CIA Drones May Have Used Illegal, Inaccurate Code 279
skids writes "Coders hate having to rush code out the door before it's ready. They also hate it when the customer starts making unreasonable demands. What they hate even more is when the customer reverse engineers the product and starts selling their own inferior product. But what really ticks them off is when that buggy, knockoff product might be used by targeting systems in military unmanned drone attacks, and the bugs introduce location errors of up to 13 meters. That's what purportedly happened to software developer IISi, based on an ongoing boardroom/courtroom drama that will leave any hard-pressed coder appreciating just how much worse his job could get. The saddest part? The CIA assumed the bug was a feature. The tinfoil-hat-inducing part? The alleged perpetrators just got bought by IBM."
I think i understand (Score:5, Funny)
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Geolocation off that bad? I'd assume they're being handed Samsung Galaxy Ses...
Why is the CIA attacking anything? (Score:3, Insightful)
The CIA is involved in the collection and analysis of foreign data.
Building an attack drone is, let's say, missing the mark.
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Re:Why is the CIA attacking anything? (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe they need to analyze the effect of high-speed projectiles on foreigners.
Re:Why is the CIA attacking anything? (Score:5, Funny)
The CIA is involved in the collection and analysis of foreign data.
Building an attack drone is, let's say, missing the mark.
You don't understand. Sometimes the foreign data they need to collect and analyze (mostly just analyze) is in a hardened bunker, or warehouse, or mud compound. They can't just land the drone and drive it into the mud compound very well, can they? The easiest way to expose the data they need to analyze is to remove the roof of the building. This allows the drone to take pictures of whatever used to be in the building, without landing, so that they can analyze it.
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Truman did it. CIA was founded on September 18, 1947.
Now CIA doing stuff like this, that's legal as of 2004 when National Clandestine Service was started, which is a descendant of Directorate of Plans and Directorate of Operations.
CIA Special Operations Group and Special Activities Division are supposedly as good as Delta and SEAL Team Six
The real world is not written by Tom Clancy (Score:3, Insightful)
Because it must be linked: (Score:2)
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Midnight Oil - US Forces [youtube.com]
Midnight Oil - Short Memory [youtube.com]
Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
Out of all the hardware that is controlled by software, I would have thought drone software would be the most scrutinized. Unbelievable. Even more reason why we should not arm robots (even remote human operated ones) with weapons such as Hellfire missiles.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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One's that it won't make a difference if you're off by 13 meters...
Nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Funny)
Out of all the hardware that is controlled by software, I would have thought drone software would be the most scrutinized. Unbelievable. Even more reason why we should not arm robots (even remote human operated ones) with weapons such as Hellfire missiles.
On the contrary, this is the reason why we should arm robots with BIGGER weapons! One's that it won't make a difference if you're off by 13 meters...
Leave the weapon out altogether, just include a divide-by-zero error in the code!
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Even more reason why we should not arm robots (even remote human operated ones) with weapons such as Hellfire missiles.
On the other hand, arming the drones with nukes would guarantee they hit their target despite their lack of accuracy.
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Funny)
The bad news: If you use nukes, then coders will get even more lazy and feel they don't have to use asserts and end up being so off that the drones nuke New Jersey instead of Afghanistan.
The good news: Such as catastrophe just be enough to take Jersey Shore off the air.
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The good news: Such as catastrophe just be enough to take Jersey Shore off the air.
But then all the guidos and guido-wannabes will off themselves. Hmm... Okay. Proceed.
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The good news: Such as catastrophe just be enough to take Jersey Shore off the air.
Rumor has it that Jersey Shore is offensive to Afghans.
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Funny)
Rumor has it that Jersey Shore is offensive to Americans.
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Rumor has it that Jersey Shore is offensive to Americans.
Mod that rumor up Insightful!
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The good news: Such as catastrophe just be enough to take Jersey Shore off the air.
No, they'll just change the title to Pennsylvania Shore.
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You're fired.
