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Spider drones that can be manufactured on 3D printers.

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The Doctor The Doctor's picture
Spider drones that can be manufactured on 3D printers.
[url=http://www.fraunhofer.de/en/press/research-news/2011/november/high-tech-... release[/url] from the Fraunhofer institute. I can see these sorts of drones being popular with gatecrashers and scrappers. It seems a safe bet that opensource hardware working groups at TAU would have come up with their own designs. Private military contractors would also no doubt have their own weaponized versions for surveillance and intelligence ops, as well as for taking out single targets.
Extrasolar Angel Extrasolar Angel's picture
Re: Spider drones that can be manufactured on 3D printers.
What's going to stop their use as bombs by amateur or professional terrorists?
[I]Raise your hands to the sky and break the chains. With transhumanism we can smash the matriarchy together.[/i]
The Doctor The Doctor's picture
Re: Spider drones that can be manufactured on 3D printers.
Extrasolar Angel wrote:
What's going to stop their use as bombs by amateur or professional terrorists?
The same thing that will stop people from using them as clothing: deciding whether or not to do it.
root root's picture
Re: Spider drones that can be manufactured on 3D printers.
root@Spider bots [hr]
The Doctor wrote:
The same thing that will stop people from using them as clothing: deciding whether or not to do it.
I like this line. I'm going to absorb it right into my memebase. I was also trying to figure out how much of an economic base you would need for a group of Machine Vision developers to cooperatively own the Spider. I know there are fab shops in larger cities, but they are much rarer in less population dense locations. My first idea I might have to write up for fun usage: if you can give these things long legs so they can stilt walk at about 3m off the surface, you could have them slowly rove through croplands recording and processing images of the crops health. I'm from Iowa, we have a strong Agricultural Engineering culture here. This and Meat Science are some of the funnier conversations you can get into playing poker over a joint way out here in the corn fields.
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Extrasolar Angel Extrasolar Angel's picture
Re: Spider drones that can be manufactured on 3D printers.
These spiders also remind me of the comic by Patrick Farley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Farley#The_Spiders
Quote:
The Spiders is a webcomic written and illustrated by cartoonist Patrick S. Farley for his website, Electric Sheep Comix. The comic traces an alternate history of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, where Al Gore is President of the United States, and ordinary civilians can view the war through web cams carried by roving robotic "spiders" dispersed into Afghanistan by the U.S. Army. Unlike most webcomics, the comic is displayed in an "infinite canvas" format, where each page of the comic has the individual panels lined up in one continuous strip, viewable in full by scrolling with the horizontal scrollbar of the reader's web browser. Occasionally, the pages of the comic deviate from the format for storytelling effect, usually in the form of a fictional web page created for the story.
http://web.archive.org/web/20070602151344/http://www.e-sheep.com/spiders/
[I]Raise your hands to the sky and break the chains. With transhumanism we can smash the matriarchy together.[/i]
root root's picture
Re: Spider drones that can be manufactured on 3D printers.
root@Spider drones [hr] That comic is brilliant. Any reason that you had to use the Way Back Machine to find it?
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Extrasolar Angel Extrasolar Angel's picture
Re: Spider drones that can be manufactured on 3D printers.
The original site is no longer working IIRC.
[I]Raise your hands to the sky and break the chains. With transhumanism we can smash the matriarchy together.[/i]