To put it simply: too much inflation is bad, deflation is always bad, and a little bit of inflation is good. Money isn't anything special, it's subject to the laws of demand and supply like anything else, and inflation is just a reflection of the supply and demand for money. Inflation boils down to "too much money seeking too few goods" (or services). Deflation therefore can be defined as "too little money seeking too many goods", in other words, an oversupply of goods in the economy.
The thing is with inflation is people are encouraged to spend rather than hoard, because if you hoard your wealth slowly falls. With deflation the opposite happens. It doesn't work as you state at all, once you have deflation people think "why spend now when I can spend tomorrow and get it for less" reducing demand for goods in the economy, which leads to more deflation, which leads to more "why spend now..." and so on, the deflationary spiral which is incredibly hard to break. So everyone's hoarding money and no one's spending, which is no more fun than not actually having the money in the first place. Even those who *want* to spend the money can't because goods producers have deduced it's more profitable just to hoard money instead of making goods. And thus the cycle sustains.
This is why when it looked like a deflationary spiral was going to start up in the UK in 2008/2009, the Bank of England embarked on a programme of "quantitative easing", or in English, printing money, to make sure we didn't get into this deflationary spiral and stagnation.
This project is all very well, but we want SSL to solve two problems today: prevent MITM attacks (which Convergence can do) and *also* identification (in other words, EV certificates) to prevent phishing or at least reduce the chances of phishing.
Unfortunately Convergence only does one of them (prevent the MITM attacks). A much bigger problem, certainly in the west, is phishing rather than MITM attacks. I'd suggest for many people Convergence still needs quite a bit of work before we can start using it in place of the current method of CAs (which I agree is broken).
The QWERTY layout wasn't invented to slow typists down, that's a myth. It was laid out (in part) to prevent the typewriter hammers from colliding. The typewriter hammers in a mechanical typewriter follow an arc to the paper. Two close-together hammers will collide much further from the paper (and jam the machine) than hammers at opposite ends of the machine. So it was laid out to reduce hammer collisions by making common sequences of letters far apart in the mechanics of the typewriter. The typewriter wasn't invented to slowly write human language but to quickly write it. Even a moderately skilled typist can type about twice as fast as they can handwrite.
And no, there won't be a better interface until we can mind control our computers.
Don't confuse "rural" with "remote". It is entirely possible to live in a very rural area of South East England, and SE England has generally a very high population density.
I'm guessing you're from the United States or Canada where there's lots of territory that is "remote", and in urban areas the suburban sprawl is so huge that a city of 4M people covers a colossal area. But in the UK cities are very compact and "green belt" legislation has prevented many cities from expanding much, and has pretty much stopped suburban sprawl completely dead. Therefore the urban areas are very compact. It's very evident that when you fly over the UK, there are vast areas of rural green space. Just because it's not remote doesn't make it not rural. Much of these rural areas are far enough away from a telephone exchange that you'll have performance problems with a 56K modem and ADSL just isn't a viable proposition. However, they aren't "remote" and therefore (for the most part) can be easily be provisioned by radio signals.
Once you get north of Manchester, the population density really drops off, too, and as you get further into Scotland you do find remote, hard-to-get-to areas. While not as remote as, say, northern Alaska, they are remote enough that if you get caught there in a winter storm without good equipment you're very likely to die. The population isn't evenly spread around Great Britain by any stretch of the imagination.
You must mis-remember: 40MB was pretty cheap by 1992 (perhaps not cheap but certainly affordable), I was a student and it was the best I could afford. It was a half-height 5.25in device so already a bit "old tech" in those days since most drives were 3.5in by then. (In 1993/1994 when I was working as a student for IBM at the hard disc plant - I wasn't anything to do with the disc drive manufacturing, we were just in the same building - they were manufacturing 2GB 3.5in drives which were in 1993 the high end).
Just a few months later, I was really wanting a Unixy like OS for my 16 MHz 386 PC with a whopping 2.5 Mb of RAM and 40MB hard disc. In the cold wet January of 1992, I think it was Linux (kernel 0.12, or perhaps 0.11) which we started with.
Two of us made a few of the PCs in the university's PC lab dual boot Linux and DOS. In those days there were no distros, you had a root disc and boot disc, and had to use cp -r to copy the root disc to the hard disc, then use a hex editor to change the kernel binary to use the hard disc for the root filesystem instead of the floppy.
