Why would anyone want to buy a Tesla when a Honda Civic will get you where you want to go for 1/3 the price?
Why would anyone want to buy a MacBook Pro when an Acer will do the job for 1/4 the price?
Why would anyone want to buy a Gucci handbag when a Walmart knockoff will carry your stuff for 1/10th the price?
Why would anyone want to buy a steak at Morton's when Waffle House will sell you one for 1/10th the price?
Why would anyone read SlashDot when you can get better news anywhere else on the planet?
Different strokes for different folks, plain and simple. Some people value a particular feature a lot more than others. Some people have more cash to burn than other people. It's why the world produces an array of products. Apple will still sell a brand new iPhone 7 for 1/2 the price of the iPhone X.
The original article states the chopper was "struck by an illegally flying drone over a residential neighborhood". That would be a "congested area, in FAA speak.
(b) Over congested areas. Over any congested area of a city, town, or settlement, or over any open air assembly of persons, an altitude of 1,000 feet above the highest obstacle within a horizontal radius of 2,000 feet of the aircraft.
The chopper should have been at least 1,000 feet above the highest structure, so probably at least 1,100 feet. Had it been at a proper altitude, it would have experienced no danger from the drone.
Chopper pilots, particularly military ones violate this rule all the time. Go to a beach near a base and they will be flying up and down practicing, I mean sight seeing very low causing a huge racket and generally annoying folks. There's really no punishment unless enough people complain, which they rarely do. Now that drones are on the rise, they have a real, dangerous obstacle. But rather than follow the rules and be safe, they want to blame the drones.
Fine the chopper pilot and revoke his license for a while.
It's a good question if you're not familiar with the typical setup.
The cars generally use HEP, a 480v AC distribution system.
In most locomotives the main diesel engine supplies electricity only to the traction motors. Basically the traction motors us a variable amount of volts and amps, and different voltages, than the passenger cars which want a fairly constant voltage. That's not to say this is a universal truth, one that has a single engine turning both the generator for the traction motors and for HEP is the F40PH, nicknamed the "screamer".
To keep the voltage constant the engine has to turn at a particular RPM. For a large (think 2000-3000HP) locomotive engine idling in a station and producing 300HP of HEP load this burns a TON of fuel. Super inefficient, super noisy.
As a result most passenger locomotives have a a separate genset for HEP only. Freight locomotives omit the HEP generator. Like any stand alone electrical generator, it's optimized for constant voltage output and continuous running.
Most locomotives today have no battery capacity, although there are a couple of brand new models that do. The simple truth is the numbers are large, one of the largest engines the AC6000CW can produce 4.5MW of power to the traction engine. That takes a lot of batteries!
These solar panels may allow them to ditch the HEP generator in the locomotive, and use that physical space for batteries that supply HEP only. More likely the generator will remain, and simply idle a lot more. Maybe a hybrid approach down the line. In regards to traction though, a whole train of solar panels is pretty much a drop in the bucket compared to the needs of 1-2 locomotives to move the train.
First, if I have a req for an engineer with a range of $160K-$190K, if you are making $220K I know it's unlikely that you will accept this job.
This is broken thinking, and is an example of the problem here.
I know plenty of folks who've left a $220k job with minimal or crappy benefits, for a $190k job with great benefits. I know others who made $220k by busting their hump at an 100 hour a week place and happy took $190k at a stable large company who was content with 40 hours a week after their baby was born. Salary may be a big motivator, but it's not the only motivator.
Everywhere I've worked the salary range for my "grade" has come out at one time or another. You're not keeping it a secret long term. Tell them the grade range is $160-$190, and ask them if it is worth their time to pursue knowing that. Most people won't waste your time if they really aren't willing to take that pay.
Most of what OP asks is basic construction better suited to ask your general contractor. Slabs, wall thickness, air conditioners and such are all going to be governed by code and standard formulas. It will likely have to be drawn up and approved by an engineer and a permit taken out for a habitable space.
