Regardless of 'global warming' being a thing or not, isn't it time we started moving away from internal combustion engines? And burning coal? Even natural gas isn't that great in the long run.
That sounds nice, but we don't have decent replacements for those things yet. We should of course keep working on them, and one day they'll arrive... but as it stands, we're going to be burning coal 50 years from now, regardless of all the hand waving.
Bearing arms is not, you will find, in the international bill of human rights.
No, it isn't... that is one of the flaws in the international version...
Like I said, politics... There is much the US says and does that doesn't live in reality. The recent calls for "peace" in Syria are a good example. Who are they kidding, even thinking to ask for it, when both sides are very busy killing each other.
Silly, it is simply not living in reality, and that is a shame.
One of a human's rights is to live secure knowing that you can provide for your own protection. In the modern day, that requires guns. Take them away and you're saying that we should all be sheep to criminals, and that really is a crime.
and yet, a whole bunch of countries have significantly more strict gun laws, and also have significantly less death and injuries by guns, while not having a corresponding increase in death by other methods.
Statistics don't help make it better when you're one of them...
Try the knife violence in the UK, it is far worse than the US.
You of course miss the point, and in doing so, would deny others rights. Being armed is the modern day way to provide for self-defense. If you take that away, you're telling people they cannot defend themselves.
All your points, numbers, and debates go right out the window because of that. It is like someone who wants to limit free speech because of what the KKK says. If you want rights, you have to respect them for everyone, even if you don't like specific situations.
... as determined by...? You? Me? Everybody as they see fit?
Our creator...
Without a creator, a higher being, then we're just brutish cavemen and it just becomes survival of the fittest.
I'll take the former, if I get a say in it...
You're right that the US Uni Dec of Human Rights is a good start, but it isn't perfect due to politics.
The right to be armed is the right to self-defense. It is the right to be reasonably secure in ones own safety. Since the police don't have the job of keeping people safe, that is your own personal responsibility.
Saudi Arabia is also violating those women's rights, what is your point?
Do you honestly think that people don't have a right to free speech, anywhere in the world, regardless of what governments do?
Do you think China's censorship is right or wrong?
At some point, basic human rights exist regardless of what laws are passed. Any law that attempts to limit such rights, is a violation of human rights.
True. But on the other hand, a full size helicopter is much easier to detect and shoot.
You'd think, but guards actually aren't good at it. I was looking over a list of helicopter prison escapes and while the guards have shot at helicopers, I haven't seen one where they hit it.
The reality is that unless you can hit the pilot, which isn't easy to do when the helicopter is a few hundred yards away and moving in three dimensions, you aren't likely to stop a helicopter with an AR-15 or similar light rifle.
Sure, with a M-60, M-240, or even M2, you could do it, with some training and practice, and tracer ammo...
But really, are you going to open up with a heavy machine gun anywhere remotely close to a city or other place people live?
If you are saying it's perfectly OK to watch your own house to catch him, are you suggesting the U.S. government should conduct ridiculously illegal massive surveillance on the lives of every single one of its clearance-holding employees? You realize that employees of the government are allowed to live free lives without surveillance of their day-to-day lives... right?
Actually, no, they aren't...
If you have someone who is cleared to have knowledge of some very secret stuff, then he/she has to accept that their life and behavior will be watched.
Does this mean we care if they cheat on their spouse? Yes it does, because that is a possible point of blackmail.
Does this mean we care if they suddenly drive an expensive car and buy a boat they shouldn't be able to afford? Yes it does, because that money might have come from other governments.
Now, that surveillance should only come about because the person agreed to the job, took the clearance, and knows it is happening.
I would really like to see the option to purchase more than 1TB of storage.
I get that they can't offer it for free, that's fine. But we store the videos that we take with our phones on OneDrive, and that adds up quickly.
The phones even auto-upload all photos and videos taken. Right now, our video folder is about 700GB. This is not movies, or DVR content, or porn, this is home videos taken with a camera or cell phone.
That number will pass 1TB by the end of next year.
If I could pay some reasonable amount, maybe $50 a year, to add another 4TB of storage, I'd do so.
I continue to not comply, and the fines rack up. What else can I do?
Do you honestly not know what happens when people don't pay the government what the government says they owe?:)
Lets just say that prison would be in your future... yes, the government ultimately would put you in jail over refusing to comply.
Fortunately, I could be dead of old age by the time "ultimately" happens.
