You're right about the US laws, however if this transmission was made from Canada to the US that might avoid the legal issue in the US if the US station never transmitted any encrypted signal or any signal with a pecuniary interest -- receiving is not really limited under part 97, only transmitting.
That said, I have no idea what the laws look like in Canada.
This suggests that Canada's laws are a little more lax, but not too much so, so... maybe?
(Trivia: I'm amused (and not surprised) to see Bruce popping up in there -- he's posting in this thread on/. as well.)
Only North Korea and Yemen do not issue amateur radio licenses to their citizens, although in both cases a limited number of foreign visitors have been permitted to obtain amateur licenses in the past.
Ham radio operators need to be very careful when they're visiting "oppressive" regimes and trying to get those really rare contacts.
Alas, what often happens is that people see their gear -- people being the police, customs, or just ordinary citizens -- and they assume that this person is a spy. The reality is that these people just want to operate in some rarely operated in area, but... the locals aren't having it, and that's exactly what a spy would say.
The hams may end up with their equipment confiscated or destroyed, and may even end up being grilled by the police or even incarcerated for some time.
Secondly, it was found that Uber isn't criminally liable; they could still be hit with a civil suit.
Honestly, minus some aggravating factor such as driving drunk, drag racing or being involved in a high-speed chase with the police, drivers are almost never charged criminally for motor vehicle crashes, even when somebody dies.
At most they will get a traffic ticket -- and even that is kind of iffy, as the police will often refrain from giving a ticket until their investigation is over, and once the investigation is over they often don't follow through and give out those tickets.
People are making fun of your noise sensor idea because airports are already really loud. But even if they were completely quiet, I can't imagine that any sort of sensor to "hear" a quadcopter would work at a distance more than a few hundred feet.
In any event, yes, these things have been traced back to their owners by the parts -- for example, this case. I can't find the article where they revealed this now, but as I understand it they found the owner by the serial number of the brushless motor (one of four) from the Phantom 4 that was stuck on the helicopter.
(Presumably, the electronics would make finding the takeoff point and probably a whole lot more even easier, but I imagine that stuff was not available.)
Most kids could probably figure out that the software is installed
Depends on the kids, and how good the software is at hiding.
I can provide a single data point: my kids. They spend hours and hours and hours on their phones and fewer (but still plenty) hours on computers, and yet they don't really have much of an understanding of how it all works -- they know how to use them well, but aren't really interested in going deeper.
So as long as any "big brother" kind of software made any effort at all to remain hidden, they'd probably never notice. At least until there were a few incidents where we (their parents) found out about stuff that there's no way we could have found out about them except for bugging their phones -- if that happened a few times, they'd put two and two together.
That said, I have little interest in babysitting them to that degree, but I think if I did... they'd probably not notice, at least not at first. But eventually, they might figure out that something is going on if I didn't keep what was learned to myself.
Sorry, I should have been clearer: the first Lithium hybrid cars had serious issues. The manufacturers thought that the lithium batteries were simple drop in replacements for the NiMH and had them setup to trickle charge with the obvious results.
Such a mistake would be grade A incompetence on the part of the designers of the cars, and while your link does talk about lots of issues -- not a single one of those issues is attributed to trickle charging Li-ion cars.
I do not believe your claim that any electric or hybrid car manufacturer (let alone multiple manufacturers) actually thought that Lithium-Ion/LiPo/etc. batteries were a drop-in replacement for NiMH batteries and so they could still trickle charge them even when full. They would absolutely have to update their chargers to support the new chemistry -- this would not be optional. NiMH chargers would probably look for the slight dip in voltage when the battery was fully charged and Lithium-ion/LiPo batteries would have no such dip -- so it would keep charging at full power, at least until it triggered whatever other protective circuit was there. (Too high of voltage, battery temperature, etc.)
If they did do this, the "obvious results" you refer to would be that almost every car with this flaw would ruin the battery within the first few days of use -- and some would probably catch fire, probably while driving down the road (I'll assume they're not plug-in hybrids, but just ordinary hybrids. If they were plug-in hybrids, it would happen with them parked and charging too.)
