Almost a SQOTD, but Guy beat me to it:
The technical and economic advantages of coattailing on the economies of scale of the trillion-dollar mobile-phone industry are astounding. If you want to understand why the personal-drone revolution is happening now, look no farther than your pocket.
That is Chris Anderson in Wired writing about how automated flying aircraft happen to need just the same sensors and processors that are found in smartphones, and hobbyists and increasingly serious people like farmers surveying their crops are taking advantage of this.
I suspect his first sentence applies more generally.
I suppose this means that we had all better say nice things about drones over our phones- wouldn’t want any of them to listen in , and track us down, would we? Soon we won’t even be able to complain about people who drone on- listeners will assume we work for the NSA!!
I also wonder if using a phone near a drone will cause either the phone or the drone to malfunction? could we be accused of sabotage? Darn- we live in too-interesting times!
Nuke’s special variety of insanity aside, from what I’ve seen systems-on-chip tend to be available in variants that don’t have the 3G-or-whatever phone radios on them. The point being that all the tech is already profitable because of phones, and making variants for other uses is then cheap.
Certainly made IEDs cheaper to produce
But this is always true.
It ain’t the inventing of things that produces economic wealth. It’s those curious monkey brains having a look at what has been invented and working out what can be done with them that does.
For example, the government invented Arpanet, a series of protocols that allowed computers to talk to each other. But humanity invented the internet by using it to distribute porn, pen Randian tracts and caption cats.
This is always, always, true. It is the experimentation of what we can do with things, not the invention of them, that is important.
Mr. Fisher, I’ll have you know that I do not suffer from insanity- I enjoy it!
Yeah, but what about the rest of us, Nuke:-)
You will have to find your own ways to amuse yourselves, Alisa. Try making up jokes.
Q. Why should ordinary people date only lawyers?
A. It’s the only way we’ll ever get our own back- by screwing a lawyer!
(This joke would also work if you changed lawyer to banker, I think.)