There are these things called "mules." They're quiet, can carry about 200lbs., and can refuel themselves as they go by eating grass and drinking water...
The logistics of keeping them fed and watered, having trained handlers, and treating them for injuries are nontrivial. And they're prone to unhelpful reactions in a firefight. There are good reasons they've largely been displaced by motor vehicles. Combining the go-anywhere ability of legged propulsion with the advantages of motor transport seems like a good enough idea to merit study.
Much easier than the logistics of keeping a robot operational in the field. You don't care whether the Taliban captures your flesh and blood mule, but you really don't want them capturing your world's-most-advanced robotic mule.
The Taliban are not going to have the capability to reverse engineer and produce their own copy, let along having the logistic capability of keeping it in the field.
I used to have some old (tube-based) test equipment that included instructions on exploding it with a grenade in the event that it had to be left behind. The grenade was not built in, however.
Sell it to a country that has the technology level needed to copy it. Russia and China likely would be interested; they might not want to do business with the Taliban directly, but might be willing to buy them through a middle man, say Pakistan.
A lot of the ability of the Boston Robotics robots is in their software thought which is much easier to lockdown via encryption. The rest is the hydraulic mechanism which is not easy but is the best known part of what the BR robots do.
Concealing algorithms and executable code is actually very difficult, consider that to run, a program must first be decrypted. Also consider the decades long war between crackers and proprietary software creators. Obfuscating algorithms has been the subject of quite a lot of academic research.
Sure and it's a problem the military has been dealing with for decades. I'm going to assume they understand the calculus and some effective countermeasures.
Perhaps reverse engineer it, find someone that can reverse engineer it, exploit it or others like it, expose every detail about it all over the internet, a number of potentially harmful things?
Yeah, but they get all nervous around gunfire and explosions. They don't handle helicopters and the airdrop well either. Packing several dozen of them to fit into a C130 for the 12 hour overseas trip is also a bit difficult.
Although in modern times it's almost ridiculously hard to avoid added iron in food these days due to enforced fortification based on outdated ideas from the 1940's.
This is not a "random alternate convention", it's a highly used convention that you aren't familiar with. I wasn't familiar with it, either, until I moved to the Silicon Valley. Now I see it all the time.
I completely agree with you, while I know $40+mm means $40M it is only because of context, not because I actually parse it as "thousand thousand". In my mind mm is millimeter, even as an American.
HN is the only place I see this notation used.
The great thing about standards is there are so many to choose from.
