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lol @ the countermeasures being high tech lasers. Spray them with water or vegetable oil. Water is easiest - just use a high pressure hose to knock them out of the sky / potentially break flight-critical components. Oil requires some special equipment but would presumably ruin the propellers/rotors.
If Battlefield 3 has taught me anything, someone is going to strap a brick of C4 to one soon enough.
I know quadcopters are very sensitive to weight, and a 10oz (285g) quadcopter could probably not carry more than a 1oz (28g) payload. How destructive is 1oz (28g) of C4? I want to see the destructive potential of a quantity of C4 graphed against its weight.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=janur7RJwm0
Or this jet. Going to need a railgun for this thing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTHWBSluUjU&feature=player_em...
This was staged by the german pirate party. They wanted to "take pictures" / draw attention to the surveillance issue. The incident wasn't discussed in terms of being a threat in german media. Merkel was photographed smiling as the drone crashed down in front of her. See also: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/merkel-campaign-...
They would have been more effective if they had 50-100 individually-controlled quadcopters, and had them hover near specific individuals, looking at facial expressions, phone screens, gestures, etc. Crashing the drone at the guy's feet makes them seem harmless, or even hapless.
lol @ the countermeasures being high tech lasers. Spray them with water or vegetable oil. Water is easiest - just use a high pressure hose to knock them out of the sky / potentially break flight-critical components. Oil requires some special equipment but would presumably ruin the propellers/rotors.
>> Spray them with water or vegetable oil. And what happens when the Prez, PM or Pope is at a rally and 10+ UAVs at the size of small birds start buzzing around? Remember, they are people around, even the sniper has to worry about what his bullet will hit next.
The only long-term solution against terrorism is to just make sure that people's options in society are good enough that they won't resort to blowing things up. This is also the only sustainable way of fighting crime, which any reasonable study will show you.
I'm from Norway, we recently had a terrorist attack that was bigger than 9/11 in relation to our population size. So I'm not saying this as some cold outsider who doesn't see what problems the United States is facing. This is the way things should be handled.
> The drone was harmless, aside from potential political collateral damage to Merkel's Christian Democratic Party, and the pilot of the drone was released after being briefly held by police. Can you imagine where this guy would be right now if he had attempted this near President Obama?
And you just don't have grounds on which to accuse him - flying drones is legal, he didn't endanger anyone and it was a prank.
Oh great, a lot of fear-mongering about to happen. We honestly can't defend against all of these things--might as well simply try to structure society to be resilient in the face of inevitable attacks, and try not to make such things desirable to anybody even remotely sane.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> Spray them with water or vegetable oil. And what happens when the Prez, PM or Pope is at a rally and 10+ UAVs at the size of small birds start buzzing around? Remember, they are people around, even the sniper has to worry about what his bullet will hit next.
The best, and soon only, good defense against terrorism is a society where people don't want to become terrorists. You guys are thinking in completely wrong terms by worrying about countermeasures. You could create 10 grenade-wielding UAVs, set them for a pre-programmed course above the crowd, out of reach of everyone, and set them off almost immediately. Water cannons, oil cannons or any other countermeasure would b…
lol @ the countermeasures being high tech lasers. Spray them with water or vegetable oil. Water is easiest - just use a high pressure hose to knock them out of the sky / potentially break flight-critical components. Oil requires some special equipment but would presumably ruin the propellers/rotors.
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/06/wha...
Adapting my comment from there:
One possibility is that in the future, high-status (and thus also high-office) can only be safely held by pseudonymous cryptographic identities that can’t be linked to soft, locatable, assassination-prone meatspace bodies.
Note that this also makes it possible for a high-status identity/officeholder to be a branded collective (or AI) that continues beyond the death of any its members.
So, potential news from that future:
The Supreme Court, on a 5-4 ruling authored by Chief Justice @CyberJeffersonian_7, rejected the suspiciously-late election returns from Puerto Marte, throwing the 2096 election to Senator @Verax1983 over Governor @Locke2001, in the closest Electoral College contest since Bush-Gore in 2000.
From his/her undisclosed location, President-Elect @Verax1983 praised the ruling and again denied allegations that he/she has been a software-only entity for the last 17 years.
I, for one, welcome our new pseudonymous overlords.
Oh great, a lot of fear-mongering about to happen. We honestly can't defend against all of these things--might as well simply try to structure society to be resilient in the face of inevitable attacks, and try not to make such things desirable to anybody even remotely sane.