Hacker News Reader

Comment by homerowilson | Hacker News Reader

There are these things called "mules." They're quiet, can carry about 200lbs., and can refuel themselves as they go by eating grass and drinking water...

View on HN

The logistics of keeping them fed and watered, having trained handlers, and treating them for injuries are nontrivial. And they're prone to unhelpful reactions in a firefight. There are good reasons they've largely been displaced by motor vehicles. Combining the go-anywhere ability of legged propulsion with the advantages of motor transport seems like a good enough idea to merit study.

Much easier than the logistics of keeping a robot operational in the field. You don't care whether the Taliban captures your flesh and blood mule, but you really don't want them capturing your world's-most-advanced robotic mule.

Is it common for military electronics to have a self-destruct feature to protect technology secrets?

E.g., when damaged beyond repair or abandoned in a hasty retreat, the hardware could ignite a little thermite to incinerate the electronics boards.

One of the stealth helicopters used in the assassination of bin Laden was so destroyed, but a part of the tail was left behind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Osama_bin_Laden#Helic...

I used to have some old (tube-based) test equipment that included instructions on exploding it with a grenade in the event that it had to be left behind. The grenade was not built in, however.

Why? What are they going to do with it?

Perhaps reverse engineer it, find someone that can reverse engineer it, exploit it or others like it, expose every detail about it all over the internet, a number of potentially harmful things?

Sell it to a country that has the technology level needed to copy it. Russia and China likely would be interested; they might not want to do business with the Taliban directly, but might be willing to buy them through a middle man, say Pakistan.

It is fairly common for countries to let other powers take a look at technology that lands in their hands (sometimes before returning it to them). See for example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Belenko#Aftermath

A lot of the ability of the Boston Robotics robots is in their software thought which is much easier to lockdown via encryption. The rest is the hydraulic mechanism which is not easy but is the best known part of what the BR robots do.

Concealing algorithms and executable code is actually very difficult, consider that to run, a program must first be decrypted. Also consider the decades long war between crackers and proprietary software creators. Obfuscating algorithms has been the subject of quite a lot of academic research.

I was thinking more along the lines of thermite

Store the decryption key in a removable module or the wireless controller? Then anyone who captures one is stuck with a ball of encrypted code that can't execute. Dealing with securing software and keys against capture is not new for the military.

Also destroying the hdd/ssd is easier than destroying the whole machine. You could even have a secure wipe option if the machine is still able to run it's computer but is disabled mechanically.

Yup, I'm sure the countermeasures you can think of in the time required to write an HN post will be secure against technically-advanced nations' militaries.

Sure and it's a problem the military has been dealing with for decades. I'm going to assume they understand the calculus and some effective countermeasures.

The Taliban are not going to have the capability to reverse engineer and produce their own copy, let along having the logistic capability of keeping it in the field.

I'm sure they could find a buyer for it that can.

But the parties they sell it to, for substantial combat-enabling cash, will.

And training a muleteer takes a long time also non mechanised units require a lot more logistic support.

The USMC small wars manual has a lot on how to organise an non mechanized unit that was mostly horse /mule and ox drawn.

Yeah, but they get all nervous around gunfire and explosions. They don't handle helicopters and the airdrop well either. Packing several dozen of them to fit into a C130 for the 12 hour overseas trip is also a bit difficult.

> and can refuel themselves as they go by eating grass and drinking water...

Try finding 30 litres of water and 8 kg of grass ( plus a portion of salt ) per mule per day, minimum, in the mountains of Afghanistan.

To move 90 kg of payload? There are many more efficient methods.

Actually they work great.

We (Air Force Special Operation) used them and horses to great effect in 2001 and the ANA have been using them before and ever since.

http://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/operation-endurin...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/for-afghan...

>Try finding 30 litres of water and 8 kg of grass ( plus a portion of salt ) per mule per day, minimum, in the mountains of Afghanistan.

Is it any easier than finding diesel fuel?

Though sometimes the tables are turned: http://imgfave-herokuapp-com.global.ssl.fastly.net/image_cac...

And they don't cost $40+mm

And you can eat them in times of scarcity. The robotic ones aren't nearly as tasty.

Speak for yourself. Diets motivated by iron deficiency are a real thing.

Although in modern times it's almost ridiculously hard to avoid added iron in food these days due to enforced fortification based on outdated ideas from the 1940's.

per http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/13/a-host-of-ills-when... , iron deficiency prevalence is 3% and iron excess intake prevalence is 12%.

> $40+mm

40 million million dollars?

http://www.accountingcoach.com/blog/what-does-m-and-mm-stand...

I think most other people use a single M to mean million, and k for thousand.

Can't we just use SI prefixes or spell the numbers out instead of using some random alternate convention?

This is not a "random alternate convention", it's a highly used convention that you aren't familiar with. I wasn't familiar with it, either, until I moved to the Silicon Valley. Now I see it all the time.

It's a ridiculous "convention" and it's dubious what you mean by "highly used."

Using Roman numerals for anything is a waste of everyone's time.

I don't think it's necessarily actually Roman numerals, but perhaps "mille", which means thousand. So thousand thousand means million.

I strongly suspect that the page's etymology is wrong -- or more precisely -- not entirely correct. The Latin word for "thousand" is mille, which why the numeral for a thousand is M.

No one would be so asinine to mix numeral systems. Same thing with percent, which originally was rendered as "per-cent", as in "per hundred".

There exists a world of finance outside of Silicon Valley. M and MM to indicate thousands and millions are a finance convention, not an SV one, people in SV just happen to talk about finance a lot. Anyone in finance would be familiar with it, and given that the amount here is a dollar amount, the use seems perfectly fair.

There is no Roman numeral m only M, so if they are sticking with convention shouldn't it be capitalised?

Probably because it's not a numeral, but rather an abbreviation for mille.

It's "highly used" in a specific field and nowhere else. Outside of that field, you should use broadly-accepted conventions.

I completely agree with you, while I know $40+mm means $40M it is only because of context, not because I actually parse it as "thousand thousand". In my mind mm is millimeter, even as an American.

HN is the only place I see this notation used.

The great thing about standards is there are so many to choose from.

https://xkcd.com/927/

Yaks and camels too, depending on the environment.

And if you ever run out of things to do, you can shave your yak.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com