I want to address the "trenching" part though, since probably few people have Outside Plant experience. Any copper running between buildings can create a ground loop. That's why the code for the electrical service running to this building will have strict requirements on ground rods and how they get connected. If you run any copper cable between the buildings (including CAT-anything or RG-anything) IT BECOMES PART OF THIS GROUNDING AND SURGE SYSTEM. Special terminations would be required at each end connected to the grounding the properly ground it and protect from surges (e.g. lightning) and keep this special office from going up in flames.
For the most part these days it is simply cheaper to use fiber optics. The light guide does not conduct electricity and thus has none of the grounding issues. Cheap switches come with SFP ports now, and multimode SFP's can be had for $30 or less. I would strongly recommend running conduit, buying a pre-terminated fiber cable to pull in it (likely 4 fibers, 2 for your active/in use pair, 2 for spares).
Whatever you do, make sure the person operating the machine calls before they dig. And I hope you don't have a sprinkler system, as those are pretty much never marked.
Remember that the algorithms not only look for patterns with your card, but patterns from merchants as well. It's quite likely the algorithm didn't get your spending habits wrong, but found a series of fraudulent charges from the merchant and marked them all as bad.
If you frequently buy internationally you need a bank that offers text or app based purchase verification. When a purchase is made with your card that looks questionable, they push an alert to your cell phone. Ack it and they now have a two-factor authorization for that purchase, and will generally allow it. If you travel overseas, particularly to high fraud countries, it is well worth calling or online chatting your bank and letting them know the countries in your itinerary, they will make adjustments.
The FAA actually has pretty good case law with RC model airplanes, showing their ability to regulate them and, at some level, treating them the same as any other aircraft. See Model Aircraft Operations.
The Military claims 50 yards effective range, and up to 80 yards lethality with the proper load. If this guy was sporting 00 or 000 buck rather than bird shot a kill on a fragile drone at 200' is not at all impossible.
Trap shooting is where a shotgun is used to hit a clay "pidgin". They are about 5" in diameter, way smaller than most drones, and moving at relatively high speed. The shooter stands 16-27 yards from the launch point of the clay, and typically hits them about 15-25 yards downstream of the launcher. That means they are regularly hitting a 5" target at 150' away, the best shooters with basically 100% accuracy.
A larger, slow moving drone at 200', hardly a challenge for anyone who has practiced trap, skeet, or bird hunting, and not even a remote challenge for a shotgun.
Federal Law does not put drones in a special category. They are just another aircraft. The penalty is up to 20 years in federal prison, and a $250,000 fine. That's in addition to the charges this individual has already faced for discharging a fire arm in the city he lived in, as they make that illegal there.
More interestingly, there is a line here that is not well defined. What's the difference between:
Google taking pictures from a Satellite for google maps.
Bing taking pictures from a Cessna at 10,000 feet for Bing maps.
The police helicopter flying over at 3,000 feet but only using their eyes.
The police helicopter flying over at 3,000 feet and using their 100x super-zoom camera.
The drone at 400 feet with a GoPro.
The done at 100 feet with a GoPro.
The drone hovering outside your window with a GoPro.
I think most people would say the first is fine, and it's not legal to try and shoot down the google satellite. Similarly, I think most people would be ok with taking action against the last one to protect privacy (even if that isn't legal per the federal law I cited above). This technology is so new, we simply haven't decided as a society where the line should be drawn, and our old laws probably don't work well.
It's not just personal houses either. What about the drones used by activists to fly over industrial operations breaking the law and get footage of it? Can the industrial operations shoot them down? If they do the same thing with a Cessna at 3,000 feet everyone would say no. What makes a drone at 400 any different?
As someone who has written in at least a dozen languages, I do not understand arguments that "python is easier to read" at all. The way python wants to use indentation to indicate blocks of code is much more difficult to read for anything of modest complexity. With standard tab widths it wastes too much screen space, and with smaller tab widths it becomes impossible to follow moderately complex code. There's a reason why almost every other language on the planet has some sort of block delimiters.
Also, python tends to be slow. I'm not sure how much of this is inherent to the language, and how much is how people use it. What I can say is that in real world experience python seems to be "too slow" for the task about twice as often as perl, and I have seen numerous examples of python tasks recoded into both C and perl to make them faster.
Python's main win seems to be that it is easy to learn. I'm afraid many of the reasons why also make it slow.
