The modifications were the best part, and really the only avenue open to improvement with the other constraints imposed. It adds a lot of cost and complexity, not to mention design skill, to make something that's modular while remaining rugged enough to not fall into pieces in that environment.
I was expecting more technological improvements after such a large gap of time, but it was mostly flippers, spinning disks, pincers.
News flash: spinners, flippers, and pincers are some of the best ways to damage a robotic target at this scale as long as entanglement, untethered projectiles, and electromagnetic type weapons aren't allowed.
Also, If you didn't see any technological improvements you must not have been looking very hard during the show, and must have also missed out on the behind the scenes stuff that appeared on youtube. The amount of energy contained in those weapons was enormous compared to the previous iteration of battlebots. The design work and fabrication by people with no background was also quite impressive, and really only made possible by recent advances in technology making CNC machines and CAD software much more ubiquitous and accessible at a hobbyist level.
However, my biggest argument here is not really the physical size, but the ability to accurately control where you are putting your jamming signal close enough. You may have the ability to put a signal that's 0.1 degrees wide out, but it's *really* hard to know where you want to point that beam with sufficient accuracy when you are trying to hit moving targets from large distances.
What I'm getting at is isn't this already a solved problem? Military FCS radars can steer a beam to hit a fast moving target. Is there something I'm not understanding about the difference between pumping enough RF through a radar system to cook a bird half a mile away vs pumping enough RF through this system to disrupt the electronics of an unhardened drone?
Remember you have to get enough RF to hit the desired receiving antenna to disrupt the signal but not disrupt other things, so as you make your beam widths wider and your antenna simpler to point you have to crank up the power, which in turn increases the likelihood you are blasting both the desired data link and a bunch of other ones.
Assuming this is a ground to air weapon and that sidelobes are effectively dealt with, what other things would be in line with the drone though?
Phased arrays are not well suited to this frequency range due to the physical size required and where they are easy to point, it is difficult to reduce the side lobes and keep the primary lobe having sufficient gain at oblique angles.
I'm definitely not an antenna expert, but doesn't the radar on a warship operate in the ghz range and use a phased array? I've heard anecdotes of knocking birds out of the sky with a highly directed beam, and there was an incident in the news several years ago where a US destroyer caused all sorts of havoc on a Norwegian ship when they accidentally painted it with their radar system at full power from a few miles away.
Also, if it's ground based size isn't a huge concern, and I don't know of any reason the whole array can't be mounted such that it's easy to rotate to face threats.
I bet it wouldn't be too hard to make one with all the plastics technology available nowadays. If only I had an easily accessible radar to test against.
According to other comments this is a ground based system. Also, yagi isn't the be all end all of directional antennas. There are most definitely microwave antennas with less prominent sidelobes, as well as phased arrays that can steer a beam very precisely.
5) Gas stations now have thick bullet proof glass surrounding their cash registers... only in America haha
That's most definitely not an only in america thing. Also, I've yet to see a gas station here with thick bulletproof glass surrounding its cash registers.
That really depends on the style of lock. I guarantee you that no one is going to be able to fire any of my firearms while they have the cable lock looped through the chamber. That said, I'm sure some bolt cutters (or possibly even a screwdriver and a pair of pliers) could remove the cable locks pretty easily sans key.
Video from multiple perspectives is always helpful. I remember one (and unfortunantly don't have the link handy) amazing demonstration of this in which the two difference squad car dashcam videos are shown. The first you see a suspect running away from the squad car with another officer in persuit. Another officer approaches with gun drawn from ahead of the suspect and perpendicular to his direction of running, and as the suspect turns, the officer guns him down with a convenience store as a backstop for the bullets. It looks like a really irresponsible and unjustified police shooting if there ever was one. Then you see the camera view from the other squad car at a different angle in which the suspect pulls a gun out of his waistband while running and is beginning to point it towards the cops, and it all makes sense.
If cameras do make enforcement of nitpicky BS laws a thing, it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. In a perfect world, that sort of scenario would provide motivation to get rid of those laws. In reality, it's tough to call which way it'll go.
A wired solution that reported "everything is ok!" if you cut the wires or the power went out would be equally stupid.
It would actually be more stupid to do that with a wired solution. The reason they likely did it that way with the wireless solution is because they didn't want to trigger false alarms every time the neighbor turns on their old badly shielded microwave. A wired system doesn't even have that excuse.
Yeah, it's not a Zigbee issue. It's an issue with using a wireless signal on an overcrowded and highly competitive spectrum to perform a mission critical communication task.
To make a car analogy, it's like blaming ford for making a shitty car because you tried to put 8 tons of bricks in your focus and the suspension failed.
The idea is to make the haystack bigger so the needle is harder to find.
