Most distros work on newer, UEFI-capable systems when in legacy/BIOS mode, though that's not always the case when trying to use native capabilities. UEFI has created some problems recently on x86 hardware, but they appear to be getting addressed. They were first really addressed with kernel 3.0 and have gotten better in 3.1. Matt Garrett was the developer to start figuring out what was going on, leading to a patch with an amusing description and a few bits of sarcasm in in-line comments. It's improved since then.
There are also some gaps in coverage stemming from grub not yet reaching a release state. Fedora was going to go grub2 across the board with F16, but some issues have stalled that for UEFI systems, which will have to wait until F17. Fortunately, grub-efi still works well enough to get it loaded, though I've not been able to get it to recognize the Windows partition on my work notebook and have to rely on the firmware's boot menu to handle that part. It means I have to pay attention when booting for the couple of seconds to hit F12, but it works.
I believe Ubuntu 11.10 also works well enough, as my last experiments were using a beta and I imagine that it's improved since then. I also tinkered with Arch, but couldn't get it to work properly. No idea how far they've gone in the last couple of months.
A citizen cannot participate in modern society without the use of an automobile.
I beg to differ. A very good friend is approaching her thirtieth birthday and does not have a driver's license. The overwhelming majority of her transport is by walking or by train or bus, and she lives in Dallas, where public transportation is decent but not great. She travels as a passenger in a car with friends sometimes, but to my knowledge has never been in the driver's seat of a vehicle with the engine running. She has an active social life and is out with or at the homes of friends about half of her evenings.
There are also cities like Chicago and New York that have excellent public transportation. I spent a week in New York as a tourist and except for a couple of journeys down to southern New Jersey when friends drove, I felt little need to even use a cab, let alone rent a car.
As to your quotes, nothing there suggests to me a right to drive. A right to use the public roads is not a right to drive, but a right to travel along them in a legal manner. This may be as a licensed driver or as a passenger in a car, bus, or cab. In some cases, it includes other methods such as bicycle, walking, or even horse-drawn buggy or horseback. Driving is a privilege and has been recognized as such by the courts. For example, in John Doe No. 1 v. Georgia Dept of Public Safety, a federal court specified as much.
A legal resident of Georgia does not have a constitutional right to a driver's license. Regulation of the driving privilege is a quintessential example of the exercise of the police power of the state, and the denial of a single mode of transportation does not rise to the level of a violation of the fundamental right to interstate travel.
You have the right to travel. You do not have the right to drive.
Whether your tax money pays for something doesn't factor into whether you get to use it. Your tax money pays for the fighters flown by the military, but that doesn't mean that you get to use them. I have a pilot's license and can fly through the majority of the skies, but clip the wrong airspace and I'm grounded. My ability to exercise my pilot skills is a privilege, not a right, and can be suspended or revoked with cause, just as your driver's license can be suspended or revoked with cause.
Even if your argument were correct at the federal level, I don't believe any state defines a right to drive. In all states, it is a privilege that may be revoked under certain circumstances, generally happening when a person has shown themselves to be irresponsible with a vehicle (whether that is being too dangerous, not paying tickets, or not having insurance).
The world used to be a much more complex place. Balancing the needs of a local people against the need to provide a bulwark against Soviet expansion meant making a decision favoring a relatively small group of people in a small region against the chances of communism taking over the world. In hindsight, it may seem that many of the decisions were bad ones, but by and large, winning the Cold War and then dealing with the dictators made more sense at the time.
I think you're confusing Gaddafi with other dictators. He'd had the idea of the coup years prior, and the king wasn't liked or respected by much of the populace. Britain and the US may not have blocked the coup, but they didn't seem to have had an active hand in it happening.
Gaddafi became a problem within months of taking power, and by the early 1970s had allied Libya with then-Soviet-backed Egypt and Syria. By 1981, Reagan had given the CIA permission to take more decisive action in Libya since Gaddafi was funding and supplying terrorist groups from the Middle East to Ireland.
You're off by a factor of more than two. While oil consumption in the US is down somewhat, the average has been a little under 19 million barrels of oil per day for a few years.
Glass, concrete, and steel were all invented thousands of years ago. There's a good chance that in two or three thousand years, no one will remember who Steve Jobs or Dennis Ritchie were, either. That doesn't change the immediate impact of the men to our time.
