Sadly, this was the only action by the people on the ground that could be interpreted as aggressive behaviour. Looking back at the video, it was clearly a mistake by the humans on the helicopter/control side.

People make mistakes so for a professional organisation like the US army you would want them to incorporate error-correcting behaviour into their procedures. What I find so saddening is that no such error-correcting behaviour can be traced in the conversations of the soliders. Once they decided on the RPG, there was no looking back. Had they been more open to alternative explanations, they might have concluded that after the initial salvo the additional shootings were too risky.

Regardless, pointing a large telescope camera at an attack helicopter in any circumstances, and especially those, was an incredibly naive thing to do by the journalist.

The video illustrates another worrying issue: the use of long distance warfare makes it incredibly difficult for the people under attack to communicate their intentions. How do you surrender yourself to a drone you can't see?

Assuming the author was born in 1979 AND was born on the 9th of May, you'd have a 1 in 1 chance. Even better odds!!! ;-)

Just burning some bibles would be a significant upgrade from what muslims are usually known for burning.

citation needed.

... so your pro-censorship stance is not popular here.

Who are you to speak on behalf of the /. population?

Yes. the subject is called Kolmogorov complexity

(mods, why was the parent modded informative? the post does not contain information, only conjecture).

Would you like to backup that statement with facts? This is what wikipedia has to say about the subject:

So about 1 in 2 people in the US cannot get 'the best healthcare' in the world.

yet still you pay an extraordinary amount to provide that healthcare. And what quality does it provide?

and

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_the_United_States

Sounds like Clever Hans...

Why it means first stage in the Tour de France of course!

[shameless plug] It's really worthwhile this year, starting in the beautiful city of Rotterdam, the Netherlands [/shameless plug]

It is quite sad to see your pedantic comment being modded +5. If you and your moderators had read the GP more carefully you would have seen he knows what he's talking about. What's more, *his* comment is actually on topic as it reflects the article.

to paraphrase: if the worst case performance for an algorithm is based on a constant speed cache, while the cache is in fact variable speed, then the true worst case performance for that algorithm may be a lot worse then expected.

This is all basic reading stuff, so maybe you should spend some more time reading and a bit less time insulting people.

as some other posters mentioned, talking to passengers is not as dangerous because they pick up clues that the driver needs to focus his/her attention on the road. This works in reverse as well: ever heard your passenger mention "they're braking ahead"?

RTFA that's the point of the algorithm: the camera sensors don't need to calculate what is interesting about the picture, they just need to sample a randomly distributed set of pixels. The algorithm calculates the highres image from that sample.

The idea behind the algorithm is really very elegant. To parafrase their approach: imagine a 1000x1000 pixel image with 24 bit color. There are 24 ^ 1000000 unique pixel configurations to fill that image. The vast majority of those configuration will look like noise. In real life you generally take pictures of non-noise things, like portraits etc. You might define a non-noise image as one where knowing the actual value of a given pixel allows a probability of predicting the value of a neighboring pixel that is greater than chance. A noisy image is one where knowing a given pixel value gives you no information about neighboring pixels at all.

The algorithm provides a way to distinguish between image configurations that depict random noise and those that depict something non-random. Since, apparently, the ratio of non-random image configurations is so small compared to the noisy image configurations, you need only a couple of hints to figure out which of the non-random image configurations you need. What the algoritm does is take a random sample of a non-random image (10% of the original pixels), and calculates a non-random image configuration that fits the given sample. Even though in theory you might end up with Madonna from a picture of E-T, in practice you don't (and I believe they claim they can prove that the chance of accidentally ending up with Madonna is extremely small).

It's all about entropy really.

this is modded insightful? how would this work in practice? you can't just loop a video file of say 10 hours. anyone monitoring the signal would figure out in at most 20 hours that they've been a fake.
And how are you going to broadcast something that fits the current daylight and weather conditions to look sufficiently fake? You would be investing *a lot* of money to create something slightly believable, only to have the whole thing fall apart as soon as someone figures out the feeds they've been watching didn't match reality.

Mind you TFA mentioned they found days and days of intercepted video feeds. it's widespread apparently.

Again TFA mentioned that adding encryption would require hardware changes not only to the drones but also to the receiving equipment, which is also used by allies and in many diverse settings (thus different equipment types). adding encryption will thus require large structural changes, making it a slow and very costly process.