Agreed, though it is interesting that nobody spotted them on radar if hypoxia were responsible. For that to happen the autopilot would have had to been set to fly a heading away from any land, and then the crew would have to lose consciousness.
Maybe if there were a problem they might put the autopilot into heading mode, but why select a heading away from land? Maybe I could see them turning the setting back towards home and passing out while still turning the dial, but I would think they'd set the heading before selecting heading mode, in which case the aircraft would be following the FMS.
I wonder how efficient ATC is in Asia. Could the airplane have actually flown across a country without actually being noticed? In a hypoxia situation the crew would probably not have disabled communications, though I suppose equipment failure is a possibility. In that case it would have working transponder, ACARS, etc.
I blame TV. Apparently everyone thinks we are actively tracking every single object flying through the air everywhere, every second of every day...
Well, over countries this isn't too far from the truth. Sure, in desolate areas there might not be primary coverage, but I understand that after 9/11 there was quite a bit of investment in primary radar around populated areas.
This aircraft was out at sea, however, and what country is going to care about monitoring airspace out there? In fact, that is half the driver for ADS-B adoption - you can track airliners out at sea that way, and by doing so greatly increase airspace utilization.
Not quite correct. The situation is quite a bit more complex than that.
ATC obtains information about aircraft in the area in a number of ways.
One is primary radar - which is in fact radar. It generally has a limited range - maybe 50 miles or so. Usually civilian equipment cannot detect altitude either, and of course it picks up noise from birds and weather and such.
The more useful source of data is secondary radar, which relies on transponders. The transponders generate a pulse when they are interrogated - the aircraft doesn't need to know its own location for this to work - the ground station works it out from the time to receive the reply. The transponder can encode a code to identify the aircraft, and it can also encode the altitude (or at least what the plane thinks its altitude is).
The more recent development is ADS-B via UAT and ES. These involve the aircraft broadcasting its position as determined by GPS. It can be sent out as part of the transponder reply, or it can be sent out without any need for secondary radar at all, potentially even being picked up by satellite.
So, radar is used to track aircraft, but with its limited range civilian radar would not detect an airliner out at sea unless it had a cooperative transponder. Even with a transponder range is only 100 miles or so. You can get much longer ranges with military radar, especially if it is airborne. However, stumbling on one of those would require luck, and a military aircraft probably wouldn't be on the lookout for rogue airliners.
I don't know how much is known vs speculation here. If the NSA has some MySQL manipulation tools, it might not actually be intended for use on the actual internet. It is possible that they infiltrate networks and use these tools on the inside.
It came out that they're tapping dedicated lines, and those are often unencrypted. However, I'd expect most competent mysql use to stay confined to a LAN, even with encryption. Latency tends to cause problems if you separate the database from the application layer. But, I'm sure that not everybody the NSA targets is competent...
Your analogy is missing the part where the adult walked up with the 10 year old and told the cashier that the child was allowed to use the credit card, and then left.
When did the device owner literally say to the phone, "my child is allowed to buy $x worth of in-game purchases?"
All he did was enter a password after authorizing a purchase he made. At no point did he intend for anybody else to buy something, or communicate that to anybody. Even if he checked a box saying "keep my password for 30 min" that isn't the same as authorizing a specific additional transaction. How can you agree to a transaction you don't even know about? And it isn't like you can give a 10-year-old a power of attorney.
Google has an easy way of verifying that the account holder or someone authorized by them is using the phone: require the password.
That helps, but is no means absolute proof of authorization or intent to purchase. If somebody steals the password, you are NOT liable for purchases made using it via a credit card.
Of course, the fact that the password was entered at the time of the transaction would be considered by a court as evidence that there was an authorization. That isn't absolute proof, but it would be considered.
