i am will risk taking my and your important time away from studying how perfect and revolutionary are facebook and twitter to draw attention to yet another science-fiction fairly tale about what might happen someday if computers get in the wrong hands, courtesy of yet another of my wacky, paranoid, near-apocalyptic sources of worry. if you choose even to read/consider that some part of it might be true, go ahead, take a deep breath, and go back and open up WoW again. someone else will take care of it. someone open source.
>From blimps to bugs, an explosion in aerial drones is transforming the way America fights and thinks about its wars. Predator drones, the Cessna-sized workhorses that have dominated unmanned flight since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, are by now a brand name, known and feared around the world. But far less widely known are the sheer size, variety and audaciousness of a rapidly expanding drone universe, along with the dilemmas that come with it. The Pentagon now has some 7,000 aerial drones, compared with fewer than 50 a decade ago. Within the next decade the Air Force anticipates a decrease in manned aircraft but expects its number of “multirole” aerial drones like the Reaper — the ones that spy as well as strike — to nearly quadruple, to 536. Already the Air Force is training more remote pilots, 350 this year alone, than fighter and bomber pilots combined. “It’s a growth market,” said Ashton B. Carter, the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer. The Pentagon has asked Congress for nearly $5 billion for drones next year, and by 2030 envisions ever more stuff of science fiction: “spy flies” equipped with sensors and microcameras to detect enemies, nuclear weapons or victims in rubble. Peter W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and the author of “Wired for War,” a book about military robotics, calls them “bugs with bugs.” Elisabeth Bumiller and Thom Shanker, War Evolves With Drones, Some Tiny as Bugs <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/20/world/20drones.html>, *The New York Times* (June 19, 2011) [image: microdrones] Chang W. Lee/The New York Times. A microdrone during a demo flight at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Filed under: surveillance <http://www.uncomputing.org/?cat=62>, war<http://www.uncomputing.org/?cat=64>, what are computers for <http://www.uncomputing.org/?cat=10> by dgloumbia http://www.uncomputing.org/?p=91 -- David Golumbia [email protected]
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