A parachute will be particularly useless when the pilot loses control at 100 feet above ground and is headed down at 100 fps. It will be more of a shroud over the body than an actual "save the pilot" device. Its main safety function will be to keep passers-by from tossing their lunch from seeing the mangled splat.
And cue the screams of the people who think they can just buy one, strap it on, and ascend to 1km... without a pilot's license. For yes, even more so than for drones, these will be classified as manned aircraft and there are already tons of federal regulations regarding operations of such.
Why on Earth aren't you allowed to test brute force attacks against your own account?
Because it isn't your computer and the people who own the computer say you aren't allowed to. Because, while THIS brute force attack may have -- we assume -- little effect on the servers being attacked, other brute force attacks may not be as benign. Because you may not be as good a programmer as you think you are and your "benign" brute force attack may turn out to be quite disruptive. But the main reason is given in the topic sentence of this paragraph.
The thing is, you can't find a brute force attack without testing it.
Of course you can. A four digit PIN is, well, there's only 10,000 possible entries, and you can run through those in a relatively short time.
And this one is so basic that it's mind boggling that even a clueless web designer let it slip though.
Huh? You don't think that United might want to allow their paying customers to be able to recover access to their account in some automated way so they can buy more services from United? This is a design decision, not a simple web-designer screw-up.
Yeah, they could disable an account and force the customer to call a phone number to get it re-enabled, like some websites do. Do you realize how expensive that would be for United to manage? An international company with customers in every time zone on the planet would have to add staff to handle the extra calls.
Oh, oh, they could put a captcha on it. That would stop automated attacks, but with only 10000 possible entries the average number to test would be 5000, and if someone can get a dozen friends to help out and they take a minute for each try that's only 7 hours to break in. Who wouldn't pay good money to have control of Barack Obama's United frequent flier account?
By the way, as a user of United's web system, I can tell you that they already do use captchas to prevent automated access. The captcha system they use is the remarkably unfriendly "select all the pictures that show X" system, and seeing the pictures on a 7" tablet is rather difficult at best. When they do it in a way that cannot be pinch-zoomed, it's stupid. And when they think that every sandwich is a "hamburger" (this morning's captcha) it's ridiculous.
but United's position is, frankly, kinda silly.
United's position is that they will accept reports of brute force attack methods but prohibit the actual testing of those methods on operational systems. That seems kinda reasonable. Their position is that they also don't pay out for a patently obvious brute-force "bug" that has certainly been reported more than once by more than one person. That also seems reasonable.
I hate Bennet Haselton as much as the next man, but you are actually wrong according to GP's quote from the rules.
He is actually right, according to GPs quote from the rules.
Do not attempt:... Brute-force attacks.
He attempted a brute-force attack. From the fine summary:
If the site doesn't limit your number of guesses, you can write a script that iterates through all 10,000 possibilities for the PIN until it finds the right one.
I wrote a script that did exactly that,..."
So our fine author admitted he did what the rules prohibited. The rules appear quite clear: they will accept reports of how a brute-force attack could be done but prohibit them from being attempted.
Also, do you not imagine that someone might have already reported this "bug" (which it isn't really, it is a deliberately programmed convenience for the UAL customers)? So why should Bennett walk in and get a prize for reporting an obvious and previously reported issue that is a design decision in the first place? Why should United waste their time replying to a douche who duplicated a previous report and admitted that he broke the rules by running a brute force attack against their website?
Whatever else BH is, his blogging is a waste of time and electrons.
Oh for Christ's sake. That's not what "brute" in "brute force attack" means. You are an idiot.
He isn't pushing the system to the limits while going through all the possible values, which is what happens in traditional brute force attacks.
Brute force attacks don't require pushing the system to its limits. Brute force attack means using a blunt object (all possible combinations) instead of a finer method (SQL injection, etc) to gain access.
The ban on that type of attack is to prevent the researchers to overload the servers.
No it isn't. The ban on getting credit for reporting that type of hack is because it isn't a hack. It is simply using all possible combinations of access credentials until access is granted. It isn't finding a bug.
If a server has an issue with 10k requests at night when nobody is using it over a few hours, then they have much bigger problems!
It is daytime somewhere on the planet all the time, United flies internationally, and there are good reasons why someone even in the US would use the United web system when it is their local nighttime. Your excuse that it was "at night when nobody is using it" is ridiculous. People use it all the time. The interwebs are international in scope, dude.
"At night" doesn't mean it wasn't brute force. Brute force, as another has already pointed out, means "trying all combinations", not "there's only 10,000".
And "brute force" is not a hack, it's script kiddy material. Do think I should get a million miles just for telling United that hey, I can attach every unattached itinerary to my frequent flier account by brute forcing the record identifier? It's only six characters, so 36 to the sixth power possible values. I can be a multiple-1K with a billion award miles in no time at all!
