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Unless my plan was to become the best falconer in the world and start the glorious revolution by turning their eagle army against them at the crucial moment. Which it definitely totally isn't. Honest.

Well that's a shame, because you should totally do that

I still think the met should get a tortoise. 

(Genuinely it could be awesome for crowd control - got a bunch of rioting students? Tired of the danger and additional threat created by kettling them? Simple, stop their movement and neutralise any threat by sending in a load of really adorable animals, they'll be far too busy cooing over them to give the met any trouble whatsoever.)

I thought this was headed in an entirely different, "attack rowdy protesters with birds of prey", kind of angle.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2016-02/08/met-police-london-eagle-drone


WELL REALLY.

*blows party favour*

I suppose, but I can't help but feel there's a more efficient solution than the eagles.

I heard of people smuggling drugs with drones. I imagine they could be useful for dodgy paparazzi or random alpacas who like to take images of stuff they shouldn't be.

But this is kinda what I was getting at - the drone itself, if the pilot has any kind of brain, will be fairly hard to trace. So you deal with one drone... then what?


Alls I know is, if *I* were a drug lord, I'd have *several* drones. Not least for case of eagle-attack.

If it were a custom-build, then of course - but if it's generic, run through a web or app interface (as more and more of them are), you'd have trouble linking the drone to the session to the pilot without probable cause on a specific person (I would imagine, for some reason my Law A-Level never went into Aerial Crime (TM)).


I'm now trying to think of what you could attach to a drone in order to commit crime... the obvious being cameras/microphones, which are not expensive... but I guess you could use it to try and ferry information under the radar? (or on the radar, I suppose, if we're being literal) Like load an SD card with Covert Information, fly it to the drop point, have someone else pick it up? Would be good if you wanted to start some sort of anarchist domestic terrorist group I guess.


WHICH YOU SHOULD DEFINITELY NOT DO.

I have lots of thoughts about this. Most of them relate to "how did anyone ever get to thinking about guard-birds in the first place??"


But I take issue with the phrase 'rogue drones'... The drones will be either autonomous, or piloted. Autonomous drones are what we should be frightened of, because in which case it seems our only tool (according to the Dutch) against the robot uprising is eagles? But many drones are not, truly, autonomous.


Piloted drones, as the name implies, have a pilot. If their pilot is AWOL, they'll just spin out of control or fly themselves into a wall = "threat" resolved. If their pilot is malicious and you take out the drone... well, good for you, but without finding the pilot they'll probably just get another drone in the air fairly quickly. They aren't exactly expensive these days, if you've got the will to be committing aerial crime.


So what are the eagles helping with?? I dunno, seems like a huge PR stunt to me. On behalf of whom I don't know - the Dutch tourist board? ("Come visit the Netherlands, we have Robot Wars. But with eagles. IN THE SKY.")

There used to be a wonderful second-hand bookshop in Birmingham. Exactly like you'd imagine a Diagon Alley shop to be - all uneven floors and piles of books to the ceiling which had no business remaining upright without magic. You could get everything from text books to popular fiction to 10-cent American spy thrillers from the 60s. Obviously I bought a LOT of those in my four years in the city.


I revisited Birmingham recently, and it was closed. The hand-scrawled note in the window read "We have closed. Not moved, just gone."


I was cry.

(I had definitely planned to launch a related project on that day, but it seems to have crept up on me rather suddenly. Best laid plans, and all that?)

I did not know there was a list of such games. Perhaps I should learn to Google in the future


I'll check out FreeCiv too

I think Codecademy covers Python, but it is probably a little basic for us prior-programmers


The Python people offer various guides on their website (linked from the same place you download Python from), aimed at various experience levels.

Hi guys,


For those of you hoping I'm PITCHING an open-source strategy game, I'm sorry - that's not what I'm doing. I'm trying to build an AI that could effectively play strategy games, using various techniques I've picked up over my degree and more (can you tell I've been inspired by AlphaGo? Because I have).


If anyone knows of a simple, open-source strategy game, could they point me to it? It'd probably need to have...

   
• A (comparatively) small set of actions
• Be focused around interaction with other players
• Be open-source, with free access to the source code

I looked into 0AD, but for one that is a behemoth of a program with far too much going on for what I need to do (which is, essentially, a proof of concept at the moment) - and, for the start of the games at least, is focused on city-building and defensive, rather than player-interaction and offensive.


So I'm maybe looking for something like Starcraft/Command and Conquer? But, y'know, with source code I can legally access.

Can't, or won't?

If boobies were NSFW, I would've been banned from the workplace a LONG time ago.