It is actually hard to prove that any online transaction is authorized. Companies use them because they're far more convenient and repudiation is not that big a risk. However, you'd never see them used for a major purchase, such as for a car or home. A court is going to put lots of weight on testimony that somebody looked you in the eye, went over a contract, and got both verbal and written agreement on its terms, and they watched you sign it and checked your ID. If there was a notary present then that agreement would be ironclad unless you could prove outright fraud/conspiracy on the part of the notary (signing in front of a notary is basically the same as signing in a courtroom in front of a clerk). They won't put nearly as much weight on testimony that says, "well, whoever was sitting at the keyboard knew his credit card number."
Doesn't this mean that anybody could reverse any online marketplace credit card transaction just blaming their kids? Or even wife, if it wasn't my intent that she used my card for online shopping?
Absolutely.
That's why the cashier is supposed to look at your signature when you sign the receipt. The store can of course go after the person who "stole" the card and press charges if they don't return the item, and I suspect they could basically force the cardholder to cooperate in this by making a declaration to the police that their card was used without permission.
That's also why there is a notary present when you sell a house or sign a mortgage. If they just mailed around documents you COULD argue that somebody forged your signature and it would be on the other parties to PROVE that you actually signed it.
You can't accidentally become a party to a contract. The signature is really just a manifestation of the decision you made in your head to agree to the terms. If you didn't intend to agree to something, then there is no contract. If there is no contract, then you aren't obligated to pay anybody anything.
But these aren't unauthorized follow-up payments, a person you are responsible for and have logged in with your credit card credentials is sitting and making actual purchases.
I doubt a court would see it this way. I'm sure it wasn't the intent of the account owner to authorize his kid to make any purchases.
Suppose a 10 year old walks up to a cashier at a Walmart, dumps 50 candy bars on the belt, and hands the cashier a credit card with no adult in sight. The cashier rings it up and charges the card. The kid opens all the candy and gives it away to friends, eats it, whatever. Later the adult discovers that the kid took his card out of his wallet when he wasn't looking and complains to his credit card company.
The fact that the kid had the card in no way authorizes its use. In fact, a court would laugh at a cashier not questioning the use of a card by a 10 year old.
This is really an extension of that. The phone owner did not give his kid permission to buy something, and thus it was not an authorized use of his account. The fact that the phone can't detect this scenario in no way makes the owner responsible. You can't unconsciously give somebody permission to do something. A computer might misinterpret your actions as authorizing something. A company might write a bunch of contract terms that claim that you can authorize something non-explicitly. However, in the end the only thing that matters is actual intent. If you don't intend to authorize a transaction, then no contract exists, and thus no obligation to pay the bill exists.
And there was monitoring going on in this case? Hardly.
He wasn't standing close enough to the helipad that he would have heard a helicopter in operation? If so, then I'm fine with legal action being taken - that would be reckless
Also, safe monitoring assumes fault-free humans, hardly probable. I'd say we'd be just a little safer if we ban the flying of model aircraft in the area of an airport, or helipad.
We'd be safer still if we banned flying any aircraft in the area of an airport of helipad. They're operated by fault-prone humans as well. In fact, planes crash into each other in the vicinity of airports from time to time, even in controlled airspace (and most helipads aren't controlled). At most airports the only way to guarantee not hitting another plane is spotting it in the air. They're not required to announce their position on radio or be equipped with gear that broadcasts their location.
I think what makes more sense is coming up with reasonable procedures to make aircraft and drones safer, not outright bans.
Plus $120 per TByte if you want to actually restore the data.
The cost to restore data from Glacier is actually fairly complex to calculate. It is about $105/TB for data transfer which you can't avoid at all and that is constant regardless of how fast you download it (it would be cheaper to have them mail you hard drives - $80 each plus a bit more for hourly loading fees). Then there is the retrieval cost, which varies SIGNIFICANTLY based on the speed of retrieval. If you restored that 20TB evenly over the span of 4 months it would cost you about $50 in retrieval costs. If you restored it over the span of 2 days it would cost you $3000 in retrieval costs (on top of the $2k for transfer).
