No, the transponder can't do that. Its signal is completely independent of the radar echo, on a different wavelength, and provides no independent position information. The radar echo arrives before the transponder reply, since both travel at the speed of light in air and the transponder response takes time to generate, while the echo is just an instantaneous reflection of microwave pulses. The signals are correlated by a ground computer to generate the controller display, which draws a symbol in place of the radar blip with the altitude data nearby, but that's just a presentation function. The computer also computes the aircraft ground speed and direction of travel and displays those numerically as well. The blips are all on screen, but deliberately dimmed to keep down screen clutter.
But BOTH raw radar data and transponder replies are recorded at the controller's station (actually by he computer, of course). This way aviation authorities can reconstruct exactly what the controllers saw on their screen. I worked on software for the original version of this system, which was written in the Jovial programming language and IBM basic assembly language (BAL). The software and computers have changed, but amazingly the radar system itself has evolved very little, other than wth the addition of more stations and better data collection networks.
The movie "Pushing Tin" (Angelina Jolie, John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton) is actually a pretty accurate depiction of how it all works. Not a lot has changed since that movie was made. The movie's title comes from slang for what controllers still do today when they lose their computer capability and have to deal with just primary radar returns. They push little paper markers around on the screen and keep track of flight information with paper data strips, and that serves as the emergency backup mechanism in the event of a computer failure.
I'm a network engineer and know 802.11 well. Your analogy fails, because the radar signal is the main function of the system, which generates aircraft position information from which the system derives track and velocity. You completely dismissed this component and actually said it's rarely used in civilian aviation.
There is no parallel with WiFi. WiFi broadcasts are just data packets; radar interrogations are directional energy beams that locate aircraft in distance and azimuth. WiFi broadcasts are no different from the packets the client sends back to the AP: the framing, timing, and encoding is identical. But radar interrogations are tri-pulse trains on a common global frequency, with unique timing to identify the type of interrogation. Transponder replies are at a different common global frequency transmitted in as TDM-encoded data frames. Replies are omnidirectional and only pass data generated by cockpit instrumentation back to the radar station.
Thus transponder data is only used by controllers for identification and altitude, and some ancillary data. Mode S GPS content in transponder replies is used by other aircraft for TCAS, not by controllers for position information. If the aircraft is outside reflection range, it won't transpond. By definition if the transponder replies to an interrogation, it was because the aircraft was being painted by a radar's "skin" beam, which at microwave frequencies means there is line of sight between the aircraft and ground antenna. The radar echo is guaranteed to make it back to the station because of this line of sight. On an aircraft the size of a 777, very little energy needs to be reflected to generate position data, and I've never seen a situation where transponders don't have a corresponding primary radar blip.
All these differences between reality and your analogy lead to radically incorrect conclusions about system capabilities and behavior. I can say the earth is like and egg, because they're both round, but that doesn't make it a good analogy.
AK Marc: I'm a licensed pilot, aircraft mechanic, and avionics technician, and have worked on FAA radar systems. What you say is completely untrue. Aviation surveillance radar worldwide is RADAR with capital letters. There is no WiFi involved, no AP, nothing like you describe. The system was designed in the 1960s and, except for some incremental enhancements, has been largely unchanged since then.
It consists of a ground based antenna system that transmits sweeping RF energy beams that bounce off metal objects such as aircraft (and occasionally flocks of birds) and reflect back to the antenna. The radar electronics complex processes digitized radar data streams from multiple antennas and generates a synthesized image, which appears on controller screens. Controllers can see this basic radar "blip" if they choose, although generally it's displayed as a faint background trace to keep the screen uncluttered.
The transponder system works by sending a coded signal that rides on the radar energy beam. When the beam paints an aircraft, the on-board transponder receiver decodes this as an "interrogation".
In its most basic form, called Mode C, the aircraft answers the interrogation with a data packet containing the a four-digit code assigned by a controller to the aircraft (which the pilot typically sets manually after receiving the "squawk" code verbally from the controller), and the aircraft pressure altitude. In the more recent Mode S, this packet contains additional data, such as the GPS location, airspeed, etc. Aircraft can overhear each others' Mode S replies and use that information to build an internal model of occupied airspace; this process is the foundation of the Terminal Collision Avoidance System (TCAS).
