Slashdot Mirror
Drones: Coming Soon To the New Jersey Turnpike?
redletterdave writes "The FAA predicts 30,000 drones will patrol the US skies by 2020, but New Jersey drivers could see these unmanned aerial vehicles hovering above the New Jersey Turnpike and Garden State Parkway much sooner than that. New Jersey lawmakers from both Republican and Democratic parties have introduced a number of bills to tackle the drones issue before the federal government starts issuing the first domestic drone permits in September 2015."
I for one welcome our hovering unmanned overlords!
How often do these things fall out of the sky, and does the added revenue offset the lives lost when they do?
Just saying.
I tend to think that drones should be used only in unusual circumstances, where unusual is translated as "high reward and low risk." Locating a lost hiker in a national park qualifies. Raising traffic fine revenue does not.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I've seen one or two drivers on the Turnpike that could have used a Hellfire missile up the tailpipe.
...counting the drones on the New Jersey Turnpike
we've all come to mourn for America...we've all come to mourn for America.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
It's too late, the local Seattle paper The Stranger is already using drones in public, under both the First Amendment (free press) and Second Amendment (Right To Bear Drones).
Wake up and smell the privacy-disabled future!
(caveat - Canadians have privacy rights, and technically the Washington State Constitution has strong privacy rights - but there are still drones)
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Many laws today if taken to their logical extreme are pretty stupid. But the two things that tend to ameliorate their implementation is that there are limits to how many police can do so many things along with that the police themselves(usually) use common sense. So if you are zipping down the road going 68 in a 65 zone most police won't bother with you along with the fact that there are a limited number of police.
But with more and more policing becoming automated it is possible that you will drive, as you usually do, from home to work and arrive to discover that you have $10,000 in fines. Every time you bumped up over the speed limit, even for a few seconds, gets you another $500. Every time you didn't come to a complete stop (as in not moving at all) at a stop sign $150. Not to mention the zillion stupid laws that most people, including policemen, don't even know; so every time you didn't signal 150 feet before turning another $150. Did you jaywalk to cross the quiet street to go into work? $300!
Right now the robotic systems are fairly stupid and can only monitor basic concepts like the physics of automobiles. But both their information gathering ability (have every traffic light make a record of all license plates.) along with their analytical ability (you are acting suspicious) is only going to get better and is going to give the police more and more probable or actual cause to arrest, fine, and detain us.
Applying information theory can allow people to see all kinds of interesting things but will also throw up many false positives. Your driving habits might overlap with a series of murders/robberies.
Then you get into who will have access to this information. If you join a political group fighting against the robotization of policing the police might suddenly take great interest in your movements and without much effort make life hell by say the above $10,000 worth of fines every time you drive.
I don't see this as a bizarre conspiracy so much as the mathematics of how our laws are created and then implemented are going to become incompatible with robotic policing. Right now the lawmakers are inclined to grease the squeaky special interest groups. They pass laws that they know will rarely, if ever, be implemented but quiet down the self righteous special interest groups. Just look at most drug laws in the western world. These are most definitely not the laws of the majority but those of a small group of stick-up-the-ass whiners. Now picture a world where all their existing stupid laws are enforced rigidly and nearly as often as the supposed offenses.
The future looks bright for Hardware and Software hackers alike, with new self driving and self flying targets and deployment platforms.
I mean, really...
Mounting things to light poles is 10,000 times more practical.
Bruce Perens.
i hit 92mph last week week on the way back from philly
(not Garfunkel). I'm an amateur videographer and have combed Vimeo and other sites for artistic videos, a number of which were taken from various flavors of "drones". Is this now illegal ?
We are turning into a nanny state, and we need to put a stop to it. There are no reasonable arguments for spying on people with 30,000 drones.
To combat such measures against American citizens, we need to start developing plans to take these things out of the sky. Perhaps we can do this by interfering with their radios, causing them to crash, shooting rockets at them, shooting at them with conventional firearms (while wearing a mask of course), or chasing them down with other drones and ramming into them. We need to be able to easily, cheaply, and effectively stop them. Of course, and I think it goes without saying, I'm NOT advocating that people actually do any of these things, but we still need to discover the best way to do it before it's too late.
hey!
If we are to have a government, its primary job should be for providing for the safety of its citizens, not creating "crimes" to milk for revenue. And an (unarmed!) drone can be used for both. A drone would be great for search and rescue operations, unfortunately, with the track record of government, it will most likely be used to help kidnap people for growing plants and for breaking arbitrary speed limits.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Security in these things, from what I understand, is pretty shabby.
So what's going to happen? Civilians will resent being monitored and harassed by drones. They will start trying to figure out ways to confuse, disrupt and hack drones. There is this wonderful thing called the internet. Information tends to spread on the internet. Smart researchers will speak at Black Hat & Defcon about fuzzing, confusing and otherwise disrupting drones (which they have every right to do). And this information will eventually find its way to the battlefield.
