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The "Chow Now, Pay Later" Wagon is ideally suited to our fast-food, fast-talking, fast-paced lifestyles.
A fleet of them cruise our city streets, seeking our text messages and converting them to lunch orders on the fly.
Some quick triangulation on your cellular 'phone signal, refined further through
use of the latest GPS 'phone location technology, a shot of compressed air and your order is on its way up the roof-mounted mortar and thus to you, the hungry luncher.
Launched to a height and on a trajectory that dodges any overhead clutter, your lunch items descend to you beneath a small parachute operating under controlled descent conditions, homing in on your 'phone.
Catch the item, disconnect and toss the parachute into the air so it can return to the departing van under its own power, courtesy of the miniature steering fans attached to the shrouds.
Pay for the items when your 'phone bill comes in at the end of the month.
What Wiki says
http://en.m.wikiped...?wasRedirected=true
//qualified services may achieve an accuracy of down to 50 meters in urban areas// [21 Quest, Sep 02 2009]
[link]
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You will be able to estimate the communal IQ of corporations by the size of the heap of foodstuff on their roofs. [+] |
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Now, if we could just get these goddammed windows open... |
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I wonder what % the premium would become for folks skipping their payments. |
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If the customer complains about a condiment he didn't ask for,
does he complain to the cellphone company about the charge on
his bill? Or to the lunch truck folks? Or is the truck run by the
cellphone company? |
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//complains about a condiment he didn't ask for// |
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He sucks it up and gets on with it, like an adult should. Alternately, we'll fix that when McDonald's get rid of their skanky pickles. |
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Ok... next question. How does it dodge overhead clutter? And
what technology, allows you to use cellphone signals to pinpoint
location that accurately? That kind of triangulation can be off by
up to several hundred meters. Methunks you've been watching
too much TV. |
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Later: I've posted a link to Wiki's article on the subject of
triangulation. According to Wiki, even in urban areas, where the
abundance of towers provides the most potential for location
accuracy, it doesn't get better than 50 meters (over half a
football field) and can be even less accurate in rural and
suburban areas. 50 meters can be a long way in an urban area.
Your food could easily land on a roof, blown off course by wind
sheer, or get stolen before you get to it. With a lot of folks using
the service, mixups would be a guarantee. |
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Now, I'm not saying it couldn't work, but it require something
more accurate than cell tower triangulation. Maybe enter the
address of the nearest building, and it aims for the roof, where a
staff member collects it for you. Wind sheer would still be an
issue between tall buildings, though, if you're using a parachute. |
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(Note: that's not my fishbone up there) |
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//That kind of triangulation can be off by up to several hundred meters// |
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That's what They want you to believe. |
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BubbaCo Labs have infiltrated the Dept of Homeland Paranoia and "borrowed" some technology that makes accurate triangulation much simpler than was previously possible. |
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If the service is run by the cell phone company, then the food wagon itself should be able to receive the signal your phone is giving off. |
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In this case, it can simply test the signal strength received by four antennas, one on each corner of it's roof. Each measurement acts as a distance measurement... so it should have more than enough data to triangulate on your cell phone. |
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Now, I'll admit that this won't work from a huge distance, but if the wagon starts by driving towards the location that cell tower triangulation indicates, and uses it's own antennae to estimate your location more precisely, while driving, it should be able to find you pretty well. |
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It doesn't work that way, Goldbb. When a cellphone dials a
number, it automatically gets routed through the nearest tower
with enough bandwidth to handle it. Then it goes to the Base
Station Controller, and from there to the Master Switch Control,
and from there to the VLR (visited location registry) where the
call is authenticated and the number's network is verified. From
there it goes to whatever MSC the dialed number is registered to,
then to the Base Station Controller, then to the tower nearest
the dialed number, and from there to the dialed phone. This is
why, even with a tower antenna on the truck, it wouldn't go
straight to it in the manner required for your idea to work. Now,
I may be missing a step or 2, but that's the general path a call
takes. |
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Well, it could use the cell signal for rough location and the Bluetooth for fine tuning the final delivery. |
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Ok... we've just established that the cell signal only puts you
within about 50 meters (approx. 160 ft), on a good day.
