XP as well - I'd say that XP really provided a significant improvement on the consumer experience. 95/98 blue-screened if you looked at it funny, XP was pretty stable.
The main defense against replay attacks is a clock. That makes network replay attacks pretty hard to pull off since most PCs have a clock (and messing with it is inconvenient, but patching the OS is of course possible and if you can do that then just strip the DRM in the first place). GPUs typically do not have clocks, and including them creates issues like batteries, and resetting the clock. Messing with a GPU RTC also isn't that inconvenient since nothing but DRM would use it anyway, so hardening a GPU against a replay would be difficult.
The other defense is to give each stream a unique ID and put in the GPU a non-volatile storage for every ID that has been seen. If the IDs are authenticated and based on the time, then another approach is to store the last one seen, and reject any ID that is lower in value. If you can authenticate a fake ID then that gives you a great way to brick a GPU, however - just feed it a really high value and now it can no longer play DRM video.
In some sense a complaint-driven approach makes sense as long as we're not talking about really serious threats to life/property/etc (which cell phone jamming only becomes if it is epidemic).
It sounds like corporations that deal with the FCC are aware of this as well. If you threaten them with complaints they are more likely to take action.
A little story. Back in the days when cable tended to consist of a lot of no-name franchises (which were later bought up by Comcast/Time-Warner/etc), somebody I knew was frustrated with their signal quality. They happened to work for an electronics test equipment vendor, and grabbed some equipment designed for TV signal testing and hooked it up to their home feed. They then called up the cable company and pointed out that half of their channels failed to meet FCC specifications. The next day they turned on the TV and noticed they had access to all the premium channels.
So, the problem doesn't always get fixed in the way that is best for consumers, but companies do have a fear of the FCC.
Good point. I know that back in the day when digital phones were being developed another concern was "comfort noise." With a digital transmission you want to filter silence on the transmitter so that you conserve battery and bandwidth. That would result in completely dead silence on the receiver when the other party isn't talking. That tends to make people think the phone isn't working right, so you can instead just inject noise on the receiver that never actually goes over the network. I'm not sure if it was ever implemented - clearly I hear noise on my phone but I don't know how aggressive the filters are.
Yup - certainly wasn't suggesting that you'd actually build office PCs. However, I imagine that you'll still get quite a few years out of a low-end one, and as I said if you use something like ChromeBooks the up-front setup is basically nil.
I'd actually love to use LiFePO4 cells for my camping solar setup but the only ones I can find are dodgy Chinese imports with questionable charge controllers.
Hey, they could come in handy if you ever run out of tinder and kindling!
Keep all that stuff on physical media unencrypted, and your heirs get it along with all the other junk in your attic.
Your passwords could be stored in a similar way, or you could get clever about it (online vault, with the password in your will or whatever).
Just assume that anything protected by DRM doesn't belong to you in the first place. By the time you die chances are half of it already won't even be accessible by you because some company went bankrupt. Whatever promises you've been given are about as well as those given to your parents by the 8-track recording standards committee.
I have to agree with this. If 20% of your robotic missions fail due to the inability to adapt, and each mission is 1/50th the cost of a manned mission, I'd call that a big success for robotics. How many Ranger probes did we crash into the Moon before we actually got useful data from them? Even so, in total they cost a fraction of what the first Apollo landing cost.
If we spent on robotic missions the way we spend on manned ones we'd have probes launching every other Tuesday, and we'd lose probes a few times a year, and we'd get a lot more done all the same.
I have to agree. If I wanted to plan for the long road of human survival off-earth I'd focus first on figuring out terraforming, or operating sealed self-supporting environments (something that you can do just fine on the ground on Earth).
Once you can create completely self-sufficient and reliable environments with nothing but solar power input, then you can talk about sticking those up in space. I see no reason to stick those down on some planet at the bottom of yet another gravity well - just stick them in space. If you spot a killer comet headed your way, just expend a few grams of propellant and nudge your orbit out of the way instead of trying to move something the size of Mount Everest halfway across the solar system. If you need materials send a probe to some asteroid or comet or just move your entire habitat there - they're made out of the same stuff as the planets anyway.
Before sending people out in space, give them someplace useful to go to...
We constantly test, and call it good enough. The difference is the fighter is going to cost more than the Saturn missions...go figure.
