The problem with certification is not where they lurk, but where they are launched. Either you need somewhere with land to launch them, or you need an aircraft carrier, or you need to be able to launch them without a runway. The carrier is expensive. If the thing is a solar powered aircraft, vertical takeoff is unlikely to be feasible. So you're left with something land-based, which means either certification form the relevant authority (and lots of these just rubber-stamp FAA certs) or doing it clandestinely.
Er, yes, plus the cost of the thing carrying it - likely to be in the $10k to $100k region at a rough guess. Or haven't you noticed that the Raspberry PI doesn't, erm, fly?
Solar-powered drone with enough battery to last overnight - it's been done but it's not easy
Satellite modem for data comms
Thunking great sat dish on the back of it - not good for aerodynamics
GPS navigation with auto-navigation to keep it in the right place
Stabilised platform for the sat dish with something to auto point it at a satellite
Some very-low-power, very-low-weight server
I guess there are more compact antennas available, but they're likely to be both more expensive and more power-hungry than a dish.
Any sort of real server iron is going to cause both weight and power-consumption problems.
The main challenge is going to be to get enough solar panels fitted to the thing to both keep it flying and keep it talking.
Launching the thing is going to be a challenge - I'm pretty sure the FAA isn't going to approve it, so it either needs to be clandestine or off a boat. And since presumably TPB's finances don't run to aircraft carriers, that introduces challenges all it's own.
Server reliability is going to become a major issue. If you have no way of recovering the thing then you'll need to treat them as disposable - when one fails, crash it into something and replace it with another one. Unless your budget is large, you'd better hope that doesn't happen too often.
And, as others have commented, while removing yourself from every legal jurisdiction does mitigate your risk of having a search warrant issued, it only replaces it with the risk of being shot down. And it's getting to the stage where it's cheaper for a government to take military action than legal action, especially when they know no-one's going to shoot back.
11 comments down and finally someone has actually understood enough of the summary to know that they aren't claiming that conservation of energy is dead.
That's three attempts at misdirection to cover for this guy. Why the desperation?
When you say, "You would have to prove that he did so for one of those purposes," isn't pointing out that the harm is obvious on point?
As for issues of theft and property, you're wrong. Check Carpenter v. United States in the SCOTUS - access to confidential information is a property right. Why don't you actually check things before you SHOUT ABOUT THEM? Because capital letters make you more right.
Of course, if you want to discuss fraud, he's guilty as hell there, too, and has admitted as much.
It ain't quick. Running on chrome-latest on a SSD-ed quad core-i5, 1 second of simulating a 3-element RC network fed by a 1kHz triangular wave takes about 45 seconds.
But I guess that's what you get when you try doing numerical simulation in javascript.
I think I read. Why on earth did he do it if not to harm them? Perhaps he was trying to help them out? It is hard to argue that his purpose was not to damage their reputation, which constitutes harm in every jurisdiction I'm familiar with.
Sorry, how does "pretending to be someone else [a director of the Heartland Institute] and asking for information directly from Heartland" not add up to stealing to documents? Heartland didn't say he confessed to stealing "the original documents" just "electronic documents". I don't understand what's so hard about this.
What he did is a crime under California law:
a) Notwithstanding any other provision of law, any person who knowingly and without consent credibly impersonates another actual person through or on an Internet Web site or by other electronic means for purposes of harming, intimidating, threatening, or defrauding another person is guilty of a public offense punishable pursuant to subdivision (d).
Subsection b says that 'electronic means' includes registering a fake email address to obtain the documents, which he has admitted doing.
Subsection d sets a penalty of $1000 and/or a year in prison.
1. I don't think "social engineering" means what you think it does. Both sides flake out from facts into intense hysteria. That's different from lying about who you are to obtain documents you want - that's what we call social engineering.
2. As a journalist, he's supposed to verify stories, not make them up. The question, "Is this document genuine?" is not the same as, "Can I find another document that agrees with it in at least one point." Receiving a document of supposedly unknown provenance and then stealing other documents that back up all the mundane bits of it does not add up to proving its provenance or verifying any of its sensational claims. This is a long way below what we should expect of journalists, and a long way below the code of conduct they sign up to (in this country, at any rate).
3. Go read the California code on obtaining documents by fraud. On the face of his own admission, he is liable to $1000 fine and a year in prison on criminal prosecution. This is not an ethical failure but a criminal one. It doesn't take much spinning of the facts.
4. I think the failure was in committing a crime, and perhaps in not covering it up very well.
Overall, he is a fool. He has admitted a state felony.
