Thus eviscerating the decades old policy of "see and avoid" as the bedrock of flight in this country. And the rest of the world.
Most of the rest of the world has lightened up about "see and avoid," especially for drones that are smaller and fly lower than migratory birds. The US is falling behind in drone application business development... (cue Dr. Strangelove / Gen. Turgidson's "we cannot allow a mineshaft gap" speech.)
Take out the "stable" requirement, just require them to maneuver enough to keep decent spacing - now you can do it with solar powered balloon platforms. Sure, 80% of them will end up over the ocean, but if you make them reflective you can help reduce global warming, cost to inflate is probably far less than 1/5th the cost to orbit (assuming you can use something other than Helium...), and if the reflectivity is tunable, you might be able to do some weather control with directed heating/cooling of the ocean and land... oh, the possibilities!
and my CS teacher in 1982 walked uphill in the snow both ways 11 months a year in Florida, while he dialed instructions into a machine with a rotary phone interface.
When I was entering college, I wanted to know how to build a computer starting from sand on the beach to make the silicon to make the transistors that the gates are made of, etc. etc. - there was always some mystery in there, until one day I was introduced to the concept of multiplexers, for whatever reason, that was the last piece of the puzzle for me. Then I had it - from junction doping up through electron guns raster scanning phosphors on a screen. Intellectually satisfying, but 90+% useless from a practical applications standpoint.
I, too, still disagree, that everyone feels a need for that intellectual satisfaction, or benefits from a full knowledge set of all principles involved. I never did learn how to refine the junction doping materials from raw ore, or any of the problems that can arise if you get it wrong, locations on the planet where the ore is mined, etc. etc.
Video over FHSS isn't ideal, but it can be done, and, yes, I didn't bother to look up Freewave, microHard or the other good digital radio suppliers, mostly because I've never seen them publish price or specs on the web (doesn't mean they're not there, just that I have been working from supplied datasheets that are easier to find and more complete than anything I've ever seen on the web.)
Traditional video radio links work better, that's why they're traditional. I was responding to a hypothetical scenario where "big brother" jams a video transmission, and if you want to respond to that threat, you can get video out over a good modern (lightweight, high bandwidth) digital link - it's not hobbyist cheap, but if you're covering OWS Manhattan, you should be able to afford it.
If you're going guerrilla, there's no 7.5KHz pipe restriction, those restrictions are purely based on national laws, and most radios are developed for international markets, compliance is handled in software. Many of the better selling radios are easily modded (against the instruction manual) to operate in modes that aren't legal anywhere.
Having said that, yes, full frame-rate video transmission is a bitch, quadruplely so for 1080p (to get wide field coverage with good detail on what you really wanted to see). But, a FHSS radio TX-RX pair that can handle it over 1km will cost less than $3K.
Depending on the size and complexity of the drone, I would wire up an appropriately-sized radio control airplane(or copter) with a camera and a light payload of explosive, probably using a servo instead of electronic signal as the detonator for safety reasons. It would be more expensive than firing off a few rounds, but the fact that the oppressors paid a hundred or even a thousand times more for their drone than I did would be worth it.
Stick with rifles, you'll have a hell of a time hitting it with an RC aircraft and they're more likely to know you did it - with the rifle you can shoot from a concealed location and disappear before they can find you. Either way, gunshots or flying explosive charges around, your're in jail when caught.
Drones (and drone operators) are extremely ill-suited to dealing with level playing fields. But you're right about everything else, though. Guess its time to move to a rural area, growing and hunting all of my food and saving up enough money to flee the country before its military is turned loose against the general population.
Point of the article is that drones are shrinking. Sure, the Predator is the size of a 707, but take a look at Switchblade, smaller than the RC plane you can get at your hobby shop, faster too, not cheaper, but it costs less than your legal fees will trying to deal with the legal charges you'll face for putting RC explosives into the air.
The rural area plan sounds good, but unless you can afford hundreds of acres, it's not much more secure than living in a normal city. And, as for fleeing, to where? Try to take comfort in the fact that we've got less than 1% of our population in the military, half of them as reservists, even if the military does consume nearly 5% of our GDP, those numbers have been generally falling from 10% of GDP and more soldiers (in absolute numbers) in 1960.
There are lots and lots of frequencies you can transmit video on, you can even put it spread spectrum across the police tactical frequencies - if they want to jam you, they'll take out their own C&C.
