What does all of this say - the Supreme Court has ruled you own at least 83 feet above your property.
No, they ruled that an aircraft at 83 feet above some property that was causing significant damage to the owner's use was in violation. It did not rule that every aircraft at that altitude is invading the property. I think it is reasonable to assume that had the aircraft in question been causing no disturbance at all the ruling would have been different.
There is an awful lot of airspace below 500' AGL that is controlled, which means it is regulated by federal statue. 14 CFR, if I recall the FAA section of the CFRs correctly.
As others pointed out already, if that would be real, the pilot would have absolutely no idea who shot the drone down.
Just by looking at the video, no. You do realize that there is GPS in the aircraft that says where it was when it was shot down, and things called "maps" that let people plot GPS coordinates to see where that is, and then when you drive up to the site and see someone with a couple of guns holding the pieces, who freely admitted shooting the quad down, I think you can be relatively sure who did it.
And that the quad was probably in line-of-sight for the pilot who was using it to take pictures of a friend's house, so he saw it when it was shot.
Furthermore, initial claims of missing the SDcard notwithstanding, the image quality is so poor that it's hard to believe it came from a 1.8k drone.
If the SD card in the camera is removed, the only remaining video is what was recorded over... the wireless data link. That video isn't intended as production quality output, it's for monitoring the camera as it records.
Except the minimum height for helicopters. Which this was.
It CLEARLY interfered with the land owners use and enjoyment of his land.
It clearly did not, and clearly not "substantially" -- which is an important word in the material you quoted.
(and multiple passes, plus hovering of a camera equipped drone... ranks as substantial in my books)
Twenty-two seconds is not "multiple passes", and your ranking of that as substantial fails the reasonable man test.
A part of the material you failed to quote says that the land owner is due compensation for an infraction, not that he has the right to shoot whatever he wants out of the sky 'cause he's afeared of terrorists.
Only one person cared that he was shooting drones, and that person was involved in criminal trespass
The drone owner did not set foot on the shooter's property until after the drone had been shot down. You're using a later act as justification for one that came earlier? No, you don't get to do that.
The definition of criminal trespass involves a person being someplace they are not allowed, not an aircraft.
But the public navigateable public airspace doesn't start until 500'.
Wrong.
And air planes aren't allowed below 1000 feet over populated areas.
This wasn't an airplane, it was a helicopter. Helicopters do not have the 1000' foot floor.
None of the regular aircraft exemptions apply since they are for higher altitudes.
Exemptions from what? The FAR? Helicopters don't need exemptions from the FAR for low altitude work because the FAR allows it.
This drone was obviously (from the video) well below that.
It was within navigable airspace at an altitude that it could make a safe landing without undue hazard to people on the ground. That's what the law requires.
The whole point of soda is to make money. They don't sell sugar, they sell HFCS in the sweet drinks (except for a few specialty drinks that market themselves as such). The fact that putting HFCS into a drink makes it taste better so more people buy it is a side effect of wanting to make money.
Why do you think they put water in bottles and try to make it sound like it's something other than water? So they can make money, not so they can get rid of a water surplus by selling it.
take out the sugar and now they are competing with the free water faucet and they will just lose
Lots of brands have taken out the sugar -- have HFCS-free products -- and they're doing quite well. "Free faucet water" is really boring.
But why bother putting sweetener in tea in the first place? Tea is just fine without it. Coffee is just fine without it. I, for one, am glad that there are companies that now recognize that "sweet tea" is not the only way to make it.
I love how people say artificial sweeteners are harmless, but whenever I accidentally ingest one I get a headache, become nauseous, a sharpness around my heart, and almost vomit.
I'm sorry you have a bad reaction to an artificial sweetener, but you should realize that the term "harmless" doesn't mean "nobody can ever have anything bad happen", it means that for normal people it does no harm.
For most people, peanuts are harmless. For most people, a bee sting is an annoyance. For most people, shellfish are a yummy treat.
