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Real-world aimbot: The $17,000 rifle with a Linux-powered scope
- Pezmc 14y agoWarning, don't miss this line from the story: "If it doesn’t upset you to see animals being hunted, the video at the end of the story gives you a good idea of how a PGF works in practice." The video shows animals being shot!
- theorique 14y agoIf you're not a vegetarian, it's important to know where your food comes from :)
- jwoah12 14y agoI trust that my steak comes from a cow without actually having seen the cow get killed.
- nodata 14y agoIt's a fair point though: if you're going to end a life to eat, perhaps it's fair that you see how it dies. Should slaughterhouses have clear walls? Probably yes.
- sageikosa 14y agoI think of those poor little bacteria that my immune system is hunting down, or the carrot so mercilously ripped from its home.
- binaryorganic 14y agoShouldn't you visit a factory then? Food hardly comes from something so graceful as the forest.
- rthomas6 14y agoI hunt. 90% of the red meat I consume comes from deer. I like to think that suddenly killing a wild deer with one bullet is more humane than factory farm conditions.
- swalsh 14y agoWhere I grew up in WI, I had a neighbor whom his entire family were vegetarians unless he killed the animal himself.
- rthomas6 14y agoThat sounds like a wonderfully natural way to live. We eat a lot of chicken, and I'm trying to convince my wife to let me raise our own chickens when we have a house. So far she's not too keen on the idea.
- binaryorganic 14y agoI completely agree with you, and think it's awesome that you're able to. It's just important to remember that traditional hunting is not where most food comes from, nor could it be.
- hnb32 14y agoIf you're an omnivore your meat probably comes from intensively farmed animals kept inside their entire life, before being beheaded on a conveyer belt or shot with a bolt gun. Not by a hunter sporting the latest rifle on the open plains.
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- jpitz 14y agoBe a pedant all you wish, but please don't call this bolt-action rifle an assault rifle, and please don't assume that the majority of hunters use assault rifles.
- maxerickson 14y agoThe conditions in feeding operations are often fairly grim, but cattle operations are often open (i.e., the animals are confined outdoors) and they buy in lots of animals from breeders that feed from pasture for a year or so. Basically, it would be more expensive to keep them inside for their entire life, so that doesn't happen.
- theorique 14y agoWell, yeah. The point I am aiming at is, meat comes from the bodies of living beings and it's important for those of us who eat it (including me) to understand that fully.
- theorique 14y agoCool toy. I'd love to take it out on the range for a few hundred rounds!
- binarymax 14y agoConsumer tech like this scares the crap out of me.
- monochromatic 14y agoWhy?
- pablisco 14y agoBecause instead of spending research money into getting cheaper and more accessible healthcare, food and housing it is used to kill more efficiently, maybe?
- monochromatic 14y agoDid you read the article? This isn't government funded. Does every private company that spends money on something other than healthcare/food/housing scare you?
- pablisco 14y agoDid you read my post? Did I say anything about government funds? I'm talking about companies' priorities. So someone talks about social things and you assume that they are talking about big daddy government? There are plenty of companies that make profit AND also make research for the common good and not how to kill each other better. I mentioned those things because they are the most obvious and possibly important... but there are more subjects like environment, education, mass transport, open governments, factory automation, communications... that could do with more research. Also, not all the profit should be monetary. Who are you gonna charge that money when there is no people left that can spend it? No "social profit" -> no people -> no business. Your clients should be your interest not your product. Bottom line: An "effing" waste of resources!
- monochromatic 14y agoOk, just wanted to make sure we were on the same page. You thini private companies should only do things that are directly humanitarian in impact. That's a bit of an uncommon position to take, and one I disagree with. The profit motive is what drives private enterprise, and I have no problem with that. If something can be developed and marketed profitably, I think it's a stretch to call it a waste of resources.
- hiddenfeatures 14y agoInteresting piece of technology. Sounds a lot like the XM-25 grenade launcher (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XM25_CDTE http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XM25_CDTE) but without the air burst grenades. I wonder why this has not been developed by the military / government.
- zeffr 14y ago"I wonder why this has not been developed by the military / government." They actually outlined this in the article. The reason pretty much boils down to the fact that gear specifically for the military has to adhere to whatever crazy shit the higher ups demand. This makes developing a proof of concept/ fully functioning, marketable device rather difficult as the costs begin to skyrocket. These guys took the opposite route: develop the tech, bring it to market, then let the military get in on it if they like it.
- hiddenfeatures 14y agoHa... I should stop scanning and actually read the articles on HN. Then again, maybe not.
- hga 14y agoA very large fraction of the small arms optics technology that the US military has been using in this century has followed exactly that part. Aimpoint, EOTech, maybe others, and of course conventional scopes.
- cpsales 14y agoI think I can hear Richard Stallman ripping out clusters of his neckbeard over the prospect of having Linux powered rifles.
- spindritf 14y agoMore of an autofire than an aimbot. Those were used to make it more difficult to spot a cheater in-game while watching from his point of view because the aiming process still looked natural — the crosshair didn't magically jumped to the target. The cheat just chose the best moment to fire.
- pestaa 14y agoWow, if online cheaters were not difficult enough to catch already! Without client-side verification (such as PunkBuster) it sounds "even more" impossible to distinguish between really good players and cheaters. I wonder if such libraries are still being developed.
- prawks 14y agoSuch libraries are constantly being developed. There's a very large market for cheats for online video games, especially highly competitive ones (Counter-strike, Call of Duty, World of Warcraft).
- SeanDav 14y agoWhat is the point, there is no skill in this....oh wait...you get to press a button to select the target, yeah 1337 skills required for this. On the upside, hopefully the animals will suffer less due to better accuracy on kill zone. Personally hunting is not my thing but I have no problem with others hunting, this rifle, however, just seems a step too far.