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Yes, people who actually know how to use asserts are quite rare. 99% of people use them incorrectly, causing more problems than they solve. If you put an assert in a piece of code you've instrumented temporarily to do some debugging, I won't mind. But if that crap ends up in the release db, I'm going to walk you to the door. For three reasons:
1. You shouldn't trust that all code will be compiled with -NDEBUG for release. Mistakes happen in makefiles, especially on large projects with iffy design docum
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Informative)
An assertion failure means something went wrong that, in the normal operation of the system, could not go wrong. The most likely reason for this is of course a programming error, but there are others: some memory got corrupted, your CPU is malfunctioning, some peripheral is malfunctioning, or some other similar sort of thing. This makes handling assertion failures tricky because you can't assume the state of the system is sane. When I did embedded stuff, assert failures would act similarly to watchdog failures -- the system would disable all interrupts, try to write the assertion code to non-volatile RAM, then reboot. For our application it made sense to do this. For other applications something different might need to be done. But the point is that an assert failure is different than an ordinary error. You can't simply handle the error condition; the whole system state could be bad. You might want to shut the system down completely (e.g. if there's a backup which will take over). You might want to attempt to completely reset your state. Or you might just want to report the condition (somehow) and continue as if nothing happened until someone intervenes. But in any case, assertions have their place.
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asserts are for preventing programming errors
Correct. They are a development tool. There is no reason to have one remaining in embedded code that is declared to be releasable (and you're lazy if you do it in desktop code, too).
If you can grep "assert" in your code, you have work left to do.
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Re:Wow. (Score:5, Informative)
It's amazing that drone hardware is fairly well designed, but its software design and implementation is so slapdash. Just last year, it was revealed that the Drones broadcasted its video feed in unencrypted form and was being used by militants to spy on us.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/121709-drone-intercept-encryption.html [networkworld.com]
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Informative)
Spying isn't limited to looking at the enemy's base. The patrol patterns of the drones, for instance, tells insurgents where US army forces are looking at. This allows them to move to new locations or hide if they notice the drones moving towards familiar territory.
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The rules for scrutinizing code for aircraft are based on the danger involved in not scrutinizing it enough. And the military doesn't have the same edict to follow them as commercial aviation does.
Since drones are unmanned, their code would get less scrutiny than manned aircraft, if it gets any scrutiny at all.
Normally, it will be scrutinized, inspected, tested, qualified, etc. But if anything goes wrong, the military can waive the requirement and take what it gets in order to meet a deadline.
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I wonder if there is any real problem.
And before anyone gets all bent hear me out and I mean from a tactical point of view.
Does it matter if the the drone ends up 13 meters away from a check point?
When using a Hellfire the operator will manually point the camera/laser at the target and fire the missile.
It really doesn't matter because there is a man in the using a laser designator.
If the Drone is dropping JDams then there may be a problem.
I believe there are two modes. One where the drone/pane uses it's vid
In Soviet America, Zeroes Divide You! (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh and as to not arming robots? Too late really. We have been doing it for ever 100 years now.
The Torpedo is a Robot. The first ones where really steampunk killing robots. Suicidal ones to be sure but still robots.
This is not the root issue of using a robot. The root issue is that technologically advanced societies have been pushing the button from further and further away. The further away they are, the less incentive they have to make sure that their target is valid.
First, you've got hand to hand combat. You're not going to engage unless you absolutely have to, and can deal with listening to someone gurgle and plead while they bleed out. Then you can move on to ranged weapons. In the early days, you had to get pretty close to hit someone with a musket, but you still at least had to watch people die. Then we got cannon. Rifles. Machine guns. Artillery. Airplanes. Satellite guided bombs. With each advance in military technology, you are taking less risk to your own life when you take the lives of others. That's why there are 6,000 dead "coalition" troops and several hundred thousand dead Afghans and Iraqis. It's not a war, it's a shooting gallery with political implications. If it were a war, like it was with the Japanese and the Nazis, there would be a front somewhere. The chances of Iraqis or Afghans crossing continents and oceans are not virtually zero, they are exactly zero.
