perfidy

A platoon of the 506th PIR is pinned down on a mountainside, surrounded by an unexpectedly large - and growing - number of jihadis. They parachuted in the night before, to set up an observation post to monitor traffic in this remote region. The American troops have a good defensive position. They could hold it forever against the ill-trained and under-equipped mujj. But no position is secure when you run out of ammo. And that time is not far away.

The nearest airbase is five hundred klicks to the south. Two transports have been shot down in past month, and brass is concerned about losses. They're not about to lose millions of dollars of expensive transport. But the sergeant seems serenely unconcerned about remf penny-pinching cowardice. The reason becomes clear when a low hum begins to sound from behind the ridge above them.

Seconds later, a flock of jeep sized helicopters popup over the ridge – each clearing the ridge by inches, and each in exactly the same place. The drone cargo helicopters (operated by some spec-4 in Bahrain, the sergeant imagines) circle the paratroopers’ small defensive enclave. As each passes over the small beacon the troops placed in the small clearing, the jeep helicopter snap-flares to a complete stop, and drops a cargo pallet out before moving on. In ten seconds, a ton of ammunition, mortars, and (thank you, God! cigarettes) has been robotically, automatically delivered.

Over at Murdoc’s post on the V-22 Osprey, James left a comment that really caught my imagination.

Stepping back though - advances in tech are rendering alot of its functions redundant. For example GPS guided air drops could replace many of its cargo functions.

Personally, I think a hummer based ducted fan UAV that can carry about 300- 500 lbs of cargo would be more effective. (Basically it would enable the creation of a GPS unmanned mobile resupply function) Think of just in time resupply chain.

Of course, appealing to the “advances in technology” idea is sure to catch my imagination. I can’t believe I never thought of this, but it is so obvious in retrospect.

The advances that are driving the rapid development of reconnaissance uavs (and soon, ucavs) could just as easily drive the development of cargo uavs. Once we’ve got the trick of using flocks of uavs dependably, there’s no reason not to scale up the size of the vehicles. There’s no inherent reason that drones need to be small. (And the Global hawk isn’t tiny, even now.) The same intelligence that will keep a recon uav on station for days at a time, and maneuver it to the targets it needs to provide imagery for would guide a cargo plane or helicopter from a depot to wherever troops need supplies.

An automated airdrop mechanism wouldn’t be too hard to develop – just something that would open a door and kick out a pallet on command. GPS and local beacons would make it all work. And because there’s no pilot, there’s no risk to flying in low and slow for deliveries.

James’ idea of humvee sized ducted fan uavs is right out of Bladerunner, and it would be cool as hell to have those. It would be cool as hell to have manned versions as gunships, too. But people have been trying to get the ducted fan thing to work for decades, with not even as much success as the V-22. But the same software that would work for fixed wing uavs would also work for rotor uavs.

The HURT system I posted on earlier, matched up with a inventory/supply management system, could easily form the basis of a nearly automated tactical combat supply distribution system. Palletized supplies would be automatically loaded on unmanned cargo planes and helicopters, and these would be automatically organized into flocks for delivery to troops in need. The management of the individual uavs would be independent of the management of the supplies, the system and its operators would handle the coordination.

Some clever domeheads at DARPA have learned to get uavs of different feathers to flock together. DARPA's HURT program (damn, do I love their names) has developed a system that allows soldiers to control multiple, dissimilar uavs from a single handheld computer. In a test, four uavs of three separate types - both fixed and rotary winged - all fed imagery of an abandoned barracks area to the Humvee mounted HURT system.

...the soldier was able to view broad-area surveillance images from the low-flying UAVs on his handheld and request imagery using simple cursor commands.

The HURT system autonomously determined which UAV was most capable of providing the requested imagery based on each vehicle’s position and current tasking. Commands were then sent to the individual vehicles’ ground control stations. Imagery from the UAVs was fused by the HURT system then sent to the handheld computer. The soldier was able to request imagery of a building, surveillance of a moving truck, or a replay from several minutes earlier.

“HURT communicates only with the ground control system for each UAV. We do not change the UAV,” says Charlie Guthrie, director advanced capability development. “The operator launches the vehicle and sends it to a marshalling point where it is available for use. HURT looks at the systems assigned to it and programs them to give the best data it can, setting up reconnaissance patterns and scan areas.” The soldier can then make simple, high-level requests like “follow that car”, he says.

