Google provides a free as in beer OS (some of it is OSS but not all)
AFAIK, everything Google provides is OSS (mostly Apache 2 licensed). What Google provides isn't enough to make a functional phone, though. There's a whole vendor layer which has to be provided by the device maker.
but is actually significantly better in some compelling way. It has to offer something that will entice people to leave their friends and family. If what you offer is exactly the same as Facebook, then what's the incentive for people to move?
Because you don't have to leave straight away, it is possible to run multiple Social Media Apps together. I currently have friends and family that I reach either by Skype, Viber, Whatsapp, Slack, Txt, Phone, Email whatever and it's not a problem.
I think maybe you don't know what social media is. Most of the things in your list are person-to-person messaging tools, not social media tools. Perhaps you only use Facebook for messaging?
Most people don't care so much about "the ads and the spying". And even if they did... how would this alternative social network be funded if it didn't use targeted advertising?
The same way every other tech project is funded, through VC.
And how are the VCs going to make money? They only invest if they think they can see big payback later. So where is that going to come from?
To support billions of users you need hundreds of thousands of servers, terabits of bandwidth and the operations and engineering staff to build and support all of it.
Like Tinder and Twitter and every other Tech App that makes no money?
Twitter is profitable -- it makes its money through targeted advertising, AKA "the ads and the spying". Tinder is not profitable, but is being run as a loss leader by the company that develops it, for now. Eventually it will have to become profitable or go away... and since it has already tried the subscription model and failed, it will almost certainly turn to targeted advertising.
Targeted advertising has proven to be the most effective way to fund large-scale online services. Until someone comes up with an alternative model, social media systems will all be funded by targeted advertising.
And this is the bit I don't get get, where are the FB clones? Most people I know hate FB and would switch to another similar product if it were available, but there simply are none.
Two words: Network effect. Everyone uses Facebook because everyone else uses Facebook.
Every competitor tried to do something different and failed (hello Google Plus).
That's because the only way to break the network effect is to offer an alternative that isn't a clone, but is actually significantly better in some compelling way. It has to offer something that will entice people to leave their friends and family. If what you offer is exactly the same as Facebook, then what's the incentive for people to move?
All that most people are after is the simple connect with 'friends', share a newsfeed format, and messaging but without the ads and the spying.
Most people don't care so much about "the ads and the spying". And even if they did... how would this alternative social network be funded if it didn't use targeted advertising? To support billions of users you need hundreds of thousands of servers, terabits of bandwidth and the operations and engineering staff to build and support all of it.
Well, who would know more about creating dystopian futures than a Certified Google Asshole like Shillden??
Hey, man, long time no see! It's been a little lonely posting without my very own slashdot stalker to quickly reply to every post. Please tell me you're planning to stick around for a while.
Even if humans are rational, when being in the 1% alone helps keep you in the 1% then that's a problem. It's too easy to use wealth to stay wealthy. You should have to do something valuable to remain wealthy.
Meh. That's not inherently a problem except in outcome-based conceptions of social justice. Until it provokes riots, anyway. Then it's an actual problem for society. Otherwise, it may be a societal opportunity cost, no more. If society allowed greater mobility it would be easier for the most competent and energetic to acquire resources which they would presumably put to better use than the silver spoon set. And it seems like an opportunity that is potentially more than offset by the costs and risks inherent in empowering someone to reallocate the silver spoon wealth.
Note that I'm not actually saying that we shouldn't try to change this, just that it's not clear that it's inherently problematic, much less that it's fixable without doing larger damage to society. Any attempt to fix it should proceed cautiously.
This will benefit some people, many more times than others. Which can be fine (it's not important how much 'the 1%' makes), unless the lowest paid don't get paid enough anymore.
If humans were rational, it wouldn't be important how much the 1% makes. In reality absolute inequality does cause social unrest, even if the lowest have more than kings of centuries past (which, arguably, is the case now, much less in an automation-heavy future that makes everything dirt cheap). The fact is that we are a status-seeking species, and although we not only allow but almost demand a certain level of inequality, so that there is status to seek, when inequality gets to be too great it generates anger. That anger manifests first as a simmering disregard of social norms (e.g. crime) plus escapism (e.g. drug abuse), but can boil over into serious civil unrest (e.g. riots) and perhaps even actual warfare.
