I wonder how much longer that'll fly with the local states.
Doesn't matter. This law overrides state laws that conflict with it, as authorized by the "supremacy clause" of the US Constitution.
(That's the one that is often misread to say that treaties have the force of constitutional amendments. In fact it says that the Constitution, federal laws passed under the authorization of the constitution, and treaties negotiated and ratified as authorized by the constitution, each override state law when they are in conflict.)
... over HERE, there is this independent body called The Electoral Commission, which is entirely non-partisan. There's also a non-partisan position called the Returning Officer who's responsible for overseeing the vote, one per constituency.
And you're claiming that these people don't have any preferences or agendas? I call BS. They're quite as partisan as anybody else. They're just hiding their affiliations from you - or the institution is doing it for them.
If you believe otherwise I have some nice ocean-front property in Nevada that might interest you.
So FTL transfer of information in a way useful for communication - even if not time-reversed in a single hop - is incompatible with Special Relativity. You have to give up one or the other.
In fact this is the whole POINT of the "light cone" analysis and the claim that cause-and-effect can't leave the light cone (i.e. information can't travel faster than c). Anything else requires a preferred frame of reference to avoid future-to-past communication.
... if there really is FTL communication, then *that* is really the "causality cone", and no matter how things may appear in the light cone, causality is not really violated.
I see what you're saying.
The problem is that if you can have FTL communication actually carrying a message, AND special relativity isn't violated (i.e. any inertial frame of reference is as good as any other), you can use two or more inertial frames to construct a multi-hop FTL message that DOES transfer information backward in some light cone. There's no question that information can be transferred FORWARD within a light-cone. So you can construct a causality loop. Stick an inverter in it and you have a paradox.
So FTL transfer of information in a way useful for communication - even if not time-reversed in a single hop - is incompatible with Special Relativity. You have to give up one or the other.
You shouldn't have partisans in charge of elections, you should have neutrals there.
Where do you find a "neutral"? What agenda does your "neutral" have?
"Non-partisans" aren't people without affiliations, goals, and agendas. They're people who are hiding this baggage.
I prefer to know WHAT agendas these people have.
You know, people that care about your constitution and the proper running of the state, not people whose career depends on the outcome!
Impossible as it may sound, some partisans actually care more for their country's constitution and/or their own integrity than they do for their sides' immediate victories and losses. They would actually prefer for their side to lose with the rules followed than to win by cheating.
The fact that you can't believe such people exist says more about your own integrity than that of the office holders.
= = = =
Which is not to say that you should TRUST them. How do you KNOW that you have one of these guys and not some cheater? Especially when there's so much to be gained by cheating, and cheating gets the cheater into a position to cheat more.
That's what transparency and citizen oversight are about. It's a lot easier, even for the amoral, to be honest when they know that dishonesty will get caught. B-)
Can you show me where I said anything about causality violation? Or even pointed to information from an event further down a light cone affecting an event in is own history.
Information going backward in time within a light cone is going backward in ALL frames of reference, not just some. Perhaps my phrasing made it appear that I was referring to that - and then the information causing an effect on an event in its own history that is also measurable in it own history - in which case I apologize.
Note that if you accept my characterization of the information traveling backward along the entangled particle's space-time trajectory, then forward along that of the partner particle, as a hidden variable, it implies that measuring the hidden variable within the light cone of the first particle's history violates causality, but causality is preserved if the measurement takes place at sufficient space-time separation that the light cones of one measurement doesn't include the other measurement.
Causality is preserved ONLY by hidden variables that remain hidden well enough to emulate "spooky action at a distance". B-)
The sad truth is that partisans are involved in just about every aspect of the voting and elections process, and that's not going to change, ever.
That's because partisans are SUPPOSED to be in charge. They are chosen by the people, in partisan elections. It is the very partisanship that gives the people a choice, along with the understanding to exercise it rationally.
When you hear the term "bi-partisan" you're hearing powermongers on both sides conspiring to deprive the electorate of a choice.