It's an easy problem to solve, not that we will.
High school level teachers should get one year of paid training every 5-8 years. That is, perhaps teach for 5 years, then attend a full years worth of classes at a university in their field, then go back to teaching. Paid, at their regular salary. That's how you get teachers who are current, interested, and properly trained.
Will most of the country go for it? No. Cries of paid vacation, and do it on your own time. Then they will complain teachers are undertrained and haven't kept up.
Ok, I'll bite. m:tier, a two-person company worth about 100,000 Pounds Sterling, that has been around for 6 years is your poster child? A company that has a single reference on its web site for a, and I quote:
We have been using the M:Tier CompliantBSD complete Desktop and Office solution since 2008 to provide an extremely secure and stable environment for up to 350 users across diverse geographical locations.
I think you just proved my point. When everyone else has thought about what to run and made their decision, a billion chose Windows, 66 million chose a Mac, and a few hundred chose OpenBSD. OpenBSD has so few users, it has trouble keeping the lights on, literally.
There is a fleetingly small number of companies with BSD on the desktop, virtually all are involved with supporting BSD in the data center (including m:tier), and they all involve a very small number of folks.
a focus on usability and mass appeal over flexibility and choice.
Let's parse that, because there's a lot packed in that small fragment.
focus on usability, so your complaint is that a vendor is spending a lot of time and effort making the software easy to use? Huh?
mass appeal, it's somehow a negative if the best option available is something everyone likes? Or turned around, it can only be a good option if a lot of people hate it? Huh?
over flexibility and choice, in what? In software? On a Mac you can open up a terminal window and./configure;make;make install pretty much any open source software I've ever seen. I think you'll be hard pressed to find any software that runs on FreeBSD that does not run on a Mac. Exactly how is a Mac limiting your choice of software? Perhaps you mean they only allow specific things in their App store? That's kind of like complaining that Ford limits your choice of tires by only selling Firestone in the service department. Maybe you mean in hardware? Except you can run any operating system you like on it. Plenty of people have installed Windows or even FreeBSD onto Apple hardware, it works just fine. You can throw out all of OS X if you want and still use the hardware. Now true, you can't do the opposite and run OS X on hardware of your choosing, so I'll give you that is a small limitation. But in the end what difference does that make.
You were drawn to linux to play. We've all gone through a phase where we tested 10 different window managers just to see what each could do. Linux, FreeBSD make that easy. It's fun. Other than a couple of guys at RedHat, I can't think of anyone who gets paid to do that though. Your job description probably doesn't include testing every software alternative in Linux.
I'm not saying you can't, all the usual stuff is in FreeBSD ports, there are distributions like PC-BSD that attempt to be good for desktops out of the box. If you really want to make it happen, you can. I've watched many Linux and FreeBSD folks spend countless hours making their desktops work.
Even going to a hard core sysadmin conference, you're going to see a sea of Mac's, some folks even using Windows, and a smattering of the hard core on Linux desktops. Why? To work with other people in their company or at other companies they need Skype, or WebEx to work. They need Excel to open the quotation for hardware, and flash player to view some mandatory training. They want resource browsing that just works so they can print to a printer in the office.
The reason BSD is great in the data center is lots of people use it for that. It's a network effect. You're standing on the shoulders of other folks. It's the same reason Windows and OS X dominate the user desktop market, the software you need just works on them, someone else has made it work. If I told you to replace all of your data center servers with Windows 8 boxes you'd probably laugh at me, and yet the opposite question does not provoke the same response!
So if you want to, try. It can be done, with much blood, sweat, and tears. You might find that fun, if so enjoy! You might work for a small enough company or even just yourself where you can mandate BSD, and LibreOffice and be happy. If so, you are extremely lucky. Otherwise as a long term, die hard, FreeBSD supporter I can tell you from 20+ years experience, you're going to just frustrate yourself.
One data breach of a CurrentC retailer such that bad guys can debt someone's account, followed by the subsequent "sorry, the money's gone and you have no fraud protection" will be the end of it. After the national news skewering no consumer will trust such a system ever again, and retailers will have lost all hope of getting around credit cards.
Given how often data is breached these days, I give it about 3 months after the system rolls out. 12 tops.