Yes, right, the only possible ethical action is to forge a document to show just how evil these bastards are, because none of their actual documents look very evil.
Hmmm. Maybe, just maybe, their actual documents don't look very evil because they're not such evil bastards?
Hmmm, given the excerpt of the California code above, it seems rather more likely to be a criminal matter than a civil one. No discovery to be had there.
Sorry, did you actually read TFS? This article is about a climate scientist who used social engineering to steal privileged documents to try to back up a memo that he forged, sorry, "received anonymously" (they don't back it up on many of the headline points, BTW). Are you listening to yourself?
This study borders on sleight-of-hand to my mind. At least the way it is presented is misleading.
The headline says that 92% of freshwater use is in agriculture. What it doesn't mention is that the vast majority of that "use" of water is rain that happens to fall on farmland. We could increase that number by converting land use to arable land without changing any natural flow of water. For instance, the city of Adelaide is about the same area as the county of Cornwall and is built largely on prime agricultural land. Moving the city 100 miles North East onto unfarmable land and resuming agriculture there would noticeably increase the agricultural use of water - but it would actually be an environmentally good thing.
When it comes to diverting the natural course of water (extraction from rivers, building dams, draining lakes etc - what you might call exploiting the natural resource), the use of water in agriculture is much less - the majority here supplies water for urban residences and industry.
Yeah, only, like, wouldn't it be great if instead of having to build huge desalination plants and then pipe the water to where it's needed, there was some way that the water would, just, like, float up into the sky and then dump down on farmland?
I... Um, I think that was what he was saying. What matters is the objective measure of press freedom, and how you performed on that; the US might not have changed at all, just 20 other countries got a whole lot better in the year. Or, as you so perspicaciously point out, if you are in "a cluster of excellent freedom rated countries at the top," that is the objective measure of freedom is good, then it doesn't matter where exactly you sit and how you move within that group.
Still, we all do things we regret when we're drunk. Not an excuse my wife accepts, but maybe/. will be more forgiving.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. Last time I saw this sort of research, they'd made a 'stunning breakthrough'.... achieving 0.6% energy efficiency. Trees still do it better.
Way to read a comment before you respond...
The problem with certification is not where they lurk, but where they are launched. Either you need somewhere with land to launch them, or you need an aircraft carrier, or you need to be able to launch them without a runway. The carrier is expensive. If the thing is a solar powered aircraft, vertical takeoff is unlikely to be feasible. So you're left with something land-based, which means either certification form the relevant authority (and lots of these just rubber-stamp FAA certs) or doing it clandestinely.
See my point?
Er, yes, plus the cost of the thing carrying it - likely to be in the $10k to $100k region at a rough guess. Or haven't you noticed that the Raspberry PI doesn't, erm, fly?
I assume we're looking at:
I guess there are more compact antennas available, but they're likely to be both more expensive and more power-hungry than a dish.
Any sort of real server iron is going to cause both weight and power-consumption problems.
The main challenge is going to be to get enough solar panels fitted to the thing to both keep it flying and keep it talking.
Launching the thing is going to be a challenge - I'm pretty sure the FAA isn't going to approve it, so it either needs to be clandestine or off a boat. And since presumably TPB's finances don't run to aircraft carriers, that introduces challenges all it's own.
Server reliability is going to become a major issue. If you have no way of recovering the thing then you'll need to treat them as disposable - when one fails, crash it into something and replace it with another one. Unless your budget is large, you'd better hope that doesn't happen too often.
And, as others have commented, while removing yourself from every legal jurisdiction does mitigate your risk of having a search warrant issued, it only replaces it with the risk of being shot down. And it's getting to the stage where it's cheaper for a government to take military action than legal action, especially when they know no-one's going to shoot back.
11 comments down and finally someone has actually understood enough of the summary to know that they aren't claiming that conservation of energy is dead.
1, 2, 3, all together now:
SELLOUT!
That's three attempts at misdirection to cover for this guy. Why the desperation?
When you say, "You would have to prove that he did so for one of those purposes," isn't pointing out that the harm is obvious on point?
As for issues of theft and property, you're wrong. Check Carpenter v. United States in the SCOTUS - access to confidential information is a property right. Why don't you actually check things before you SHOUT ABOUT THEM? Because capital letters make you more right.
Of course, if you want to discuss fraud, he's guilty as hell there, too, and has admitted as much.
It ain't quick. Running on chrome-latest on a SSD-ed quad core-i5, 1 second of simulating a 3-element RC network fed by a 1kHz triangular wave takes about 45 seconds.
But I guess that's what you get when you try doing numerical simulation in javascript.