When you hear the term "non-partisan" you're hearing powermongers depriving the electorate of information about candidates' political affiliations.
Huw Price has an interesting theory that all we need to do is give up the unidirectional nature of time. That is, causes can go forwards and backwards, at the micro level anyway.
The other way to "patch" Q.M. is to allow faster-than-light travel of information (breaking "locality"). You can show, using only special relativity, that in some frames of reference this is equivalent to sending information backward in time. So letting information travel back in time along the particle's space-time path is a special case of breaking locality. (It's also a case of adding a "hidden variable" to the particle's state - the backward-flowing information.)
As I read it they're not saying anything about the universe not existing when nobody's looking.
Quantum mechanics has a set of descriptions of matter/energy that "feel" incomplete.
To "classical physics" thinking the collapse of wave functions of entangled particles seems to require either some faster-than-light communication between the entangled particles (to tell the far one about how the near one was observed - violation of "locality") or some hidden variable (to carry information slower-than-light from the point in space-time where they became entangled to the point where each is observed - "realism" would include this hidden variable as part of the particles' state). Quantum mechanics doesn't describe either. It just describes a situation where this sort of thing just happens - in a way that you can't use it to carry information faster than light from one spacetime location to another.
Lots of work is being done to see if quantum mechanics can be "patched" into a more classical theory, in a way that preserves realism and locality by figuring out some way that a hidden variable can carry, from the entanglement to the observation at no more than lightspeed, the information necessary for a classical mechanism to produce the same result.
This work shows that some simple experiments have already eliminated a very broad class of such hidden variable theories - to the point that "realism" patches involving hidden variables carrying additional information with the particles looks pretty hopeless. This is another step toward the "quantum mechanics really is all there is to it" viewpoint.
(Of course I Am Not A Physicist so I could be reading it wrong.)
I still think Einstein's most accurate statement is that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that its comprehensible at all. There is no "reason" it should be or will continue to be.
I view that as the primary form of a reverse-anthropic principle:
The universe is comprehensible because the mechanisms of comprehension evolved within it by conferring an advantage to those organisms that have them. This only occurs for those aspects of comprehension which operate correctly within the universe.
So comprehension evolves only for those aspects of the universe that ARE comprehensible enough to make useful predictions. If there are no comprehensible aspects to the universe, comprehension doesn't evolve.
Isn't there always going to be some company with more access than anybody else?
Except when two or more are tied for first place. B-)
= = = =
Their spokesperson was innumerate, which makes his lead argument ludicrous to anybody with even a slight understanding of math.
He was also very unclear on his major point:
- Google now has access to info on user searches, along with SOME of the link-follows from their search results (those where they hotwired it to go to their servers and forward to the target along with those that use their cache).
- Doubleclick has access to info on page views where they have ads - info that Google, in the main, doesn't have.
By buying Doubleclick, Google potentially has much MORE information about users' online behavior. It isn't quite as good as having a tap on the users' internet connection. But far less of their browsing will be missed.
There "Don't be evil" motto has never been a higher priority than "Making money," which I am sure the stockholders are very appreciative of.
As a commercial corporation they are legally mandated to put making money for their stockholders at the top of their priority list.
It's the job of corporations to make money. It's the job of governments to adjust the rules of the money-making game so that doing good and not causing harm makes MORE money than doing bad and causing harm.
I'm not an expert on Van Eck phreaking, so it's possible that the previously used methods were incapable of detecting this for whatever reason...
Previous methods could intercept the signal. Processing it back into an image was the problem.
CRTs essentially modulate the beam current with the basic video signal. Leakage of that puts into the air precicely what you need to produce a copy of the image part (though the current is cut off for retrace). Also pick up and sort out the spikes from the H and V deflection, or interpolate the image sync from the dark areas in the video, and you can reconstruct the sync signals and have a fully-functional video signal, ready to put into another CRT. (Use a directional antenna so you don't jam your own receiver by looking at the result.)