The transponder data gets painted on the controller's integrated radar display to make it easier to track targets. This is called "narrowband" mode because a this system can filter out a lot of clutter, leaving the controller with only verified targets to track. But if the narrowband system fails, which happens on occasion, controllers are all trained to revert to an old manual system using paper markers that they stick to their screens to track aircraft.
All commercial aircraft and many general aviation aircraft use Mode S today, and thus we collect quite a lot of data about flights in progress. In the Malaysian case, the aircraft was in radar coverage, receiving interrogations and responding, when they lost contact with it. Although the actual radar data hasn't been revealed, the sense of what has been shown so far is that the raw radar return, or echo, as well as the transponder Mode C, stopped simultaneously. It's possible that the controllers were not displaying non-transponder returns on their screens, so it may turn out that there was a raw signal for some time. That's the big question that, once answered, will indicate whether there was a deliberate action to turn off the transponder or a cataclysm turned it off. People can turn off transponders, but they cannot turn off raw radar signatures.
Tell me what more you want. I provided references to both verifiable nutrition data and news reports supporting the lack of scientific evidence that AGW is causing increasingly severe droughts in the Western U.S. You seem to be confused about who has to provide evidence in a scientific argument. The person making the assertion is the one who must provide data to support their position, i.e., the AGW drought hypothesis. I, as a HyperDrought Denier (I just coined that term) need provide no evidence that AGW isn't having that effect.
Missing from the vegetarian fear fest is that meat has ten times the caloric value of vegetables. For example, the 100 calories achieved with 1.2 ounces of porterhouse steak requires eating more than 12 ounces of Broccoli. . That ten-fold higher mass also has an even higher bulk, since vegetables are much less dense than meat. That means ten times the cost, at least, to ship the same caloric content as vegetables compared to meat.
Of course we need vegetables too, for vitamins and minerals, as part of a balanced diet. But meat has high value as a compact source of calories required for daily life. As far as water usage goes, the California drought is temporary. There is no scientific evidence that the intensity or frequency of drought in the western U.S. is increasing (). All that is required is managing agricultural cycles to accommodate dry periods. When you interfere with that management, for instance by blocking water supplies to agriculture to protect delta smelt, then drought can get the upper hand. That's what's happening today in California.
The bricklayer analogy is flawed because it assumes that all technical endeavors are equally mature. Bricklayers have been around for millennia, while software developers have been around for less than a century. A better comparison is with aviation, which has been in existence for only a little longer than software development.
With aircraft, when craftsmanship problem occurs, such as a poorly constructed propeller, then it is covered by warranty.. But an aircraft design problem, even a problem where assembly of components is faulty but not immediately apparent, is not covered by warranty. Instead it is fixed through a legal process called an Airworthiness Directive (AD), which cost is borne by the owner of the aircraft, not the manufacturer.
The reason for this is simple. Aircraft are complicated machines, and are not fully understood. Even today, new phenomena in manufacturing, materials, and even aerodynamics, are discovered and affect future design and construction techniques. If aircraft manufacturers had to bear the cost of every discovered problem, the industry would fail. In fact, it nearly did collapse under the weight of litigation even with the essential AD system. Only extensive tort reform was able to insulate the industry from liability for defects that occurred decades ago yet were completely unforeseeable by manufacturers.
Despite what some commenters here have said, it is a well accepted principle in computer science that nontrivial programs cannot even be proven correct, let alone be written correctly. The short form of this principle is "all software has bugs." This is just a limitation of the technology, not a reason to place blame on people, or try to exact penalties.
Radia Perlman, the inventor of Spanning Tree and many other protocols fundamental to computer networks, has quipped in several of her talks (available on YouTube): "Many people think standards committees are intelligent, careful examiners of all aspects of a technology. But that's wrong. They're actually like drunken sports fans." Or words to that effect.