Well, there is no doubt a ton of waste in the fighter programs, but do consider that the Saturn V did not have to deal with people trying to shoot it down, only had a run of a dozen or two units, and each unit only had to work one time on a single day, only spending a few days outdoors. That means that you could have a complex series of tests/checks/etc that all take place up until launch which are good for only that one launch. You can't exactly design an F-35 so that you need to reassemble the thing from components before every mission, or dictate that if it is a rainy day you'll just postpone the mission until the next day, or that the fighter would throttle up the engines exactly once, slowly reduce thrust as fuel is burned off, shut them off, and never use them again.
There is much truth here. I remember when my advisor in grad school pointed out that we have stone tablets from a few thousand BC which we can read today, but he has tapes up on a shelf that he couldn't read without essentially re-engineering the systems used to create them.
Building even a 10 meter one in space costs WAY more than this one will.
For a given amount of money you'll always get a much larger mirror if you put it on the top of a mountain vs putting it up in space. Either solution is a compromise. There is really room for having both, as I imagine particular problems can be solved by one vs the other. If you're going to build a telescope on Earth it is probably best to either build it really big, or really cheap (both are things which you can't do in space).
I wouldn't count out the really cheap aspect either. I've read in astronomy forums that there is a lot of real science that can be done with fairly cheap telescopes (tens of thousands of dollars, not millions), but there aren't really enough of them. They would need first-class services around them (good siting, automation, calibration, etc), but would be great for things that require more eyes on the sky but don't require that those eyes be the fanciest ones available. Many things like asteroids/comets/etc are still spotted by amateur astronomers with binoculars and even cheaper telescopes simply because the big ones are are busy staring at some vanishingly small region of the sky 75% of the way across the universe. I'd think that if you wanted to study asteroids and such that you'd do far better with hundreds of cheap automated small telescopes that can monitor much larger regions of the sky (the bigger telescopes have VERY narrow fields of view).
Somehow rather than being impressed with the difficulty of the test I'm struck by awe for what is likely the stupidity of my fellow man. Either that or they load it up with the kinds of trivia I was forced to memorize in history class and some of my less-well-taught science classes.
I'm not sure if they're outright spying on US Citizens, or if they're merely participating in some legal shell games.
Most nations prevent their covert operations groups from legally spying on their own citizens. However, most of those nations still want to do it. The legal trick they employ is to spy on their allies citizens, and get their allies to spy on their own citizens, and then swap data.
So, the NSA may very well not be sniffing your packets. However, the UK might be doing so, and the NSA might be sniffing UK packets. Both governments just look the other way, and then when they want to know about somebody they make a friendly inquiry of the other.
There are probably countless other variations on this sort of thing - ways to legally tell Congress that the laws are being followed to the letter while completely ignoring the spirit of those laws.
What a joke that would be. I suspect I could have passed that test in middle school, as could the top 25% or so of any high school. They're testing for minimal proficiency - ie that somebody performs as well as somebody who just barely managed to get a diploma. These are the sorts of students who make headlines in surveys that show that most Americans can't point out Europe on a map.
While I won't say that high school was the most efficient learning experience it could have been, I still learned quite a bit while there. The fact that you don't need to understand Chemistry, Calculus, or Literature to graduate high school doesn't mean that these subjects aren't valuable.
Well, privatization makes sense when there can actually be competition. It also makes sense if you lack an economy of scale that a private company could offer.
However, if you privatize something that you already have economy of scale on and give an exclusive contract to a single company, well, yes, you're going to get clobbered.
If the state police is running its own paper mill to create ticket pads for its officers then buying the paper from whoever is cheapest that month makes sense. On the other hand, privatizing the police force itself doesn't make sense - you're already employing tens of thousands of people with all the support structures in place. There really isn't any sensible way to privatize that without an exclusive contract. Now, privatizing bounty hunting and such would make more sense - you can just publish a name and a bounty and give the money to whoever drags the guy in.
I'm all for outsourcing or privatizing when it makes sense. The problem is that it is usually just done as a matter of fashion, or management laziness, or often in the case of the government (and sometimes industry as well), corruption.
There are various patches that implement this. There were some root-requiring apps that did this as well but I don't believe they work post-v4.