For most people, aspartame is a harmless sweetener. For people who have phenylketonuria (PKU) it can kill them. They lack an enzyme that processes phenylalanine, an amino acid (building block of proteins) that is part of aspartame, and is also found in higher concentrations in turkey. Should the media report on a regular basis this fact?
For most people, most medications intended to treat some symptom or disease do just that and nothing more. But read the contraindications or side-effect lists and see that some people don't have the same reaction that everyone else does. Does that mean the drug or whatever should be banned? Of course not.
Thanks to a complete failure of the media,
I don't know that it is the media's responsibility to report every bad side-effect that a minority of people experience to some common food additive. They'd be so busy reporting on what affects a minority that the main news would never get covered.
You miss the point about broadcast or point to point. The point to point link still must "broadcast" energy in the RF spectrum to work.
No, I used the term correctly. The radio transmits, but it is not a broadcast.
Does the 900MHz band in use have bandwidth available to transmit the signal?
Of course it does. They were using a COMMERCIALLY PRODUCED data radio with FCC approval for sale in the US. If you mean "are there hams trying to use the bandwidth", then it doesn't matter. It is a SHARED RESOURCE, and as an ISM device hams are legally required to accept any interference there might be from it. Damn unlikely to be any, though, given the low power and narrow radiation pattern being used.
and if y'all are being POLITE said prick might land up in the local jail.
For what, using a legal data radio link in a way that doesn't require a license and isn't causing you any interference?
if not... (insert theme to BONES)
If not, YOU wind up in jail for assault and trespass, and the FCC yanks your ham license for failing to abide by the Part 97 rules that say you must accept interference, if any, from the guy you beat up, and for a demonstrated lack of moral character that has cost other felons their licenses.
Y'all need to take a breath and realize that there are other authorized users of ham frequencies, some of whom don't need licenses to operate there, and some of whom you are required to accept interference from. Just because they show up on what you consider your private radio real-estate and don't have a ham license doesn't mean they're doing anything illegal, or anything that you can legally threaten violence against them for.
The difference is mainly in legal vs illegal. It's not illegal to hide yourself, but it IS illegal using the previous method. Broadcasting all over a licensed band...
1. It's not "broadcasting", it's point-to-point data.
2. It's unlicensed for the devices that were being used.
HAMs self report, no FCC required. Hell, we'd grab the YAGIs and make a game out of finding the prick.
Yeah, go track down a legal secondary user of a band where you are a secondary user yourself and Part 97 (97.301 and 97.303(e)) tells you that you must accept interference from, and then what? Force them to stop their legal use of the frequencies you want to call your own?
The "previous method" is no different than the current one. You didn't bother to read any of the discussion about this in the earlier/. dust-up and conspiracy party, did you? It was pointed out by several people, myself included, that the ProxyHam hardware shown in the pictures they released were simple 900 MHz unlicensed data radios and cheap Yagi-Uda antennas. That's not illegal. They weren't shut down by some awful FCC or NSA conspiracy to stop some dangerous hacking activity, because it was both legal and the intended use for the commercial products they were using.
It does look like there's a shortage of modern read-only tech these days, optical disc appears to really be the only game in town and it comes with its own baggage.
It's a buck for a blank CD-ROM, or less. It has no more baggage than a USB stick. If you don't have a USB port on the system and are going to have to open the box to plug a USB header onto the MB, then plug a USB CD into it. It's YOUR verified CD reader so there's no issue with it having malware.
And if you say you can't trust the CD from the vendor to be malware free, then you need to explain why you would trust a USB PROM to be malware free from the vendor.
That's why I said "If you are worried about authenticating the update, sign it."
You replace my patch with malware. You put a password on the encrypted file that you got from some other customer after I told it to him. Bingo, you have an "encrypted" patch that has the right password. You win.
You don't have my private key to sign it with. When the signature doesn't match, you don't win. No password needed. No encryption needed.
