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Comment by dschobel | Hacker News Reader

This whole conversation is way off-topic but the operations happen with the partnership of the Pakistani government (so the bit about "...in a country we're not at war with" is irrelevant) against military targets who are not fighting under any nation's flag.

The days of two armies lining up at opposite ends of a battle-field are gone.

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> This whole conversation is way off-topic.

I think not when software is used to kill people. I refuse to sanitize and rationalize that fact away and happily discuss UAV realtime software development patterns.

The story was about UAV software, your agenda is extraneous. Otherwise any story can be used as a jumping off point for politics and righteous indignation.

Indeed. As someone who is:

1. Currently living neither in the US, nor the places it deploys these drones—and therefore unable to affect, or be affected by, the US's foreign policy re: drones;

2. and who rationally values their time;

I can't see any benefit to investing said time in analyzing US drone deployment policy. The technology of drones, however, is fascinating.

There's always the possibility that (1) will one day change. For example, when, in some state of emergency, the US decides to back one political strength over another. I'm not military or historical expert, so I might be wrong, but I could easily see this happening in countries like Mexico.

Good point. The only problem is the Netezza appliance is definitely not used by drones, for controlling drones, or anything directly related to their operations. The Register headline (and the many copies) are typically hyperbolic.

The software is used to determine target locations,which are then fed to the drones for execution. I'd say it's pretty damm relevant when someone decides to hack something up real quick and says they don't mind using it knowing that it's giving erroneous data with several meter deviations. I bet you wouldn't find it hyperbolic if you were, let's say, 10 meters away from someone being located with that software.

Yes, it could be better, but in the grand scheme of things it's a major improvement over what came before. Less than a century ago, in WWII, bombers often missed their target by miles. Miles. We are orders of magnitude more accurate, leading to smaller amounts of explosive used, and fewer people being killed by accident.

No, it's never good when an unintended person is killed, but let's keep things in perspective.

I think not when software is used to kill people.

This is not new. Software is also in most components of military weapons and vehicles: in missiles, tanks, submarines, torpedoes, artillery, helicopters and fighter jets, etc. What's different about UAVs?

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