Throughout the 80s and 90s, videogames created a generation of programmers. We started by playing games. Then thought 'how do these games work? could I make my own?'. Then started tinkering with BASIC, enjoyed it, and wanted to learn more, and create software of our own. It's sad how much things have changed. Instead of booting into BASIC and encouraging you to tinker, devices pretty much boot into a storefront and the apps constantly beg you to spend.:(
It takes a fairly big, powerful drone to carry a couple of large pizzas. Spinning propellors on big powerful drones can cause nasty injuries. Safe places to land are limited (how does it actually 'make the delivery' - it can't ring a doorbell!). Navigating an urban area in 3D is hard (avoiding vehicles, overhead cables, etc). The full-scale aviation industry dislikes drones (for somewhat reasonable reasons). The general public irrationally fears drones (privacy reasons). The government fears drones (terrorism risk). Paranoid gun nuts will shoot at them. Others will steal them.
Right now, drone deliveries are nothing more than a marketing gimmick, or at best, a very-long-term research project.
'Thousands of medical emergencies' related to small drones sounds a bit of an exaggeration...
Sure, the blades can cause some nasty cuts, a fair number of careless/unfortunate hobbyists have hurt themselves, and very occasionally a bystander gets hurt. But they're no more of a menace to society than, say, things like skateboards or even golf balls - which are involved in the occasional fatal accident.
But scaling these drones up to human-carrying size does sound like a recipe for disaster...
Manufacturers are taking it more seriously. But for consumers, it comes with a very high price.
There's some increasingly secure platforms out there (iOS, UWP, games consoles), where code is signed and runs in a sandboxed environment. But you can't run your own code on them, unless it's been approved, censored, and taxed by a monopolistic App Store.
The Rift headset contains a light sensor to detect if the headset is being worn. So it can power down the screen and/or pause software when you remove the headset. If you want to keep it running (useful as a developer), it's easily covered with a finger, or I guess you could put tape over it...
(The real annoyance with the Rift is the health+safety warning. Has anyone come up with a hack to disable that yet?)
Traffic offences are easily caught on camera. There should be little need to stop a motorist unless they're clearly putting other people at risk.
In a country that insists on having firearms all over the fucking place, being policed by machines is probably safer...
Long random passwords are great... until you need to enter them manually (no copy+paste from a password manager) on a device without a keyboard...
Games consoles and Apple TV, for example. (Although the voice recognition on the new Apple TV is pretty good, it'll recognise things like 'uppercase A' if you try to dictate a password to it)
Flash is starting to seem slick and lightweight (at least for games), compared to some of the HTML5/JS/WebGL stuff. Everyone's taking their huge C++ codebases, running them through Emscripten, and out comes something far bigger and slower to download/compile/start than anything in Flash.
Another young person comitted suicide. Meh, just a statistic. There's little sypmathy. People who have never had to deal with depression call them 'selfish'
But a suicide streamed online... 'inappropriate content'... outrage! outrage! ban this sick filth!
Millions of people enjoy watching 'livestreamed' football matches on their TV.
I find Starcraft 2 matches to be much more entertaining. Others like FPS games.
Drones are noisy. If there's one hovering outside your window, you'll know about it! And anyway, if you point a camera at a window in most light conditions, you're not likely to see much beyond reflections. Also, the cameras on most quadcopters have wide-angle lenses - great for navigation and landscape photography, but no use for spying on people.
But if you're really worried about they looking through your windows, close the bloody curtains/blinds. And if the drone noise is a real annoyance, call the cops, rather than getting the local gun nut to shoot it down...
If somebody really wants to spy on you, they'll find better ways to do it. Even something as crude as a cellphone on a stick is going to be more effective than a noisy quadcopter.
You can add a stabilisation system to an RC plane or heli these days. Or you can fly a quadcopter with auto-level turned off, which is quite similar to flying a heli.
Well, there's the Red Bull Air Race, with manned planes.