The signal to the laptop's LCD display also leaks. But the leaked signal isn't such a straightforward copy of an analog video signal, ready to be fed to a monitor. Much more processing.
But then, it is pretty obvious that using the notebook ungrounded IS asking for trouble anyway as far as signal interference goes, and those hinges are earth-grounded if you have the notebook plugged to wall power using a three-prong power supply.
Grounding and shielding are two different issues.
At the frequencies involved, grounding the device is no help at all. (In fact the ground wiring may act as a helper antenna.)
I'd expect acoustic gunfire detection/location systems to be part of the original package on similar platforms deployed by US law enforcement, rather than upgrades.
Ground-based acoustic gunfire locators (with multiple widely-spread sensors running software similar to earthquake-analysis to identify the source location) have been a disaster.
They were installed in Menlo Park, near East Palo Alto. They did a great job of spotting the location of a gunshot. Or any other impulse noise. Police response to holiday firing of guns into the air resulted in a number of gun confiscations and a great reduction of the (largely Chicano) tradition.
But they're more of an aid to the crooks than they are to the cops. After they'd been in use for a bit the cops noticed that they'd "hear" a gunfight on one side of town, scramble the available units to the area, and find nothing. Meanwhile, while the cops were all on that side of town, there'd be a rash of criminal activity on the other side. Oops! The crooks had figured out that you could clear an area of cops by faking gunshots elsewhere.
Of course this is not the sort of thing one emphasizes in one's sales literature. So it hasn't stopped other cities from springing for systems. (For instance: Oakland just installed one, to the tune of $350,000.)
Acoustic gunfire location systems also require considerable separation between the sensors. So it's not the sort of thing you install on ONE airship. If you've already got one on the ground, the airship can carry an extra microphone or two to aid in triangulation. But for airborne-only you'd need at least three craft to do the job.
But shots AT the craft are necessarily in view. An infrared bullet-backtrack system could pinpoint the shooter AND identify that he had actually taken a shot AT the craft.
It's because the US has the bulk of the helium wells (and Russia virtually all of the remainder) and has treated helium gas as a strategic material since the use of barage balloons in WWI (and the potential for use of Zepplins as weapons platforms in WWII).
As a result potential developers of lighter-than-air craft can't plan on a reliable source of helium.
Hydrogen-bouyed craft took a PR hit when Hindenberg burned, while hot-air craft are too energy intensive for fuel efficiency. And that's about it for the field, since pretty much anything else has insufficient lift for practicality.
I think I just coined this one: To heisenberg: To change a process' outcome by observing the process. By analogy with the original derivation of Heisenberg's uncertanty principle but applied at a macroscopic, rather than quantum-mechanical, level.
(Related to "heisenbug", where adding instrumentation to diagnose a bug changes timing or some other aspect of program behavior such that the bug stops manefesting - until you pull your insturmentation out at which point it comes back.)
Anyway, like almost everything that this government does, it's pretty sure that this will be used more for political/social control than crime prevention.
Huh?
Don't you understand that resisting a totalitarian regime is a crime?
After all, they're the government and they pass the laws. Many of these laws were to make it illegal to resist them, right? So political/social control IS law enforcement.
(I hear the fearless leader believes strongly in a one man, one vote system. He's the man, and he has the vote.)
It also helps to avoid the wake turbulence of the preceding aircraft.
An airplane generates a pair of trailing vortices from the wing tips as an unavoidable consequence of producing lift. These are like a stretched out smoke ring - through the wings, back through the air on both sides, to where the wings were when it took off - although they don't stay in place forever.
The vortices expand and move slowly downward, until they are dissipated on the ground below the flight path - providing a slight overpressure that transfers the weight of the passing aircraft to the ground under its flight path.
Meanwhile the concentrated spinning tubes of air are a real problem for any following plane until they've had a chance to spread out and sink.
Shooting down an airship is tough. You can punch several big holes in it and it will still take it a while to even notice.