That sounds like a great system. If you want to fly your drone in controlled airspace, then you should have to have something like that on it.
Nonsense. You shouldn't be in a place where you endanger manned aircraft in the first place.
In the second place, that system depends on ATC providing traffic separation services to the manned aircraft, which they do not do for VFR flights.
Third, it depends on the pilot actually seeing the target to avoid it. Smokey air, turbulence, pilot busy flying and looking for the drop site, not a very good recipe for seeing a small drone before it hits you.
Fourth, it depends on the area having radar service. No radar service, transponders don't do anything. If you are low enough to get good video of the fire, you're probably under the radar coverage area.
And finally, the weight and cost of putting such a system on a DJI Phantom, for example, would make the drone unable to fly.
Last I checked, it was possible to make antennas directional,
Yeah, the directional antennas used for the transponders are those huge spinny things you often see near airports. Actually, the largest spinny thing is the primary radar which depends on the radio echo. The smaller spinny thing mounted on top is the transponder antenna, called secondary radar. Very large and very not portable. You won't have time or ability to set one up near a fire site, and if you did you'd have to worry about coverage. You have to have them in the clear so they can see far enough to be worth it.
It's not a feasible solution to this problem. It's a solution suggested only by people who hate drones to the extent they want to see them eliminated from the skies altogether.
you're being snarky because you're really clever
I'm telling you in a polite way what a ridiculous idea you have and that putting such a transponder on a drone will not keep them out of the way of manned aircraft and will not allow manned aircraft to avoid them. When you are a pilot on a firefighting aircraft you do NOT want to be distracted by trying to identify traffic that may collide with you. THAT IS WHY THEY PUT A TFR UP IN THE FIRST PLACE. It is a big KEEP OUT sign intended to make the operation safe enough to continue. Other aircraft in the area are a hazard for which the only mitigation is to stop flight operations until they leave.
A drone sitting over the firefighters or behind them is going to be completely out of the flight line.
Firefighting aircraft do not appear magically directly over a fire and then magically disappear after dumping their loads. They have to get from the landing area to the fire and then back again. As a drone operator, you have NO IDEA what the flight path of the firefighting aircraft will be since they have to consider weather and winds and desired destinations in their planning.
And it's not a "flight line" -- that's the place where the airplanes park.
Yes, there will be exceptions, but you can't make stupid illegal.
You can make "dangerous" illegal. And putting an aircraft into a no-fly zone just to take pictures is not just stupid, it is dangerous -- which is why they put temporary flight restrictions over active fires in the first place.
I'm not afraid of a giant forest fire, but I'm terrified of drones.
If you're the pilot of a firefighting aircraft, you understand and mitigate the risks of flying over fires, and through experience those risks and means of mitigation have become reasonably well known. You are not "afraid", you are appropriately cautious.
Drones, on the other hand, are not a well defined risk and can show up in front of you without any notice. Yes, if it means you might crash into an active fire area*, you are scared of drones.
* said areas are typically mountainous and have few readily available landing areas. "Controlled descent into terrain" is the best way to describe the result.
Manned aircraft have to carry transponders and broadcast their license code.
In SOME airspace SOME aircraft have to carry transponders that TRANSPOND to radar interrogation with the code assigned by ATC. It's not a broadcast, it's not a "license code", it's not associated with any specific aircraft until ATC assigns it.
a low-power transponder which can be used to ID them. It could work like active RFID, and only broadcast when ID is requested.
And this would remove the risk of collisions exactly how? "Oh my, there's a drone somewhere in the area. It's ID is... I guess I can fly right through it because it IDd itself..."
Since they have to charge a lower price to maximize profit while compensating for the tax,
The other examples I listed disprove the claim that companies have to lower prices to "maximize profit". The water rates did not go down here, for example, when taxes were added as line items. The cable bill has never gone down, and certainly not when more taxes were added as line items. My ISP, ditto. My phone bill, ditto. The last hotel room I stayed in gave me the price without taxes, and then added them on after I was standing in the lobby checking in.
And the last airline ticket I priced showed me the prices without tax, and then added the taxes at the end after I had chosen to buy the ticket.
In none of those cases did the companies involved lower their base prices to make up for the taxes -- which meant I was paying them in full.
That doesn't mean some companies don't do that, it's just becoming less common as taxes start to show up as specific charges instead of being lumped into the price.
By the way, since the taxes I'm talking about apply to all providers of a specific service (room taxes at a hotel, for example), those providers know that their competitors will be charging their customers more so they don't have to cut prices to compete. Gas taxes are a shining example of this -- they apply to all gas sales and not just to one company. A rising tide lifts all boats, to adapt a phrase.
