I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

  • kartwaffles

    What fun! I approve of this sort of activity, especially as a way to point out the current red tape / gray area / mess concerning for-profit UAV ops.

  • Bersl

    Better a drone delivering weapons of toilet destruction than weapons of people destruction.

  • Brainspore

    I can’t wait that long. When will someone finally come up with a ballistic burrito delivery service?

    • http://losinfinitos.tumblr.com Haz 0

      Once they do, many a treaty will have to be made to end the forthcoming Food Wars between various taco trucks across the world.

    • http://twitter.com/MartianEmpress Rezeya Montecore

      My friends and I are already making jokes about taquito MIRVs.

    • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=13001904 Jeremy Sweeney

      During WWII, the Germans were hard at work developing a number of superweapons. One of them was a burrito mortar.

      • Ashen Victor

         Soviets were successful developing the Katyusha Burrito Launcher.

    • Lupus_Yonderboy

      Ballistics will never be workable.  Thank heavens for the Alameda/Weehawken Burrito Tunnel.

      http://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda-weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm

    • Warren_Terra

      I’ll bet you could use an existing T-shirt cannon. Put a turret on your food truck, and you’re good to go.

      Deceleration for delivery might be a problem.

      • Brainspore

        1 .Mount it to one of those military MRAP vehicles.
        2. Call your catering service “Mmm-Wrap.”

      • jagedge

        In fact…
        I was almost taken out by one of these just last month.

        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3LEgxZ1TaQ

  • wastrel

    I prefer mine directly from El Farolito via the transcontinental pneumatic burrito tube. http://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda-weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm

    That being said, this is awesome <3 many loves for Darwin Air.

    • Lupus_Yonderboy

      Aw, man.  I should have known someone would post this.  Sorry if my post above steals any of your well deserved thunder.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=509503225 Dan Patey

    Rising from the ashes of the Tacocopter: http://tacocopter.com/

    • http://twitter.com/cjporkchop cjporkchop

      Seems to me that a quadcopter like this would be a more precise delivery device than the Burrito Bomber’s fly-by/parachute method.

      How often would people be finding small parachutes and tubes full of rotten burrito on their roofs, along with the usual Frisbee?

    • http://www.facebook.com/people/Robert-Drop/100000929402049 Robert Drop

      I assume this proposal is just as serious.

  • http://losinfinitos.tumblr.com Haz 0

     Gran video, pienso hacer uno para tostadas : Great video, going to have to make one for dropping tostadas (wrapped for eating, unwrapped for the slapstick)

  • waetherman

    If I’d know that this was what they meant when they said “…the Air Force holds a bake sale to buy a bomber” I would have been supporting my schools a lot less and my military a lot more.

  • http://twitter.com/cbuchner1 Christian Buchner

    Will this also drop shoes on unsuspecting presidents / heads of state?

    • Ashen Victor

       I would support a shoe/espadrille/boot to the face world offensive.

  • http://twitter.com/cjporkchop cjporkchop

    If they tried this with falafel, they’d be put on a watch list.

  • Rotwang

    It’s all fun and games until someone dies from a burrito-related coronary.

    • Brainspore

      Go with the black beans, they have less fat than the refried option.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Ender-Wiggin/100000885624281 Ender Wiggin

    umm…isn’t this old? i remember reading this story on wired and boing boing a few months ago…but i thought it was killed because of regulations against civilian UAV’s flying around cities?

  • Kelly M

    They need to mount a 3D food printer on it.  We could then order and take delivery from an army of round-the-clock food service drones. 

    • Boundegar

      My God.  If it could also play the ukulele, it would be the end of BoingBoing.

    • jackbird

       You would need to call it something catchy, like FLDSMDFR.

  • http://www.disoriented.net/ angusm

    Does anyone know what the Circular Error Probable (CEP) of this delivery system is? In the best case, a burrito landing on someone else’s property is simply a loss for the intended recipient; in the worst case, it could be construed as an act of war.

  • jeligula

    How fun.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=4303976 Joshua Birch

    Move over P.W. Singer, I’m creating the 21st Century Delicious Initiative

  • http://twitter.com/davidmcraney David McRaney

    “Watching missiles fly down air vents, pretty unbelievable. But couldn’t we feasibly use that same technology to shoot food at hungry people? Know what I mean? Fly over Ethiopia, ‘There’s a guy that needs a banana!’ (missile sound). The Stealth Banana.” – Bill Hicks on the first Gulf War

  • Gilbert Wham

    Wait, does this mean Teh Terr’ists have won or lost?

  • Donald Petersen

    That’s it, I’m finally goin’ to law school.  I’ll work my way up through the Public Defender’s office, maybe spend a few years in the DA’s office, then eventually I’ll attain a judgeship, or whatever the hell they call it.  And every morning I’ll leap out of bed and eagerly iron my robe and powder my wig and dash off to the courthouse.

    ‘Cause finally, for the first time in my life, lawsuits and liability are starting to sound entertaining as hell.

  • http://illustratorhints.com/ Jesseham

    It’s Kozmo.com 2.0!  This needs to happen!

  • wavehog

    Great song. Who is that?

  • anansi133

    One kind of drone for locating people lost in the woods (or hiding from the law) and another kind of drone for dropping survival kit on them (or snot-gunning them)

    I like to think drone technology will prove cheap enough that peaceful uses far outweigh the police state uses- but if they decide to commercially encrypt GPS signal – (meaning you pay for the codes to tell you where your plane is) - it’s all over.

    • Donald Petersen

      It occurs to me that there’s a glaring hole in my science fiction reading history that I didn’t imagine existed.  I don’t think I’ve ever read a story (or seen a movie) wherein cheap semiautonomous drones are used for mundane, everyday, morally-neutral (or even benevolent) purposes.  Drones usually end up wearing the same black hats (albeit somewhat larger ones) as nanobots in the corner of the canon with which I’m familiar.  Anyone got any recommendations with which I can patch this hole?

      • freemoore

        Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels have something kind of answering that description. I hope Charles Stross has a go sometime too…

      • http://twitter.com/tadasyoyolt Tadas Jelinek

        Here’s a reality patch: http://www.uavoutbackchallenge.com.au/

        I’m not sure if it’s the same goal every year but at least this year’s challenge is dropping emergency package” for someone lost in a remote location.

        Give this some more years and more readily available drone software and hardware we will be able to do search and rescue with swarms of cheap drones quickly covering large areas, taking hi-res pictures and then doing the search part by, say, crowd-sourced effort on the Internet.

  • nettdata

    By “burrito” they mean “drugs”, right?

    • Kerouac

      Only in Colorado and Washington.

  • Kerouac

    Use them to destroy whatever you want terrestrially… but I’m pretty sure the U.N. should step in and ban burritos on all space flights.

  • oasisob1

    I first read that it anonymously delivered Mexican food. I was only a little sad to learn that I had it wrong.

  • ChickieD

    My husband must never ever know about this.

  • RandomJerk

    This is going to kill all the terrestrial-based burrito delivery jobs.