Bluetooth has a range of about 9 meters (30 ft). That gives this
delivery system roughly 80% chance of failure. The technology
simply does not support the idea. Sorry, mate. |
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Some cell phones (such as the iphone) have GPS built in. There could be a food ordering app that displays the menu and reports the location to the chow wagon. I don't know if GPS is accurate enough but its better than triangulation I'd imagine. |
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On reading [UB]'s post, he doesn't come out and say whether there's a human navigator / burgerflipper / artilleryman at the helm / grill / firing controls of said van. But we can address both possibilities. |
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1. Unmanned. The main concern will be getting the van navigated safely and successfully around urban lunch-rush streets. If you can do that, the further technical problem of finding the precise location of the cell phone is no big step. ([21Q] - think HARM missile. You don't even *care* how accurately the cell phone can calculate it's own position in relation to the network - you're going to zero in on the emissions of the phone itself.) |
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2. Manned. The cell phone emissions can include such information as "Yeah, it's me - up here on the 7th floor balcony!" (and maybe even responses like "Careful - this sausage-bacon-mayo burger might leave a grease stain!"); but even if they don't, the flingermeister can still look up, figure out the best-looking delivery path, take careful readings, and apply his highly-tip-worthy expertise to his fast-food-fast-pitch. The main concern will be getting the van navigated safely and successfully around urban lunch-rush streets. |
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The GPS may work... the Google Maps version of the GPS is awfully
accurate, down to just a few feet. The way to do this, then, is
through a phone security app called PinTail, which I've tested to
great success... here's how this is gonna work: |
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You call, or text, the lunch truck to place your order. You provide
them with your PinTail password. They store your number for
later. When the order is ready, they send your phone an SMS
with the password you provided them. PinTail app kicks in,
automatically activates your phone's GPS chip and autoreplies
with a link to your location and coordinates on Google Maps. As
long as you don't move after the autoreply is sent, they've got
your location down to a few feet, and you're golden. |
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This may require modification of the app to support more phone
types in order to be a commercial success, but that's easy. Sorry
mate, I wasn't thinking of GPS before, but that's the best way to
make this work, and the PinTail application is absolutely perfect
for it. It might also work with Social Networking friend-finder
apps like Loopt, but I'm not sure how accurate those are. |
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Thank you. I knew GPS was getting better but I was not sufficiently aware of its workings to use them in the idea. |
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I may be wrong here, but the GPS version used by my phone is extremely accurate. It seems to be a matter of what kind of phone you're using. My suggested method may only work for higher-end smartphones. Not sure how comercially viable an operation that's dependent on such limited technology would be, but it's definitely food for thought (or would this be thought for food?). |
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later: I just opened Google Maps on my phone, and activated the GPS to test the accuracy again, and it claims to only be accurate to 2700 meters. The dot on the map labelled "My Location", however, is in my neighbor's backyard, about 50 feet away from where I'm sitting. So I might have been a little overly optimistic, but it's worked more accurately before. Perhaps use a bright red parachute and hope for the best? It's still better than the tower location, which puts me about a half mile away, in the middle of the Spokane River. |
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Signal homing is a completely baked technology. It
doesn't have to be able to understand the signal, or talk to
it, just differentiate it from any surrounding signals, which
isn't that difficult. Once it does that current technology
makes the homing simple, per HARM anti-radiation missiles
as [lurch] said. Admittedly the seeker heads on HARMs are
multi-million dollar components, but then again, I don't
think most sandwiches are going to travel in excess of
mach 1 or deal with spoofing countermeasures (unless you
order the onion and limburger, in which case your
coworkers might get creative). |
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Trying to home in on a singal cellphone signal in a city with
hundreds of thousands of cellphones in a single city block is not
possible with existing technology, I don't care what those
entertaining cop shows say. Maybe if the call is active
throughout the whole ordering and delivering process it could be
done, sure. But you better hope the call doesn't drop. |
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//call is active// If it's not, just call the cellphone just prior to launch. Plus, provide the customer with a free ringtone which yells "Incoming!" |
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See, that's why I respect you, Lurch. That would probably work
pretty well, too, although it may take longer to triangulate using
that method. |
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