I suspect that you already know this, but in case somebody else doesn't realize this... lignux actually happened, sort of.
Not only was RMS suggesting that everybody call it "GNU/Linux", "GNU Linux" or a "Linux-based GNU system"... but it was also "LiGNUx" or just "lignux" for short.
And he did more than just preach this, he applied it himself. For example, in 1996 or so if you compiled emacs (a GNU editor, witten by RMS himself) on your Linux system it would actually call the target "lignux" where previously it was just "linux".
Soon after he changed it to linux-gnu which was a good deal less awkward, and emacs is still using that today, though RMS personally generally calls it GNU/Linux now. (But the target name for emacs can't include a slash, so... linux-gnu it is.)
To be fair, most or all of these applications will also run under Windows... and you don't even need to use Linux-like environments like cygwin, though you certainly can do that too.
It would be hard to find a Linux distribution that doesn't use *anything* by GNU.
Even FreeBSD and OpenBSD have traditionally used gcc to do their compiling, though both are now moving to clang or have already done so... and as I understand it this is mostly due to the GPL. Even outside of clang, OpenBSD uses a few GNU packages in their base system... though they don't sound happy about it.
Where Uber got *super* lucky is that the person that they hit was actually breaking the law by jaywalking.
Allegedly the car didn't even stop after the collision -- the human sitting in the driver's seat had to stop the car.
Given that the self-driving stuff probably relies on LIDAR to detect things like cyclists, it sounds like the system may not have even detected a cyclist riding down the road in the proper way with proper lighting as required by law and would have run them down. Had that been the case, there would be no "this collision was their fault" at all -- the fault would lie entirely with the self-driving car and its inattentive human sitting in the driver's seat.
That would have lead to a much larger settlement and hurt the self-driving car cause much more -- after all, given what really happened there's a large number of people saying "no human could have avoided that collision!" which is absolutely not true -- human eyes are way better than what that dashcam can see -- but people do still sort of believe that.
This is a case where I expected they wouldn't even get a letter of condolence, not only because of the circumstances but also because of who was involved (and who wasn't, namely the family).
If a human driver had had this collision with no dashcam showing them on the phone -- there would be no settlement.
In fact, the insurance company might sue the estate of the deceased for damages to the car if they thought there was some money to get.
But... this case is different. The self-driving car that should have been able to trivially avoid this collision, the inattentive "driver" (and evidence to that effect), the self-driving computer that probably kept logs of every little part of its decision making, the "first fatality" part of it and the big company with deep pockets behind it all -- there's so much that would make this "not your typical jaywalking collision", and I imagine that lawyers would be falling over themselves to represent that family.
It's in Uber's interests to get this settled quickly so it can fade into history, and my guess is that they offered a substantial amount of cash to help that happen.
All GUI applications for Linux are client-server, with the client (app) and X (server)
This is not true.
First, rudimentary graphics can be done with just text, and a number of applications do work that way. Or graphics can be rendered [in text](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s15eJ9WMfVg), (though yes, I do realize that that video was made of the game running under Windows.)
But beyond that, there certainly are plenty of Linux applications that talk directly to the graphics hardware without any sort of server.
If you want one that runs on the Linux side, you don't understand how this works.
People do lots of weird things with X servers -- there's Xvb, Xnest, LBX, etc. There may very well be some use case that somebody solves by running a Windows X server under Linux in some way (WINE? Virtualization?) -- I'm not going to second guess what they're doing without a lot more details.
Self driving cars have sensors that don't work good in heavy rain, heavy snow or bright sun, etc and aren't smart enough to stop driving when these error conditions happen
Just to be clear, the drivers of non self-driving driving cars also have sensors that have similar/related limitations, and they often aren't smart enough to stop driving (or even slow down) when these error conditions happen either.
