"We are not going to end up in jail – if we did, in Sweden one year equals nine months in jail and you get education and food for free. There's no free Wi-Fi. But I'm not going to jail."
-Peter Sunde
As a disclaimer, I had quite a bit of trouble finding relevant media for my WISE project, as to my knowledge no documentaries on MEMS exist, and shockingly few ones on drones exist, given both fields prominence in today's modern technology. For my three pieces of media, I first watched TPB: AFK which is a documentary entirely about the founders of the pirate bay, which was an online file sharing site frequently used to torrent films, ebooks, and other digital media. Honestly, the film was horrendous. It's not that the cinematography, audio, or anything about the shooting of the movie was bad, it's just that the subject matter was not interesting at all. Far from illustrating how the pirate bay website actually worked at a technical level, it basically consisted of a couple of guys bickering with attorneys and judges all day long. Three men founded The Pirate Bay: Peter Sunde, Frederik Neij, and Gottfrid Svartholm. Here is the format of the film:
Copyright Lawyers tell the three TPB founders: "Oh, you're so busted!".
Three Pirate Bay founders: "No we're not, no we're not."
Swedish Judge: "The three TPB founders are found guilty, sentenced to prison, and fined millions of dollars for copyright infringement."
Copyright Lawyers: "Told you so!"
Three TPB founders: "We're not guilty yet! We're appealing!"
Other Swedish Judge: "I'm knocking down your prison sentence but I'm imposing more fines on you. You're still guilty."
Three TPB founders: "Well.....This is sub-optimal."
It took the movie 1 hour and 22 minutes to explain what I just did in seven lines of dialogue. It was a waste of my time, as I learned nothing even remotely interesting, and I basically just watched the worst courtroom drama I've ever seen.
The second media piece I watched was not relevant at all to my third space, as it was a drama about backwoods west virginia boys launching rockets in a coal mining town, where they all are expected to mine coal but they break free from their stereotypes and become rocket specialists. One of the boys, Homer Hickam, later becomes an engineer at NASA. It was a fun movie to watch, albeit incredibly predictable, and also not all that original. The entire message of the movie was to pursue your dreams, and so I think it may have been a better use of my time to pursue my actual dreams then watch an irrelevant heartthrob flick about a boy who just wants to fly rockets. The funny thing is, I'm a boy who just wants to fly drones. Hmmmmmmmm..........
Since I wasn't having much luck with the films, my third and final piece of media is a cool interactive website that displays where it is legal to fly drones and also the different types of airspace in the US:
You can toggle all sorts of different restrictions on flights to see where they apply. The site, Airmap, has already come in handy for me as I've been flying around a lot more now. I flew once again at Wagner this past week, and just yesterday I tested out the drone again at OIS, this time pushing the quadcopter a lot harder.
This has been primarily a business post. If you'd like to read about my presentation in retrospect, please read the next post.