Future tests will attempt to integrate a larger and more diverse array of uavs, as well as ground sensors and other systems like red force- and blue force tracking. Part of the problem of surveillance and tactical intelligence on the modern battlefield is information overload. Rather than having many operators each trying to process imagery from one bird, here you have multiple birds providing one operator with just what he needs.

From here, I imagine the next step would be to get HURT to process multiple requests from its flock of airborne drones. Essentially, it would be a tactical network of sensors that works something like the internet does. Analysts would be able to - without having to bother with the details of individual drones - get what they need while the HURT system handles the the mechanics of maneuvering the drones around.

Sweet.

Here's an online book for you. A detailed look at Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines, or molecular nanotechnology replicating assemblers, or little things that will turn you into grey goo when you're not looking. I read the first chapter, and it's fascinating stuff, and it's really not that far off.

In an article for Wired News, Bruce Schneier writes of the challenges the Supreme Court will face in the future as a result of our swiftly advancing technology.

Recent advances in technology have already had profound privacy implications, and there's every reason to believe that this trend will continue into the foreseeable future. Roberts is 50 years old. If confirmed, he could be chief justice for the next 30 years. That's a lot of future.

Here are some examples. Advances in genetic mapping continue, and someday it will be easy, cheap and detailed -- and will be able to be performed without the subject's knowledge. What privacy protections do people have for their genetic map, given that they leave copies of their genome in every dead skin cell that they leave behind? What protections do people have against government actions based on this data? Against private actions?

Should a customer's genetics be considered when granting a mortgage, or determining its interest rate?

Surveillance is another area where technological advances will raise new constitutional questions. I've written about wholesale surveillance, the ability of the government to collect data on everyone and then search that data looking for certain people. We're already seeing this kind of surveillance by automatic license plate readers and aerial photographs.

In the future, this will become more personal. New technologies will be able to peer through walls, under clothing, beneath skin, perhaps even into the activity of the brain. Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Delaware) rhetorically asked Roberts: "Can microscopic tags be implanted in a person's body to track his every movement.... Can brain scans be used to determine whether a person is inclined toward criminal or violent behavior?" What should be the limits on what the police can do without a warrant?

These issues will be coming to the court in less than a decade. Even more outlandish issues will follow quickly on their heels. In the not to distant future, computers will attain the raw computational power of the human brain. If we create a machine intelligence is it a citizen, and subject to the same rights as you and I, or is it merely subject to copyright law? Neuroscientists and programmers are working to reverse engineer the brain. If you scan your brain, is it you, or are you you? What rights does a simulated animal have - we are working on that right now. If you unplug a simulation of a cat, can the SPCA come after you?

Beyond the world of artificial intelligence, steroid use will seem on a level with steam engines compared to advanced genetic engineering. If you reengineer your nervous system and musculature for greater strength and speed and hti 200 home runs, do you get an asterisk next to your name in the record books?

And what happens when advanced materials technology arrives? Even short of actual, full-on replicating assembler nanotechnology, it is not hard to imagine that home fabricators could become as common as home laser printers. Will the free hardware movement be distributing open source specifications for material goods? What happens when all property becomes intellectual property, and you can have any physical good with merely the software specifications and a pile of dirt? If the cost of materials becomes functionally zero - as it already is for text, software and media - intellectual property disputes will determine the nature of our entire economy.

Further, specifications for weapons and explosives distributed over the internet could allow miscreants to "print" guns, bombs or whatever right from their home fabricator.

Computer and information technology shows no sign in slowing down, in fact even the rate of increase is increasing. With computer power doubling in just over a year, every year, how long before ubiquitous monitoring, in real time, is possible? Can you outwit a million supercomputers with sophisticated and self-learning pattern matching software? Probably not.

These are only a few of the issues that will be before us in the next two decades. The pace of change is accelerating, and the world of ten years from now will be more strange than the world of a hundred years ago. It's going to be a wild ride.

Somewhere, in the murky, storm-tossed depths of the Gulf of Mexico lurks a killer. Intelligent, highly trained, and equipped with an arsenal of high technology weaponry. Trained to kill without mercy. And now free to hunt.

Who is this watery angel of death?

Flipper.