...people from taking pot shots at them, be it with firearms, slingshots, toy rockets, what have you. I suppose that the best way to prevent this from happening is to make them so hideously expensive to insure or operate that no one bothers.
Discharge of firearm in a populated area: bad, jail bad.
Slingshots: good luck hitting a small, erratically moving target 20 stories up.
Toy rockets: you got a gyro guidance system with optical tracking on that thing?
What have you: apparently you have nothing that can take out a drone, even the guns aren't going to be easy, trying to hit a 2' target at 100+ yards with a major elevation change.
Insurance: is based on risk, it's a business. The only way risk will be increased by lawmakers is if the chance for lawsuit is increased. Since most applications are downright illegal right now, drones are un-insurable. As for liability after they are legal, how much damage can 2 lbs of plastic do falling on whatever? O.K., now, how much damage does a Cessna do when it crashes while flying low for pipeline monitoring, crop dusting, etc.?
People hate change, drones are change. Don't hate the drones, they really are better than what we had before.
Go ahead and hate the people who will misuse them, but remember that you don't need to fly to install cameras on every intersection, automatic license plate readers in every squad car, or facial recognition cameras at the entry to every store.
This only approaches making economic sense because of the comparison to cost of living in the San Francisco Bay area. The Visa thing is a nice distraction, but if it cost more to keep the B-1 Visa holders afloat than it would to hire actual Americans, they would never bother to float the idea to investors.
My favorites are the SMS I get on Verizon at 3am, somebody sent it to me in the middle of the day and it makes my phone beep in the middle of the next night. I have pretty much everyone trained to not SMS me, but the dentist still does it for appointments.
I like the legend of Napoleon's mail. Story has it that he never opened anything mailed to him until it was at least one month old, and by that time, most issues had resolved themselves.
Put another way: is there a contribution here, or are they just doing what's necessary to avoid getting sued?
One of the major lessons of cryptography is that every code is breakable, it's just a matter of how long it takes to break. Releasing a pile of open source is sort of like encryption in the clear, it will take time and effort to decode what has (and possibly has not) been released.
This release of source code should put a good light on Amazon until the Christmas shopping season is over, it will take at least that long for anyone who cares to stir up trouble for them if they haven't released something they should have.
a chat session demands no time from me. I ignore them over emails.
Priority is , walk to my office, call me, email me, any of the other useless communication channels.
Absolute bottom is SMS message my phone. I will ignore you for 7 days if you SMS me.
Judging by your user number, I'd say you've been in the game long enough to take a Grumpy attitude and get away with it - I do the same, in the last 5 years I might have sent 3 SMS messages, and responded to none, though I did try to get my wife to start sending grocery lists SMS instead of dictating them over the phone...
Still, I like e-mail the best, most things in life can wait up to a day before reaching my attention, and e-mail is a great way to do that.
I agree that most emails are useless (starting from those which are sent just FYI, but are still distracting and interrupting the workflow).
The beauty of e-mail is that the social contract of e-mail allows you to ignore it for longer than a real-time chat. If you want to hold an IM-like conversation in e-mail, most systems are fast enough to support that, but if you've got something you're in the middle of, e-mail doesn't demand instant attention the way a phonecall or chat session does.
No, they don't "matter less and less". Larger structures are being built around them, but that's like saying the bigger and fancier the car, the less important the engine. It''s nonsense....rambling automotive analogy edited for clarity... They matter less and less to the end users, yes. But they don't matter "less" to a programmer, any more than electrons matter "less" to someone doing modern electronics.
Been there, done that with the degrees in electrical and computer engineering, 20 years in the field. I used to write 6502 assembly code by hand and peck in the op-codes in decimal... worked up through looking at compiler generated assembly and tweaking when necessary... I'm currently coding for a custom multi-core system realized in an FPGA and I have "looked under the hood" down to the assembly level exactly never in the last 15 years. gcc generates good working code from C/C++, it has its quirks and flaws, but my time is better spent on objects than op-codes. Bits and Bytes I do still use out of archaic habit, but I'd probably be more productive overall if I'd stick with higher level structures.
Same for electrons - 99% of my electron interaction since school is making sure the magic smoke isn't released, yes I know V=IR and I have used it once in awhile, but it's rare, and rarer still that it was really necessary. In my life, it's far more important to read the datasheet thoroughly than to manually design an RC network with more than 2 components.