I started learning C on this system. All the stuff I needed to learn C on a partition of a 40MB IDE disc. (Later I had a 486 with an 80MB IDE disc, partitioned 50/50 DOS and Linux, on the Linux side I had the X Window System, a C compiler and all the development libraries and enough space to write programs in C for X11. By then there was an early TCP stack too, so a friend and I networked our computers and shared files with NFS).
They don't on anonymous ftp, but ftp fundamentally sucks: it needs two ports, a fixed port and a random data port that gets opened and closed for each transfer or directory listing, meaning added firewall complexity (the packet filter now must understand and parse the FTP protocol to be able to punch the holes to allow the random port traffic to pass, then close them again afterwards).
HTTP is far better for doing what anonymous FTP does. It requires only one port. For anything authenticated, sftp beats ftp.
FTP (and FTPS) uses two ports: one fixed port number and the other random. You also have passive mode and "active" mode for FTP (but everyone these days uses passive, except one particularly backward vendor I had to deal with).
This causes firewall headaches because now the packet filter must understand FTP and selectively punch holes in the firewall for the data connection, and close them when the data connection finishes. Either the packet filter in the OS kernel must understand FTP, or you must use an FTP proxy that can dynamically modify your packet filter rules.
SFTP requires none of this. It works on a single port and this port doesn't change with each file you want to transfer or directory listing you want to see. You can also use the scp command which is much cleaner for scripting than writing FTP scripts. SFTP is a *lot* easier and cleaner to support, and the encryption is built right into the protocol, not added ad-hoc some time later.
If the neighbours aren't structural engineers it's likely they won't have a clue if a structure is safe or not. In this libertarian paradise, I suppose everyone has to be an expert in everything to make sure badly built stuff isn't going to cause problems... instead of having simple minimum standards worked out before hand, so not everyone has to be a structural engineer.
There's other practicalities too. I live on an island that's about 30 miles long and 15 miles wide (part of the British Isles)... and when you're exposed to the weather that the sea can throw at you, the weather can really, really suck. At least our island is a rock firmly attached to the Earth's crust and doesn't bob up and down in a storm. Our weather is far more severe than England's (which is only 60 miles away) due to us not having enough land to slow the wind down.
A floating nation? People will soon tire of the weather during the stormy season especially when it starts bobbing up and down when it's storm force 9 out. Just think of all the vomit.
And also the loss of all high frequencies (typical landline 3.5kHz, cell phone probably much less, certainly wordse sound quality) means you have to concentrate more on the call to understand the other person when compared with someone in the passenger seat.
All those years ago it seems they went to great effort to break up AT&T. But now it's just clumped back together, a lot of the Baby Bells seem to just be part of AT&T again.
This takeover ought to be stopped not just because of the problems with competition it will bring now, but the work it'll bring later when AT&T has to be broken up a second time.
Perhaps there ought to be regulations that when a company reaches a certain size, it can't take over other companies (in other words, any new growth has to be by growing its existing business rather than taking over others) in case it becomes "too big to fail" and needs the taxpayer to bale it out, like what has happened with GM and Chrysler.
Being "too old to learn" is mostly an excuse. Unless you have a brain injury of some description, or a brain disease, you're never too old to learn anything. It might take slightly longer, then again - it might not.
Nearing 40, I'm learning Verilog which is not merely another language, it's a hardware description language and although the syntax looks familiar to a language you write software with, how you use it is radically different. This has certain challenges, but there is no problem with actually *learning* it, nor some of the very big differences that "writing hardware" so to speak has compared with writing software. Also, while we had a slack period at work I made a start at learning Erlang, which looked like it had some useful applications for what we do, and had no particular problems learning it despite it being a functional language whereas everything I've done to date has been an imperative language.
In fact to learn a new language within the same family (for instance, if I were to learn Python) today I find it much easier and much faster than I did 20 years ago because depth of experience can help avoid the dead-ends, and we have much better tools which can also help us to learn faster.
This, by the way, applies to human languages. "I'm too old to learn a foreign language" is an excuse. "English speakers are bad at learning foreign languages" is an excuse. I started learning Spanish 3 years ago. Today, I'm at an advanced level and have even stood up in public and given talks in Spanish. I can think in Spanish and conduct my entire daily life in that language. I can even laugh at humorous programmes on Spanish TV, which proves that I'm getting to grip with it pretty well. Until 3 years ago I was monolingual so it's not that I'm getting a handy lift-up by knowing some other foreign language.
