NYT, Using Drones on Americans (The Tesla Mobile)
Mort Zuckerman
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Subject: NYT, Using Drones on Americans
Date: Nov 13, 2009 4:54 AM
Drones will be cheaper and more
effective than the Halliburton Gulags.
And the Rich People are hiring super-
security services that formerly only
contracted with the Military, as previously
mentioned (Utc.com and GE, and drs-ss.com).
While some people prefer to not
think about this, in the last two
weeks there have been two articles in
the MSM (Samuelson and Will, WaPo) about
what's going to happen around here when
the dollar goes down.
People can use e-weapons and shoot their
own flak. Which shouldn't be too hard to
make at home. Just watch the History
Channel. They give a daily expose' on
how various weapons work.
http://www.rmcybernetics.com/projects/DIY_Devices/tesla-coil-srsg.htm
Spin a rod attached to where you car's
wheel is attached inside a coil...
The Tesla Mobile...
KMDickson
http://www.actionlyme.org
==============================
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/opinion/13iht-edcohen.html?ref=global-home&pagewanted=print
November 13, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Of Fruit Flies and Drones
By ROGER COHEN
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA — I hadn’t thought much about the relationship
between fruit flies and Predator drones before visiting the California
Institute of Technology, but Caltech, which boasts more than 30 Nobel
laureates, teaches many things, not least about the fast-growing field
of robotics and war.
Fruit flies, as I learned from a graduate student, use optic flow to
navigate their environment. Optic flow is the apparent motion of the
landscape relative to the insect as it flies through it. When the
insect gets closer to an object, that object appears to get larger;
the expansion in the optic flow field triggers a collision avoidance
response in the fly, which veers away from the expanding object.
“The insect eye is not, and does not need to be, high resolution to
make this computation, so it follows that low resolution sensors can
be employed in robotics and serve the same purpose,” she told me.
Call this bio-mechanics — biologically inspired engineering
principles. It’s a booming field. You’ll find fruit flies tethered to
pins under microscopes in a virtual arena with the aim of developing
simplified command algorithms that will tell a robot sensor how to
mimic the insect for navigation. The feedback loop for the robot is
simple: If an object is expanding at a certain rate, that equals
proximity, so turn away!
The U.S. military is interested in such experiments because robotics
is its hot new thing. The loss of more than 5,000 U.S. military
personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 has concentrated minds on
putting robots rather than flesh and blood in harm’s way.
When the United States went into Iraq in 2003, it had a handful of
pilotless planes, or drones; it now has over 7,000. The invasion force
had no unmanned ground vehicles; the U.S. armed forces now employ more
than 12,000. One is called the PackBot and is made by iRobot,
manufacturers of the popular robot vacuum cleaner called the Roomba.
Since taking office, President Obama has shown a quiet predilection
for drone warfare. He’s been vacuuming up targets. There are two
programs in operation: a publicly acknowledged military one in Iraq
and Afghanistan and a covert C.I.A. program targeting terror suspects
in countries including Pakistan.
As Jane Mayer notes in a groundbreaking recent piece in The New
Yorker, “The intelligence agency declines to provide any information
to the public about where it operates, how it selects targets, who is
in charge, or how many people have been killed.”
According to a just-completed study by the New America Foundation,
quoted in Mayer’s piece, Obama has authorized as many drone strikes in
Pakistan in nine and a half months as George W. Bush did in his last
three years in office — at least 41 C.I.A. missile strikes, or about
one a week, that may have killed more than 500 people.
The dead have included high-value targets like Osama bin Laden’s
oldest son and Baitullah Mehsud, the Taliban leader in Pakistan — as
well as bystanders. Circling drones have struck panic. But as Mayer
notes, “The embrace of the Predator program has occurred with
remarkably little public discussion, given that it represents a
radically new and geographically unbounded use of state-sanctioned
lethal force.”
These are targeted international killings, no less real, and indeed
more insidious, for their video-game aspect. The thing about robotic
warfare is you can watch people get vaporized on a screen in Langley,
Virginia, and then drive home for dinner with the kids. The very
phrase “go to war” becomes hard to distinguish from going to work.
That’s a conflation fraught with ethical danger. The barriers to war
get lowered.
P.W. Singer, the author of an important new book called “Wired for
War,” told me that, “We are at a breakpoint in history. The U.S. Air
Force this year will train more unmanned system pilots than fighter
and bomber pilots combined. And, as Bill Gates has noted, robotics are
now where computers were back in 1980.”
Now you might think that a “pilot” sitting behind a computer bank in
Nevada blowing away people in Afghanistan is less liable to combat
stress than a soldier in a unit deployed there, but Singer said the
opposite has often proved the case
It’s time for a reckoning, especially from a president who campaigned
so vigorously against the “dark side” of the war on terror.
Congressional review of the drone programs and the full implications
of robotic warfare is essential to cast light and lay ground rules.
The Obama administration should not be targeting people for killing
without some public debate about how such targets are selected, what
the grounds are in the laws of war, and what agencies are involved.
Right now there’s an accountability void.
There are also broader questions. When robots are tomorrow’s veterans,
does war become more likely and more endless? Do drones cow enemies
with America’s technological prowess or embolden them to think America
is not man enough to fight? What is the psychological toll on video-
screen warriors?
There’s nothing innocent after all about the fluttering of a fruit
fly’s wing.
"[Real] scientists are *fiercely* independent. That's the good
news."-- NIH's Top Fool, Anthony Fauci