I’ve experienced that while on the ground (also an Embraer I think). Was your experience in the air? I think I’d hold my breath if that happened while mid flight.
While I understand that it's part of the procedure and flying is generally very safe, I'd be holding my breath, armrest, and fellow passengers with a vise grip if they power cycled my plane mid-flight.
> The OS0 lidar sensor: an ultra-wide field of view sensor with 128 lines of resolution
> The OS2 lidar sensor: a long-range sensor with up to 128 lines of resolution
> Two new 32 channel sensors: both an OS0 and OS2 version
> Price: Starts at $16,000 with volume discounts available
I would LOVE to get my hands on this tech. Maybe in 5-10 years when the price comes down to commodity level for hackers to play around with. :-)
Since LIDARs impact airflow over the top of a car, is there a way to make LIDARs less spherical and more triangular or elliptical? How would that impact the scans and can that impact be corrected/recalibrated mathematically?
While this is a ~80% discount on other 128 beam sensors, it's unfortunately still out of reach for the hacker community. We absolutely plan to get prices down to an affordable level for individuals in well under 5 years!
Also, Ouster runs a sponsorship program that gives deeply discounted or free sensors to cool projects. If you have a cool idea, shoot me an email: derek.frome at ouster dot io
Might be interesting to add the Ouster sensor to our sensor simulation [1] to give people the ability to play around with the data even if it's outside the price range?
Oh, this is interesting! I've been putting together a 6-Kinect rig to take a 3D scan of my body as I go on hormone treatment and an exercise routine, monitoring subtle changes over time.
Does it support Kinect v1 and changing the orientation using the built-in motors?
I also have a few projects using photogrammetry reconstruction of convention booths using 2D images. I've been interested in adding in lidar/pointcloud cameras...
it's 1080p of resolution in lighting from two angles at 60 fps for like ~100-200 W. if you had some good cameras and some clever and fast software you could use this thing to illuminate anything you need to know about -- a high frequency light probe. i don't think you need coherent light at all or phase control, you'd just like timing control so you can strobe between left and right lights and use the variation to better characterize objects.
whole system seems doable in budgets of ~$8k hardware (total guess...)
I'm already thinking of the scrap yards where these might end up when cars with them are totaled by the insurance company :-). But I agree, if they can do exponential improvements in processing then this version will be fairly cheap in roughly 5 years.
People have ways and you can google that. It won't be perfect. We don't have a lot of rabbits but we have groundhogs, chipmunks, squirrels, deer, and lots of birds. Our strategy is basically:
1) grow things like wildflowers that don't get eaten (but do get pollinated)
2) grow things that produce more than you need (tomatoes in our case, but summer squash is another good example)
3) grow things that produce more than can be eaten by the critters (pumpkins)
4) grow things that most critters don't want (chili peppers, basil)
5) enjoy the fact that some critters got something to eat, instead of treating it like a problem. We don't try to keep anybody out of anything.
#5 is easier for us than it is for a lot of people, I'm sure, but it's easier if you get #1-4 right. If I were growing things that took lots of effort I might be annoyed but where we live (southeastern Pennsylvania), most things just grow.
I live on the edge of the woods. Tons of deer, rabbits, etc. The only thing that 1) works reliably for me and 2) is safe and ethical (so not poison or the like) has been an enclosed wire mesh fence. I resisted this solution for a long time even though my neighbors warned me that a fence was the only workable solution, but it's the only thing I've found that really works in my situation and I wish I had done it sooner.
Other things I tried that did not work:
Repellents, both natural and synthetic including but not limited to deer blood, other animal blood, predator urines (tried multiple types and brands), soaps and bitter and/or spicy repent sprays and gels.
Fake snakes, fake predator models and even real predators (not uncommon for foxes and coyotes are to be seen in our neighborhood).
Noisemakers and motion activated lights.
Lots more.
I wasted a ton of time and money trying the above, not to mention all the time spent gardening only to have it eaten by our woodland friends. A fence just works and does not harm animals. It can look very attractive too and can be relatively inexpensive if you keep an open mind w/r/t materials and look out for good deals/craigslist.
I've seen at least one person claim to solve the deer problem by building a covered chicken run around the outside of the property. Deer get discouraged by the depth of the fence moreso than the height. Presumably the cover saves them from raptors.
Probably works better in a square lot than a rectangular one.