Using it for bombings. What's so different from sending an autodrive vehicle to someplace with a bomb in it as opposed to sending a regular vehicle with a bomb and then leaving it before it blows, or even having some ignorant stooge drive it for you? After all, it's not like you can make the autodrive violate it's programming and plow through a crowd or into a mall. If you really wanted to do that, you could just rig a normal car up with remote controls. It's not that hard or expensive, they do it a lot on mythbusters, so it's not a strange concept to most people either.
I'm afraid you're not being very creative. The threat isn't one car with one bomb, because you can always find a single bomber. The threat here is fleets of cars, possibly hacked remotely, perhaps in coordination with other attacks. For instance many government buildings have strict security on which cars can get inside the perimeter. A latent trojan in the car firmware might not activate until after it was inside the security perimeter. Or if someone could find a way to take over a fleet of semi-trucks they may be able to convince them to all drive down a perfectly ordinary street -- at the same time a marathon is being held. It's the same tactics being used with botnets on the internet, but this time with real things that pose life-threatening dangers.
Another reply has already pointed out the "navigable airspace" limitation. The specific FAA rule is FAR Part 91.119 Minimum Safe Altitudes. Basically 500 feet everywhere, and 1,000 feet over "populated areas".
Back in 1981 the FAA addressed RC operators with Advisory Circular 91-57. It requires RC operators stay under 400', remain in line of sight, and coordinate with an airport if they are within 3 miles of the airport (which is where planes may be under those minimums due to take offs and landings.
This set of rules basically insures vertical separation of RC operators and "real" planes. It's worked for over 30 years, quite nicely. In fact the FAA is quite happy with this for "drone" (really RC quadcopter) operators. Buy one, fly it over your house within the rules, take a video and post it on YouTube for your "hobby" and the FAA is perfectly ok with it, and won't give you a hard time.
Rather, the FAA is drawing a different line here. They have a long history of distinguishing between commercial and private operations, and have different regulations for both. They have generally held in the past that "all commercial operators must be licensed", which in the context of real planes makes perfect sense. But with these new quadcopters this rule has gone screwy. If you take the same video from the last paragraph and provide it to your realtor to help sell your house, suddenly you are a "commercial" operator and can't operate without an FAA License, and oh by the way they have no procedure to license RC operators right now so you can't get one, but you can ask for a one off waver, it may be approved in a few months.
And that's what is stupid here. If it's a RC device, operated by a human, under 400' and in line of site, they should stay out of it. Commercial or hobby shouldn't matter.
It's actually a rather common, and well studied occurrence. For instance here's a 70 MPH into a tree car split in half. Many cars have had extremely weak side impact designs for years. It's also one of the hardest things to protect against since there is no crumple zone on the side to absorb energy, unlike the front and back.
I bet across the country there are multiple cars split in half every single day, many from hitting narrow objects like light poles at relatively modest speeds, like 45MPH.
The latest iPad Air made some news in the tech circles when it came out for it's 4G capabilities. It was the first time Apple was able to use 100% identical hardware for AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, and T-Mobile. In fact, baring some stupidity in provisioning departments, it's possible to buy one, get SIM's from the other three, and have a 4-provider iPad in the US.
Based on my reading at the time, due to the power and antenna requirements there were no phones that had the same laundry list of 4G bands. Of course that was ~1 year ago now, and time moves pretty fast in the mobile world. The reason I post this though is the iPad Air makes a killer 4G hotspot, 24 hours of battery life with the screen off. Maybe a 3G world phone and an iPad Air for high speed data are a viable solution? The iPad also is sold unlocked from Apple, no extra charge. Phones will likely have carrier locking issues.
It exists, and is called GnuTLS. All the developers I've worked with who've looked at it and OpenSSL say it is worse than OpenSSL, although I don't remember the particulars of why. Feel free to support it if you prefer a GNU alternative.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would anyone want to buy a Tesla when a Honda Civic will get you where you want to go for 1/3 the price?
Why would anyone want to buy a MacBook Pro when an Acer will do the job for 1/4 the price?
Why would anyone want to buy a Gucci handbag when a Walmart knockoff will carry your stuff for 1/10th the price?