Now we're at the point where some militaries have the majority of their apparatus safely tucked away in a megabase or in the air or even back in their home country. Ninety nine percent of the military are good guys who sign up thinking they will be fighting for their country. For the military to work, when the guy with the most penises on their shoulder says "Kill" the command must be passed down until a trigger is pulled somewhere. But for that guy at the very end, it's still a human decision that can be overridden by natural desires to protect human life. He can make up something about the target being obscured. He can stop it if he really thinks it's not achieving an objective. He knows intuitively that he will pay a high price for taking this life, because he has to take that memory home with him.
When the top brass are over your shoulder, you'd better click the button and blow up the house.
And soon the top brass won't even need to issue a command. They will order the command, and the quasi-sentient robots (not some half assed definition that fits your argument) will kill, and the grunts will simply arrive to ID the body parts.
The real problem with this technology is that there is no pushback for human life. If a politician wants it, and he can find someone in the military who will perform it, you can bet your ass that millions of innocent people will die as a result. The more humans you remove from the end of the equation, the less humane the result will be.
Re:In Soviet America, Zeroes Divide You! (Score:5, Interesting)
I read an interesting article in a mainstream magazine about Air Force drone pilots. Basically, they sit in Nevada and control drones in Afghanistan. I was expecting to read about how jaded and eager they were to press buttons at the drop of the hat, but what I found was the opposite.
The drones are capable of staying in the air for days at a time, monitoring a target (person). They have cameras running, and multiple shifts of human crews watching the video feeds and analyzing what's going on. In the process, they are able to ascertain with frightening accuracy that yes, this particular man is a terrorist: Here's the video feed of him buying some weapons, and here's the part X hours later where we just watched him create a roadside IED. Being able to keep someone under direct video surveillance (including thermal, if I recall correctly, so being indoors didn't help a lot) meant that for at least some targets, they were very sure that that person was a bad guy.
We have people halfway around the globe pushing buttons to kill people about whom we have reams of (video) evidence showing hostile behavior. I think that's better informed killing than having combat teams need to go in and do the same killing on foot, with potentially faulty intelligence, and without (at times) being able to mount multi-day uninterrupted surveillance.
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No, the most scrutinized things with software are probably cars. Thats good in that way because they are used for driving hundreds of millions of kilometers each day. An deadly error occurring once every 1000000 kilometers for a single device will kill 100s of people per day.
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Re:Wow. (Score:5, Informative)
i don't think you understood the article or didn't read it.
The software wasn't the guidance system for the drone, control it in anyway, or even run on the drone itself. Its running in some data center some where tracking where people are when they use a cell phone or an ATM, etc.
Its just a mapping package for laying out data thats correlated to geography, its just "google earth - government edition".
I doubt the 13m really mattered, your not getting 13m accuracy anyway when tracking a cell phone via tower transitions.
The CIA was using it to find potential targets so they could send a drone toward them, they'd have to get more specific information as to the exact target location elsewhere.
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I'm guessing this is adaptable to alternative sensor platforms, not just cell towers. If they want that kind of accuracy from the SIGINT/DF hardware, they can probably get it. The problem is that they might not have a handle on the systematic errors being introduced into their targeting.
For example, say they slave the on station Predator optics to data from this software so they can pick up a guy in a town and follow him to wherever he's going. Everything is peachy, because they know there was nobody within
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True, but the error is additive, and any other errors in the pipeline stack up.
Pretend for a minute that the munition has a 6 meter kill zone. Say you have a tracking tech that's accurate to 10 meters. Likely anyone in that +/- 10m area is going to be very sorry even if they don't get dead right away.
Now, introduce another 10 meter inaccuracy. This means that you can be anywhere from bullseye to 20 meters away. The odds have suddenly gone from "most likely dead" to "more likely unharmed" - not a desired res
Salesmen promising too much (Score:5, Funny)
And sub contractor steadfastly saying that they can't deliver production ready software in the given time fame.
Where have I heard that before? .. ah yes .. the current death march project that I am in the middle of!
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stop posting on slashdot you lazy sob. And go back to your march.
The reason I *am* posting is that we have hit an issue with a third party system and I am waiting for their tech support to get back to me with a solution to the problem that their system causes. I thought I was going to be done with this project last Monday.
