If just 5% of the American public wanted to overthrow the government, an armed revolution would be possible. You do not need overwhelming support, you need enough angry people with guns.
The problem is that less than 0.05% of the public cares about SOPA or PIPA. Most people just want to watch The Jersey Shore, football, etc., and then post about it on Facebook. They will not overthrow the government as long as they can still get their cheap entertainment. They will not even get their magazines and clips loaded.
It would not surprise me if the "cheap entertainment" you speak of soon comes to an end. With legislation like SOPA, this only encourages broadcast media corporations to engage in tit for tat patent-style quibbles over copyrights.
I suspect you've never run a business, or at least not handled the accounting side of one. Placing an arbitrary cap on the length of time a company can recover their expenses is exactly what you want.
I suspect you've never managed an economy.
If you place a cap on the amount of time a company can recover its spectrum expense, you limit the scope and scale of potential services for that block of spectrum.
Furthermore, as the government ( the public ) is the one holding the auction, placing a time limit also caps the amount of money that can be raised for the treasury today.
If you want to experience the joyous wonders of a planned economy, move to North Korea.
Check your vast expanse of business acumen at the door.
This sounds like the same argument for extending patents and copyrights indefinitely. Except in this case the medium is in the public domain from the start and there's only a finite quantity of it. A time cap of _appropriate_ length will incentivize the licensees to maximize the use of the medium rather than let it go to waste.
The real danger here is not that the monopoly based industries will win, but that they will annoy the public enough that the grants of monopoly will be withdrawn completely.
I would be amazed if Google truly signed an agreement with UMG that allowed UMG to basically shut down YouTube whenever they wanted. If there are no limits on UMG's ability to take down videos, why don't they just take down all the videos and eliminate youtube permanently?
UMG probably didn't want the public to know. If they took down everything, people would find out, protests would ensue, and ultimately Google would remove this "feature". However, my making it appear that the takedowns were a result of DMCA claims, nobody would be the wiser. Of course, they would have to selectively remove content, but they were probably removing a lot more than they could get away with using only the DMCA.
It's like the codebreaking that went on during World War II. The Allies had gobs of actionable intelligence but they couldn't act on everything because the Axis would know the codes were broken and switch to something more secure. The Allies resorted to stuff like planting a guy floating in the water with a suitcase full of secrets as a cover for how they learned what the Axis doing.
Agreed. Especially since correctly timing the spoofed GPS signals requires knowing the location of the (stealth) drone you're trying to trick.
I'm sure it would be possible to spoof the timestamps sent from different satellites so that the position is spoofed. However, are you sure that you would need to know the true position of the drone? If you know the spoofed location, then you can send signals to the drone with the correct timestamp offsets so that the spoofed position will be computed. The differences of the satellite clocks are what's used to compute the position; no clock on the drone is used at all.
A compass and some accelerometers(or even a view of the sun and an RTC) are a lousy substitute for the accuracy of GPS; but they do provide a sanity check that could keep you going in approximately the right direction, at least enough to hard-land somewhere nominally friendly, if GPS cannot be trusted...
It's almost certain that this drone DOES have an inertial navigation system - the problem is, how do you know when to use it? The way they usually work is that the navigation system computes two solutions: a hybrid GPS/INS solution to use most of the time, and a backup inertial-only solution. The inertial-only solution doesn't get used by the flight computers unless GPS is out entirely or there's some other very obvious problem. If you spoofed a GPS signal with real coordinates and slowly guided it away, how could the nav system see there's something wrong?
Inertial navigation systems need reference points to prevent huge drifts over time. This is especially a problem if the aircraft flies relatively straight at the same speed for a long time -- accelerometers won't be able to detect slight changes in course. Like you said, GPS is often used to provide the reference points to attenuate drift. If the GPS system is wrong, then the inertial nav system is also going to be fooled.
Texting while driving is something which shouldn't be legal. It's not a matter of morality, it's dangerous enough that it should be banned. Same goes for talking on the cellphone without a handset. Eating lunch and really anything else that's distracting and requires one to take a hand off the wheel.
So we're banning smoking in cars, manual transmissions, and the handicapped now?
I know your comment is in jest, but manual transmissions actually increase driver attentiveness. I have one in my car and I never use a phone while driving because I don't have a free hand. I also get a decent insurance discount -- I pay only slightly more than my wife who has a 4 banger sedan while I've got a RWD V8 coupe.