The government isn't THAT slow... Pirker gave up when the rules were changed (by the FAA), when he correctly pointed out that even if he won, it wouldn't matter since the goal posts had been moved...
It means that the FAA can't pull my "certificate" first and ask questions later while I go broke.
A pilot certificate is actually the least of your concerns.
What happens if the FAA fines you $500 per day until you comply with their orders?
Yes, the FAA can fine you, and when you refuse to pay it, you end up in administrative court where you aren't innocent until proven guilty, and your refusal ultimately ends up with the sheriff showing up.
Despite all that, once the FAA passes its new rules, it'll still be legal for me to fly my unregistered helis, still legal for me to buy or build new models without registering them, and still legal for me to fly them.
It can be really expensive to prove that your actions are legal, but you're welcome to try. Someone gets to be the test case.
At the end of the day, neither you nor I are the person who actually decides if it is legal or not, a judge is.
Look, I'm not the FAA, I'm not here to tell you that you're right or wrong, I honestly don't care. What I am telling you is that your "tough guy attitude" doesn't work against an agency like the FAA who ultimately will get some type of drone regulations into place and if they decide to come after you, they'll almost always win.
You presumably have a pilot's license, so they've got you by the short-and-curlies. You buck them, they pull your license while you fight, you go broke. I have no such restriction.
:) You keep thinking that... not having a pilot certificate (it isn't a license, it is a certificate, it never expires) does not exempt you from the FAA's area of enforcement.
I'll ignore any rules they make contrary to that.
Sure, and plenty of people use drugs, and drive over the speed limit, and a thousand other things... and get away with it much of the time... but don't kid yourself, enforcement always comes down to "naked force" as you put it.
As I said, flying a small $50 RC quad copter in your back yard is not going to be an issue. Flying a $1,500 remote drone 2,000ft in the air 2 miles from your home, will be. There will end up being a line somewhere in-between the two that gets drawn, enforcement will depend largely on where you live of course. I doubt the government cares much if you live in Montana, more so in NYC.
While I agree with this, it just isn't going to happen. We will talk about it and hem and haw about it, but we'll keep burning it...
We may not burn EVERY last pound of coal in the ground, but we'll sure give it the old college try...
All the talking back and fourth won't change that...
- Increase energy efficiency (buildings, appliances, vehicles, etc.) as much as possible
We are already doing this, it takes time, decades, to make a major difference. Existing buildings don't get torn down and replaced overnight. Building codes also vary widely. Sadly, in Texas, home builders are still putting up inefficient homes.
- Switch to non-fossil energy sources as quickly as possible
This won't happen, see coal. We will slowly switch to some non-fossil energy sources, but not "as quickly as possible".
---
Please note: I'm not telling you my opinion, I'm telling you which way the wind is blowing. There is "what we'd like to do", then there is "what we will do". Never confuse the two.
Not just do it by fiat in an arbitrary and capricious manner contrary to the laws which have actually been passed.
You must be new here...:) Have you not met our government?
I've worked with the FAA, there is what the book says, then there is what they do. You're welcome to fight them, but I'd rather not.
Now the FAA wants to ignore all that and set up a point of sale registration system for all model aircraft, without even going through the normal rulemaking process, let along getting the statutory authorization to make such rules.
You're welcome to protest, it may even work for a bit... the process might be messy, it may not even be correct...
My primary point however is that in some years time (might be 5, might be more or less), there will be new rules and restrictions on where you can fly an RC anything.
While it likely will end up in court sooner or later, at the end of the day, that is probably a waste of time and money.
Why? Because it is clear that the government has the right to regulate the national airspace system. Both Congress and the FAA have the right to control access to the NAS.
As such, while there may be some give and take on the specifics, you're not going to win in the long run by saying, "I get to keep doing what I've been doing for years, just because I've been doing it".
They may come up with a specific rule in the regs that says "you may fly line-of-sight RC aircraft up to 200ft AGL in congested areas and up to 400ft AGL in uncongested areas without prior ATC approval, or something like that.
---
Frankly I fully expect a FAA requirement for a "drone pilot certificate" at some point, for anything over a given size or ability, regardless of where you fly it.
Note that this likely won't have anything to do with the little microhelicopters that you buy on eBay or at the local mall, but it would apply to this:
The issue hasn't been addressed in the past because it hasn't happened often enough to get attention.
It is getting attention now, the situation as it currently stands won't last.
Mode C veils didn't exist once, Class A airspace didn't exist once either. Both exist today for good reasons. As the price of drones (RC aircraft, whatever) drops and the number rises, this will have to be addressed.