Meanwhile, if remote-sensing platforms start getting shot down they'll quickly be upgraded with trace-the-projectile-back sensors to let the cops go after the shooters.
Fan of the Second Amendment that I am, I doubt that it would turn any city's copseye-in-the-sky airship program into a shooting gallery. (If it would, it already would have done so for cop helicopters or big brother "traffic" cams. Helicopters are EASY, and fixed cameras are sitting ducks.)
But I could be surprised. I used to think that un-suppressing private citizen concealed-weapon carry would reduce crime but only after a short bloodbath while the crooks learned that victims were now sometimes armed. Turns out crooks are smart enough to figure that out right away, so you get a precipitous crime drop without a bloody "learning period".
... how long do you think until we see similar measures in high-crime American cities?
Never.... Because ours actually ARE black helicopters.
Naw. As soon as a major city has a big enough RICO siezure to buy 'em.
Helicopters cost a LOT to operate. They spend over an hour in the shop for every hour in the air. They MUST be maintained because there are a LOT of moving parts that are single points of failure - most involving a crash if they fail.
Airships can be very redundant and even if they crash they tend to do so gently (unless you paint them with thermite and fill them with hydrogen).
It's easy for police departments to buy big ticket items with RICO money. But their ongoing upkeep has to keep paying off, so it helps to keep that low.
Helicopters are good for point work - like assisting chases or patrolling highways during rush hour. But for ongoing surveillance they're expensive. And noisy, which tends to heisenberg ongoing crime out of their view.
I seem to recall that the main "cause" for firing some of the attorneys was failure to prosecute things the Bush administration wanted prosecuted.
Won't you feel silly if it turns out this was the sort of thing they wanted prosecuted and couldn't get to happen until they started firing prosecutors?
Slashdot Mirror
Just out of curiosity, has anybody done a breakdown by party?
I wonder how much longer that'll fly with the local states.
Doesn't matter. This law overrides state laws that conflict with it, as authorized by the "supremacy clause" of the US Constitution.
(That's the one that is often misread to say that treaties have the force of constitutional amendments. In fact it says that the Constitution, federal laws passed under the authorization of the constitution, and treaties negotiated and ratified as authorized by the constitution, each override state law when they are in conflict.)
... over HERE, there is this independent body called The Electoral Commission, which is entirely non-partisan. There's also a non-partisan position called the Returning Officer who's responsible for overseeing the vote, one per constituency.
And you're claiming that these people don't have any preferences or agendas? I call BS. They're quite as partisan as anybody else. They're just hiding their affiliations from you - or the institution is doing it for them.
If you believe otherwise I have some nice ocean-front property in Nevada that might interest you.
I didn't exclude the middle.
Are you claiming that "independents" have no agendas?
So FTL transfer of information in a way useful for communication - even if not time-reversed in a single hop - is incompatible with Special Relativity. You have to give up one or the other.
In fact this is the whole POINT of the "light cone" analysis and the claim that cause-and-effect can't leave the light cone (i.e. information can't travel faster than c). Anything else requires a preferred frame of reference to avoid future-to-past communication.
... if there really is FTL communication, then *that* is really the "causality cone", and no matter how things may appear in the light cone, causality is not really violated.
I see what you're saying.
The problem is that if you can have FTL communication actually carrying a message, AND special relativity isn't violated (i.e. any inertial frame of reference is as good as any other), you can use two or more inertial frames to construct a multi-hop FTL message that DOES transfer information backward in some light cone. There's no question that information can be transferred FORWARD within a light-cone. So you can construct a causality loop. Stick an inverter in it and you have a paradox.
So FTL transfer of information in a way useful for communication - even if not time-reversed in a single hop - is incompatible with Special Relativity. You have to give up one or the other.
You shouldn't have partisans in charge of elections, you should have neutrals there.
Where do you find a "neutral"? What agenda does your "neutral" have?