- wtracy 14y agoI had a similar reaction to the hunting shown in the video, but if you're shooting for animal control purposes rather than recreation it makes more sense.
- rthomas6 14y agoIn some places in the US, deer are pests, and state conservation agents actually shoot them to thin their numbers. Otherwise, lacking a sufficient number of natural predators in the area, the population would explode to a number greater than the land could handle. This would cause a significant portion of the deer population to die of famine and disease, and cause local flora and crops to be eaten bare.
- duck 14y agoActually, wildlife bounties are more common than you think and are often offered to the general public. This isn't a complete listing (as I know some Maine counties offer bounties on coyotes and yet it isn't listed), but gives you a general idea: http://www.bornfreeusa.org/b4a2_bounty.php http://www.bornfreeusa.org/b4a2_bounty.php
- brudgers 14y agoThe expense of the weapon system and ammunition probably outweigh any gain in efficiency when eradicating varmints. The .300 ammunition capable of accuracy at 900m is overkill for shooting coyotes. Let's be clear, for someone stalking a mountain goat there are plausible reasons for the weapon, but the main target market is gun collectors.
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- wtracy 14y agoActually, for civilian (or police) purposes I'd like to see a system that lets you mark targets that you don't want to hit, then automatically prevents you from shooting at or near them when you're aiming at your real target.
- joelthelion 14y agoDoes the military have similar technology?
- rthomas6 14y agoHow could the answer possibly be no?
- joelthelion 14y agoI was just surprised to first hear about this on a civilian application.
- liotier 14y agoThey are working on better stuff : https://share.sandia.gov/news/resources/news_releases/bullet/ https://share.sandia.gov/news/resources/news_releases/bullet... - steerable laser-guided bullets will soon be common for calibers of 12.7 and above.
- hnb32 14y agoIt makes me sad that software like Linux written in a benevolent co-operative spirit ends up being used for such a purpose. Makes you wonder if there needs to be a software license with a stipulation along the lines of "must not be used for evil", though I guess that would need defining.
- phpnode 14y agoJSON cannot be used for evil, unless you have permission from Crockford: http://www.json.org/license.html http://www.json.org/license.html
- robin_reala 14y agoIncidentally, IBM have permission from Crockford to be evil or to have evil sublicensees: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=764024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=764024
- dbaupp 14y agoAnd that clause is (widely considered) a bad idea, because "evil" is relative (e.g. some people think abortions are evil, others don't). http://www.sonatype.com/people/2012/03/use-json-well-youd-better-not-be-evil/ http://www.sonatype.com/people/2012/03/use-json-well-youd-be... http://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article46/json-license http://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article46/json-license http://wiki.debian.org/qa.debian.org/jsonevil http://wiki.debian.org/qa.debian.org/jsonevil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Crockford#Criticism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Crockford#Criticism
- swalsh 14y ago"must not be used for evil" But what's evil? If you eat the deer, is hunting it evil?
- hnb32 14y agoYes, some of us regard the unnecessary killing of other sentient creatures as evil.
- roel_v 14y agoNext step: quadcopter based delivery of a gun like this (presumably one with a shorter or retractable barrel). Imagine: from the comfort of your office 1000's of kilometers away, you can have a gun fly out of a container, fly to the mark's backyard, wait until he gets home, shoot him in the head, and fly off before the cops or anyone else has a chance to even realize what happened! I've thought about the idea several times over the last few years, way cool that at least part of it is working. Or way scary, depending on how you look at it.
- duck 14y agoAlthough this one just had a camera on it, it comes pretty close: http://boingboing.net/2013/01/08/what-the-moose-was-thinking-wh.html http://boingboing.net/2013/01/08/what-the-moose-was-thinking...
- ricardobeat 14y agowhy… have you been thinking so long about 'remote murders'?
- roel_v 14y agoWell not so much thinking about (committing) murders, more hypothesizing on what the next logical evolution of drones would be, and how (once they have been developed and mass-produced by the military) they will be used by organized crime.
- cabirum 14y agolike http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNPJMk2fgJU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNPJMk2fgJU ?
- rthomas6 14y agoI'd just like to point out something that nobody has addressed so far, which is that this setup triples the accurate range of the rifle compared to a human operator. That is absolutely astonishing. If the accurate range increase would apply to larger caliber rifles, this means that with a .50 sniper rifle, it could be used to snipe targets almost a mile away. It wouldn't even take a human sniper being in position. ...In fact, the $17,000 price tag is probably cheaper than training a human sniper. I'm sure we'll see this in military use in the next 20 years.
- pxlpshr 14y agoYou are exactly right.
- monochromatic 14y ago... assuming it works as well as this PR piece suggests. But even if it doesn't, the tech will certainly evolve to something incredible in the next 20 years.
- hga 14y agoNot at all clear except on calm days; all my readings about sniping and very long range target shooting talk about the need to read the winds way beyond the location of the shooter. Long target ranges have flags at intervals, snipers have to learn how to read it from vegetation movement and so on.
- rthomas6 14y agoInteresting. I suppose at such long distances one can no longer assume that wind speed is the same at the target's location. I wonder if tech like this could be made to also read wind speed from vegetation movement?
- shpxnvz 14y agoI shoot service rifle at 600 yards on a range with wind flags at 100 yard intervals. It's not uncommon at that range for the wind to be blowing in opposite directions at each interval. At that range you can make an accurate read on the wind speed at the target purely from the mirage, reading vegetation movement is not necessary. My understanding is that down range wind sensing systems do so by reading the mirage as well.
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- anon31415933 14y agoMaybe the government should consider banning Linux. I know you guys hate this idea but if it can be used to make weapons ...