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Get your Part 107 federal drone license and volunteer for your local fire department or search and rescue. When the FD responds to structure fires they sometimes have to go up on the roof to cut an air hole. This allows oxygen into the building which helps prevent backdrafts. A FLIR equipped drone can help direct the hole cutter around hotspots on the roof. If your local fire department has a drone, it might not have the staff to be able to use it on calls.

How involved is the license? I've flown racing quads and RC planes, so I think I have the hand-eye coordination and spatial awareness skills.

Is this something that would be saturated in the Bay Area? Does the SAR team provide the drone?


You'd need to schedule and take an exam. There are lots of resources online to help you study. I recommend the Youtube video from Tony and Chelsea Northrup.

I'm not sure how saturated it would be. My advice would be to contact the closest FD (or PD if you wanted to go the SAR route) and ask. If they say they're covered, ask if they know any other stations that could use a hand. There's bound to be a department that needs volunteers.

The FD should have an enterprise level DJI (or equivalent) with color and IR cameras but it will probably depend on how well funded the department is. SAR may be a different story as far as equipment but I don't know since that's not the route I pursued.



Maybe the Osprey's reputation is due not only to the accident rate but also to the fatality rate. A fatal accident in a standard F-16 (not the 2 seater), assuming no one outside the plane is killed, means 1 death. A fatal accident in a V-22 with the same assumptions would have a minimum of 2 deaths (pilot and copilot) at a soft maximum of 26 deaths (2 crew + 24 passengers, possibly more if overloaded).


All flying craft that cannot glide by itself should have failsafe parachutes. If one engine goes out the other engine needs to stop too to prevent flipping. Parachute is easily acceseible behind a red lever with glass to break


The osprey has both engines tied together for this exact reason. One engine can turn both props. It's part of the complexity of the thing. It's just too complex.


This is correct.


You might like "The Bomb" documentary from 2016. "[It] explores the culture surrounding nuclear weapons, the fascination they inspire and the perverse appeal they still exert."

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt5596034/

https://www.thebombnow.com/


Glad they're still doing these. I really enjoyed Scan of the Month and then they just stopped doing new scans after the Moka Pot.


According to the article, the Flock cameras are still in place but are "offline".

Why does that not convince me?


Are there cameras pointed at the offline Flock cameras? I sure hope so because it would be a shame if they disappeared...



Not very useful, is it?


Also check out prettymapp

https://prettymapp.streamlit.app/



This is of course assuming that Internet Archive will still exist in 100 years.


And that Internet will still exist in 100 years


The Internet Archive would not require the Internet to continue to store digital data, nor to ingest additional digital data. As long as the bills get paid and people watch the machine, the data would remain on disk and accessible.

The Library of Congress has existed for ~225 years, for example.


There's a huge difference though between storing books, magazines and newspapers versus storing digital media.


One requires more electricity than the other, and custodians of somewhat different skills. A sysadmin is a librarian and custodian with technology skills. If you can vault and custodian physical archives at scale, you can do the same for digital data (imho, based on experience with both). You’re simply building resilient systems on durable primitives.

I’m hopeful for a future where you can potentially carry all recorded knowledge on a device and media you can fit in something somewhat human portable [1]. But until then, humans interested will maintain and continually improve archival and information retrieval systems to preserve and make accessible knowledge.

[1] SPhotonix – 360TB into 5-inch glass disc with femtosecond laser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268911 - December 2025 (27 comments)


And that anything will still exist in 100 years


And that anyone will be there to observe whether anything still exists in 100 years



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