Why would anyone want to buy a steak at Morton's when Waffle House will sell you one for 1/10th the price?
Why would anyone read SlashDot when you can get better news anywhere else on the planet?
Different strokes for different folks, plain and simple. Some people value a particular feature a lot more than others. Some people have more cash to burn than other people. It's why the world produces an array of products. Apple will still sell a brand new iPhone 7 for 1/2 the price of the iPhone X.
The original article states the chopper was "struck by an illegally flying drone over a residential neighborhood". That would be a "congested area, in FAA speak.
91.119 - Minimum safe altitudes: General
(b) Over congested areas. Over any congested area of a city, town, or settlement, or over any open air assembly of persons, an altitude of 1,000 feet above the highest obstacle within a horizontal radius of 2,000 feet of the aircraft.
The chopper should have been at least 1,000 feet above the highest structure, so probably at least 1,100 feet. Had it been at a proper altitude, it would have experienced no danger from the drone.
Chopper pilots, particularly military ones violate this rule all the time. Go to a beach near a base and they will be flying up and down practicing, I mean sight seeing very low causing a huge racket and generally annoying folks. There's really no punishment unless enough people complain, which they rarely do. Now that drones are on the rise, they have a real, dangerous obstacle. But rather than follow the rules and be safe, they want to blame the drones.
Fine the chopper pilot and revoke his license for a while.
It's a good question if you're not familiar with the typical setup.
The cars generally use HEP, a 480v AC distribution system.
In most locomotives the main diesel engine supplies electricity only to the traction motors. Basically the traction motors us a variable amount of volts and amps, and different voltages, than the passenger cars which want a fairly constant voltage. That's not to say this is a universal truth, one that has a single engine turning both the generator for the traction motors and for HEP is the F40PH, nicknamed the "screamer".
To keep the voltage constant the engine has to turn at a particular RPM. For a large (think 2000-3000HP) locomotive engine idling in a station and producing 300HP of HEP load this burns a TON of fuel. Super inefficient, super noisy.
As a result most passenger locomotives have a a separate genset for HEP only. Freight locomotives omit the HEP generator. Like any stand alone electrical generator, it's optimized for constant voltage output and continuous running.
Most locomotives today have no battery capacity, although there are a couple of brand new models that do. The simple truth is the numbers are large, one of the largest engines the AC6000CW can produce 4.5MW of power to the traction engine. That takes a lot of batteries!
These solar panels may allow them to ditch the HEP generator in the locomotive, and use that physical space for batteries that supply HEP only. More likely the generator will remain, and simply idle a lot more. Maybe a hybrid approach down the line. In regards to traction though, a whole train of solar panels is pretty much a drop in the bucket compared to the needs of 1-2 locomotives to move the train.
First, if I have a req for an engineer with a range of $160K-$190K, if you are making $220K I know it's unlikely that you will accept this job.
This is broken thinking, and is an example of the problem here.
I know plenty of folks who've left a $220k job with minimal or crappy benefits, for a $190k job with great benefits. I know others who made $220k by busting their hump at an 100 hour a week place and happy took $190k at a stable large company who was content with 40 hours a week after their baby was born. Salary may be a big motivator, but it's not the only motivator.
Everywhere I've worked the salary range for my "grade" has come out at one time or another. You're not keeping it a secret long term. Tell them the grade range is $160-$190, and ask them if it is worth their time to pursue knowing that. Most people won't waste your time if they really aren't willing to take that pay.
Most of what OP asks is basic construction better suited to ask your general contractor. Slabs, wall thickness, air conditioners and such are all going to be governed by code and standard formulas. It will likely have to be drawn up and approved by an engineer and a permit taken out for a habitable space. I want to address the "trenching" part though, since probably few people have Outside Plant experience. Any copper running between buildings can create a ground loop. That's why the code for the electrical service running to this building will have strict requirements on ground rods and how they get connected. If you run any copper cable between the buildings (including CAT-anything or RG-anything) IT BECOMES PART OF THIS GROUNDING AND SURGE SYSTEM. Special terminations would be required at each end connected to the grounding the properly ground it and protect from surges (e.g. lightning) and keep this special office from going up in flames. For the most part these days it is simply cheaper to use fiber optics. The light guide does not conduct electricity and thus has none of the grounding issues. Cheap switches come with SFP ports now, and multimode SFP's can be had for $30 or less. I would strongly recommend running conduit, buying a pre-terminated fiber cable to pull in it (likely 4 fibers, 2 for your active/in use pair, 2 for spares). Whatever you do, make sure the person operating the machine calls before they dig. And I hope you don't have a sprinkler system, as those are pretty much never marked.