So, it is and will be in the best interest of the 1% to ensure not only that the bottom have food, shelter, clothing and entertainment, but that the level of inequality doesn't get to be too great. If the 1% are really smart, they'll endeavor to reduce inequality to a fairly low level... say no more than 100X between top and bottom, because there's ample evidence that equality is strongly correlated with overall happiness and safety.
I'm a decidedly libertarian person, with a strong belief in market efficiency and therefore a preference for laissez faire economic policy, but the fact that absolute inequality does matter to people because of the way our brains are wired has convinced me that this we really do need to reduce inequality, and would even if the absolute wealth of those at the bottom were perfectly adequate.
In truth, Economists know that automation and the associated productivity will make life much better, just like it always has.
Your argument is a strawman which misses the point. Obviously economists understand that massive automation will create equally massive gains in productivity, causing prices to plummet and goods to be abundant. This isn't the topic of the debate. The topic is what to do about the fact that our current model for distributing goods and services is based on the notion that labor is scarce and that people must be motivated to work. Automation makes labor abundant and may ultimately remove the opportunity for many people to work, and under the present system, if they don't work, they don't get to eat (or, more accurately, they're forced to grovel to a massive, sneering bureaucracy for the opportunity to eat, barely).
This means that continuing our current approach looks like it will create a rather dystopian future, which means that we really should be thinking hard about alternatives. The paper argues that we're not putting enough effort into the latter.
struggling and hitting them late may be because of a one-time setback or may indicate that bumpy roads lie ahead, too.
Or it may indicate that they just habitually set very high goals. There's a common notion in Silicon Valley that if you regularly achieve your goals, you must be setting them too low. Musk's companies have a history of doing incredible things while failing to do the even more incredible things he promised.
Interesting. I had to look it up. Not a terribly compelling example, though, since sites using the paid service were given more than a year's notice, and they still had the option of using the ad-based service if they didn't want to invest in something else.
If that's the best example there is, then I'd say it supports my argument that Google is pretty careful not to pull the rug without warning from paying customers. It's unreasonable to expect that a business will never shut down a product, what you can and should expect is that the business will honor its contracts and provide adequate notice for transition.
HTTPS does prevent malware from being inserted by people who control one of the hops between the server and the browser. It obviously cannot prevent malware that is being served by the server.
it does bring up the issue that TFA codes probably need a warning placed alongside the code. "This code is for your personal use only. Nobody should ever ask you for this code. Never give the code to another person, even if they claim to be from [company] or [government]."
It's actually really hard to convince people not to share their TFA codes. It's pretty much exactly the same problem as convincing them not to share their passwords, and social engineering passwords from people is astonishingly easy.
Google's corporate security team decided a few years back to move all employee sign-in off of code-based TFA and onto security key-based TFA for exactly this reason. They couldn't train a bunch of smart, highly-educated people not to share TFA codes, but found that it's pretty easy to convince people to keep a physical device in their possession, and to report when it's lost or stolen.
affecting all legit websites which don't actually need HTTPS
All web sites need HTTPS. Not to make sure the data transmitted is secret, but to make sure that the data that the web site transmits is the data the browser receives. Without that integrity assurance, someone with control of any node in the path between server and browser can modify the data stream to inject malware.
But narrow use cases aren't going to drive a broad technology shift. More passenger vehicles are built than all other types combined, and BEVs have that use case pretty well covered now, and will have it fully covered within a few years. I expect Tesla's semi trucks to move the freight industry towards BEVs as well; the economics are pretty compelling.
No, I don't see fuel cells going anywhere. Batteries are going to continue moving into larger and larger swaths of the vehicle market and the remaining use cases are going to stick with ICEs until batteries can take over.
If Bitcoin is slowly inflating, rather than violently oscillating between extremes, it might start to be possible to take it seriously as a "currency".
Per arth1 above, it's up 8% since yesterday. So, still violently oscillating.
... fuel cells. The batteries are a stop gap. We need air breathing fuel cells to compete with hydrocarbon internal combustion engines.