I'm surprised that it didn't have some sort of dead-reckoning or inertial system as a backup in such cases. If the dead-reckoning says "whoa, it is physically impossible for you to be anywhere NEAR where you think you are so ignore the GPS, go on inertial"...
This reminds me of a cruise ship running aground because a GPS antenna came unhooked. The crew was supposed to use LORAN to verify the GPS every hour, but they didn't.
In some ways, the US may have learned just as much from this as the Iranians. Losing one unmanned aircraft to learn of a serious exploit that has implications far beyond drones might not be such a bad result.
Having a phone or other device in your hand while driving is a $600 fine here (Quebec). Blowing through a crosswalk while someone is trying to cross is a $150 fine.
That's what I believe it is in California. Does a higher fine work? Do you still see people on phones while driving?
not to mention you know... how many lives have been saved because someone on the road witnessed an accident and called for an ambulance without having to look for a rest stop.
Yeah, that's what I meant. But how many of those calls were because of an accident that was caused by someone on the phone?
Actually, that funny old law is essentially why the FRC (Federal Radio Commission) was formed in 1912, which eventually became the FCC.
See, for you to receive radio transmissions from a tower far away, you need cooperation from all your neighbors. They have to silence any machinery that would cause interference on channels designated for radio.
Cell phone jammers are illegal because they interfere with designated channels for radio transmission. If they were legal, then you would have no way to deal with a neighbor that runs one near your house. That neighbor would legally be able to interfere with your radio, television, wi-fi, cell phone, etc.
I'm not completely sure whether you were being sarcastic or not, but this regulation, honestly, is very important. Without it, we'd pretty much have to rely on wired communication.
The argument is that public safety trumps nonexclusive access to the medium. That's what the NTSB and other state laws intend by outlawing phone use. However, just making handhelds illegal isn't doing the job. Either the fines aren't high enough, drivers don't understand the risks, or both. Legalizing jammers on highways probably isn't a good idea either since people who live nearby or have to make emergency calls will be affected.
Interestingly, if you do operate such a jammer and are caught by the FCC, I believe they can impose up to a $10,000 fine. If the fine for using your phone while driving was this expensive, it might cause drivers to think twice. Or, at least someone could compute an estimated cost in terms of life and property loss caused by phone-related crashes and set a fine accordingly. I'm sure it would be higher than the $20-50 in most states.
The other reason is that there are a lot more SWAT teams than they used to be, so the threshold for calling them out is a lot lower. Gotta justify that taxpayer money spent on fancy equipment somehow...
When you're a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. SWAT teams and now drones are sitting idle, all brought in under the guise of terrorism. If they aren't used, the budget will be cut and they'll soon be gone. Better put them to use, somehow.
It's incredibly arrogant of people to block ads simply because they dislike advertisements on an idealogical basis. They want free websites, but they don't want them to be able to make any money to pay for all the work that goes into it.
Every ad-tolerant person I've ever met uses this argument: "they need to make money." Webmasters aren't entitled to revenue only because of the desire to keep their sites running. People are only willing to pay what they believe something is worth. To me, flash ads are a high price to pay to view webpages which are mostly an unproductive time sink. However, I will pay cash for content that I think is interesting enough -- I have an online subscription to the local newspaper, for example.
Lastly, I run my own website at my expense. Granted, the traffic is low, but if that were to change, I would never force flash ads on anyone to pay for the hosting.
In the mid 1990s, when I was in middle school, we also had tons of books. We would all coax our parents to buy the biggest backpack available to carry them. It was almost to the point where you were shunned if you didn't have a bag that made you look like you were about to tip over. Somehow, I don't remember books being a problem in high school even though I rarely used my locker. I guess I grew enough so that books weren't a problem. I can't say for sure that ebooks are the right solution, but they would certainly lighten the load.
University is for learning. The idea is that you open the textbook on your own to gain a deeper understanding of the topic than you had time to cover in class.
This. If you have to constantly resort to the book, the professor isn't doing his or her job. For most of my college courses, books were more of a "second opinion" that I could reference when I had trouble understanding something.
