Unmanned drone to start surveying U.S.-Canada border

[Harvey Specter]

OTTAWA — The U.S. is scheduled to start flying an unmanned and unarmed drone over the U.S.-Canada border Tuesday, a U.S. Border Patrol spokesman tells Canwest News Service.


Juan Munoz-Torres of U.S. Customs and Border Protection says the Predator drone will survey a 370 kilometre stretch of the Manitoba-North Dakota border at about 20,000 feet.


The drone will fly no closer than 15 kilometres from the border, said Munoz-Torres. A single drone will be surveying the border at first but "in the future we may have more, it will be determined as we move along with this operation," he added.


The drone is equipped with hi-definition sensors that can spot an object as far as 35 kilometres away, he said.


To date the Border Patrol had been testing the readiness of the drone, which will be flying out of Grand Forks, N.D.


The launch of the drone flights is taking place as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has asked for a review of vulnerabilities along the world's longest undefended boundary.

[Nightwalker]

It seems like only a matter of time before that. Unmanned drones are perfect for crap like this.

[mmmk]

so what do they do exactly?

[Nightwalker]

Surveillance for people jumping the border (primarily drug runners). They already have these at the US/Mexico border.

Predators use the drones' radar imaging and infrared capabilities to "light" a target at night with a laser visible only through the night-vision goggles of helicopter crews who intercept some of the people crossing the Mexican border.

From October 2006 through a year ago, the drones had helped in the apprehension of 3,857 illegal immigrants and the seizure of more than nine tons of marijuana, according to the most recent statistics available.

Currently border agents arrest about 4,000 people who illegally come into the United States a year from Canada and seize about 40,000 pounds of illegal drugs.

http://www.startribune.com/local/39644257.html

[mmmk]

^ lol coincidence that u answered the questioned about catching smugglers at night...and u're nightwalker!

initially, i was thinking that drones were useless since u can use ur eyes to see during the day time

[Synaptik]

but can it stop tunnel diggers? jaja

[BoneThug]

Originally Posted by mmmk

so what do they do exactly?

emits a loud, low pitch buzzing sound for continuous intervals

[achiam]

In the Terminator storyline, Skynet gains sentience shortly after it is placed in control of all of the U.S. military's weaponry and is given the task to protect humans from all threats. Skynet learns at an exponential rate until it becomes self-aware. The human operators try to shut the system down. It then employs humankind's weapons of mass destruction in a campaign to exterminate the global human population.

In Terminator 2, Skynet was a direct descendant of a revolutionary microprocessor invented by Miles Bennett Dyson, a programmer for Cyberdyne. The company began installing these processors in military hardware, becoming the leading weapons manufacturer. The military retrofitted all of its missile defense systems and stealth bombers with Cyberdyne technology, effectively removing human decisions from strategic defense. When Skynet was created, it networked all of this computerized hardware seamlessly. But when it unexpectedly became sentient, Skynet's panicked human operators tried to take it offline, an act that would have meant death for its intelligence. Within milliseconds, Skynet responded by firing nuclear missiles at Russia, initiating a nuclear war on August 29, 2011 (known as Judgment Day), knowing that the Russian counter-attack would kill its enemies in the United States in an act of mutually assured destruction.

[orange7]

drone? starcraft 2 has came alive??

do those zerg drones ever jerk off or do they just jerk each other off..

[jimmerz]

this is kind of like the drones in babylon A.D. except these dont have machine guns and rocket pods

[Mancini]

Originally Posted by achiam

In the Terminator storyline, Skynet gains sentience shortly after it is placed in control of all of the U.S. military's weaponry and is given the task to protect humans from all threats. Skynet learns at an exponential rate until it becomes self-aware. The human operators try to shut the system down. It then employs humankind's weapons of mass destruction in a campaign to exterminate the global human population.

In Terminator 2, Skynet was a direct descendant of a revolutionary microprocessor invented by Miles Bennett Dyson, a programmer for Cyberdyne. The company began installing these processors in military hardware, becoming the leading weapons manufacturer. The military retrofitted all of its missile defense systems and stealth bombers with Cyberdyne technology, effectively removing human decisions from strategic defense. When Skynet was created, it networked all of this computerized hardware seamlessly. But when it unexpectedly became sentient, Skynet's panicked human operators tried to take it offline, an act that would have meant death for its intelligence. Within milliseconds, Skynet responded by firing nuclear missiles at Russia, initiating a nuclear war on August 29, 2011 (known as Judgment Day), knowing that the Russian counter-attack would kill its enemies in the United States in an act of mutually assured destruction.

No.

[hotjoint]

Originally Posted by Synaptik

but can it stop tunnel diggers? jaja

haha yup

[jpoon]

crazy high tech shiet nowadays haha

[sulos]

doesn't someone have to be at a console somewhere to pilot those things?

[StylinRed]

its gonna be armed soon to catch "terrorists" and soon after that its gonna start blowing random shit up

probably has a radar or something on it to search for tunnels too