Half-joking aside, autonomous cars have a tough task here -- they can't merely settle for being as good as humans, or even somewhat better than humans. They have to be *way better* than humans before they'll be allowed on the road by themselves en-masse -- anything less would find them banned in the legislatures (with these efforts driven largely by those who currently drive for a living and by those who are afraid of the encroaching technology, even if it is already driving better than humans) and would also find the companies making these self-driving cars getting hit with massive lawsuits everytime some thing goes wrong -- even if the car was not at fault and has logs to prove it. (The cars will almost certainly record every little detail, making forensic analysis of collisions more complete and more interesting. Not only will we critique what happened, but we'll critique the driver's thought process that lead up to it!)
Regarding the lawsuits, compare this to the mandatory insurance requirement most states have -- Texas has a minimum liability insurance requirement of $30k. If a human driver hits you (and if he's insured!) that only guarantees that he can pay $30k -- well, you can burn through $30k in one hour in the emergency room. This is how little we value injuries and deaths caused by motor vehicles -- we only mandate that the responsible party can pay up to $30k.
Of course, a self-driving car will have much deeper pockets behind it, and I'd expect lawsuits to be much larger than even those against commercial vehicles (driven by humans) -- so companies like Uber and Google need to have things way, way better than human drivers because the courts are going to punish them much more than they would punish humans. Maybe in the future, this will change, but this is how it will be for a while at least.
As for *this* fatal collision... this could very well end up being the most carefully investigated traffic fatality ever, or at least more carefully investigated than any of a non-famous or political figure (like Princess Di's fatal collision.) That said, the car should have logged everything, making the investigation a lot easier -- and again... a lot of that investigation will not just be about what happened, but what thought process (of the computer's) led up to that result, stuff that's not normally really gotten into in a (non-criminal) traffic fatality investigation with a human driver.
I live in Austin, and I do have to say that microtrenching is kind of nasty -- it's all over my neighborhood.
It "scars" the roads and leaves bumps that are getting worse over time as whatever it is that they used to fill them in gets pushed in more. It's not so noticeable in a car, but on a bicycle it is.
And I fear what might happen when they resurface the roads (which they do periodically.) If the fiber really is only an inch or two down, when they scrape off the top of the road it might tear up the fiber too? That would be a huge mess! That said, if it doesn't damage the fiber, resurfacing should fix the "bumpy/ugly" issue completely.
That said, disruptive or not... I *love* my Google Fiber. Fast, reliable and even the TV service and hardware is good.
Google may have neutered the search interface, but it's still up to this particular job :
Just search for: "open source" before:1995/01/01
There's lots and lots of things that aren't what we're looking for -- but more than a few that are. Such as this from 1990 or this from 1989, or this from 1985, though this last one isn't about computer software -- but the idea is still very much the same.
You get the idea.
That 1985 reference is the earliest one I find in what Google has archived of Usenet.
Oh, I have a prescription already. With astigmatism and nearsightedness. And I get it updated every year or two.
A decade ago one prescription worked for everything. But now I'm needing reading glasses and the like, and I can adjust my prescription to cover that as well as the optometrist can -- just adjust the OS and OD values. Adding 1.5 to both values gives me reading glasses. +0.5 works well for the computer. +3.0 for *really* close-up work, and so on.
For my mom, I am talking straight reading glasses, yes. But with whatever frame she wants and whatever strength she wants, and they're no more expensive than if she buys something at Walmart.
Really, this entire "expose" is stupid -- "Alison Griswold" seems to be confused about what a "prescription" from a doctor is. Ultimately, it boils down to two things --
* A directive from your doctor to do something, and * Possibly permission to do that thing.
A doctor can give you a prescription to get more exercise, or rest, or take aspirin or some other over the counter drug -- presumably, this will help with some medical condition. But these things don't require permission.
The doctor can also give you a prescription for Xanax or antibiotics or whatever else -- these drugs are controlled, and so the permission *is* required, and the prescription provides it as well as the instructions on how to take it.
But eyeglasses and contacts are not controlled, and there's no need for them to be. So there's no need for the companies selling them to verify prescriptions -- all the prescription is is what specifications are required, and if somebody wants to fake that or adjust that -- so be it.
This is one case where I don't want them verifying the prescription.
