20kg is around 5 gallons of fire supression - even a home sprinkler head will discharge around 20 gpm, and you'll have more than one in a typical room. Set off a pair of those for 15 minutes and you've already got 600 gallons of water in the house.

A 1.5" handline can supply up to 200 gpm, so I figured it'd take at least 5 or 10 minutes to knock down the fire. This house fire took 75,000 gallons of water. When a nearby house was on fire, I saw 3 pairs firefighters each with a line (2 looked like maybe 1.5", the one they were spraying up through the roof was larger, maybe 2 or 2.5") spraying a constant stream of water for at least 10 minutes to douse the fire.

An 18 rotor aircraft designed to carry a person for up to 20 minutes is not really comparable with a 3 fan long endurance surveillance drone.

911: what's your emergency?
Homeowner: I called 30 minutes ago for a firetruck because of an electrical fire in my basement, where are they!?
911: Oh, we sent a drone to look at your house, it didn't see any fire from the air.
Homeowner: Well my basement is still full of smoke, and I can hear electrical arcing
911: Can you see smoke or flames from the outside of your house?
Homeowner: No, just the basement
911: Wait until the flames have burnt through the roof or walls of the house then give us a call and we'll send another drone. If we see a fire at that time, we'll refund the $99.99 "false alarm" fee from the first drone. Please make sure that you really see flames this time, as you only 3 false alarms before we stop sending out the drone. Those things are expensive to operate, you know.... maybe go down and try fanning the flames to see if you can really get the fire going you call us again.

Have any fire fighting experts claimed that you can reliably detect an early stage house fire with a drone? Will you be as inclined to take their word for it if you call in a fire, and the fire department says they couldn't see it from the air, so you must be lying about it?

Assuming you're talking about a house fire, unless the fire has burned through the roof, all a couple of kilos of fire suppression chemicals is going to do is stain the roof. And if the fire *has* burned through the roof, all it's going to do is piss off the fire -- it'll take thousands of gallons of water to suppress it at that point.

If someone calls in a fire or accident and the first department sends a drone first to see if the caller is lying, I forsee some big liability lawsuits if someone dies because the fire department was delayed by the time it takes to get a drone in the air and verify the fire. Or worse, if the drone flies out, doesn't detect the fire in the basement, and the call is cancelled as a false alarm.

Will taxpayers really get $6M of value out of the fleet?

Since the FCC has declared that Wifi blocking is illegal, why not just use your phone as a hotspot and then you don't need to carry around a network closet's worth of wifi equipment with you? Worst case, get a USB cellular modem and plug it straight into your laptop.

Doing all of that just to get "free" wifi doesn't make you a scumbag, it makes you a geek.

I think they mean that encryption on licensed Ham bands is illegal, since encryption over radio is perfectly legal (otherwise both Bluetooth and Wifi would be illegal).

Oh don't get me wrong, I love cloud computing, and I spend most of my day managing cloud infrastructure, which is much better than when I used to manage physical datacenters.

But still, it's lamentable that rural communities have so little to gain from a multi billion dollar datacenter in their back yard.

Most large datacenters are staffed by a small NOC that coordinates access to the datacenter by service contractors for routine maintenance. The datacenter itself is literally "lights out" most of the time - the NOC uses nightvision cameras to keep an eye on it, but lights are out (usually with motion sensor lights so when you walk through the datacenter, the lighting follows you) There may be a few service techs on staff that go around and replace failed hardware (no hurry since the software routes around dead hardware so it doesn't impact operations, it just sits there until someone swaps it out... or may sit there for a few years until the rack or entire rack or datacenter zone is considered obsolete and all of the servers are swapped out wholesale, but the company will usually fly in their own datacenter team for big replacements like that).

So a billion dollar 750,000 sq ft datacenter may be staffed by a dozen or two full time staff. In contrast, a 250,000 sq ft Walmart Supercenter may employ 400+ employees -- mostly minimum wage jobs, but in many rural areas, a minimum wage job is better than no job.

Too bad datacenters don't bring jobs commensurate with their size and spending. Once the construction is done, it doesn't take many people to run a modern lights-out datacenter.

It's no joke, this business strategy has been been used by a number of internet companies during the first dotcom boom and the model has been extremely profitable to executives and early investors. Webvan and Pets.com both come to mind as early adopters of this strategy, but they are far from the only ones.

How many people in areas that don't have frequent and ubiquitous transit use transit exclusively and don't use a car?

In NYC many people rely on transit and never drive. How many people in Los Angeles or Atlanta do?

I live in an area that's fairly well served by transit (by USA standards), I used to take the train to work, now I work closer so I bike to work. Yet I could still never give up my car completely without giving up a lot of mobility since there are still many places I'd like to go that are underserved or completely unserved by transit.

Well sure, you might lose a little money on each one, but you can make it up in VOLUME!

Unless public transit is frequent and ubiquitous, it can't replace a car regardless of price

When I moved to San Francisco, an unlimited Muni pass was so cheap ($35) that it may as well been free, but I still had a car because weekend service is infrequent, and didn't go everywhere I wanted to go. I thought about giving up my car, until I tried an out of town trip on BART one weekend, it would have been an hour (or less) round trip by car, but since it involved a train transfer plus a long wait for a bus (that never came so I ended up walking the 2 miles), the transit part of the trip ended up being being over 3 hours.

Even now an unlimited Muni pass is cheap ($70), much cheaper than owning and parking a car in the city so it's not the cost of transit that makes people hold on to their cars.

On the other hand, when I spent some time in Tokyo, a $170 monthly Metro pass was much better than having a car, few of my friends who lived there full time owned a car.

Sure, but if they flood the market and the horns become more popular and more available (even if they are fake), it's not going to drop the price to zero, it will just increase overall demand. I suspect that even if the price dropped precipitously from $65K/kg to $1K/kg, there would still be people willing to kill rhinos for the real thing.

Maybe they'd be better off tranquilizing the real rhinos, removing their horns, and replacing them with 3d printed fakes (that are a different color or have some other characteristic that identifies them as fake). At least then it removes the incentive to kill the rhino to steal a fake horn that looks fake.

It happens to me all the time, I have a relatively common Gmail address using my first initial and last name. I frequently get misdirected email from a variety of vendors where someone gave them my email address by mistake. I used to try to contact the merchant and tell them, but they rarely respond intelligently (usually they tell me to log on to my account and change the address... duh, I don't have an account!). So now I usually just flag them as spam and ignore them.

Comcast has been sending me monthly bill notifications for someone else's account for over a year, I emailed them, but they told me to call and I didn't feel like calling, so I've been ignoring it.

Some guy keeps sending me his flight reservations, I could screw with him and cancel his flights online or maybe keep changing his seat to put him next to the bathroom.

One guy said he was going to sue me for stealing his email address when I told him that he's using the wrong address, he swore that he'd been using that address for 5 years and that I stole it from him.