The key isn't to return errors to applications - you just need to return a successful call with no useful data. If it asks for contacts, just say that the user hasn't defined any (a situation every app has to handle anyway). If it asks for the IMEI tell the app that there is no SIM installed. If it asks for the location, tell the app that there is no GPS coverage. If it asks to phone home, tell it that the network appears to be down at the moment.
Apps handle all of these things gracefully already. The key is to intercept the API call and direct it along one of these paths, and not to just return an error due to a lack of permissions, which the app no doubt was not designed for since it was supposed to be guaranteed those permissions.
My neighbors can currently buy a camera and watch me from their property. They can have slightly more visibility for some angles from the air. If the noise is the issue, you can already call in complaints on that , and police will help you remove the nuisance.
You're doing it wrong. You just need to put up a 10 foot wall and have about 2000 yards of space between that and hour house, and lots of strategically placed hedges and such. That should stop anything short of a drone.
Oh wait, you don't own a multi-million-dollar home like Eric Schmidt?
As I learned on some other gun-control thread on slashdot, about the only thing assault rifles really make sense for is hunting (whether that is larger animals, or people).
For most cases of self defense and such a shotgun is a much more practical weapon (especially if it has a short barrel - speaking only of effectiveness - not of legalities). Such a weapon is devastating at the short ranges typically involved in home defense, won't fire through walls with the right shot, and has little effect on unintended stuff that is in the background. I imagine it has a lot more shock effect than a pistol or rifle as well (if the bad guy somehow ducks behind cover they get to see the general area they were standing in completely trashed, as opposed to a tiny hole in the wall - they're probably going to run, which is really all you should care about). If outdoors you could even fire a warning shot first and not be likely to kill somebody 2 miles down the road.
Not really looking to open a debate on the pros/cons of weapons for home defense, and I'm not sure I'd want to own a shotgun for such use myself. However, the point is that for whatever reason people seem to ignore the utility of shotguns as self-defense weapons.
If you're bleeding from a wound while hunting and the nearest road or place to find help is on the other side of somebody's private property you can walk right across it, and if the guy shoots you along the way it is murder. That doesn't mean that you can have a picnic in their backyard and be exempt from trespassing laws, especially if you're asked to leave.
I suspect that courts would view an aircraft that is just going from point A to point B and happens to pass over a house differently than somebody who sets up an aircraft that basically hovers in the same place 24x7 minus refueling stops, regardless of exact altitude. A neighbor who happens to launch a hot air balloon from their yard once a month probably would be treated differently than one that tethers a huge balloon to their house with the words "Buy apples here!" on it.
I don't think the solution to any of this involves bans on drones - it just involves applying common sense, which for the most parts courts tend to do in cases where neighbors go out of their way to tick each other off.
Personally, I'd rather see stuff like this democratized. The big corporations and such are going to have subscriptions to data feeds on everybody anyway, so at least if we make the data available to everybody culture can change to deal with it. The fact is that everybody around you has done stuff that they would never admit to, and the fact that it usually isn't documented and accessible lets us all live in the fantasy world where everybody is perfect except for a few unlucky individuals who get caught and have their reputations destroyed for life (heaven help you if you're caught urinating in public while drunk in college). Once everybody is a documented heathen maybe we can stop treating heathens like they're sub-human.
I'm not sure how much star tracking would help with aurora - the images change over time so you'd probably just get a photo of some stars over a colored background that lacks most of the features of an aurora. For short-duration photos that would capture the essence of the aurora star tracking is probably not necessary.
As far as the milky way goes, I'm surprised somebody hasn't taken a photo from the ISS or such. The hubble probably wouldn't generate a terribly impressive photo - the field of view is way too narrow. Telescopes generate images of very small areas in the sky - especially large ones like the Hubble. If you want to really capture the milky way you need a pretty wide-angle lens.
I do find it odd that it is hard to find such photos online. All you need to do is take a photo from space - I'd think that even a regular DSLR would work. If you wanted it to be a reasonably long exposure you would need to have it attached to a support which was motionless with respect to the stars.
Uh, an i7 costs $300, and requires a $180 motherboard. Then add in $60 for RAM and your system board upgrade costs you $540.
