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Comments on ‘US troops to scatter crawling Wi-Fi mini-droids’

DARPA gives new meaning to the term 'bot net'

Published Tuesday 12th June 2007 15:32 GMT

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The Sun is now advising the US military? 

By Cavan
Posted Tuesday 12th June 2007 16:31 GMT

Just take a look at the photo, theres the proof right there; in case you were unable to picture the size of a pack of playing cards, and how the lAndroid would compare. (no built in antennas? surely that'd keep the size down.)

Roomba 

By Anonymous Coward
Posted Tuesday 12th June 2007 19:48 GMT

Wifi Roomba's could sweep up as they deploy

Movement is silly 

By MacroRodent
Posted Wednesday 13th June 2007 08:47 GMT

If they are going to make these expendable, it would be better to make them much smaller and cheaper by omitting the locomotion mechanism. Then the coverage problem could be solved by simply scattering more of these. I suspect the guys who come up with the concept were just childishly fascinated by the notion of these toy-tank -like things crawling around the battlefield.

Could you imagine... 

By James Penketh
Posted Wednesday 13th June 2007 11:46 GMT

...how quickly these would get stolen if they were deployed?

I mean, they're not exactly going to be quick, so what (apart from the guy with the M16) is stopping you from picking up one of these toys^H^H^H^H devices and having a tinker?

Could you imagine the devastation if captured WiFi robots were rigged with explosives? (Yeah, I know they're not very big, so they're not likely to have much room (if any) inside. But these people are very inventive when it comes to IEDs*.)

* Improvised Explosive Devices

Retrieval !! 

By Ishkandar
Posted Wednesday 13th June 2007 12:38 GMT

I'm sure the "enemy" non-cobmatants will gladly clear up after they have departed and modify these little robots so that they can be recycled into non-suicide bombs to be used against their previous owners !!

I believe Sun Tzu mentioned something about "making war support war" some 2,500 years ago !!

Did we need another neologism? 

By Jeff Silver
Posted Wednesday 13th June 2007 13:37 GMT

"Dismounted warfighter" ?? Is that what used to be called an infantryman?

Wardriving 

By James Cleveland
Posted Wednesday 13th June 2007 20:29 GMT

Anyone up for a spot?

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Customer Perspectives on the Impact of Storage Vendor Decisions on Power, Cooling, & Space in Enterprise Data Centers.

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