Drones...why have a GoPro?

[Jonathan]

What about the local pervert droning the neighborhood pools? Is there anything other than a shotgun to stop that?

A county in eastern CO is issuing drone hunting permits. Sounds fun.

[Bob Ross]

What is news worthy here? It's a "robot." It just happens to be a robot that flies.

Wait, I must be missing something: How is "a robot that flies" not newsworthy? It's not like we have any of the other perks they promised us on The Jetsons...lord knows a Roomba is hardly the same as Rosie The Maid, we don't have flying cars* or personal helicopters or Star Trek transporters/tractorbeams/androids/alien soirees ..."a robot that flies" is infinitely closer to the awesome cool shit that was being predicted for the 21st Century ~50 years ago than any of the actual cool shit we do have that they didn't predict: Internet? SmartPhones? 11-speed electronic shifting? Meh...

I love the idea of drones because it's the fulfillment of a sci-fi promise from an age seemingly long gone.




*what was Bill Maher's recent line? Something about "It's 2015, for comparison, the movie Bladerunner took place in 2017...which means we have two years to get flying cars and robots who fuck us."

[EricKeller]

I'm sorry, this has already been figured out:

https://www.grasp.upenn.edu/research/swarms

while their work is impressive, if you reverse engineer what they are doing, it's about as practical as a google car. There is still a large amount of human interaction/controlled environment/expensive ancillary equipment. The really practical stuff is still being done by a guy with an RC transmitter. And quadcopters have about a 15 minute flight time