My personal opinion is that regardless of which administration or party is in power, the trend towards more control, monitoring and scrutiny is irreversible. Unfortunately.
Just make (keep?) it legal to use any drone over public land or your private property for target practice, and the problem will quickly take care of itself.
I am not in favor of using drones as the Obama Government has in the middle East and Northeast Africa for indiscriminate killing for political purposes to advance the Obama Terror War.
On the other hand, if the Predator, HellFire and KILLNOW drones are unleashed over the USA Eisenhower Federal Road System to indiscriminately kill drivers using cell phone while the drive then I am for sure all for it !
Next would be having 'Zapper' drones inside Safeway and Walmart to indiscriminately kill patrons using cell phone while trying to push their cart.
High Schools would love the ability to have drones patrolling the halls to indiscriminately kill the 'little bastards' as they prance between classes.
Students of High Schools would also love Retaliation drones to indiscriminately kill the 'Smelly Ass Teachers' as they emerge from the 'Conference Room' at the schools.
What a Wonderful Drone World awaits us !
With location-tracking, I feel like a sitting duck. Now I don't even want a smartphone.
-- Jimtown Kelly
I understand that we can't expect privacy when out on a public road or out shopping or whatever. However having tens of thousands of drones watching and recording everything everyone does is not "American." This is not the freedom that our nation was founded on. This is nothing more than those in charge looking to control everyone by constant observation. If they know everywhere you go and everyone you see, how can you be free?
How long until companies can buy your travel history to see what you do and when you do it? They see you go to a bar every Friday and Saturday and don't hire you because they have data that shows people who drink alcohol miss more work. They see you go to your local democratic headquarters during election season so they fire you because the democratic party doesn't see things the way the company does.
I can promise you that I will be out with a rifle and a scope taking out as many as I can. If they use high altitude drones you can expect Americans to start smuggling SAMs into the states to take them out.
This is an issue that either everyone stands up and calls bullshit or we give our country and our freedom to big corporations and government agencies.
Is riding on the autobahn in heavy, heavy traffic. 5 lanes, no speed limits. The left lane was doing 70kph, second left 80, 90, 100 and the right lane was 'as fast as you want'. If someone in the right lane saw somebody bearing down on them, they switched one lane to the left and let them past. But you hardly saw anyone driving above 120, and I didn't see a single soul above 130. The car doing 130 was a brand new Porsche on a flat straight stretch of road ... a perfectly safe speed for such a car.
.. just flip on the indicator and the next person let you in. Nobody cutting people off, driving aggressively or getting frustrated. Everyone was driving very sensibly and patiently, with 60% of the people driving slower than what the marked speed limits would say if you were in Australia.
.. you make a conscious decision on how fast you want to drive. Give someone a limit and they react to that limit. Either by driving right on it, exceeding it or being aggressive toward others driving in their own way in relation to the limit.
All lanes moved smoothly, if you needed to change lanes
If you can drive however fast you want
Speed limits are a mechanism of control. They're designed to fill your head with ideas that you otherwise wouldn't have were you thinking without limits. The limits don't limit the speed of the car, they impact the mind of the driver. The more troubled the mind of the driver, the greater the impact of the limit. Roads are unsafe because of the impact of speed limits on drivers, not because of drivers exceeding speed limits.
Take the red pill.
The summary is mostly to blame here, because it leads you to believe the exact opposite of what's happening in the NJ state legislature - namely, that the bills introduced are all to RESTRICT drone usage in NJ. Even the least restrictive proposal seeks to require a warrant for their use and outright bans them for use in traffic or speed limit violation instances. The most restrictive seeks to ban them completely from the state.
Thanks for jumping the gun, everyone, and assuming that there's going to be speeding tickets handed out via drones in NJ. Blame slashdot if you want, but in the end, you're the morons for not RTFA.
I've learned that they're worthless, so I don't read AC comments anymore.
I'm talking HERF here. Pretty hard to do EMI protection when you lack a real ground. Just fry the communications on the things and they'll cease to be a useful tool to the pigs that run them.
What I did not see in TFA is what kind of missiles are they going to put on these drones (??).
Seriously, they doubled the size on about half of it, jacked up the rates and now there is like 1/4th the traffic. Rush hour is great and it's like the autobahn. So if the legislature wants to fly drones over it, well, good luck with that. It seems I (and many others) can't afford it anymore anyway.