If it's anything like in other countries, it's not a shortage of people who graduated from a CS class, it's a shortage of people who can write sensible code.
The two groups have overlapping areas, but they're not congruent. CS doesn't equate programming. I know a fair lot of people with CS degrees that I wouldn't trust enough coding skills to have them write an Excel macro for me.
CS is NOT programming. My university pretty much expects you to know how to program if you come in for their CS classes.
I totally concur. And, a bigger problem is that all the CS degrees awarded to people who can't code to save their life makes it that much harder to find one who can.
I would suspect that there are far more people employed in writing mundane crap like "accounts receivable form generator that Jim made before quitting" than any of the effects areas you mention.
I am certain there are, how many primary school teachers do you know who are able to inspire their students to study with dreams of becoming an accounts receivable form generator author?
Actually, nothing beyond one link was "echoed". And the link was to a BBC interview they contributed to, so I'm sure they are ecstatic that slashdot picked it up.
If you haven't noticed, this has never been a site for investigative journalism and hard hitting original reporting, it's mostly blog that posts links to other articles and lets people comment on them.
I have noticed, and I'm very happy for Raspberry Pi getting the/. traffic (as I am sure they are), I suppose it has been almost a whole week since we had a RP story and it was a little clever to not mention Pi in the summary... as for the link being to a BBC interview, it was a BBC interview about the Raspberry Pi project and its goals - with some other stuff thrown in for the appearance of balanced and thorough journalism.
And, if we have to have a heavy rotation subject, I'd much rather eat Raspberry than Apple.
Still, I'd be more impressed if/. could come up with some Pi news that isn't also posted on their blog.
I don't know the whole industry stats, but there are a large number of people employed in movie special effects, games, and related things like virtual reality for architecture, etc. Much larger than pro sports, (highly paid) acting/modeling, and the typical wish list.
Slashdot Mirror
Thus eviscerating the decades old policy of "see and avoid" as the bedrock of flight in this country. And the rest of the world.
Most of the rest of the world has lightened up about "see and avoid," especially for drones that are smaller and fly lower than migratory birds. The US is falling behind in drone application business development... (cue Dr. Strangelove / Gen. Turgidson's "we cannot allow a mineshaft gap" speech.)
Take out the "stable" requirement, just require them to maneuver enough to keep decent spacing - now you can do it with solar powered balloon platforms. Sure, 80% of them will end up over the ocean, but if you make them reflective you can help reduce global warming, cost to inflate is probably far less than 1/5th the cost to orbit (assuming you can use something other than Helium...), and if the reflectivity is tunable, you might be able to do some weather control with directed heating/cooling of the ocean and land... oh, the possibilities!
and my CS teacher in 1982 walked uphill in the snow both ways 11 months a year in Florida, while he dialed instructions into a machine with a rotary phone interface.
When I was entering college, I wanted to know how to build a computer starting from sand on the beach to make the silicon to make the transistors that the gates are made of, etc. etc. - there was always some mystery in there, until one day I was introduced to the concept of multiplexers, for whatever reason, that was the last piece of the puzzle for me. Then I had it - from junction doping up through electron guns raster scanning phosphors on a screen. Intellectually satisfying, but 90+% useless from a practical applications standpoint.
I, too, still disagree, that everyone feels a need for that intellectual satisfaction, or benefits from a full knowledge set of all principles involved. I never did learn how to refine the junction doping materials from raw ore, or any of the problems that can arise if you get it wrong, locations on the planet where the ore is mined, etc. etc.
Video over FHSS isn't ideal, but it can be done, and, yes, I didn't bother to look up Freewave, microHard or the other good digital radio suppliers, mostly because I've never seen them publish price or specs on the web (doesn't mean they're not there, just that I have been working from supplied datasheets that are easier to find and more complete than anything I've ever seen on the web.)
Traditional video radio links work better, that's why they're traditional. I was responding to a hypothetical scenario where "big brother" jams a video transmission, and if you want to respond to that threat, you can get video out over a good modern (lightweight, high bandwidth) digital link - it's not hobbyist cheap, but if you're covering OWS Manhattan, you should be able to afford it.
If you're going guerrilla, there's no 7.5KHz pipe restriction, those restrictions are purely based on national laws, and most radios are developed for international markets, compliance is handled in software. Many of the better selling radios are easily modded (against the instruction manual) to operate in modes that aren't legal anywhere.