Bash runs on most every platform, from mainframes to Macs to phones and tablets and Raspberry PIs. And unnumbered embedded systems. It's the Duct Tape of computing, executing daily and hourly scheduled jobs on millions of computers. Routers have it. DVRs have it. Even digital cameras have it. Brian Fox created bash to serve as a universal open source substrate for portable systems. It has performed better at this role than anyone could have hoped.
...confronted with things they cannot blow up. If you're anonymous on the Internet, conducting anonymous commerce, you cannot be senselessly slaughtered with a bomb.
I could just as accurately say "...describing a technique that is explicitly not an witch's broom system, and doesn't pretend to be, but looks very much like one."
But it's not an anti-gravity device, either. Anti-gravity means canceling, or protecting against the effect, of gravity, using some kind of shielding or field that acts outside the standard laws of force. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-gravity
It does not refer to counteracting the force of gravity with some other force, such as electromagnetism or aerodynamic lift.
Anti-gravity is currently science fiction.
Suicide eliminates all other options
on
Losing Aaron
·
· Score: 1
When you kill yourself, you rule out the possibility of intervention, by God or anyone else.
"...describing a technique that is explicitly not an anti-gravity system, and doesn't pretend to be, but looks very much like one."
Um, it's basic physics. An actual force is moving an actual object, completely in compliance with standard Newtonian law. It no more "looks like" an anti-gravity system than does the Bernoulli effect when an airplane flies. The researchers demonstrate a novel use of ultrasound, but no more novel than superconductivity in a ceramic creating a magnetic field that can make a magnet hover in space. Using force. Just like you do when you hold something in the air with your hand.
Only if you consider the NSA's unconstitutional spying on US citizens to be legitimate access. Under current HIPAA rules, up until Obamacare, the government had no access to health records apart from veterans and some Medicaid patients. The ACA implicitly demolishes HIPAA by inserting the IRS squarely in the application and enforcement roles, giving it unwarranted access to some (but not all) health data formerly protected under HIPAA.
Personal health information, or PHI, is highly protected under federal law, but the latest ruling from the Department of Health and Human Services allows agencies to trade the information to "verify that Obamacare applicants are getting the minimum amount of health insurance coverage" they need from the health “exchanges.”
The ruling does not require that applicants first OK the release of their PHI, and overrides the current HIPAA requirement that exchange of PHI without an individual’s pre-approval is limited to a “government program providing public benefits.” In other words, previously you only gave PHI to the government when the government directly provided healthcare, as in veterans medical facilities. Now the IRS can share anything it can collect through your health delivery process with anyone it likes. Including local law enforcement, for example, in order to seize firearms from "at risk" individuals, as has already occurred.
That's the pain of regulation, and why hobbies like RC aircraft want to be self managing as long as possible. Unfortunately, it's no longer possible with the proliferation of cheap grounds I can be flown by any idiot.
And the safety issue isn't just from 400 lb dromes, it's from the smallest quad copter's that weigh mere ounces. If one of these gets ingested by, say, my helicopter's turbine engine, you'll now have a several thousand pound plummeting helicopter to contend with. I for one am not willing to take that safety risk with drones, whose only claim to fame is cheapness.
The FAA rules makes perfect sense, but the rules are admittedly incomplete regarding drones. In this case, where a journalist wants to fly a drone over a news event, he would be violating the implicit FAA-sanctioned AMA rule "All pilots shall avoid flying directly over unprotected people, vessels, vehicles or structures and shall avoid endangerment of life and property of others."
The difference between RC modelers and the journalist's anticipated drone operations is that RC modelers fly in specific areas free of obstructions, people, vessels, vehicles, and structures. Drones covering some newsworthy event would be likely flying directly over all of these things, creating a huge safety problem. The actual lowest altitude for human-piloted aircraft is not 1000 feet, as people have erroneously said here, but 500 feet. 500 feet is the altitude at which helicopters fly, for virtually all operations. Helicopters must stay 500 feet below fixed-wing traffic, but also 500' above the ground, to avoid the flow of fixed-wing traffic, which means that for the most part helos fly at exactly 500 feet above ground level. RC modelers are not a hazard, because they are flown far from airports, and in and uncongested areas -- specifically designated as RC model flight areas -- which helicopters can easily avoid because they're charted on aviation maps. And yes, they are limited to 400' altitude as well.
