81–90 of 145 posts
Technology like this is why The Wall is a waste of money when it comes to deterring drug trafficking.
You can shoot at drones with impunity, unlike people that you have to feed, house, process and eventually extradict if that's even possible.
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The technology world progresses as an arms race. I'm quite sure that when these things are used to traffic drugs, a small version of [0] will be used to stop them. [0] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/neqvag/the-us-nav...
Heh, that's cute. The issue with that is that locating UAV's that are, say 50 meters above the deck, more than 1km from your detector is essentially impossible. Without a VERY dense detection infrastructure, catching these things is not going to happen. Furthermore even though these lasers are very cheap, by army norms, to fire, they're still 600$ or so for a single shot. So shooting down drones will be expensive. Fa…
What is the approximate cost of allowing the drone in?
Fine and dandy when flying over a desert but when the drone meets the city and an "autopilot" failure occurs over a freeway/highway/street or someone's head the consequences will be unforgivable.
I don't get that. Before the sun rises tomorrow, for the US alone, 32 Americans will make a mistake with their car that kills someone (potentially, but unlikely, themselves, 2 will kill themselves, 29 will kill someone else, one will kill 2 others, for a total of 33 deaths). At the same time, a further 2000 Americans will injure someone with a car, and another 3000 will cause severe (I believe > 1000$) property damag…
At the moment you don't have a choice if some idiot cobbled some crap together in his basement, attached a load to it and decides to place it way over top of you in the sky.
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This is why I quit IT to become a machinist. Now seeing how starved manufacturing is for talent, I suspect IT 'easy' money is a huge brain-drain on society.
The world can use more smart IT individuals. 7 years ago I left silicon valley and moved to Raleigh, NC. It was part of our grand plan to move all the extended family back to the same area. As part of this move I became involved with a couple manufacturing companies. I couldn't help but start helping with their IT set ups. I built some web apps to provide access to information locked up in their horrible ERP/MRP syst…
I started last year and inherited a horrific ERP system (and ancillary code for things like production scanners).
They realised they needed an ERP but they where unlucky in who they got to build it, things I take for granted as simple things to do (an interactive timeline showing job start stop, per user/department in d3) has had a massive impact on how they run things (it surfaced issues around job tear down/turnover).
Efficiency against estimate tracking (it's a table that's red/green if over under) in real time again made a huge difference since it surfaced issues with optimistic estimates from some operators and pessimistic estimates from others).
That matters because it throws off capacity planning and pricing on jobs (we go in too high, too low, too high we might lose the job, too low we take the hit on profits).
All vanilla stuff really.
None of this stuff is particularly difficult (refactoring parts of the existing shitpile are but that's because it's one gigantic pile of mud).
The fundamental problem is that there was a disconnect between the business and the specification of what they wanted, they didn't know enough to know what they could have asked for and the original devs didn't think about how they could improve on the existing business flow at all (I'm not even convinced they even considered the business in a lot of cases..).
In terms of users, about the same 50 on a typical day and I have a similar level of control, from the hardware we buy to the OS to the framework to the programming languages to well everything, it's an awesome feeling of freedom to be able to pick the correct tool for the job.
Technology applied properly can still have a multiplicative effect for a lot of SME's, there is still a vast amount of low-hanging fruit out there.
What 20 pound load could have saved the Titanic? Why wouldn't such a miraculous tool or part have been brought aboard already as a precaution?
At the time, probably nothing. At best they could have sent out life jackets or something similar, though I don't know how much they weighed at the time. But if that happened today, we could minimally start getting inflatable lifeboats out to the people, supplementing afterwards with blankets for heat, life preservers, food, and so on. If you kept some on the ship in a slightly similar tragedy, the drones could offsh…
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You can shoot at drones with impunity, unlike people that you have to feed, house, process and eventually extradict if that's even possible.
She the whole wall is going to be manned with anti-drone squads? If you’re manning the border, why do you need such a huge wall? Wouldn’t a fence provide better visibility?
You have issues with weather affecting coverage but it would be a lot cheaper than a massive ineffective wall.
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Jamming drones is easier than you think, the new battleground will be autonomous flying to avoid trivial radio/gps jamming. MIT has open source code for this already. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qah8oIzCwk https://github.com/andybarry/flight
How about going low tech and just use gyroscopes to keep steady and fly in a straight line until it is unlikely that any jamming might occur?
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I don't get that. Before the sun rises tomorrow, for the US alone, 32 Americans will make a mistake with their car that kills someone (potentially, but unlikely, themselves, 2 will kill themselves, 29 will kill someone else, one will kill 2 others, for a total of 33 deaths). At the same time, a further 2000 Americans will injure someone with a car, and another 3000 will cause severe (I believe > 1000$) property damag…
You have a choice to get in a car and how far you drive. At the moment you don't have a choice if some idiot cobbled some crap together in his basement, attached a load to it and decides to place it way over top of you in the sky.
Except I don't drive and I got hit by a car (it backed out into a main road over the pavement (UK) without checking mirrors properly and hit me.
Do I also have a choice about going outside my front door?
What 20 pound load could have saved the Titanic? Why wouldn't such a miraculous tool or part have been brought aboard already as a precaution?
Of all the things I think this will really impact, I think food delivery and fresh ingredient delivery will be near the top of the list.
It's a little sad that people's first thoughts about tech like this is "It can bring me goods faster than FedEx!" That's such a trivial thing to use it for. Emergency deliveries in rural areas are where this will be most useful. Getting medicine and mechanical parts to remote places during crisises is hard .