I fly within the NYC area mode C veil (and not far from class C airspace, which extends 5 nautical miles from almost every dinky airport in the country). Putting an FCC-approved transponder on my models would bankrupt me and they'd not be able to fly due to the weight and power requirements anyway. Also I have no pilot's license and am unlikely to get one. And I can't imagine how I'd get a certificate of airworthiness for these things.
The Mode C veil goes all the way to the surface around the airport itself (out to various distances depending on the area).
You're not exempt from that rule just because you're not physically in the aircraft.
Now, does this really apply to $50 toys that you fly to 50 feet in your backyard? No.
Does it apply to $1,000 toys that fly to 500 feet? Yes it does.
Guess what, want to fly more than a bit above the tree line? Want to go a few hundred feet up? Want to do it in a congested area? You'll need a transponder.
Slashdot Mirror
Try this:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...
$800 for a true quad core Intel notebook, Skylake and all:
Intel i5-6300HQ 2.3 GHz Quad-Core
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 4GB GDDR5
8 GB DDR3L / 256 GB Solid-State Drive
15.6-Inch FHD IPS, Wide-Angle, Anti Glare Screen
I own one of these, preordered it the day I saw it on Amazon, it is fast and the screen is very nice.
Regardless of 'global warming' being a thing or not, isn't it time we started moving away from internal combustion engines? And burning coal? Even natural gas isn't that great in the long run.
That sounds nice, but we don't have decent replacements for those things yet. We should of course keep working on them, and one day they'll arrive... but as it stands, we're going to be burning coal 50 years from now, regardless of all the hand waving.
Bearing arms is not, you will find, in the international bill of human rights.
No, it isn't... that is one of the flaws in the international version...
Like I said, politics... There is much the US says and does that doesn't live in reality. The recent calls for "peace" in Syria are a good example. Who are they kidding, even thinking to ask for it, when both sides are very busy killing each other.
Silly, it is simply not living in reality, and that is a shame.
One of a human's rights is to live secure knowing that you can provide for your own protection. In the modern day, that requires guns. Take them away and you're saying that we should all be sheep to criminals, and that really is a crime.
and yet, a whole bunch of countries have significantly more strict gun laws, and also have significantly less death and injuries by guns, while not having a corresponding increase in death by other methods.
Statistics don't help make it better when you're one of them...
Try the knife violence in the UK, it is far worse than the US.
You of course miss the point, and in doing so, would deny others rights. Being armed is the modern day way to provide for self-defense. If you take that away, you're telling people they cannot defend themselves.
All your points, numbers, and debates go right out the window because of that. It is like someone who wants to limit free speech because of what the KKK says. If you want rights, you have to respect them for everyone, even if you don't like specific situations.
No holy book ever written included a right to bear arms (or any mention of the topic at all).
They don't talk about free speech either, so what's your point? How about the right for women to vote, that isn't in there either.
But I'm not talking about a book written by men a long time ago.
The right to bear arms is the right to self-defense, it used to be with sticks, now it is with guns.
This is a good start, but it isn't complete, due to politics:
http://www.un.org/en/universal...
That is a nice sounding idea, let me know when all murders have stopped and the banning of guns has fixed that.
Of course, if we could just ban that pesky speech, life would be easier as well, right?
---
As a side note: Your desire to be safe from gun-bearing lunatics doesn't mean I have to be unsafe due to being unable to protect myself.
You're assuming that your fears and desires outweight mine, but they don't.
... as determined by ...? You? Me? Everybody as they see fit?
Our creator...
Without a creator, a higher being, then we're just brutish cavemen and it just becomes survival of the fittest.
I'll take the former, if I get a say in it...
You're right that the US Uni Dec of Human Rights is a good start, but it isn't perfect due to politics.
The right to be armed is the right to self-defense. It is the right to be reasonably secure in ones own safety. Since the police don't have the job of keeping people safe, that is your own personal responsibility.
Being armed is one way to do that.
A law professor probably would, but that doesn't make him right... it means he sees the world through man-made laws.
Slavery was once legal, it still exists in the world. Is that ok?
Or is it wrong and a violation of human rights, regardless of the law?
It's a 'right' that nobody in the UK wants.
"Nobody" is highly unlikely...
But in any case, you can't vote away your rights. If you could, then they wouldn't be rights.
We either have a civilization based on basic fundamental rights that exist because we do, or we're just thugs getting our way with brute force.