And please RTFA & TFL - it's not public infrastructure,
The radio frequencies being used are license-free publicly-owned resources. WiFi doesn't work by magic, it takes bandwidth in the radio spectrum.
When you are streaming random numbers just to be using the bandwidth, you are interfering with other users. Even other users who are not using Google's access points.
Giving campaign promises the force of law is the dumbest idea I have heard all day.
I agree. Having courts step in to decide the appropriate level of response to a technological issue is even dumber. Either the defendant(s) are or are not following the contracts or laws. Making up a contract or law that the defendants should have to obey and filling in the blanks as to technical details is right out.
You still haven't heard it, jackass. The idea is to hold politicians responsible for their promises.
Now he's just heard it -- from you.
Personally, I think any politician who makes a promise they later can't keep should be immediately booted out,
And just what will authorize this politician to be "booted out"? Could that require, perhaps, a LAW? And thus his campaign promise is being enforced by force of law.
Liars should be held accountable. I'm not interested in paying these fucks to lie to me.
Everyone on/. who wants to see Obama booted out for not closing Gitmo please raise your hands.
Can you imagine the chaos that would ensue if every politician who made a promise that turned out to be impossible for him to keep, or was misinterpreted by the opposing political parties, was simply booted out? You'd spend more time in elections than you would with someone actually running things. The congress would empty overnight, state governments would stop doing anything because they lack a quorum, and even city councils would be hamstrung.
Wait a minute, that might not be a bad thing after all. Off with their heads, I say!
You get basic economics wrong.
A tax is never 100% passed to the consumer, unless the demand elasticity is null. In practice, some part of the tax is absorbed by the seller/producer, and in part by the consumer.
Every penny of gas taxes legislated by states and local municipalities is paid by the customer -- none of it is paid by the gas company.
I have half a dozen taxes on my phone and cable and electric and water bills that are paid for in full by me without a penny of it being paid by any of the companies involved.
There are about a dozen (guessing) taxes applied to every plane ticket sold in the US. Guess who pays those taxes in full?
I occasionally hear ads from stores who say "buy from us and we'll pay the sales taxes", but those are rare. Guess who pays the sales taxes in stores normally?
Some taxes don't get fully passed along, but it is increasingly common for more and more of them to become a line-item on the bill and the customer pays them.
"How can a circular roadway be smaller than a simple intersection?"
No turning lanes on the approaches.
Simple intersections don't have turn lanes. They have two roads that cross.
So in addition to the median in the center that a simple intersection doesn't have, a roundabout has physical dividing barriers in each of the approaching roadways, forcing those roads to be widened to allow space for them.
RTFM. Try looking at pictures of any US city 100 years ago.
You said most of the roads, not most of the roads 100 years ago. Today they're built for cars. I've see a lot of roads in European cities that haven't been rebuilt, but I see few urban roads in the US today that are still 100 years old. Certainly not enough of them to say that most of them are.
And they're not built with the idea that a policeman will pull you over and make you park there for three days. I don't know what manual you think I should read that would explain that one.
Roundabouts actually consume the same amount of land as an intersection of similar traffic,
They can't be the same size. Where do you get the space for the median in the middle? It has to come from somewhere.
they're also self regulating and dont require power.
I've yet to see a stop sign that needs power, and what is "self regulating"?
They're also more efficient and help the flow of traffic,
That depends on what they are replacing. I'd say that a main route that has to come to a stop because someone on a side street has entered the circular roadway is making things less efficient. Compare all the cars on the main route that don't have to do anything special and the few cars on the side street have to stop and wait for a few seconds, versus every car having to slow down and those on the main road being forced to stop so side street traffic can have immediate access.
But it seems that it requires a higher quality of driver than is typical of your area.
You don't know where my area is, so your insult is particularly stupid.
At a roundabout you look both ways as you would for any intersection,
At a roundabout you need to yield to traffic in the circular roadway. Since that roadway is going ONE DIRECTION, you need only look the direction the traffic is coming from to know if you need to yield or not. Traffic you see looking the other direction is going away from you and you don't need to yield to them.
not just for pedestrians but because people dont follow the rules.
Yes, people can go the wrong way around. It's pretty easy to detect that with a quick glance. If there's nobody in the circle, there's nobody going the wrong way.
Think of it this way, when you're turning right at a T junction, do you only look for traffic approaching from the left?
I don't care what the traffic coming from the right is going to do.
The lines are still irrelevant - I am free to go as soon as the pedestrian passes my car,
Not in my state. He must be out of the lane next to you. I.e., for a two lane road, you must stop and remain stopped if there is anyone in the crosswalk. I would guess that your state laws are similar.
