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A Power Outage In Silicon Valley Was Caused By A Drone Crash (mercurynews.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the San Jose Mercury News:
A drone crashed into a high-voltage wire Thursday night, causing tens of thousands of dollars in damage and knocking out power to roughly 1,600 people for about two hours, police said... "The FAA has rules and regulations in place to prevent this exact type of incident from happening," said Mountain View police spokeswoman Katie Nelson. "We simply ask that people comply with the rules and that they operate drones safely and sensibly."
The town's city hall was without power -- along with the rest of the 1,600 homes -- prompting a Google software engineer to tweet that "drones are fun until someone flies one into high-voltage power lines." They added later that "apparently the owner 'fled in a white hatchback', which is the least dignified way that someone can flee, I think."
The town's city hall was without power -- along with the rest of the 1,600 homes -- prompting a Google software engineer to tweet that "drones are fun until someone flies one into high-voltage power lines." They added later that "apparently the owner 'fled in a white hatchback', which is the least dignified way that someone can flee, I think."
Not all ranges are indoors... do you know what you're talking about?
I thought I'd shed some details I witnessed as it happened. I live on Hope St, which is about 1.5 miles from from Polaris Ave. This is what I saw:
1. Incident happened at 20:14 PDT (UTC-0700),
2. Effects were: immediate loss of power, ~0.5 second delay, restoration of power, ~0.5 second delay, restoration of power, ~1-2 second delay, brown-out (as in incandescent lights at half brightness) for ~2-3 full seconds, restoration of power. My UPSes kicked on during this event. Black-outs are one thing, but a brown-out is serious and dangerous. I wonder what the input AC voltage was at the time, same with the waveform. Probably not pretty,
3. For many in Mountain View, this impacted Comcast service for about 1.5 hours. Comcast's nodes have in-line equipment (on utility poles or underground (varies per block/area)) which are powered directly off of PG&E wiring on the same utility pole (or underground). Some of the equipment is battery-backed, some is not; and those which *are*, many of the batteries do not hold a charge any longer (i.e. have been neglected). No idea if power conditioning equipment is used. In this case, I have a feeling a piece of equipment fried/failed due to item #2,
4. Restoration of Comcast service was at 21:34 PDT. Comcast appears to have routed around the failed equipment (at the cable network level); my signal levels were substantially different after the workaround was put in place,
5. Further Comcast repair was done the following day (2017/06/09) at roughly 04:58 PDT and lasted until 05:04. Signal loss was seen during this time; my guess is network/maintenance reverted the workaround from several hours prior. Signal levels were restored to normal values after this.
About drones in general: in the past 3-4 weeks, I've seen several of these being operated *at night* within my local area. There's no way to easily identify who or where the operator is, but noticing the drone is easiest due to sound -- the best analogy is to that of a swarm of bees, except slightly higher in octave. The first time I heard this, I thought "why are bees swarming at night? Wait a minute, what's that thing with blinking red LEDs in the sky? Drones, sigh. Why at night?!?!"
Flying these things around other people and their property without liability insurance is pretty foolish. It leads you to doing things like running away when an accident occurs and making everything much worse for yourself.
That's actually the definition of an assault rifle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Assault Rifle By U.S. Army definition, a selective-fire rifle chambered for a cartridge of intermediate power. If applied to any semi-automatic firearm regardless of its cosmetic similarity to a true assault rifle, the term is incorrect." - https://www.nraila.org/about/g...
You should stop while you're way behind
An AR-15 is not an assault weapon. The term 'assault rifle' originally referred to a battle rifle that fires fully automatically but is lightweight. The AR-15 is a semi-automatic rifle that looks like an particular assault rifle (the M16) but is not itself an assault rifle.
The use of the term 'assault weapon' applied to the AR-15 seems to have followed an arc from "assault-type rifle" (based on its appearance but admitting that it wasn't actually an assault rifle), to leaving off the "-type" but adding on "weapon" in order to avoid the argument that it isn't an assault *rifle*. This seems like a rather disingenuous ploy to confuse the public.
If you want to argue that people shouldn't own rifles that shoot centerfire rifle cartridges, or shouldn't own rifles that exceed a certain level of muzzle energy or just muzzle velocity, then we can have that argument, and we'll include all available firearms that have those capabilities. But to get all hot and bothered about the appearance of the firearm seems pointless to me. The Clinton Crime Bill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violent_Crime_Control_and_Law_Enforcement_Act included a provision to ban certain types of firearms that have come to be called "assault weapons". The ban also included a provision to track the use of these weapons for crimes. It is my understanding that the sunset provision for the ban was not blocked in part because no significant use of these weapons in crimes was found.
As for drones, and as far as "ordinary people" are concerned, I'm not sure the many people using drones for useful purposes would agree with your cavalier assessment that they don't need them. I have a friend with a drone business who provides a service to local farmers to assess the conditions of their fields using the drone. This saves the farmers a lot of time while providing them with a much more comprehensive view of their fields than they could achieve otherwise.
I'm not thrilled with some of the annoying things people do with drones any more than I'm thrilled about how some people use ATVs, personal watercraft, motorcycles, weed whackers, blowers, and other such devices, but they do have useful purposes, and many many people use them carefully and within legal limits. Let's enforce existing laws against the misuse of technology, whether its firearms or drones, but let's not go around making things illegal without evidence that they are a significant problem.