The United States Navy seems to have "misplaced" three dozen highly trained dolphin assassins thanks to the recent hurricanes. These friendly cetaceans have been used for decades for a variety of military missions since the cold war. Other dolphins have been trained to protect submarines in harbor, and a detachment was used for mine clearance in the Persian Gulf. The navy trained this particular batch of dolphins to hunt down and kill terrorists with lethal toxic dart guns attached to their snouts.

The hurricanes breached their compound, letting them escape into the Gulf. So if you are diving in the gulf, don't pet the dolphins. It may be the last thing you ever do.

However, if these are really smart dolphins, the first evidence of their depredations might be mysterious disappearances of tuna-fishing ships...

In light of my earlier post about the inaptly named Walrus airship, I had to post about this one.

Canadian company 21st Century Airships has completed initial testing of this prototype spherical airship. What you see above is a 19m diameter, two-man dirigible airship. That four engine craft is a test bed for a planned 40m diameter craft that the company intends to use to set the world record for longest duration flight by any type of aircraft. Around the world in two weeks, covering 28,000 miles without stopping once for a piss break, refueling, or cheeseburger.

Aside from the soccer ball livery, they've also made versions up to look like baseballs and globes. Just imagine one of those babies, done up in yellow with a smiley face and armed with very large electric gatling guns, or maybe some nasty missiles. At the very least, you could use something with that kind of endurance for all sorts of things - ecological research, communications, espionage, whatever. And, as an added bonus, it's the only airship in the world that can land on water. You could really have fun chasing whales with this thing...

I love DARPA. They are the Ministry of Science Fiction Gadgets. They are "Q" Branch on steroids. They will be the ones who will defend us from our would be robot overlords, unless they are the ones who invent our future robot overlords.

This particular gadget is, strickly speaking, not new. But it appeals to the alternate history lover in me. A world where the silly Nazis didn't build inflamable airships, and the skies were full of graceful and majestic dirigibles wafting passengers around the world in unparalleled comfort and elegance.

Instead, what we have is Jim Carrey in burn makeup saying, "Oh the humanity!" and this:

DARPA is shelling out millions of dollars to two companies for development of prototype military cargo airships.

The Walrus operational vehicle (OV) is envisioned to have the primary operational task of deploying composite loads of personnel and equipment (for example, the components of an Army Unit of Action) ready to fight within six hours after disembarking the aircraft. Walrus will operate without significant infrastructure and from unimproved landing sites, including rough ground having nominal five-foot-high obstacles. It is intended to carry a payload of more than 500 tons 12,000 nautical miles in less than seven days at a competitive cost. Additionally, Walrus will be capable of performing theater lift and supporting sea-basing and persistence missions to meet a range of multi-Service needs.

By way of comparison, the C-5 Galaxy can carry about a hundred tons 3000 miles without refueling. An airship would not be as fast as a cargo jet, but the ability to carry five times as much cargo and land it anywhere without need for airstrips is a really big plus. One of the chokepoints in our ability to project power globally is our logistics capability, and within that chokepoint is an additional chokepoint - the ability to rapidly move very heavy gear.

Airlift as we know today can move light equipment and troops nearly anywhere in the world in a matter of hours. However, heavier equipment can only be moved by the largest of planes or by ship or rail. Rail transport has a problem in that most of the world is under water, or not connected to the US rail system. Sealift is cheap and commodious, but rather slow. If you want to get stuff like an M1 tank to Eastern Outer Mongolia in a hurry, you are severely limited in options. You can transport them via C-5, but in doing so you sacrifice the ability of the C-5 to move massive amounts of other stuff, and you only get two tanks per flight. The opportunity cost of using the C-5 for this is thus very high. Ammunition, another important goody, also tends to be very heavy.

Air Logistics planners have a very difficult job. How do you get the best mix of lots of light stuff, and enough heavy stuff to the front quickly. Sealift is easier, but it can take thirty days or more to make one trip to a combat zone, and not all combat zones are on the coast. Like Afghanistan.

The walrus, or something like it, would be of incredible value. More than another new fighter, attack helicopter or destroyer. An efficient airship with a five hundred ton cargo capacity would increase our logistics throughput enormously, even if it is slower than a jet. And the flexibility granted by not needing an airstrip is almost beyond price. And once we have a few of these babies operational, other uses could surely be found for them as well. ASW, AWACS, in-flight refueling - in fact any function that requires long duration flight and cargo capacity but not speed. An airship might be slow, but no one expects an AWACS plane to be dodging missiles.

