop further for the swarms), or at least 90% autonomous.
Removing the morality of killing millions from the equation and just imagining a modern war between the US/Europe and Russia is kind of staggering and scary with drones involved. I don't think it would take long before we would be cranking out drones like we were cranking out piston fighters in WWII. In full fledged World War, which is what any full on war with Russia would be, we would be less concerned with civilian casualties. This would mean we could take 5,000 drones and load them with hellfires or some other smart munition and launch them over an area with orders to destroy any vehicles. I think the programs are smart enough to do that with minimal human intervention.
This reminds me more of WWI than WWII, as WWI was the first truly modern industrial war. The generals on both sides weren't expecting the level of casualties that occurred from industrial war. The French lost something like 40-60k men and 250k wounded in the first 2 weeks. An enjoyable listen is Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcasts titled "A Blueprint for Armagedon I & II."
- jennypenny
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Re: Drone Society
Funny you say that. I always think of drones as being closer to biological and chemical weapons than WMDs.Chad wrote: This reminds me more of WWI than WWII, as WWI was the first truly modern industrial war."
Re: Drone Society
I always wonder what the error rate is for this stuff.jennypenny wrote:Yes. Current programs use markerless motion capture combined with IR to ID and track people based on certain measurements. A sophisticated set of measurements is combined to produce a (hopefully) unique mark. For fun, check out ... http://www.xsens.com/ . That's just what availble in the affordable, commercial market.
Also, we used to be able to suggest the government had more advanced systems than civilians in a lot of areas, but I'm not sure that's entirely true anymore. Certain tech moves too fast now for the bureaucracy of government and government funded companies (Northrop, Lockheed, Boeing, etc.) to keep up. Of course, I'm not talking about tech civilians have no use for like stealth.
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Re: Drone Society
Face recognition has come a long way in recent years. In ideal lighting conditions, given the same pose, facial expression etc, it easily outperforms humans. But the real world isn't like that. People grow beards, wear make up and glasses, make strange faces and so on, which makes the task of facial recognition tricky even for humans. A well-known photo database called Labelled Faces in the Wild captures much of this variation. It consists of 13,000 face images of almost 6000 public figures collected off the web. When images of the same person are paired, humans can correctly spot matches and mismatches 97.53 per cent of the time. By comparison, face recognition algorithms have never come close to this. Now a group of computer scientists have developed a new algorithm called GaussianFace that outperforms humans in this task for the first time.
http://slashdot.org/story/14/04/23/1229 ... rms-humans
http://slashdot.org/story/14/04/23/1229 ... rms-humans
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Re: Drone Society
Actually, most of the detailed data comes from assessors. when you move out to the low resolution rural areas, that is satellites. When you really want to know where the bodies are buried, check the tax records!George the original one wrote:
where do people think the google earth images come from?
Satellites. Unmanned and hovering constantly:)
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Re: Drone Society
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014 ... o/8975227/
The latest in HD Video Drone News..advancements keep coming hard and fast
The latest in HD Video Drone News..advancements keep coming hard and fast
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