I use Glacier for backups, but only in addition to local backups. My Glacier use case is that the house has burned down, and having to pay an extra $100 to restore my backup really isn't a big deal in that case. Chances are it would take days to have a new PC up and running so I could probably cut down the costs considerably by spreading out my restore requests.
This is the approach I use, actually, with some variation.
Group 1 is critical data (documents, etc). It is only a few GB, and I use duplicity to do daily incrementals to the cloud. Group 2 is everything (including group 1). It is about 2TB, and I do daily rsnapshots with a few days retained to a local hard drive.
Regarding multimedia like photos, etc. I put that in group 1 to start. However, once I accumulate a few GB of it I do a one-time backup of it and then move those files to group 2. That keeps my critical files collection manageable so that my full backups of that set don't keep growing over time. If I take a picture it doesn't keep changing over time, so a one-time strategy makes more sense, and there are many ways to do that (burn to DVD, offsite hard drive, cheap cloud service, etc).
The main benefits of the cloud-based solution to me are that it is offsite, and it doesn't require any media manipulation so I can stick it in my crontab and just occassionally test that it is still working. I don't want to rely on a backup solution that I can potentially forget to run.
What's he going to spend his bitcoins on? Also, the government can just order him to hand over the keys to his wallet and hold him in contempt (in jail) until he complies.
Anything tangible he owns can be seized, as can he. Courts aren't as easy to bamboozle as his customers. The only way to avoid a court is to shelter all your assets and your person in a jurisdiction that won't hand you over and can't be forced to hand you over.
Depends on the nature of the custodial agreement and how the accounting was handled.
Only to a degree.
If we agree to trade 5 sheep for $500, and I give you 5 sheep, and you don't give me $500, a court is going to frown on that. Just about anything we agree to on paper isn't going to change that a great deal. Maybe if we agree that you don't have to pay me for six months then the court will give you six months.
If you argue that the piece of paper really says that you can take my sheep and only give me $500 if you feel like it, then a court is just going to ignore the paper.
Now, if we were talking about an investment of some kind where I stood to both gain and lose, then a court would treat it as such.
Bottom line is that you can't use legal arguments to claim that a contract should be construed in a one-sided way. Contracts have to involve some kind of consideration. If you take my sheep, then you owe me money, or at the very least you owe me my sheep back.
Having seen how most big companies in this space operate, they don't hire coders to do this kind of work.
They take their best bench scientist. Then they buy a bunch of licenses for some bioinformatics software and turn them loose on it. The scientist never really gets far and the software gets blamed. Then lots of money gets spent trying to adapt the software so that somebody with no knowledge of CS can make it work.
I saw a lab try to automate some routine work. They took their best bench chemist and sent them to robot school for a week and had him try to get a $1M robot to do the job. Then he had to take care of the robot in 5% of his spare time, and all the chemists were expected to try to use it for their tests, and it just didn't work out.
I've also see organizations do this sort of thing right. They recognize that the skills needed to be a bench scientists are not the same as the ones needed to engineer robots, program them, or automate processes. They go ahead and staff a project with one scientist (who has no other responsibilities), an engineer, and a programmer. Then they buy all the equipment they need. After a few months they put together some automated tests that aren't just robot arms trying to do things the same way humans do them. Then the team tends the robots - they don't let anybody else near them, but they go ahead and start rolling out more robots (with that same small staff to tend all of them). The end result is a lab that can do the work that would take 100 people to do at much lower cost.
These companies should be hired skilled CS workers. However, the way it works is that the IT organizations hire CS workers to get the software working, and they hire scientists with no particular skills in CS to try to write queries and perform data analysis. It just doesn't work, as the company spends millions of dollars trying to build idiot-proof query tools instead of just hiring one guy who knows SQL to actually write the queries.
You have three platforms now. The API is the platform, and Tivo has the Tivo API, Android has its own toolset and libraries, and X11 is a third.
