I guess, if "ironic" means "contrived by desperate anthropogenic climate change deniers".

Anyone know how much flame retardant you'd need in order to have an effect? Not every kind is useful on every fire, but if you could feasibly actually start fighting a fire before humans arrive on the scene...well, score. I have no idea if you could realistically put enough to be useful on a drone of this size though.

Hell, even if you aren't directly fighting an industrial fire or something, it'd be nice to dust nearby buildings' roofs with something to keep it from spreading as fast.

Well, it could still help with triaging emergency calls. And presumably you still dispatch the firefighters, you just get more power to recall them early if it's obviously a false alarm, or (maybe even better yet) you give them eye-in-the-sky information about what the fire looks like. I could see a view like that improving outcomes in some proportion of calls: either they fight things more effectively, or they save fifteen seconds trying to locate that basement fire on foot and get the water on it faster.

I'm pretty willing to believe what they say about heat signatures. Hot air has a way of escaping. A couple minutes after an alarm goes off, there's got to be heat showing SOMEwhere, even if there's not necessarily a lot of smoke yet. If the experts say you can affirm where there's a fire or not the vast majority of the time, I'm inclined to take their word for it, especially if (going back to triage) there's more fires than manpower at the moment and the opportunity cost of making sure is measured in lives lost at another call.

Man, you weren't kidding about talking in code.

Because swatting sounds a lot like attempted murder to me.

Started using "My Data Manager" recently on android. It shows data by app per time period. There's a lot of other stuff out there, probably plenty better and plenty worse, and probably most of it free like this one. Still...it seems pretty invaluable. I just use it to see which apps are using way more data than they ought to on my unlimited plan, but it also lets you set alarms, and it differentiates between wifi/phone data use.

As the evil empire of this decade, we really need a snarky nickname like that for Google.

I got over Fark a long time ago.

Ah, okay. That does make a lot of sense. Thanks!

Ehh, that's not entirely reasonable. I mean, kind of, but it's like the "pirating vs stealing" thing. You're not strictly depriving the dealership of being able to sell that copy of the software again. (Unless it has unique keys even for oems, but that's still silly.)

Really just arguing against the analogy here.

Man, now I really really want an exploit that hijacks /dev/null and logs it (with reasonable limits to prevent overloading it by piping in gigabytes of random). I'm sure you learn some pretty neat stuff from whatever output normally gets sent there.

Uh, wasn't there someone flying around the world in a solar plane or something? Going across the Channel seems like really tiny potatoes.

If you can cut something from 3lb to 2lb, that just means you have room for 1lb more battery.

Same thing applies with phones. Stop making them thinner, and use the saved space for more battery!

If Slashdot dropped every article about an actual product (as opposed to news or science stories), we'd have even less content...

Serious question. (And yes I know they contain carbon.)

I mean, normally I'm really against organic crops because they take up more space per person fed, which isn't so great for environmental preservation. This stuff on the other hand, doesn't need pesticides or anything. Seems very hippie-friendly, but on the other hand they aren't going to help out bees or whatever. Not sure how expensive it'll be, but with this kind of space efficiency (and quite likely better quality output) sure I'd pay the 'organic' markup for it.