I buy glasses from Zenni Optical. I enter the numbers from the prescription into their web form, and two weeks later I get glasses. Cheap.
I want computer glasses? Add 0.50 to my correction figure. I want reading glasses? Add 1.50 to my correction figure. I want to make strong reading glasses for my mom, who doesn't normally need glasses at all? Just get her some glasses with "+3.00 0.00 0.00" prescriptions.
This isn't rocket science and there's no room to "abuse" this. Worse, if there's any sort of crackdown on this or change in the law to require that these prescriptions be vetted -- it's going to hit me with either increased costs or decreased flexibility, and probably both.
All civil, manned aircraft (not quite sure about ultralights etc...) all have a nationally assigned registration.
As you've guessed, ultralights do not require registration in the US and in fact the FAA doesn't seem consider them to be aircraft, but they've made it clear that unmanned aircraft are aircraft, no matter their size.... which is kind of odd. I can take an ultralight and add an R/C receiver and servos and such to control it (basically turning it into a big R/C plane), and the FAA considers it to be an aircraft, but if somebody gets in it and flies it directly, it's not? And if it weighs more than 55 lbs, the FAA regulates it more heavily if it's R/C controlled than if it's controlled by a person in it.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right about the US laws, however if this transmission was made from Canada to the US that might avoid the legal issue in the US if the US station never transmitted any encrypted signal or any signal with a pecuniary interest -- receiving is not really limited under part 97, only transmitting.
That said, I have no idea what the laws look like in Canada.
This suggests that Canada's laws are a little more lax, but not too much so, so ... maybe?
(Trivia: I'm amused (and not surprised) to see Bruce popping up in there -- he's posting in this thread on /. as well.)
Only North Korea and Yemen do not issue amateur radio licenses to their citizens, although in both cases a limited number of foreign visitors have been permitted to obtain amateur licenses in the past.
Ham radio operators need to be very careful when they're visiting "oppressive" regimes and trying to get those really rare contacts.
Alas, what often happens is that people see their gear -- people being the police, customs, or just ordinary citizens -- and they assume that this person is a spy. The reality is that these people just want to operate in some rarely operated in area, but ... the locals aren't having it, and that's exactly what a spy would say.
The hams may end up with their equipment confiscated or destroyed, and may even end up being grilled by the police or even incarcerated for some time.
Experiments like this should not be allowed on public roads.
Every new teenage driver is an experiment in driving.
And their insurance rates reflect this.
Secondly, it was found that Uber isn't criminally liable; they could still be hit with a civil suit.
Honestly, minus some aggravating factor such as driving drunk, drag racing or being involved in a high-speed chase with the police, drivers are almost never charged criminally for motor vehicle crashes, even when somebody dies.
At most they will get a traffic ticket -- and even that is kind of iffy, as the police will often refrain from giving a ticket until their investigation is over, and once the investigation is over they often don't follow through and give out those tickets.
So ... this result is expected.
People are making fun of your noise sensor idea because airports are already really loud. But even if they were completely quiet, I can't imagine that any sort of sensor to "hear" a quadcopter would work at a distance more than a few hundred feet.
In any event, yes, these things have been traced back to their owners by the parts -- for example, this case. I can't find the article where they revealed this now, but as I understand it they found the owner by the serial number of the brushless motor (one of four) from the Phantom 4 that was stuck on the helicopter.
(Presumably, the electronics would make finding the takeoff point and probably a whole lot more even easier, but I imagine that stuff was not available.)
... and the cyclists *still* beat them. Who knew?
Should folks learn these tools? Should folks educate themselves?
That's definitely a fair way of looking at the issue.
I certainly do install cygwin on Windows boxes rather than learn how to really use all the stuff that Windows has to offer natively ...
(I know how to use some of it, but ... for the more complicated stuff, I tend to do it in cygwin because it's easier.)
Most kids could probably figure out that the software is installed
Depends on the kids, and how good the software is at hiding.
