Cool New Technology

This has been a big problem in the military and in local systems for quite some time. For instance, we had a city officer and a state officer run head into each other during simultaneous high speed chases. Both officers were killed. It was partially blamed on the lack of interoperability between communications systems.

It's amazing how simple of an idea this is. Why didn't anyone think of it before?

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/24/technolo...gy/24cisco.html

Better buy your cisco stock now. This could be huge......

I invented a process to solve this problem years ago. See below

Needed:
1 Police Walkie-Talkie
1 Firewalkie-tlkie
2 Rubber bands

Directions:
1.) Face Walkie-talkies to each other
2.) place rubber band over the talk button on each of the walkie-talkies.
3.) Bask in your patent glory!!

note: if rubberbands are unavailable, use something less useful such as Duck to hold in the talk button. ;-)

LOL!

Ok, I am a big geek, but considering how difficult it is for different branches of the military to talk to each other over the radio, this has big possibilities. The part I like the most is the fact that Cisco is taking Internet technology and applying it to non-Internet related communcation. That's very cool.

If helping public safety personnel talk with each other during emergencies is an obvious current need, Giancarlo thinks APICs could ultimately be applied to a far larger market. While it's currently limited to melding voice-based systems, in the future it will also be able to deal with data and video. That way, that policeman could stream a video of an injured person to the paramedic on call, so he can get care instructions while waiting for the ambulance to arrive. And there could be a large corporate market, as well--say, to allow a companies to link their security cameras to the fire department. That way, fire fighters could get a real-time view of what's happening before entering a burning building.

Think about that? How cool is that?

I remember reading something after Katrina (or maybe it was on TV) but some "expert" was saying how stupid it was to let each municipality and agency have it's own communications system. That and the fact that many are cellular based, or at least rely on local equipment which is likely to go down in a hurricane, flooding, or other natural event. His point was that if the system is supposed to help in the time of a natural disaster it should be a satellite based system that would work in any terrestrial natural disaster. It would be put in place by the Feds for all police/fire/emergency response agencies to use so that they could all talk to each other at any time.

Again, the idea of KISS. I am telling you the rubberband is where it's at!!!! ;-) no natural diaster is taking that out.