Tune it to the 2.4 Ghz WiFi band too... That will get you the bulk of these things, along with the pilot's equipment..

Better yet, just jam WiFi and folks won't be able to use these things to start with...

That will only find you the pilot, which is not a bad thing, but it's not the direct threat at this point..

They use a set of well known frequencies, usually 2.4Ghz WiFi or the old model aircraft band. Now you can "adjust" these if you know what you are doing, but off the shelf, this is what you generally get.

It's about being able to deflect them and prevent them from doing bad things.

Sure, it's easier to deal with something you can detect in the first place, but if you can effectively block them by putting up barriers, physical and electronic you will have succeeded in your primary goal. So here's my approach..

1. Do your best to detect them, use sound, video and detect the RF signals emitted by the device and the pilot.

2. Erect physical barriers that are not visible to the operator or the device. I'm thinking there is a LOT you can do with simple fishing line in this regard, but I'm sure a lot of tall trees would serve an excellent purpose too. Put up an obstacle course.

3. Put up electronic fences using short range GPS and WiFi jamming around the "protected" area. You can effectively reduce the ability of a drone to find it's way around and make it impossible for it to be remotely controlled.

4. Concentrate your efforts on finding the PILOT. They will likely have an RF transmitter in their hands, so it shouldn't be that hard, unless the drone is self guided (which is why you jam GPS and provide physical barriers).

5. And Finally, if you do detect something flying where you don't want, come up with some non-lethal ways of bringing it down. You don't need to fire anti-aircraft guns at it, there are ways I can think of which wouldn't present much risk to people, but would be effective in bringing down your average hobbyist's drone.

So I say again, detection is but a small piece of the total security puzzle here, and trying to use audio detection is about the LAST way I'd try it...

As great as Apollo was for tangible technology spin offs

Other than NASA press releases and articles written based on them - I have yet to see any actual evidence this is true.

Let's call it a cloud burst and let it go..

What's happening is providers have entered an era where the supply of the product (cloud services) has saturated the market and the low volume, high overhead operations cannot stay in business. It's the natural "survival of the fittest" phase where the overpopulation of folks providing this service are being weeded down to the handful who will survive.

Like the Hula-Hoop, tickle-me-Elmos and Pet Rock, the fad is reaching it's peak and it's down hill from here. Sell any stock you have in this market....

Not really a problem for two reasons....

1. HUGE data generally requires processing power to sort though, so where it might be cheaper to by shares of some data center's pile of rack mounted servers, once you get to a certain size, building your own makes financial sense. I'm guessing, but it sure seems to me that if you are big enough to be worried about how long it takes to move your data, you will have it locally processed anyway and won't be dependent on a cloud provider.

2. Data has value that is largely age based. Newer data is worth more than the old stuff. So if you *really* have a lot of data laying around that you depend on, you have a design and implementation problem with your big data operation. And if you don't have a design issue and really ARE processing that much data, then transferring the historical data to another provider is largely unnecessary, just switch your data feeds to the new provider and turn off the old provider once the data it has gets stale, which shouldn't be too long.

Do you mean these? http://www.hawking.org.uk/vide...

They are quite good, I must say. :-p

His mistake is that he thinks we don't already spend the money on social programs. Our government expenditures on social programs outpace our expenditures on NASA something like 50 to 1. It's not even close. Sounds like your "science" teacher was a clueless fool.

Ok, how do you propose to do that? Private enterprise isn't going to do basic research and exploration - not at a meaningful scale anyway. Exploration of the frontiers of knowledge and basic research is almost entirely government funded. Don't believe me? Take a look at who is behind almost all research grants. (hint, NIH, DARPA, NSF are good places to look)

No it isn't and it never will be. Not at the real frontiers of exploration anyway. I'm an accountant and I can assure you that you cannot make a credible financial business plan for a trip to Mars for example such that it will get financial backing. Why? 1) The risks are unknown and unquantifiable. We simply don't know what we don't know. 2) The financial capital required is huge and there is no reasonable guarantee of a return based on past experience. 3) The only institution that can fund exploration on a large scale without an expectation of a financial return is the government. Once the boundaries have been moved then private enterprise can come in behind (ala SpaceX) and make it more efficient and useful but you simply CANNOT make a credible business plan and get it funded for something like a manned mission to mars. Companies do not fund big things unless they can have some reasonable expectation of a return on their investment.

If the opponent can never catch up then it isn't a race. A race is a competition by definition. If one side can never win then it was never actually a competition in any meaningful sense of the word.

Sometimes it does and sometimes it does not. What is certain is that competition gets results. Our entire economy is based on it. The ONLY reason we went to the moon was because we were at (cold) war with the Soviets. Take away that driver and the Apollo missions simply would never have happened. Once it was clear the Soviets weren't going to the moon, the Apollo program was folded like a cheap tent and we haven't been back since.

I have seen no compelling argument or evidence to support this assertion and you certainly haven't presented either here.

There is this thing called Wikipedia that is just chock full of answers to questions like that.

Because it won't work. There is a reason we have competitive markets instead of collaborative markets. Collaboration works on a small scale but you need to harness competition to really push the boundaries quickly. Not to say collaboration is a bad thing but it simply will not make things happen. Sad but true.

NdGT makes a very good point that the only technologies that are really expensive (like space travel) that get funded are either in response to existential threats (i.e. nuclear war, etc) or for tangible financial gain. When it comes to space exploration you simply cannot quantify the risks sufficiently to get a return on investment so financial gain is off the table for anything on the frontier of our technology and knowledge. We went to the moon because we were in a (cold) war with the Soviet Union at the time. That underpinned everything we did in the Apollo missions. Once the Soviets cancelled their moon missions, so did we and we haven't been back since.

Sounds like I'm in the wrong business....

Cloud services are pretty much fungible... If provider A tries to turn the thumbscrews, provider B will just under cut them in price and customers will switch in droves the next time the service contract comes up for renewal.

What will actually happen (if it's not already) is that a small number of larger cloud service providers will corner the market and drive the smaller and less efficient providers into mergers, consolidation or just plain out of business. You will end up with 3 or 4 major players, maybe more, but all large, who will dominate the market, control prices to keep the small upstarts from getting much of a foothold in the market.

The price gouging won't really start until you get the number of vendors down to near to 2 and everybody else is afraid of trying to enter the market because there is no growth left. Then prices will go up, but only enough to make the big 2 some cash, while keeping it hard for an upstart to undercut them and grab market share.

I see what you mean. Let's put some numbers to that for everyone's benefit.

According to the table I linked previously, the OOOO gauge wire is 0.16072 ohms per 1000m. So, for a 20m run, that's about 0.00321 ohms. The voltage drop incurred by 330A across that resistance would be just over 1.06 volts.

For a 5V run, that's pretty significant, really. And you'd be dissipating over 350W in that wire alone. Yow! At 330A, you'd be burning 20% of your power just in that cable if you used OOOO gauge cabling.

Now the same numbers for 10 gauge wire, 15A, 110V, 20m. That's 3.276392 ohms per 1000m, or 0.0655 ohms for 20m. Voltage drop at 15A is 0.983V. Peak power dissipated in the wire is 15A * 0.983V = 14.7W. (RMS power is only ~10W.)