But nobody is going to pay someone to fly a UAV at RC hobbyist venues. Customers pay money to have videos taken of news events, real estate, and other commercial objectives. The FAA recognizes that this, by definition, puts paid RC operation in a completely different airspace situation than RC hobbiests. So so using remuneration as the dividing line between safe and unsafe RC operations is actually quite sensible.
What the FAA needs to do is to codify the current AMA regulations as actual federal aviation regulations (FARs), which the FAA can do by publishing a "notice of proposed rulemaking" (NPRM) on which the general public can comment before regulations become effective. I personally think that drone-based journalism (and all other commercial drone operations) is incompatible with aviation safety, because drone pilots cannot comply with the FAA rules for air-traffic separation, which uses a "see and avoid" doctrine.
"See and avoid" is a concept that everyone who is not a licensed pilot seems to misunderstand about drones. In visual flight conditions, human pilots are responsible to maintain their own separation from other aircraft by simply looking around. I know it sounds primitive, but this system actually works quite well, and there is no technologically superior capability available today. The so-called "CSI effect" unfortunately leads many who are not in aviation into believing that there is some kind of magic radar or visual tracking technology that would let drone pilots automatically avoid other aircraft. But even with the most expensive multi-camera military drones, the pilot cannot rapidly scan the sky like a human pilot inside an aircraft, but is instead limited to essentially looking in a few directions slowly. At closure rates of hundreds of miles per hour, this is simply inadequate for "see and avoid" to work with drones.
In nonvisual flight conditions, a different set of rules apply, called instrument flight rules (IFR). Under IFR, every aircraft is on a flight plan, is positively controlled by an individual human air traffic controller, and must follow controller instructions to the letter. Every aircraft also contains a transponder, which provides positive radar identification, with flight plan, altitude, direction and speed readouts. Under IFR, aircraft generally must maintain 5 miles of horizontal separation and 1000' of vertical separation from terrain and other aircraft. It should be obvious that IFR won't work for drones, because the drone would be unable to maintain 5 miles and 1000' of separation between aircraft and terrain during its essentially visual miss
I'm a pilot too. A helicopter pilot. You've got the rules wrong. Fixed wing aircraft stay 1000' and higher. But helicopters fly specifically at 500' AGL for the most part, as we are required to "avoid the flow of fixed-wing traffic." So there is a scant 100' clearance between us and potential catastrophe from an errant RC pilot. Drones are a worse hazard than RCs to helo pilots, because drones are often flown by idiots whose sole qualification is a Frys Electronics gift card. This includes the so-called drone journalists, who uniformly, in my experience, are ignorant of airspace rules and regulations.
Putting drones at the same site as an active news story likely to be covered by helicopter ENGs is abject stupidity. Drones, even million-dollar military models, are incapable of complying with the FAA's see-and-avoid visual flight rules for traffic separation. The technology to sense and avoid other aircraft in the same close quarters simply doesn't exist. Drones should be specifically outlawed in any journalistic or commercial role because they cannot operate with the same separation helos have from overlying fixed-wing traffic.
Police can't simply stop people coming out of a bar and test them for drunk driving without probable cause (PC). Your story may be true, but the reason the practice was stopped is more likely that cases were tossed out of court. There may be a day when where you shop provides probable cause for a stop and search, but thankfully that isn't the case currently.
In the instant case, they phrased the question wrong. They should have asked "Are you willing to give your government utter and total access to the most intimate details of your life, empowering it to extort you into complying with anything it desires, in order to give terrorists exactly what they seek: the destruction if your freedom?"
Drone usage is exploding, and it's unregulated for the most part. Where it is regulated (as in a new Texas bill forbidding most drone usage by civilians), the regulations favor government use, which generally leads to a loss of privacy. Check out http://drones.jet.net/ to see how drones are abusing freedom.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the transponder can't do that. Its signal is completely independent of the radar echo, on a different wavelength, and provides no independent position information. The radar echo arrives before the transponder reply, since both travel at the speed of light in air and the transponder response takes time to generate, while the echo is just an instantaneous reflection of microwave pulses. The signals are correlated by a ground computer to generate the controller display, which draws a symbol in place of the radar blip with the altitude data nearby, but that's just a presentation function. The computer also computes the aircraft ground speed and direction of travel and displays those numerically as well. The blips are all on screen, but deliberately dimmed to keep down screen clutter.
