In other news today...
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@TimeBandit said in In other news today...:
From the SJW-are-winning department:
FakeEdit: Good jorb, onebox !
Looks like I need to try other distros
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=906119#36
Our understanding, after reading the mail threads and bug reports, is
that the package in its current shape is against the Debian CoC ("be
respectful") -- while it's not a "flagrant" violation,I think they should remove their CoC, for much the same reasons...
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@acrow said in In other news today...:
UK police can't shoot drones down for fear of stray rounds. They called the army for help....But I doubt that that's going to help. For once, I miss U.S cops' affinity to shotguns.
Small flying objects have been a thing for more than a decade now and they still trump all.
Woof.
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@PJH said in In other news today...:
@acrow said in In other news today...:
UK police can't shoot drones down for fear of stray rounds. They called the army for help....But I doubt that that's going to help. For once, I miss U.S cops' affinity to shotguns.
Small flying objects have been a thing for more than a decade now and they still trump all.
Woof.
Sounds like a "low tech" and old school version of:
@topspin said in In other news today...:
Instead of shotguns and eagles and shit, why not triangulate where the remote signal is coming from (got to be strong enough if they’re all over the airport), so you can find the idiots and sue them into oblivion?
Except the dogs are just chasing the operators away.
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@PJH said in In other news today...:
@acrow said in In other news today...:
UK police can't shoot drones down for fear of stray rounds. They called the army for help....But I doubt that that's going to help. For once, I miss U.S cops' affinity to shotguns.
Small flying objects have been a thing for more than a decade now and they still trump all.
Woof.
Did not know her name was “Barking Dogs”. Is she related to our Sen. Warren?
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You're holding it wrongIt's normal
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@loopback0
"Innocent""Officers found a bag of marijuana and cocaine residue in Mr Jackson's vehicle, reports the Post-Standard."
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Screenshot, in case actual editing breaks out on /.:
I knew Brexit was causing currency swings with the pound, but 1 billion pounds = $1.25 seems a little more extreme than expected.
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@izzion Plus, neither amount makes a lick of sense.
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Government FOR the people, what's that?
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Stop shooting aliens, you need to patch and reboot ASAP
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@TimeBandit
The FOR stands for F------ Over Royally
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@izzion said in In other news today...:
Screenshot, in case actual editing breaks out on /.
Next thing you know, mods around here will start doing work and we got ourselves a little Christmas miracle.
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@PJH said in In other news today...:
@TimeBandit said in In other news today...:
From the SJW-are-winning department:
FakeEdit: Good jorb, onebox !
Looks like I need to try other distros
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=906119#36
Our understanding, after reading the mail threads and bug reports, is
that the package in its current shape is against the Debian CoC ("be
respectful") -- while it's not a "flagrant" violation,I think they should remove their CoC, for much the same reasons...
They tried, but it identified as female and claimed discrimination.
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@TimeBandit said in In other news today...:
Stop shooting aliens, you need to patch and reboot ASAP
Yeah, right. Like I use Internet Explorer for anything...
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@brie
Yeah, but the in-game process that displays ads on the billboards behind the aliens you're shooting ties into the built-in Windows IE API.
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@djls45 said in In other news today...:
@acrow said in In other news today...:
@Gribnit said in In other news today...:
@acrow some sort of long-pistol might help - now hear me out - instead of the grip, you make sort of a thingie to rest against the shoulder, and you make the barrel much longer. I bet that could shoot at flying things, if it could be constructed.
The problem with most pistol and rifle caliber ammunition is that it's still lethal when it comes down. But it's easy to find shotgun loads that are not. Then your only problem is getting close enough to the target for sufficient terminal impact force.
Only if it's still traveling significantly horizontally. If it was fired at a near-vertical angle, then it will drop to the ground at terminal velocity, which is much less than the muzzle velocity and is generally not lethal for the small size of the projectile. Only the larger calibers have sufficient mass to counteract the atmospheric drag enough to be highly dangerous. Shot, .22, and 5.56mm rounds are small enough that they are unlikely to cause significant damage when falling at terminal velocity.
Oh f**k, not this again. 5.56mm is perfectly lethal coming down, unless you shot it at a vertical enough angle to make sure that it tumbles coming down, instead of being kept stabilized by its spin. This will NOT happen when aiming at a moving target in the sky, so 5.56mm is NOT safe to shoot upwards at a drone. DO NOT SHOOT A 5.56mm AT THE SKY! Same for .22; you can get loadings with enough mass to pierce the thin parts of the skull, coming down. If in doubt (and you absolutely must shoot a .22 upwards, for some reason), get iron or aluminum rounds.