I don't think fuel cells will take off. There are some pretty fundamental difficulties with them, and relatively little research investment is going into them -- certainly nothing to compare with the research going into improved batteries. We see another probably-significant battery research result every couple of weeks.
Further, BEVs already compete quite well with ICEVs. Not for all use cases, but many. Batteries are going to continue getting better, and cheaper, and moving BEVs into ever-broader roles, continuing to narrow the applications for which fuel cells would be better... if practical, cost-effective, mass market fuel cells existed, which they don't.
The US constitution's definition of "treaty" isn't the same as the normal definition. You're right that, under US legal terminology congressional-executive and sole executive agreements aren't treaties. But under the normal definition of the word, and the definition used in international law, as well as in every practical way, they are treaties. So, most people call them treaties. You're welcome to be pedantic and call them agreements if you like, of course.
Sure. Essentially the Paris Accord was also a congressional-executive treaty. The president was supposed to work the political process to meet the goals.
President of the United States Obama agreed to it, and by the laws of the United States, the United States agreed to it.
The law in the United States is that the President may agree to treaties only with the consent of the Senate.
That's irrelevant in this case, because the Paris Agreement was specifically structured with the constitutional situation in the US in mind, so that Obama would not need ratification by the Senate.
To understand this, we first have to take a step back and look at how treaties are handled by the United States. The US actually enters into three different kinds of treaties, only one of which uses the constitutional process. No, this doesn't make the other two kinds unconstitutional.
The first kind is what you've described, per Article II. The US rarely uses this kind, because the Senate is a pain in the ass to work with.
The second kind is what are called "congressional-executive" treaties. These are treaties which the president (the executive part of the name) signs, but which don't directly obligate the US to do anything. They only represent an agreement by the president to seek legislation (the congressional part of the name) to enact the terms of the treaty. This enactment is performed via the same process that any federal law is made: majority vote of both houses plus the signature of the president.
The third kind is what are called "sole-executive" treaties. These are treaties signed by the president with no involvement of either legislative house. They are constitutional because they only obligate the president, not the country, and are written so that they cover only things that the president already has the authority to do. One very common example is a "Status Of Forces Agreement". These describe the terms under which US military forces in US bases on foreign soil will operate. Because the president is commander in chief of the armed forces, he can and does simply order the military to comply with the terms of the treaty.
The Paris Accord was a sole-executive treaty. When Obama signed it, he really only promised to do three things:
1. Meet every five years to make new, more aggressive goals on climate change reduction.
2. Meet every five years and publish how we're doing on our climate change reduction goals.
3. Track how we're doing on climate change reduction.
That's it. The president can easily order the relevant departments of the executive branch to do these things.
So, Obama could sign the treaty without Senate involvement. Then he needed to ask Americans to meet the specified goals, whatever that involved, but he could really only ask. Likewise, Trump could back out of the treaty without Senate involvement. That just means that the US isn't going to show up to the goal-setting and goal accomplishment review meetings. Nothing more.
Why not just shoot down the drones though?
It seems like losing a $300 drone should be punishment enough.
It's essentially the same thing as flying a kite, so maybe felony prosecution is a bit heavy-handed.
So you're saying the Forest Service should equip its planes and helicopters with drone-killer air-to-air missiles. Cool! Or maybe directed EMP weapons?
Or, instead of militarizing the USFS, we could just attach a heavy enough penalty to being caught flying a drone over a forest fire to ensure that the word quickly spreads through the drone hobbyist community that breaking the law and endangering USFS personnel who are already doing a hard and dangerous job will have a very bad outcome. Its much less sexy, but a lot cheaper and probably more effective.
Criminal penalties shouldn't be excessive, but they're also not just about equitable punishment for actual damage. Their primary intent is deterrence, and legislators have to factor in not only the level of societal risk posed by the crime, but also the likelihood of being caught. Crimes that can easily be gotten away with often get stiffer penalties. This is why mail fraud and check forgery are felonies, even when the amounts of money involved are small.