Remember that the algorithms not only look for patterns with your card, but patterns from merchants as well. It's quite likely the algorithm didn't get your spending habits wrong, but found a series of fraudulent charges from the merchant and marked them all as bad.
If you frequently buy internationally you need a bank that offers text or app based purchase verification. When a purchase is made with your card that looks questionable, they push an alert to your cell phone. Ack it and they now have a two-factor authorization for that purchase, and will generally allow it. If you travel overseas, particularly to high fraud countries, it is well worth calling or online chatting your bank and letting them know the countries in your itinerary, they will make adjustments.
The FAA actually has pretty good case law with RC model airplanes, showing their ability to regulate them and, at some level, treating them the same as any other aircraft. See Model Aircraft Operations.
You're not quite right for fixed wing, but more importantly for the discussion at hand helicopters have an exemption in FAR 91.119.
The Military claims 50 yards effective range, and up to 80 yards lethality with the proper load. If this guy was sporting 00 or 000 buck rather than bird shot a kill on a fragile drone at 200' is not at all impossible.
I beg to differ, and have a great example.
Trap shooting is where a shotgun is used to hit a clay "pidgin". They are about 5" in diameter, way smaller than most drones, and moving at relatively high speed. The shooter stands 16-27 yards from the launch point of the clay, and typically hits them about 15-25 yards downstream of the launcher. That means they are regularly hitting a 5" target at 150' away, the best shooters with basically 100% accuracy.
A larger, slow moving drone at 200', hardly a challenge for anyone who has practiced trap, skeet, or bird hunting, and not even a remote challenge for a shotgun.
I can pay the fine
Federal Law does not put drones in a special category. They are just another aircraft. The penalty is up to 20 years in federal prison, and a $250,000 fine. That's in addition to the charges this individual has already faced for discharging a fire arm in the city he lived in, as they make that illegal there.
More interestingly, there is a line here that is not well defined. What's the difference between:
I think most people would say the first is fine, and it's not legal to try and shoot down the google satellite. Similarly, I think most people would be ok with taking action against the last one to protect privacy (even if that isn't legal per the federal law I cited above). This technology is so new, we simply haven't decided as a society where the line should be drawn, and our old laws probably don't work well.
It's not just personal houses either. What about the drones used by activists to fly over industrial operations breaking the law and get footage of it? Can the industrial operations shoot them down? If they do the same thing with a Cessna at 3,000 feet everyone would say no. What makes a drone at 400 any different?
Without roads, students and teachers can't get to school, making them useless. So roads > schools.
As someone who has written in at least a dozen languages, I do not understand arguments that "python is easier to read" at all. The way python wants to use indentation to indicate blocks of code is much more difficult to read for anything of modest complexity. With standard tab widths it wastes too much screen space, and with smaller tab widths it becomes impossible to follow moderately complex code. There's a reason why almost every other language on the planet has some sort of block delimiters.
Also, python tends to be slow. I'm not sure how much of this is inherent to the language, and how much is how people use it. What I can say is that in real world experience python seems to be "too slow" for the task about twice as often as perl, and I have seen numerous examples of python tasks recoded into both C and perl to make them faster.
Python's main win seems to be that it is easy to learn. I'm afraid many of the reasons why also make it slow.
It's an easy problem to solve, not that we will. High school level teachers should get one year of paid training every 5-8 years. That is, perhaps teach for 5 years, then attend a full years worth of classes at a university in their field, then go back to teaching. Paid, at their regular salary. That's how you get teachers who are current, interested, and properly trained. Will most of the country go for it? No. Cries of paid vacation, and do it on your own time. Then they will complain teachers are undertrained and haven't kept up.