A Phenom II X4 costs $95, and works fine on a $40 motherboard. It needs the same $60 worth of RAM, costing you $195 for that system board upgrade.
There is no question the i7 will outperform the Phenom II by a decent margin, but that is at 2.6x the price. That means that with the same annual spend you can upgrade the AMD system far more often, and I have little doubt that either company's next-gen chip will beat out the other company's current-gen chip.
So, if you really need bleeding-edge CPU performance, I'd just stick with the cheaper processors and upgrade more often. You'll have a better performing system most of the time.
I compared Intel/AMD here, but I suspect that the numbers would still favor going cheap if you compared Intel/Intel. you pay a big premium to get the latest and greatest. The only reason I'd buy high-end is if the work was so CPU-bound that expensive employees would be idle too often (video editing, etc), and then I'd buy high-end and still upgrade frequently.
Of course for typical business use I'd just get the lower-end chips and still not upgrade very often and spend the money on office supplies or whatever instead. Most PC users don't need a modern CPU. If you don't need to run local apps consider a Chromebook while you're at it - gets rid of all the management hassle entirely since when it gets old you just donate it and buy a new one.
Carreon starts this huge litigation fight. He takes steps to cost some guy's employer a lot of money in the hope that one of this enemies would lose his job. I'm sure that didn't help the next time he was up for a review/promotion.
After tons of pain and hardship for everybody involved a judge forces Carreon to pay maybe 2/3rds of the opposing counsel's legal fees.
This isn't justice - all this did was prove Carreon's point. If you don't give in early, expect to lose a lot of money in court. Sure, the court saw to it that they didn't lose as much as they could have, but this whole case was still a loss to them. Sure, Carreon lost some money too, but this was a fight of his choosing and presumably those who get into such fights do so willing to lose.
Bottom line is that if you tick off somebody who has a lot more money than you the courts will NOT be your friend. The best you can hope for is a Pyrrhic victory, like this one.
Slashdot Mirror
XP as well - I'd say that XP really provided a significant improvement on the consumer experience. 95/98 blue-screened if you looked at it funny, XP was pretty stable.
I love the windows versioning system - I don't know why they bother to even try.
If you ran consumer Windows starting around Win 3 when it became popular, you'd have;
Windows 3 / 3.11
Windows 95
Windows 98 / 98SE
Windows XP
Windows Vista
Windows 7
Windows 8
They've yet to have more than two major releases in a row that used the same versioning scheme in their branding.
The main defense against replay attacks is a clock. That makes network replay attacks pretty hard to pull off since most PCs have a clock (and messing with it is inconvenient, but patching the OS is of course possible and if you can do that then just strip the DRM in the first place). GPUs typically do not have clocks, and including them creates issues like batteries, and resetting the clock. Messing with a GPU RTC also isn't that inconvenient since nothing but DRM would use it anyway, so hardening a GPU against a replay would be difficult.
The other defense is to give each stream a unique ID and put in the GPU a non-volatile storage for every ID that has been seen. If the IDs are authenticated and based on the time, then another approach is to store the last one seen, and reject any ID that is lower in value. If you can authenticate a fake ID then that gives you a great way to brick a GPU, however - just feed it a really high value and now it can no longer play DRM video.
In some sense a complaint-driven approach makes sense as long as we're not talking about really serious threats to life/property/etc (which cell phone jamming only becomes if it is epidemic).
It sounds like corporations that deal with the FCC are aware of this as well. If you threaten them with complaints they are more likely to take action.
A little story. Back in the days when cable tended to consist of a lot of no-name franchises (which were later bought up by Comcast/Time-Warner/etc), somebody I knew was frustrated with their signal quality. They happened to work for an electronics test equipment vendor, and grabbed some equipment designed for TV signal testing and hooked it up to their home feed. They then called up the cable company and pointed out that half of their channels failed to meet FCC specifications. The next day they turned on the TV and noticed they had access to all the premium channels.
So, the problem doesn't always get fixed in the way that is best for consumers, but companies do have a fear of the FCC.
Good point. I know that back in the day when digital phones were being developed another concern was "comfort noise." With a digital transmission you want to filter silence on the transmitter so that you conserve battery and bandwidth. That would result in completely dead silence on the receiver when the other party isn't talking. That tends to make people think the phone isn't working right, so you can instead just inject noise on the receiver that never actually goes over the network. I'm not sure if it was ever implemented - clearly I hear noise on my phone but I don't know how aggressive the filters are.