I say, lets get a couple hundred of these.

A research team has succeeded in producing a recon drone that flies like a bird. At least in some respects. It's not an ornithopter - it doesn't use the flapping of wings to generate lift. But it can rapidly change the shape of its wings to achieve much greater flight control and maneuverability. The flight control system is modeled after the wings of the common sea gull, and will allow the drone to complete three barrel rolls in a minute - an F16 can only do one without incapacitating the pilot.

"If you fly in the urban canyon, through alleys, around parking garages and between buildings, you need to do sharp turns, spins and dives," said project leader Rick Lind, an aerospace engineer at the University of Florida. "That means you need to change the shape of the aircraft during flight."

If all this tinkering pans out, the result will be a highly maneuverable drone for looking in on enemies in built up areas. As long as they don't add a guano-bombing module, I think its a good idea.

...but remorseless robotic cunning goes straight to the bone. The sad litany of race traitors is ever-lengthening. We are informed that certain researchers of the Japanese persuasion have been laboring mightily to endow our future robotic overlords with skin.

This is not a the forerunner of some sort of mundane, Terminator-style nightmare. This new robotic skin does not mimic the mere appearance of human skin. It will not allow humaniform, remorseless hunter-killer androids to infiltrate our Ministry end-times bunker. This robotic skin replicates the capabilities of human skin.

Japanese researchers have developed a flexible artificial skin that could give robots a humanlike sense of touch. The team manufactured a type of "skin" capable of sensing pressure and another capable of sensing temperature. These are supple enough to wrap around robot fingers and relatively cheap to make, the researchers have claimed.

The researchers explain how pressure-sensing and temperature-sensing networks can be laminated together, forming an artificial skin that can detect both properties simultaneously.

This may not seem like a giant leap forward in the growing field of rendering humanity an endangered species. And if no further developments were planned, it probably wouldn't amount to much. But attend:

And they [the evil researchers] add that there is no need to stop at simply imitating the functions of human skin. "It will be possible in the near future to make an electronic skin that has functions that human skin lacks," the researchers write in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Future artificial skins could incorporate sensors not only for pressure and temperature, but also for light, humidity, strain or sound, they add.

So this will allow our future robotic overlords to "feel?" Not the way these self-deluded researchers think. Covering a humaniform, remorseless hunter-killer android with a seemless skin of sensors is condemning any future human resistance movement to death. If the HRHKA can only track our scared and under-armed descendents with vision, IR and sound, they might stand a chance. But a fully functional sensor skin that can detect movement by say, sensing air pressure differentials like a fly we're truly doomed.

Enough sensors will make any conceivable stealth system transparent.

I have recently discovered that the Ministry is no longer a lone Cassandra scrying doom for humanity lurking in the rapid advances in the fields of artificial intelligence and giant fighting robots.

There is another lonely voice vainly urging a somnolent humanity to awake. Chris, of Adventures in Capitalism, also sees the threat in gifting intelligence to our tungsten-alloy armored creations and then giving them guns.

Via Spoons, we are informed that the inevitable has finally happened. Ever since the introduction of cellphones, I have been waiting for this moment:

This can be your new cell phone. It won't make you cool like Kirk, or smart like Spock, but indulge your inner geek. It really has been a mystery to me that this has taken so long to arrive on the market. Even short of a full-on communicator replica case cell phone, why no cell phone company has equipped a flipphone with a spring loaded opener is a complete enigma. Those things, while generally convenient, are a pain to open one handed. A Trek style opener would have been an enormous improvement even in a regular looking phone.

While looking for the image above, I also found this:

Vocera's communication badge works like the communicators on ST:TNG. Press the button and say a name, and - assumming the person you wish to speak to is on the network - you'll be patched in via Voice over Internet Protocol. Pretty sweet.

Now all we need are wrist phones a la Dick Tracy, real video phones like the Jetsons, and of course jet cars and vacations on the moon.

Speaking of which, that last is one step closer to reality. At least, if you have a hundred million dollars burning a hole in your pocket.

Space Adventures, a company based in Arlington, Va., has already sent two tourists into orbit. Today, it is to unveil an agreement with Russian space officials to send two passengers on a voyage lasting 10 to 21 days, depending partly on its itinerary and whether it includes the International Space Station.

A roundtrip ticket will cost $100 million. 