It depends on the noise level of the DC. Where I work, microphones would be useless, but some of the computer rooms in other buildings are relatively quiet and we've used microphones on NetBotz devices when people have been in the room and we're monitoring what they're talking about while working. (It has sometimes saved a phone call when a configuration looked odd momentarily but they were doing it for a reason.)
One of the major backbone providers has a lights-out data center not far from my work. I know a guy who has a hosting business there, and he's shown me around to the limits of his access. There is no one on-site from the company or its contractors--not even a security guard. They have biometrics plus PINs for access; it's laced with low-light/IR cameras (it wouldn't surprise me to learn they have microphones); it has motion detectors in case the cameras miss something; and the redundancy is incredible. They maintain contracts with local electricians, plumbers, and a few technical companies should a blade burn out. They manage the entire thing from a few states over, and as of a couple of years ago almost all of their data centers had been converted to run this way. Savings were good, something like a million dollars per DC per year even as unanticipated downtime decreased.
I looked at it and saw the future of IT. I wasn't sure if I was more impressed or scared.
It's not that humans are lazy. Humans are social creatures, wired to fit into the crowd. It's a survival strategy to avoid being the sole soft, tasty morsel on the plains. When we learn something new, we share it (or at least the fact that we learned it) with others in part to seek their approval. Even those who choose not to conform tend to group with others who don't conform.
Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution provides Congress the power to call forth the militia to "suppress Insurrections." Article III, Section 3 defines treason as "levying war against [the United States]." Given that these are delegated by the Constitution, it would seem to me an implicit denial of the right to revolt.
I disagree with the viewpoint, though I think they're doing it for what they believe are good reasons. Bullying is something with which I am intimately familiar, having been much shorter than normal in childhood and usually acing everything. By the time I got to high school, I figured out some ways to befriend a few football jocks and managed to get some protection. Not everyone I knew was so lucky. Back then, bullying was largely limited to a single school or sometimes just one grade; with e-mail and social networking, bullies can get friends from all over to gang up on a target. But as much as the issue needs attention, I don't think this is the way to address it.
My tax dollars go to support a lot of people I don't like. It's the nature of the system. But the system helps to balance all of this. There are other legislators who may (and probably will) prevent this from passing (or even getting to the floor); there is a governor who has to agree with and sign the legislation to law if it passes; and at this level, both the state and federal courts are avenues of challenge.
They wrote a paper that explains an opinion about an idea that is controversial and unpopular. It is exactly the kind of thing that the First Amendment was intended to protect.
Incidentally, there is no "right to revolt" in the Constitution. The concept is covered in the Declaration of Independence which, while culturally and politically significant, holds no legal weight.
We use Iron Mountain and they're generally good (and the local warehouse is only a couple of miles away), but it's still a good idea to encrypt any tape that leaves the facility, whether or not it contains personal data. A system backup could provide information useful to someone who wants to gain access to a network, among other things.
Accreditation Hell has another room wherein you have managers who push for a technology because it has attained Common Criteria EAL5 certification and even budget for it, but then refuse to allow it to be configured even remotely close to it.
Anecdotal evidence I've heard is that Leo is even less-liked than Carly was, especially with this announcement. That dislike may extend well into the upper reaches, as since the announcement, various senior managers and vice presidents have said some very scattered things about the future of the division and what will happen with webOS. Either there is very poor communication at the top, there is no real strategy and HP's executive board is winging it, or someone is actively working to undermine someone else. Any of those is individually a bad thing, but given HP's management issues over the last few years it would not surprise me to find more than one of those to be true, and possibly true multiple times over.
That depends on the firewalls in use. More modern firewalls (McAfee Firewall Enterprise [formerly Sidewinder], Palo Alto Networks Firewall, etc.) perform application checks such as ensuring that only HTTP and not HTTPS goes over port 80 and vice versa for port 443, and certainly someone trying to use IPSec over port 80 is going to get stopped. Some web filters can check the IP address ranges in use to determine if they're traditionally assigned to home use and block them. Our web filter can do this so that we have fewer people connecting to their home systems. It's not perfect as the databases are still catching up and sometimes shift to other uses, though we often catch users when report time comes around and half of their web traffic is to an unidentified IP address.
You absolutely can build up a tolerance to a food allergy. There have been several studies in the last few years suggesting that small amounts of allergens can be used to build up a tolerance. Here are two examples:
The flying wing technology was recognized in the US as stealthy to early radar, too, but despite a lot of money poured into it by Jack Northrop, it also proved to be unstable and difficult to fly with the technology of that era. It wasn't until flight computers caught up and a lot of Reagan-era build-up money became available that the B-2 became viable.