If you want to define the word "platform" that way then sure, there are three platforms. None of them are linux platforms in that case, because you're defining the platform as the presence of some kind of non-Linux API (X11, etc). In fact, the software designed to run on X11 would probably be easier to run on FreeBSD than on Android, and that isn't Linux at all.
Linux is a kernel. It has an API - it is called the system call interface. You can target it with software if you so desire, though usually this is only done directly for fairly low-level stuff.
So, if a dude flies his model airplane for profit over an airport runway, it is only FAA business if a plane is trying to take off or land at the time? Sure.
Why not? If the area is being monitored so that there is no risk of conflict, then there is no opportunity for somebody to be harmed.
If the airspace were controlled it would make sense to coordinate with the controlling authority. If the airspace were uncontrolled then airplanes land without coordination all the time without anybody getting hurt.
So your comment "That doesn't apply to stuff near the earth" was not really all that smart then? Particularly considering your comment "because collision is a very real threat ".
That's why I said, "Now, the bit about the helipad alone does start to encroach into FAA territory, but I'd say they would only have a case there if a helicopter were attempting to operate in the area and the guy kept flying his plane."
Agree. Honestly, it would be a lot easier for the drone operators to deal with GPS jamming than it would be for everybody else in the world to deal with it.
Border patrol (and just about every other agency with an enforcement mandate) is already exploring UAV use, what we will see eventually is an air war where unauthorized UAVs are simply shot down automatically.
Drones can be fixed wing which can give them fairly decent speeds, and they would be capable of terrain-following, which combined with their small size would make them quite difficult to pick up on radar. Or they could fly slow and be hard to distinguish from birds. They're already working on DIY drones that use ultrasonics to measure altitude. Include laser ranging or vision in them and they could fly inches off the surface dodging brush.
And nobody has even tried making them stealthy. There are flying wing designs already - somebody need only look up some photos of a B2/etc and build a drone that matches, and I wouldn't be surprised if combined with the low size it would be very hard to detect.
Yeah, I suspect that non-payment for drug deliveries is one of those things drug dealers have an efficient system for handling. I doubt it involves civil suits, either.
So the US isn't repositioning its satellites? It seems to me that China these days are doing the things that America used to at the drop of a hat without a whim...
Who said they aren't? I can't remember the last time the US announced the use of satellite surveillance for just about anything.
Seems like more of a PR move. I'm sure just about anybody with spy satellites is using them to look for debris. What else are they going to be busy looking at when they're over this region?
I believe most US airliners do just this. I imagine most EU ones do as well. That is, at least for position - the amount of telemetry might vary based on mode of communications. It might not be as frequent as once a minute, however.
Why do they not have satellite location based reporting on the planes providing the planes position every five minutes? Expand the ACARS system to give the position of the plane. This would help the searchers narrow down the location where the plane was lost.
I think most airliners do just that. If not equipped with ACARS then they have to do HF position reports with regular frequency. However, I'm not sure how much that applies internationally, it is quite possible that procedures at Malaysian airlines aren't quite what they are with Lufthansa or United.
Heck, in the middle of the sea they could have skipped the dive and just turned off their transponder and communications. It isn't like air search radar sets are in operation in the middle of the ocean. They could probably overfly large parts of the US without being detected on primary radar (though probably not the borders - not much point in advertising an ADIZ and not having radar).
If they actually flew at low altitude it would not be picked up by radar unless it was fairly close or airborne. They wouldn't be just a few meters above the waves though - this was at night and that would be a challenge in a military aircraft equipped for that kind of flight (usually including terrain-following radar-assisted autopilots). They could probably have flown 100 feet up though, which would be good enough if not trying to infiltrate an air defense network.
At low altitude they wouldn't be able to fly all that far - the burn rate at low altitude is considerably higher than at cruise altitude, and the speed is much lower as well.
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Agreed, though it is interesting that nobody spotted them on radar if hypoxia were responsible. For that to happen the autopilot would have had to been set to fly a heading away from any land, and then the crew would have to lose consciousness.