It really should be an embarrassment to the colleges that bill themselves as technical schools, that virtually none of their athletes have a technical major. Athletic scholarships are a travesty in my opinion. A scholarship should be based on your potential to excel at your chosen major and your financial situation. Not whether you'll give the school bragging rights for having a winning team (which encourages alumni donations).
I think this boils down to different people's viewpoints on the purpose of higher education. The European model is much different than the American one. The focus truly is on education and the education you receive is also much more narrowly focused on your field of study.
In the US, however, it gets blurry. Most of the liberal arts and social sciences faculty like to argue that the purpose of college is more intrinsic than just academics; that you are gaining life skills and experience not found elsewhere. At the same institution, the faculty in the engineering department will tell you flat out that they are preparing you for employment. In its current state, American higher education means different things to different people. Many students, both athletes and non-athletes, go to school for reasons other than education and it really shows when employers and the media cite statistics about how college grads can write or perform simple arithmetic.
I don't think any one US college student even scratches the surface of what's available to them during four years of school. Is a formal academic education the main benefit? I don't know. I think it depends on who you are.
Yes, but since you can't't really tell the difference until they start shooting, you need to remove the guns.
That is why that argument is stupid.
I'm with the OP: a few choice questions will quickly identify the people that are about to cause harm. Guns are just one of the many modalities available to someone with an ax to grind. Taking them away is no different than banning liquids on airline flights.
On my D1 track team, there were seven of us who graduated the same year I did. I don't remember all of our undergrad majors, but 3 of us are now PhD students, 1 is a medical doctor (orthopedist), 1 is a dentist,
And very likely they are worse at their chosen fields than people who spent their time and effort studying instead of training.
and two more are economic policy analysts in Washington.
That is not even funny.
I'm curious as to what your beef is. Work hard to solve your own problems and you won't have to complain about what anyone else does or how they got there.
I'm just curious how you're coming to this conclusion. How are athletes "shitting up" education? Are they somehow bringing everyone else down?
They waste space in the classroom, and curriculum has to be adjusted to accommodate their lack of talent, interest, preparation and effort.
You're going to have to demonstrate that significantly more athletes require curriculum adjustment than the average non-athlete. Just saying this is true based on a few anecdotal examples isn't good enough. Moreover, I'm wagering a guess that you've never attended an American university. Professors don't care whether you're an athlete or not; you're still expected to complete the same course material as everyone else. Occasionally, you may be given a few extra days to finish an assignment or take a test because you were traveling, but this isn't anything significant since plenty of "adjustments" like this are made for students with other obligations.
The reason college athletes have higher GPAs is they generally don't take demanding courses and often are taking the minimum credit load to be considered full time, whereas the folks taking engineering courses have a harder course load.
This may be true for some sports, but not for all.
There are plenty of exceptions where the student is using the athletic scholarship as a means of getting an education, but it is very rare to someone on an athletic scholarship majoring in anything but a liberal arts or a fluff business degree.
On my D1 track team, there were seven of us who graduated the same year I did. I don't remember all of our undergrad majors, but 3 of us are now PhD students, 1 is a medical doctor (orthopedist), 1 is a dentist, and two more are economic policy analysts in Washington. Previous and successive graduating classes also have similar outcomes. The women's track team also had similar postgrad activities, as did most other teams at my school. It's mostly the big name football and basketball schools that have the problems.
I find it funny that the author of the piece blurred her name in the profile screenshot in the article. The profile name can be clearly made out to be "Emily Steel," while all the other giveaway info like "reporter at the WSJ" and even hometown, education, and birthday aren't blurred out at all.
Athletic scholarships at American universities are almost entirely funded by alumni. These athletic scholarships aren't taking away any money from academic scholarships.
stop shitting up education for future generations.
I'm just curious how you're coming to this conclusion. How are athletes "shitting up" education? Are they somehow bringing everyone else down? Is the quality of education suffering at universities with high power athletic teams? Are more academically qualified applicants really being turned down? I think not; at a typical American public university with 20-40k students, maybe 500 of them are athletes. That's a pretty small percentage.
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If just 5% of the American public wanted to overthrow the government, an armed revolution would be possible. You do not need overwhelming support, you need enough angry people with guns. The problem is that less than 0.05% of the public cares about SOPA or PIPA. Most people just want to watch The Jersey Shore, football, etc., and then post about it on Facebook. They will not overthrow the government as long as they can still get their cheap entertainment. They will not even get their magazines and clips loaded.