That's part why I suggested formatting and then sending it back, if the method of couriering the media is secure then the originating party can inspect the flash (as formatting isn't terribly thorough)
And just what good to the customer is it if you inspect a formatted USB stick and find nothing on it? I suppose you did a full byte-level dump on it before sending it and are going to compare to see if any of the blocks outside the filesystem management ones are different. And if you find something, does that just mean that the system wrote a file to it, or is it a sign of infection? Do you call the customer in a panic, just to have him tell you "yeah, we copied the system log files onto it since we were there and had the space on the stick"?
but formatting it might stop the malware from actually executing on a random third-party's computer if something happens and the media is lost.
Why is that the vendor's problem?
I'm a bit disappointed in the lack of PROM options these days. It seems like it's making this more difficult than it used to be, especially with the demise of conventional serial and parallel.
What makes you think "conventional serial and parallel" can't be used to download malware? And PROM is cheap, but why would you think that PROM can't be used to install malware?
I think you're over-reading the question. Nobody said this was a nuclear weapons manufacturing system that needed top-secret security. It's just not online.
The only safe way is after the USB stick is used, is to destroy it.
If you can't trust your vendor to not send you malware on a USB stick, you don't put it into the airgapped system in the first place, and then you find a different vendor. So I guess "USB stick" as a way of getting data into an airgapped system is not acceptable. That would seem to apply to other methods of entering an update except, perhaps, getting a printed sheet of paper with source code on it. You first have your programming experts look through the source code, then they type it in and recompile.
Also, always assume that your airgapped network is infected.
Then you have to always assume that anything the vendor sends you with an update is infected and you can't do updates. "Encyption" gets you nothing, nor will signatures or checksums.
I think you have to figure out the level of security you're trying to achieve, and I don't see in the question being asked that there is any special security concern involved, only that the system to be updated is not online. There are any number of reasons for that besides "we're running mission critical top secret stuff on it."
In any case, a vendor requiring that the customer format and return the USB stick is ridiculous. USB sticks cost so little these days that managing such a system will eat up any cost savings very quickly, and if the customer doesn't want to format it then what business is it of the vendor? I commented on a VENDOR requirement, not what good practice for the customer might or might not be.
Ship encrypted files on flash with instructions for them to call when the media arrives. Provide phone support to walk them through the install process,
Why bother with encryption? Why not have an automated process where you just put the USB stick in the USB hole and reboot, and the system finds the update and installs it? If you're worried about authenticating the update, sign it.
where you provide the password to the files at that time.
Free clue: if you don't want the user to get the update, don't send him the files. Why bother with a password?
Once the patch is installed, walk them through formatting the flash media and mailing it back to you.
The price for a USB stick is so low these days that it will cost more to manage the mailing and return than the stick is worth. And why do they have to format the media? Just let them delete the file if they want to, and then use the stick.
And you're taking it on faith that the pill was made correctly, when it often wasn't.
Citation required. "Often" is a bit of hyperbole. Maybe a lot of hyperbole. Manufacturers of pills have quality control systems that verify the output of their pill mills, and if they aren't right the entire batch is dumped. The mistakes take place much more often long after the pill is put in the bottle, by the guy taking the wrong bottle off the shelf. When that happens, what the pill looks like is the only verification the patient has.
Who checks the validity of a hospital's 3D pill printer?
Amazon sells the Adafruit version of TV-B-Gone as a kit, so you get the fun of building something and then the fun of going to the local sports bar during playoff time and getting beaten to a pulp when they realize you're the reason all the TVs shut off right before the final buzzer.
If you carry one in your pocket, make sure you either have no coins or other metal, or put good insulation around the board. I had one in my jacket pocket one time and wondered where the smoke smell was coming from.
and came accompanied by a printout of what was in them
"Here's your daily pill Mr. Poo and here are the MSDS sheets for what's in it and here's the certificate of authenticity."
then you'd have just as much assurance as you do now that the pills are what they say they are.
