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African firm is selling pepper-spray bullet firing drones

bbc.com

21–30 of 51 posts

Re: African firm is selling pepper-spray bullet firing drones

#21
Fuck that and fuck you assholes who are excited about this torture weapon, it's gonna be used against people! The first order was probably for a mining company in Amazon, to torture the locals who defend their land against fucking mining companies. And soon, it's gonna be used everywhere in the world against people protesting for rights.

Lots of people lost their lives, lots of people lost their eyes by pepper gas bullets this year, including this 15 years old kid: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Berkin_Elvan

See this documentary: http://www.worldpressphoto.org/multimedia-gallery/2014/witne...

Re: African firm is selling pepper-spray bullet firing drones

#22

Technical solutions to people problems.

All solutions are technical. Only some are the wrong ones.

> All solutions are technical.

What does this mean? When employees are on strike, one solution is to increase wages. How is this a technical solution?

Re: African firm is selling pepper-spray bullet firing drones

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> That said I don't see why these folks don't have drones of their own There's some important historical context here. The client was a South African mining company (I assume - it said mining company, and the company is in South Africa). There were recent riots in South Africa between a miner's union and the mine, and the miner's got slaughtered (literally). Most likely not the same company, but miner's in South Afr…

The South African's aren't the only one, miners in the coal belt of the US, and in China today, have always been victimized by unscrupulous corporations. In both those cases having documentation of the problems with video from a drone could have furthered the miner's interest in getting justice. That was what I was trying to say that with my comment about them (the miners) having drones of their own.

Oh I agree - I think they SHOULD have drones of their own, I just think they're a lot less likely to have access to them than miners in America or most parts of the middle east. Don't know much about China, but yeah. I should have posted my comment as a top-level comment because it ended up being a more general response than to your comment specifically.

Re: African firm is selling pepper-spray bullet firing drones

#24
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define 'small'? Recoil and weight are the primary factors, I assume, in why no such beast exists. Anything in the size of the average quad-copter is going to have to manage the fact that its flight trajectory would be significantly altered with each shot. The guys at Red Jacket invented something like that, and the way they mitigated the recoil was to have the barrel pointing straight down, which limits the effective…

Agreed that a quad-copter wouldn't be able to handle the recoil, and that weight is a factor - bullets are (relatively) heavy. I was just saying that something the size of a Predator drone isn't necessary for close combat. I'm sure that there is some engineering magic that could be done to manage both of these issues in a relatively small package.

A swarm of small drones with photographic flashers could give one side of a gunfight a huge advantage.

Re: African firm is selling pepper-spray bullet firing drones

#25

If I were a manager at the mining company that purchased the drones, I would be worried about retaliation in kind by workers who obtained a similar drone.

Managers at South African mining companies already have good reason to be worried about retaliation from workers. Details in my other comment on this thread - but in short, buying a drone is really just throwing fuel on an already well-fueled fire in this case.

Re: African firm is selling pepper-spray bullet firing drones

#26
post #8

"Desert Wolf's website states that its Skunk octacopter drone is fitted with four high-capacity paintball barrels, each capable of firing up to 20 bullets per second." If they sell this in the US our company paintball outings might get a little more interesting.

How about Terminator themed post apocalyptic LARP?

Re: African firm is selling pepper-spray bullet firing drones

#28
post #9

I am surprised that anyone would be caught off guard by this sort of thing. After all it is going to be much more effective to fly over a crowd and shoot at them than to try to hit them from behind a riot shield. The Union outrage is interesting too, mostly because I agree that as your government (or companies) acquire tools for crowd control it certainly has a chilling effect on peaceful assembly. That said I don't…

>> That said I don't see why these folks don't have drones of their own There's some important historical context here. The client was a South African mining company (I assume - it said mining company, and the company is in South Africa). There were recent riots in South Africa between a miner's union and the mine, and the miner's got slaughtered (literally). Most likely not the same company, but miner's in South Afr…

The use of UAVs for commercial use, including this application, is at present illegal in South Africa. So it's not at all certain that the client is a South African mining company.

You're oversimplifying the events at Marikana, which were somewhat more complex.

The shooting itself was preceded by days of violence in which striking miners armed themselves with pangas (machetes) and guns and massacred two police officers, two mine security officers and six other miners accused of not participating in the strike.

It was the South African Police Service, not the mine, which shot 34 miners on that horrible day. They did so after an operation to remove the miners from the hilltop went horribly wrong, causing armed miners to run towards a line of policemen who panicked and opened fire.

It also does not appear that the miners' union involved, AMCU, is negotiating in good faith. Their non-negotiable salary demand of approximately US$1170 in base pay plus another US$470 in benefits takes them into the upper percentile of all South Africans and is more than a software developer with a three-year degree earns on entering the workplace.

Moreover, each time the government and the mines reach an agreement with AMCU on wages, AMCU has added additional demands not previously mentioned. It's clear their main desire is to extend the strike, already the longest in South Africa's history and responsible for two successive quarterly declines in GDP this year.

Those types of wages aren't sustainable, so we're starting to see the mining companies adopt the same techniques used in Australia and elsewhere which are more automated and require far fewer workers.

In the end those who suffer will be the miners and their families, most of whom live in dirt-poor rural areas and have no other income options. They've been abused by the mining companies and their own union in equal measure and let down by an incompetent government. There's no good outcome for them now.

Re: African firm is selling pepper-spray bullet firing drones

#29
post #9

I am surprised that anyone would be caught off guard by this sort of thing. After all it is going to be much more effective to fly over a crowd and shoot at them than to try to hit them from behind a riot shield. The Union outrage is interesting too, mostly because I agree that as your government (or companies) acquire tools for crowd control it certainly has a chilling effect on peaceful assembly. That said I don't…

The large companies are much more likely to have the protection of the state for their drones, while the worker's drones are more likely to be ruled illegal and confiscated etc.

Re: African firm is selling pepper-spray bullet firing drones

#30

Side note: I'm always a little bothered when people attribute something from "Africa". Africa has 54 countries, c'mon people

What about when they attribute it to "Europe"?

Africa is a place, and the countries there are more similar to each other than to other countries, so combining them is natural.

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