Rolling Drone Thread

salon asks the one nagging question that was troubling us all:

http://www.salon.com/2013/02/11/would_lincoln_use_drones/

you know, i'm not sure i'm against (unarmed) drones searching for a particular bad guy. seems materially different from "surveillance"

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2013/02/drones_war_and_civilian_casualties_how_unmanned_aircraft_reduce_collateral.html

Rather laughable to talk about reducing collateral damage through the use of drones in countries the US is not at war with and would have no other practical option for attacking if it were not for unmanned aircraft.

Damn, schlump - that's a powerful piece you linked to.

that slate piece is incredibly awful

OT?: The Cannes '12 sound & light show performed by a 16 drone swarm and mentioned en passant in the Time piece is rather pretty.

http://www.seattlepi.com/news/us/article/FAA-investigating-report-of-drone-spotted-near-NYC-4329166.php

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/drones-congress-terror

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2013/03/drones_don_t_target_u_s_citizens_they_kill_them_overseas_as_collateral_damage.2.html

http://www.theonion.com/articles/youre-my-best-friend-says-obama-to-drone-that-appe,31594/

Obama’s Defense Budget Shows the Drone Spending Boom Is Over
www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/04/drone-budget/

The laser cannons the Navy are installing are purportedly for downing drones.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/04/pentagon-global-observer

The Pentagon spent millions developing a humongous hydrogen-fueled drone that, it hoped, could fly at soaring altitudes for a week at a time. Now the drone is all on its lonesome, because no one wants to buy it.

Built by drone manufacturer AeroVironment, the Global Observer is a 70-foot-long jumbo drone with a wingspan nearly as long as one of the Air Force’s B-52 bombers. Powered by liquid-hydrogen fuel cells, it was billed as a persistent eye-in-the-sky capable of loitering at 65,000 feet for a week a time without spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The Pentagon also envisioned many missions. The drone’s 380-pound payload of spy cameras and sensors could stare at a diameter of 600 miles of earth at once, while doubling as a communications relay. It could patrol the oceans and possibly track hurricanes — the Department of Homeland Security was interested in it too.

But now no one wants the giant drone. “Currently, no service or defense agency has advocated for it to be a program,” Pentagon spokeswoman Maureen Schumann told InsideDefense (subscription only) in April. This was after spending $27.9 million developing the drone since 2007, which came to an end in December when the Pentagon closed down its development contract, the trade journal reports.

Flies on the nose of the Pentagon in fairness - the F-35 jet cost $40 billion and is just as unloved.

I feel like we're so close to

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9b/Helicarrier.jpg

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/05/14/a_liberal_case_for_drones

Speculating that technology nobody is building could be programmed using criteria nobody has outlined to be less malicious / incompetent than the people operating drones IRL is an odd "liberal case" but it's an attention-grabbing headline, i suppose.

http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama/2013/05/i-might-need-you-kill-signatures-patterns-and-alternatives.html

http://www.imore.com/tom-clancys-division-let-mobile-players-get-post-apocalyptic-console-action

In a lot of ways, it's a standard duck-and-cover action game with lots of gadgets, skills, progression, and persistent open world player-versus-player, but what's really interesting to us is the mobile element. Players on unnamed tablets will be able to join in the fun as a drone, offering tactical support by way of surveillance, healing, and providing other bonuses. You can still get shot at, even though you're in the air, so watch out.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/07/25/gender_and_drone_strikes_pew_research_center_study_shows_a_huge_gap_in_public.html

How To Think About Drones
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/09/the-killing-machines-how-to-think-about-drones/309434/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/files/2013/10/whitehouse-photo.png

Malala Yousafzai may not have won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, but she enjoyed a private Oval Office audience with President Obama and the first family.

Yousafzai, the 16-year-old Pakistani student who was shot in the head by Taliban gunmen for speaking out in support of the right of girls to go to school, met Friday with Obama and his wife, Michelle. A photograph issued by the White House shows the Obamas' 15-year-old daughter, Malia, also present during the visit.

...Yousafzai said she was honored to meet Obama and that she raised concerns with him about the administration's use of drones, saying they are "fueling terrorism."
"I thanked President Obama for the United States' work in supporting education in Pakistan and Afghanistan and for Syrian refugees," Yousafzai said in a statement published by the Associated Press. "I also expressed my concerns that drone attacks are fueling terrorism. Innocent victims are killed in these acts, and they lead to resentment among the Pakistani people. If we refocus efforts on education it will make a big impact."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/10/11/malala-yousafzai-meets-with-the-obamas-in-the-oval-office/

otmfm

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/10/drone-reports/

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia/2013/11/pakistan-taliban-chief-killed-drone-strike-2013111163646666844.html

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/2013/11/Maveric_Prioria.jpg

http://gailshumway.com/gallery/plog-content/images/my-collection/mammals/bottlenose-dolphin-3-touched-up-best-sky-9-violet-photo-filter-cropped-2-sharp.jpg

uh
http://www.amazon.com/b?node=8037720011

Ha! just last month my gf and I were brainstorming future products/services for an art project and one of our ideas was drone-delivered takeout.

american govt p big on that already

http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/10/us/colorado-town-drone-ordinance/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

"I would shoot a drone down if it's peering in my window, scanning me, and it's within elevation where I can nail it," said Robert Copely, a resident.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/02/technology/personaltech/review-the-phantom-2-vision-photo-drone-from-dji.html

Navy’s 757-Sized Drone Will Provide Big-Time Surveillance

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2014/01/triton/

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/2014/01/23941-660x440.jpg

Gonna be an interesting next couple decades

Making super-huge and expensive drones like that Navy one is just very, very stupid. Because the whole point of drones is that they are cheap and expendable. Having no pilot means you can put them in harm's way. All those advantages are inapplicable to a massively expensive drone filled with super-secret hardware. You might as well give the damn thing a pilot who can respond to sticky situations better than some techie sitting in a room 8,000 miles away with a joystick.