If I have a question about what a pill is, right now I can go to the PDR or any number of other references, or go online to find a picture of what it looks like. Once you start handing out 3D printed versions you have no visual clue that what you are holding is NOT the right thing. It won't take old Mr. Gower very long to send little George Bailey out with the wrong thing...
or "This does not look like the medication I usually get, I don't trust this, I'm not taking this!"
On the other hand, the visible features of a pill are often the only way to differentiate between different doses or different medications. That's why the Physician's Desk Reference often has pictures of the pills.
It's a SAFETY feature. Your elderly patients are quite right to question the look of the medications they are being given. It is not unheard of for pharmacists or nurses to make mistakes and hand out the wrong pills. ANY patient is right to question.
This idea that you can trick people into taking the medicine by making it look just like something they are used to taking is absolutely pathetic. The fact that nobody will be able to tell the difference between a 5mg dose of something and a 50mg dose could kill someone. It will have nurses who distribute meds saying "it's in your medication cup, it must be for you and it must be the right thing". Or someone will put the wrong thing in the med dispenser cart because it looks the same...
However, even though that can be very annoying I'm more worried about me being able to quick and clearly tell the difference in pills and dosage.....
It is right for you to worry, but if you screw up the worst that happens to you is you lose your job at that facility and you have to go work at another one. For the patient it can be deadly.
This is really no different than a compounding pharmacy. The claim that insurance has stopped paying for compounding should be a death knell for this idea, too. Why would they pay for a machine to dole out the specific amount of a bulk med when they won't pay for a machine to dole out the specific amount of a bulk med? That's right, compounding pharmacies were already using automation to create their products. What's the difference, again? "With a computer"? Feh.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I am not. I am saying his drone was trespassing on the property.
Drones cannot commit criminal trespass. From Kentucky law:
A quad-copter is not a person, and the person who flew it did not enter until after the quad was shot down.
That depends on where you are.
That's why I quoted Kentucky law.
What does all of this say - the Supreme Court has ruled you own at least 83 feet above your property.
No, they ruled that an aircraft at 83 feet above some property that was causing significant damage to the owner's use was in violation. It did not rule that every aircraft at that altitude is invading the property. I think it is reasonable to assume that had the aircraft in question been causing no disturbance at all the ruling would have been different.
As 0-500' isn't regulated by federal statute
There is an awful lot of airspace below 500' AGL that is controlled, which means it is regulated by federal statue. 14 CFR, if I recall the FAA section of the CFRs correctly.
As others pointed out already, if that would be real, the pilot would have absolutely no idea who shot the drone down.
Just by looking at the video, no. You do realize that there is GPS in the aircraft that says where it was when it was shot down, and things called "maps" that let people plot GPS coordinates to see where that is, and then when you drive up to the site and see someone with a couple of guns holding the pieces, who freely admitted shooting the quad down, I think you can be relatively sure who did it.
And that the quad was probably in line-of-sight for the pilot who was using it to take pictures of a friend's house, so he saw it when it was shot.
Furthermore, initial claims of missing the SDcard notwithstanding, the image quality is so poor that it's hard to believe it came from a 1.8k drone.
If the SD card in the camera is removed, the only remaining video is what was recorded over ... the wireless data link. That video isn't intended as production quality output, it's for monitoring the camera as it records.
This drone was under all FAA minimum heights.
Except the minimum height for helicopters. Which this was.
It CLEARLY interfered with the land owners use and enjoyment of his land.
It clearly did not, and clearly not "substantially" -- which is an important word in the material you quoted.
(and multiple passes, plus hovering of a camera equipped drone ... ranks as substantial in my books)
Twenty-two seconds is not "multiple passes", and your ranking of that as substantial fails the reasonable man test.
A part of the material you failed to quote says that the land owner is due compensation for an infraction, not that he has the right to shoot whatever he wants out of the sky 'cause he's afeared of terrorists.