Maybe if there were a problem they might put the autopilot into heading mode, but why select a heading away from land? Maybe I could see them turning the setting back towards home and passing out while still turning the dial, but I would think they'd set the heading before selecting heading mode, in which case the aircraft would be following the FMS.
I wonder how efficient ATC is in Asia. Could the airplane have actually flown across a country without actually being noticed? In a hypoxia situation the crew would probably not have disabled communications, though I suppose equipment failure is a possibility. In that case it would have working transponder, ACARS, etc.
The whole situation just seems odd.
I blame TV. Apparently everyone thinks we are actively tracking every single object flying through the air everywhere, every second of every day...
Well, over countries this isn't too far from the truth. Sure, in desolate areas there might not be primary coverage, but I understand that after 9/11 there was quite a bit of investment in primary radar around populated areas.
This aircraft was out at sea, however, and what country is going to care about monitoring airspace out there? In fact, that is half the driver for ADS-B adoption - you can track airliners out at sea that way, and by doing so greatly increase airspace utilization.
Not quite correct. The situation is quite a bit more complex than that.
ATC obtains information about aircraft in the area in a number of ways.
One is primary radar - which is in fact radar. It generally has a limited range - maybe 50 miles or so. Usually civilian equipment cannot detect altitude either, and of course it picks up noise from birds and weather and such.
The more useful source of data is secondary radar, which relies on transponders. The transponders generate a pulse when they are interrogated - the aircraft doesn't need to know its own location for this to work - the ground station works it out from the time to receive the reply. The transponder can encode a code to identify the aircraft, and it can also encode the altitude (or at least what the plane thinks its altitude is).
The more recent development is ADS-B via UAT and ES. These involve the aircraft broadcasting its position as determined by GPS. It can be sent out as part of the transponder reply, or it can be sent out without any need for secondary radar at all, potentially even being picked up by satellite.
So, radar is used to track aircraft, but with its limited range civilian radar would not detect an airliner out at sea unless it had a cooperative transponder. Even with a transponder range is only 100 miles or so. You can get much longer ranges with military radar, especially if it is airborne. However, stumbling on one of those would require luck, and a military aircraft probably wouldn't be on the lookout for rogue airliners.
I don't know how much is known vs speculation here. If the NSA has some MySQL manipulation tools, it might not actually be intended for use on the actual internet. It is possible that they infiltrate networks and use these tools on the inside.
It came out that they're tapping dedicated lines, and those are often unencrypted. However, I'd expect most competent mysql use to stay confined to a LAN, even with encryption. Latency tends to cause problems if you separate the database from the application layer. But, I'm sure that not everybody the NSA targets is competent...
Your analogy is missing the part where the adult walked up with the 10 year old and told the cashier that the child was allowed to use the credit card, and then left.
When did the device owner literally say to the phone, "my child is allowed to buy $x worth of in-game purchases?"
All he did was enter a password after authorizing a purchase he made. At no point did he intend for anybody else to buy something, or communicate that to anybody. Even if he checked a box saying "keep my password for 30 min" that isn't the same as authorizing a specific additional transaction. How can you agree to a transaction you don't even know about? And it isn't like you can give a 10-year-old a power of attorney.
Google has an easy way of verifying that the account holder or someone authorized by them is using the phone: require the password.
That helps, but is no means absolute proof of authorization or intent to purchase. If somebody steals the password, you are NOT liable for purchases made using it via a credit card.
Of course, the fact that the password was entered at the time of the transaction would be considered by a court as evidence that there was an authorization. That isn't absolute proof, but it would be considered.
It is actually hard to prove that any online transaction is authorized. Companies use them because they're far more convenient and repudiation is not that big a risk. However, you'd never see them used for a major purchase, such as for a car or home. A court is going to put lots of weight on testimony that somebody looked you in the eye, went over a contract, and got both verbal and written agreement on its terms, and they watched you sign it and checked your ID. If there was a notary present then that agreement would be ironclad unless you could prove outright fraud/conspiracy on the part of the notary (signing in front of a notary is basically the same as signing in a courtroom in front of a clerk). They won't put nearly as much weight on testimony that says, "well, whoever was sitting at the keyboard knew his credit card number."
Doesn't this mean that anybody could reverse any online marketplace credit card transaction just blaming their kids? Or even wife, if it wasn't my intent that she used my card for online shopping?
Absolutely.
That's why the cashier is supposed to look at your signature when you sign the receipt. The store can of course go after the person who "stole" the card and press charges if they don't return the item, and I suspect they could basically force the cardholder to cooperate in this by making a declaration to the police that their card was used without permission.
That's also why there is a notary present when you sell a house or sign a mortgage. If they just mailed around documents you COULD argue that somebody forged your signature and it would be on the other parties to PROVE that you actually signed it.
You can't accidentally become a party to a contract. The signature is really just a manifestation of the decision you made in your head to agree to the terms. If you didn't intend to agree to something, then there is no contract. If there is no contract, then you aren't obligated to pay anybody anything.
A contract is a mater of intent. If the cardholder didn't intend to make a contract, then he didn't.
If he leaves a signature stamp lying around, that isn't a license for anybody to come along and start stamping away.
But these aren't unauthorized follow-up payments, a person you are responsible for and have logged in with your credit card credentials is sitting and making actual purchases.
I doubt a court would see it this way. I'm sure it wasn't the intent of the account owner to authorize his kid to make any purchases.
Suppose a 10 year old walks up to a cashier at a Walmart, dumps 50 candy bars on the belt, and hands the cashier a credit card with no adult in sight. The cashier rings it up and charges the card. The kid opens all the candy and gives it away to friends, eats it, whatever. Later the adult discovers that the kid took his card out of his wallet when he wasn't looking and complains to his credit card company.
The fact that the kid had the card in no way authorizes its use. In fact, a court would laugh at a cashier not questioning the use of a card by a 10 year old.
This is really an extension of that. The phone owner did not give his kid permission to buy something, and thus it was not an authorized use of his account. The fact that the phone can't detect this scenario in no way makes the owner responsible. You can't unconsciously give somebody permission to do something. A computer might misinterpret your actions as authorizing something. A company might write a bunch of contract terms that claim that you can authorize something non-explicitly. However, in the end the only thing that matters is actual intent. If you don't intend to authorize a transaction, then no contract exists, and thus no obligation to pay the bill exists.
And there was monitoring going on in this case? Hardly.
He wasn't standing close enough to the helipad that he would have heard a helicopter in operation? If so, then I'm fine with legal action being taken - that would be reckless
Also, safe monitoring assumes fault-free humans, hardly probable. I'd say we'd be just a little safer if we ban the flying of model aircraft in the area of an airport, or helipad.
We'd be safer still if we banned flying any aircraft in the area of an airport of helipad. They're operated by fault-prone humans as well. In fact, planes crash into each other in the vicinity of airports from time to time, even in controlled airspace (and most helipads aren't controlled). At most airports the only way to guarantee not hitting another plane is spotting it in the air. They're not required to announce their position on radio or be equipped with gear that broadcasts their location.
I think what makes more sense is coming up with reasonable procedures to make aircraft and drones safer, not outright bans.
Plus $120 per TByte if you want to actually restore the data.
The cost to restore data from Glacier is actually fairly complex to calculate. It is about $105/TB for data transfer which you can't avoid at all and that is constant regardless of how fast you download it (it would be cheaper to have them mail you hard drives - $80 each plus a bit more for hourly loading fees). Then there is the retrieval cost, which varies SIGNIFICANTLY based on the speed of retrieval. If you restored that 20TB evenly over the span of 4 months it would cost you about $50 in retrieval costs. If you restored it over the span of 2 days it would cost you $3000 in retrieval costs (on top of the $2k for transfer).