Yup - certainly wasn't suggesting that you'd actually build office PCs. However, I imagine that you'll still get quite a few years out of a low-end one, and as I said if you use something like ChromeBooks the up-front setup is basically nil.
I'd actually love to use LiFePO4 cells for my camping solar setup but the only ones I can find are dodgy Chinese imports with questionable charge controllers.
Hey, they could come in handy if you ever run out of tinder and kindling!
Keep all that stuff on physical media unencrypted, and your heirs get it along with all the other junk in your attic.
Your passwords could be stored in a similar way, or you could get clever about it (online vault, with the password in your will or whatever).
Just assume that anything protected by DRM doesn't belong to you in the first place. By the time you die chances are half of it already won't even be accessible by you because some company went bankrupt. Whatever promises you've been given are about as well as those given to your parents by the 8-track recording standards committee.
I have to agree with this. If 20% of your robotic missions fail due to the inability to adapt, and each mission is 1/50th the cost of a manned mission, I'd call that a big success for robotics. How many Ranger probes did we crash into the Moon before we actually got useful data from them? Even so, in total they cost a fraction of what the first Apollo landing cost.
If we spent on robotic missions the way we spend on manned ones we'd have probes launching every other Tuesday, and we'd lose probes a few times a year, and we'd get a lot more done all the same.
I have to agree. If I wanted to plan for the long road of human survival off-earth I'd focus first on figuring out terraforming, or operating sealed self-supporting environments (something that you can do just fine on the ground on Earth).
Once you can create completely self-sufficient and reliable environments with nothing but solar power input, then you can talk about sticking those up in space. I see no reason to stick those down on some planet at the bottom of yet another gravity well - just stick them in space. If you spot a killer comet headed your way, just expend a few grams of propellant and nudge your orbit out of the way instead of trying to move something the size of Mount Everest halfway across the solar system. If you need materials send a probe to some asteroid or comet or just move your entire habitat there - they're made out of the same stuff as the planets anyway.
Before sending people out in space, give them someplace useful to go to...
We constantly test, and call it good enough. The difference is the fighter is going to cost more than the Saturn missions...go figure.
Well, there is no doubt a ton of waste in the fighter programs, but do consider that the Saturn V did not have to deal with people trying to shoot it down, only had a run of a dozen or two units, and each unit only had to work one time on a single day, only spending a few days outdoors. That means that you could have a complex series of tests/checks/etc that all take place up until launch which are good for only that one launch. You can't exactly design an F-35 so that you need to reassemble the thing from components before every mission, or dictate that if it is a rainy day you'll just postpone the mission until the next day, or that the fighter would throttle up the engines exactly once, slowly reduce thrust as fuel is burned off, shut them off, and never use them again.
There is much truth here. I remember when my advisor in grad school pointed out that we have stone tablets from a few thousand BC which we can read today, but he has tapes up on a shelf that he couldn't read without essentially re-engineering the systems used to create them.
Building even a 10 meter one in space costs WAY more than this one will.
For a given amount of money you'll always get a much larger mirror if you put it on the top of a mountain vs putting it up in space. Either solution is a compromise. There is really room for having both, as I imagine particular problems can be solved by one vs the other. If you're going to build a telescope on Earth it is probably best to either build it really big, or really cheap (both are things which you can't do in space).
I wouldn't count out the really cheap aspect either. I've read in astronomy forums that there is a lot of real science that can be done with fairly cheap telescopes (tens of thousands of dollars, not millions), but there aren't really enough of them. They would need first-class services around them (good siting, automation, calibration, etc), but would be great for things that require more eyes on the sky but don't require that those eyes be the fanciest ones available. Many things like asteroids/comets/etc are still spotted by amateur astronomers with binoculars and even cheaper telescopes simply because the big ones are are busy staring at some vanishingly small region of the sky 75% of the way across the universe. I'd think that if you wanted to study asteroids and such that you'd do far better with hundreds of cheap automated small telescopes that can monitor much larger regions of the sky (the bigger telescopes have VERY narrow fields of view).