I can provide a single data point: my kids. They spend hours and hours and hours on their phones and fewer (but still plenty) hours on computers, and yet they don't really have much of an understanding of how it all works -- they know how to use them well, but aren't really interested in going deeper.
So as long as any "big brother" kind of software made any effort at all to remain hidden, they'd probably never notice. At least until there were a few incidents where we (their parents) found out about stuff that there's no way we could have found out about them except for bugging their phones -- if that happened a few times, they'd put two and two together.
That said, I have little interest in babysitting them to that degree, but I think if I did ... they'd probably not notice, at least not at first. But eventually, they might figure out that something is going on if I didn't keep what was learned to myself.
Sorry, I should have been clearer: the first Lithium hybrid cars had serious issues. The manufacturers thought that the lithium batteries were simple drop in replacements for the NiMH and had them setup to trickle charge with the obvious results.
Such a mistake would be grade A incompetence on the part of the designers of the cars, and while your link does talk about lots of issues -- not a single one of those issues is attributed to trickle charging Li-ion cars.
I do not believe your claim that any electric or hybrid car manufacturer (let alone multiple manufacturers) actually thought that Lithium-Ion/LiPo/etc. batteries were a drop-in replacement for NiMH batteries and so they could still trickle charge them even when full. They would absolutely have to update their chargers to support the new chemistry -- this would not be optional. NiMH chargers would probably look for the slight dip in voltage when the battery was fully charged and Lithium-ion/LiPo batteries would have no such dip -- so it would keep charging at full power, at least until it triggered whatever other protective circuit was there. (Too high of voltage, battery temperature, etc.)
If they did do this, the "obvious results" you refer to would be that almost every car with this flaw would ruin the battery within the first few days of use -- and some would probably catch fire, probably while driving down the road (I'll assume they're not plug-in hybrids, but just ordinary hybrids. If they were plug-in hybrids, it would happen with them parked and charging too.)
I suspect that you already know this, but in case somebody else doesn't realize this ... lignux actually happened, sort of.
Not only was RMS suggesting that everybody call it "GNU/Linux", "GNU Linux" or a "Linux-based GNU system" ... but it was also "LiGNUx" or just "lignux" for short.
And he did more than just preach this, he applied it himself. For example, in 1996 or so if you compiled emacs (a GNU editor, witten by RMS himself) on your Linux system it would actually call the target "lignux" where previously it was just "linux".
Soon after he changed it to linux-gnu which was a good deal less awkward, and emacs is still using that today, though RMS personally generally calls it GNU/Linux now. (But the target name for emacs can't include a slash, so ... linux-gnu it is.)
To be fair, most or all of these applications will also run under Windows ... and you don't even need to use Linux-like environments like cygwin, though you certainly can do that too.
It would be hard to find a Linux distribution that doesn't use *anything* by GNU.
Even FreeBSD and OpenBSD have traditionally used gcc to do their compiling, though both are now moving to clang or have already done so ... and as I understand it this is mostly due to the GPL. Even outside of clang, OpenBSD uses a few GNU packages in their base system ... though they don't sound happy about it.
A shill gambit? I expected better from you.
Dude, it is very, very clear the term was not coined in 1998 -- it was already in common use for at least several years before.
Where Uber got *super* lucky is that the person that they hit was actually breaking the law by jaywalking.
Allegedly the car didn't even stop after the collision -- the human sitting in the driver's seat had to stop the car.
Given that the self-driving stuff probably relies on LIDAR to detect things like cyclists, it sounds like the system may not have even detected a cyclist riding down the road in the proper way with proper lighting as required by law and would have run them down. Had that been the case, there would be no "this collision was their fault" at all -- the fault would lie entirely with the self-driving car and its inattentive human sitting in the driver's seat.
That would have lead to a much larger settlement and hurt the self-driving car cause much more -- after all, given what really happened there's a large number of people saying "no human could have avoided that collision!" which is absolutely not true -- human eyes are way better than what that dashcam can see -- but people do still sort of believe that.
This is a case where I expected they wouldn't even get a letter of condolence, not only because of the circumstances but also because of who was involved (and who wasn't, namely the family).