Kelly Johnson mentioned at one point that he would have loved to come up with a stealth design as sleek and cool as the F-19 concept that had been around in models for a few years, but the math for those kinds of curved surfaces is exceptionally difficult and beyond the computers of the time. The facets of the F-117 are useful to ensure that the radar signal goes elsewhere, and radar-absorbent paint helps to reduce the reflection. Even the frame around the canopy is angled to reduce direct reflections. When dropping bombs, the bay door opens, the weapon is ejected, and the door closes, all fairly quickly. S-shaped intakes remove the engine fans from the reflection problem, and diffusers reduce the heat signature. The thing is tiny, too, as fighters go, or at least appears to be. I saw it at a post-Desert Storm air show at March AFB (where it was surrounded by armed personnel who prevented anyone from getting closer than about 20 feet from it). While the length and width are about the same as an F-15 (which was also nearby), it is vertically much shorter.
They were effective for their day, but that just makes one wonder what has replaced them. It may be that the shoot-down over Yugoslavia was more effective than realized, and once word of it got around, they weren't safe anymore. I imagine a day when we'll be looking for not the planes, but the ripples they leave in the air.
Much of that was due to the Iraqi use of old Soviet doctrines which advocated certain rigid defensive procedures and absolute adherence to command and control centers. Only certain units were given the flexibility to go out on their own, and units cut off from C2 centers (either through loss of radio contact or by the C2 center itself being destroyed) were often lost as to how to respond. The strategy had worked well enough against Iran if you ignore Iran's superior numbers (often through the use of the Martyrs' Brigades), but the Soviets had started to get rid of it at least by the first couple of years in Afghanistan (if not earlier) where terrain and circumstances led to loss of contact with C2 on a regular basis and units had to be flexible.
Anyway, I'm not surprised that the F-117 was babied early on. I remember the talk of picking up incoming aircraft by watching for signals between cell towers to be interrupted. I don't know how that worked out, but it may be an early mechanism by which future attacks are monitored when everything is too stealthy for radar.
I agree that that the Pakistani government is generally happier to have the drone strikes than not, though they have perhaps legitimately objected to those which have killed more civilians than militants. It also can make their lives harder in negotiating with tribes which are on the fence in terms of loyalties.
The stealth helicopter was surprising mostly because most people didn't think that a stealth helo even existed. The fact that it used certain materials and ducted fans isn't surprising once it's known to exist. The existence of a stealth fighter in the 1980s wasn't really a well-kept secret. What was well-kept was the shape. My parents saw it before it was publicized when they were out camping in the deserts of Southern California. A trio of planes passed not far overhead and only two of them looked familiar. When they told me about it, I got my books out and went through them. The chase planes were easy to identify as T-38s, but the other didn't look like anything I'd ever heard of. A few months later, my parents excitedly called me in from another room, pointing at the TV screen and say, "That's what we saw!" My best guess is that it was either doing a run out at the bomb ranges around China Lake or else was ferrying between Edwards and Nellis/Area-51 and the decision had been made to allow daylight flights a little before the public unveiling.
Reconnaissance drones with stealth capabilities are already in use, and that suggests that attack drones are also in use. Most people think of the Predator drones (still performing well and widely used with a payload of two Hellfire missiles), but also in use are the Grey Eagle (an upgraded Predator that can carry four Hellfires), and the Reaper (capable of carrying 14 Hellfires). Boeing has publicly rolled out the Phantom Ray for testing, but I would bet that Boeing and/or Lockheed have already provided stealth drones to the military. Even tougher to track is what the CIA buys because even more of its funding is black and it's almost impossible to guess what it's being used for. Jamming defenses isn't really viable because it lights up every scope with noise, announcing that an attack is occurring.
Of course, some of the strikes in Somalia were done with AC-130s, so drones aren't always the preferred means of attack.
The convenient thing about the drones is the ease of putting them in play from carriers, small airfields, and neighboring countries and so are easy to sneak in and out. US drone strikes are suspected in many more places than just Pakistan and Afghanistan, including Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Sudan, as well as possibly Colombia, Algeria, Morocco, and others. Many of them involve (technically) no military operations as they are carried out by the CIA.
US drones have reportedly been shot down by Iran and I think also Syria, so they're operating in many more countries than just those subject to airstrikes.