Why not turn the haystack into a needlestack? Make the script go to actual pages you've visited (or follow actual searches you've performed before with a few words changed) and pull words/phrases from there.
The title is absolutely misleading, as you don't feel objects, you get a haptic response based on distance away. At best it's good for a game of hot/cold where you have no idea if the feedback your getting is for the object you're looking for or not
Sort of. It really depends on how fine grained the sonar is and how much lag exists between movement and feedback. With a small gradient, fast feedback, and some high resolution sonar I'd bet you could get it very close to something akin to feeling the object through gloves.
I dislike standing to work as well. I can think while pacing though, so generally I break up the sitting by taking breaks to walk through the building (we have a massive highbay that takes a good 5 minutes to cross) when I need to think without writing code.
It would help the discussion if you'd actually give me some substance to work with instead of these grand sweeping (and generally meaningless) generalizations about AI.
AI does interesting things these days, and the applications are numerous. Collectively, AI powers civilian, military, scientific, and research in astounding ways. These applications now transverse disciplines. Some of the actions are in production today, others are in our immediate future, while admittedly, some are far off. But not that far off.
I can't even tell what you're on about. How does this relate to your point earlier about AI making decisions to benefit humankind on a high level scale? I feel like either we have different definitions of terms, or you have some wildly inaccurate misconceptions about what AI actually is.
Current (and anything in the near to medium future) AI is completely incapable of understanding those concepts. At the risk of getting into an argument of semantics, machine learning / AI isn't really capable of understanding anything. It's just running some equations on input variables that are able to be quantified and then spitting out a result. The only difference between this and a calculator is that there's a feedback loop constantly tweaking the equation.
Do these details matter to a human? I never really got these exercises because if I were in that situation the crash would be long over by the time I was able to collect and process those details.
In reality, I'd make whatever decision I was able to make in a split second given minimal data and hope it turned out ok. I suspect that that decision would be based on theoretical possibly bad outcomes (e.g. switching to an unexpected track will probably have a lot more unintended and potentially very bad consequences than continuing on and hitting the car). Generalizing that into an AI solution, it should probably err on the side of predictability and continue on to hit the stalled car (a known and manageable outcome where we can reasonably expect the occupants of the car to be the only victims) rather than switch tracks and take on potentially even more unknown risks (we know there's a maintenance truck there, but what might be behind the truck? What's the condition of the track?).
It's my worry that bad AI logic makes uncontrollable actions, in the sense of not benefiting mankind/humans or the sustainability of the rest of the planet when viewed on a higher scale.
AI is nowhere (and probably never will be) near that level. It's pointless to even discuss that kind of thing because we don't even know what it'll look like, how it'll be programmed, or what context it'll be operating in. You should be more worried about someone writing some bad code that causes your self driving car to swerve into oncoming traffic in rare circumstances that weren't covered under any of the test cases.
We have collections of free basic books. They're called libraries. They don't contain every book, but they still provide a world of good.
What Zuckerberg apparently fails to realize is that libraries don't see their users as a product, and generally don't have a vested interest in keeping their users away from the local bookstore and other non-library sanctioned locations. Because users are facebooks product, it creates a massive conflict of interest.
They even reported Umpqua Community College was a gun-free zone. It isn't, and wasn't.
You're buying into too many liberal talking points. While you're right that Oregon state law prohibits community colleges from banning ccw holders from carrying, it does not prohibit them from banning guns in certain buildings. iirc there was also a student code of conduct requiring written authorization to carry on campus (knowing the way campuses are, I'd be really hesitant to let the administration know I was a ccw holder). All they'd need to do is ban guns in a few key buildings and it's too much hassle to carry anymore.
School shootings get all the coverage in mainstream conservative news to push the "gun free zone" myth. But school shootings are a small portion of all mass shootings, and aren't even all gun-free zones.
Movie theaters, military bases (only the guards at the gate and maybe the MPs will have live ammo), and quite a few of the retail outlets you'd find in a mall explicitly ban the carrying of firearms.
Give them an inch and they take a mile; at least that's what I see as a gun owner.
Yep. The biggest obstacle to sensible gun laws is the part where the anti-gun crowd hijacks the regulations to harass gun owners. I remember a conversation with one who said if he could ban guns based purely on color (e.g. any gun painted purple isn't allowed) he would do so knowing full well it's nonsensical. His logic was that the more kinds of guns banned (and the more hoops to jump through in owning them), even if that particular regulation only bans one specific individual gun, the better.
Slashdot Mirror
The modifications were the best part, and really the only avenue open to improvement with the other constraints imposed. It adds a lot of cost and complexity, not to mention design skill, to make something that's modular while remaining rugged enough to not fall into pieces in that environment.