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I meant cool down from the march... relax, enjoy your break
please accept my apologies, i am worst than usual with words and people today
No worries .. I am wired after a month of 14-18 hour days, 7 days a week, a couple of all nighters and now I am hanging on hearing back from tech support on a Friday afternoon when they seem to have t no clue that they product is causing a problem.
Not *that* big of a deal. (Score:2)
If the bug is actually limited to reducing accuracy by 13, that's not a huge deal given the kill zone of hellfire missiles.
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Unless you're in the house 13 meters down the street from the real target :)
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Hellfires don't use GPS for targeting.
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Off by 13 meters? (Score:5, Funny)
No one will ever need more than 13 meters accuracy.
Re:Off by 13 meters? (Score:4, Funny)
Fuck You!
-Signed,
Princess Leia
AMEN Brother!
-Signed,
The Womp Rats
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I used to bullseye womprats from my T-16 back home. They're only about 2 meters.
So why the big deal?
:-)
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That's what she said?
I think they buried the lead.... (Score:5, Insightful)
to direct secret assassination drones in central Asia.
The CIA has the authority to direct secret assassination drones? Inside of Pakistan and possibly other countries?
Did we learn NOTHING from the Bay of Pigs, Nicaragua, the equipping of the Mujaheddin with weapons, etc... ? The CIA should not be fighting wars. We're supposed to be the city upon the hill. We shouldn't be fighting our wars in secrecy.
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Of course we did not, or we would not be creating more Irans by propping up dictators.
Re:I think they buried the lead.... (Score:5, Insightful)
To quote many prominent Republicans, "9-11 changed everything."
To be fair, it did. It gave cover for authoritarian assholes to do whatever they wanted to do. Fighting wars in secrecy is just the tip of the iceberg. Welcome to the large gulag, comrade.
9-11 was just a drop in the ocean (Score:3, Informative)
To be fair, fighting wars in secrecy has been going on for a long long time, way before 9-11, making it the proverbial drop in the ocean:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_United_States_foreign_regime_change_actions [wikipedia.org]
Now, what should upset the American public is that 9-11 was probably engineers or supported by "allied" forces, in order to escalate conflict levels and justify wars.
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Dude. That's been common knowledge for years.
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Equipping the Muj with weapons was worth it, even counting the blowback (which was more consequence of ABANDONING A-stan than equipping the Muj).
Lest we forget, the Cold War was a VASTLY more important and larger struggle than the current police actions. A few thousand or few tens of thousands dead in late consequence of that existential conflict is a trifle. We are too easily impressed by small wars nowadays.
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A few thousand or few tens of thousands dead in late consequence of that existential conflict is a trifle. We are too easily impressed by small wars nowadays.
What do you mean we kemosabe?
Wouldn't it be nice if the people who felt it was acceptable to kill a few thousand people for their political goals were included in the total?
But they do not actually mind (Score:2, Informative)
the risk of being included in the total, which is why they tend to win if they are also smart and can get enough resources.
Revolutions actually run on people who are much less risk-averse, including the ultimate risk of death. Pretending that everyone shares the same aversion to the risk of violent death that is characteristic of educated urbanites is naive. In many cultures of the world Western style conflict avoidance will get you exploited, enslaved, or even killed.
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"Wouldn't it be nice if the people who felt it was acceptable to kill a few thousand people for their political goals were included in the total?"
They frequently risk that, and fear doesn't stop those who think the game is worth the candle. Killing thousands of enemies has often been the price of progress.
Killing thousands of Brits, Tories and Hessians freed the US from England. Killing thousands of Confederates freed the slaves. Killing millions of Nazis and Italian Fascists saved Europe. Killing millions
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I'm just not ok with fighting these wars in secrecy, or the fact that my country condones assassination (i.e. murder) in any form. If we have a just cause, there is no need to use a veil of secrecy.
Not to mention the fact that we live in a (representative) democracy, so keeping the voters uninformed is no better than rigging an election.
A
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Re:Lest we forget (Score:5, Insightful)
The greatest American general? Would that be Patton? Or Lee? Or the only man ever to get higher marks at West Point than Lee, Douglas MacArthur? Pershing was no slouch either. Eisenhower had actually been subordinate to both Pershing and MacArthur earlier in his career, and only a lucky break getting assigned to the General Staff in D.C. that allowed him some paper-pusher promotions got him to the head of the queue. He barely even had any combat experience.
