Friday, June 29, 2018

What do you think of these drone stations? 

This is a twitter vid, and I'm Luke warm about imbeding twitter vids. So use your mouse finger and click the link.

3 comments:

  1. Capital of Texas RefugeeFriday, June 29, 2018 7:32:00 PM

    It looks too over-designed for aesthetics to be all that functional ...

    And I'm saying that because the sleek little box that you're supposed to "scan" will be the first and most important single point of failure in the whole system.

    When they can airlift a slightly drippy box full of cow shit that has smeared bar codes on it to someone across town as a joke, then I'll start taking this stuff more seriously. Until then, this looks like someone did some drugs while watching the Wil Smith version of "I, Robot" and then went to a design concepts charrette at Boeing the next week. (It just needs some FedEx stickers on it, in other words.)

    The least special thing about the system should be the in-flight container.

    The fact that it looks like the most special thing in the system very much looks to me like a failure of design concepts over anticipated real-world use.

    Otherwise, Dwan: there's a French architect named Paul Virilio who developed "a theory of the accident" who you might find interesting.

    Boiling down his theory rather drastically, every new invention, development, or discovery also invents, develops, or discovers a matching accident.

    For instance, developing aircraft also develops airplane accidents, while discovering a treatment for Staphylococcus aureus also discovers the future accident in which that treatment may no longer work as intended. *hiyoo*

    The least nutty top-rated search result I can find for Paul Virilio that actually reads like a decent introduction is an interview with Paul Virilio's at VICE. It's a bit old, as is Virilio himself, but at least you can read some of his ideas without shelling out serious $$$$$ for his books in English translations.

    BTW, as for the most nutty top-rated search results, you can discover those at your own risk, but should you find the words "cognitive theory", I suggest you replace them with "computational theory" and then determine whether the concepts being discussed are actually possible.

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  2. See.... if the price really came down. And I don't know what the price is now. But I can see restaurants buying small versions of these for delivery drones. I'm sure they would tweak the design.

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  3. Capital of Texas RefugeeSaturday, June 30, 2018 11:09:00 PM

    Dwan: SCOTUS could rule for en banc removal of an entire appellate or district court ...

    That they have yet to do this doesn't mean that it's not in their powers to do so. It's also possible that SCOTUS could rule that the entire judicial output of one or more of those courts is invalid from a given date. (Something like this happened recently in the UK, in fact, because of documented cases of selective withholding of evidence by police.)

    One part of the law I would very much like to see enforced involves the only criminal action for which there is a prescribed punishment in the US Constitution, and it should be used unsparingly when dealing with a "rogue judiciary" ...

    Also, it is in the power of Congress to rein in the "rogue judiciary" as well -- there's a part of 1 USC that ended stare decisis of British laws and courts for the US court system, just as one example.

    The current district court system was created by an act of Congress anyway, and there is in fact no legal requirement under US law for the current district court system to exist at all. It's only been in existence for a little under 130 years.

    So there are options besides the Long Hammer of Justice Thomas smacking down on the Second and Ninth Circuits -- a broad sweep of some legislation could shut the entire thing down so it can be replaced with something else.

    But these "rogue judiciaries" should take note: if Justice Thomas is warning them of bad things to come, it's not just because Thomas himself has plans to do something about them.

    Still, it would amuse the hell out of me if SCOTUS issues a broad writ of certiorari before judgement on all of the output from the Second and Ninth Circuits ... and, once again, it's in their power. :-)

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