"Non-partisans" aren't people without affiliations, goals, and agendas. They're people who are hiding this baggage.
I prefer to know WHAT agendas these people have.
You know, people that care about your constitution and the proper running of the state, not people whose career depends on the outcome!
Impossible as it may sound, some partisans actually care more for their country's constitution and/or their own integrity than they do for their sides' immediate victories and losses. They would actually prefer for their side to lose with the rules followed than to win by cheating.
The fact that you can't believe such people exist says more about your own integrity than that of the office holders.
= = = =
Which is not to say that you should TRUST them. How do you KNOW that you have one of these guys and not some cheater? Especially when there's so much to be gained by cheating, and cheating gets the cheater into a position to cheat more.
That's what transparency and citizen oversight are about. It's a lot easier, even for the amoral, to be honest when they know that dishonesty will get caught. B-)
Can you show me where I said anything about causality violation? Or even pointed to information from an event further down a light cone affecting an event in is own history.
Information going backward in time within a light cone is going backward in ALL frames of reference, not just some. Perhaps my phrasing made it appear that I was referring to that - and then the information causing an effect on an event in its own history that is also measurable in it own history - in which case I apologize.
Note that if you accept my characterization of the information traveling backward along the entangled particle's space-time trajectory, then forward along that of the partner particle, as a hidden variable, it implies that measuring the hidden variable within the light cone of the first particle's history violates causality, but causality is preserved if the measurement takes place at sufficient space-time separation that the light cones of one measurement doesn't include the other measurement.
Causality is preserved ONLY by hidden variables that remain hidden well enough to emulate "spooky action at a distance". B-)
The sad truth is that partisans are involved in just about every aspect of the voting and elections process, and that's not going to change, ever.
That's because partisans are SUPPOSED to be in charge. They are chosen by the people, in partisan elections. It is the very partisanship that gives the people a choice, along with the understanding to exercise it rationally.
When you hear the term "bi-partisan" you're hearing powermongers on both sides conspiring to deprive the electorate of a choice.
When you hear the term "non-partisan" you're hearing powermongers depriving the electorate of information about candidates' political affiliations.
Huw Price has an interesting theory that all we need to do is give up the unidirectional nature of time. That is, causes can go forwards and backwards, at the micro level anyway.
The other way to "patch" Q.M. is to allow faster-than-light travel of information (breaking "locality"). You can show, using only special relativity, that in some frames of reference this is equivalent to sending information backward in time. So letting information travel back in time along the particle's space-time path is a special case of breaking locality. (It's also a case of adding a "hidden variable" to the particle's state - the backward-flowing information.)
As I read it they're not saying anything about the universe not existing when nobody's looking.
Quantum mechanics has a set of descriptions of matter/energy that "feel" incomplete.
To "classical physics" thinking the collapse of wave functions of entangled particles seems to require either some faster-than-light communication between the entangled particles (to tell the far one about how the near one was observed - violation of "locality") or some hidden variable (to carry information slower-than-light from the point in space-time where they became entangled to the point where each is observed - "realism" would include this hidden variable as part of the particles' state). Quantum mechanics doesn't describe either. It just describes a situation where this sort of thing just happens - in a way that you can't use it to carry information faster than light from one spacetime location to another.
Lots of work is being done to see if quantum mechanics can be "patched" into a more classical theory, in a way that preserves realism and locality by figuring out some way that a hidden variable can carry, from the entanglement to the observation at no more than lightspeed, the information necessary for a classical mechanism to produce the same result.
This work shows that some simple experiments have already eliminated a very broad class of such hidden variable theories - to the point that "realism" patches involving hidden variables carrying additional information with the particles looks pretty hopeless. This is another step toward the "quantum mechanics really is all there is to it" viewpoint.
(Of course I Am Not A Physicist so I could be reading it wrong.)
I still think Einstein's most accurate statement is that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that its comprehensible at all. There is no "reason" it should be or will continue to be.