The war in Germany was limited because the Americans and British, while not pro-Nazi (except the people where were), weren't really anti-German. There are too many Germans in the US and Britain for that to happen, and the current set of British Royals are German. My grandfather on my mother's side fought in Europe during WWII, but before he shipped out they trained him for bayonet on dolls with Japanese features.
The American people at that time probably would have accepted extremely high losses fighting the Japanese and wouldn't take anything less than unconditional surrender. If they hadn't given up after the two nukes, no one here would probably ever have heard the phrase "made in Japan."
But what the OP was referring two was more along the lines of the fact that between the US, UK and Canada, we suffered over 10,000 casualties, with well over 2000 of those being actual battlefield deaths, just on D-DAY. Just D-DAY, not even the whole Normandy campaign. We have had a bit of 4,000 dead in all 7 years of the Iraq war, while we lost over 418,000 in WWII, or about 0.32% of our population at the start of the war.
I'm not trying to diminish the feeling of loss I'm sure the families of the 4,000+ US soldiers who have died in Iraq must feel. However, the fact that in 7 years we've lost about twice the number of soldiers we lost trying to get ashore in France on 6 June, 1944, speaks volumes about what "limited" war might actually be.
tl;dr you're wrong.
Re:Lest we forget (Score:4, Informative)
The Cold War arose because of the Russian fear of the nuclear-armed US [...] and their desire to create buffer zones in the West of the Soviet Union.
You mean to the West of the Soviet Union. Places like Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and anywhere else they could roll in tanks and grab.
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The Cold War arose because of the Russian fear of the nuclear-armed US (they had after all nearly been destroyed by Germany, a smaller country) and their desire to create buffer zones in the West of the Soviet Union. That, and what that notorious left-winger Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex".
Eisenhower wasn't upset about having a strong, high technology military. He was concerned that crackpot projects were excessively milking the country for money and that military spending should be looked upon always with a certain amount of clear eyed judgement to prevent unwarranted waste.
Nuclear powered bombers? Remember that one? Safeguard? Heck, even now NMD is being built for pork purposes under the smokescreen of a fictional "rogue nation" threat.
Even the Sovs had their own version military industrial
Forget about, it, and ... (Score:2)
ROFL (Score:3, Funny)
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Actually that turned out to be driver error.
Re:ROFL (Score:4, Insightful)
Until later, when it became clear it was very badly designed software.
IP theft by drone overlords! (Score:5, Insightful)
Military drones, armed and dangerous, operating software resulting from IP theft?
Heh... I'd love to see the Business Software Alliance go after these guys... :-)
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I'd love to see the Business Software Alliance go after these guys
It would be a bloodbath - the BSA guys can only muster the support of the US Marshals. Somehow I don't think they'd come equipped with armed attack drones.
13 meters? (Score:5, Interesting)
so what?
hellfires are laser guided, not GPS. a predator reporting its position as being 13 meters wrong is basically nothing....and a non-issue with regards to missile targeting.
if the predator was dropping JDAMS, i could see the issue. but even then, 13 meters is well within the CPE allowed for the JDAM.
Re:13 meters? (Score:5, Insightful)
If my understanding is correct, this software was used to determine the locations of people making phone calls. So if it's off by 13 meters, the operator may chose the wrong target. The missile being laser guided doesn't help you if you're laser guiding it to the wrong place.
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You misunderstand how the hellfire / predator platform works.
Several systems can fly the predator to the target area. Once in the target area, remote operators designate the target on the video feed, which is to say (in this phone call scenario) the operators designate the person making the phone call on the TV screen. The target designator is a laser device on the predator which sends encoded information in the beam to actually hit the target. Where the laser target beam hits the target, it shines. Electro
Re:13 meters? (Score:4, Insightful)
In any case, 13 meters is nothing. Civilians have been watching too many movies to think war is fought on that scale.
13 meters is a hell of a lot if there's a hospital or school ten meters from the target. This isn't warfare, it's assassinations. A 13 m discrepancy when you're trying to assassinate someone is pretty damn unacceptable.