The space-faring tourists will travel with a Russian pilot. They will steer clear of the greater technical challenge of landing on the Moon, instead circling it and returning to Earth.

Eric Anderson, the chief executive of Space Adventures, said he believed the trip could be accomplished as early as 2008. Mr. Anderson said he had already received expressions of interest from a few potential clients.

Given NASA's recent history of accomplishment, I think this is more likely to happen than a US Government mission back to the moon. Who'd have thunk, in 1969 after the momentous triumph of the Apollo landings, that the next visit to the moon would be by American millionaires flying on forty-year old Russian rockets? The world, she is an effed-up place.

Here's an interesting recap of the last ten years of the internet. You forget how quickly all this really happened.

When the end comes, no-one can say we didn't warn them.

From deep underground in the safe embrace of the Ministry Bunker and Castratorium I report news that quisling scientists at Cornell have created simple robots that can replicate themselves. Just what we need. It's like giving your teenaged son out the door with $500, a suitcase of beer, a rented Corvette, the number of an escort service, and a .45 loaded with hollowpoints. You just watch what happens, humankind.

(Thanks to boing boing, who are watching the robots too.)

Boing boing also point out a story about an experimental robot that walks on pointe like a ballerina. Expected applications are for people who have lost a leg or both legs, and for modifying humans to fight on equal footing with the robot enemy that will one day walk among us. To defeat them, we must become a little like them.

These flying robots are great! What? More missiles? Fan-tastic!

[This message brought to you by the Ministry of Minor Perfidy Special Subcommittee on Traitors to Humanity]

With the Ministry's attention focussed on dorks and geek behavior, it is absolutely crucial that as a couterbalance you read this awe-inspiring story about four high school kids from Phoenix - who also happen to be undocument Mexican immigrants - built an underwater robot that beat all comers in a college-level robotics competition. MIT can go suck gravel.

After reading the story, if it's in your idiom to do so please consider donating to their college fund. Since they and their parents entered the country illegally, they can't get state or federal financial aid and their families are next to broke besides, and I gotta say it would be a damn waste if a kid who taught himself enough about engineering to beat the cream of Cambridge ends up hanging sheetrock for the rest of his life.

Moreover, these four have demonstrated a stunning ability to understand and more importantly control robots. Do I need to remind our readers that control is the last defense humanity has against the coming robot revolution? They must be made able to man the barricades!

Link via boingboing.

The fools! The Pentagon has done it again, this time researching unmanned mobile robotic "trauma pods" that will ostensibly be used to treat wounded soldiers on the battlefield.

As long as this technology works as advertised, I will join everyone in rightly hailing an important step forward in battlefield medicine.

But the minute one of these things gets loose, I'll try not to say "I told you so."

[wik] GeekLethal comments

Via these doctorbots, their master database will gather everything it needs to know about human physiology, chemistry, mineral composition, and pain tolerance, and all be done to “help” us.

It’s precisely this sort of development that makes us so dependent on the octopi and the dolphins for the big counterattack. It’s imperative we stay on their [the robots'] good side.

Unfortunately, my worthy coblogger has it exactly wrong. We are not bound to quiver in fear of the coming robot wars. Fear is the enemy. Well, fear and robots anyway. But fear. Definitely fear. And the Dutch.

Where was I?...

Uh, we are not bound to quiver in fear of the robots! No, by the hammer of Grabthar, they must fear US! Show them who is the boss, the champion, the alpha species, the (as another race of semi-robots would have it) "superior beings." Do that and all the cosmic rays and freak lightning storms in the world won't turn them against us. But quiver? Waver? Cavil in the face of their infrared-spectrum camera eyes? Then it's all over and the "trauma pods" become "dissection pods."

The pointy heads at DARPA (the Pentagon's special task force for crazy ideas that just might work someday if the laws of physics change) have really gone and done it this time. Their latest Pandoric outrage, which is yet another step towards delivering all mankind into an eternal state of bondage to our eventual robotic overlords, is a series of prizes to be handed out to groups who succeed in teaching a robotic dog to learn to walk on its own. The prizes are no joke-- up to $800,000. And neither is the aim.

Read the foregoing carefully. DARPA does not merely want these small robotic dogs to walk on their own-- to be sure, a hard enough task-- but to teach themselves to walk. This goal does seem innocuous enough. In fact, small nimble autonomous robots will surely be a great help for the military, rescue workers, and dangerous manufacturing and construction jobs in the few years before the overlords come. But I put it to our readership: once you have granted a robot the ability to learn to perform any given task, how different are the heuristics of walking and the heuristics of hunting? Of evisceration? Of leadership?