Having said that, yes, full frame-rate video transmission is a bitch, quadruplely so for 1080p (to get wide field coverage with good detail on what you really wanted to see). But, a FHSS radio TX-RX pair that can handle it over 1km will cost less than $3K.
Depending on the size and complexity of the drone, I would wire up an appropriately-sized radio control airplane(or copter) with a camera and a light payload of explosive, probably using a servo instead of electronic signal as the detonator for safety reasons. It would be more expensive than firing off a few rounds, but the fact that the oppressors paid a hundred or even a thousand times more for their drone than I did would be worth it.
Stick with rifles, you'll have a hell of a time hitting it with an RC aircraft and they're more likely to know you did it - with the rifle you can shoot from a concealed location and disappear before they can find you. Either way, gunshots or flying explosive charges around, your're in jail when caught.
Drones (and drone operators) are extremely ill-suited to dealing with level playing fields. But you're right about everything else, though. Guess its time to move to a rural area, growing and hunting all of my food and saving up enough money to flee the country before its military is turned loose against the general population.
Point of the article is that drones are shrinking. Sure, the Predator is the size of a 707, but take a look at Switchblade, smaller than the RC plane you can get at your hobby shop, faster too, not cheaper, but it costs less than your legal fees will trying to deal with the legal charges you'll face for putting RC explosives into the air.
The rural area plan sounds good, but unless you can afford hundreds of acres, it's not much more secure than living in a normal city. And, as for fleeing, to where? Try to take comfort in the fact that we've got less than 1% of our population in the military, half of them as reservists, even if the military does consume nearly 5% of our GDP, those numbers have been generally falling from 10% of GDP and more soldiers (in absolute numbers) in 1960.
There are lots and lots of frequencies you can transmit video on, you can even put it spread spectrum across the police tactical frequencies - if they want to jam you, they'll take out their own C&C.
...people from taking pot shots at them, be it with firearms, slingshots, toy rockets, what have you. I suppose that the best way to prevent this from happening is to make them so hideously expensive to insure or operate that no one bothers.
Discharge of firearm in a populated area: bad, jail bad.
Slingshots: good luck hitting a small, erratically moving target 20 stories up.
Toy rockets: you got a gyro guidance system with optical tracking on that thing?
What have you: apparently you have nothing that can take out a drone, even the guns aren't going to be easy, trying to hit a 2' target at 100+ yards with a major elevation change.
Insurance: is based on risk, it's a business. The only way risk will be increased by lawmakers is if the chance for lawsuit is increased. Since most applications are downright illegal right now, drones are un-insurable. As for liability after they are legal, how much damage can 2 lbs of plastic do falling on whatever? O.K., now, how much damage does a Cessna do when it crashes while flying low for pipeline monitoring, crop dusting, etc.?
People hate change, drones are change. Don't hate the drones, they really are better than what we had before.
Go ahead and hate the people who will misuse them, but remember that you don't need to fly to install cameras on every intersection, automatic license plate readers in every squad car, or facial recognition cameras at the entry to every store.
Yeah, true, but I don't think Blueseed will be affording a tall ship...
Yeah, those 9 foot swells are lots of fun while below decks on a ship...
This only approaches making economic sense because of the comparison to cost of living in the San Francisco Bay area. The Visa thing is a nice distraction, but if it cost more to keep the B-1 Visa holders afloat than it would to hire actual Americans, they would never bother to float the idea to investors.
My favorites are the SMS I get on Verizon at 3am, somebody sent it to me in the middle of the day and it makes my phone beep in the middle of the next night. I have pretty much everyone trained to not SMS me, but the dentist still does it for appointments.
I like the legend of Napoleon's mail. Story has it that he never opened anything mailed to him until it was at least one month old, and by that time, most issues had resolved themselves.
Put another way: is there a contribution here, or are they just doing what's necessary to avoid getting sued?
One of the major lessons of cryptography is that every code is breakable, it's just a matter of how long it takes to break. Releasing a pile of open source is sort of like encryption in the clear, it will take time and effort to decode what has (and possibly has not) been released.
This release of source code should put a good light on Amazon until the Christmas shopping season is over, it will take at least that long for anyone who cares to stir up trouble for them if they haven't released something they should have.
Considering that the Kindle Fire runs Android, are we supposed to forgive them for intrusive DRM because they abided by their legal requirements to us
Celebrate your easy victories... just because it's "legally required" doesn't mean that anyone will do it, especially major corporations.
staff spend between 5-20 hours handling emails every week.