I was expecting more technological improvements after such a large gap of time, but it was mostly flippers, spinning disks, pincers.
News flash: spinners, flippers, and pincers are some of the best ways to damage a robotic target at this scale as long as entanglement, untethered projectiles, and electromagnetic type weapons aren't allowed.
Also, If you didn't see any technological improvements you must not have been looking very hard during the show, and must have also missed out on the behind the scenes stuff that appeared on youtube. The amount of energy contained in those weapons was enormous compared to the previous iteration of battlebots. The design work and fabrication by people with no background was also quite impressive, and really only made possible by recent advances in technology making CNC machines and CAD software much more ubiquitous and accessible at a hobbyist level.
1. Walk the kid to school.
And get charged with attempted kidnapping? No way.
However, my biggest argument here is not really the physical size, but the ability to accurately control where you are putting your jamming signal close enough. You may have the ability to put a signal that's 0.1 degrees wide out, but it's *really* hard to know where you want to point that beam with sufficient accuracy when you are trying to hit moving targets from large distances.
What I'm getting at is isn't this already a solved problem? Military FCS radars can steer a beam to hit a fast moving target. Is there something I'm not understanding about the difference between pumping enough RF through a radar system to cook a bird half a mile away vs pumping enough RF through this system to disrupt the electronics of an unhardened drone?
Remember you have to get enough RF to hit the desired receiving antenna to disrupt the signal but not disrupt other things, so as you make your beam widths wider and your antenna simpler to point you have to crank up the power, which in turn increases the likelihood you are blasting both the desired data link and a bunch of other ones.
Assuming this is a ground to air weapon and that sidelobes are effectively dealt with, what other things would be in line with the drone though?
Phased arrays are not well suited to this frequency range due to the physical size required and where they are easy to point, it is difficult to reduce the side lobes and keep the primary lobe having sufficient gain at oblique angles.
I'm definitely not an antenna expert, but doesn't the radar on a warship operate in the ghz range and use a phased array? I've heard anecdotes of knocking birds out of the sky with a highly directed beam, and there was an incident in the news several years ago where a US destroyer caused all sorts of havoc on a Norwegian ship when they accidentally painted it with their radar system at full power from a few miles away.
Also, if it's ground based size isn't a huge concern, and I don't know of any reason the whole array can't be mounted such that it's easy to rotate to face threats.
Maybe we'll even see some mini-stealth.
I bet it wouldn't be too hard to make one with all the plastics technology available nowadays. If only I had an easily accessible radar to test against.
According to other comments this is a ground based system. Also, yagi isn't the be all end all of directional antennas. There are most definitely microwave antennas with less prominent sidelobes, as well as phased arrays that can steer a beam very precisely.
5) Gas stations now have thick bullet proof glass surrounding their cash registers... only in America haha
That's most definitely not an only in america thing. Also, I've yet to see a gas station here with thick bulletproof glass surrounding its cash registers.
That really depends on the style of lock. I guarantee you that no one is going to be able to fire any of my firearms while they have the cable lock looped through the chamber. That said, I'm sure some bolt cutters (or possibly even a screwdriver and a pair of pliers) could remove the cable locks pretty easily sans key.
Video from multiple perspectives is always helpful. I remember one (and unfortunantly don't have the link handy) amazing demonstration of this in which the two difference squad car dashcam videos are shown. The first you see a suspect running away from the squad car with another officer in persuit. Another officer approaches with gun drawn from ahead of the suspect and perpendicular to his direction of running, and as the suspect turns, the officer guns him down with a convenience store as a backstop for the bullets. It looks like a really irresponsible and unjustified police shooting if there ever was one. Then you see the camera view from the other squad car at a different angle in which the suspect pulls a gun out of his waistband while running and is beginning to point it towards the cops, and it all makes sense.
If cameras do make enforcement of nitpicky BS laws a thing, it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. In a perfect world, that sort of scenario would provide motivation to get rid of those laws. In reality, it's tough to call which way it'll go.
A wired solution that reported "everything is ok!" if you cut the wires or the power went out would be equally stupid.
It would actually be more stupid to do that with a wired solution. The reason they likely did it that way with the wireless solution is because they didn't want to trigger false alarms every time the neighbor turns on their old badly shielded microwave. A wired system doesn't even have that excuse.
Yeah, it's not a Zigbee issue. It's an issue with using a wireless signal on an overcrowded and highly competitive spectrum to perform a mission critical communication task.
To make a car analogy, it's like blaming ford for making a shitty car because you tried to put 8 tons of bricks in your focus and the suspension failed.
The idea is to make the haystack bigger so the needle is harder to find.