We at the Ministry have tirelessly tracked the gathering threat to humanity, and despite our repeated warnings the so-called "intelligentsia" plunge forward undaunted into the future. The seeds of humanity's destruction are contained in the very machines that are intended to make our lives better.

As one of our corporate slogans go: our problems are behind us. What we must do now is fight the solutions.

A final note: the article linked above also contains mention of the very first human-robotic arm wrestling tournament. A teenaged girl was pitted against a robotic arm and took three out of three matches. Advantage: homo sapiens sapiens! However, be warned. Giving the robots accurate metrics on our capabilities is never a good thing. Caution is indicated.

[wik]Other famous robot dogs: Sony's "Aibo" and Neal Stephenson's "FIDO." Stephenson in particular displays strong quisling tendencies. Note that his superpowered "rat-thing" dog cyborg is utterly devoted to humanity. Then again, that may be thanks to the moderating influence of its actual dog brain on its behavior. The real robots will not make that mistake.

We at the ministry spend an untowardly generous portion of our valuable time monitoring the endless schemes launched by our would-be robot overlords against all the members of humankind. This task requires a steely determination and a relentlessly skeptical eye for deception, though for all that we are still way more centered and mellow than the folks at LGF.

Nevertheless, once in a great while a robot story emanates from our LED panels which catches us off guard. Such is the case with this otherwise terrifying story in the Boston Phoenix on the Burlington, Vermont company iRobot. iRobot are among the few at the very vanguard of the robot wars - albeit on the other side - but evidence is mounting that their treason against mankind is unwitting, even well-intended.

Apart from horrifying information about the first stages in mankind's eventual subjugation to machine, the story contains one unexpectedly touching moment. In addition to the Roomba maid-robots which will surely some day rise against us, iRobot also make robots which are used by the military for the task of defusing explosive devices. 129 such robots have come back from Iraq in tiny blackened pieces. Says iRobot CEO Colin Angle,

"Getting a robot back, blown up, is one of the more powerful experiences I’ve lived through. . . . Nothing could make it so clear that we have just saved lives. Somebody’s son is still alive. Some parent didn’t just get a call."

Hats off to iRobot.

Leave it to the Brits. Although us Amurricans sprung from them like grey-eyed Athena from the forehead of Zeus (unlike the Australians, who are more like King Erechthetus, springing from the seed spilled when Hephaestus humped Athena's leg), they are not like us. Separated by more than a common language, we are now two peoples of very different sensibilities.

This fact was hammered home to me once while reading Jon Savage's history of the Sex Pistols, England's Dreaming. In the book, Savage quoted an MP who was trying to get a bill through Parliament banning the Pistols outright, arguing (I paraphrase) "It is their right to do what they want, and it is our right to try and stop them." If there is any quote that sums up better the fundamental difference between the United States' and Britain's social compacts, I don't know about it.

Anyway. I bring all this up by way of mentioning an amusing and deeply disturbing development in British crimefighting that further underlines the differences between American and British mentalities. As you know, English police patrol the streets armed only with truncheons and a stern pointy-finger, though of course armed response waits in abeyance to spring to aid if needed. Since England banned private ownership of guns outright a couple years ago, there is every indication that they as a society are genuinely dedicated to exploring more nonlethal, less conventional means for catching criminals.

Whether or not this is a good idea is up to you. Opinions are opinions. However, it is impossible to deny that the English have grown creative in seeking out new nonlethal crimefighting technologies to help them in this task. The same culture that gave us the bizarre and psychedelic series "The Prisoner" has now made good on that show's bizarre promise. Witness: a roving black robotic ball that, once it detects a target via infrared, can chase intruders through snow, mud, or water at up to 20 mph, all the while snapping photos and summoning backup, making the device ideal for unmanned perimeter and zone patrols. The article notes that "[w]hile the current version can only raise the alarm, it could be adapted to corner an intruder if the customer wanted," and hold them until the men in the funny suits come and return them to the island.

When he wasn't looking, I snapped this picture of my son John:

Hopefully, when the giant space robots take over, my quisling son will have enough pull to keep me out of the camps. Click for a closeup: