dargaud - Slashdot User

Submission + - Ask /.: are home drones a possibility ?

Submitted by

dargaud

on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @01:36PM

dargaud writes: "I live in an alpine setting and I'd like to be able to remotely view various remote valleys to check for ice formations for winter climbing. I wonder if there are cheap drones that could do that. Requirements would be: GPS guided on a preset route (no remote control necessary, and anyway there's no line of sight), at least 20km autonomy, 1 or 2 cameras on the sides to record valley walls, easy launching and autonomous landing (parachute?) at predefined point, ground detection to avoid crashes (if preset route is wrong or GPS echoes on valley walls as is often the case). Is there anything commercially available cheap enough, or any DIY that doesn't require a year of assembly ?"

Submission + - Oldest multicellular fossil found (latimes.com)

Submitted by

dargaud

on Thursday July 01, 2010 @09:13AM

dargaud writes: "The earliest known multicellular fossil has been discovered in Gabon, pushing back the fossil record for such life forms to 2.1 billion years ago and suggesting that they lived 200 million years earlier than scientists had thought. This is when the continents first stabilized and when cyanobacteria evolved and began producing oxygen."

Submission + - You can say that the Taser kills (in France) (liberation.fr)

Submitted by

dargaud

on Tuesday November 25, 2008 @05:47AM

dargaud writes: "Although in the US Taser International is known to sue anybody who claims tasers contributed to the cause of death of people (even going as far as changing causes on death certificates), in France things now go the other way. A communist leader was sued by the company after claiming in an interview that tasers had killed 150 people in the US and Canada. And they lost yesterday (link in french) after failing to prove otherwise. It's the 2nd victory for free speech in the country against the company which is trying to sell its devices to police forces. But where the story gets even more interesting is that 6 staff members of the company were arrested while spying on the political leader..."

Submission + - Ascii art spam

Submitted by

dargaud

on Friday November 17, 2006 @12:06PM

dargaud writes: "I just received a spam message that was so geeky that I held my finger off the delete key in curiosity: it's the usual pump'n'dump scam, but in ASCII art ! The message contains only numbers and spaces, but when read in a monospaced font it spells a stock reference 11 characters high and contains nothing else. The hitch is that in the usual windowed mail reader it's pure giberish so I doubt this new attempt at evading spam filters will catch on."

Submission + - DVD sniffing dogs

Submitted by

dargaud

on Thursday September 28, 2006 @04:50AM

dargaud writes: "The Washington Post (reg necessary) is running a story about yet another airport paranoia: MPAA sponsored DVD sniffing dogs! Two dogs have been trained to recognize the smell released by the plastic of pirate DVDs. The catch? They smell just like legal ones..."

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