Take your pick...
---
Side note: Would you be ok with women losing the right to vote in the UK, if a petition passed to ban them from voting?
Saudi Arabia is also violating those women's rights, what is your point?
Do you honestly think that people don't have a right to free speech, anywhere in the world, regardless of what governments do?
Do you think China's censorship is right or wrong?
At some point, basic human rights exist regardless of what laws are passed. Any law that attempts to limit such rights, is a violation of human rights.
Its the UK , there is not right to own and bear arms.
Yes there is, the UK government is simply oppressing the people and denying them their rights.
"Rights" aren't something given by a government, they are something we all have, simply by existing.
True. But on the other hand, a full size helicopter is much easier to detect and shoot.
You'd think, but guards actually aren't good at it. I was looking over a list of helicopter prison escapes and while the guards have shot at helicopers, I haven't seen one where they hit it.
The reality is that unless you can hit the pilot, which isn't easy to do when the helicopter is a few hundred yards away and moving in three dimensions, you aren't likely to stop a helicopter with an AR-15 or similar light rifle.
Sure, with a M-60, M-240, or even M2, you could do it, with some training and practice, and tracer ammo...
But really, are you going to open up with a heavy machine gun anywhere remotely close to a city or other place people live?
No, of course not, that would be stupid.
If you are saying it's perfectly OK to watch your own house to catch him, are you suggesting the U.S. government should conduct ridiculously illegal massive surveillance on the lives of every single one of its clearance-holding employees? You realize that employees of the government are allowed to live free lives without surveillance of their day-to-day lives... right?
Actually, no, they aren't...
If you have someone who is cleared to have knowledge of some very secret stuff, then he/she has to accept that their life and behavior will be watched.
Does this mean we care if they cheat on their spouse? Yes it does, because that is a possible point of blackmail.
Does this mean we care if they suddenly drive an expensive car and buy a boat they shouldn't be able to afford? Yes it does, because that money might have come from other governments.
Now, that surveillance should only come about because the person agreed to the job, took the clearance, and knows it is happening.
I would really like to see the option to purchase more than 1TB of storage.
I get that they can't offer it for free, that's fine. But we store the videos that we take with our phones on OneDrive, and that adds up quickly.
The phones even auto-upload all photos and videos taken. Right now, our video folder is about 700GB. This is not movies, or DVR content, or porn, this is home videos taken with a camera or cell phone.
That number will pass 1TB by the end of next year.
If I could pay some reasonable amount, maybe $50 a year, to add another 4TB of storage, I'd do so.
I continue to not comply, and the fines rack up. What else can I do?
Do you honestly not know what happens when people don't pay the government what the government says they owe? :)
Lets just say that prison would be in your future... yes, the government ultimately would put you in jail over refusing to comply.
Fortunately, I could be dead of old age by the time "ultimately" happens.
The government isn't THAT slow... Pirker gave up when the rules were changed (by the FAA), when he correctly pointed out that even if he won, it wouldn't matter since the goal posts had been moved...
Passwords are for protecting against remote bruteforcing. For local protection you lock the door.
Yes, but you can put a password on your computer that I cannot brute force.
You cannot put a lock on your door that I cannot bypass, likely without you even knowing it was bypassed.
It means that the FAA can't pull my "certificate" first and ask questions later while I go broke.
A pilot certificate is actually the least of your concerns.
What happens if the FAA fines you $500 per day until you comply with their orders?
Yes, the FAA can fine you, and when you refuse to pay it, you end up in administrative court where you aren't innocent until proven guilty, and your refusal ultimately ends up with the sheriff showing up.
Despite all that, once the FAA passes its new rules, it'll still be legal for me to fly my unregistered helis, still legal for me to buy or build new models without registering them, and still legal for me to fly them.
It can be really expensive to prove that your actions are legal, but you're welcome to try. Someone gets to be the test case.
At the end of the day, neither you nor I are the person who actually decides if it is legal or not, a judge is.
You're probably familiar with this case:
http://www.outsideonline.com/1...
Are you aware it was overturned?
http://www.npr.org/sections/th...
Here is the final outcome of that case:
http://motherboard.vice.com/re...
---
Look, I'm not the FAA, I'm not here to tell you that you're right or wrong, I honestly don't care. What I am telling you is that your "tough guy attitude" doesn't work against an agency like the FAA who ultimately will get some type of drone regulations into place and if they decide to come after you, they'll almost always win.