When using a shotgun, err towards birdshot. Gives a better chance against drones anyway. If in California, use iron shot; you don't want to get charged for dumping heavy metals into sacred Cali soil.
I'm sorry to answer this one so far down the thread, but it's a matter of public safety.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
a strong jammer
...would likely violate FCC regulations.
Now, if you were to put up a Faraday cage around it, you could block the signal. Upon loss of guidance signal, some drone models will just immediately cut out and drop to the ground, other models will descend until they're on the ground and then turn off, and some models will engage a "return home" routine. Apparently not all drones are capable of re-establishing a connection to the controller (and some connections can be hijacked with another controller if the signal can be interrupted.
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@TimeBandit said in In other news today...:
Government FOR the people, what's that?
I would think this would affect outsourcing rates but outsourcers are already morons so they won't be taking this into account.
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@djls45 said in In other news today...:
@topspin said in In other news today...:
a strong jammer
...would likely violate FCC regulations.
Probably not when the police does it. (Besides, it’s not the US)
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@djls45 said in In other news today...:
Now, if you were to put up a Faraday cage around it, you could block the signal.
If you can get a Faraday cage around a drone, you can probably just grab the drone physically instead and drag it to whereever.
@Rhywden said in In other news today...:
I do wonder though what the attenuation of a 1+ kW laser in air actually is / what range you'll get.
Pointing a 1+kW laser into the sky at things is probably not a good idea. I'm guessing that even a very small reflection is enough energy to very thoroughly ruin somebody's day.
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@cvi
terrorist_drone.defenses.add(new ReflectiveSurfaces())
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@PleegWat said in In other news today...:
@cvi
terrorist_drone.defenses.add(new WhateverSurface())
FTF1kW.
So, the old Class IV starts at around 500mW (depends on wavelength), and to quote Wikipedia:
Diffuse reflections of the laser beam can be hazardous to skin or eye within the Nominal Hazard Zone.
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@PleegWat said in In other news today...:
A chaff dispenser then?
Not a bad idea, assuming you can keep the chaff between the drone and the laser. Perhaps some smoke too? Should scatter away parts of the energy.
I don't know how fast 1kW will chew through various materials (assuming you get a significant amount of that 1kW to the drone) ... but I'd try a bit of ablative material on the drone (pick a material that is reflective at the relevant wavelengths; white is probably a good base color choice) and then keep moving, hoping to distribute the energy across the drone without damaging anything vital.
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@acrow said in In other news today...:
Oh f**k, not this again. 5.56mm is perfectly lethal coming down, unless you shot it at a vertical enough angle to make sure that it tumbles coming down, instead of being kept stabilized by its spin.
I did mention that:
@djls45 said in In other news today...:
If it was fired at a near-vertical angle, then it will drop to the ground at terminal velocity, which is much less than the muzzle velocity and is generally not lethal for the small size of the projectile.
And 5.56 mm is about the same size as a .223, and both of those are only slightly bigger than a .22; the terminal velocity of all three is not likely to do more than bruise. Dropping at terminal velocity implies that the bullet began tumbling in its trajectory.
@acrow said in In other news today...:
I'm sorry to answer this one so far down the thread, but it's a matter of public safety.
Oh, I agree. Shooting any firearm up into the air is somewhere between not a good idea and a very bad idea. But at the same time, saying it's always dangerous isn't quite accurate, either. But I'm also not saying it's okay to try it.
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@izzion said in In other news today...:
@brie
Yeah, but the in-game process that displays ads on the billboards behind the aliens you're shooting ties into the built-in Windows IE API.Some retard, somewhere, does this.
Search your feelings, you know it be true...
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@brie said in In other news today...:
@TimeBandit said in In other news today...:
Stop shooting aliens, you need to patch and reboot ASAP
Yeah, right. Like I use Internet Explorer for anything...
MasterControl doesn't seem to work nice with Chrome, so I use IE for that site whenever I have to do my SOP/policy document "trainings." The IT department where I work manages Windows updates via group policy.
(I don't know how FF handles it, but I don't use FF much anyways.)
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@djls45 Yeah, but using IE for work is different, though. If you're using it for work because that's the only browser you can use, and your work computer gets infected by a virus, that's the IT department's problem.
Now, unless the IT department finds out that you got the virus from some dodgy website you shouldn't have been visiting... then, you might also have a problem.
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@swayde said in In other news today...:
@brie said in In other news today...:
some dodgy website you shouldn't have been visiting
Facebook?
TDWTF?
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@kazitor said in In other news today...:
@topspin I suppose it would now be pretty easy for someone else to prosecute.