You are making assumptions about laws and construction. The simple solution is to have part of the 'bulb' be the crosswalk.
Sorry, but I know the law. You assume that the sidewalk can be the crosswalk, and that isn't how the law is written.
Have the lines for the crosswalk start ON the bulb
The lines are irrelevant. We have crosswalks without lines -- in fact, many more of those than ones that are marked. The only benefit from lines is when a courteous pedestrian steps outside the lines and allows traffic to proceed before it could otherwise legally. (E.g., on a two lane road where there is no traffic he needs to worry about coming the other way, he can step out of the marked crosswalk as soon as he gets past your car and you can go.)
Fortunately, cities cannot just slap paint on something and change the laws of the state. That's what painting lines on the sidewalk to try making them into crosswalks would be doing. Imagine the confusion when someone from out of town comes visiting and knows state law.
All you'll do is make the "standing on the corner chatting with someone" problem worse. Yes, there are people who stand on the sidewalk taking to other people. If you make the sidewalk part of the crosswalk you will force traffic to stop for no reason at all, and eventually traffic will learn to not stop when there is a reason.
If people know there is an 80 percent chance they will be stopped, forced to park their car, and not able to use that car for three days (72 hours), or any other car, they will stop doing certain risky things.
I have no idea where you got this from. Who is forcing people to park their cars and not drive for three days? Is just visiting a store in an urban area and arriving by car supposed to be considered a crime sufficient to justify such nonsensical punishment? Do we not value the concept of "considered innocent until proven guilty" enough that we would force someone to park for three days just for being stopped for a traffic infraction?
Stop molly-coddling car drivers.
Allowing people free access to visit downtown businesses and do so from distant places is hardly "molly-coddling".
Most of the urban roads were built for bicycles and pedestrians originally.
Citation required. Most of the urban roads I've seen have been built for cars, and have the markings to prove it.
I am always surprised that American cities don't learn from the rest of the world and install round-abouts instead of intersections.
Because roundabouts consume a lot more land and are not that much safer for pedestrians. The drivers are busy looking for traffic going around the circle and not compelled by personal protection to look both ways like they are at intersections. I care what vehicles are coming from the left. The ones coming from the right have to stop for me.
Many European countries have been aggressively converting their intersections to traffic circles;
Where I live, traffic circles and roundabouts are two different things with two very different sets of rules.
and often the round-about needs the same or even less space than traditional intersections.
You must be talking about something other than the roundabouts that I know of in Europe. How can a circular roadway be smaller than a simple intersection? You can't put a median in the middle of an intersection and force the traffic to go around it without it being bigger than a simple cross.
But in the end the benefits are very obvious.
The benefits of a simple, cheap crossing intersection are also obvious. We're dropping half a million dollars in our area to replace a simple intersection because a few people don't like waiting at the stop signs on the intersection side streets. I see no obvious benefit to that waste.
The curb extension also provides better visibility. 'They can see cars coming but more importantly the cars can see them coming,' Stone said about the curb extensions. 'So it's a great way to improve pedestrian safety.'
They call these "bulbed intersections" where I live.
Here's the problem. By law (also where I live) vehicles are not required to stop for pedestrians unless they are in the crosswalk. Not standing on the corner looking helpless, not waving at cars going by to get their attention. Actually in the crosswalk.
A bulbed intersection forces pedestrians to be much close to active traffic before that traffic has to stop for them. Instead of putting a foot into the street that is still ten feet away from the moving traffic (the width of the parking lane), they will be putting that foot into, or very close to, the lane that has moving traffic. That cannot be a safer situation.
It will certainly create confusion for the hapless pedestrian who thinks that because the drivers can see him better they will be more likely to stop for him when he stands on the sidewalk. "Why aren't they stopping", he will ask, from his protected perch on the sidewalk where nobody is required to stop for him.
Since when do we not think about the longevity and potential disruption from service terminations for companies other than ISPs?
It is entirely possible, and rather likely I think, that gmail will see changes, even if in just the TOS, that people decide they do not like and thus have reason to leave.
And oh yes we should use wild unreasonable predictions of the future to guide our present actions!!! What a great idea!!! Maybe we should dig our graves now to avoid inconveniencing our heirs.
"Planning ahead" is something that mature adults tend to do. They tend to buy life insurance to deal with "wild unreasonable predictions" about the future and to care for their family. They put money in the bank to deal with the future.
And many of them do, indeed, purchase cemetery plots ahead of time so that the people who will do the digging (rarely the heirs, by the way) have someplace to do the digging and the heirs aren't burdened with finding someplace to plant Mom or Dad on short notice.
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I wouldn't use it without a parachute either.