I use Glacier for backups, but only in addition to local backups. My Glacier use case is that the house has burned down, and having to pay an extra $100 to restore my backup really isn't a big deal in that case. Chances are it would take days to have a new PC up and running so I could probably cut down the costs considerably by spreading out my restore requests.
This is the approach I use, actually, with some variation.
Group 1 is critical data (documents, etc). It is only a few GB, and I use duplicity to do daily incrementals to the cloud.
Group 2 is everything (including group 1). It is about 2TB, and I do daily rsnapshots with a few days retained to a local hard drive.
Regarding multimedia like photos, etc. I put that in group 1 to start. However, once I accumulate a few GB of it I do a one-time backup of it and then move those files to group 2. That keeps my critical files collection manageable so that my full backups of that set don't keep growing over time. If I take a picture it doesn't keep changing over time, so a one-time strategy makes more sense, and there are many ways to do that (burn to DVD, offsite hard drive, cheap cloud service, etc).
The main benefits of the cloud-based solution to me are that it is offsite, and it doesn't require any media manipulation so I can stick it in my crontab and just occassionally test that it is still working. I don't want to rely on a backup solution that I can potentially forget to run.
What's he going to spend his bitcoins on? Also, the government can just order him to hand over the keys to his wallet and hold him in contempt (in jail) until he complies.
Anything tangible he owns can be seized, as can he. Courts aren't as easy to bamboozle as his customers. The only way to avoid a court is to shelter all your assets and your person in a jurisdiction that won't hand you over and can't be forced to hand you over.
Depends on the nature of the custodial agreement and how the accounting was handled.
Only to a degree.
If we agree to trade 5 sheep for $500, and I give you 5 sheep, and you don't give me $500, a court is going to frown on that. Just about anything we agree to on paper isn't going to change that a great deal. Maybe if we agree that you don't have to pay me for six months then the court will give you six months.
If you argue that the piece of paper really says that you can take my sheep and only give me $500 if you feel like it, then a court is just going to ignore the paper.
Now, if we were talking about an investment of some kind where I stood to both gain and lose, then a court would treat it as such.
Bottom line is that you can't use legal arguments to claim that a contract should be construed in a one-sided way. Contracts have to involve some kind of consideration. If you take my sheep, then you owe me money, or at the very least you owe me my sheep back.
Having seen how most big companies in this space operate, they don't hire coders to do this kind of work.
They take their best bench scientist. Then they buy a bunch of licenses for some bioinformatics software and turn them loose on it. The scientist never really gets far and the software gets blamed. Then lots of money gets spent trying to adapt the software so that somebody with no knowledge of CS can make it work.
I saw a lab try to automate some routine work. They took their best bench chemist and sent them to robot school for a week and had him try to get a $1M robot to do the job. Then he had to take care of the robot in 5% of his spare time, and all the chemists were expected to try to use it for their tests, and it just didn't work out.
I've also see organizations do this sort of thing right. They recognize that the skills needed to be a bench scientists are not the same as the ones needed to engineer robots, program them, or automate processes. They go ahead and staff a project with one scientist (who has no other responsibilities), an engineer, and a programmer. Then they buy all the equipment they need. After a few months they put together some automated tests that aren't just robot arms trying to do things the same way humans do them. Then the team tends the robots - they don't let anybody else near them, but they go ahead and start rolling out more robots (with that same small staff to tend all of them). The end result is a lab that can do the work that would take 100 people to do at much lower cost.
These companies should be hired skilled CS workers. However, the way it works is that the IT organizations hire CS workers to get the software working, and they hire scientists with no particular skills in CS to try to write queries and perform data analysis. It just doesn't work, as the company spends millions of dollars trying to build idiot-proof query tools instead of just hiring one guy who knows SQL to actually write the queries.