Slashdot Mirror
Most distros work on newer, UEFI-capable systems when in legacy/BIOS mode, though that's not always the case when trying to use native capabilities. UEFI has created some problems recently on x86 hardware, but they appear to be getting addressed. They were first really addressed with kernel 3.0 and have gotten better in 3.1. Matt Garrett was the developer to start figuring out what was going on, leading to a patch with an amusing description and a few bits of sarcasm in in-line comments. It's improved since then.
There are also some gaps in coverage stemming from grub not yet reaching a release state. Fedora was going to go grub2 across the board with F16, but some issues have stalled that for UEFI systems, which will have to wait until F17. Fortunately, grub-efi still works well enough to get it loaded, though I've not been able to get it to recognize the Windows partition on my work notebook and have to rely on the firmware's boot menu to handle that part. It means I have to pay attention when booting for the couple of seconds to hit F12, but it works.
I believe Ubuntu 11.10 also works well enough, as my last experiments were using a beta and I imagine that it's improved since then. I also tinkered with Arch, but couldn't get it to work properly. No idea how far they've gone in the last couple of months.
Pass the test, get a license isn't recognition of a right to drive. It's an example of the right to due process and equal treatment under the law.
I beg to differ. A very good friend is approaching her thirtieth birthday and does not have a driver's license. The overwhelming majority of her transport is by walking or by train or bus, and she lives in Dallas, where public transportation is decent but not great. She travels as a passenger in a car with friends sometimes, but to my knowledge has never been in the driver's seat of a vehicle with the engine running. She has an active social life and is out with or at the homes of friends about half of her evenings.
There are also cities like Chicago and New York that have excellent public transportation. I spent a week in New York as a tourist and except for a couple of journeys down to southern New Jersey when friends drove, I felt little need to even use a cab, let alone rent a car.
As to your quotes, nothing there suggests to me a right to drive. A right to use the public roads is not a right to drive, but a right to travel along them in a legal manner. This may be as a licensed driver or as a passenger in a car, bus, or cab. In some cases, it includes other methods such as bicycle, walking, or even horse-drawn buggy or horseback. Driving is a privilege and has been recognized as such by the courts. For example, in John Doe No. 1 v. Georgia Dept of Public Safety, a federal court specified as much.
You have the right to travel. You do not have the right to drive.
Whether your tax money pays for something doesn't factor into whether you get to use it. Your tax money pays for the fighters flown by the military, but that doesn't mean that you get to use them. I have a pilot's license and can fly through the majority of the skies, but clip the wrong airspace and I'm grounded. My ability to exercise my pilot skills is a privilege, not a right, and can be suspended or revoked with cause, just as your driver's license can be suspended or revoked with cause.
Even if your argument were correct at the federal level, I don't believe any state defines a right to drive. In all states, it is a privilege that may be revoked under certain circumstances, generally happening when a person has shown themselves to be irresponsible with a vehicle (whether that is being too dangerous, not paying tickets, or not having insurance).
The world used to be a much more complex place. Balancing the needs of a local people against the need to provide a bulwark against Soviet expansion meant making a decision favoring a relatively small group of people in a small region against the chances of communism taking over the world. In hindsight, it may seem that many of the decisions were bad ones, but by and large, winning the Cold War and then dealing with the dictators made more sense at the time.
I think you're confusing Gaddafi with other dictators. He'd had the idea of the coup years prior, and the king wasn't liked or respected by much of the populace. Britain and the US may not have blocked the coup, but they didn't seem to have had an active hand in it happening.
Gaddafi became a problem within months of taking power, and by the early 1970s had allied Libya with then-Soviet-backed Egypt and Syria. By 1981, Reagan had given the CIA permission to take more decisive action in Libya since Gaddafi was funding and supplying terrorist groups from the Middle East to Ireland.
You're off by a factor of more than two. While oil consumption in the US is down somewhat, the average has been a little under 19 million barrels of oil per day for a few years.
Glass, concrete, and steel were all invented thousands of years ago. There's a good chance that in two or three thousand years, no one will remember who Steve Jobs or Dennis Ritchie were, either. That doesn't change the immediate impact of the men to our time.
It depends on the noise level of the DC. Where I work, microphones would be useless, but some of the computer rooms in other buildings are relatively quiet and we've used microphones on NetBotz devices when people have been in the room and we're monitoring what they're talking about while working. (It has sometimes saved a phone call when a configuration looked odd momentarily but they were doing it for a reason.)
