Interesting Links for 23-09-2021

[andrewducker]

World's largest floating offshore wind farm begins operation off the coast of Scotland

(tags:Scotland windpower viaDanielDWilliam )

Taiwan applies to join Pacific trade deal just days after China

(tags:taiwan china trade )

Microplastics are coming out of our babies! (10x more than they come out of adults)

(tags:faeces plastic babies )

Warnings instead of prosecution for Class A drug users in Scotland

(tags:drugs Scotland )

Dark Souls 10th anniversary tour. (Gorgeous and haunting.)

(tags:video games )

Priti Patel's asylum plan will break international law, says UNHCR

(tags:refugee UK OhForFucksSake )

China to stop building coal plants in developing nations

(tags:china coal GoodNews globalwarming )

Israel Killed an Iranian Nuclear Scientist With a Robot Sniper

(tags:israel iran robots guns )

Comments

[armiphlage]

Using robotic assassination outside of active combat to achieve strategic goals is a bit of a risky path to take.

In "Kaleidoscope Century" by John Barnes, "brilliant weapons" used image recognition to target and kill researchers, doctors, and pretty much any educated professional in a target geography, to degrade an opponent's strategic capabilities.

As seen in Nagorno-Karabakh last year, drones are getting smaller, cheaper, and capable of delivering payloads with extreme precision. Instead of targeting a few people, you can afford to target everyone in key industries.

Right now, a skilled hobbyist with a few thousand dollars could make a drone that would identify and fly to the driver's side window of all commercially-available transport trucks. For the price of a house, you could deploy hundreds of them in the weeds along highways, to be triggered by the sound of an oncoming vehicle. After a few hundred drivers had been injured or killed, a nation's short-haul transport infrastructure would be destroyed. Even if a driver was brave enough to get behind the wheel, they'd be flinching and swerving every time a bird flew by.

[andrewducker]

https://youtu.be/9fa9lVwHHqg

[agoodwinsmith]

*That* was disturbing.

[andrewducker]

Yup!

[agoodwinsmith]

Interesting. You could also do that if you were a commercial interest trying to get all your trucks with autodriving without fighting unions or gov't or etc etc.

For heaven's sake, wasn't there/isn't there an issue already with tow truck drivers being killed in Ontario? This would would just be a tech-savvy way forward. Argh.

Down the page, 4 drivers killed; 30 trucks burned:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/tow-truck-violence-new-rules-ontario-1.5933266

[armiphlage]

That article understates the issue, too. I live in Newmarket, just beside the epicenter of the tow-truck violence. Even in our town, burning tow trucks are a daily occurrence. Autonomous drones would be even cheaper than the bribes currently given to the OPP and Toronto Police to pull over trucks from competing gangs and give them encrypted police radios.

A somewhat less lethal idea would be drones to scatter caltrops on the highway; a towtruck would then coincidentally arrive just as cars pulled over with flat tires. Or the Israeli method could be used with a lower aim point, with a sniper rifle firing a nail (with a discarding sabot) at the sidewalls of tires.