A parachute will be particularly useless when the pilot loses control at 100 feet above ground and is headed down at 100 fps. It will be more of a shroud over the body than an actual "save the pilot" device. Its main safety function will be to keep passers-by from tossing their lunch from seeing the mangled splat.
And cue the screams of the people who think they can just buy one, strap it on, and ascend to 1km ... without a pilot's license. For yes, even more so than for drones, these will be classified as manned aircraft and there are already tons of federal regulations regarding operations of such.
Why on Earth aren't you allowed to test brute force attacks against your own account?
Because it isn't your computer and the people who own the computer say you aren't allowed to. Because, while THIS brute force attack may have -- we assume -- little effect on the servers being attacked, other brute force attacks may not be as benign. Because you may not be as good a programmer as you think you are and your "benign" brute force attack may turn out to be quite disruptive. But the main reason is given in the topic sentence of this paragraph.
The thing is, you can't find a brute force attack without testing it.
Of course you can. A four digit PIN is, well, there's only 10,000 possible entries, and you can run through those in a relatively short time.
And this one is so basic that it's mind boggling that even a clueless web designer let it slip though.
Huh? You don't think that United might want to allow their paying customers to be able to recover access to their account in some automated way so they can buy more services from United? This is a design decision, not a simple web-designer screw-up.
Yeah, they could disable an account and force the customer to call a phone number to get it re-enabled, like some websites do. Do you realize how expensive that would be for United to manage? An international company with customers in every time zone on the planet would have to add staff to handle the extra calls.
Oh, oh, they could put a captcha on it. That would stop automated attacks, but with only 10000 possible entries the average number to test would be 5000, and if someone can get a dozen friends to help out and they take a minute for each try that's only 7 hours to break in. Who wouldn't pay good money to have control of Barack Obama's United frequent flier account?
By the way, as a user of United's web system, I can tell you that they already do use captchas to prevent automated access. The captcha system they use is the remarkably unfriendly "select all the pictures that show X" system, and seeing the pictures on a 7" tablet is rather difficult at best. When they do it in a way that cannot be pinch-zoomed, it's stupid. And when they think that every sandwich is a "hamburger" (this morning's captcha) it's ridiculous.
but United's position is, frankly, kinda silly.
United's position is that they will accept reports of brute force attack methods but prohibit the actual testing of those methods on operational systems. That seems kinda reasonable. Their position is that they also don't pay out for a patently obvious brute-force "bug" that has certainly been reported more than once by more than one person. That also seems reasonable.
I hate Bennet Haselton as much as the next man, but you are actually wrong according to GP's quote from the rules.
He is actually right, according to GPs quote from the rules.
He attempted a brute-force attack. From the fine summary:
So our fine author admitted he did what the rules prohibited. The rules appear quite clear: they will accept reports of how a brute-force attack could be done but prohibit them from being attempted.
Also, do you not imagine that someone might have already reported this "bug" (which it isn't really, it is a deliberately programmed convenience for the UAL customers)? So why should Bennett walk in and get a prize for reporting an obvious and previously reported issue that is a design decision in the first place? Why should United waste their time replying to a douche who duplicated a previous report and admitted that he broke the rules by running a brute force attack against their website?
Whatever else BH is, his blogging is a waste of time and electrons.
There's no brutality in this attack,
Oh for Christ's sake. That's not what "brute" in "brute force attack" means. You are an idiot.
He isn't pushing the system to the limits while going through all the possible values, which is what happens in traditional brute force attacks.
Brute force attacks don't require pushing the system to its limits. Brute force attack means using a blunt object (all possible combinations) instead of a finer method (SQL injection, etc) to gain access.
The ban on that type of attack is to prevent the researchers to overload the servers.
No it isn't. The ban on getting credit for reporting that type of hack is because it isn't a hack. It is simply using all possible combinations of access credentials until access is granted. It isn't finding a bug.
If a server has an issue with 10k requests at night when nobody is using it over a few hours, then they have much bigger problems!
It is daytime somewhere on the planet all the time, United flies internationally, and there are good reasons why someone even in the US would use the United web system when it is their local nighttime. Your excuse that it was "at night when nobody is using it" is ridiculous. People use it all the time. The interwebs are international in scope, dude.
"At night" doesn't mean it wasn't brute force. Brute force, as another has already pointed out, means "trying all combinations", not "there's only 10,000".
And "brute force" is not a hack, it's script kiddy material. Do think I should get a million miles just for telling United that hey, I can attach every unattached itinerary to my frequent flier account by brute forcing the record identifier? It's only six characters, so 36 to the sixth power possible values. I can be a multiple-1K with a billion award miles in no time at all!