Also, the system was used to locate targets. So it might say the target is in one hut, when in fact, they are in a hut 13 meters away. The drone's pilot would then designate the wrong hut with the laser. The system is for target selection, not missile or drone guidance.
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Yes. Especially those of us standing near the people getting shot with missiles.
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So a 13 meter error is acceptable, even though that's the result of a bug caused by copying software that was accurate?
You must be in the military, Mr. Ghandi, if that is your real name...
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How the software came into being is important. If it was ripped off from someone else, they should fix that. If there's errors, they should fix those.
But 13 meters? You must have NEVER served in any armed force, Friend of NYCL, if that is your real name...
Re:13 meters? (Score:5, Insightful)
And while yes, being 13 meters away from a hellfire hit is still going to turn your brain to mush, a blase attitude towards the need to be as accurate and efficient as possible in target selection is what leads to blue on blue and death of civies. Once you start accepting 13 meter inaccuracies as "good enough" you're on a slippery slope. You want to be as accurate as your weapon system allows you to be, and you always want to strive to improve upon it.
Re:13 meters? (Score:5, Insightful)
For assassinating houses, 13 meters will most likely still give the remote operator the same house.
In sparsely-built American suburbs, perhaps. Most places that's the house next door, or the car across the street or a couple of car lengths ahead or behind.
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Better idea... (Score:5, Funny)
Capture these badly programmed drones, reinstall them with some sweet, sweet Linux goodness, use them for fun aerial combat play, and taking snaps of bikini-clad neighbors. Problem solved. Patent not pending. Come as you are. There you go.
Open letter to terrorists (Score:2, Funny)
Anonymous Coward (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyone who works in/for the U.S. military industrial complex should quit if they have any shred of morality in their being. It's way beyond defense.
Let me see if I have this straight (Score:3, Insightful)
1) US creates military drones used in Pakistan.
2) Drones are controlled using software.
3) Software company that writes drone software is bought by IBM.
4) Software can now, potentially, be outsourced to IBM development personnel in um, Pakistan.
Is it just me, or is something wrong with this picture?
Re:Let me see if I have this straight (Score:5, Insightful)
Back when I was a lowly QA tester for a company that took DARPA contracts involving things specific to North Korea, it never ceased to amaze me that the entire programmer staff were H1B's from China, who just happens to be North Korea's main ally, who were hired solely for their utter cheapness.
This is why I just can't take tin-foil hat people seriously.
Re:Let me see if I have this straight (Score:5, Interesting)
Sadly, I can top that story. I used to work for a government contractor that took blueprints and had them redrawn in AutoCAD in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Our main client was Los Alamos National Labs. We sent them the blueprints for almost every building there.
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1) US creates military drones used in Pakistan.
2) Drones are controlled using software.
3) Software company that writes drone software is bought by IBM.
4) Software can now, potentially, be outsourced to IBM development personnel in um, Pakistan.
Is it just me, or is something wrong with this picture?
Don't ask me, before I followed the links, I was trying to figure out how IBM bought the CIA ;-)
Illegal Software (Score:3, Insightful)
The CIA? This is a bunch who allegedly run clandestine torture camps. Use illegal software - oh no, they'd never do that...
How could they not know their job? (Score:3, Insightful)
The entire point of American warfare is to expend as much ammunition as possible so to stick the American public with the biggest bill possible. A 13 meter margin of error means you can justify using three guided missiles instead of one. How does a military contractor not see the benefit of that? How are they supposed to create business for you if you're tying them up in court!
These clowns can't possibly think they're actually looking for WMD's and Osama Bin Laden could they? They're looking for an intractable enemy to spend billions trying to irradicate, and they've found them in the Taliban, just like Isreal found the Palestinians. Spooky sneaky "bad guys" are literally booming business.
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Re: Confounded (Score:4, Informative)
The Romans had plumbing and they were occupying Jerusalem at the time the New Testament was written... but please don't allow facts to stand in the way of your religion-bashing.
Re: Confounded (Score:5, Funny)
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So the Romans wrote the New Testament?
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No, they were just guest stars, but they owned the place and had indoor plumbing.
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