I think I read. Why on earth did he do it if not to harm them? Perhaps he was trying to help them out? It is hard to argue that his purpose was not to damage their reputation, which constitutes harm in every jurisdiction I'm familiar with.
Sorry, how does "pretending to be someone else [a director of the Heartland Institute] and asking for information directly from Heartland" not add up to stealing to documents? Heartland didn't say he confessed to stealing "the original documents" just "electronic documents". I don't understand what's so hard about this.
What he did is a crime under California law:
a) Notwithstanding any other provision of law, any person who knowingly and without consent credibly impersonates another actual person through or on an Internet Web site or by other electronic means for purposes of harming, intimidating, threatening, or defrauding another person is guilty of a public offense punishable pursuant to subdivision (d).
Subsection b says that 'electronic means' includes registering a fake email address to obtain the documents, which he has admitted doing.
Subsection d sets a penalty of $1000 and/or a year in prison.
1. I don't think "social engineering" means what you think it does. Both sides flake out from facts into intense hysteria. That's different from lying about who you are to obtain documents you want - that's what we call social engineering.
2. As a journalist, he's supposed to verify stories, not make them up. The question, "Is this document genuine?" is not the same as, "Can I find another document that agrees with it in at least one point." Receiving a document of supposedly unknown provenance and then stealing other documents that back up all the mundane bits of it does not add up to proving its provenance or verifying any of its sensational claims. This is a long way below what we should expect of journalists, and a long way below the code of conduct they sign up to (in this country, at any rate).
3. Go read the California code on obtaining documents by fraud. On the face of his own admission, he is liable to $1000 fine and a year in prison on criminal prosecution. This is not an ethical failure but a criminal one. It doesn't take much spinning of the facts.
4. I think the failure was in committing a crime, and perhaps in not covering it up very well.
Overall, he is a fool. He has admitted a state felony.
I've not met many people who think journalists should just make stories up and forge documents to 'prove' them, either.
Yes, right, the only possible ethical action is to forge a document to show just how evil these bastards are, because none of their actual documents look very evil.
Hmmm. Maybe, just maybe, their actual documents don't look very evil because they're not such evil bastards?
Hmmm, given the excerpt of the California code above, it seems rather more likely to be a criminal matter than a civil one. No discovery to be had there.
Current at '-1'. You deserved that, sorry.
Leak ~= good.
Lying about who you are to steal documents != good.
Sorry, did you actually read TFS? This article is about a climate scientist who used social engineering to steal privileged documents to try to back up a memo that he forged, sorry, "received anonymously" (they don't back it up on many of the headline points, BTW). Are you listening to yourself?
Jim Hansen, is that you?
This study borders on sleight-of-hand to my mind. At least the way it is presented is misleading.
The headline says that 92% of freshwater use is in agriculture. What it doesn't mention is that the vast majority of that "use" of water is rain that happens to fall on farmland. We could increase that number by converting land use to arable land without changing any natural flow of water. For instance, the city of Adelaide is about the same area as the county of Cornwall and is built largely on prime agricultural land. Moving the city 100 miles North East onto unfarmable land and resuming agriculture there would noticeably increase the agricultural use of water - but it would actually be an environmentally good thing.
When it comes to diverting the natural course of water (extraction from rivers, building dams, draining lakes etc - what you might call exploiting the natural resource), the use of water in agriculture is much less - the majority here supplies water for urban residences and industry.
Yeah, only, like, wouldn't it be great if instead of having to build huge desalination plants and then pipe the water to where it's needed, there was some way that the water would, just, like, float up into the sky and then dump down on farmland?
Wait...
Someone please, PLEASE mod this up. It so deserves better than 0.
Hang on... moon... space elevator... YES! Let's move the moon to a geostationary orbit and use it as the other anchor for a space elevator!
What could possibly go wrong?
I... Um, I think that was what he was saying. What matters is the objective measure of press freedom, and how you performed on that; the US might not have changed at all, just 20 other countries got a whole lot better in the year. Or, as you so perspicaciously point out, if you are in "a cluster of excellent freedom rated countries at the top," that is the objective measure of freedom is good, then it doesn't matter where exactly you sit and how you move within that group.
Still, we all do things we regret when we're drunk. Not an excuse my wife accepts, but maybe /. will be more forgiving.
Wow. Just wow. You've found a way to simultaneously make enemies of both sides of the vi/emacs holy war.
Or should we be modding this flamebait, in the truest sense?
I'll get around to writing to my senator right away. What? England isn't represented in the senate???
No Blackout Without Representation! Or... something...
Because English is only spoken in the USA, of course.