That sounds like a great system. If you want to fly your drone in controlled airspace, then you should have to have something like that on it.
Nonsense. You shouldn't be in a place where you endanger manned aircraft in the first place.
In the second place, that system depends on ATC providing traffic separation services to the manned aircraft, which they do not do for VFR flights.
Third, it depends on the pilot actually seeing the target to avoid it. Smokey air, turbulence, pilot busy flying and looking for the drop site, not a very good recipe for seeing a small drone before it hits you.
Fourth, it depends on the area having radar service. No radar service, transponders don't do anything. If you are low enough to get good video of the fire, you're probably under the radar coverage area.
And finally, the weight and cost of putting such a system on a DJI Phantom, for example, would make the drone unable to fly.
Last I checked, it was possible to make antennas directional,
Yeah, the directional antennas used for the transponders are those huge spinny things you often see near airports. Actually, the largest spinny thing is the primary radar which depends on the radio echo. The smaller spinny thing mounted on top is the transponder antenna, called secondary radar. Very large and very not portable. You won't have time or ability to set one up near a fire site, and if you did you'd have to worry about coverage. You have to have them in the clear so they can see far enough to be worth it.
It's not a feasible solution to this problem. It's a solution suggested only by people who hate drones to the extent they want to see them eliminated from the skies altogether.
you're being snarky because you're really clever
I'm telling you in a polite way what a ridiculous idea you have and that putting such a transponder on a drone will not keep them out of the way of manned aircraft and will not allow manned aircraft to avoid them. When you are a pilot on a firefighting aircraft you do NOT want to be distracted by trying to identify traffic that may collide with you. THAT IS WHY THEY PUT A TFR UP IN THE FIRST PLACE. It is a big KEEP OUT sign intended to make the operation safe enough to continue. Other aircraft in the area are a hazard for which the only mitigation is to stop flight operations until they leave.
A drone sitting over the firefighters or behind them is going to be completely out of the flight line.
Firefighting aircraft do not appear magically directly over a fire and then magically disappear after dumping their loads. They have to get from the landing area to the fire and then back again. As a drone operator, you have NO IDEA what the flight path of the firefighting aircraft will be since they have to consider weather and winds and desired destinations in their planning.
And it's not a "flight line" -- that's the place where the airplanes park.
Yes, there will be exceptions, but you can't make stupid illegal.
You can make "dangerous" illegal. And putting an aircraft into a no-fly zone just to take pictures is not just stupid, it is dangerous -- which is why they put temporary flight restrictions over active fires in the first place.
I'm not afraid of a giant forest fire, but I'm terrified of drones.
If you're the pilot of a firefighting aircraft, you understand and mitigate the risks of flying over fires, and through experience those risks and means of mitigation have become reasonably well known. You are not "afraid", you are appropriately cautious.
Drones, on the other hand, are not a well defined risk and can show up in front of you without any notice. Yes, if it means you might crash into an active fire area*, you are scared of drones.
* said areas are typically mountainous and have few readily available landing areas. "Controlled descent into terrain" is the best way to describe the result.
Manned aircraft have to carry transponders and broadcast their license code.
In SOME airspace SOME aircraft have to carry transponders that TRANSPOND to radar interrogation with the code assigned by ATC. It's not a broadcast, it's not a "license code", it's not associated with any specific aircraft until ATC assigns it.
a low-power transponder which can be used to ID them. It could work like active RFID, and only broadcast when ID is requested.
And this would remove the risk of collisions exactly how? "Oh my, there's a drone somewhere in the area. It's ID is ... I guess I can fly right through it because it IDd itself..."
Since they have to charge a lower price to maximize profit while compensating for the tax,
The other examples I listed disprove the claim that companies have to lower prices to "maximize profit". The water rates did not go down here, for example, when taxes were added as line items. The cable bill has never gone down, and certainly not when more taxes were added as line items. My ISP, ditto. My phone bill, ditto. The last hotel room I stayed in gave me the price without taxes, and then added them on after I was standing in the lobby checking in.
And the last airline ticket I priced showed me the prices without tax, and then added the taxes at the end after I had chosen to buy the ticket.
In none of those cases did the companies involved lower their base prices to make up for the taxes -- which meant I was paying them in full. That doesn't mean some companies don't do that, it's just becoming less common as taxes start to show up as specific charges instead of being lumped into the price.
By the way, since the taxes I'm talking about apply to all providers of a specific service (room taxes at a hotel, for example), those providers know that their competitors will be charging their customers more so they don't have to cut prices to compete. Gas taxes are a shining example of this -- they apply to all gas sales and not just to one company. A rising tide lifts all boats, to adapt a phrase.