If you believe you're too old to learn it'll become a self-fulfilling prophecy and your brain will wither away.
This is why GPS must be used intelligently. You've got to review a route rather than just taking it. At least the TomTom app gives you easy access to see the route (I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, perhaps the user interface isn't all that great on the older Garmins, I have an aviation Garmin from a few years ago and it's very slow, and the UI is shockingly bad).
It's called value add, and is quite easy to understand. To take the favorite car analogy, a car is significantly more valuable than the raw materials (a pile of metal, glass and hydrocarbons) that went into make it. If it weren't so, it wouldn't be profitable to sell them.
The radius of the earth isn't a good thing to use, well, unless this thing is going to tunnel through the earth from one side to the other via the core at mach 20. You want the circumference, which is 2 * pi * r, in other words, a distance well over 6 times further than you thought...
Really? Czechoslovakia was a Soviet satellite state, but Finland - while not in NATO - was not. I suspect the Soviets woudln't have dared invade Finland as it would have had a severe risk of military confrontation with the west. Likewise, I doubt NATO would have done anything to Finland to avoid a confrontation with the Soviets.
I'm not too worried about gliders, the majority of them are light and don't have a large dense metallic lump (a nitro or gasser engine) in them (at most, most of the RC motorgliders I've seen have a small brushless motor), and are unlikely to fatally damage a light plane.
- have an instrument rating, which means they have been tested on their knowledge of "the system" with a practical, a written and an oral test. - are talking to air traffic control - are following certain navigational procedures (altitudes to fly) - it's their butt on the line so they are careful to do it well because generally they want to still be alive at the end of the flight.
RC and drones on the other hand are flown by people who don't know the rules of the air. For RC it's not a problem generally (I fly both RC and full scale), because with RC the modeller is within visual range and can hear and see other approaching aircraft. Having to be able to see the model limits the area that an RC aircraft will cover. My T-Rex 600 helicopter, for example, is rarely more than 150 feet away from me so that I can see it properly.
Drones however are a different kettle of fish. They are often under automatic control rather than the control of a person, they can't see and avoid, and they may be out of visual range of the owner. Drones need adequate failsafes, so that they don't stray where they shouldn't go. They also need a method of "see and avoid", and certainly in the case of a drone of significant size (big enough to cause a full scale aircraft to crash if there were a collision) really ought to be piloted by someone who is provably qualified to do so, and really ought to be subject to the same regulations as light aircraft in terms of reliability of systems, inspections, maintenance etc.
I'd worry more not about a suit banging on the door, but what happens if it hits a full scale aircraft. What kind of redundancy do you have built in to make sure your failsafe works? How are you avoiding controlled airspace? Is the camera good enough that you can adequately "see and avoid" other air traffic? Flying low alone isn't good enough, there's plenty of low flying light aircraft (for example pipeline patrol, powerline patrol, law enforcement, agricultural operations).
I am *both* an RC pilot (helicopters and fixed wing) and a full scale pilot (glider, single and multiengine plus instrument rating), so for me it's not a "them and us" (like it appears to be for you), because I'm counted in "us" for both sides.
I *have* been buzzed in a full scale by RC aircraft, which was extremely dangerous (it wasn't someone I knew, it was out over the boonies in Texas halfway between Victoria and Houston). For good reasons, you don't go flying either drones or RC aircraft near full scale (we were at 1500 feet, far higher than RC aircraft ever should go, and a largeish yellow RC aircraft passed between our two aircraft - we were in a formation of 2 aircraft). For VFR, see-and-avoid is extremely important, it's extremely difficult to see-and-avoid an RC plane which is perhaps 1/8th the size of something small like a C150. The RC pilot couldn't have possibly had a reasonable idea where exactly his aircraft was relative to ours due to the aircraft being at a minimum 1500 feet away from him (and in controlled airspace). Had we collided, the RC pilot would have been without a few hundred bucks. At best, the repairs would cost me several thousand (or even the loss of the entire airframe if the damage were bad enough) or at worst I could have ended up dead. The stakes are much higher if you're in a full scale aircraft so it's only right that full scale wants anything unmanned to have adequate systems to prevent collisions!