It would not surprise me if the "cheap entertainment" you speak of soon comes to an end. With legislation like SOPA, this only encourages broadcast media corporations to engage in tit for tat patent-style quibbles over copyrights.
I suspect you've never run a business, or at least not handled the accounting side of one. Placing an arbitrary cap on the length of time a company can recover their expenses is exactly what you want.
I suspect you've never managed an economy. If you place a cap on the amount of time a company can recover its spectrum expense, you limit the scope and scale of potential services for that block of spectrum. Furthermore, as the government ( the public ) is the one holding the auction, placing a time limit also caps the amount of money that can be raised for the treasury today. If you want to experience the joyous wonders of a planned economy, move to North Korea. Check your vast expanse of business acumen at the door.
This sounds like the same argument for extending patents and copyrights indefinitely. Except in this case the medium is in the public domain from the start and there's only a finite quantity of it. A time cap of _appropriate_ length will incentivize the licensees to maximize the use of the medium rather than let it go to waste.
The real danger here is not that the monopoly based industries will win, but that they will annoy the public enough that the grants of monopoly will be withdrawn completely.
I hope you're right.
I would be amazed if Google truly signed an agreement with UMG that allowed UMG to basically shut down YouTube whenever they wanted. If there are no limits on UMG's ability to take down videos, why don't they just take down all the videos and eliminate youtube permanently?
UMG probably didn't want the public to know. If they took down everything, people would find out, protests would ensue, and ultimately Google would remove this "feature". However, my making it appear that the takedowns were a result of DMCA claims, nobody would be the wiser. Of course, they would have to selectively remove content, but they were probably removing a lot more than they could get away with using only the DMCA.
It's like the codebreaking that went on during World War II. The Allies had gobs of actionable intelligence but they couldn't act on everything because the Axis would know the codes were broken and switch to something more secure. The Allies resorted to stuff like planting a guy floating in the water with a suitcase full of secrets as a cover for how they learned what the Axis doing.
My mistake: the receiver does need a clock, but it doesn't need to be accurate. Additional satellites can be used to account for the lack of accuracy.
Agreed. Especially since correctly timing the spoofed GPS signals requires knowing the location of the (stealth) drone you're trying to trick.
I'm sure it would be possible to spoof the timestamps sent from different satellites so that the position is spoofed. However, are you sure that you would need to know the true position of the drone? If you know the spoofed location, then you can send signals to the drone with the correct timestamp offsets so that the spoofed position will be computed. The differences of the satellite clocks are what's used to compute the position; no clock on the drone is used at all.
A compass and some accelerometers(or even a view of the sun and an RTC) are a lousy substitute for the accuracy of GPS; but they do provide a sanity check that could keep you going in approximately the right direction, at least enough to hard-land somewhere nominally friendly, if GPS cannot be trusted...
It's almost certain that this drone DOES have an inertial navigation system - the problem is, how do you know when to use it? The way they usually work is that the navigation system computes two solutions: a hybrid GPS/INS solution to use most of the time, and a backup inertial-only solution. The inertial-only solution doesn't get used by the flight computers unless GPS is out entirely or there's some other very obvious problem. If you spoofed a GPS signal with real coordinates and slowly guided it away, how could the nav system see there's something wrong?
Inertial navigation systems need reference points to prevent huge drifts over time. This is especially a problem if the aircraft flies relatively straight at the same speed for a long time -- accelerometers won't be able to detect slight changes in course. Like you said, GPS is often used to provide the reference points to attenuate drift. If the GPS system is wrong, then the inertial nav system is also going to be fooled.
Texting while driving is something which shouldn't be legal. It's not a matter of morality, it's dangerous enough that it should be banned. Same goes for talking on the cellphone without a handset. Eating lunch and really anything else that's distracting and requires one to take a hand off the wheel.
So we're banning smoking in cars, manual transmissions, and the handicapped now?
I know your comment is in jest, but manual transmissions actually increase driver attentiveness. I have one in my car and I never use a phone while driving because I don't have a free hand. I also get a decent insurance discount -- I pay only slightly more than my wife who has a 4 banger sedan while I've got a RWD V8 coupe.