I view that as the primary form of a reverse-anthropic principle:
The universe is comprehensible because the mechanisms of comprehension evolved within it by conferring an advantage to those organisms that have them. This only occurs for those aspects of comprehension which operate correctly within the universe.
So comprehension evolves only for those aspects of the universe that ARE comprehensible enough to make useful predictions. If there are no comprehensible aspects to the universe, comprehension doesn't evolve.
Isn't there always going to be some company with more access than anybody else?
Except when two or more are tied for first place. B-)
= = = =
Their spokesperson was innumerate, which makes his lead argument ludicrous to anybody with even a slight understanding of math.
He was also very unclear on his major point:
- Google now has access to info on user searches, along with SOME of the link-follows from their search results (those where they hotwired it to go to their servers and forward to the target along with those that use their cache).
- Doubleclick has access to info on page views where they have ads - info that Google, in the main, doesn't have.
By buying Doubleclick, Google potentially has much MORE information about users' online behavior. It isn't quite as good as having a tap on the users' internet connection. But far less of their browsing will be missed.
There "Don't be evil" motto has never been a higher priority than "Making money," which I am sure the stockholders are very appreciative of.
As a commercial corporation they are legally mandated to put making money for their stockholders at the top of their priority list.
It's the job of corporations to make money. It's the job of governments to adjust the rules of the money-making game so that doing good and not causing harm makes MORE money than doing bad and causing harm.
No, they don't require that much maintenance.
Glad to hear I was misinformed.
The operating costs are much greater, however.
Also glad to hear that my original point still holds, despite the derivation being a tad off. B-)
I'm not an expert on Van Eck phreaking, so it's possible that the previously used methods were incapable of detecting this for whatever reason...
Previous methods could intercept the signal. Processing it back into an image was the problem.
CRTs essentially modulate the beam current with the basic video signal. Leakage of that puts into the air precicely what you need to produce a copy of the image part (though the current is cut off for retrace). Also pick up and sort out the spikes from the H and V deflection, or interpolate the image sync from the dark areas in the video, and you can reconstruct the sync signals and have a fully-functional video signal, ready to put into another CRT. (Use a directional antenna so you don't jam your own receiver by looking at the result.)
The signal to the laptop's LCD display also leaks. But the leaked signal isn't such a straightforward copy of an analog video signal, ready to be fed to a monitor. Much more processing.
Which they've now managed to do.
But then, it is pretty obvious that using the notebook ungrounded IS asking for trouble anyway as far as signal interference goes, and those hinges are earth-grounded if you have the notebook plugged to wall power using a three-prong power supply.
Grounding and shielding are two different issues.
At the frequencies involved, grounding the device is no help at all. (In fact the ground wiring may act as a helper antenna.)
I'd expect acoustic gunfire detection/location systems to be part of the original package on similar platforms deployed by US law enforcement, rather than upgrades.
Ground-based acoustic gunfire locators (with multiple widely-spread sensors running software similar to earthquake-analysis to identify the source location) have been a disaster.
They were installed in Menlo Park, near East Palo Alto. They did a great job of spotting the location of a gunshot. Or any other impulse noise. Police response to holiday firing of guns into the air resulted in a number of gun confiscations and a great reduction of the (largely Chicano) tradition.
But they're more of an aid to the crooks than they are to the cops. After they'd been in use for a bit the cops noticed that they'd "hear" a gunfight on one side of town, scramble the available units to the area, and find nothing. Meanwhile, while the cops were all on that side of town, there'd be a rash of criminal activity on the other side. Oops! The crooks had figured out that you could clear an area of cops by faking gunshots elsewhere.
Of course this is not the sort of thing one emphasizes in one's sales literature. So it hasn't stopped other cities from springing for systems. (For instance: Oakland just installed one, to the tune of $350,000.)
Acoustic gunfire location systems also require considerable separation between the sensors. So it's not the sort of thing you install on ONE airship. If you've already got one on the ground, the airship can carry an extra microphone or two to aid in triangulation. But for airborne-only you'd need at least three craft to do the job.