Its starting to resemble Route 1, Pyonyang, North Korea.
it's right in TFA "Think about missing children,"
lets keep tax loopholes for the rich -- think of the children (the rich have children too)
lets invade some helpless country -- think of the children (there's children there we gotta save)
lets slash social security -- think of the children (people with children pay ss taxes)
lets extend copyright indefinitely -- think of the children (children need their mickey mouse protected)
lets have warrantless wiretaps -- think of the children (someone somewhere MIGHT be talking about children)
lets not have reform of campaign finance -- think of the children (politicians and rich executives have children, or make money off them)
lets grope everyone that wants to hop on a flight -- think of the children (children too, no exceptions)
works just about everywhere.
How long before the NRA introduces a bill for all Americans to have the right to bear drones with Hellfire missiles for self protection and hunting?
Ahem. Nice straw-man argument, but the math already dictates that you're better off speeding on the city street portions of your trip.
Consider a 10-mile trip (half-city, half-highway). If you only allow yourself to speed by +10mph for only one half of the trip, you'll get there a couple of minutes sooner if you choose to speed in the city. Do the math if you don't believe it.
They tried having photo cops on Route 80 in NJ back in the late 80's or early 90's (don't quite remember) and it was simply a camera sticking out of the back of a van. Trip the speed limit, take a photo of the driver, mail summons to person. From what I remember at the time, it caused a bit of an uproar after a few politicians got pictures of them driving with their mistress and the summons envelope being opened by their wife.
Speed enforcement is fine; it keeps people relatively sane with their driving habits. I personally feel that the dangerous ones on the road are the ones who are driving more than 5-10 mph away from the average that everyone else on the section of road is driving. But sometimes you have a clear shot where there is nobody around you and goosing it up several mph to gain some time isn't that big a deal. If an automaton is going to penalize me without any context, that's where I draw the line.
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
Thankfully I live in a State that has at least some semblance of constitutional restraint in mind.
Hopefully the legislature will pass this bill quickly, as it restricts police drone use to that which is specifically authorized by a warrant, related to a known specific criminal act.
"The bill would allow law enforcement to use drones only when a court has agreed that there are grounds to collect evidence relating to a specific instance of criminal wrongdoing, or in emergencies. Requiring a neutral arbiter to sign off on drone use assures the public that this new technology will be used consistently with our values."
So for a state that constantly complains about how we need to focus our budget on things that matter and cut out everything that doesn't this qualifies as something that's needed? So we are firing tons of other public workers all across the state to meet the budget yet somehow its ok to start some new program like this? Amazing what the higher ups find necessary for our state. On top of all this we have horrible traffic and can desperately use alternate highways to be made to alleviate the massive amounts of congestion yet all we will get it seems are drones that will probably make everyone's life even more miserable than it already is riding on these stop and go highways to work everyday. Fantastic news for everybody, glad to see our state making the best choices for the people as usual.
Who gives them the right to watch me, without a warrant?
Raising traffic fine revenue using drones is "high reward and low risk." It costs far more to have police officers do that job, who are better deployed to arrest dangerous criminals. The drone will "pay for themselves" in this use, unlike a hopefully rare national park search-and-rescue.
As a New Jersey resident (who commutes by train not car), I'd rather buy drones to do this work. Anyway, my last red-light ticket came from a camera and snail-mail print out. So, we already have automated traffic fines, which are at least more honest than human cops.
Lawmakers? Drones? highways?
Sounds like the real agenda is to allow Google to streetview the roads 24/7.
That the drones they show as an example are:
the AR.Done: a toy, with spy cameras, which perts can use on suspecting bikini-clad neighbors.
the Predator: a weapon, which is used to blow up stuff... including people.
Using 2 extremes compared to the drones already out there.
I have doubts. Per this link http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/tra_dri_sid_of_the_roa_lef_or_rig-driving-side-road-left-right Germany is a right-hand drive state (along with most of the continent). For the most part, you drive faster toward the center, e.g. left lane is the passing lane.
I suspect your Australian left-side-driving brain turned things inside out.
For the American audience, these speed are not remarkable:
70kph ~= 42mph
80 ~= 48
90 ~= 54 (the "slow" highway speed limit)
100 ~= 60 (typical is 65mph/108kph)
120 ~= 72 (occassionally 75mph/124kph)
130 ~= 78
In NV, there are stretches of road where the limit is 75mph (and that is unenforced due to the 2 patrol car/day schedule, see Top Gear s12e2). 80mph is routine for many parts of California (in spite of a 65mph limit). 130kph sound fast to an American who can't do metric conversions, but it really isn't that fast in practice. You'll see a few people doing 90mph in those situations. 100mph+ is considered unreasonable by about 98% of the population in almost all scenarios. (that would bet 160kph)
On the other hand, a town near me has a school on the highway through town, and that has a limit of 15mph (22kph). And it is effectively enforced by the population going that speed (so no bad actors could go through there faster due to the traffic jam). Hehe, one of our managers got a ticket for 30mph through there yesterday, and he regarded it as a fair cop.
Remember when we lived in America?