Editing 1358: NRO

{{comic
| number    = 1358
| date      = April 21, 2014
| title     = NRO
| image     = nro.png
| titletext = 'DISPATCHING DRONE TO TARGET COORDINATES.' 'Wait, crap, wrong button. Oh jeez.'
}}

==Explanation==
''Where's Waldo?'' (the North American renaming of the British ''{{w|Where's Wally?}}'') is a children's puzzle book in which you have to locate 'Waldo', a character with a distinctive striped shirt and hat, in a picture crowded with hundreds of characters. This is harder than it sounds, since the characters and other distractions are both very small and quite densely packed on the page, and the pages (especially in later books) are often littered with "decoy" characters wearing similar articles of clothing to Waldo's. In some cases, almost ''all'' characters as well as several objects have the red-and-white stripes.

[[Cueball]] and his friend are using satellite imaging to find Waldo, by holding the book up to the sky and viewing it on the computer, presumably using some advanced image processing software to identify Waldo among the crowd. This would require a very advanced camera, as resolutions are usually much lower than would be necessary to resolve the characters in a Where's Waldo book. But since Cueball works at the {{w|National Reconnaissance Office}} (NRO), the US government agency responsible for operating spy satellites, he probably has access to some powerful satellite/{{w|Unmanned aerial vehicle|UAV}}-mounted cameras.

The humor in this being, while he could be using that power for much more important things, he's instead trying to solve a simple game. Further, the Cueballs could probably hook up the image parsing software to a smaller camera on the ground, rather than a satellite-mounted camera. They would get even better results without using a camera by scanning the image and running it through the same image processing software.

The title text is implying that the Cueball operating the computer has accidentally launched a drone at the co-ordinates, which would be where he and his friend are standing. The drone is presumably a military drone armed with explosive weaponry — not a good thing for those on the receiving end.

==Transcript==
:Cueball and a friend are in a remote area. The friend is holding a ''Where's Waldo?'' book towards the sky.
:Laptop: [<tt>Target located</tt>]
:Cueball: Got him. Left edge, two inches down.
:The National Reconnaissance Office has an unusual approach to ''Where's Waldo''.

==Trivia==
*A ''What If'' comic examining the use of the {{w|Hubble Space Telescope}} for the purpose of taking photos from the earth's surface can be found here: [http://what-if.xkcd.com/32/ Hubble]. It just shows that current technology is not capable of achieving the image resolutions needed here.

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Multiple Cueballs]]
[[Category:Comics with lowercase text]]
[[Category:Drones]]