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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.
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.
Mounting things to light poles is 10,000 times more practical.
Bruce Perens.
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!
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.
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.