One of the major backbone providers has a lights-out data center not far from my work. I know a guy who has a hosting business there, and he's shown me around to the limits of his access. There is no one on-site from the company or its contractors--not even a security guard. They have biometrics plus PINs for access; it's laced with low-light/IR cameras (it wouldn't surprise me to learn they have microphones); it has motion detectors in case the cameras miss something; and the redundancy is incredible. They maintain contracts with local electricians, plumbers, and a few technical companies should a blade burn out. They manage the entire thing from a few states over, and as of a couple of years ago almost all of their data centers had been converted to run this way. Savings were good, something like a million dollars per DC per year even as unanticipated downtime decreased.
I looked at it and saw the future of IT. I wasn't sure if I was more impressed or scared.
NASA bought the pens for under $3 each starting in 1968. The Russians were using exactly the same ink pens in orbit a year later at the same price.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fact-or-fiction-nasa-spen
It's not that humans are lazy. Humans are social creatures, wired to fit into the crowd. It's a survival strategy to avoid being the sole soft, tasty morsel on the plains. When we learn something new, we share it (or at least the fact that we learned it) with others in part to seek their approval. Even those who choose not to conform tend to group with others who don't conform.
Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution provides Congress the power to call forth the militia to "suppress Insurrections." Article III, Section 3 defines treason as "levying war against [the United States]." Given that these are delegated by the Constitution, it would seem to me an implicit denial of the right to revolt.
I disagree with the viewpoint, though I think they're doing it for what they believe are good reasons. Bullying is something with which I am intimately familiar, having been much shorter than normal in childhood and usually acing everything. By the time I got to high school, I figured out some ways to befriend a few football jocks and managed to get some protection. Not everyone I knew was so lucky. Back then, bullying was largely limited to a single school or sometimes just one grade; with e-mail and social networking, bullies can get friends from all over to gang up on a target. But as much as the issue needs attention, I don't think this is the way to address it.
My tax dollars go to support a lot of people I don't like. It's the nature of the system. But the system helps to balance all of this. There are other legislators who may (and probably will) prevent this from passing (or even getting to the floor); there is a governor who has to agree with and sign the legislation to law if it passes; and at this level, both the state and federal courts are avenues of challenge.
They wrote a paper that explains an opinion about an idea that is controversial and unpopular. It is exactly the kind of thing that the First Amendment was intended to protect.
Incidentally, there is no "right to revolt" in the Constitution. The concept is covered in the Declaration of Independence which, while culturally and politically significant, holds no legal weight.
Based on a quick search, at least as recently as 2009. And then 2008 before that. And 2007, 2006, and 2005 (twice) before that.
http://datalossdb.org/organizations/128-iron-mountain
We use Iron Mountain and they're generally good (and the local warehouse is only a couple of miles away), but it's still a good idea to encrypt any tape that leaves the facility, whether or not it contains personal data. A system backup could provide information useful to someone who wants to gain access to a network, among other things.
Accreditation Hell has another room wherein you have managers who push for a technology because it has attained Common Criteria EAL5 certification and even budget for it, but then refuse to allow it to be configured even remotely close to it.
Anecdotal evidence I've heard is that Leo is even less-liked than Carly was, especially with this announcement. That dislike may extend well into the upper reaches, as since the announcement, various senior managers and vice presidents have said some very scattered things about the future of the division and what will happen with webOS. Either there is very poor communication at the top, there is no real strategy and HP's executive board is winging it, or someone is actively working to undermine someone else. Any of those is individually a bad thing, but given HP's management issues over the last few years it would not surprise me to find more than one of those to be true, and possibly true multiple times over.
That depends on the firewalls in use. More modern firewalls (McAfee Firewall Enterprise [formerly Sidewinder], Palo Alto Networks Firewall, etc.) perform application checks such as ensuring that only HTTP and not HTTPS goes over port 80 and vice versa for port 443, and certainly someone trying to use IPSec over port 80 is going to get stopped. Some web filters can check the IP address ranges in use to determine if they're traditionally assigned to home use and block them. Our web filter can do this so that we have fewer people connecting to their home systems. It's not perfect as the databases are still catching up and sometimes shift to other uses, though we often catch users when report time comes around and half of their web traffic is to an unidentified IP address.
You absolutely can build up a tolerance to a food allergy. There have been several studies in the last few years suggesting that small amounts of allergens can be used to build up a tolerance. Here are two examples:
Milk
Peanuts
The flying wing technology was recognized in the US as stealthy to early radar, too, but despite a lot of money poured into it by Jack Northrop, it also proved to be unstable and difficult to fly with the technology of that era. It wasn't until flight computers caught up and a lot of Reagan-era build-up money became available that the B-2 became viable.