Private pilots don't have an entitlement complex - it's that if the air has a lot of drones in it the stakes are pretty damned high - a collision can easily kill you. For the drone owner the stakes are very very low. They lose a bit of hardware, big deal. Therefore do you think it's surprising that full scale pilots don't like it? Especially when to accomodate the drone pilots, full scale pilots will have to fit their aircraft with extremely expensive hardware, probably costing a lot more than the entire cost of your drone. Anything that goes into a full scale aircraft has to be certified and have a paper trail a mile long, and therefore tends to be extremely expensive. Full scale pilots therefore feel that to pursue your hobby, you are imposing some serious costs onto them.
Generally with my full scale hat on I have no problems with RC, generally RC is pretty self-limiting, you can't fly too far away without the aircraft becoming a dot you can't really control, and an RC pilot watching their model can do an adequate job of see and avoid (and collisions between RC and full scale are rare enough that I've only ever heard of one). However, this isn't the case with FPV and drones where the aircraft can easily be beyond visual range of the owner.
Drones in particular I think by regulation will need some kind of safety systems to prevent them from wandering where they shouldn't be. It's all very well having ADS-B, but systems fail, and drones need adequate failsafes to prevent them entering airspace where they shouldn't be, and it should be put in the regulations that the drones have this kind of thing. Failsafes like monitoring the ADS-B out and shutting down the engine as soon as a problem is detected. RAIM equipped GPS, etc. Unlike RC they don't really have the "self limiting" feature of needing to be seen adequately enough to be able to control the aircraft, they can easily operate at beyond visual range of the owner or any spotter he may have. Being in the RC world I do know that quite a few RC pilots don't have exactly the approach to safety that full scale pilots have, after all their butt isn't in the plane. (Personally all my models have a failsafe, and I test the failsafe. The last thing I want is my 12 cell T-Rex 600 flying off into the distance and colliding with something, there is a *lot* of energy in those rotor blades and they can do a great deal of damage. People have been killed by similar sized RC helicopters).
If you want to operate in the same airspace as full scale, you'll need to follow the same regulations as full scale, that means you ne
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No, absolutely wrong.
To put it simply: too much inflation is bad, deflation is always bad, and a little bit of inflation is good. Money isn't anything special, it's subject to the laws of demand and supply like anything else, and inflation is just a reflection of the supply and demand for money. Inflation boils down to "too much money seeking too few goods" (or services). Deflation therefore can be defined as "too little money seeking too many goods", in other words, an oversupply of goods in the economy.
The thing is with inflation is people are encouraged to spend rather than hoard, because if you hoard your wealth slowly falls. With deflation the opposite happens. It doesn't work as you state at all, once you have deflation people think "why spend now when I can spend tomorrow and get it for less" reducing demand for goods in the economy, which leads to more deflation, which leads to more "why spend now..." and so on, the deflationary spiral which is incredibly hard to break. So everyone's hoarding money and no one's spending, which is no more fun than not actually having the money in the first place. Even those who *want* to spend the money can't because goods producers have deduced it's more profitable just to hoard money instead of making goods. And thus the cycle sustains.
This is why when it looked like a deflationary spiral was going to start up in the UK in 2008/2009, the Bank of England embarked on a programme of "quantitative easing", or in English, printing money, to make sure we didn't get into this deflationary spiral and stagnation.
This project is all very well, but we want SSL to solve two problems today: prevent MITM attacks (which Convergence can do) and *also* identification (in other words, EV certificates) to prevent phishing or at least reduce the chances of phishing.
Unfortunately Convergence only does one of them (prevent the MITM attacks). A much bigger problem, certainly in the west, is phishing rather than MITM attacks. I'd suggest for many people Convergence still needs quite a bit of work before we can start using it in place of the current method of CAs (which I agree is broken).
The QWERTY layout wasn't invented to slow typists down, that's a myth. It was laid out (in part) to prevent the typewriter hammers from colliding. The typewriter hammers in a mechanical typewriter follow an arc to the paper. Two close-together hammers will collide much further from the paper (and jam the machine) than hammers at opposite ends of the machine. So it was laid out to reduce hammer collisions by making common sequences of letters far apart in the mechanics of the typewriter. The typewriter wasn't invented to slowly write human language but to quickly write it. Even a moderately skilled typist can type about twice as fast as they can handwrite.
And no, there won't be a better interface until we can mind control our computers.
It only has meaning in a few Latin American countries. From the DRAE:
menso, sa.
1. adj. coloq. Ec., El Salv., Hond., Méx. y Nic. tonto (â- falto de entendimiento o razÃn).