Ok, I'll bite. m:tier, a two-person company worth about 100,000 Pounds Sterling, that has been around for 6 years is your poster child? A company that has a single reference on its web site for a, and I quote:
We have been using the M:Tier CompliantBSD complete Desktop and Office solution since 2008 to provide an extremely secure and stable environment for up to 350 users across diverse geographical locations.
And somehow you want us to believe this is evidence that BSD is competitive on the desktop with over a billion Windows installations, or 66 million Macs in use?
I think you just proved my point. When everyone else has thought about what to run and made their decision, a billion chose Windows, 66 million chose a Mac, and a few hundred chose OpenBSD. OpenBSD has so few users, it has trouble keeping the lights on, literally.
There is a fleetingly small number of companies with BSD on the desktop, virtually all are involved with supporting BSD in the data center (including m:tier), and they all involve a very small number of folks.
a focus on usability and mass appeal over flexibility and choice.
Let's parse that, because there's a lot packed in that small fragment.
focus on usability, so your complaint is that a vendor is spending a lot of time and effort making the software easy to use? Huh?
mass appeal, it's somehow a negative if the best option available is something everyone likes? Or turned around, it can only be a good option if a lot of people hate it? Huh?
over flexibility and choice, in what? In software? On a Mac you can open up a terminal window and ./configure;make;make install pretty much any open source software I've ever seen. I think you'll be hard pressed to find any software that runs on FreeBSD that does not run on a Mac. Exactly how is a Mac limiting your choice of software? Perhaps you mean they only allow specific things in their App store? That's kind of like complaining that Ford limits your choice of tires by only selling Firestone in the service department. Maybe you mean in hardware? Except you can run any operating system you like on it. Plenty of people have installed Windows or even FreeBSD onto Apple hardware, it works just fine. You can throw out all of OS X if you want and still use the hardware. Now true, you can't do the opposite and run OS X on hardware of your choosing, so I'll give you that is a small limitation. But in the end what difference does that make.
You were drawn to linux to play. We've all gone through a phase where we tested 10 different window managers just to see what each could do. Linux, FreeBSD make that easy. It's fun. Other than a couple of guys at RedHat, I can't think of anyone who gets paid to do that though. Your job description probably doesn't include testing every software alternative in Linux.
You don't want to use BSD on the desktop.
I'm not saying you can't, all the usual stuff is in FreeBSD ports, there are distributions like PC-BSD that attempt to be good for desktops out of the box. If you really want to make it happen, you can. I've watched many Linux and FreeBSD folks spend countless hours making their desktops work.
Even going to a hard core sysadmin conference, you're going to see a sea of Mac's, some folks even using Windows, and a smattering of the hard core on Linux desktops. Why? To work with other people in their company or at other companies they need Skype, or WebEx to work. They need Excel to open the quotation for hardware, and flash player to view some mandatory training. They want resource browsing that just works so they can print to a printer in the office.
The reason BSD is great in the data center is lots of people use it for that. It's a network effect. You're standing on the shoulders of other folks. It's the same reason Windows and OS X dominate the user desktop market, the software you need just works on them, someone else has made it work. If I told you to replace all of your data center servers with Windows 8 boxes you'd probably laugh at me, and yet the opposite question does not provoke the same response!
So if you want to, try. It can be done, with much blood, sweat, and tears. You might find that fun, if so enjoy! You might work for a small enough company or even just yourself where you can mandate BSD, and LibreOffice and be happy. If so, you are extremely lucky. Otherwise as a long term, die hard, FreeBSD supporter I can tell you from 20+ years experience, you're going to just frustrate yourself.
One data breach of a CurrentC retailer such that bad guys can debt someone's account, followed by the subsequent "sorry, the money's gone and you have no fraud protection" will be the end of it. After the national news skewering no consumer will trust such a system ever again, and retailers will have lost all hope of getting around credit cards. Given how often data is breached these days, I give it about 3 months after the system rolls out. 12 tops.
...there's a good chance I don't want it.