Man, so how many hours will they spend if they are on Facebook and Twitter trying to accomplish the same thing?
only 10 per cent of the 200 electronic messages his employees receive per day on average turn out to be useful,
10 per cent is an awesomely high signal to noise ratio in Facebook and Twitter.
a chat session demands no time from me. I ignore them over emails.
Priority is , walk to my office, call me, email me, any of the other useless communication channels.
Absolute bottom is SMS message my phone. I will ignore you for 7 days if you SMS me.
Judging by your user number, I'd say you've been in the game long enough to take a Grumpy attitude and get away with it - I do the same, in the last 5 years I might have sent 3 SMS messages, and responded to none, though I did try to get my wife to start sending grocery lists SMS instead of dictating them over the phone...
Still, I like e-mail the best, most things in life can wait up to a day before reaching my attention, and e-mail is a great way to do that.
I agree that most emails are useless (starting from those which are sent just FYI, but are still distracting and interrupting the workflow).
The beauty of e-mail is that the social contract of e-mail allows you to ignore it for longer than a real-time chat. If you want to hold an IM-like conversation in e-mail, most systems are fast enough to support that, but if you've got something you're in the middle of, e-mail doesn't demand instant attention the way a phonecall or chat session does.
It is. (no goatse, I promise.)
No, they don't "matter less and less". Larger structures are being built around them, but that's like saying the bigger and fancier the car, the less important the engine. It''s nonsense. ...rambling automotive analogy edited for clarity... They matter less and less to the end users, yes. But they don't matter "less" to a programmer, any more than electrons matter "less" to someone doing modern electronics.
Been there, done that with the degrees in electrical and computer engineering, 20 years in the field. I used to write 6502 assembly code by hand and peck in the op-codes in decimal... worked up through looking at compiler generated assembly and tweaking when necessary... I'm currently coding for a custom multi-core system realized in an FPGA and I have "looked under the hood" down to the assembly level exactly never in the last 15 years. gcc generates good working code from C/C++, it has its quirks and flaws, but my time is better spent on objects than op-codes. Bits and Bytes I do still use out of archaic habit, but I'd probably be more productive overall if I'd stick with higher level structures.
Same for electrons - 99% of my electron interaction since school is making sure the magic smoke isn't released, yes I know V=IR and I have used it once in awhile, but it's rare, and rarer still that it was really necessary. In my life, it's far more important to read the datasheet thoroughly than to manually design an RC network with more than 2 components.
If it's anything like in other countries, it's not a shortage of people who graduated from a CS class, it's a shortage of people who can write sensible code.
The two groups have overlapping areas, but they're not congruent. CS doesn't equate programming. I know a fair lot of people with CS degrees that I wouldn't trust enough coding skills to have them write an Excel macro for me.
CS is NOT programming. My university pretty much expects you to know how to program if you come in for their CS classes.
I totally concur. And, a bigger problem is that all the CS degrees awarded to people who can't code to save their life makes it that much harder to find one who can.
I would suspect that there are far more people employed in writing mundane crap like "accounts receivable form generator that Jim made before quitting" than any of the effects areas you mention.
I am certain there are, how many primary school teachers do you know who are able to inspire their students to study with dreams of becoming an accounts receivable form generator author?
Actually, nothing beyond one link was "echoed". And the link was to a BBC interview they contributed to, so I'm sure they are ecstatic that slashdot picked it up.
If you haven't noticed, this has never been a site for investigative journalism and hard hitting original reporting, it's mostly blog that posts links to other articles and lets people comment on them.
I have noticed, and I'm very happy for Raspberry Pi getting the /. traffic (as I am sure they are), I suppose it has been almost a whole week since we had a RP story and it was a little clever to not mention Pi in the summary... as for the link being to a BBC interview, it was a BBC interview about the Raspberry Pi project and its goals - with some other stuff thrown in for the appearance of balanced and thorough journalism.
And, if we have to have a heavy rotation subject, I'd much rather eat Raspberry than Apple.
Still, I'd be more impressed if /. could come up with some Pi news that isn't also posted on their blog.
I don't know the whole industry stats, but there are a large number of people employed in movie special effects, games, and related things like virtual reality for architecture, etc. Much larger than pro sports, (highly paid) acting/modeling, and the typical wish list.
I think Media Molecule in particular is pushing this along because they can't find anyone under the age of 25 worth hiring anymore.