If a human driver had had this collision with no dashcam showing them on the phone -- there would be no settlement.
In fact, the insurance company might sue the estate of the deceased for damages to the car if they thought there was some money to get.
But ... this case is different. The self-driving car that should have been able to trivially avoid this collision, the inattentive "driver" (and evidence to that effect), the self-driving computer that probably kept logs of every little part of its decision making, the "first fatality" part of it and the big company with deep pockets behind it all -- there's so much that would make this "not your typical jaywalking collision", and I imagine that lawyers would be falling over themselves to represent that family.
It's in Uber's interests to get this settled quickly so it can fade into history, and my guess is that they offered a substantial amount of cash to help that happen.
There's no need. Very few people need to run Linux within Windows, and even fewer will need to run X within Windows.
Besides, the "browser choice" thing was forced on them by the courts. That's not going to be done with X servers for the reason I just gave above.
All GUI applications for Linux are client-server, with the client (app) and X (server)
This is not true.
First, rudimentary graphics can be done with just text, and a number of applications do work that way. Or graphics can be rendered [in text](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s15eJ9WMfVg), (though yes, I do realize that that video was made of the game running under Windows.)
But beyond that, there certainly are plenty of Linux applications that talk directly to the graphics hardware without any sort of server.
If you want one that runs on the Linux side, you don't understand how this works.
People do lots of weird things with X servers -- there's Xvb, Xnest, LBX, etc. There may very well be some use case that somebody solves by running a Windows X server under Linux in some way (WINE? Virtualization?) -- I'm not going to second guess what they're doing without a lot more details.
Self driving cars have sensors that don't work good in heavy rain, heavy snow or bright sun, etc and aren't smart enough to stop driving when these error conditions happen
Just to be clear, the drivers of non self-driving driving cars also have sensors that have similar/related limitations, and they often aren't smart enough to stop driving (or even slow down) when these error conditions happen either.
Half-joking aside, autonomous cars have a tough task here -- they can't merely settle for being as good as humans, or even somewhat better than humans. They have to be *way better* than humans before they'll be allowed on the road by themselves en-masse -- anything less would find them banned in the legislatures (with these efforts driven largely by those who currently drive for a living and by those who are afraid of the encroaching technology, even if it is already driving better than humans) and would also find the companies making these self-driving cars getting hit with massive lawsuits everytime some thing goes wrong -- even if the car was not at fault and has logs to prove it. (The cars will almost certainly record every little detail, making forensic analysis of collisions more complete and more interesting. Not only will we critique what happened, but we'll critique the driver's thought process that lead up to it!)
Regarding the lawsuits, compare this to the mandatory insurance requirement most states have -- Texas has a minimum liability insurance requirement of $30k. If a human driver hits you (and if he's insured!) that only guarantees that he can pay $30k -- well, you can burn through $30k in one hour in the emergency room. This is how little we value injuries and deaths caused by motor vehicles -- we only mandate that the responsible party can pay up to $30k.
Of course, a self-driving car will have much deeper pockets behind it, and I'd expect lawsuits to be much larger than even those against commercial vehicles (driven by humans) -- so companies like Uber and Google need to have things way, way better than human drivers because the courts are going to punish them much more than they would punish humans. Maybe in the future, this will change, but this is how it will be for a while at least.
As for *this* fatal collision ... this could very well end up being the most carefully investigated traffic fatality ever, or at least more carefully investigated than any of a non-famous or political figure (like Princess Di's fatal collision.) That said, the car should have logged everything, making the investigation a lot easier -- and again ... a lot of that investigation will not just be about what happened, but what thought process (of the computer's) led up to that result, stuff that's not normally really gotten into in a (non-criminal) traffic fatality investigation with a human driver.
Hell ... oxygen is even poisonous to humans in high concentrations!
I live in Austin, and I do have to say that microtrenching is kind of nasty -- it's all over my neighborhood.
It "scars" the roads and leaves bumps that are getting worse over time as whatever it is that they used to fill them in gets pushed in more. It's not so noticeable in a car, but on a bicycle it is.