But BOTH raw radar data and transponder replies are recorded at the controller's station (actually by he computer, of course). This way aviation authorities can reconstruct exactly what the controllers saw on their screen. I worked on software for the original version of this system, which was written in the Jovial programming language and IBM basic assembly language (BAL). The software and computers have changed, but amazingly the radar system itself has evolved very little, other than wth the addition of more stations and better data collection networks.
The movie "Pushing Tin" (Angelina Jolie, John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton) is actually a pretty accurate depiction of how it all works. Not a lot has changed since that movie was made. The movie's title comes from slang for what controllers still do today when they lose their computer capability and have to deal with just primary radar returns. They push little paper markers around on the screen and keep track of flight information with paper data strips, and that serves as the emergency backup mechanism in the event of a computer failure.
I'm a network engineer and know 802.11 well. Your analogy fails, because the radar signal is the main function of the system, which generates aircraft position information from which the system derives track and velocity. You completely dismissed this component and actually said it's rarely used in civilian aviation.
There is no parallel with WiFi. WiFi broadcasts are just data packets; radar interrogations are directional energy beams that locate aircraft in distance and azimuth. WiFi broadcasts are no different from the packets the client sends back to the AP: the framing, timing, and encoding is identical. But radar interrogations are tri-pulse trains on a common global frequency, with unique timing to identify the type of interrogation. Transponder replies are at a different common global frequency transmitted in as TDM-encoded data frames. Replies are omnidirectional and only pass data generated by cockpit instrumentation back to the radar station.
Thus transponder data is only used by controllers for identification and altitude, and some ancillary data. Mode S GPS content in transponder replies is used by other aircraft for TCAS, not by controllers for position information. If the aircraft is outside reflection range, it won't transpond. By definition if the transponder replies to an interrogation, it was because the aircraft was being painted by a radar's "skin" beam, which at microwave frequencies means there is line of sight between the aircraft and ground antenna. The radar echo is guaranteed to make it back to the station because of this line of sight. On an aircraft the size of a 777, very little energy needs to be reflected to generate position data, and I've never seen a situation where transponders don't have a corresponding primary radar blip.
All these differences between reality and your analogy lead to radically incorrect conclusions about system capabilities and behavior. I can say the earth is like and egg, because they're both round, but that doesn't make it a good analogy.
AK Marc: I'm a licensed pilot, aircraft mechanic, and avionics technician, and have worked on FAA radar systems. What you say is completely untrue. Aviation surveillance radar worldwide is RADAR with capital letters. There is no WiFi involved, no AP, nothing like you describe. The system was designed in the 1960s and, except for some incremental enhancements, has been largely unchanged since then.
It consists of a ground based antenna system that transmits sweeping RF energy beams that bounce off metal objects such as aircraft (and occasionally flocks of birds) and reflect back to the antenna. The radar electronics complex processes digitized radar data streams from multiple antennas and generates a synthesized image, which appears on controller screens. Controllers can see this basic radar "blip" if they choose, although generally it's displayed as a faint background trace to keep the screen uncluttered.
The transponder system works by sending a coded signal that rides on the radar energy beam. When the beam paints an aircraft, the on-board transponder receiver decodes this as an "interrogation".
In its most basic form, called Mode C, the aircraft answers the interrogation with a data packet containing the a four-digit code assigned by a controller to the aircraft (which the pilot typically sets manually after receiving the "squawk" code verbally from the controller), and the aircraft pressure altitude. In the more recent Mode S, this packet contains additional data, such as the GPS location, airspeed, etc. Aircraft can overhear each others' Mode S replies and use that information to build an internal model of occupied airspace; this process is the foundation of the Terminal Collision Avoidance System (TCAS).