I'm skeptical that a human in a plane can pilot better than a gamer w/ a joystick.

may you live in interesting decades

I'm still aligned with the reality-based community myself.

The advantages of a big expensive drone is that it can handle way more gs, will never panic, doesn't become fatigued or subject to environmental factors. In order to accommodate a human pilot, significant amounts of weight and design are compromised...and the leading cause of crashes will be pilot error.

http://complex.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2014/01/27/medals_for_drone_pilots_hagel_still_cant_decide

They should just do Achievements

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2014/02/avenger/

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/13/opinion/let-the-military-run-drone-warfare.html

seems like a great idea to me -why diversify our war crimes when we can get the same division doing all of them?

“Civilian casualties” authorized under secret US drone-strike memo: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/civilian-casualties-authorized-under-secret-us-drone-strike-memo/

A secret Obama administration memo disclosed Monday outlines the legal justification for the government's drone-targeted killing program, a lethal strategy that authorizes the killing of innocents as collateral damage.

The memo (PDF), released by a US federal appeals court under a Freedom of Information Act request, describes the government's legal underpinnings for its so-called overseas targeted-killing program where drones from afar shoot missiles at buildings, cars, and people. It began under the George W. Bush administration but was broadened under Obama and now includes the killing of Americans.

leading cause of crashes will be pilot error.

Belated note to Don:

Just because a drone's joystick is located outside the plane doesn't mean the person holding it is not the pilot or is magically exempted from making an pilot error or becoming fatigued. While the panic of being responsible for the loss of a drone worth tens of millions of dollars may not be quite as potent if you are not in it at the time, I presume it can still get a good amount of fear stirred up.

IT BEGINS

The commercial use of drones in American skies took a leap forward on Thursday with the help of Hollywood.

The Federal Aviation Administration, responding to applications from seven filmmaking companies and pressure from the Motion Picture Association of America, said six of those companies could use camera-equipped drones on certain movie and television sets. Until now, the F.A.A. has not permitted commercial drone use except for extremely limited circumstances in wilderness areas of Alaska.

Put bluntly, this is the first time that companies in the United States will be able to legally use drones to fly over people.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/26/business/media/drone-exemptions-for-hollywood-pave-the-way-for-widespread-use.html

ok fine, you welcome our corporate low-flying unmanned overlords

http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2014/10/16/only-4-of-drone-victims-in-pakistan-named-as-al-qaeda-members/

As the number of US drone strikes in Pakistan hits 400, research by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism finds that fewer than 4% of the people killed have been identified by available records as named members of al Qaeda. This calls in to question US Secretary of State John Kerry’s claim last year that only “confirmed terrorist targets at the highest level” were fired at.

The Bureau’s Naming the Dead project has gathered the names and, where possible, the details of people killed by CIA drones in Pakistan since June 2004. On October 11 an attack brought the total number of drone strikes in Pakistan up to 400.

The names of the dead have been collected over a year of research in and outside Pakistan, using a multitude of sources. These include both Pakistani government records leaked to the Bureau, and hundreds of open source reports in English, Pashtun and Urdu.

Naming the Dead has also drawn on field investigations conducted by the Bureau’s researchers in Pakistan and other organisations, including Amnesty International, Reprieve and the Centre for Civilians in Conflict.

Only 704 of the 2,379 dead have been identified, and only 295 of these were reported to be members of some kind of armed group. Few corroborating details were available for those who were just described as militants. More than a third of them were not designated a rank, and almost 30% are not even linked to a specific group. Only 84 are identified as members of al Qaeda – less than 4% of the total number of people killed.

These findings “demonstrate the continuing complete lack of transparency surrounding US drone operations,” said Mustafa Qadri, Pakistan researcher for Amnesty International.

When asked for a comment on the Bureau’s investigation, US National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said that strikes were only carried out when there was “near-certainty” that no civilians would be killed.

“The death of innocent civilians is something that the U.S. Government seeks to avoid if at all possible. In those rare instances in which it appears non-combatants may have been killed or injured, after-action reviews have been conducted to determine why, and to ensure that we are taking the most effective steps to minimise such risk to non-combatants in the future,” said Hayden.

The Obama administration’s stated legal justification for such strikes is based partly on the right to self-defence in response to an imminent threat. This has proved controversial as leaked documents show the US believes determining if a terrorist is an imminent threat “does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on US persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.”

*sigh*

^ yup

F-35 fighter aircraft cost roughly $100 million per unit, not counting maintenance. You can buy one helluva lot of drone aircraft for that kind of money.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/dec/20/tens-of-thousands-of-passengers-stranded-by-gatwick-airport-drones

drones

i can't remember this and it's impossible to google and it's driving me crazy: who composed the early drone/experimental piece "was?" (german for "what?")

fuck wrong thread

You think?

"“Like in many other areas of drone regulation, the statutory and regulatory framework is lagging the technology,” said Reggie Govan, a former chief counsel to the F.A.A. who now teaches at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. “It’s just that simple.”"

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/01/us/drones-FAA-colorado-nebraska.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage