They'd still show up on radar without a transponder and it would make no sense at all to not have a $200 transponder on $200,000 drone.
Or they would if raw RADAR returns were actually displayed to Air Traffic Controllers.... they don't see anything but a computer generated screen populated with traffic based on IFF transponder returns...
The FAA isn't stupid when it comes to safety (you might even say they're borderline paranoid). They won't give arbitrary exceptions to safety-related regulations.
True enough, which is why nothing flying in "commercial" air traffic lanes will be allowed there without an IFF device...
OTOH, Drones of the sort that have been getting popular with law enforcement tend to be smaller units that loiter over alleys or even sit on a roof monitoring activitiy...
Having ONE drone capable of flying at 30,000 feet with an amazing telescope just might not be as useful as a few dozen little rotor bugs that can peep into windows and send back a grainy 640x480 video that shows where the Bad Guys are lurking...
Communications medium of every kind including radio spectrum should be directly provided by the government.
I'll just address this...
Have you ever seen the government administer ANYTHING more efficently than a "for profit" private corporation?
If I want DMV type service from my cellular provider (or any wireless/data/comm stuff) I can find always look at the coverage charts and buy from a company that doesn't actually have a working presence in my part of the map...
I most certainly don't need that becoming the standard...
OTOH I DO MOST CERTAINLY WANT the FCC, who is supposedly administering spectrum belonging to We The People, to get the best profit out of LEASING it to companies competing for it's use!!!!!!
Five year leases, one automatic renewal and then it goes back on the block for a new bid!!!!!
I had a Motorola v360. It had such a good microphone that I could walk down a Manhattan avenue talking and people would not know I was even outside except for the occasional siren.
Then you would enjoy the Droid X, Razr, and other late model Motorola Android phones as well... three microphones for active noice cancelation
I can be in a Fire Truck, or sitting on my diesel farm tractor, and all people can hear is my voice...
Finding a suitable Bluetooth earpiece that has noise reduction nearly as good took a bit of hunting... My current Plantronics does a pretty decent job, but the phone has an advantage in the distance between mics...
More people would go closer to bison than they would to grizzlies...
Which is why so many visitors to Yellowstone and the Flathead Bison Reservation take a few weeks to recover from their vation time before going home... (if they make it back...)
They are "furry" so they MUST be nice to touch!!! Idiots!
They'd better watch out... Paramount is VERY jealous of that "Tricorder" word... The Android application that actually enabled some of those functions got smashed...
Let's see... IT problems, in my experience, tend to come in three basic categories...
Things that people broke, things they're not supposed to do, and things that wouldn't have happened if they'd Read The Fine Manual...
They're NOT aloof, they're something that's a mixture of bored, disgusted, and amused...
Once in a while you get a real technical challenge... but that always seems to happen when they wanted it yesterday
There are many uses for cables that really are perfect quality, made with best parts and are harder and more professional than your usual home cables. Usually they are required in production environments, not for your home HDTV. Same is true for video as in this case, but also audio. The prices can seemingly look high, but remember that these products are used for professional work.
I know that there's never yet been a successful conversion of an Audiophule to common sense... but FWIW HDMI is "digital" meaning that several paper clips wired between the jacks would carry the signal (1s & 0s) as well as the most expensive piece of highway robbery a crook could get a pigeon to buy...
On the other hand... if you're getting this you'd better plan to include "High Definition" AC cables as well... I can recommend some that are less $2,000 for a six foot power cable... AudioQuest makes their "Hyperlitz" cables for the discerning Audiophule who can hear the difference between 60 cycle and 50 cycle power supplies...
So given that there were 2 sides fighting, which side do you suggest America should have supported ?
What if they gave a war, and the United States just watched them duke it out WITHOUT taking sides???
I realize they our "representatives" still believe the idiotic mantra "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" but it hasn't worked that way in the last fifty years... at BEST we've found fair weather friends that way...
Our ENEMIES from the past are now much better allies than some of those we've never opposed at all...
Can you imagine how much money it would save just minding out own business unless there is a "Vital Interest" at stake?
Housing prices holding their value? Here? What's he smoking?
For the local folks who grew up there housing prices have done OK... especially when they bought early to be under Prop 13 protections on taxes.
One of my high school classmates owns a home downtown... and has probably lost a couple hundred thousand in property value over the last decade or so... on paper...
OTOH, she bought it for 30 or 40K and it peaked at more half a million before settling down to merely 8 or 9 times her purchase price...
Expecting "accuracy" from "journalists" that can't spell, parse a sentence, or explain what "journalistic integrity" is versus "making news" is a bit naive isn't it?
We're seeing the same result in journalism as we've already seen in economics... both have become a way of making things happen instead of observing and explaining what REALLY occurred.
Using them as levers to move society hasn't worked out all that well... unintended consequences tend to be worse the harder they try...
Besides a Good Story is a LOT more interesting than mundane facts any day of the week! "if it bleeds it leads!!!"
but spending money on DRM books doesn't seem worth the convenience (I suppose) that Amazon offers...
So far I've been able to get non-DRM books sufficient to keep me reading for years and most of my writer friends are published without DRM and doing quite well even though the only thing keeping their files from being "shared" is the honor system... If an E-Bbook is not being sold DRM free the printed copy is, as was pointed out before, something I can read then sell, or give away...
The general public doesn't seem to mind that their books can be deleted remotely, that they are paying nearly the full price of a book for a "license" to read the text (subject to the terms and conditions they also haven't read), or that by doing so they are encouraging more of the same...
Unfortunately the education required to make the public aware of this as a problem is a probably beyond the appreciation of the 50% of the population that both test "below average" in intelligence, and learn about what they "want" or "need" from advertising... Especially whatever portion of them see a Kindle or Nook being read by beautiful people in beautiful surroundings and assume that their life would be better for having the product...
Living in an area where people die withing a few miles of a road every year the idea that GPS systems might be affected is enough to make me want to know a LOT more before something like this is put out in the field...
The "Power Line Carrier" stuff was only good for wiping all LF, and HF communications for miles... using the power lines as HUGE antennas for those bands...
The FCC has had a poor track record on unintended consequences in naming secondary users, or allowing commercial exploitation of frequencies already assigned to other services.
DSLR models, as has been pointed out. are terrific cameras... My personal equipment bag holds one body, a couple of lenses, some filters, batteries, spare batteries, charger, remote, and a camcorder with its accessories... and only takes up the space of a small backpack...
That said, a "point and shoot" camera that can fit in your pocket, has at least a 7x zoom range, and will do perfectly acceptable video, comes in at around $300... whereas my favorite lens ran a little over a grand a half dozen years ago.
The slightly larger models with 10-25x zooms run a bit more, but still can be carried in a small case and have terrific sensors...
When I'm not toting a backpack full of gear, my favorite format is the "super zoom" camera that combine the best of both worlds, creative control of exposure, a very wide zoom range, and great glass... all wrapped up in a compact package.
What are you giving up from a DSLR? Not much really...
The P&S cameras are usually not as capable of taking extreme low light pictures, meaning that you'll be using a flash more often, they don't have specialized lenses for wide angle or telephoto, meaning only that you have to work within the camera's limitations.
Where they are less adequate is in technically difficult or artistic shots where the wide range of lenses and settings a DSLR gives you makes the shot possible.
The kind of shot for which photographic artists spend hours setting up that perfect exposure, and tourists get by firing off dozens of shots to stumble on one perfect frame...
The photographer is a hundred times as important as the gear though, if you're shooting a camera with "shutter lag" you'll have to anticipate the action to catch "The Moment"... If it's not as useful in low light, creatively rearranging the room lighting, or using a tripod can bring make the difference...
All that said, a $69 pocket camera beats even my Rolleiflex f2.8 film camera if one is back home in a box and the other is in your hand when things happen!!!
"security vendors" are concerned about the "rise of malware" on the Android platform...
Hmmmm... know anyone that's found a "malware" application lately... at least one that didn't specify permissions up front?
I suspect that the only malware out there MIGHT be some Trojans that users installed and fat, dumb, and ignorantly gave permission for the program to OWN their device...
I haven't even found a real "virus" on a PC for years, only Trojans using some crude social engineering designed to appeal to the cheap (and ignorant) using the lowest common denominator...
I'd rather they called me when their computer ran "slow" instead of downloading the first piece of crap that promises to "fix" their PC... but the time it takes to track down a "send money" Trojan PLUS the time spent cleaning up their system so it will function as good as new is ALL billable time...
I've used my palmtop/phone/pad systems for note taking for quite a while now... starting with a Palm Pilot and the IR folding keyboard that they sold.
The worst (but still functional) setup I've used was a Samsung Palm OS flip phone, with a wired keyboard... worked great, but, between no stand for the phone, and the cable in the way, was just a little inconvenient
My current setup is a MS Mobil Bluetooth Keyboard 6000 and a Droid X...
The keyboard is about 3/8 inch thick and about the size of a standard laptop keyboard with a nicely ergonomic layout... When I picked it up it was about $80 with a separate 10-Key pad...
It's not quite as nice as the Palm folding keyboard and T5 since there's nothing like the built in stand that Palm provided... but it's a LOT nicer keyboard for the touch typist!
I'm pretty sure that a similar keyboard with any of the Apple or Android pads would do every bit as well...
Then again she could have been downloading files that the heavy hitters were prosecuting for hundreds of thousands of dollars of damages EACH and WINNING...
Not that it excuses a beating, but I'd have been a little torqued over my entire life's accomplishments being jeopardized by an asswipe kid wanting to steal software/files... especially when a pattern of theft continued despite continued repeated efforts to break her of the habit...
Not only did she set up and stage manage the video, but she managed to live off him till recently and only released the video when he told her a part time job in a game store wasn't cutting it... he wasn't paying for her lifestyle any longer and BTW drop off the Mercedes at the house...
She told him he'd live to regret it, and did her best to make that come true..
.
Now she and her mom are making the talk show circuits and getting lots of sympathy...
As a slow learner, taking 33 years to go from my HS diploma to a BS degree, I got to see some of the changes in Economics first hand
My first Macro Economics class was concerned with STUDYING the market to see how it was affected by consumers and take advantage of their NEEDS, WANTS, and DESIRES to produce products to fulfill their expectations... thus providing products, and services that people would exchange their hard earned money for and make a profit for anyone serving the market successfully...
By the time I graduated (Business Management) it had changed to an "Applied Science" focused on CHANGING consumer behavior and INFLUENCING society... the problem being it only influences that portion of society that doesn't understand economics...
The rules of the game as I was taught early on would have predicted (and did from the mouths of those still using them) all of the economic woes we've seen...
The Social Tool that "Modern Economics" theories are based on don't really work quite the way the books claim... kinda like when the butcher puts his thumb on the scale and says "this is for Timmy’s College Fund" and the customers don't appreciate the "contribution" they're making
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They'd still show up on radar without a transponder and it would make no sense at all to not have a $200 transponder on $200,000 drone.
Or they would if raw RADAR returns were actually displayed to Air Traffic Controllers.... they don't see anything but a computer generated screen populated with traffic based on IFF transponder returns...
The FAA isn't stupid when it comes to safety (you might even say they're borderline paranoid). They won't give arbitrary exceptions to safety-related regulations.
True enough, which is why nothing flying in "commercial" air traffic lanes will be allowed there without an IFF device... OTOH, Drones of the sort that have been getting popular with law enforcement tend to be smaller units that loiter over alleys or even sit on a roof monitoring activitiy...
Having ONE drone capable of flying at 30,000 feet with an amazing telescope just might not be as useful as a few dozen little rotor bugs that can peep into windows and send back a grainy 640x480 video that shows where the Bad Guys are lurking...
Communications medium of every kind including radio spectrum should be directly provided by the government.
I'll just address this...
Have you ever seen the government administer ANYTHING more efficently than a "for profit" private corporation? If I want DMV type service from my cellular provider (or any wireless/data/comm stuff) I can find always look at the coverage charts and buy from a company that doesn't actually have a working presence in my part of the map...
I most certainly don't need that becoming the standard...
OTOH I DO MOST CERTAINLY WANT the FCC, who is supposedly administering spectrum belonging to We The People, to get the best profit out of LEASING it to companies competing for it's use!!!!!!
Five year leases, one automatic renewal and then it goes back on the block for a new bid!!!!!
I had a Motorola v360. It had such a good microphone that I could walk down a Manhattan avenue talking and people would not know I was even outside except for the occasional siren.
Then you would enjoy the Droid X, Razr, and other late model Motorola Android phones as well... three microphones for active noice cancelation
I can be in a Fire Truck, or sitting on my diesel farm tractor, and all people can hear is my voice...
Finding a suitable Bluetooth earpiece that has noise reduction nearly as good took a bit of hunting... My current Plantronics does a pretty decent job, but the phone has an advantage in the distance between mics...
More people would go closer to bison than they would to grizzlies...
Which is why so many visitors to Yellowstone and the Flathead Bison Reservation take a few weeks to recover from their vation time before going home... (if they make it back...)
They are "furry" so they MUST be nice to touch!!! Idiots!
Except those of us who used to watch as NDI labs routinely X-rayed welds, castings, and even whole aircraft to discover hidden flaws in the metal...
There are some nice water cooled X-Ray tubes that woudn't fit in your dentist's office
If that isn't sufficent even more powerful gamma ray sources are avialable too...
My Droid Razr is SUPPOSED to be protected by a similar coating... My "testing" so far has been unintended splashes once in a while.
There's no reason the same treatment that makes some Docker pants stain and waterproof wouldn't work on other materials...
Sounds like a good idea to me!
They'd better watch out... Paramount is VERY jealous of that "Tricorder" word... The Android application that actually enabled some of those functions got smashed...
Let's see... IT problems, in my experience, tend to come in three basic categories... Things that people broke, things they're not supposed to do, and things that wouldn't have happened if they'd Read The Fine Manual...
They're NOT aloof, they're something that's a mixture of bored, disgusted, and amused...
Once in a while you get a real technical challenge... but that always seems to happen when they wanted it yesterday
I can't believe it, he's actually on to something there...
Theaters that are enjoyable get customers to come back over and over... even if Hollywood isn't holding up their end of the deal
It's not rocket science Roger!!!
There are many uses for cables that really are perfect quality, made with best parts and are harder and more professional than your usual home cables. Usually they are required in production environments, not for your home HDTV. Same is true for video as in this case, but also audio. The prices can seemingly look high, but remember that these products are used for professional work.
I know that there's never yet been a successful conversion of an Audiophule to common sense... but FWIW HDMI is "digital" meaning that several paper clips wired between the jacks would carry the signal (1s & 0s) as well as the most expensive piece of highway robbery a crook could get a pigeon to buy...
On the other hand... if you're getting this you'd better plan to include "High Definition" AC cables as well... I can recommend some that are less $2,000 for a six foot power cable... AudioQuest makes their "Hyperlitz" cables for the discerning Audiophule who can hear the difference between 60 cycle and 50 cycle power supplies...
So given that there were 2 sides fighting, which side do you suggest America should have supported ?
What if they gave a war, and the United States just watched them duke it out WITHOUT taking sides???
I realize they our "representatives" still believe the idiotic mantra "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" but it hasn't worked that way in the last fifty years... at BEST we've found fair weather friends that way...