The transponder data gets painted on the controller's integrated radar display to make it easier to track targets. This is called "narrowband" mode because a this system can filter out a lot of clutter, leaving the controller with only verified targets to track. But if the narrowband system fails, which happens on occasion, controllers are all trained to revert to an old manual system using paper markers that they stick to their screens to track aircraft.
All commercial aircraft and many general aviation aircraft use Mode S today, and thus we collect quite a lot of data about flights in progress. In the Malaysian case, the aircraft was in radar coverage, receiving interrogations and responding, when they lost contact with it. Although the actual radar data hasn't been revealed, the sense of what has been shown so far is that the raw radar return, or echo, as well as the transponder Mode C, stopped simultaneously. It's possible that the controllers were not displaying non-transponder returns on their screens, so it may turn out that there was a raw signal for some time. That's the big question that, once answered, will indicate whether there was a deliberate action to turn off the transponder or a cataclysm turned it off. People can turn off transponders, but they cannot turn off raw radar signatures.
Tell me what more you want. I provided references to both verifiable nutrition data and news reports supporting the lack of scientific evidence that AGW is causing increasingly severe droughts in the Western U.S. You seem to be confused about who has to provide evidence in a scientific argument. The person making the assertion is the one who must provide data to support their position, i.e., the AGW drought hypothesis. I, as a HyperDrought Denier (I just coined that term) need provide no evidence that AGW isn't having that effect.
Missing from the vegetarian fear fest is that meat has ten times the caloric value of vegetables. For example, the 100 calories achieved with 1.2 ounces of porterhouse steak requires eating more than 12 ounces of Broccoli. . That ten-fold higher mass also has an even higher bulk, since vegetables are much less dense than meat. That means ten times the cost, at least, to ship the same caloric content as vegetables compared to meat.
Of course we need vegetables too, for vitamins and minerals, as part of a balanced diet. But meat has high value as a compact source of calories required for daily life. As far as water usage goes, the California drought is temporary. There is no scientific evidence that the intensity or frequency of drought in the western U.S. is increasing (). All that is required is managing agricultural cycles to accommodate dry periods. When you interfere with that management, for instance by blocking water supplies to agriculture to protect delta smelt, then drought can get the upper hand. That's what's happening today in California.
Witness the dearth of comments to this post. This administration is assaulting free speech more severely than Mao.
Some people pay a mechanic $25 to replace a burned out brake light. Nothing new here. Move along.
C.S. Lewis could craft a clever allegory here.
The bricklayer analogy is flawed because it assumes that all technical endeavors are equally mature. Bricklayers have been around for millennia, while software developers have been around for less than a century. A better comparison is with aviation, which has been in existence for only a little longer than software development.
With aircraft, when craftsmanship problem occurs, such as a poorly constructed propeller, then it is covered by warranty.. But an aircraft design problem, even a problem where assembly of components is faulty but not immediately apparent, is not covered by warranty. Instead it is fixed through a legal process called an Airworthiness Directive (AD), which cost is borne by the owner of the aircraft, not the manufacturer.
The reason for this is simple. Aircraft are complicated machines, and are not fully understood. Even today, new phenomena in manufacturing, materials, and even aerodynamics, are discovered and affect future design and construction techniques. If aircraft manufacturers had to bear the cost of every discovered problem, the industry would fail. In fact, it nearly did collapse under the weight of litigation even with the essential AD system. Only extensive tort reform was able to insulate the industry from liability for defects that occurred decades ago yet were completely unforeseeable by manufacturers.
Despite what some commenters here have said, it is a well accepted principle in computer science that nontrivial programs cannot even be proven correct, let alone be written correctly. The short form of this principle is "all software has bugs." This is just a limitation of the technology, not a reason to place blame on people, or try to exact penalties.
Radia Perlman, the inventor of Spanning Tree and many other protocols fundamental to computer networks, has quipped in several of her talks (available on YouTube): "Many people think standards committees are intelligent, careful examiners of all aspects of a technology. But that's wrong. They're actually like drunken sports fans." Or words to that effect.
Go Radia!