And please RTFA & TFL - it's not public infrastructure,
The radio frequencies being used are license-free publicly-owned resources. WiFi doesn't work by magic, it takes bandwidth in the radio spectrum.
When you are streaming random numbers just to be using the bandwidth, you are interfering with other users. Even other users who are not using Google's access points.
Giving campaign promises the force of law is the dumbest idea I have heard all day.
I agree. Having courts step in to decide the appropriate level of response to a technological issue is even dumber. Either the defendant(s) are or are not following the contracts or laws. Making up a contract or law that the defendants should have to obey and filling in the blanks as to technical details is right out.
You still haven't heard it, jackass. The idea is to hold politicians responsible for their promises.
Now he's just heard it -- from you.
Personally, I think any politician who makes a promise they later can't keep should be immediately booted out,
And just what will authorize this politician to be "booted out"? Could that require, perhaps, a LAW? And thus his campaign promise is being enforced by force of law.
Liars should be held accountable. I'm not interested in paying these fucks to lie to me.
Everyone on /. who wants to see Obama booted out for not closing Gitmo please raise your hands.
Can you imagine the chaos that would ensue if every politician who made a promise that turned out to be impossible for him to keep, or was misinterpreted by the opposing political parties, was simply booted out? You'd spend more time in elections than you would with someone actually running things. The congress would empty overnight, state governments would stop doing anything because they lack a quorum, and even city councils would be hamstrung.
Wait a minute, that might not be a bad thing after all. Off with their heads, I say!
You get basic economics wrong. A tax is never 100% passed to the consumer, unless the demand elasticity is null. In practice, some part of the tax is absorbed by the seller/producer, and in part by the consumer.
Every penny of gas taxes legislated by states and local municipalities is paid by the customer -- none of it is paid by the gas company.
I have half a dozen taxes on my phone and cable and electric and water bills that are paid for in full by me without a penny of it being paid by any of the companies involved.
There are about a dozen (guessing) taxes applied to every plane ticket sold in the US. Guess who pays those taxes in full?
I occasionally hear ads from stores who say "buy from us and we'll pay the sales taxes", but those are rare. Guess who pays the sales taxes in stores normally?
Some taxes don't get fully passed along, but it is increasingly common for more and more of them to become a line-item on the bill and the customer pays them.
"How can a circular roadway be smaller than a simple intersection?"
No turning lanes on the approaches.
Simple intersections don't have turn lanes. They have two roads that cross.
So in addition to the median in the center that a simple intersection doesn't have, a roundabout has physical dividing barriers in each of the approaching roadways, forcing those roads to be widened to allow space for them.
RTFM. Try looking at pictures of any US city 100 years ago.
You said most of the roads, not most of the roads 100 years ago. Today they're built for cars. I've see a lot of roads in European cities that haven't been rebuilt, but I see few urban roads in the US today that are still 100 years old. Certainly not enough of them to say that most of them are.
And they're not built with the idea that a policeman will pull you over and make you park there for three days. I don't know what manual you think I should read that would explain that one.
Roundabouts actually consume the same amount of land as an intersection of similar traffic,
They can't be the same size. Where do you get the space for the median in the middle? It has to come from somewhere.
they're also self regulating and dont require power.
I've yet to see a stop sign that needs power, and what is "self regulating"?
They're also more efficient and help the flow of traffic,
That depends on what they are replacing. I'd say that a main route that has to come to a stop because someone on a side street has entered the circular roadway is making things less efficient. Compare all the cars on the main route that don't have to do anything special and the few cars on the side street have to stop and wait for a few seconds, versus every car having to slow down and those on the main road being forced to stop so side street traffic can have immediate access.
But it seems that it requires a higher quality of driver than is typical of your area.
You don't know where my area is, so your insult is particularly stupid.
At a roundabout you look both ways as you would for any intersection,
At a roundabout you need to yield to traffic in the circular roadway. Since that roadway is going ONE DIRECTION, you need only look the direction the traffic is coming from to know if you need to yield or not. Traffic you see looking the other direction is going away from you and you don't need to yield to them.
not just for pedestrians but because people dont follow the rules.
Yes, people can go the wrong way around. It's pretty easy to detect that with a quick glance. If there's nobody in the circle, there's nobody going the wrong way.
Think of it this way, when you're turning right at a T junction, do you only look for traffic approaching from the left?
I don't care what the traffic coming from the right is going to do.
The lines are still irrelevant - I am free to go as soon as the pedestrian passes my car,
Not in my state. He must be out of the lane next to you. I.e., for a two lane road, you must stop and remain stopped if there is anyone in the crosswalk. I would guess that your state laws are similar.
You are making assumptions about laws and construction. The simple solution is to have part of the 'bulb' be the crosswalk.