You do NOT control the airspace over your property. You have exclusive air rights up to 500 feet,
Citation required. Otherwise, no.
Only one person cared that he was shooting drones, and that person was involved in criminal trespass
The drone owner did not set foot on the shooter's property until after the drone had been shot down. You're using a later act as justification for one that came earlier? No, you don't get to do that.
The definition of criminal trespass involves a person being someplace they are not allowed, not an aircraft.
But the public navigateable public airspace doesn't start until 500'.
Wrong.
And air planes aren't allowed below 1000 feet over populated areas.
This wasn't an airplane, it was a helicopter. Helicopters do not have the 1000' foot floor.
None of the regular aircraft exemptions apply since they are for higher altitudes.
Exemptions from what? The FAR? Helicopters don't need exemptions from the FAR for low altitude work because the FAR allows it.
This drone was obviously (from the video) well below that.
It was within navigable airspace at an altitude that it could make a safe landing without undue hazard to people on the ground. That's what the law requires.
the whole point of soda is to sell sugar.
The whole point of soda is to make money. They don't sell sugar, they sell HFCS in the sweet drinks (except for a few specialty drinks that market themselves as such). The fact that putting HFCS into a drink makes it taste better so more people buy it is a side effect of wanting to make money.
Why do you think they put water in bottles and try to make it sound like it's something other than water? So they can make money, not so they can get rid of a water surplus by selling it.
take out the sugar and now they are competing with the free water faucet and they will just lose
Lots of brands have taken out the sugar -- have HFCS-free products -- and they're doing quite well. "Free faucet water" is really boring.
But why bother putting sweetener in tea in the first place? Tea is just fine without it. Coffee is just fine without it. I, for one, am glad that there are companies that now recognize that "sweet tea" is not the only way to make it.
I love how people say artificial sweeteners are harmless, but whenever I accidentally ingest one I get a headache, become nauseous, a sharpness around my heart, and almost vomit.
I'm sorry you have a bad reaction to an artificial sweetener, but you should realize that the term "harmless" doesn't mean "nobody can ever have anything bad happen", it means that for normal people it does no harm.
For most people, peanuts are harmless. For most people, a bee sting is an annoyance. For most people, shellfish are a yummy treat.
For most people, aspartame is a harmless sweetener. For people who have phenylketonuria (PKU) it can kill them. They lack an enzyme that processes phenylalanine, an amino acid (building block of proteins) that is part of aspartame, and is also found in higher concentrations in turkey. Should the media report on a regular basis this fact?
For most people, most medications intended to treat some symptom or disease do just that and nothing more. But read the contraindications or side-effect lists and see that some people don't have the same reaction that everyone else does. Does that mean the drug or whatever should be banned? Of course not.
Thanks to a complete failure of the media,
I don't know that it is the media's responsibility to report every bad side-effect that a minority of people experience to some common food additive. They'd be so busy reporting on what affects a minority that the main news would never get covered.
You miss the point about broadcast or point to point. The point to point link still must "broadcast" energy in the RF spectrum to work.
No, I used the term correctly. The radio transmits, but it is not a broadcast.
Does the 900MHz band in use have bandwidth available to transmit the signal?
Of course it does. They were using a COMMERCIALLY PRODUCED data radio with FCC approval for sale in the US. If you mean "are there hams trying to use the bandwidth", then it doesn't matter. It is a SHARED RESOURCE, and as an ISM device hams are legally required to accept any interference there might be from it. Damn unlikely to be any, though, given the low power and narrow radiation pattern being used.
and if y'all are being POLITE said prick might land up in the local jail.
For what, using a legal data radio link in a way that doesn't require a license and isn't causing you any interference?
if not ... (insert theme to BONES)
If not, YOU wind up in jail for assault and trespass, and the FCC yanks your ham license for failing to abide by the Part 97 rules that say you must accept interference, if any, from the guy you beat up, and for a demonstrated lack of moral character that has cost other felons their licenses.