Our ENEMIES from the past are now much better allies than some of those we've never opposed at all...
Can you imagine how much money it would save just minding out own business unless there is a "Vital Interest" at stake?
Housing prices holding their value? Here? What's he smoking?
For the local folks who grew up there housing prices have done OK... especially when they bought early to be under Prop 13 protections on taxes.
One of my high school classmates owns a home downtown... and has probably lost a couple hundred thousand in property value over the last decade or so... on paper...
OTOH, she bought it for 30 or 40K and it peaked at more half a million before settling down to merely 8 or 9 times her purchase price...
Expecting "accuracy" from "journalists" that can't spell, parse a sentence, or explain what "journalistic integrity" is versus "making news" is a bit naive isn't it?
We're seeing the same result in journalism as we've already seen in economics... both have become a way of making things happen instead of observing and explaining what REALLY occurred.
Using them as levers to move society hasn't worked out all that well... unintended consequences tend to be worse the harder they try...
Besides a Good Story is a LOT more interesting than mundane facts any day of the week! "if it bleeds it leads!!!"
You hit the home button, and do anything you want during a call...
What is this stuff, doesn't ANYONE in the Patent Office own a phone, or make any attempt to detect troll patenting of prior art?
but spending money on DRM books doesn't seem worth the convenience (I suppose) that Amazon offers...
So far I've been able to get non-DRM books sufficient to keep me reading for years and most of my writer friends are published without DRM and doing quite well even though the only thing keeping their files from being "shared" is the honor system... If an E-Bbook is not being sold DRM free the printed copy is, as was pointed out before, something I can read then sell, or give away...
The general public doesn't seem to mind that their books can be deleted remotely, that they are paying nearly the full price of a book for a "license" to read the text (subject to the terms and conditions they also haven't read), or that by doing so they are encouraging more of the same...
Unfortunately the education required to make the public aware of this as a problem is a probably beyond the appreciation of the 50% of the population that both test "below average" in intelligence, and learn about what they "want" or "need" from advertising... Especially whatever portion of them see a Kindle or Nook being read by beautiful people in beautiful surroundings and assume that their life would be better for having the product...
I love your sig!
Living in an area where people die withing a few miles of a road every year the idea that GPS systems might be affected is enough to make me want to know a LOT more before something like this is put out in the field...
The "Power Line Carrier" stuff was only good for wiping all LF, and HF communications for miles... using the power lines as HUGE antennas for those bands...
The FCC has had a poor track record on unintended consequences in naming secondary users, or allowing commercial exploitation of frequencies already assigned to other services.
The best camera is the one you have with you...
DSLR models, as has been pointed out. are terrific cameras... My personal equipment bag holds one body, a couple of lenses, some filters, batteries, spare batteries, charger, remote, and a camcorder with its accessories... and only takes up the space of a small backpack...
That said, a "point and shoot" camera that can fit in your pocket, has at least a 7x zoom range, and will do perfectly acceptable video, comes in at around $300... whereas my favorite lens ran a little over a grand a half dozen years ago.
The slightly larger models with 10-25x zooms run a bit more, but still can be carried in a small case and have terrific sensors...
When I'm not toting a backpack full of gear, my favorite format is the "super zoom" camera that combine the best of both worlds, creative control of exposure, a very wide zoom range, and great glass... all wrapped up in a compact package.
What are you giving up from a DSLR? Not much really...
The P&S cameras are usually not as capable of taking extreme low light pictures, meaning that you'll be using a flash more often, they don't have specialized lenses for wide angle or telephoto, meaning only that you have to work within the camera's limitations.
Where they are less adequate is in technically difficult or artistic shots where the wide range of lenses and settings a DSLR gives you makes the shot possible.
The kind of shot for which photographic artists spend hours setting up that perfect exposure, and tourists get by firing off dozens of shots to stumble on one perfect frame...