Sorry, but I know the law. You assume that the sidewalk can be the crosswalk, and that isn't how the law is written.
Have the lines for the crosswalk start ON the bulb
The lines are irrelevant. We have crosswalks without lines -- in fact, many more of those than ones that are marked. The only benefit from lines is when a courteous pedestrian steps outside the lines and allows traffic to proceed before it could otherwise legally. (E.g., on a two lane road where there is no traffic he needs to worry about coming the other way, he can step out of the marked crosswalk as soon as he gets past your car and you can go.)
Fortunately, cities cannot just slap paint on something and change the laws of the state. That's what painting lines on the sidewalk to try making them into crosswalks would be doing. Imagine the confusion when someone from out of town comes visiting and knows state law.
All you'll do is make the "standing on the corner chatting with someone" problem worse. Yes, there are people who stand on the sidewalk taking to other people. If you make the sidewalk part of the crosswalk you will force traffic to stop for no reason at all, and eventually traffic will learn to not stop when there is a reason.
If people know there is an 80 percent chance they will be stopped, forced to park their car, and not able to use that car for three days (72 hours), or any other car, they will stop doing certain risky things.
I have no idea where you got this from. Who is forcing people to park their cars and not drive for three days? Is just visiting a store in an urban area and arriving by car supposed to be considered a crime sufficient to justify such nonsensical punishment? Do we not value the concept of "considered innocent until proven guilty" enough that we would force someone to park for three days just for being stopped for a traffic infraction?
Stop molly-coddling car drivers.
Allowing people free access to visit downtown businesses and do so from distant places is hardly "molly-coddling".
Most of the urban roads were built for bicycles and pedestrians originally.
Citation required. Most of the urban roads I've seen have been built for cars, and have the markings to prove it.
We have a few, especially in New England, but we can't keep the European drivers from turning clockwise.
We had a traffic circle where we couldn't keep the locals from going clockwise. It's gone now. Good riddance.
I am always surprised that American cities don't learn from the rest of the world and install round-abouts instead of intersections.
Because roundabouts consume a lot more land and are not that much safer for pedestrians. The drivers are busy looking for traffic going around the circle and not compelled by personal protection to look both ways like they are at intersections. I care what vehicles are coming from the left. The ones coming from the right have to stop for me.
Many European countries have been aggressively converting their intersections to traffic circles;
Where I live, traffic circles and roundabouts are two different things with two very different sets of rules.
and often the round-about needs the same or even less space than traditional intersections.
You must be talking about something other than the roundabouts that I know of in Europe. How can a circular roadway be smaller than a simple intersection? You can't put a median in the middle of an intersection and force the traffic to go around it without it being bigger than a simple cross.
But in the end the benefits are very obvious.
The benefits of a simple, cheap crossing intersection are also obvious. We're dropping half a million dollars in our area to replace a simple intersection because a few people don't like waiting at the stop signs on the intersection side streets. I see no obvious benefit to that waste.
The curb extension also provides better visibility. 'They can see cars coming but more importantly the cars can see them coming,' Stone said about the curb extensions. 'So it's a great way to improve pedestrian safety.'
They call these "bulbed intersections" where I live.
Here's the problem. By law (also where I live) vehicles are not required to stop for pedestrians unless they are in the crosswalk. Not standing on the corner looking helpless, not waving at cars going by to get their attention. Actually in the crosswalk.
A bulbed intersection forces pedestrians to be much close to active traffic before that traffic has to stop for them. Instead of putting a foot into the street that is still ten feet away from the moving traffic (the width of the parking lane), they will be putting that foot into, or very close to, the lane that has moving traffic. That cannot be a safer situation.
It will certainly create confusion for the hapless pedestrian who thinks that because the drivers can see him better they will be more likely to stop for him when he stands on the sidewalk. "Why aren't they stopping", he will ask, from his protected perch on the sidewalk where nobody is required to stop for him.
Since when is google an ISP?
Since when do we not think about the longevity and potential disruption from service terminations for companies other than ISPs?
It is entirely possible, and rather likely I think, that gmail will see changes, even if in just the TOS, that people decide they do not like and thus have reason to leave.
And oh yes we should use wild unreasonable predictions of the future to guide our present actions!!! What a great idea!!! Maybe we should dig our graves now to avoid inconveniencing our heirs.
"Planning ahead" is something that mature adults tend to do. They tend to buy life insurance to deal with "wild unreasonable predictions" about the future and to care for their family. They put money in the bank to deal with the future.
And many of them do, indeed, purchase cemetery plots ahead of time so that the people who will do the digging (rarely the heirs, by the way) have someplace to do the digging and the heirs aren't burdened with finding someplace to plant Mom or Dad on short notice.