I imagine they happen with some regularity at places where R/C and manned aircraft share the airspace -- for example, at Torrey Pines before R/C use was banned (not sure what the current status is.) Of course, nobody was arrested in those incidents and I don't even know that there were any injuries -- but there were some collisions.
isn't its 5,000 max for ultralight aircraft. anything above crosses into commercial.
You don't seem to have a clue what you're talking about.
The maximum weight for an ultralight in the US is 254 lbs.
As for commercial use, that depends on the use, not so much the plane. If you're getting paid to fly Cub (at around 1000 lbs) -- that's commercial and requires a commercial license. If you're just flying it for fun, no -- but you will need a private or sport pilot license for it.
Modern electric RC trainers like a slow stick are almost unbreakable.
A slow stick is very easy to break. It's relatively easy to fix as well, but it's far from "almost unbreakable".
A much more durable plane would be a foam flying wing like a Zagi -- motor in the back, foam everywhere else. That's much more likely to survive a hard crash than a slow stick.
As far as the FAA getting on people's case, it usually doesn't matter if it's a R/C plane or drone at all -- what matters is if the use is recreational or commercial.
In general an ultralight has to be under 254 lbs and there's some other limitations. And then you don't need a license to fly them, but they're still subject to many of the FAA regulations -- in particular about where they can fly.
Ducted fans are horribly inefficient for anything that is to hover. Using ducted fans would decrease the performance and/or increase the cost by a large margin.
They work better for high speed airplanes, but even then an exposed prop is more efficient.
the FAA forbids the operation of unmanned aerial vehicles over crowded areas such as Manhattan.
But that isn't really true.
A standard "line of sight" controlled R/C plane is an "unmanned aerial vehicle", but isn't explicitly banned from flying over crowded areas. Not by the FAA, anyways -- Manhattan might have regulations of their own, and it might be a controlled airspace which would complicate things -- but wouldn't automatically and completely ban use of such aircraft.
The "FAA Advisory Circular 91 57" basically says not to do so, but it's advisory -- it doesn't amount to a forbidding of such an action. The AMA regulations largely mirror what the circular says -- but it's just rules for a hobby association, and the only thing you lose by not adhering to them is you risk your membership and your insurance through the group (if you're a member, of course.)
This quadcopter may or may not have been an actual drone -- I don't know if it was autonomously controlled or not. Maybe it was just a standard R/C model flown in a crowded location, and just happened to have a camera on it? I'd expect a little more... precision from something that was flying itself. What seems more likely is that the pilot wasn't very experienced and lost track of the orientation of the craft. If so, he should have never tried to fly in such crowded conditions, at least until he got the hang of the quadcopter and maybe not even then.
Pretty handy for growing up in a slack-jawed yokel country who's politicians never let teachers adopt the metric system, but I digress...
Eh?
Politicians have never stopped teachers from teaching the metric system in this country, and schools have taught the metric system for decades starting at a young age.
But it's often taught in the context of science and while the students do learn enough about it to use it "in the real world" -- the US still doesn't use it for everyday things, and so they don't get practice using it and don't truly grow comfortable using it (unless they go into science) and as adults they still know the metric system but are more comfortable with the Imperial system and so don't really support laws to move more things to the metric system, and so things stay the same.
But certainly, it's not politicians "not letting teachers teach". And remember, today's politicians were yesterday's students.
Actually, I've already ditched Gnome. I liked Gnome 2, but so many of the features I liked and actually used were removed for Gnome 3 that I finally bit the bullet and just switched to XFCE. I miss some of the features of Gnome 2, but not Gnome 3.
And if I hadn't, removing middle button paste and not even making it an option would have run me off even faster. At least I spent some time trying to like Gnome 3 before giving up.
Seriously, they can have my middle mouse button paste when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
It's hypothetically possible that ISPs might be influenced to route traffic to physically pass through a NOC where taps are in place, the extra hops causing latency.
In that same vein, it may be that the NSA is equipped to record/decrypt certain types of data, but not others.
For example, suppose they could decrypt normal traffic just fine, but not VPN traffic. So to discourage VPN use, they make it unpractical for normal use by slowing it to 5% of the speed it should work at. They could break it entirely, but they want to remain covert, so they just slow it to a crawl.
The user knows that its still working -- so he doesn't set to "fix" it (either by using different ports, algorithms, providers, etc.) but instead tries to deal with it, then gives up, sending important data over unsecured lines that the covert government agency can easily capture/decrypt.
Now, all of this seems extremely unlikely -- but it's another hypothetical possibility.
Personally, I suspect his issues are much more mundane (overloaded lines, QoS slowing his VPN packets, etc.) and much less nefarious. But tracking such things down can be difficult.