Somehow rather than being impressed with the difficulty of the test I'm struck by awe for what is likely the stupidity of my fellow man. Either that or they load it up with the kinds of trivia I was forced to memorize in history class and some of my less-well-taught science classes.
I'm not sure if they're outright spying on US Citizens, or if they're merely participating in some legal shell games.
Most nations prevent their covert operations groups from legally spying on their own citizens. However, most of those nations still want to do it. The legal trick they employ is to spy on their allies citizens, and get their allies to spy on their own citizens, and then swap data.
So, the NSA may very well not be sniffing your packets. However, the UK might be doing so, and the NSA might be sniffing UK packets. Both governments just look the other way, and then when they want to know about somebody they make a friendly inquiry of the other.
There are probably countless other variations on this sort of thing - ways to legally tell Congress that the laws are being followed to the letter while completely ignoring the spirit of those laws.
Yup, a GED is a box-checking exercise (job requires diploma or GED - check box). I suspect that the top 25% of 8th graders could probably pass it.
What a joke that would be. I suspect I could have passed that test in middle school, as could the top 25% or so of any high school. They're testing for minimal proficiency - ie that somebody performs as well as somebody who just barely managed to get a diploma. These are the sorts of students who make headlines in surveys that show that most Americans can't point out Europe on a map.
While I won't say that high school was the most efficient learning experience it could have been, I still learned quite a bit while there. The fact that you don't need to understand Chemistry, Calculus, or Literature to graduate high school doesn't mean that these subjects aren't valuable.
Well, privatization makes sense when there can actually be competition. It also makes sense if you lack an economy of scale that a private company could offer.
However, if you privatize something that you already have economy of scale on and give an exclusive contract to a single company, well, yes, you're going to get clobbered.
If the state police is running its own paper mill to create ticket pads for its officers then buying the paper from whoever is cheapest that month makes sense. On the other hand, privatizing the police force itself doesn't make sense - you're already employing tens of thousands of people with all the support structures in place. There really isn't any sensible way to privatize that without an exclusive contract. Now, privatizing bounty hunting and such would make more sense - you can just publish a name and a bounty and give the money to whoever drags the guy in.
I'm all for outsourcing or privatizing when it makes sense. The problem is that it is usually just done as a matter of fashion, or management laziness, or often in the case of the government (and sometimes industry as well), corruption.
There are various patches that implement this. There were some root-requiring apps that did this as well but I don't believe they work post-v4.
The key isn't to return errors to applications - you just need to return a successful call with no useful data. If it asks for contacts, just say that the user hasn't defined any (a situation every app has to handle anyway). If it asks for the IMEI tell the app that there is no SIM installed. If it asks for the location, tell the app that there is no GPS coverage. If it asks to phone home, tell it that the network appears to be down at the moment.
Apps handle all of these things gracefully already. The key is to intercept the API call and direct it along one of these paths, and not to just return an error due to a lack of permissions, which the app no doubt was not designed for since it was supposed to be guaranteed those permissions.
My neighbors can currently buy a camera and watch me from their property. They can have slightly more visibility for some angles from the air. If the noise is the issue, you can already call in complaints on that , and police will help you remove the nuisance.
You're doing it wrong. You just need to put up a 10 foot wall and have about 2000 yards of space between that and hour house, and lots of strategically placed hedges and such. That should stop anything short of a drone.
Oh wait, you don't own a multi-million-dollar home like Eric Schmidt?
As I learned on some other gun-control thread on slashdot, about the only thing assault rifles really make sense for is hunting (whether that is larger animals, or people).
For most cases of self defense and such a shotgun is a much more practical weapon (especially if it has a short barrel - speaking only of effectiveness - not of legalities). Such a weapon is devastating at the short ranges typically involved in home defense, won't fire through walls with the right shot, and has little effect on unintended stuff that is in the background. I imagine it has a lot more shock effect than a pistol or rifle as well (if the bad guy somehow ducks behind cover they get to see the general area they were standing in completely trashed, as opposed to a tiny hole in the wall - they're probably going to run, which is really all you should care about). If outdoors you could even fire a warning shot first and not be likely to kill somebody 2 miles down the road.
Not really looking to open a debate on the pros/cons of weapons for home defense, and I'm not sure I'd want to own a shotgun for such use myself. However, the point is that for whatever reason people seem to ignore the utility of shotguns as self-defense weapons.