Using it for bombings. What's so different from sending an autodrive vehicle to someplace with a bomb in it as opposed to sending a regular vehicle with a bomb and then leaving it before it blows, or even having some ignorant stooge drive it for you? After all, it's not like you can make the autodrive violate it's programming and plow through a crowd or into a mall. If you really wanted to do that, you could just rig a normal car up with remote controls. It's not that hard or expensive, they do it a lot on mythbusters, so it's not a strange concept to most people either.
I'm afraid you're not being very creative. The threat isn't one car with one bomb, because you can always find a single bomber. The threat here is fleets of cars, possibly hacked remotely, perhaps in coordination with other attacks. For instance many government buildings have strict security on which cars can get inside the perimeter. A latent trojan in the car firmware might not activate until after it was inside the security perimeter. Or if someone could find a way to take over a fleet of semi-trucks they may be able to convince them to all drive down a perfectly ordinary street -- at the same time a marathon is being held. It's the same tactics being used with botnets on the internet, but this time with real things that pose life-threatening dangers.
Another reply has already pointed out the "navigable airspace" limitation. The specific FAA rule is FAR Part 91.119 Minimum Safe Altitudes. Basically 500 feet everywhere, and 1,000 feet over "populated areas".
Back in 1981 the FAA addressed RC operators with Advisory Circular 91-57. It requires RC operators stay under 400', remain in line of sight, and coordinate with an airport if they are within 3 miles of the airport (which is where planes may be under those minimums due to take offs and landings.
This set of rules basically insures vertical separation of RC operators and "real" planes. It's worked for over 30 years, quite nicely. In fact the FAA is quite happy with this for "drone" (really RC quadcopter) operators. Buy one, fly it over your house within the rules, take a video and post it on YouTube for your "hobby" and the FAA is perfectly ok with it, and won't give you a hard time.
Rather, the FAA is drawing a different line here. They have a long history of distinguishing between commercial and private operations, and have different regulations for both. They have generally held in the past that "all commercial operators must be licensed", which in the context of real planes makes perfect sense. But with these new quadcopters this rule has gone screwy. If you take the same video from the last paragraph and provide it to your realtor to help sell your house, suddenly you are a "commercial" operator and can't operate without an FAA License, and oh by the way they have no procedure to license RC operators right now so you can't get one, but you can ask for a one off waver, it may be approved in a few months.
And that's what is stupid here. If it's a RC device, operated by a human, under 400' and in line of site, they should stay out of it. Commercial or hobby shouldn't matter.
I think I can help you out.
It's actually a rather common, and well studied occurrence. For instance here's a 70 MPH into a tree car split in half. Many cars have had extremely weak side impact designs for years. It's also one of the hardest things to protect against since there is no crumple zone on the side to absorb energy, unlike the front and back.
I bet across the country there are multiple cars split in half every single day, many from hitting narrow objects like light poles at relatively modest speeds, like 45MPH.
The latest iPad Air made some news in the tech circles when it came out for it's 4G capabilities. It was the first time Apple was able to use 100% identical hardware for AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, and T-Mobile. In fact, baring some stupidity in provisioning departments, it's possible to buy one, get SIM's from the other three, and have a 4-provider iPad in the US.
The specs:
UMTS/HSPA/HSPA+/DC-HSDPA (850, 900, 1700/2100, 1900, 2100 MHz); GSM/EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz)
CDMA EV-DO Rev. A and Rev. B (800, 1900 MHz)
LTE (Bands 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 13, 17, 18, 19, 20, 25, 26)
Based on my reading at the time, due to the power and antenna requirements there were no phones that had the same laundry list of 4G bands. Of course that was ~1 year ago now, and time moves pretty fast in the mobile world. The reason I post this though is the iPad Air makes a killer 4G hotspot, 24 hours of battery life with the screen off. Maybe a 3G world phone and an iPad Air for high speed data are a viable solution? The iPad also is sold unlocked from Apple, no extra charge. Phones will likely have carrier locking issues.
It was a kick-starter wet dream. When I saw the initial post I said "He'll have the money in 48 hours tops". Apparently I overestimated by about 4x!
We need a GNU/SSL fork too. GPL forever!
It exists, and is called GnuTLS. All the developers I've worked with who've looked at it and OpenSSL say it is worse than OpenSSL, although I don't remember the particulars of why. Feel free to support it if you prefer a GNU alternative.