New dawn. New decade. To all affected by this day, our thoughts are with you.
Terrific project. Really impressed by the progress made here using open platforms. These drones can be especially powerful once you add swarm-coordination algorithms (for smart dispersion and collaboration of aerial assets). Public safety needs as many force-multipliers as it can get!
The price point @ $1,000 is a little higher than we imagined it to be in 2009 when we accounted for “disposable UAVs” within our Rapid Response Platform. A target price-point nearer to $200 should be attainable by 2014 if reusability of the drones no longer is a design constraint.
"Take a look at Paul Graham’s ideas for frighteningly ambitious startups. Now take a look at the last 30 or so startups on Techcrunch. Where are the people thinking big? What I see is people filling ever-smaller niches in this “ecosystem” or that “ecosystem."
— @alexismadrigal (The Atlantic)
Very cool illustration done by Disney animator Glenn Keane for Atari’s “Intelligent Encyclopedia” concept. Alan Kay and Bob Stein commissioned these illustrations in 1982. It was amusing to see a public safety use-case feature prominently amongst others that we accept into our digital fabric today. Source: Future of the Book
When Probabilistic Models Fail.
Kenichi Ohmae wrote a great piece in the Christian Science Monitor citing why probabilistic models aided by multiple layers of homogenous redundancy can give a false sense of comfort:
The most important lesson of Fukushima No.1 plant, therefore, is that we should have a multiplicity of means to provide a continuous electric supply and heat sinks. This is not the same as “You should not put all the eggs in one basket.” We should have eggs and apples in a few different baskets.
True redundancy is inherently diverse and harder to justify on financial and operational fronts. It is easier to engineer quintuple failover of the same system, and thus we do.