Bash runs on most every platform, from mainframes to Macs to phones and tablets and Raspberry PIs. And unnumbered embedded systems. It's the Duct Tape of computing, executing daily and hourly scheduled jobs on millions of computers. Routers have it. DVRs have it. Even digital cameras have it. Brian Fox created bash to serve as a universal open source substrate for portable systems. It has performed better at this role than anyone could have hoped.
...confronted with things they cannot blow up. If you're anonymous on the Internet, conducting anonymous commerce, you cannot be senselessly slaughtered with a bomb.
I could just as accurately say "...describing a technique that is explicitly not an witch's broom system, and doesn't pretend to be, but looks very much like one."
But it's not an anti-gravity device, either. Anti-gravity means canceling, or protecting against the effect, of gravity, using some kind of shielding or field that acts outside the standard laws of force. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-gravity
It does not refer to counteracting the force of gravity with some other force, such as electromagnetism or aerodynamic lift.
Anti-gravity is currently science fiction.
When you kill yourself, you rule out the possibility of intervention, by God or anyone else.
"...describing a technique that is explicitly not an anti-gravity system, and doesn't pretend to be, but looks very much like one."
Um, it's basic physics. An actual force is moving an actual object, completely in compliance with standard Newtonian law. It no more "looks like" an anti-gravity system than does the Bernoulli effect when an airplane flies. The researchers demonstrate a novel use of ultrasound, but no more novel than superconductivity in a ceramic creating a magnetic field that can make a magnet hover in space. Using force. Just like you do when you hold something in the air with your hand.
F = MA. Nothing anti about it.
Only if you consider the NSA's unconstitutional spying on US citizens to be legitimate access. Under current HIPAA rules, up until Obamacare, the government had no access to health records apart from veterans and some Medicaid patients. The ACA implicitly demolishes HIPAA by inserting the IRS squarely in the application and enforcement roles, giving it unwarranted access to some (but not all) health data formerly protected under HIPAA.
Personal health information, or PHI, is highly protected under federal law, but the latest ruling from the Department of Health and Human Services allows agencies to trade the information to "verify that Obamacare applicants are getting the minimum amount of health insurance coverage" they need from the health “exchanges.”
The ruling does not require that applicants first OK the release of their PHI, and overrides the current HIPAA requirement that exchange of PHI without an individual’s pre-approval is limited to a “government program providing public benefits.” In other words, previously you only gave PHI to the government when the government directly provided healthcare, as in veterans medical facilities. Now the IRS can share anything it can collect through your health delivery process with anyone it likes. Including local law enforcement, for example, in order to seize firearms from "at risk" individuals, as has already occurred.
That's the pain of regulation, and why hobbies like RC aircraft want to be self managing as long as possible. Unfortunately, it's no longer possible with the proliferation of cheap grounds I can be flown by any idiot.
And the safety issue isn't just from 400 lb dromes, it's from the smallest quad copter's that weigh mere ounces. If one of these gets ingested by, say, my helicopter's turbine engine, you'll now have a several thousand pound plummeting helicopter to contend with. I for one am not willing to take that safety risk with drones, whose only claim to fame is cheapness.
The FAA rules makes perfect sense, but the rules are admittedly incomplete regarding drones. In this case, where a journalist wants to fly a drone over a news event, he would be violating the implicit FAA-sanctioned AMA rule "All pilots shall avoid flying directly over unprotected people, vessels, vehicles or structures and shall avoid endangerment of life and property of others."
The difference between RC modelers and the journalist's anticipated drone operations is that RC modelers fly in specific areas free of obstructions, people, vessels, vehicles, and structures. Drones covering some newsworthy event would be likely flying directly over all of these things, creating a huge safety problem. The actual lowest altitude for human-piloted aircraft is not 1000 feet, as people have erroneously said here, but 500 feet. 500 feet is the altitude at which helicopters fly, for virtually all operations. Helicopters must stay 500 feet below fixed-wing traffic, but also 500' above the ground, to avoid the flow of fixed-wing traffic, which means that for the most part helos fly at exactly 500 feet above ground level. RC modelers are not a hazard, because they are flown far from airports, and in and uncongested areas -- specifically designated as RC model flight areas -- which helicopters can easily avoid because they're charted on aviation maps. And yes, they are limited to 400' altitude as well.
