attack of the drones

[Eugen Leitl]

On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 12:50:03PM -0400, Tyler Durden wrote:
> The New Yorker last week had an interesting article on this and also described
> the drone "pilots" as residing in the US.

I have seen multiple reports that they're operated from the US.
Difficult to say inasmuch they're reliable. They do make sense
from the logistics point of view. 
 
> However, there's something a little unclear here: Pure speed-of-light
> limitations would add, you'd think, unacceptable latency (a couple of
> seconds?).

Why should this be routed by GEO? This can be routed by LEO
or via fiber. Arguably, this can be done mostly via regular Internet,
with only the last leg of the journey through military platforms
in the area.
 
> Does this mean there's some kind of automatic lock-on that commits the drone
> to fire upon targets, or is there some kind of propaganda-typre reason why the

Of course they are smart ammunitions. This isn't a dogfight, where you would
need local operators, or even reflexes built-in into UAVs.

> gubmint would go out of it's way to make it appear that the operators are in
> the US?

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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