[pierrekin]

I am possibly wrong about small details, and would appreciate corrections.

So when I joined the project, the physical aircraft was based in the USA, but the software team for the autopilot was based in the UK.

For some reason - I think it was the very high altitude capability - the USA considered the autopilot to be munitions.

When I first joined the project, there was this bizzare situation where it turned out to be simpler and easier to occasionally ship the entire aircraft across the ocean, than to send software updates over the internet.

I'm not sure how long this lasted but I was assured it was temporary.

[OnlineGladiator]

Hey dang, this is the second time I had to vouch for this user's comment. I don't know how your system is set up, but it seems odd to me these are immediately showing up as dead.

[pierrekin]

I think it's just because I'm a new account. I signed up to make this comment. But I'm not a troll or anything so thank you for vouching.

[crabbone]

Re' sending an entire aircraft over the ocean vs. sending software over the internet: you'd be surprised, but it's still often the case.

I worked for a storage company that made a long-distance replication product (i.e. a program that allows one to store their data both locally and far away in a reasonable time-frame). We were contacted at some point by a movie production company which had this problem of moving the "raw" footage from the place it was filmed to the place it was supposed to be edited, and because it would take ages over the Internet, they'd use an airplane to fly it between the sites.

In general, it's a known phenomenon in the storage industry and as technology advances gets rebranded from "Boeing loaded with CD-ROMs", to loaded with hard-drives, to loaded with USB sticks etc. In other words: Internet is slow, if you want to move a lot of data, as in it has very low bandwidth.

[nl]

I don't think the size of the update was the issue here.

I guess it's something like the US Export control systems for arms, but for imports? I'd love to know the details of what legislation it was under - possible it was on the UK side.

[pierrekin]

In my home country, there was a stunt where a person used a carrier pidgeon with a usb drive to race a local ISP transferring a file.

It got me thinking about strange units. Like how for example a car's mileage can be thought of as a surface area (distance per volume), or in this case how for every pidgeon speed, drive capacity and length there is an equivalent bandwidth capacity * (distance / (distance / time)).

[Juicyy]

AWS has this its an 18 wheeler called "snowmobile" literally a mini data center on wheels for transporting.

[KaiserPro]

> the USA considered the autopilot to be munitions.

I could be wrong but it might be related to the GPS. Most off the shelf GPS units have a height and speed limit to stop them being used in ballistic missiles.