I'm surprised that it didn't have some sort of dead-reckoning or inertial system as a backup in such cases. If the dead-reckoning says "whoa, it is physically impossible for you to be anywhere NEAR where you think you are so ignore the GPS, go on inertial" ...
This reminds me of a cruise ship running aground because a GPS antenna came unhooked. The crew was supposed to use LORAN to verify the GPS every hour, but they didn't.
In some ways, the US may have learned just as much from this as the Iranians. Losing one unmanned aircraft to learn of a serious exploit that has implications far beyond drones might not be such a bad result.
If they were legal, then you would have no way to deal with a neighbor that runs one near your house.
People have known how to deal with bothersome neighbors for millennia before government regulators showed up.
When a bothersome neighbor refuses to stop being a nuisance, what happens next? We've evolved beyond the Hatfields and McCoys.
$20-$50?
Having a phone or other device in your hand while driving is a $600 fine here (Quebec). Blowing through a crosswalk while someone is trying to cross is a $150 fine.
That's what I believe it is in California. Does a higher fine work? Do you still see people on phones while driving?
not to mention you know... how many lives have been saved because someone on the road witnessed an accident and called for an ambulance without having to look for a rest stop.
Yeah, that's what I meant. But how many of those calls were because of an accident that was caused by someone on the phone?
Some funny old FCC thing baring them.
Actually, that funny old law is essentially why the FRC (Federal Radio Commission) was formed in 1912, which eventually became the FCC.
See, for you to receive radio transmissions from a tower far away, you need cooperation from all your neighbors. They have to silence any machinery that would cause interference on channels designated for radio.
Cell phone jammers are illegal because they interfere with designated channels for radio transmission. If they were legal, then you would have no way to deal with a neighbor that runs one near your house. That neighbor would legally be able to interfere with your radio, television, wi-fi, cell phone, etc.
I'm not completely sure whether you were being sarcastic or not, but this regulation, honestly, is very important. Without it, we'd pretty much have to rely on wired communication.
The argument is that public safety trumps nonexclusive access to the medium. That's what the NTSB and other state laws intend by outlawing phone use. However, just making handhelds illegal isn't doing the job. Either the fines aren't high enough, drivers don't understand the risks, or both. Legalizing jammers on highways probably isn't a good idea either since people who live nearby or have to make emergency calls will be affected.
Interestingly, if you do operate such a jammer and are caught by the FCC, I believe they can impose up to a $10,000 fine. If the fine for using your phone while driving was this expensive, it might cause drivers to think twice. Or, at least someone could compute an estimated cost in terms of life and property loss caused by phone-related crashes and set a fine accordingly. I'm sure it would be higher than the $20-50 in most states.
The other reason is that there are a lot more SWAT teams than they used to be, so the threshold for calling them out is a lot lower. Gotta justify that taxpayer money spent on fancy equipment somehow...
When you're a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. SWAT teams and now drones are sitting idle, all brought in under the guise of terrorism. If they aren't used, the budget will be cut and they'll soon be gone. Better put them to use, somehow.
^ This.
It's incredibly arrogant of people to block ads simply because they dislike advertisements on an idealogical basis. They want free websites, but they don't want them to be able to make any money to pay for all the work that goes into it.
Every ad-tolerant person I've ever met uses this argument: "they need to make money." Webmasters aren't entitled to revenue only because of the desire to keep their sites running. People are only willing to pay what they believe something is worth. To me, flash ads are a high price to pay to view webpages which are mostly an unproductive time sink. However, I will pay cash for content that I think is interesting enough -- I have an online subscription to the local newspaper, for example.
Lastly, I run my own website at my expense. Granted, the traffic is low, but if that were to change, I would never force flash ads on anyone to pay for the hosting.
Or would he? Welcome to the Police State.
Sovereign Immunity is all the rage these days.
In the mid 1990s, when I was in middle school, we also had tons of books. We would all coax our parents to buy the biggest backpack available to carry them. It was almost to the point where you were shunned if you didn't have a bag that made you look like you were about to tip over. Somehow, I don't remember books being a problem in high school even though I rarely used my locker. I guess I grew enough so that books weren't a problem. I can't say for sure that ebooks are the right solution, but they would certainly lighten the load.
University is for learning. The idea is that you open the textbook on your own to gain a deeper understanding of the topic than you had time to cover in class.