The real reason quadcopters are so much more popular than planes/helis for FPV racing is not ease of control, it'and that they're so much cheaper+easier to repair after crashes. Planes have fragile wings and control surfaces, Helis have lots of moving parts that need careful setup/tuning to fly well. But quadcopters... if you've got a small quad with a tough 'racing style' frame, most crashes will just break cheap and easily replaceable propellers.
All quadcopters have stabilisation. Without it, they'd be unflyable.
Racers don't turn off stabilisation, they turn off auto-level - in 'manual/acro' mode, when you centre the pitch/roll stick, the rate of rotation will be zero, rather than the absolute rotation.
Isn't Google the scarier massive corporation these days?
There's more choice of OS than ever (if you consider mobile, too) - but Google have a lot of power over huge aspects of the Internet that Microsoft has very little influence over
Requiring insurance to own a gun might not be a terrible idea for dealing with America's gun problem... with costs scaling like cars - lower premiums for less powerful/lower capacity models, especially if kept in a secure gun cabinet. Higher premiums for types of gun more likely to be involved in crime or accidents.
Mandatory Insurance for small model aircraft?... well, there's a risk of injury or property damage, but is it really any higher than the risk from a bicycle or skateboard? - All could kill in the case of a very unlucky accident, but the chances of more than minor injuries or property damage is very low.
A lot of model aircraft enthusiasts (via their clubs) already have some level of insurance, at least when flying at club fields. Traditional model aircraft - fairly large planes and helis - have been rather more dangerous than the small electric models that are popular these days, so safety has been taken very seriously by most people involved in the hobby.
C64 from the early 80s, Amiga 1200 from the early 90s (the old floppies still read OK, too). Assorted consoles. Although they've only been lightly used for the nostalgia in the last decade or two...
Slashdot Mirror
And MacOS seems likely to be absorbed into iOS long before desktop Windows vanishes
Throughout the 80s and 90s, videogames created a generation of programmers. We started by playing games. Then thought 'how do these games work? could I make my own?'. Then started tinkering with BASIC, enjoyed it, and wanted to learn more, and create software of our own. It's sad how much things have changed. Instead of booting into BASIC and encouraging you to tinker, devices pretty much boot into a storefront and the apps constantly beg you to spend. :(
It takes a fairly big, powerful drone to carry a couple of large pizzas. Spinning propellors on big powerful drones can cause nasty injuries. Safe places to land are limited (how does it actually 'make the delivery' - it can't ring a doorbell!). Navigating an urban area in 3D is hard (avoiding vehicles, overhead cables, etc). The full-scale aviation industry dislikes drones (for somewhat reasonable reasons). The general public irrationally fears drones (privacy reasons). The government fears drones (terrorism risk). Paranoid gun nuts will shoot at them. Others will steal them. Right now, drone deliveries are nothing more than a marketing gimmick, or at best, a very-long-term research project.
DJI Demands Withdrawal Of Misleading Drone Collision Video: https://www.dji.com/newsroom/n...
'Thousands of medical emergencies' related to small drones sounds a bit of an exaggeration...
Sure, the blades can cause some nasty cuts, a fair number of careless/unfortunate hobbyists have hurt themselves, and very occasionally a bystander gets hurt. But they're no more of a menace to society than, say, things like skateboards or even golf balls - which are involved in the occasional fatal accident.
But scaling these drones up to human-carrying size does sound like a recipe for disaster...
Manufacturers are taking it more seriously. But for consumers, it comes with a very high price.
There's some increasingly secure platforms out there (iOS, UWP, games consoles), where code is signed and runs in a sandboxed environment. But you can't run your own code on them, unless it's been approved, censored, and taxed by a monopolistic App Store.
The Rift headset contains a light sensor to detect if the headset is being worn. So it can power down the screen and/or pause software when you remove the headset. If you want to keep it running (useful as a developer), it's easily covered with a finger, or I guess you could put tape over it...
(The real annoyance with the Rift is the health+safety warning. Has anyone come up with a hack to disable that yet?)
Traffic offences are easily caught on camera. There should be little need to stop a motorist unless they're clearly putting other people at risk. In a country that insists on having firearms all over the fucking place, being policed by machines is probably safer...