Kelly Johnson mentioned at one point that he would have loved to come up with a stealth design as sleek and cool as the F-19 concept that had been around in models for a few years, but the math for those kinds of curved surfaces is exceptionally difficult and beyond the computers of the time. The facets of the F-117 are useful to ensure that the radar signal goes elsewhere, and radar-absorbent paint helps to reduce the reflection. Even the frame around the canopy is angled to reduce direct reflections. When dropping bombs, the bay door opens, the weapon is ejected, and the door closes, all fairly quickly. S-shaped intakes remove the engine fans from the reflection problem, and diffusers reduce the heat signature. The thing is tiny, too, as fighters go, or at least appears to be. I saw it at a post-Desert Storm air show at March AFB (where it was surrounded by armed personnel who prevented anyone from getting closer than about 20 feet from it). While the length and width are about the same as an F-15 (which was also nearby), it is vertically much shorter.
They were effective for their day, but that just makes one wonder what has replaced them. It may be that the shoot-down over Yugoslavia was more effective than realized, and once word of it got around, they weren't safe anymore. I imagine a day when we'll be looking for not the planes, but the ripples they leave in the air.
Much of that was due to the Iraqi use of old Soviet doctrines which advocated certain rigid defensive procedures and absolute adherence to command and control centers. Only certain units were given the flexibility to go out on their own, and units cut off from C2 centers (either through loss of radio contact or by the C2 center itself being destroyed) were often lost as to how to respond. The strategy had worked well enough against Iran if you ignore Iran's superior numbers (often through the use of the Martyrs' Brigades), but the Soviets had started to get rid of it at least by the first couple of years in Afghanistan (if not earlier) where terrain and circumstances led to loss of contact with C2 on a regular basis and units had to be flexible.
Anyway, I'm not surprised that the F-117 was babied early on. I remember the talk of picking up incoming aircraft by watching for signals between cell towers to be interrupted. I don't know how that worked out, but it may be an early mechanism by which future attacks are monitored when everything is too stealthy for radar.
I agree that that the Pakistani government is generally happier to have the drone strikes than not, though they have perhaps legitimately objected to those which have killed more civilians than militants. It also can make their lives harder in negotiating with tribes which are on the fence in terms of loyalties.
The stealth helicopter was surprising mostly because most people didn't think that a stealth helo even existed. The fact that it used certain materials and ducted fans isn't surprising once it's known to exist. The existence of a stealth fighter in the 1980s wasn't really a well-kept secret. What was well-kept was the shape. My parents saw it before it was publicized when they were out camping in the deserts of Southern California. A trio of planes passed not far overhead and only two of them looked familiar. When they told me about it, I got my books out and went through them. The chase planes were easy to identify as T-38s, but the other didn't look like anything I'd ever heard of. A few months later, my parents excitedly called me in from another room, pointing at the TV screen and say, "That's what we saw!" My best guess is that it was either doing a run out at the bomb ranges around China Lake or else was ferrying between Edwards and Nellis/Area-51 and the decision had been made to allow daylight flights a little before the public unveiling.
Reconnaissance drones with stealth capabilities are already in use, and that suggests that attack drones are also in use. Most people think of the Predator drones (still performing well and widely used with a payload of two Hellfire missiles), but also in use are the Grey Eagle (an upgraded Predator that can carry four Hellfires), and the Reaper (capable of carrying 14 Hellfires). Boeing has publicly rolled out the Phantom Ray for testing, but I would bet that Boeing and/or Lockheed have already provided stealth drones to the military. Even tougher to track is what the CIA buys because even more of its funding is black and it's almost impossible to guess what it's being used for. Jamming defenses isn't really viable because it lights up every scope with noise, announcing that an attack is occurring.
Of course, some of the strikes in Somalia were done with AC-130s, so drones aren't always the preferred means of attack.
The convenient thing about the drones is the ease of putting them in play from carriers, small airfields, and neighboring countries and so are easy to sneak in and out. US drone strikes are suspected in many more places than just Pakistan and Afghanistan, including Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Sudan, as well as possibly Colombia, Algeria, Morocco, and others. Many of them involve (technically) no military operations as they are carried out by the CIA.
US drones have reportedly been shot down by Iran and I think also Syria, so they're operating in many more countries than just those subject to airstrikes.