OESF Portables Forum
General Forums => General Discussion => Topic started by: tumnus on June 09, 2004, 06:49:47 am
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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/08/wi...enabled_cattle/ (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/08/wifi_enabled_cattle/)
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The problem is how do you keep the Z and gps unit fully charged? Solar power?
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Would this make you a \"Virtual Cowboy\"?
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Would this make you a \"Virtual Cowboy\"?
I wasn\'t going to say anything when I read this earlier but I had a vision of a few geeks gathered at a coffee shop with fresh cowpie on there shoes playing with their new Z\'s. Meanwhile back on the ranch... cows are wandering all over hell.
Greg
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Frankly, I\'m appauled at this.... first we have posts here with veal skin Z cases, and now people strapping electronics to cows! what\'s happening to our community???
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Cows aren\'t the most intelligent of species, so I doubt a \"virtual\" fence would actually work with them.
With a physical electric fence it would go somethig like :-
\"mmm it hurts when I touch that fence\" and after maybe the 100th shock the cow may actually retreat from it and learn to avoid it in future.
If the cow was just plodding along and received a belt for seemingly no apparent reason, then I doubt it would be smart enough to realise that in order to stop getting a shock it needs to go into reverse. (cows don\'t corner quickly)
How it could happen :-
Cow walking along sedatley minding it\'s own business. *bang* it gets a shock for seemingly (to it) no reason at all. Cow bolts at 30mph to try and get away from what is annoying it. Cow bolts in the direction it is facing, as it sees no visible reason why it can\'t go that way. Cow ends up miles away from where you want it to be and is totally freaked by the time you find it after receiving multitudes of zaps for no apparent reason to it. Cow attacks the first living thing it sees as that thing must have caused the pain as it is the nearest thing to it.
It may work with students, but you would need to tell them that if they got a shock, then they have gone out of bounds and need to retreat otherwise they too would probably find it hard to work out why they got a belt and most students are several orders of magnitude more intelligent than your average cow. A couple of them may even work out to reflash the thing and play warcraft on it rather than it giving them a belt.
The trouble is how do you teach a cow *how to react* to the shock?
You are far better simply sending out a bloke with a bucket full of cattle feed, they would blindly follow him everywhere he goes.
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I think it would work if you gave the \"fence\" a \"thickness\". Basically, the farther out of bounds the cow goes, the stronger the pain. It would feel the pain increasing as it walked forward and back off. The initial shock wouldn\'t be strong enough to panic it. Stepping back would make it better. Then Pavlov takes over.
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I work in a uni and i think this idea would be great for our students, althrough some have less brains then a cow...