Why not turn the haystack into a needlestack? Make the script go to actual pages you've visited (or follow actual searches you've performed before with a few words changed) and pull words/phrases from there.
The title is absolutely misleading, as you don't feel objects, you get a haptic response based on distance away. At best it's good for a game of hot/cold where you have no idea if the feedback your getting is for the object you're looking for or not
Sort of. It really depends on how fine grained the sonar is and how much lag exists between movement and feedback. With a small gradient, fast feedback, and some high resolution sonar I'd bet you could get it very close to something akin to feeling the object through gloves.
I dislike standing to work as well. I can think while pacing though, so generally I break up the sitting by taking breaks to walk through the building (we have a massive highbay that takes a good 5 minutes to cross) when I need to think without writing code.
We very much disagree.
It would help the discussion if you'd actually give me some substance to work with instead of these grand sweeping (and generally meaningless) generalizations about AI.
AI does interesting things these days, and the applications are numerous. Collectively, AI powers civilian, military, scientific, and research in astounding ways. These applications now transverse disciplines. Some of the actions are in production today, others are in our immediate future, while admittedly, some are far off. But not that far off.
I can't even tell what you're on about. How does this relate to your point earlier about AI making decisions to benefit humankind on a high level scale? I feel like either we have different definitions of terms, or you have some wildly inaccurate misconceptions about what AI actually is.
Current (and anything in the near to medium future) AI is completely incapable of understanding those concepts. At the risk of getting into an argument of semantics, machine learning / AI isn't really capable of understanding anything. It's just running some equations on input variables that are able to be quantified and then spitting out a result. The only difference between this and a calculator is that there's a feedback loop constantly tweaking the equation.
Do those details matter to the AI? Should they?
Do these details matter to a human? I never really got these exercises because if I were in that situation the crash would be long over by the time I was able to collect and process those details.
In reality, I'd make whatever decision I was able to make in a split second given minimal data and hope it turned out ok. I suspect that that decision would be based on theoretical possibly bad outcomes (e.g. switching to an unexpected track will probably have a lot more unintended and potentially very bad consequences than continuing on and hitting the car). Generalizing that into an AI solution, it should probably err on the side of predictability and continue on to hit the stalled car (a known and manageable outcome where we can reasonably expect the occupants of the car to be the only victims) rather than switch tracks and take on potentially even more unknown risks (we know there's a maintenance truck there, but what might be behind the truck? What's the condition of the track?).
It's my worry that bad AI logic makes uncontrollable actions, in the sense of not benefiting mankind/humans or the sustainability of the rest of the planet when viewed on a higher scale.
AI is nowhere (and probably never will be) near that level. It's pointless to even discuss that kind of thing because we don't even know what it'll look like, how it'll be programmed, or what context it'll be operating in. You should be more worried about someone writing some bad code that causes your self driving car to swerve into oncoming traffic in rare circumstances that weren't covered under any of the test cases.
Sure, if you want to get pedantic about it.
That's your own damn fault for buying your phones at subsidized rates from the carrier.
We have collections of free basic books. They're called libraries. They don't contain every book, but they still provide a world of good.
What Zuckerberg apparently fails to realize is that libraries don't see their users as a product, and generally don't have a vested interest in keeping their users away from the local bookstore and other non-library sanctioned locations. Because users are facebooks product, it creates a massive conflict of interest.
They even reported Umpqua Community College was a gun-free zone. It isn't, and wasn't.
You're buying into too many liberal talking points. While you're right that Oregon state law prohibits community colleges from banning ccw holders from carrying, it does not prohibit them from banning guns in certain buildings. iirc there was also a student code of conduct requiring written authorization to carry on campus (knowing the way campuses are, I'd be really hesitant to let the administration know I was a ccw holder). All they'd need to do is ban guns in a few key buildings and it's too much hassle to carry anymore.
School shootings get all the coverage in mainstream conservative news to push the "gun free zone" myth. But school shootings are a small portion of all mass shootings, and aren't even all gun-free zones.
Movie theaters, military bases (only the guards at the gate and maybe the MPs will have live ammo), and quite a few of the retail outlets you'd find in a mall explicitly ban the carrying of firearms.
The locomotion should probably be provided by legs in some way to keep it at least semi-interesting. Wheelchair racing on the other hand....
Give them an inch and they take a mile; at least that's what I see as a gun owner.
Yep. The biggest obstacle to sensible gun laws is the part where the anti-gun crowd hijacks the regulations to harass gun owners. I remember a conversation with one who said if he could ban guns based purely on color (e.g. any gun painted purple isn't allowed) he would do so knowing full well it's nonsensical. His logic was that the more kinds of guns banned (and the more hoops to jump through in owning them), even if that particular regulation only bans one specific individual gun, the better.