Is this just me being paranoid again, or is there someone else who isn't exactle thrilled either by the idea of someone (== private company) knowing when and where i park my car ?
Airspace only easier to deal with because it's possible to deny access to everything except the stuff you want to have inside it. That's much like building a private highway with only vehicles on them, controlled by some mandatory guidance system. Because this is probably not acceptable for everyone you'd have to come up with a system that deals with a much more complex environment on the ground (bikes, people, etc.) and i wish they'd do the same in the air because it's really nice to be able to move quite freely on the ground and on water on my own and i'd like to continue to to the same in the air.
It sounds like the bunch are yet another single issue party. Single issue parties get nowhere.
...
Personally I prefer my vote to go to a political party with a more rounded manifesto.
... manifesto that takes the full 360 degree swing to have experts for every single issue there might be i suppose ? And if there is no expert, well then appoint someone. It will always be beyond my comprehension how someone who runs the department of X can be the best person to run the department of Y one election later.
I really wish that one day a large party would stand up and tell us that they *don't* pretend to be competent for *that* issue and shut up. (something along "It's better to remain silent and have people believe you are incompetent than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.")
Then it will be put on a single chip and mass produced. Look at cell phones. The first ones used discrete circuits and were big and heavy.
The market is too damn small for that. Remember this could only work for cell phones, personal computers etc. because there was/is a huge market.
Who cares? Fuck those rich bastards. They can fly the airlines with the rest of us. Ground every fucking Cessna and cut their wings off. Recycle the metal to make something useful to the rest of society. Maybe then we can take helicopter tours near the Statue of Liberty without worrying about yet another rich fuck in a private jet running us over because he's too important to listen to air traffic control instructions.
You'll want to do that with every car as well, don't you ? (Rich) bastards kill people on the road every day i hear.
Unmanned flight is going to happen. Not if, but when. This will occur with commercial cargo transports first (FedEx, UPS, etc), where saving money on "human support systems" will go a long way to reduce costs, improve route times, increase the amount of flights to be made, etc.. It only makes sense.
Yeah, right.
I'd say it must be much easier to control a URV (say, an autonomous, unmanned truck) since it's basically a 2D and not 3D problem. But this hasn't happened until now and it won't in the foreseeable future.
Correct if i'm wrong but you'd be scared just like me by the idea of a 30+ ton unmanned truck rolling through my neigbourhood ? Well, if this happens above my head it's not better either IMHO.
(Someone will bring up the argument that it's possible and acceptable for many people to free up enough airspace for autonomous aircraft but not roads for trucks. So let's give more large chunks of airspace to the companies & the military ???)
Wrong guess, i've 5000+hrs in real size ones, no kidding.
The problem basically breaks down into two parts:
1) find a thermal
Standard theory says that thermals are spaced at intervals of about 1.5 times their vertical extension (ground to cloud base or top of blue thermal with no Cu cloud on top) and using all his senses a glider pilot has a fair chance of getting from one to the next without hitting the ground first. If the only available option to find the next thermal is to fly in a straight line and wait until you hit it, it's still working most of the time (that's when thermals are not marked by clouds and i suppose this guy's gizmo can't see them anyway). Taking into consideration the much smaller L/D (distance that it can glide from a given height) of a model i don't know if it still works, but the results in TFA seem to confirm this. I can't see that he uses another way of finding the thermal
2) use the thermal = climb
I'd think that given the small turning radius of a model glider and the large radius of a thermal not too near the ground there is no need to center the thermal nearer to the core in order to get some altitude. This might not apply to microthermals near the ground and is not very effective of course. The development (read the papers on the website) tries to deal with this problem by modeling the thermal from measurements of vertical speed and maneuvering the glider nearer to it's core in order to climb faster / at all. BTW that's what >50% of soaring a glider is all about and it's something that involves lots of senses, hence my first comment.
Come on guys, that's all about trying to emulate a migrating bird's flight with a model glider on limited resources. IMHO the challenge is to squeeze the necessary instrumentation in a model glider and do the programming for autonomous operation.
On a first approach "finding thermals" is not more than 1) glide in a straight line and wait, 2) when lift is detected (altitude increases), turn, 3) when lift dies off goto 1). So that shouldn't be too difficult to implement.
The *real* geek fun is : "try to implement other senses to improve the probability of finding a thermal", like used by birds or pilots of paragliders, hang gliders & sailplanes: "see" cumulus clouds, other birds, planes... sense differences in the temperature of the air... look for spots/features on the ground likely to produce thermals.
As a notoriously un-PC old-european me thinks that it's less natural to have kids (and whoever filters may concern) look at war, killing, dead people and the like than at people being naked or even copulating. So, may i hope that any violence depicting content (even if related to the holy "War On ***"(TM) itself) goes in this domain as well ?