Don't confuse "rural" with "remote". It is entirely possible to live in a very rural area of South East England, and SE England has generally a very high population density.
I'm guessing you're from the United States or Canada where there's lots of territory that is "remote", and in urban areas the suburban sprawl is so huge that a city of 4M people covers a colossal area. But in the UK cities are very compact and "green belt" legislation has prevented many cities from expanding much, and has pretty much stopped suburban sprawl completely dead. Therefore the urban areas are very compact. It's very evident that when you fly over the UK, there are vast areas of rural green space. Just because it's not remote doesn't make it not rural. Much of these rural areas are far enough away from a telephone exchange that you'll have performance problems with a 56K modem and ADSL just isn't a viable proposition. However, they aren't "remote" and therefore (for the most part) can be easily be provisioned by radio signals.
Once you get north of Manchester, the population density really drops off, too, and as you get further into Scotland you do find remote, hard-to-get-to areas. While not as remote as, say, northern Alaska, they are remote enough that if you get caught there in a winter storm without good equipment you're very likely to die. The population isn't evenly spread around Great Britain by any stretch of the imagination.
You must mis-remember: 40MB was pretty cheap by 1992 (perhaps not cheap but certainly affordable), I was a student and it was the best I could afford. It was a half-height 5.25in device so already a bit "old tech" in those days since most drives were 3.5in by then. (In 1993/1994 when I was working as a student for IBM at the hard disc plant - I wasn't anything to do with the disc drive manufacturing, we were just in the same building - they were manufacturing 2GB 3.5in drives which were in 1993 the high end).
Just a few months later, I was really wanting a Unixy like OS for my 16 MHz 386 PC with a whopping 2.5 Mb of RAM and 40MB hard disc. In the cold wet January of 1992, I think it was Linux (kernel 0.12, or perhaps 0.11) which we started with.
Two of us made a few of the PCs in the university's PC lab dual boot Linux and DOS. In those days there were no distros, you had a root disc and boot disc, and had to use cp -r to copy the root disc to the hard disc, then use a hex editor to change the kernel binary to use the hard disc for the root filesystem instead of the floppy.
I started learning C on this system. All the stuff I needed to learn C on a partition of a 40MB IDE disc. (Later I had a 486 with an 80MB IDE disc, partitioned 50/50 DOS and Linux, on the Linux side I had the X Window System, a C compiler and all the development libraries and enough space to write programs in C for X11. By then there was an early TCP stack too, so a friend and I networked our computers and shared files with NFS).
Looks like you are suffering from Muphry's Law. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry's_law
They don't on anonymous ftp, but ftp fundamentally sucks: it needs two ports, a fixed port and a random data port that gets opened and closed for each transfer or directory listing, meaning added firewall complexity (the packet filter now must understand and parse the FTP protocol to be able to punch the holes to allow the random port traffic to pass, then close them again afterwards).
HTTP is far better for doing what anonymous FTP does. It requires only one port. For anything authenticated, sftp beats ftp.
I recommend WordReference:
English definition: http://www.wordreference.com/definition/ossified
Synonyms: http://www.wordreference.com/thesaurus/ossified
(WordReference will also give you the definition in a variety of languages).
FTP (and FTPS) uses two ports: one fixed port number and the other random. You also have passive mode and "active" mode for FTP (but everyone these days uses passive, except one particularly backward vendor I had to deal with).
This causes firewall headaches because now the packet filter must understand FTP and selectively punch holes in the firewall for the data connection, and close them when the data connection finishes. Either the packet filter in the OS kernel must understand FTP, or you must use an FTP proxy that can dynamically modify your packet filter rules.
SFTP requires none of this. It works on a single port and this port doesn't change with each file you want to transfer or directory listing you want to see. You can also use the scp command which is much cleaner for scripting than writing FTP scripts. SFTP is a *lot* easier and cleaner to support, and the encryption is built right into the protocol, not added ad-hoc some time later.
If the neighbours aren't structural engineers it's likely they won't have a clue if a structure is safe or not. In this libertarian paradise, I suppose everyone has to be an expert in everything to make sure badly built stuff isn't going to cause problems... instead of having simple minimum standards worked out before hand, so not everyone has to be a structural engineer.
There's other practicalities too. I live on an island that's about 30 miles long and 15 miles wide (part of the British Isles)... and when you're exposed to the weather that the sea can throw at you, the weather can really, really suck. At least our island is a rock firmly attached to the Earth's crust and doesn't bob up and down in a storm. Our weather is far more severe than England's (which is only 60 miles away) due to us not having enough land to slow the wind down.