One bio-ethical route (at least for many of us in the Mid/Mountain-West US) is to use a deer or pigs blood dilute. It isn't harmful for edible plants (you should be at least rinsing your produce anyway) and it keeps most foragers off the goods - minus birds, but netting part of the trees or shrubs is a good way to deal with birds over foraging produce.
If there's a local butcher they're a ready supply of the stuff, and it helps your local markets so win-win. Or if you already hunt for meat (or have friends that do), it's just making sure you're using even more of the animal, so again, win-win. If you don't think that locally sourced meats are ethically/environmentally sustainable then... ummm... /shrug; there's other methods, but none that have been as effective for our plot size.
We are lucky in that we have a five foot rat snake that lives in the rocks in front of our house. I think I've seen it twice in 10 years. We have no rodents on our property.
The negative is that you can't go out and do fundraising with any other parties until that 6 months is up. Depending on how much runway you have, that might be terminal for some startups.
I think 30 days is more typical, but YMMV. If the company is in dire need of funding then the VCs can usually get away with more.
A six month lockup with no guarantee on the other side sounds crazy, but with a cash transfer to compensate and provide runway it looks a lot more reasonable.
(Of course, it depends a lot on the missing detail of what SoftBank took for that money in the absence of a deal. Was it a loan? A smaller investment at the same terms/valuation planned for the big one?)
I'm not saying Softbank is a great fund (I've thought they made shitty investments long before the recent media frenzy in the past year), I just meant Creator isn't exactly a startup starlet that is drowning in funding opportunities. They're ~10 years old, have raised ~25 MM, and I heard their last round was already a downround (pretty bad considering how little they've raised and how long they've been around).
Looking from the outside, Creator was likely desperate for cash and happy to agree to anything - which they did. And unless they ended up with no cash at all after this brouhaha, they are probably still better off than they were initially.
And who knows - maybe Softbank will still give a stupid amount of cash to another terrible robotics startup. They've certainly done dumber things before.
Out of all those stories, I'm most surprised SoftBank walked away on Seismic. Maybe they're scared that all the recent unicorns are going to lose value, but it's a pretty safe/standard company that wasn't depending on Softbank to live, and opening the Japanese market was a Softbank-specific perk.
Funding an already-unicorn at a high valuation isn't likely to get you the usual VC 10x, I guess. But it sounds like a way to help stabilize Softbank's rep with a modest win, not a risky bet to bail out of.
Agreed. Imagine if everyone was allowed to abuse their positions. After years of working in enterprises, I know many that would create popups about the silliest things. The Security VP quoted in the article stated that she abused a security tool, and I agree.
My best story is a popup every time you connected to the main corporate wifi, saying that you've connected and you should disconnect if you're not authorized to connect.
>Imagine if everyone was allowed to abuse their positions.
So it's okay if some people are allowed to abuse their positions by firing someone who essentially added a little footnote on one website in particular with a reminder as to what Federal law actually dictates?
That's my issue with that logic. We are all citizens first. Corporate shenanigans should never undermine civil rights. The right to organize and to do so at work, is protected, just as the right of a corporation to spew as much anti-unionization propaganda is protected. Period.
The employer will find any other excuse besides the blatantly illegal thing on which to pin the rationale for the firing. They just want to reap the benefit of the outcome (one less active organizer) without the hassle of being called to the carpet for a clear violation of labor law. That's how it works. It's all about how to get what you want while having an out to fall back on when someone calls you out. This is why legal departments exist. To ensure a jury in the event of getting called out will have to slog through every conceivable distraction before the company can be held accountable for their actions.
She has the legal right to do union organizing at work, but she doesn't have the right to subvert the company's tools to do it. The idea that misbehavior becomes okay once you say "well I was organizing a union" seems incredibly toxic to me, and fundamentally incompatible with the kinds of freedoms software developers generally enjoy. If Spiers gets her way, and Google is legally barred from expecting line staff to use their powers responsibly, that just means Google will start requiring manager approval for everything potentially disruptive.
> MIT/BSD do have some legal drawbacks for certain use cases
Sure I think the OP you're replying to isn't implying that MIT/BSD is insufficient. He/she is saying that the three "AGPLv3, the LGPLv3, and Apache v2" are insufficient but these five "AGPLv3 + LGPLv3 + Apache2 + MIT + BSD" would be more sufficient.
You're right .. this is an insane amount of money. Their total cash on hand at the end of 2018 looks like it was 26,800,814,000 [1]. And yet they spent a record $10 billion on a piece of land (3x the appraisal value) ~5 years ago. [2]