But shots AT the craft are necessarily in view. An infrared bullet-backtrack system could pinpoint the shooter AND identify that he had actually taken a shot AT the craft.
It's because the US has the bulk of the helium wells (and Russia virtually all of the remainder) and has treated helium gas as a strategic material since the use of barage balloons in WWI (and the potential for use of Zepplins as weapons platforms in WWII).
As a result potential developers of lighter-than-air craft can't plan on a reliable source of helium.
Hydrogen-bouyed craft took a PR hit when Hindenberg burned, while hot-air craft are too energy intensive for fuel efficiency. And that's about it for the field, since pretty much anything else has insufficient lift for practicality.
Wow! Did you just use 'heisenberg' as a verb?
Yep: Hacker slang: "Any noun can be verbed."
I think I just coined this one: To heisenberg: To change a process' outcome by observing the process. By analogy with the original derivation of Heisenberg's uncertanty principle but applied at a macroscopic, rather than quantum-mechanical, level.
(Related to "heisenbug", where adding instrumentation to diagnose a bug changes timing or some other aspect of program behavior such that the bug stops manefesting - until you pull your insturmentation out at which point it comes back.)
Anyway, like almost everything that this government does, it's pretty sure that this will be used more for political/social control than crime prevention.
Huh?
Don't you understand that resisting a totalitarian regime is a crime?
After all, they're the government and they pass the laws. Many of these laws were to make it illegal to resist them, right? So political/social control IS law enforcement.
(I hear the fearless leader believes strongly in a one man, one vote system. He's the man, and he has the vote.)
It also helps to avoid the wake turbulence of the preceding aircraft.
An airplane generates a pair of trailing vortices from the wing tips as an unavoidable consequence of producing lift. These are like a stretched out smoke ring - through the wings, back through the air on both sides, to where the wings were when it took off - although they don't stay in place forever.
The vortices expand and move slowly downward, until they are dissipated on the ground below the flight path - providing a slight overpressure that transfers the weight of the passing aircraft to the ground under its flight path.
Meanwhile the concentrated spinning tubes of air are a real problem for any following plane until they've had a chance to spread out and sink.
Shooting down an airship is tough. You can punch several big holes in it and it will still take it a while to even notice.
Meanwhile, if remote-sensing platforms start getting shot down they'll quickly be upgraded with trace-the-projectile-back sensors to let the cops go after the shooters.
Fan of the Second Amendment that I am, I doubt that it would turn any city's copseye-in-the-sky airship program into a shooting gallery. (If it would, it already would have done so for cop helicopters or big brother "traffic" cams. Helicopters are EASY, and fixed cameras are sitting ducks.)
But I could be surprised. I used to think that un-suppressing private citizen concealed-weapon carry would reduce crime but only after a short bloodbath while the crooks learned that victims were now sometimes armed. Turns out crooks are smart enough to figure that out right away, so you get a precipitous crime drop without a bloody "learning period".
Never.
Naw. As soon as a major city has a big enough RICO siezure to buy 'em.
Helicopters cost a LOT to operate. They spend over an hour in the shop for every hour in the air. They MUST be maintained because there are a LOT of moving parts that are single points of failure - most involving a crash if they fail.
Airships can be very redundant and even if they crash they tend to do so gently (unless you paint them with thermite and fill them with hydrogen).
It's easy for police departments to buy big ticket items with RICO money. But their ongoing upkeep has to keep paying off, so it helps to keep that low.
Helicopters are good for point work - like assisting chases or patrolling highways during rush hour. But for ongoing surveillance they're expensive. And noisy, which tends to heisenberg ongoing crime out of their view.
I seem to recall that the main "cause" for firing some of the attorneys was failure to prosecute things the Bush administration wanted prosecuted.
Won't you feel silly if it turns out this was the sort of thing they wanted prosecuted and couldn't get to happen until they started firing prosecutors?