Democracy happened. As much as the result sucks, You can't say 'ah crap... best of 3?' and expect to be taken seriously.
The really good tablets come with keyboards attached...
Long random passwords are great... until you need to enter them manually (no copy+paste from a password manager) on a device without a keyboard...
Games consoles and Apple TV, for example. (Although the voice recognition on the new Apple TV is pretty good, it'll recognise things like 'uppercase A' if you try to dictate a password to it)
Flash is starting to seem slick and lightweight (at least for games), compared to some of the HTML5/JS/WebGL stuff. Everyone's taking their huge C++ codebases, running them through Emscripten, and out comes something far bigger and slower to download/compile/start than anything in Flash.
Another young person comitted suicide. Meh, just a statistic. There's little sypmathy. People who have never had to deal with depression call them 'selfish'
But a suicide streamed online... 'inappropriate content'... outrage! outrage! ban this sick filth!
"Armored cars may have bulletproof windows"
Millions of people enjoy watching 'livestreamed' football matches on their TV. I find Starcraft 2 matches to be much more entertaining. Others like FPS games.
Drones are noisy. If there's one hovering outside your window, you'll know about it! And anyway, if you point a camera at a window in most light conditions, you're not likely to see much beyond reflections. Also, the cameras on most quadcopters have wide-angle lenses - great for navigation and landscape photography, but no use for spying on people.
But if you're really worried about they looking through your windows, close the bloody curtains/blinds. And if the drone noise is a real annoyance, call the cops, rather than getting the local gun nut to shoot it down...
If somebody really wants to spy on you, they'll find better ways to do it. Even something as crude as a cellphone on a stick is going to be more effective than a noisy quadcopter.
If autonomous cars can cooperate and navigate more intelligently to reduce traffic jams, there'll be some pretty big benefits
There's some pics here showing how such a motor can be concealed surprisingly well:
http://cyclingtips.com/2015/04...
You can add a stabilisation system to an RC plane or heli these days. Or you can fly a quadcopter with auto-level turned off, which is quite similar to flying a heli.
The best FPV quadcopter pilots have some serious skills: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Well, there's the Red Bull Air Race, with manned planes.
The real reason quadcopters are so much more popular than planes/helis for FPV racing is not ease of control, it'and that they're so much cheaper+easier to repair after crashes. Planes have fragile wings and control surfaces, Helis have lots of moving parts that need careful setup/tuning to fly well. But quadcopters... if you've got a small quad with a tough 'racing style' frame, most crashes will just break cheap and easily replaceable propellers.
All quadcopters have stabilisation. Without it, they'd be unflyable.
Racers don't turn off stabilisation, they turn off auto-level - in 'manual/acro' mode, when you centre the pitch/roll stick, the rate of rotation will be zero, rather than the absolute rotation.
Isn't Google the scarier massive corporation these days?
There's more choice of OS than ever (if you consider mobile, too) - but Google have a lot of power over huge aspects of the Internet that Microsoft has very little influence over
Requiring insurance to own a gun might not be a terrible idea for dealing with America's gun problem... with costs scaling like cars - lower premiums for less powerful/lower capacity models, especially if kept in a secure gun cabinet. Higher premiums for types of gun more likely to be involved in crime or accidents.
Mandatory Insurance for small model aircraft?... well, there's a risk of injury or property damage, but is it really any higher than the risk from a bicycle or skateboard? - All could kill in the case of a very unlucky accident, but the chances of more than minor injuries or property damage is very low.
A lot of model aircraft enthusiasts (via their clubs) already have some level of insurance, at least when flying at club fields. Traditional model aircraft - fairly large planes and helis - have been rather more dangerous than the small electric models that are popular these days, so safety has been taken very seriously by most people involved in the hobby.
C64 from the early 80s, Amiga 1200 from the early 90s (the old floppies still read OK, too). Assorted consoles. Although they've only been lightly used for the nostalgia in the last decade or two...
So the risk of crashing a drone onto a crowd is better than risking any injury to a highly-paid sports star?