Y'all need to take a breath and realize that there are other authorized users of ham frequencies, some of whom don't need licenses to operate there, and some of whom you are required to accept interference from. Just because they show up on what you consider your private radio real-estate and don't have a ham license doesn't mean they're doing anything illegal, or anything that you can legally threaten violence against them for.
The difference is mainly in legal vs illegal. It's not illegal to hide yourself, but it IS illegal using the previous method. Broadcasting all over a licensed band ...
1. It's not "broadcasting", it's point-to-point data.
2. It's unlicensed for the devices that were being used.
HAMs self report, no FCC required. Hell, we'd grab the YAGIs and make a game out of finding the prick.
Yeah, go track down a legal secondary user of a band where you are a secondary user yourself and Part 97 (97.301 and 97.303(e)) tells you that you must accept interference from, and then what? Force them to stop their legal use of the frequencies you want to call your own?
The "previous method" is no different than the current one. You didn't bother to read any of the discussion about this in the earlier /. dust-up and conspiracy party, did you? It was pointed out by several people, myself included, that the ProxyHam hardware shown in the pictures they released were simple 900 MHz unlicensed data radios and cheap Yagi-Uda antennas. That's not illegal. They weren't shut down by some awful FCC or NSA conspiracy to stop some dangerous hacking activity, because it was both legal and the intended use for the commercial products they were using.
It does look like there's a shortage of modern read-only tech these days, optical disc appears to really be the only game in town and it comes with its own baggage.
It's a buck for a blank CD-ROM, or less. It has no more baggage than a USB stick. If you don't have a USB port on the system and are going to have to open the box to plug a USB header onto the MB, then plug a USB CD into it. It's YOUR verified CD reader so there's no issue with it having malware.
And if you say you can't trust the CD from the vendor to be malware free, then you need to explain why you would trust a USB PROM to be malware free from the vendor.
You don't have my private key to sign it with. When the signature doesn't match, you don't win. No password needed. No encryption needed.
That's part why I suggested formatting and then sending it back, if the method of couriering the media is secure then the originating party can inspect the flash (as formatting isn't terribly thorough)
And just what good to the customer is it if you inspect a formatted USB stick and find nothing on it? I suppose you did a full byte-level dump on it before sending it and are going to compare to see if any of the blocks outside the filesystem management ones are different. And if you find something, does that just mean that the system wrote a file to it, or is it a sign of infection? Do you call the customer in a panic, just to have him tell you "yeah, we copied the system log files onto it since we were there and had the space on the stick"?
but formatting it might stop the malware from actually executing on a random third-party's computer if something happens and the media is lost.
Why is that the vendor's problem?
I'm a bit disappointed in the lack of PROM options these days. It seems like it's making this more difficult than it used to be, especially with the demise of conventional serial and parallel.
What makes you think "conventional serial and parallel" can't be used to download malware? And PROM is cheap, but why would you think that PROM can't be used to install malware?
I think you're over-reading the question. Nobody said this was a nuclear weapons manufacturing system that needed top-secret security. It's just not online.
The only safe way is after the USB stick is used, is to destroy it.
If you can't trust your vendor to not send you malware on a USB stick, you don't put it into the airgapped system in the first place, and then you find a different vendor. So I guess "USB stick" as a way of getting data into an airgapped system is not acceptable. That would seem to apply to other methods of entering an update except, perhaps, getting a printed sheet of paper with source code on it. You first have your programming experts look through the source code, then they type it in and recompile.
Also, always assume that your airgapped network is infected.
Then you have to always assume that anything the vendor sends you with an update is infected and you can't do updates. "Encyption" gets you nothing, nor will signatures or checksums.
I think you have to figure out the level of security you're trying to achieve, and I don't see in the question being asked that there is any special security concern involved, only that the system to be updated is not online. There are any number of reasons for that besides "we're running mission critical top secret stuff on it."
