Can't blame NASA though, when the commands are transmitted over 3 billion miles, the signal would degrade so much it is possible some critical command or an command argument was not correctly received.

Nonsense - that's one of the easiest problems to solve in all of computer science: you just tack on a hashcode, checksum, parity bit, etc., and the receiver verifies that it got the right message. If it doesn't verify, the receiver doesn't follow it, and when the sender doesn't get an acknowledgment, it retransmits the message.

That technique is baked into every communications protocol. Hamming even invented a technique to allow automatic correction...in the 1950's.

Realistically, yes, I'd call the cops quickly if someone was buzzing the crowd unsafely with a quadcopter. And cops are not totally incompetent - it's usually not that hard to spot an R/C operator (presuming the operator is flying within line-of-sight.)

But if the opportunity presented itself, I'd probably throw a jacket or other object at the stupid thing, and if by some random chance it actually came down, I'd probably stomp the shit out of it. I have no tolerance or respect for people threatening my safety with their stupidity.

Apparently you've never been to the Uptown Art Fair. A fishing net and a long pole would barely make the top third of the "weird shit you'll see in Uptown" list. :-)

No, I don't have to learn any of the skills, at all, and I don't want to. I don't want to spend days or hours or even minutes learning the finer points of pit BBQ, and that's the entire point of buying this robot. I don't have to learn when to turn up the heat or turn it down, I don't have to know how much wood to put in or when. I don't have to check on the condition of the product. I simply give my charge card to Williams-Sonoma, haul the BBQbot home and plug it in, add meat and wood, and get delicious brisket out the other end. Every. Single. Time. I wasted zero of my time learning how to barbeque brisket - I just enjoy the results of other people's learnings. If the robot fails, I drag it back to Williams-Sonoma and ask them to service it. It would be no different than any other tool that I own that I don't fix myself.

I don't understand your preoccupation with fear of breakdowns of systems. I know that some days, despite scheduled maintenance, my truck will breakdown in some way I can't fix and that I'll have to have to deal with a problem. Fear of the inevitable breakdown doesn't mean I sell my truck today and walk to work. It means that I understand the truck can break, and that some days I'll have to call for a tow. Similarly if the BBQbot fails in my restaurant, I tell the servers to 86 the brisket, and we sell grilled chicken until the replacement robot arrives.

As a business owner, why would I buy a BBQbot instead of hiring a pit master? Because the robot costs me $20,000, and it stays in the kitchen 24x7x365. A pit master has weekends, takes vacations, calls in sick (or doesn't call in at all), and costs me $60,000 every year. I'd be far more worried about hiring a temperamental person that could quit and cripple the menu on a busy night. And if I discovered I was that utterly dependent on the robot, I'd simply buy two of them.

Every business risks breakdowns of all kinds of complex systems every day: plumbing, fires, melted freezers, employees quitting, roof collapses, electrical problems, labor problems, yet most manage to stay in business even through disasters. Why? Because they know how to adapt to problems, and because taking the risks yields far more reward than doing nothing; instead of sitting there paralyzed by the fear that something might go wrong.

Through lifelong dedication, a craftsman can align a car with a string, or smoke BBQ in a trash can, or whatever it is he or she does. But their activity doesn't scale beyond what they can personally produce. And if they end up smoking 100 pounds of meat per day to run their restaurant, that's it. There's little time left in the day to innovate. Craftsmen don't scale well, unless they industrialize their processes, (and then you risk ending up with a product with all the qualities of Budweiser.).

The rest of us are dedicated to other things: jobs, families, other hobbies. Does our inexperience mean we can't enjoy products of similar quality as the craftsmen produce? What's wrong with distilling the essence of their wisdom into a PID controller and an Atmel chip? If my BBQ-bot fails, I'm certainly not going to fix it with string - but that's not the point. The point is I could occasionally enjoy a high quality smoked brisket, thanks to a machine that knows more than I do about the process.

The posting specifically mentions a 4kg model flying 15 feet over a crowd. That's not a "toy" sized device, that's an untethered Cuisinart.

How about handing a friend a video camera, and you with a fishing net on a long pole. Show it flying unsafely, take it down on video, and hand the footage to the cops telling them you feared for your family's safety.

will be the first to board the next launch vehicle to the ISS after all these failures.

It's not like any of them are proving themselves particularly reliable. And it's not like any of these failures would have been survivable for the crew.

hmmm... what about slashdot?

awhile ago

and i feel vindicated

reddit needs to pay its mods (say, a cut of ad revenue from their sub)

if they work for free, they have no real power over them. which is unstable as current developments indicate

also, if they pay them, they can fire them

you can say paying mods will change the tenor of reddit but this is bullshit: what motivates someone to mod for free is a sort of pathetic need for power, which is actually worse than any nefariousness due to filthy lucre as their motivation

bye bye reddit, you were fun. but you have a fatal flaw in your power structure:

uncaring admins and abusive mods

so what's the next site to rise?

any tips?

your alternative method is inferior as the specific request is tech *skills*, which you find on resumes, people speaking to their merits to get hired

not "tech appearing together on message boards," which indicated a whole host of relationships, relationship by skillset being far down the list

the simple fact is there is no perfect methodology so criticizing the methodology for being imperfect is without merit. and in articulating a yet even more inferior methodology in your latest comment i have to assume you're just arguing for the sake of arguing, you're barely trying, you're not serious, and so this useless thread is over

i was joking!

are you joking?

arggh

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

the arnold schwarzenegger move "terminator genisys" is in theatres and hollywood wanted a really effective advertising stunt

are you saying there exists some implementation that analyzes every resume in existence perfectly? it's "incomplete" in the sense that any such effort is incomplete and imperfect by nature of the problem. your criticism is invalid, you don't understand the task if you expect completeness is possible

"A terrible social crime". Sounds like he's mad because his wife couldn't read Facebook.