If you're bleeding from a wound while hunting and the nearest road or place to find help is on the other side of somebody's private property you can walk right across it, and if the guy shoots you along the way it is murder. That doesn't mean that you can have a picnic in their backyard and be exempt from trespassing laws, especially if you're asked to leave.
I suspect that courts would view an aircraft that is just going from point A to point B and happens to pass over a house differently than somebody who sets up an aircraft that basically hovers in the same place 24x7 minus refueling stops, regardless of exact altitude. A neighbor who happens to launch a hot air balloon from their yard once a month probably would be treated differently than one that tethers a huge balloon to their house with the words "Buy apples here!" on it.
I don't think the solution to any of this involves bans on drones - it just involves applying common sense, which for the most parts courts tend to do in cases where neighbors go out of their way to tick each other off.
Personally, I'd rather see stuff like this democratized. The big corporations and such are going to have subscriptions to data feeds on everybody anyway, so at least if we make the data available to everybody culture can change to deal with it. The fact is that everybody around you has done stuff that they would never admit to, and the fact that it usually isn't documented and accessible lets us all live in the fantasy world where everybody is perfect except for a few unlucky individuals who get caught and have their reputations destroyed for life (heaven help you if you're caught urinating in public while drunk in college). Once everybody is a documented heathen maybe we can stop treating heathens like they're sub-human.
I'm not sure how much star tracking would help with aurora - the images change over time so you'd probably just get a photo of some stars over a colored background that lacks most of the features of an aurora. For short-duration photos that would capture the essence of the aurora star tracking is probably not necessary.
As far as the milky way goes, I'm surprised somebody hasn't taken a photo from the ISS or such. The hubble probably wouldn't generate a terribly impressive photo - the field of view is way too narrow. Telescopes generate images of very small areas in the sky - especially large ones like the Hubble. If you want to really capture the milky way you need a pretty wide-angle lens.
I do find it odd that it is hard to find such photos online. All you need to do is take a photo from space - I'd think that even a regular DSLR would work. If you wanted it to be a reasonably long exposure you would need to have it attached to a support which was motionless with respect to the stars.
Uh, an i7 costs $300, and requires a $180 motherboard. Then add in $60 for RAM and your system board upgrade costs you $540.
A Phenom II X4 costs $95, and works fine on a $40 motherboard. It needs the same $60 worth of RAM, costing you $195 for that system board upgrade.
There is no question the i7 will outperform the Phenom II by a decent margin, but that is at 2.6x the price. That means that with the same annual spend you can upgrade the AMD system far more often, and I have little doubt that either company's next-gen chip will beat out the other company's current-gen chip.
So, if you really need bleeding-edge CPU performance, I'd just stick with the cheaper processors and upgrade more often. You'll have a better performing system most of the time.
I compared Intel/AMD here, but I suspect that the numbers would still favor going cheap if you compared Intel/Intel. you pay a big premium to get the latest and greatest. The only reason I'd buy high-end is if the work was so CPU-bound that expensive employees would be idle too often (video editing, etc), and then I'd buy high-end and still upgrade frequently.
Of course for typical business use I'd just get the lower-end chips and still not upgrade very often and spend the money on office supplies or whatever instead. Most PC users don't need a modern CPU. If you don't need to run local apps consider a Chromebook while you're at it - gets rid of all the management hassle entirely since when it gets old you just donate it and buy a new one.
Justice?
Carreon starts this huge litigation fight. He takes steps to cost some guy's employer a lot of money in the hope that one of this enemies would lose his job. I'm sure that didn't help the next time he was up for a review/promotion.
After tons of pain and hardship for everybody involved a judge forces Carreon to pay maybe 2/3rds of the opposing counsel's legal fees.
This isn't justice - all this did was prove Carreon's point. If you don't give in early, expect to lose a lot of money in court. Sure, the court saw to it that they didn't lose as much as they could have, but this whole case was still a loss to them. Sure, Carreon lost some money too, but this was a fight of his choosing and presumably those who get into such fights do so willing to lose.
Bottom line is that if you tick off somebody who has a lot more money than you the courts will NOT be your friend. The best you can hope for is a Pyrrhic victory, like this one.