And I fear what might happen when they resurface the roads (which they do periodically.) If the fiber really is only an inch or two down, when they scrape off the top of the road it might tear up the fiber too? That would be a huge mess! That said, if it doesn't damage the fiber, resurfacing should fix the "bumpy/ugly" issue completely.
That said, disruptive or not ... I *love* my Google Fiber. Fast, reliable and even the TV service and hardware is good.
Google may have neutered the search interface, but it's still up to this particular job :
Just search for: "open source" before:1995/01/01
There's lots and lots of things that aren't what we're looking for -- but more than a few that are. Such as this from 1990 or this from 1989, or this from 1985, though this last one isn't about computer software -- but the idea is still very much the same.
You get the idea.
That 1985 reference is the earliest one I find in what Google has archived of Usenet.
The rules for a hobbyist UAV pilot are actually quite different.
There is no requirement that they get a weather briefing. (They ought to know what the weather is like, but there's no requirement to check.)
They are required to follow relevant TFRs.
They are *not* limited to 400 feet AGL -- that limit is advisory, not mandatory.
Here's the rules they do have to follow, and I guess there's the re-enabled registration requirement, and you'll need to pick some CBO guidelines to operate under -- the AMA safety code is a fine choice but it's not the only one.
This guy broke a few of these rules, but there's no rule prohibiting going over 400' AGL for a hobbyist -- that's advisory, but not mandatory.
Oh, I have a prescription already. With astigmatism and nearsightedness. And I get it updated every year or two.
A decade ago one prescription worked for everything. But now I'm needing reading glasses and the like, and I can adjust my prescription to cover that as well as the optometrist can -- just adjust the OS and OD values. Adding 1.5 to both values gives me reading glasses. +0.5 works well for the computer. +3.0 for *really* close-up work, and so on.
For my mom, I am talking straight reading glasses, yes. But with whatever frame she wants and whatever strength she wants, and they're no more expensive than if she buys something at Walmart.
Really, this entire "expose" is stupid -- "Alison Griswold" seems to be confused about what a "prescription" from a doctor is. Ultimately, it boils down to two things --
* A directive from your doctor to do something, and
* Possibly permission to do that thing.
A doctor can give you a prescription to get more exercise, or rest, or take aspirin or some other over the counter drug -- presumably, this will help with some medical condition. But these things don't require permission.
The doctor can also give you a prescription for Xanax or antibiotics or whatever else -- these drugs are controlled, and so the permission *is* required, and the prescription provides it as well as the instructions on how to take it.
But eyeglasses and contacts are not controlled, and there's no need for them to be. So there's no need for the companies selling them to verify prescriptions -- all the prescription is is what specifications are required, and if somebody wants to fake that or adjust that -- so be it.
This is one case where I don't want them verifying the prescription.
I buy glasses from Zenni Optical. I enter the numbers from the prescription into their web form, and two weeks later I get glasses. Cheap.
I want computer glasses? Add 0.50 to my correction figure. I want reading glasses? Add 1.50 to my correction figure. I want to make strong reading glasses for my mom, who doesn't normally need glasses at all? Just get her some glasses with "+3.00 0.00 0.00" prescriptions.
This isn't rocket science and there's no room to "abuse" this. Worse, if there's any sort of crackdown on this or change in the law to require that these prescriptions be vetted -- it's going to hit me with either increased costs or decreased flexibility, and probably both.
All civil, manned aircraft (not quite sure about ultralights etc...) all have a nationally assigned registration.
As you've guessed, ultralights do not require registration in the US and in fact the FAA doesn't seem consider them to be aircraft, but they've made it clear that unmanned aircraft are aircraft, no matter their size. ... which is kind of odd. I can take an ultralight and add an R/C receiver and servos and such to control it (basically turning it into a big R/C plane), and the FAA considers it to be an aircraft, but if somebody gets in it and flies it directly, it's not? And if it weighs more than 55 lbs, the FAA regulates it more heavily if it's R/C controlled than if it's controlled by a person in it.