“I want this to finish at 6PM” can be easier maths than 11h 15m from now.

1. Most of these are in a metal box, which blocks signal. Adding careful routing to get an antenna in an unshrouded position where it’s still physically protected is a pain. Also, in the middle of an apartment building can give you pretty terrible reception in the first place.

2. GPS doesn’t provide time zones or daylight savings info. The appliance would know where you are and what UTC time it is, but not which time zone you’re in. The manufacturer could pre-program shape files in (yay, more memory) but they become obsolete the next time a politician decides to move time zones or change daylight savings. If this happens to you, your device will keep repeatedly changing to be an hour fast/slow no matter how often you reset it.

   You could have the GPS satellites continually broadcast shape files for the time zone but this would be a big change, use up a lot of the limited bandwidth, and it would take your clock half an hour to set itself.

3. it’s like an extra $5-10 in parts and unlike a WiFi module, the manufacturer can’t make any big data or ad revenue from it.

Exactly. The military isn’t obligated to look at every single picture and tell you that it’s not a drone. But if they don’t do that, they can’t say “we have looked at every single picture and confirmed there are no suspicious drones”.

The military is rightly refusing to prove a negative.

I mean, its trivial to prove something isn’t Bigfoot on the grounds that Bigfoot Isn’t Real. That’s just Hitchens’s Razor. The burden of proof is on the person presenting the claim, not the one refuting it.

Shifting the burden of proof doesn’t disprove the claim. You can look at a picture and call someone an idiot for believing it’s bigfoot/a drone, but still not be able to swear that there is no way it could possibly be a drone.

They may be making a PR decision to issue warnings rather than actually arrest people.

I don’t see anything in the article that suggests they know drones have gone above their bases but not been identified or dealt with.

I think the reference to not being able to identify everything is in reference to civilian reports.

It’s like trying to disprove Bigfoot. Someone comes to you with a shaky, out of focus video with no audio, time, date, or precise location.

I can’t prove it’s not bigfoot. That doesn’t mean I think it is Bigfoot, or that you should think so.

If you have good video and know where it was shot from and can cross-reference that with aircraft trackers? Then maybe they can do a good investigation. There’s been a few of those where it turns out to pretty obviously be a helicopter, a V-22, or just a 737.

Especially since it’s rather hard to judge scale on airborne things some distance away.

Sorry, could have been clearer. I was talking about random dumb civilians.

Quadcopters have been buzzing military bases for years, basically since they became available to the public.

With all this PR about drones and people sometimes blaming the military, the number of dumb civilians thinking about ‘spying’ on military bases will be on the rise.

“We have had confirmed sightings at Picatinny Arsenal and Naval Weapons Station Earle,” the spokesperson said. “This is not a new issue for us. We’ve had to deal with drone incursions over our bases for quite a time now. It’s something that we routinely respond to in each and every case when reporting is cited.”

It’s not explicitly stated, but my read is they get normal consumer-style quadcopters regularly, and this is simply a continuation of that. Perhaps an increase because people are now trying to explicitly spy on the military.

The public drone sightings, on the other hand, definitely don’t seem to be consumer quadcopters. They mostly look suspiciously like 737s, V-22s, or out of focus stars.

That sounds entirely like a store configuration thing.

It can vary depending on how the store sets the machines up. I’m on the wrong continent to use Walmart ones, but there’s definitely variation in how paranoid and slow they are set here.

I feel it’s one of those cases where if you’re familiar with them and can think like the person who designed/programmed them, it can work pretty well. If you get confused by unfamiliar card terminals or a phone doing an update, you’re in trouble.

E.g. it uses an expected weight and tolerance for products going into the scales. If this is produce you’ve just weighed, it’s going to be pretty precise. Same goes for something really light like a toothbrush; a 50% margin on tens of grams is still not much. If it’s a prepacked bag of oranges, then the weight could be way off (add a whole orange over the expected weight) so it won’t alarm on e.g. you putting a reusable shopping bag on the scale with the oranges. This lets you skip the annoying use-your-own-bag process.

Knowing and remembering which is the next button to hit helps a lot.

I find they’re fine for <5 items especially if the store is busy, but for a full trolley, you’re better off with a lane just for staging reasons.

Fibre needs bigger bend radii proportional to the cable size, but they’re still rarely over 15mm diameter cables so you can bend them in like 150mm.

Once you start getting to 11kV MV cables, they do like 2m bend radii.

Yeah, directional thrusting is a thing. It was used a lot when contractors were installing NZ’s new fibre network about a decade ago. I don’t think it’s in as widespread usage for power because power cables tend to have much wider bending radii.

I expect structural life of the tunnels isn’t much longer than the services within them, especially with roads above.

Boring through rock is super slow and expensive, plus now your tunnel needs to be big enough to walk & run machines through, and needs aircon to keep it cool. It is done, but usually only in CBD areas where you need lots of cables and room for future expansion. Google ‘cable tunnel’ and you’ll find lots of examples. Trenching machines go through very expensive consumable digging teeth whereas bucket trucks are just a fancy forklift, burning fuel and needing hydraulic & engine maintenance.

With high voltage cables, the (really thick) insulation gets really expensive, plus you need more conductor (copper/aluminium) because the insulation needs to stay cool. Aerial lines are directly air cooled (better cooling), and can run hotter, because the limit is the metal getting too hot and sagging, not the plastic degrading. Glass insulators are only needed at every tower and can be easily replaced.

Because keeping the conductor small is important, you need to use expensive copper rather than cheap aluminium for cables.

You also need regular joints which are very labour intensive, because they have to be perfect and you can’t make a cable the full length because you can’t ship a drum that big.

If a cable fails, fixing it is much harder than fixing an aerial issue. There was a cable fault in LA in 1989 that took 8 months of round-the-clock work to fix. When a tower falls over (usually because of slope failure or undermining), temporary structures are usually up in a couple of days.

Digging trenches under roads is much more invasive than pulling cables over roads, and rivers are even worse to deal with. It’s very common for underground cables to be converted to overhead when they cross a river before heading back underground.

The Western HVDC Link between Scotland and England was built as an undersea cable because it’s so hard to get planning permission and land rights to do major projects in the UK, as High Speed 2 found out.

Yeah, we have lots of underground services here in NZ. It’s when you start getting to low population densities that you start having trouble doing it.

Plenty of cities have ‘steam tunnels’ used for far more than just steam pipes, and sometimes no steam in there at all. It’s an awesome solution where you have reasonable density, and especially for within a facility/campus.

I don’t think you’re going to see it happen in surburban streets. It’s the tyranny of the car.

I can’t find the exact shot, but I used to have a picture of the 220kV lines parallel to the Desert Road as my desktop background. Something like this:https://johnmathews.smugmug.com/Nov-18-Desert-Road-North-Island/i-CkSm5tK

Underground works well for greenfields construction, where you can map everything out ahead of time and don’t have to deal with existing underground services.

It’s manageable on low-density streets where its really only three waters and maybe some telephone lines.

It’s a nightmare to underground existing infrastructure in dense environments. Underground is already full of three generations of critical comms, corroding gas, water, HV lines that will fail if you look at them wrong, and if you’re really unlucky, steam pipes too.

Still about a 10x cost difference, plus (particularly on transmission lines) there’s issues with extra capacitive loading.

As in coal-powered steam trains? There’s a moderate number in tourist service around the world.

Diesel or electric trains carrying coal are still very common.