The theory is that people apply an "expected risk" model when deciding whether to do something illegal, and the word "expected" here has roughly the same meaning as it does in statistics. The expected value or expected cost is the value/cost multiplied by the probability of receiving/bearing it. In cases like this, be probability of getting caught and prosecuted is extremely low (forest fires are big and in remote areas and drones are small) so if the only risk is the loss of the drone, or even that plus a few hundred dollars in fines, people may decide to do it anyway. A heavier penalty serves to overcome the low probability of getting caught.
All this means is that they're using standard crypto -- and if it's really "bank grade" then it could be a little behind the times. Banks still use 3DES all over the place. That's not a security problem, exactly, but they really need to update.
I'm surprised they didn't use the more common "military-grade security" phrase. It's not one whit more meaningful than "bank-grade security", other than it probably indicates use of AES, perhaps AES-256, given the NSA's apparent concern about quantum computing.
I guess both phrases can be taken to indicate "We aren't complete idiots who roll our own ciphers" though it definitely leaves the door wide open for "(but we are stupid enough to roll our own protocols and implementations)". No way to know on the latter point without looking at the details.
In fact the probabilities of being alone and not being alone are close to equal.
From the actual paper's Conclusion:
"...we find a substantial probability that we are alone in our galaxy, and perhaps even in our observable universe (53%–99.6% and 39%–85% respectively). ’Where are they?’ — probably extremely far away, and quite possibly beyond the cosmological horizon and forever unreachable."
Yep. Within the orders of magnitude we're talking about, that's "close to equal".
The problem is 99.9999999 of the bottles aren't a "Pet bottle" like yours
I assume you meant 99.9999999%. That would mean that only one out of every 1,000,000,000 bottles gets reused. That would mean that out of the 40B bottles used (and not recycled) in the US every year, only 40 of them get reused. Since I personally know a dozen or so people who do this regularly, you've got to be off by a few orders of magnitude.
(Yes, I'm making a pedantic point about your excessive number of nines. Yes, I know you didn't actually calculate an estimate, but just pounded the '9' until you felt satisfied. This is a common thing innumerate people do and it's really obnoxious. 99.99% would be a far more realistic guess, and would have made your point just as effectively.)
Slashdot Mirror
Google intentionally makes certain aspects Chrome only.
For example?
Google provides a free as in beer OS (some of it is OSS but not all)
AFAIK, everything Google provides is OSS (mostly Apache 2 licensed). What Google provides isn't enough to make a functional phone, though. There's a whole vendor layer which has to be provided by the device maker.
but is actually significantly better in some compelling way. It has to offer something that will entice people to leave their friends and family. If what you offer is exactly the same as Facebook, then what's the incentive for people to move?
Because you don't have to leave straight away, it is possible to run multiple Social Media Apps together. I currently have friends and family that I reach either by Skype, Viber, Whatsapp, Slack, Txt, Phone, Email whatever and it's not a problem.
I think maybe you don't know what social media is. Most of the things in your list are person-to-person messaging tools, not social media tools. Perhaps you only use Facebook for messaging?
Most people don't care so much about "the ads and the spying". And even if they did... how would this alternative social network be funded if it didn't use targeted advertising?
The same way every other tech project is funded, through VC.
And how are the VCs going to make money? They only invest if they think they can see big payback later. So where is that going to come from?
To support billions of users you need hundreds of thousands of servers, terabits of bandwidth and the operations and engineering staff to build and support all of it.
Like Tinder and Twitter and every other Tech App that makes no money?
Twitter is profitable -- it makes its money through targeted advertising, AKA "the ads and the spying". Tinder is not profitable, but is being run as a loss leader by the company that develops it, for now. Eventually it will have to become profitable or go away... and since it has already tried the subscription model and failed, it will almost certainly turn to targeted advertising.
Targeted advertising has proven to be the most effective way to fund large-scale online services. Until someone comes up with an alternative model, social media systems will all be funded by targeted advertising.
And this is the bit I don't get get, where are the FB clones? Most people I know hate FB and would switch to another similar product if it were available, but there simply are none.
Two words: Network effect. Everyone uses Facebook because everyone else uses Facebook.
Every competitor tried to do something different and failed (hello Google Plus).
That's because the only way to break the network effect is to offer an alternative that isn't a clone, but is actually significantly better in some compelling way. It has to offer something that will entice people to leave their friends and family. If what you offer is exactly the same as Facebook, then what's the incentive for people to move?