In any case, a vendor requiring that the customer format and return the USB stick is ridiculous. USB sticks cost so little these days that managing such a system will eat up any cost savings very quickly, and if the customer doesn't want to format it then what business is it of the vendor? I commented on a VENDOR requirement, not what good practice for the customer might or might not be.
Ship encrypted files on flash with instructions for them to call when the media arrives. Provide phone support to walk them through the install process,
Why bother with encryption? Why not have an automated process where you just put the USB stick in the USB hole and reboot, and the system finds the update and installs it? If you're worried about authenticating the update, sign it.
where you provide the password to the files at that time.
Free clue: if you don't want the user to get the update, don't send him the files. Why bother with a password?
Once the patch is installed, walk them through formatting the flash media and mailing it back to you.
The price for a USB stick is so low these days that it will cost more to manage the mailing and return than the stick is worth. And why do they have to format the media? Just let them delete the file if they want to, and then use the stick.
I think the ideal would be a CO2-driven pellet which trailed the line...
Taser darts trail a wire behind them.
And you're taking it on faith that the pill was made correctly, when it often wasn't.
Citation required. "Often" is a bit of hyperbole. Maybe a lot of hyperbole. Manufacturers of pills have quality control systems that verify the output of their pill mills, and if they aren't right the entire batch is dumped. The mistakes take place much more often long after the pill is put in the bottle, by the guy taking the wrong bottle off the shelf. When that happens, what the pill looks like is the only verification the patient has.
Who checks the validity of a hospital's 3D pill printer?
With only 7 they certainly could have included a list of frequencies, or at least a range.
Page 7 of the paper that is the second link in the summary.
If you carry one in your pocket, make sure you either have no coins or other metal, or put good insulation around the board. I had one in my jacket pocket one time and wondered where the smoke smell was coming from.
If the pills were serialized
A SERIAL NUMBER on each pill?
and came accompanied by a printout of what was in them
"Here's your daily pill Mr. Poo and here are the MSDS sheets for what's in it and here's the certificate of authenticity."
then you'd have just as much assurance as you do now that the pills are what they say they are.
If I have a question about what a pill is, right now I can go to the PDR or any number of other references, or go online to find a picture of what it looks like. Once you start handing out 3D printed versions you have no visual clue that what you are holding is NOT the right thing. It won't take old Mr. Gower very long to send little George Bailey out with the wrong thing ...
or "This does not look like the medication I usually get, I don't trust this, I'm not taking this!"
On the other hand, the visible features of a pill are often the only way to differentiate between different doses or different medications. That's why the Physician's Desk Reference often has pictures of the pills.
It's a SAFETY feature. Your elderly patients are quite right to question the look of the medications they are being given. It is not unheard of for pharmacists or nurses to make mistakes and hand out the wrong pills. ANY patient is right to question.
This idea that you can trick people into taking the medicine by making it look just like something they are used to taking is absolutely pathetic. The fact that nobody will be able to tell the difference between a 5mg dose of something and a 50mg dose could kill someone. It will have nurses who distribute meds saying "it's in your medication cup, it must be for you and it must be the right thing". Or someone will put the wrong thing in the med dispenser cart because it looks the same ...
However, even though that can be very annoying I'm more worried about me being able to quick and clearly tell the difference in pills and dosage.....
It is right for you to worry, but if you screw up the worst that happens to you is you lose your job at that facility and you have to go work at another one. For the patient it can be deadly.
This is really no different than a compounding pharmacy. The claim that insurance has stopped paying for compounding should be a death knell for this idea, too. Why would they pay for a machine to dole out the specific amount of a bulk med when they won't pay for a machine to dole out the specific amount of a bulk med? That's right, compounding pharmacies were already using automation to create their products. What's the difference, again? "With a computer"? Feh.
the terrain is not going to change that much.
Hello, flatlander!