@but even the footprints they leave in the dirt
Now if only it could tell if those were the footprints of a 12ft fire-breathing evil terrorist or just somebody on their way to a wedding - before dropping bombs on them. Then it might have some use.
UK's Watchkeeper drone 'can see footprints through cloud'
UK military robot spyplanes due to be fielded in Afghanistan within two years are fitted with radar so sensitive, according to its makers, that it can detect not only individual people moving about on the ground - but even the footprints they leave in the dirt. The Watchkeeper in Israel, where most of the tests thus far have …
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Tuesday 20th July 2010 20:33 GMT Nexox Enigma
Straws!
"""Will somebody please elaborate on the term "drinking-straw sensor"."""
That means you get a high-zoom, narrow field of view sensor.
Imagine watching your neighbor's house w/ a good sized telescope - you can get a nice crisp view of what's happening through one window, but if you've picked the wrong one you might just stare at nothing for a couple hours, while an all-girl topless pillow fight breaks out in full view of another window.
So you get a wide angle sensor to tell you where to aim the drinking straw sensors, so that they don't require as much luck to be useful.
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Tuesday 20th July 2010 20:33 GMT I didn't do IT.
Re: Drinking Straw
The idea is that it is a very fine, narrow field sensor, typically a camera. This (usually) means that it has very good magnification, but can only view a very small patch of ground.
Due to the speeds/time involved, it would not be very useful to survey a large area with one of these...
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Tuesday 20th July 2010 16:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
Footprints
Being able to detect footprints is all fine and well...though this has the reek of the same sort of bullshit statements from last century, like "Satelites so powerful you can read a newspaper from space".
In other words it's actual value is very low, because:
a) the signal to noise ratio will be high
b) you need to tie this into a "holistic" inteligence model for it to be reliable enough to be sure you're targeting terrorists, and not some school field trip (or wedding as per YAAC poster above). And we don't have that. Not in a joined up way at least.
Having said that, it won't be wasted tech because Arnie and his terminator pals will be deploying the future generations of these with slightly less restrictive mission parameters. Ie they'll be set to autonomous "kill every f*ing thing that moves", so footprint detection will be a good thing. For them at least.
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Wednesday 21st July 2010 00:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
You have to ask? These people are making good money and probably believe they're contributing to national security and keeping the population safe & secure and all that old tripe.
It's only after everyone is safely secured in a government-required straitjacket that they will notice they've squandered their own freedom too, though by then it's too late to fix it. Or perhaps they believe they'll have a plum position up top free from mandatory governmental straitjacketing and/or the connections to make it feel more comfy.
Believing your own bullshit and getting it reinforced by a fat paycheque does that to people. At the risk of invoking Godwin, the Germans were far from the only ones to get to know the effects of this "groupthink" thing. Just to name a few: micros~1 with their corporate culture (``look how much we "help" the people'' while destroying innovation after innovation), the military-industrial complex (and again very fat paycheques), communism (and cosy positions and exclusive shops). Self-interest in Sauce de Virtue is a potent psychedelic drug.
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Wednesday 21st July 2010 00:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
Footprints you say...
“Lord, you said once I decided to follow you, You’d walk with me all the way. But I noticed that during the saddest and most troublesome times of my life, there was only one set of footprints. I don’t understand why, when I needed You the most, You would leave me.”
The Lord replied, “My son, my precious child, due to my extreme religious beliefs and possibly beard, those footprint tracking Watchkeeper drones don't make it as easy as it used to be to take a stroll along the beach!"
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Wednesday 21st July 2010 08:54 GMT Anonymous Coward
Oooh!
Aren't we a wonderful species, eh?!
We laugh at the funny animals, they spend all day, eating, pooping and, well you know other things! What does the human race do? Makes machines that can tell if some off us, that may or may not be up to no good, have walked over a piece of ground!
Tell me again, who are the stupid ones?
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Wednesday 21st July 2010 09:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
Bolt-ons
It's all very well to say that they can just "bolt-on" some weapons, but that is what killed the Pheonix.
It met it's spec and objective, _until_ someone changed the spec, and just bolted on a new set of optical sensors on the bottom. This then meant that it weighed more, and needed larger wings, also increasing the mass. Then the engine power was increased to cope with this.
Of course, this also meant that it couldn't land the correct way up because that would damage the new sensor pod they just stuck on the bottom of it, so it also needed to be able to fly inverted. This also increased the power demand, so a larger engine had to be fitted, and the wings grew again.
This is a shortened version of events. There was not just one change, but several over a period, each having knock-on effects. The eventual thing that died was a lot different from what it started out as.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