A floating nation? People will soon tire of the weather during the stormy season especially when it starts bobbing up and down when it's storm force 9 out. Just think of all the vomit.
And also the loss of all high frequencies (typical landline 3.5kHz, cell phone probably much less, certainly wordse sound quality) means you have to concentrate more on the call to understand the other person when compared with someone in the passenger seat.
All those years ago it seems they went to great effort to break up AT&T. But now it's just clumped back together, a lot of the Baby Bells seem to just be part of AT&T again.
This takeover ought to be stopped not just because of the problems with competition it will bring now, but the work it'll bring later when AT&T has to be broken up a second time.
Perhaps there ought to be regulations that when a company reaches a certain size, it can't take over other companies (in other words, any new growth has to be by growing its existing business rather than taking over others) in case it becomes "too big to fail" and needs the taxpayer to bale it out, like what has happened with GM and Chrysler.
Being "too old to learn" is mostly an excuse. Unless you have a brain injury of some description, or a brain disease, you're never too old to learn anything. It might take slightly longer, then again - it might not.
Nearing 40, I'm learning Verilog which is not merely another language, it's a hardware description language and although the syntax looks familiar to a language you write software with, how you use it is radically different. This has certain challenges, but there is no problem with actually *learning* it, nor some of the very big differences that "writing hardware" so to speak has compared with writing software. Also, while we had a slack period at work I made a start at learning Erlang, which looked like it had some useful applications for what we do, and had no particular problems learning it despite it being a functional language whereas everything I've done to date has been an imperative language.
In fact to learn a new language within the same family (for instance, if I were to learn Python) today I find it much easier and much faster than I did 20 years ago because depth of experience can help avoid the dead-ends, and we have much better tools which can also help us to learn faster.
This, by the way, applies to human languages. "I'm too old to learn a foreign language" is an excuse. "English speakers are bad at learning foreign languages" is an excuse. I started learning Spanish 3 years ago. Today, I'm at an advanced level and have even stood up in public and given talks in Spanish. I can think in Spanish and conduct my entire daily life in that language. I can even laugh at humorous programmes on Spanish TV, which proves that I'm getting to grip with it pretty well. Until 3 years ago I was monolingual so it's not that I'm getting a handy lift-up by knowing some other foreign language.
If you believe you're too old to learn it'll become a self-fulfilling prophecy and your brain will wither away.
This is why GPS must be used intelligently. You've got to review a route rather than just taking it. At least the TomTom app gives you easy access to see the route (I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, perhaps the user interface isn't all that great on the older Garmins, I have an aviation Garmin from a few years ago and it's very slow, and the UI is shockingly bad).
It's called value add, and is quite easy to understand. To take the favorite car analogy, a car is significantly more valuable than the raw materials (a pile of metal, glass and hydrocarbons) that went into make it. If it weren't so, it wouldn't be profitable to sell them.
The radius of the earth isn't a good thing to use, well, unless this thing is going to tunnel through the earth from one side to the other via the core at mach 20. You want the circumference, which is 2 * pi * r, in other words, a distance well over 6 times further than you thought...
Adding 6 hours to EDT won't give you GMT (or UTC), it'll give you CEST (Central European Summer Time).
EDT is UTC-4, not UTC-6.
Really? Czechoslovakia was a Soviet satellite state, but Finland - while not in NATO - was not. I suspect the Soviets woudln't have dared invade Finland as it would have had a severe risk of military confrontation with the west. Likewise, I doubt NATO would have done anything to Finland to avoid a confrontation with the Soviets.
I'm not too worried about gliders, the majority of them are light and don't have a large dense metallic lump (a nitro or gasser engine) in them (at most, most of the RC motorgliders I've seen have a small brushless motor), and are unlikely to fatally damage a light plane.
When people are flying in the clouds they:
- have an instrument rating, which means they have been tested on their knowledge of "the system" with a practical, a written and an oral test.
- are talking to air traffic control
- are following certain navigational procedures (altitudes to fly)
- it's their butt on the line so they are careful to do it well because generally they want to still be alive at the end of the flight.
RC and drones on the other hand are flown by people who don't know the rules of the air. For RC it's not a problem generally (I fly both RC and full scale), because with RC the modeller is within visual range and can hear and see other approaching aircraft. Having to be able to see the model limits the area that an RC aircraft will cover. My T-Rex 600 helicopter, for example, is rarely more than 150 feet away from me so that I can see it properly.