But nobody is going to pay someone to fly a UAV at RC hobbyist venues. Customers pay money to have videos taken of news events, real estate, and other commercial objectives. The FAA recognizes that this, by definition, puts paid RC operation in a completely different airspace situation than RC hobbiests. So so using remuneration as the dividing line between safe and unsafe RC operations is actually quite sensible.
What the FAA needs to do is to codify the current AMA regulations as actual federal aviation regulations (FARs), which the FAA can do by publishing a "notice of proposed rulemaking" (NPRM) on which the general public can comment before regulations become effective. I personally think that drone-based journalism (and all other commercial drone operations) is incompatible with aviation safety, because drone pilots cannot comply with the FAA rules for air-traffic separation, which uses a "see and avoid" doctrine.
"See and avoid" is a concept that everyone who is not a licensed pilot seems to misunderstand about drones. In visual flight conditions, human pilots are responsible to maintain their own separation from other aircraft by simply looking around. I know it sounds primitive, but this system actually works quite well, and there is no technologically superior capability available today. The so-called "CSI effect" unfortunately leads many who are not in aviation into believing that there is some kind of magic radar or visual tracking technology that would let drone pilots automatically avoid other aircraft. But even with the most expensive multi-camera military drones, the pilot cannot rapidly scan the sky like a human pilot inside an aircraft, but is instead limited to essentially looking in a few directions slowly. At closure rates of hundreds of miles per hour, this is simply inadequate for "see and avoid" to work with drones.
In nonvisual flight conditions, a different set of rules apply, called instrument flight rules (IFR). Under IFR, every aircraft is on a flight plan, is positively controlled by an individual human air traffic controller, and must follow controller instructions to the letter. Every aircraft also contains a transponder, which provides positive radar identification, with flight plan, altitude, direction and speed readouts. Under IFR, aircraft generally must maintain 5 miles of horizontal separation and 1000' of vertical separation from terrain and other aircraft. It should be obvious that IFR won't work for drones, because the drone would be unable to maintain 5 miles and 1000' of separation between aircraft and terrain during its essentially visual miss
I'm a pilot too. A helicopter pilot. You've got the rules wrong. Fixed wing aircraft stay 1000' and higher. But helicopters fly specifically at 500' AGL for the most part, as we are required to "avoid the flow of fixed-wing traffic." So there is a scant 100' clearance between us and potential catastrophe from an errant RC pilot. Drones are a worse hazard than RCs to helo pilots, because drones are often flown by idiots whose sole qualification is a Frys Electronics gift card. This includes the so-called drone journalists, who uniformly, in my experience, are ignorant of airspace rules and regulations.
Putting drones at the same site as an active news story likely to be covered by helicopter ENGs is abject stupidity. Drones, even million-dollar military models, are incapable of complying with the FAA's see-and-avoid visual flight rules for traffic separation. The technology to sense and avoid other aircraft in the same close quarters simply doesn't exist. Drones should be specifically outlawed in any journalistic or commercial role because they cannot operate with the same separation helos have from overlying fixed-wing traffic.
Police can't simply stop people coming out of a bar and test them for drunk driving without probable cause (PC). Your story may be true, but the reason the practice was stopped is more likely that cases were tossed out of court. There may be a day when where you shop provides probable cause for a stop and search, but thankfully that isn't the case currently.
You can't make a wrong right with a poll.
In the instant case, they phrased the question wrong. They should have asked "Are you willing to give your government utter and total access to the most intimate details of your life, empowering it to extort you into complying with anything it desires, in order to give terrorists exactly what they seek: the destruction if your freedom?"
Drone usage is exploding, and it's unregulated for the most part. Where it is regulated (as in a new Texas bill forbidding most drone usage by civilians), the regulations favor government use, which generally leads to a loss of privacy. Check out http://drones.jet.net/ to see how drones are abusing freedom.
I won't think or people as idiots anymore just based on their possibly munged comment subjects.
The splorky mobile slash dot interface truncated "heroin addict" to "hero.
Freaky!