This. If you have to constantly resort to the book, the professor isn't doing his or her job. For most of my college courses, books were more of a "second opinion" that I could reference when I had trouble understanding something.
It really should be an embarrassment to the colleges that bill themselves as technical schools, that virtually none of their athletes have a technical major. Athletic scholarships are a travesty in my opinion. A scholarship should be based on your potential to excel at your chosen major and your financial situation. Not whether you'll give the school bragging rights for having a winning team (which encourages alumni donations).
I think this boils down to different people's viewpoints on the purpose of higher education. The European model is much different than the American one. The focus truly is on education and the education you receive is also much more narrowly focused on your field of study.
In the US, however, it gets blurry. Most of the liberal arts and social sciences faculty like to argue that the purpose of college is more intrinsic than just academics; that you are gaining life skills and experience not found elsewhere. At the same institution, the faculty in the engineering department will tell you flat out that they are preparing you for employment. In its current state, American higher education means different things to different people. Many students, both athletes and non-athletes, go to school for reasons other than education and it really shows when employers and the media cite statistics about how college grads can write or perform simple arithmetic.
I don't think any one US college student even scratches the surface of what's available to them during four years of school. Is a formal academic education the main benefit? I don't know. I think it depends on who you are.
Yes, but since you can't't really tell the difference until they start shooting, you need to remove the guns.
That is why that argument is stupid.
I'm with the OP: a few choice questions will quickly identify the people that are about to cause harm. Guns are just one of the many modalities available to someone with an ax to grind. Taking them away is no different than banning liquids on airline flights.
On my D1 track team, there were seven of us who graduated the same year I did. I don't remember all of our undergrad majors, but 3 of us are now PhD students, 1 is a medical doctor (orthopedist), 1 is a dentist,
And very likely they are worse at their chosen fields than people who spent their time and effort studying instead of training.
and two more are economic policy analysts in Washington.
That is not even funny.
I'm curious as to what your beef is. Work hard to solve your own problems and you won't have to complain about what anyone else does or how they got there.
I'm just curious how you're coming to this conclusion. How are athletes "shitting up" education? Are they somehow bringing everyone else down?
They waste space in the classroom, and curriculum has to be adjusted to accommodate their lack of talent, interest, preparation and effort.
You're going to have to demonstrate that significantly more athletes require curriculum adjustment than the average non-athlete. Just saying this is true based on a few anecdotal examples isn't good enough. Moreover, I'm wagering a guess that you've never attended an American university. Professors don't care whether you're an athlete or not; you're still expected to complete the same course material as everyone else. Occasionally, you may be given a few extra days to finish an assignment or take a test because you were traveling, but this isn't anything significant since plenty of "adjustments" like this are made for students with other obligations.
The reason college athletes have higher GPAs is they generally don't take demanding courses and often are taking the minimum credit load to be considered full time, whereas the folks taking engineering courses have a harder course load.
This may be true for some sports, but not for all.
There are plenty of exceptions where the student is using the athletic scholarship as a means of getting an education, but it is very rare to someone on an athletic scholarship majoring in anything but a liberal arts or a fluff business degree.
On my D1 track team, there were seven of us who graduated the same year I did. I don't remember all of our undergrad majors, but 3 of us are now PhD students, 1 is a medical doctor (orthopedist), 1 is a dentist, and two more are economic policy analysts in Washington. Previous and successive graduating classes also have similar outcomes. The women's track team also had similar postgrad activities, as did most other teams at my school. It's mostly the big name football and basketball schools that have the problems.
I find it funny that the author of the piece blurred her name in the profile screenshot in the article. The profile name can be clearly made out to be "Emily Steel," while all the other giveaway info like "reporter at the WSJ" and even hometown, education, and birthday aren't blurred out at all.
Athletic scholarships at American universities are almost entirely funded by alumni. These athletic scholarships aren't taking away any money from academic scholarships.
stop shitting up education for future generations.
I'm just curious how you're coming to this conclusion. How are athletes "shitting up" education? Are they somehow bringing everyone else down? Is the quality of education suffering at universities with high power athletic teams? Are more academically qualified applicants really being turned down? I think not; at a typical American public university with 20-40k students, maybe 500 of them are athletes. That's a pretty small percentage.