All that most people are after is the simple connect with 'friends', share a newsfeed format, and messaging but without the ads and the spying.
Most people don't care so much about "the ads and the spying". And even if they did... how would this alternative social network be funded if it didn't use targeted advertising? To support billions of users you need hundreds of thousands of servers, terabits of bandwidth and the operations and engineering staff to build and support all of it.
Well, who would know more about creating dystopian futures than a Certified Google Asshole like Shillden??
Hey, man, long time no see! It's been a little lonely posting without my very own slashdot stalker to quickly reply to every post. Please tell me you're planning to stick around for a while.
Indeed, time will tell. And it won't take too long, I think. It should be clear in three or four years.
Even if humans are rational, when being in the 1% alone helps keep you in the 1% then that's a problem. It's too easy to use wealth to stay wealthy. You should have to do something valuable to remain wealthy.
Meh. That's not inherently a problem except in outcome-based conceptions of social justice. Until it provokes riots, anyway. Then it's an actual problem for society. Otherwise, it may be a societal opportunity cost, no more. If society allowed greater mobility it would be easier for the most competent and energetic to acquire resources which they would presumably put to better use than the silver spoon set. And it seems like an opportunity that is potentially more than offset by the costs and risks inherent in empowering someone to reallocate the silver spoon wealth.
Note that I'm not actually saying that we shouldn't try to change this, just that it's not clear that it's inherently problematic, much less that it's fixable without doing larger damage to society. Any attempt to fix it should proceed cautiously.
This will benefit some people, many more times than others. Which can be fine (it's not important how much 'the 1%' makes), unless the lowest paid don't get paid enough anymore.
If humans were rational, it wouldn't be important how much the 1% makes. In reality absolute inequality does cause social unrest, even if the lowest have more than kings of centuries past (which, arguably, is the case now, much less in an automation-heavy future that makes everything dirt cheap). The fact is that we are a status-seeking species, and although we not only allow but almost demand a certain level of inequality, so that there is status to seek, when inequality gets to be too great it generates anger. That anger manifests first as a simmering disregard of social norms (e.g. crime) plus escapism (e.g. drug abuse), but can boil over into serious civil unrest (e.g. riots) and perhaps even actual warfare.
So, it is and will be in the best interest of the 1% to ensure not only that the bottom have food, shelter, clothing and entertainment, but that the level of inequality doesn't get to be too great. If the 1% are really smart, they'll endeavor to reduce inequality to a fairly low level... say no more than 100X between top and bottom, because there's ample evidence that equality is strongly correlated with overall happiness and safety.
I'm a decidedly libertarian person, with a strong belief in market efficiency and therefore a preference for laissez faire economic policy, but the fact that absolute inequality does matter to people because of the way our brains are wired has convinced me that this we really do need to reduce inequality, and would even if the absolute wealth of those at the bottom were perfectly adequate.
In truth, Economists know that automation and the associated productivity will make life much better, just like it always has.
Your argument is a strawman which misses the point. Obviously economists understand that massive automation will create equally massive gains in productivity, causing prices to plummet and goods to be abundant. This isn't the topic of the debate. The topic is what to do about the fact that our current model for distributing goods and services is based on the notion that labor is scarce and that people must be motivated to work. Automation makes labor abundant and may ultimately remove the opportunity for many people to work, and under the present system, if they don't work, they don't get to eat (or, more accurately, they're forced to grovel to a massive, sneering bureaucracy for the opportunity to eat, barely).
This means that continuing our current approach looks like it will create a rather dystopian future, which means that we really should be thinking hard about alternatives. The paper argues that we're not putting enough effort into the latter.
struggling and hitting them late may be because of a one-time setback or may indicate that bumpy roads lie ahead, too.
Or it may indicate that they just habitually set very high goals. There's a common notion in Silicon Valley that if you regularly achieve your goals, you must be setting them too low. Musk's companies have a history of doing incredible things while failing to do the even more incredible things he promised.
Interesting. I had to look it up. Not a terribly compelling example, though, since sites using the paid service were given more than a year's notice, and they still had the option of using the ad-based service if they didn't want to invest in something else.