As I understood it, the charges were never actually filed. The prosecutor's incompetence led to her missing the deadline for filing them. Or maybe they were filed, but she missed the deadline for bringing the case to trial. Right to a speedy trial, and all that. So the opportunity is gone.
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
I don't know how fast 1kW will chew through various materials
1kW CO2 (IR) (TIL and fiber (solid state), also up to 12kW) lasers are used for cutting shapes out of sheet steel, and the one time I saw one in action, it did so pretty quickly. A YT clip shows a 4kW laser cutting 1/2 in (12 mm) steel at what I'd guess to be maybe a couple of inches (5 cm) per second, and An Engineer's Guide to Laser Cutting seems to suggest that if your laser cutter can't do at least 75 cm a second, you should upgrade to a better cutter.
OTOH, these depend on the laser being precisely focused to a point on material a carefully controlled distance from the beam's focusing mirror/lens/fiber. The energy density may be quite a bit lower in a larger diameter, parallel beam aimed at a distant object.
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@swayde said in In other news today...:
@brie said in In other news today...:
some dodgy website you shouldn't have been visiting
Facebook?
Very Dodgy!
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
Pointing a 1+kW laser into the sky at things is probably not a good idea. I'm guessing that even a very small reflection is enough energy to very thoroughly ruin somebody's day.
Since the reflection won't be as focussed as the original source the hazard zone around the drone will be a relatively(!) small one.
Mount two or three of those at a large triangle on airport grounds and you'll always find an angle to hit the drone with minimal risks to anyone.
Plus, the "but teh terrorists!" angle is irrelevant. Dealing with morons who want to play with their new toy is a bigger issue.
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This is pretty cool:
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@djls45 Glad to hear it. That said, however:
- "Terminal velocity" is the speed at which an object no longer accelerates, while falling through the atmosphere. It does not by itself imply tumbling, as it is possible for a bullet to fall nose-first without tumbling, retaining an aerodynamic shape.
- 5.56mm and .223 are the same caliber, but with different powder loadings. Both are twice the weight and thrice the muzzle velocity of .22LR. If terminal velocity is not achieved, this translates to a higher parabolic arc, and thus greater impact energy.
- A bullet in a vertical fall is likely to hit the soft part of the head, from up top. This is especially dangerous to small children, that are otherwise quite sturdy. They have that soft spot up there.
- Depending on internal structure, a bullet may fall in an aerodynamic attitude even if fired perfectly vertically.
Recommended reading:
Yes, I'm .
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@djls45 said in In other news today...:
@topspin said in In other news today...:
a strong jammer
...would likely violate FCC regulations.
Probably be pointless too unless you want to eliminate radio comms in a huge area for absolutely everything else.
They said these are professional kit so they're almost guaranteed to be using spread-spectrum. The power-density of spread-spectrum can be below the noise floor and very, very wide. So you need to blanket the entire transmission spectrum (if you can even identify it in the first place!) with a huge amount of continuous power to get the SNR up enough to jam it.
Professional drones also have Inertial Guidance, they can return-to-base or start flying waypoint-to-waypoint when they lose comms without any need for any kind of radio signal, even GPS.
Possibly these would waypoint flying anyway, less chance of being caught if you don't need to be anywhere near it.
Edit: Friend got into professional drones/UAVs a while ago, he had some big buggers the size of mini-fridges with enough payload capacity to hitch a small dog up. There is some tasty stuff on the market at the serious end. He didn't find it a viable business though.
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Can't the drone jamming, bullet physics and laser optics be Jeffed to another thread already?
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"You're holding it wrong!" now repeated by doctors:
And make sure to give your thumb some rest, so you don't end up like this 2015 case of "Candy Crush thumb":
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@Rhywden said in In other news today...:
Since the reflection won't be as focussed as the original source the hazard zone around the drone will be a relatively(!) small one.
Mount two or three of those at a large triangle on airport grounds and you'll always find an angle to hit the drone with minimal risks to anyone.Diffuse reflections will indeed spread out the energy rather quickly. But even a small specular reflection (which will stay much more focused) will be enough to give you a very bad day. Hitting a moving drone will be difficult enough as is, so you won't be able to guarantee that you wont hit one of the shiny parts, even if you could identify those.
Plus, the "but teh terrorists!" angle is irrelevant. Dealing with morons who want to play with their new toy is a bigger issue.
Agreed. But I don't think lasers are going to solve this one in a satisfactory way. If you're dead set on shooting the drones down, I'd guess that developing something that goes into a conventional gun and isn't dangerous on the way down is going to be much easier and cheaper than any laser-based system.
