Patriot Missile Shoots Down Quadcopter Drone

An ally of the US has used a Patriot missile to shoot down a small quadcopter. A US general revealed the incident but noted it’s not exactly an economical tactic.

The Patriot missile system has been in use since 1984 but came to prominence during the first Gulf War. It’s primarily designed to use radar to find and intercept inbound missiles.

General David Perkins said of the incident “That quadcopter that cost 200 bucks from Amazon.com did not stand a chance against a Patriot.” It’s far from clear that the Amazon reference was meant literally rather than as a general example of the type of device targeted by the missile.

Perkins did not detail where the incident took place or who was involved. However, recent reports have claimed groups in Iraq have been targeting the country’s security forces by dropping grenades via quadcopter drones.

It appears Perkins highlighted the case to make a wider point about the challenges of adjusting from a traditional “nation vs nation” war to a battle between established armies and insurgency groups. He noted that with a Patriot missile costing around three million dollars and a quadcopter a couple of hundred dollars, one-for-one exchanges of weapons were not “a good economic exchange ratio.”


Droids Interrupt Darth Vader Interview [Parody of Children Interrupt BBC Interview]

You’ve all seen the video where professor Robert Kelly got interrupted by his children during a very serious BBC interview a few days ago, right? The clip was EVERYWHERE online this week! To poke fun at the phenomenon, Youtuber “Jack of All Genius” filmed a parody of the video using varioud characters from the Star Wars franchise: Darth Vader, the Emperor, R2-D2, and BB-8.

[Jack of All Genius]

Super Mario Themed Pop-Up Bar Appears (Somewhere)

So somewhere in America last night, a cool pop-up bar appeared (the first rule about pop up bars is that you don’t talk about pop-up bar locations) and as you can see from the decor, they went with a cool, Super Mario Bros. theme. Heck, they even got the clouds right!

But I’m pretty sure anyone who asked for power-up mushrooms that make you grow twice your size got kicked out. You need to go to Amsterdam to get those.

Via

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Chrome To Throttle Background Tabs

Google says it will limit the amount of processing power that background tabs can consume in Chrome. The change is designed to increase battery life on mobile devices without affecting usability too much.

It builds upon an existing policy that means any background tab can only carry out actions (such as reloading data) once a second. With this in place, the browser batches together actions across all the background tabs to reduce the overall load on the processor.

The new policy means that once a tab has been in the background for 10 seconds it will have an individual time “budget” on running actions. Any actions eat into this budget, while during this period of inactivity the budget is regenerated by 0.01 seconds for every one second that passes. The tab can’t carry out any actions when the budget is at or below zero.

The idea is to set and manage the budget (including automatically tweaking the regeneration rate) so that no background tab is ever averaging more than one percent use of a processor core.

There’ll be exceptions for audio (including a few seconds’ grace to allow for the silence between tracks) and applications that use real-time connections such as WebSockets and WebRTC, which are used for functions such as chat tools.

In the long run Google wants to be able to completely suspend all background tabs, but concedes it can’t do that until most developers have stopped relying on them. It’s set a goal of 2020 to reach this point.