Bringing clay sat shooting to the proletariat!

It's an Imperial Probe.

I wonder if Indiana Jones has his blaster handy?

How long before we see reports of someone killed or injured by a malfunctioning one of these falling from a great height?

to the battle of Hoth.

CSI Miami no doubt then......I can almost imagine Horatio taking his shades off when he sees it the first time..

will it go to the takeaway and pick up a 4 pack on the way back?

Or running out of fuel and falling from a great height.

Or maybe even just falling from six feet up and bouncing.

Dalek =/= looking like something out of Star Wars.

Next thing you know, Princess Leia'll be coming out of the TARDIS.

Brings to mind the hovering security cameras in Half Life 2. The combine are already among us!

...before the secret military A.I. chip is activated and it goes on a rampage....

You know that the Iraqi "stay deployed for another 100 years" plan has been subtitled "from leading to partnering to overwatch".

I kid you not.

I've been to where they test the thing, it can't fly if it's too windy. There have been crashes. Nothing out there but abandoned uranium mines and the Bibo Bar (great hamburgers & steaks). A crash in a large city ought to be exciting. About like the sheriff's helicopter somebody shot down here a few years ago.

soon to be followed by a high-energy capacitor dart, as an effective countermeasure. think Taser for robots, shooting longer range and high-precision, with a charged self-contained projectile. pumps enough juice into your flying surveillance drone to transform it into a nice paperweight. can probably get an upgrade to handle land-based sniperbots, too. perhaps we can get a high capacitance from the new metamaterials...

otherwise, i suppose a particle beam would work too.

yeah, so i'm stealing it all from Shadowrun, but they seem to have gotten a few things very right.

"Whatever they invest in these things, they would get a lot more coverage if that money were spent on far less showy and less complicated devices - like cameras on poles."

Jon, in America, we'd call those pole camera's 'targets' and you could probably count their service life in hours if not minutes...

Doesn't mean that the flying fan thingies aren't going to shot at too, it's just upping the skill level required to knock one down - moving targets vs fixed would be a little more challenging.

On another point, I second the motion for Princess Leia in a chain-mail Bikini...

The Paris icon because I think she'd look pretty good in one too.

> So, does it make its own way to the local service station and fill itself up when it

> "gets hungry"?

I'm betting that that Dutch Robo-Gas-Pump already has this thing in its database. They don't need us any more.

It's more like V.I.N.CENT out of The Black Hole

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V.I.N.CENT), or, given the state of it, Old Bob (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_BOB)

(And Whatddaya mean you've never seen The Black Hole?! Call yerselves geeks?!)

No Peter, some of us call ourselves IT professionals.

I merely *work* as an "IT Professional" - in REAL life, I'm a geek!