Weird, Birdlike Mystery Drone Crashes in Pakistan

Never underestimate the power of a well-funded PR campaign spreading FUD. "Could HACKERS be targeting YOUR CHILDREN with ROBOT BIRDS? More at 11."

I have to say, you made the right choice. You would have probably ended up with a visit from Secret Service, FBI or other such organization.

Someone I know wrote about a similar hypothetical scenario and ended up getting a visit from FBI at their workplace, in front of everyone, then also at home. You know, just a friendly "chat"... They ended up lecturing him about 1st Ammendment rights, oh the irony.

The Golden Age books deal with this rather dramatically. It takes various ideas (augmented reality, global network connectivity, the singularity, etc.) to an extreme, to the point that a severe social punishment is to be disconnected from all globally integrated technology. A person in this state virtually becomes a non-person, unable to even achieve basic communication with other people physically in the same room, most other people even filtering disconnected persons out of their entire sensory experience.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Age_(science_fiction...

They're pretty dense stuff and can be dry reads at times, but the ideas explored are really fascinating.

Sure it is. Replace general purpose computers with centrally and permanently connected (It's a feature!) computing devices that only run signed apps. Then whenever someone does something too clever you just revoke their developer ID and everything they've written stops working. Justify this control with "piracy" and it'll be accepted.

It won't really work, but it seems like it would to an authoritarian, so it's pretty likely where we're going in such a hurry. Like all false security it just opens us up to a bigger attack, but reality never won an election so government will never handle this properly.

We talk about how nasty Iran, Egypt, Libya, etc, shut down communications preventing the people from changing things, but what measures do we have against our own governments doing the same things? I imagine we're totally screwed. Our government has the resources to do things thoroughly, and as the BART incident recently showed, the willingness to deny service to the innocent to inconvenience protestors.

Someone should tell these guys: http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/

In my opinion, the best solutions I can think of are:

1) EMP. May not shut off the motors, but should shut off the brains.

2) Base station with targeting system. Laser would be too slow, too dangerous. Maybe a high-powered water jet. Knock them right out of the sky. Break their wings.

3) A swarm of predator drones. Good ones would not be self-sacrificial.

A laser sounds pretty good, they're big but you can swivel the beam very fast since you just have to move the mirrors. And they don't fall back to earth like bullets do.

EMPs are hard to produce without explosions of some kind[1], the energy requirements are similar to lasers but the power is way higher. They're hard to make directional, too, leading to a lot of collateral damage whenever you set one off.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compres...

I think you'd just float some blimps with various sensors to watch for anything suspicious. [1] If you did spot anything suspicious, you'd simply move your high-value target as if you'd spotted someone with a gun or a suspicious bag in the area.

A jammer could be put into a ground-based vehicle and activated as part of a response, but even if you could engage a suspicious drone with your own, you'd still need to move the would-be target for safety's sake. So why bother?

[1] I'm rather surprised these things aren't already in use. They could be trivially disguised as promotional material for an event and even be tethered to provide superior power/data resources to your spotter blimp.