A great story, with lots of interesting technology aspects too. The Coast Guard seems to have a strange mix of advanced and very primitive technology for condu

A great story, with lots of interesting technology aspects too. The Coast Guard seems to have a strange mix of advanced and very primitive technology for conducting searches - a program that uses Monte Carlo simulations to predict the best places to search and (presumably smartly) computes good search paths for all the available resources and can relay those paths directly to the helicopters' autopilot systems, but then does the actual searching with people in the helicopters scanning with their eyes and the computer system crashes with no way to restore state mid-search. Seems like it shouldn't be too long before the Coast Guard can just launch a few hundred drones (e.g., DJI Phantom 2 Vision Quadcopters only costs ~$1K each, but might need a few boats to provide networking and recharging out at sea) with directions to scan the area, and computer vision algorithms would do most of the video analysis. https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DavidEvans/posts/FFQsaWuy8Ry https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DavidEvans/posts/FFQsaWuy8Ry