If that's the best example there is, then I'd say it supports my argument that Google is pretty careful not to pull the rug without warning from paying customers. It's unreasonable to expect that a business will never shut down a product, what you can and should expect is that the business will honor its contracts and provide adequate notice for transition.
Sure, Google drops free products with little warning. Do you have any examples of them dropping a paid product that way?
... HTTPS does not prevent malware.
It securly transmits the malware.
HTTPS does prevent malware from being inserted by people who control one of the hops between the server and the browser. It obviously cannot prevent malware that is being served by the server.
it does bring up the issue that TFA codes probably need a warning placed alongside the code. "This code is for your personal use only. Nobody should ever ask you for this code. Never give the code to another person, even if they claim to be from [company] or [government]."
It's actually really hard to convince people not to share their TFA codes. It's pretty much exactly the same problem as convincing them not to share their passwords, and social engineering passwords from people is astonishingly easy.
Google's corporate security team decided a few years back to move all employee sign-in off of code-based TFA and onto security key-based TFA for exactly this reason. They couldn't train a bunch of smart, highly-educated people not to share TFA codes, but found that it's pretty easy to convince people to keep a physical device in their possession, and to report when it's lost or stolen.
affecting all legit websites which don't actually need HTTPS
All web sites need HTTPS. Not to make sure the data transmitted is secret, but to make sure that the data that the web site transmits is the data the browser receives. Without that integrity assurance, someone with control of any node in the path between server and browser can modify the data stream to inject malware.
But narrow use cases aren't going to drive a broad technology shift. More passenger vehicles are built than all other types combined, and BEVs have that use case pretty well covered now, and will have it fully covered within a few years. I expect Tesla's semi trucks to move the freight industry towards BEVs as well; the economics are pretty compelling.
No, I don't see fuel cells going anywhere. Batteries are going to continue moving into larger and larger swaths of the vehicle market and the remaining use cases are going to stick with ICEs until batteries can take over.
If Bitcoin is slowly inflating, rather than violently oscillating between extremes, it might start to be possible to take it seriously as a "currency".
Per arth1 above, it's up 8% since yesterday. So, still violently oscillating.
... fuel cells. The batteries are a stop gap. We need air breathing fuel cells to compete with hydrocarbon internal combustion engines.
I don't think fuel cells will take off. There are some pretty fundamental difficulties with them, and relatively little research investment is going into them -- certainly nothing to compare with the research going into improved batteries. We see another probably-significant battery research result every couple of weeks.
Further, BEVs already compete quite well with ICEVs. Not for all use cases, but many. Batteries are going to continue getting better, and cheaper, and moving BEVs into ever-broader roles, continuing to narrow the applications for which fuel cells would be better... if practical, cost-effective, mass market fuel cells existed, which they don't.
The US constitution's definition of "treaty" isn't the same as the normal definition. You're right that, under US legal terminology congressional-executive and sole executive agreements aren't treaties. But under the normal definition of the word, and the definition used in international law, as well as in every practical way, they are treaties. So, most people call them treaties. You're welcome to be pedantic and call them agreements if you like, of course.
Sure. Essentially the Paris Accord was also a congressional-executive treaty. The president was supposed to work the political process to meet the goals.
The law in the United States is that the President may agree to treaties only with the consent of the Senate.
That's irrelevant in this case, because the Paris Agreement was specifically structured with the constitutional situation in the US in mind, so that Obama would not need ratification by the Senate.
To understand this, we first have to take a step back and look at how treaties are handled by the United States. The US actually enters into three different kinds of treaties, only one of which uses the constitutional process. No, this doesn't make the other two kinds unconstitutional.
The first kind is what you've described, per Article II. The US rarely uses this kind, because the Senate is a pain in the ass to work with.
The second kind is what are called "congressional-executive" treaties. These are treaties which the president (the executive part of the name) signs, but which don't directly obligate the US to do anything. They only represent an agreement by the president to seek legislation (the congressional part of the name) to enact the terms of the treaty. This enactment is performed via the same process that any federal law is made: majority vote of both houses plus the signature of the president.
