Drones

Drone hunting is here…pig hunting with the Dehogaflier.

Wild hogs have become a huge problem in places like Louisiana, rooting up fields in their quest for food and generally being extraordinary 200 pound pests. Given their size, smarts, and tenacity, feral hogs can be hard to kill—and that’s when you can even find them amid all the vegetation. So how do you deal with the problem? If you’re like electrical engineers Cy Brown and James Palmer, you strap a $5,000 thermal imaging camera to a remote-controlled airplane, then fly the thing around farmers’ fields on weekend evenings until you spot a hog. Then you shoot it from the ground with a night vision-equipped rifle.  Read more »

More than a million tweets were sent about Rand Paul’s remarkable filibuster the other day. You see when you actually stand for something and don;t just post photos of cats on Facebook and inane jokes people take you seriously.

Twitter reported Thursday afternoon on its blog that more than a million tweets were sent during Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul’s near-13 hour filibuster on the Senate floor Wednesday, placing the conversation almost on par with the 1.36 million tweets sent about President Barack Obama’s most recent State of the Union address.

Paul took to the Senate floor at approximately 11:47 a.m. EST to filibuster the Senate’s confirmation vote of White House adviser John Brennan as the new head of the CIA, pending an explanation from the White House as to whether it believes President Barack Obama could justifiably use domestic drone strikes to execute American citizens without due process.  Read more »

ᔥ BBC

Some cool drones. I especially like the “pack horse” drone:

ᔥ Popular Science

If  hunters don’t use them then wowsers, tree huggers and animal rights activists will…the problem they have though is hunter have guns, and drones don;t fly so well when multiple holes are blasted in them:

An animal rights group stopped a planned pigeon shoot over the weekend, leaving the would-be marksmen to shoot down another target: The animal group’s aerial drone.

A group called SHARK, SHowing Animals Respect and Kindness, went to Broxton Bridge Plantation near Ehrhardt, S.C., on Sunday to video a live pigeon shoot, according to the Times and Democrat of Orangeburg, S.C. The group lofted a small Mikrokopter drone and planned to tape the shoot. Law enforcement officers and an attorney tried to stop the drone from flying, according to the T&D. The group persisted, and apparently the shooters got back in their cars to leave, said Steve Hindi, president of SHARK.

The drone took off anyway, and then several shots rang out. One eventually struck the drone and it spiraled to the ground, to the dismay of the SHARK representatives who were filming it from the ground. The T&D has video of it here.

ᔥ the tipline

This is in the World Headlines on Stuff today….seems like a great idea, perhaps we could trial it on the East Coast of Northland?