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Is this just me being paranoid again, or is there someone else who isn't exactle thrilled either by the idea of someone (== private company) knowing when and where i park my car ?
Nah, that's not officially certified vacuum and much too simple. Only the Russians would do this !
Airspace only easier to deal with because it's possible to deny access to everything except the stuff you want to have inside it. That's much like building a private highway with only vehicles on them, controlled by some mandatory guidance system. Because this is probably not acceptable for everyone you'd have to come up with a system that deals with a much more complex environment on the ground (bikes, people, etc.) and i wish they'd do the same in the air because it's really nice to be able to move quite freely on the ground and on water on my own and i'd like to continue to to the same in the air.
It sounds like the bunch are yet another single issue party. Single issue parties get nowhere.
...
Personally I prefer my vote to go to a political party with a more rounded manifesto.
... manifesto that takes the full 360 degree swing to have experts for every single issue there might be i suppose ? And if there is no expert, well then appoint someone. It will always be beyond my comprehension how someone who runs the department of X can be the best person to run the department of Y one election later.
I really wish that one day a large party would stand up and tell us that they *don't* pretend to be competent for *that* issue and shut up. (something along "It's better to remain silent and have people believe you are incompetent than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.")
Then it will be put on a single chip and mass produced. Look at cell phones. The first ones used discrete circuits and were big and heavy.
The market is too damn small for that. Remember this could only work for cell phones, personal computers etc. because there was/is a huge market.
Who cares? Fuck those rich bastards. They can fly the airlines with the rest of us. Ground every fucking Cessna and cut their wings off. Recycle the metal to make something useful to the rest of society. Maybe then we can take helicopter tours near the Statue of Liberty without worrying about yet another rich fuck in a private jet running us over because he's too important to listen to air traffic control instructions.
You'll want to do that with every car as well, don't you ? (Rich) bastards kill people on the road every day i hear.
Unmanned flight is going to happen. Not if, but when. This will occur with commercial cargo transports first (FedEx, UPS, etc), where saving money on "human support systems" will go a long way to reduce costs, improve route times, increase the amount of flights to be made, etc.. It only makes sense.
Yeah, right. I'd say it must be much easier to control a URV (say, an autonomous, unmanned truck) since it's basically a 2D and not 3D problem. But this hasn't happened until now and it won't in the foreseeable future. Correct if i'm wrong but you'd be scared just like me by the idea of a 30+ ton unmanned truck rolling through my neigbourhood ? Well, if this happens above my head it's not better either IMHO. (Someone will bring up the argument that it's possible and acceptable for many people to free up enough airspace for autonomous aircraft but not roads for trucks. So let's give more large chunks of airspace to the companies & the military ???)
The problem basically breaks down into two parts:
1) find a thermal
Standard theory says that thermals are spaced at intervals of about 1.5 times their vertical extension (ground to cloud base or top of blue thermal with no Cu cloud on top) and using all his senses a glider pilot has a fair chance of getting from one to the next without hitting the ground first. If the only available option to find the next thermal is to fly in a straight line and wait until you hit it, it's still working most of the time (that's when thermals are not marked by clouds and i suppose this guy's gizmo can't see them anyway). Taking into consideration the much smaller L/D (distance that it can glide from a given height) of a model i don't know if it still works, but the results in TFA seem to confirm this. I can't see that he uses another way of finding the thermal
2) use the thermal = climb
I'd think that given the small turning radius of a model glider and the large radius of a thermal not too near the ground there is no need to center the thermal nearer to the core in order to get some altitude. This might not apply to microthermals near the ground and is not very effective of course. The development (read the papers on the website) tries to deal with this problem by modeling the thermal from measurements of vertical speed and maneuvering the glider nearer to it's core in order to climb faster / at all. BTW that's what >50% of soaring a glider is all about and it's something that involves lots of senses, hence my first comment.
Come on guys, that's all about trying to emulate a migrating bird's flight with a model glider on limited resources. IMHO the challenge is to squeeze the necessary instrumentation in a model glider and do the programming for autonomous operation. On a first approach "finding thermals" is not more than 1) glide in a straight line and wait, 2) when lift is detected (altitude increases), turn, 3) when lift dies off goto 1). So that shouldn't be too difficult to implement. The *real* geek fun is : "try to implement other senses to improve the probability of finding a thermal", like used by birds or pilots of paragliders, hang gliders & sailplanes: "see" cumulus clouds, other birds, planes... sense differences in the temperature of the air... look for spots/features on the ground likely to produce thermals.
As a notoriously un-PC old-european me thinks that it's less natural to have kids (and whoever filters may concern) look at war, killing, dead people and the like than at people being naked or even copulating. So, may i hope that any violence depicting content (even if related to the holy "War On ***"(TM) itself) goes in this domain as well ?
>What odd, interesting, or funny game locations have you wandered into? Slashdot ?! Oh wait, that's not a game...