You presumably have a pilot's license, so they've got you by the short-and-curlies. You buck them, they pull your license while you fight, you go broke. I have no such restriction.
:) You keep thinking that... not having a pilot certificate (it isn't a license, it is a certificate, it never expires) does not exempt you from the FAA's area of enforcement.
I'll ignore any rules they make contrary to that.
Sure, and plenty of people use drugs, and drive over the speed limit, and a thousand other things... and get away with it much of the time... but don't kid yourself, enforcement always comes down to "naked force" as you put it.
As I said, flying a small $50 RC quad copter in your back yard is not going to be an issue. Flying a $1,500 remote drone 2,000ft in the air 2 miles from your home, will be. There will end up being a line somewhere in-between the two that gets drawn, enforcement will depend largely on where you live of course. I doubt the government cares much if you live in Montana, more so in NYC.
- Stop burning coal
While I agree with this, it just isn't going to happen. We will talk about it and hem and haw about it, but we'll keep burning it...
We may not burn EVERY last pound of coal in the ground, but we'll sure give it the old college try...
All the talking back and fourth won't change that...
- Increase energy efficiency (buildings, appliances, vehicles, etc.) as much as possible
We are already doing this, it takes time, decades, to make a major difference. Existing buildings don't get torn down and replaced overnight. Building codes also vary widely. Sadly, in Texas, home builders are still putting up inefficient homes.
- Switch to non-fossil energy sources as quickly as possible
This won't happen, see coal. We will slowly switch to some non-fossil energy sources, but not "as quickly as possible".
---
Please note: I'm not telling you my opinion, I'm telling you which way the wind is blowing. There is "what we'd like to do", then there is "what we will do". Never confuse the two.
Not just do it by fiat in an arbitrary and capricious manner contrary to the laws which have actually been passed.
You must be new here... :) Have you not met our government?
I've worked with the FAA, there is what the book says, then there is what they do. You're welcome to fight them, but I'd rather not.
Now the FAA wants to ignore all that and set up a point of sale registration system for all model aircraft, without even going through the normal rulemaking process, let along getting the statutory authorization to make such rules.
You're welcome to protest, it may even work for a bit... the process might be messy, it may not even be correct...
My primary point however is that in some years time (might be 5, might be more or less), there will be new rules and restrictions on where you can fly an RC anything.
Of that, I'm 100% sure of...
While it likely will end up in court sooner or later, at the end of the day, that is probably a waste of time and money.
Why? Because it is clear that the government has the right to regulate the national airspace system. Both Congress and the FAA have the right to control access to the NAS.
As such, while there may be some give and take on the specifics, you're not going to win in the long run by saying, "I get to keep doing what I've been doing for years, just because I've been doing it".
They may come up with a specific rule in the regs that says "you may fly line-of-sight RC aircraft up to 200ft AGL in congested areas and up to 400ft AGL in uncongested areas without prior ATC approval, or something like that.
---
Frankly I fully expect a FAA requirement for a "drone pilot certificate" at some point, for anything over a given size or ability, regardless of where you fly it.
Note that this likely won't have anything to do with the little microhelicopters that you buy on eBay or at the local mall, but it would apply to this:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...
Don't expect to be able to continue to fly such things without specific regulations in a few years.
The issue hasn't been addressed in the past because it hasn't happened often enough to get attention.
It is getting attention now, the situation as it currently stands won't last.
Mode C veils didn't exist once, Class A airspace didn't exist once either. Both exist today for good reasons. As the price of drones (RC aircraft, whatever) drops and the number rises, this will have to be addressed.
I fly within the NYC area mode C veil (and not far from class C airspace, which extends 5 nautical miles from almost every dinky airport in the country). Putting an FCC-approved transponder on my models would bankrupt me and they'd not be able to fly due to the weight and power requirements anyway. Also I have no pilot's license and am unlikely to get one. And I can't imagine how I'd get a certificate of airworthiness for these things.
The Mode C veil goes all the way to the surface around the airport itself (out to various distances depending on the area).
You're not exempt from that rule just because you're not physically in the aircraft.
Now, does this really apply to $50 toys that you fly to 50 feet in your backyard? No.
Does it apply to $1,000 toys that fly to 500 feet? Yes it does.
Guess what, want to fly more than a bit above the tree line? Want to go a few hundred feet up? Want to do it in a congested area? You'll need a transponder.
That is a nice link, but it doesn't apply to privacy fenced backyards.
No, you may not climb the fence to take pictures over it, yes you can go to jail for doing that.