You have three platforms now. The API is the platform, and Tivo has the Tivo API, Android has its own toolset and libraries, and X11 is a third.
If you want to define the word "platform" that way then sure, there are three platforms. None of them are linux platforms in that case, because you're defining the platform as the presence of some kind of non-Linux API (X11, etc). In fact, the software designed to run on X11 would probably be easier to run on FreeBSD than on Android, and that isn't Linux at all.
Linux is a kernel. It has an API - it is called the system call interface. You can target it with software if you so desire, though usually this is only done directly for fairly low-level stuff.
So, if a dude flies his model airplane for profit over an airport runway, it is only FAA business if a plane is trying to take off or land at the time? Sure.
Why not? If the area is being monitored so that there is no risk of conflict, then there is no opportunity for somebody to be harmed.
If the airspace were controlled it would make sense to coordinate with the controlling authority. If the airspace were uncontrolled then airplanes land without coordination all the time without anybody getting hurt.
So your comment "That doesn't apply to stuff near the earth" was not really all that smart then? Particularly considering your comment "because collision is a very real threat ".
That's why I said, "Now, the bit about the helipad alone does start to encroach into FAA territory, but I'd say they would only have a case there if a helicopter were attempting to operate in the area and the guy kept flying his plane."
Agree. Honestly, it would be a lot easier for the drone operators to deal with GPS jamming than it would be for everybody else in the world to deal with it.
Border patrol (and just about every other agency with an enforcement mandate) is already exploring UAV use, what we will see eventually is an air war where unauthorized UAVs are simply shot down automatically.
Good luck with that...
Drones can be fixed wing which can give them fairly decent speeds, and they would be capable of terrain-following, which combined with their small size would make them quite difficult to pick up on radar. Or they could fly slow and be hard to distinguish from birds. They're already working on DIY drones that use ultrasonics to measure altitude. Include laser ranging or vision in them and they could fly inches off the surface dodging brush.
And nobody has even tried making them stealthy. There are flying wing designs already - somebody need only look up some photos of a B2/etc and build a drone that matches, and I wouldn't be surprised if combined with the low size it would be very hard to detect.
Yeah, I suspect that non-payment for drug deliveries is one of those things drug dealers have an efficient system for handling. I doubt it involves civil suits, either.
So the US isn't repositioning its satellites? It seems to me that China these days are doing the things that America used to at the drop of a hat without a whim...
Who said they aren't? I can't remember the last time the US announced the use of satellite surveillance for just about anything.
Seems like more of a PR move. I'm sure just about anybody with spy satellites is using them to look for debris. What else are they going to be busy looking at when they're over this region?
I believe most US airliners do just this. I imagine most EU ones do as well. That is, at least for position - the amount of telemetry might vary based on mode of communications. It might not be as frequent as once a minute, however.
Why do they not have satellite location based reporting on the planes providing the planes position every five minutes? Expand the ACARS system to give the position of the plane. This would help the searchers narrow down the location where the plane was lost.
I think most airliners do just that. If not equipped with ACARS then they have to do HF position reports with regular frequency. However, I'm not sure how much that applies internationally, it is quite possible that procedures at Malaysian airlines aren't quite what they are with Lufthansa or United.
Heck, in the middle of the sea they could have skipped the dive and just turned off their transponder and communications. It isn't like air search radar sets are in operation in the middle of the ocean. They could probably overfly large parts of the US without being detected on primary radar (though probably not the borders - not much point in advertising an ADIZ and not having radar).
If they actually flew at low altitude it would not be picked up by radar unless it was fairly close or airborne. They wouldn't be just a few meters above the waves though - this was at night and that would be a challenge in a military aircraft equipped for that kind of flight (usually including terrain-following radar-assisted autopilots). They could probably have flown 100 feet up though, which would be good enough if not trying to infiltrate an air defense network.
At low altitude they wouldn't be able to fly all that far - the burn rate at low altitude is considerably higher than at cruise altitude, and the speed is much lower as well.