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@Cursorkeys said in In other news today...:
@djls45 said in In other news today...:
@topspin said in In other news today...:
a strong jammer
...would likely violate FCC regulations.
Probably be pointless too unless you want to eliminate radio comms in a huge area for absolutely everything else.
They said these are professional kit so they're almost guaranteed to be using spread-spectrum. The power-density of spread-spectrum can be below the noise floor and very, very wide. So you need to blanket the entire transmission spectrum (if you can even identify it in the first place!) with a huge amount of continuous power to get the SNR up enough to jam it.
Professional drones also have Inertial Guidance, they can return-to-base or start flying waypoint-to-waypoint when they lose comms without any need for any kind of radio signal, even GPS.
Possibly these would waypoint flying anyway, less chance of being caught if you don't need to be anywhere near it.
Edit: Friend got into professional drones/UAVs a while ago, he had some big buggers the size of mini-fridges with enough payload capacity to hitch a small dog up. There is some tasty stuff on the market at the serious end. He didn't find it a viable business though.
How about an EMP then? Drones can't carry much of a shielding.
...Are EMP grenades manufactured anymore?
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
Hitting a moving drone will be difficult enough as is, so you won't be able to guarantee that you wont hit one of the shiny parts, even if you could identify those.
Not really. They're slow, they're rather large and thus prove no big problem for a proper tracking software.
I mean, there's mosquito tracking and zapping software...
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@acrow said in In other news today...:
Are EMP grenades manufactured anymore?
Were they ever? I thought the explosively-pumped generators never left the lab:
All of the other generators are not exactly portable:
And using nuclear weapons, even small ones, would probably be frowned upon.
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@izzion said in In other news today...:
@TimeBandit
So you're admitting to being a Weboob enthusiast? Seems risky in the #MeToo worldMaybe it was boobs who were offended.
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@Cursorkeys Hmm... so they stopped developing them, then. Since every tank and military chopper is advertised "EMP proof", you'd think the world is full of EMP weapons.
I wonder if there would be better success today, now that battery technology has advanced another step. Not my area of expertise, but an EMP grenade works by charging a coil and then explosively dismantling it, correct? So it stands to reason that modern batteries get more oomph into the coil.
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@acrow said in In other news today...:
@Cursorkeys Hmm... so they stopped developing them, then. Since every tank and military chopper is advertised "EMP proof", you'd think the world is full of EMP weapons.
I wonder if there would be better success today, now that battery technology has advanced another step. Not my area of expertise, but an EMP grenade works by charging a coil and then explosively dismantling it, correct? So it stands to reason that modern batteries get more oomph into the coil.
Even modern batteries store less energy per unit area than explosives. But that energy is misleading, explosives work by changing pressures, so you need to be talking about the hydrodynamic work done. This is why explosives are compared to each other using the detonation velocity rather than kJ.Mol or something.
The explosively pumped generators are interesting beasts! More physics-y than electronics-y but I think I understand it.
You use a energy storage device to prime it, so modern batteries might help here for charging the capacitor bank or whatever. You then fire off your explosive which severs the cap bank, completes the drive coil, and then starts physically shortening the coil. This has the effect of compressing all that stored flux (that the cap bank set up) to ridiculous levels. Now the load coil has a very low inductance compared to the work coil so it basically does bugger all until it gets matched to the drive coil...which is currently shortening, lowering its inductance, and compressing flux like crazy. If you've designed it right the drive coil is fully compressed/exploded at the point where its well-matched to the load coil and then all that energy can go to work and be radiated to make an EMP.So, the explosive is key to how it works as a kind-of magnetic amplifier. The explosive energy is going into adding energy to the system by moving the conductors in the drive coil. If you want to use just batteries then you need a totally different kind of system.
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@Rhywden said in In other news today...:
@cvi said in In other news today...:
Pointing a 1+kW laser into the sky at things is probably not a good idea. I'm guessing that even a very small reflection is enough energy to very thoroughly ruin somebody's day.
Since the reflection won't be as focussed as the original source the hazard zone around the drone will be a relatively(!) small one.
Mount two or three of those at a large triangle on airport grounds and you'll always find an angle to hit the drone with minimal risks to anyone.
Plus, the "but teh terrorists!" angle is irrelevant. Dealing with morons who want to play with their new toy is a bigger issue.
So, I will relate a story. A hardware engineer once told me of his younger days, when he used to cannibalize laser printers. And also, he knew about resonance. So, he took two Class-A lasers and used them to destroy streetlights, by intersecting the beams at the target.
So, mount like a hunnerd with good fast computer controlled gimbals and designate a dozen per target.