The photographer is a hundred times as important as the gear though, if you're shooting a camera with "shutter lag" you'll have to anticipate the action to catch "The Moment"... If it's not as useful in low light, creatively rearranging the room lighting, or using a tripod can bring make the difference...
All that said, a $69 pocket camera beats even my Rolleiflex f2.8 film camera if one is back home in a box and the other is in your hand when things happen!!!
"security vendors" are concerned about the "rise of malware" on the Android platform...
Hmmmm... know anyone that's found a "malware" application lately... at least one that didn't specify permissions up front?
I suspect that the only malware out there MIGHT be some Trojans that users installed and fat, dumb, and ignorantly gave permission for the program to OWN their device...
I haven't even found a real "virus" on a PC for years, only Trojans using some crude social engineering designed to appeal to the cheap (and ignorant) using the lowest common denominator...
I'd rather they called me when their computer ran "slow" instead of downloading the first piece of crap that promises to "fix" their PC... but the time it takes to track down a "send money" Trojan PLUS the time spent cleaning up their system so it will function as good as new is ALL billable time...
I've used my palmtop/phone/pad systems for note taking for quite a while now... starting with a Palm Pilot and the IR folding keyboard that they sold. The worst (but still functional) setup I've used was a Samsung Palm OS flip phone, with a wired keyboard... worked great, but, between no stand for the phone, and the cable in the way, was just a little inconvenient
My current setup is a MS Mobil Bluetooth Keyboard 6000 and a Droid X...
The keyboard is about 3/8 inch thick and about the size of a standard laptop keyboard with a nicely ergonomic layout... When I picked it up it was about $80 with a separate 10-Key pad...
It's not quite as nice as the Palm folding keyboard and T5 since there's nothing like the built in stand that Palm provided... but it's a LOT nicer keyboard for the touch typist!
I'm pretty sure that a similar keyboard with any of the Apple or Android pads would do every bit as well...
Then again she could have been downloading files that the heavy hitters were prosecuting for hundreds of thousands of dollars of damages EACH and WINNING...
Not that it excuses a beating, but I'd have been a little torqued over my entire life's accomplishments being jeopardized by an asswipe kid wanting to steal software/files... especially when a pattern of theft continued despite continued repeated efforts to break her of the habit...
Not only did she set up and stage manage the video, but she managed to live off him till recently and only released the video when he told her a part time job in a game store wasn't cutting it... he wasn't paying for her lifestyle any longer and BTW drop off the Mercedes at the house...
She told him he'd live to regret it, and did her best to make that come true..
. Now she and her mom are making the talk show circuits and getting lots of sympathy...
Then load FBReader for generic non-DRM files, the Android version of Kindle, and any other readers you want... it will run them all...
It's not like buying an iPad or BlackBerry where someone else is deciding what you can run on the device...
What's "Bing" again... Oh yeah I remember, looked at it once when it came up as a default setting... Haven't seen it since.
Oddly enough it appears (to the most casual observer at least) that COPYright is about copying....
So it's NOT about "stealing" rather it's about copying...
As a slow learner, taking 33 years to go from my HS diploma to a BS degree, I got to see some of the changes in Economics first hand
My first Macro Economics class was concerned with STUDYING the market to see how it was affected by consumers and take advantage of their NEEDS, WANTS, and DESIRES to produce products to fulfill their expectations... thus providing products, and services that people would exchange their hard earned money for and make a profit for anyone serving the market successfully...
By the time I graduated (Business Management) it had changed to an "Applied Science" focused on CHANGING consumer behavior and INFLUENCING society... the problem being it only influences that portion of society that doesn't understand economics...
The rules of the game as I was taught early on would have predicted (and did from the mouths of those still using them) all of the economic woes we've seen...
The Social Tool that "Modern Economics" theories are based on don't really work quite the way the books claim... kinda like when the butcher puts his thumb on the scale and says "this is for Timmy’s College Fund" and the customers don't appreciate the "contribution" they're making