Drones however are a different kettle of fish. They are often under automatic control rather than the control of a person, they can't see and avoid, and they may be out of visual range of the owner. Drones need adequate failsafes, so that they don't stray where they shouldn't go. They also need a method of "see and avoid", and certainly in the case of a drone of significant size (big enough to cause a full scale aircraft to crash if there were a collision) really ought to be piloted by someone who is provably qualified to do so, and really ought to be subject to the same regulations as light aircraft in terms of reliability of systems, inspections, maintenance etc.
I'd worry more not about a suit banging on the door, but what happens if it hits a full scale aircraft. What kind of redundancy do you have built in to make sure your failsafe works? How are you avoiding controlled airspace? Is the camera good enough that you can adequately "see and avoid" other air traffic? Flying low alone isn't good enough, there's plenty of low flying light aircraft (for example pipeline patrol, powerline patrol, law enforcement, agricultural operations).
I am *both* an RC pilot (helicopters and fixed wing) and a full scale pilot (glider, single and multiengine plus instrument rating), so for me it's not a "them and us" (like it appears to be for you), because I'm counted in "us" for both sides.
I *have* been buzzed in a full scale by RC aircraft, which was extremely dangerous (it wasn't someone I knew, it was out over the boonies in Texas halfway between Victoria and Houston). For good reasons, you don't go flying either drones or RC aircraft near full scale (we were at 1500 feet, far higher than RC aircraft ever should go, and a largeish yellow RC aircraft passed between our two aircraft - we were in a formation of 2 aircraft). For VFR, see-and-avoid is extremely important, it's extremely difficult to see-and-avoid an RC plane which is perhaps 1/8th the size of something small like a C150. The RC pilot couldn't have possibly had a reasonable idea where exactly his aircraft was relative to ours due to the aircraft being at a minimum 1500 feet away from him (and in controlled airspace). Had we collided, the RC pilot would have been without a few hundred bucks. At best, the repairs would cost me several thousand (or even the loss of the entire airframe if the damage were bad enough) or at worst I could have ended up dead. The stakes are much higher if you're in a full scale aircraft so it's only right that full scale wants anything unmanned to have adequate systems to prevent collisions!
Private pilots don't have an entitlement complex - it's that if the air has a lot of drones in it the stakes are pretty damned high - a collision can easily kill you. For the drone owner the stakes are very very low. They lose a bit of hardware, big deal. Therefore do you think it's surprising that full scale pilots don't like it? Especially when to accomodate the drone pilots, full scale pilots will have to fit their aircraft with extremely expensive hardware, probably costing a lot more than the entire cost of your drone. Anything that goes into a full scale aircraft has to be certified and have a paper trail a mile long, and therefore tends to be extremely expensive. Full scale pilots therefore feel that to pursue your hobby, you are imposing some serious costs onto them.
Generally with my full scale hat on I have no problems with RC, generally RC is pretty self-limiting, you can't fly too far away without the aircraft becoming a dot you can't really control, and an RC pilot watching their model can do an adequate job of see and avoid (and collisions between RC and full scale are rare enough that I've only ever heard of one). However, this isn't the case with FPV and drones where the aircraft can easily be beyond visual range of the owner.
Drones in particular I think by regulation will need some kind of safety systems to prevent them from wandering where they shouldn't be. It's all very well having ADS-B, but systems fail, and drones need adequate failsafes to prevent them entering airspace where they shouldn't be, and it should be put in the regulations that the drones have this kind of thing. Failsafes like monitoring the ADS-B out and shutting down the engine as soon as a problem is detected. RAIM equipped GPS, etc. Unlike RC they don't really have the "self limiting" feature of needing to be seen adequately enough to be able to control the aircraft, they can easily operate at beyond visual range of the owner or any spotter he may have. Being in the RC world I do know that quite a few RC pilots don't have exactly the approach to safety that full scale pilots have, after all their butt isn't in the plane. (Personally all my models have a failsafe, and I test the failsafe. The last thing I want is my 12 cell T-Rex 600 flying off into the distance and colliding with something, there is a *lot* of energy in those rotor blades and they can do a great deal of damage. People have been killed by similar sized RC helicopters).
If you want to operate in the same airspace as full scale, you'll need to follow the same regulations as full scale, that means you ne