The third kind is what are called "sole-executive" treaties. These are treaties signed by the president with no involvement of either legislative house. They are constitutional because they only obligate the president, not the country, and are written so that they cover only things that the president already has the authority to do. One very common example is a "Status Of Forces Agreement". These describe the terms under which US military forces in US bases on foreign soil will operate. Because the president is commander in chief of the armed forces, he can and does simply order the military to comply with the terms of the treaty.
The Paris Accord was a sole-executive treaty. When Obama signed it, he really only promised to do three things:
1. Meet every five years to make new, more aggressive goals on climate change reduction.
2. Meet every five years and publish how we're doing on our climate change reduction goals.
3. Track how we're doing on climate change reduction.
That's it. The president can easily order the relevant departments of the executive branch to do these things.
So, Obama could sign the treaty without Senate involvement. Then he needed to ask Americans to meet the specified goals, whatever that involved, but he could really only ask. Likewise, Trump could back out of the treaty without Senate involvement. That just means that the US isn't going to show up to the goal-setting and goal accomplishment review meetings. Nothing more.
Why not just shoot down the drones though? It seems like losing a $300 drone should be punishment enough. It's essentially the same thing as flying a kite, so maybe felony prosecution is a bit heavy-handed.
So you're saying the Forest Service should equip its planes and helicopters with drone-killer air-to-air missiles. Cool! Or maybe directed EMP weapons?
Or, instead of militarizing the USFS, we could just attach a heavy enough penalty to being caught flying a drone over a forest fire to ensure that the word quickly spreads through the drone hobbyist community that breaking the law and endangering USFS personnel who are already doing a hard and dangerous job will have a very bad outcome. Its much less sexy, but a lot cheaper and probably more effective.
Criminal penalties shouldn't be excessive, but they're also not just about equitable punishment for actual damage. Their primary intent is deterrence, and legislators have to factor in not only the level of societal risk posed by the crime, but also the likelihood of being caught. Crimes that can easily be gotten away with often get stiffer penalties. This is why mail fraud and check forgery are felonies, even when the amounts of money involved are small.
The theory is that people apply an "expected risk" model when deciding whether to do something illegal, and the word "expected" here has roughly the same meaning as it does in statistics. The expected value or expected cost is the value/cost multiplied by the probability of receiving/bearing it. In cases like this, be probability of getting caught and prosecuted is extremely low (forest fires are big and in remote areas and drones are small) so if the only risk is the loss of the drone, or even that plus a few hundred dollars in fines, people may decide to do it anyway. A heavier penalty serves to overcome the low probability of getting caught.
Yeah, right.
Meh.
All this means is that they're using standard crypto -- and if it's really "bank grade" then it could be a little behind the times. Banks still use 3DES all over the place. That's not a security problem, exactly, but they really need to update.
I'm surprised they didn't use the more common "military-grade security" phrase. It's not one whit more meaningful than "bank-grade security", other than it probably indicates use of AES, perhaps AES-256, given the NSA's apparent concern about quantum computing.
I guess both phrases can be taken to indicate "We aren't complete idiots who roll our own ciphers" though it definitely leaves the door wide open for "(but we are stupid enough to roll our own protocols and implementations)". No way to know on the latter point without looking at the details.
From the actual paper's Conclusion:
"...we find a substantial probability that we are alone in our galaxy, and perhaps even in our observable universe (53%–99.6% and 39%–85% respectively). ’Where are they?’ — probably extremely far away, and quite possibly beyond the cosmological horizon and forever unreachable."
Yep. Within the orders of magnitude we're talking about, that's "close to equal".
The problem is 99.9999999 of the bottles aren't a "Pet bottle" like yours
I assume you meant 99.9999999%. That would mean that only one out of every 1,000,000,000 bottles gets reused. That would mean that out of the 40B bottles used (and not recycled) in the US every year, only 40 of them get reused. Since I personally know a dozen or so people who do this regularly, you've got to be off by a few orders of magnitude.
(Yes, I'm making a pedantic point about your excessive number of nines. Yes, I know you didn't actually calculate an estimate, but just pounded the '9' until you felt satisfied. This is a common thing innumerate people do and it's really obnoxious. 99.99% would be a far more realistic guess, and would have made your point just as effectively.)