Modern cameras are easy to detect and destroy without leaving any physical evidence. All you need is something capable of sending out a pulse of near-infrared light and then looking for the highest return signal. Visible light will work too, but since we're being sneaky and all. All digital reflect light in the same direction as it is received; an optical quality not found naturally.
Um, are you trying to say that digital cameras are retroreflectors? If so, they are not.
Now, it's possible that the sensor is -- though I've seen no evidence of this -- but don't forget that the sensor is generally behind some lenses and possibly a shutter.
I do recall a system being deployed in movie theaters designed to prevent filming of the movie with IR signals, but this doesn't require that a digital camera be retroreflective -- instead it just relies on the fact that digital cameras are sensitive to IR and our eyes are not. Using such a device it would be pretty easy to make pictures taken not come out (as long as the IR source was very close to what you're trying to protect) but it won't damage your camera unless it's so incredibly powerful that it's uncomfortable for humans to be near.
an optical quality not found naturally.
Um, yes it is. You mentioned cat's eyes already, but there are other things that exhibit this property naturally as well.
Just shoot a high power laser on a very short duration wherever this quality is found, and you'll burn out the CCD of any nearby digital camera. Be warned however; while this won't happen to humans, animals like cats have eyes which produce similar effect.
Yes, cats have retroreflective eyes.
But any laser strong enough to damage a camera CCD (especially through a closed shutter, or a camera not even pointed at the laser) will also damage human eyes. And cat eyes, though the retroreflective property isn't why.
I don't know where you're getting your information, but you seem to have misunderstood much of it.
should have noticed it well before it made it to print
Also, much peer review happens after it goes to print. After all, that's the purpose of printing it in the first place, to get it out to more people.
I'm not sure if the person who discovered this bit in the supplemental information is a "peer" or not -- but if so, it looks like peer review worked perfectly.
Please stop using the word 'lawyer' as some sort of substitute for 'wizard'. It's like when media reports use 'scientist'.
I don't know the protocol for wizards, but if you ask a rocket scientist for his thoughts on a new cancer treatment in a context where it's important that he be correct (i.e. not casual conversation), he'll tell you that he doesn't know (unless he really does know both fields -- rare but possible) and suggest you ask somebody else. He might even have somebody in mind.
Same goes for lawyers. Yes, they specialize in things -- they have to. If your business has a lawyer that handles most of your stuff, you can start with him. If it's over his head, he'll refer you to a lawyer that specializes in that area of law. If your lawyer (or wizard, rocket scientist or medical doctor) can't tell you when a question is outside the scope of what they know and refer you to somebody else, then they're not a very good one.
What if you're an online start-up, with little legal know-how? Are you really going to resist demands from such a high level?
If you have little legal know-how and are confronted with an important legal issue that could have serious ramifications if you screw it up, you consult with a lawyer.
If you are smart, this is always the case, be you a startup, a large company or an individual.
A small company probably won't have a lawyer on payroll, but certainly, they can still pick up the phone and call one. It'll cost some money, yes, but even small businesses need lawyers for lots of things, so the concept should not be foreign to them.
Now, if you're saying that "legal know-how" means knowing when an issue is important and could have serious ramifications, well, that doesn't require much skill. If you receive a demand from the government of any sort and it's not something you're familiar with, a quick consultation with a lawyer would be prudent. Especially if it just plain sounds wrong.
Now, your lawyer may very well advise you to just give them what they want, but still, asking him was the right thing to do.
A bigger problem is the gag orders that tend to come with these orders, where you can't even tell somebody that you received them. You can generally still consult with a lawyer, but even so, they really do fly in the face of the rights we used to think we have.
My phone did it's first Amber Alert a few months ago.
It was screaming in a tone that I had never heard before, louder than any noise the phone had ever made. It sounded like the fire alarm, but it was coming from my pocket. Scared the crap out of me, could have caused an accident had I been driving. Fortunately it was during the day, not while I was asleep. Another one happened the next day, and then I figured out how to kill the alerts and did so. If I could make it a quiet tone, then OK, but this terror beep? No, and it didn't seem to be configurable.
As for a few minutes of missing sleep, let's say it's five minutes. Multiply that times four million, and that's 38 years lost for an action that probably won't do anything to actually find the missing child. It does add up.
Actually, the cost is greater than that, as disrupting people's sleep causes them to sleep poorly, and they may drive more poorly the next day, do their job more poorly, etc. It could possibly cause fatal accidents, etc. It's quite possible that by alerting everybody about this missing child, they've actually caused a few deaths.
In cases of works made for hire, the employer or commissioning party is considered to be the author
... is considered to be the author for purposes of copyright law. The employer owns the code.
HOWEVER, that doesn't mean they sat down and wrote it. They paid somebody else to do it. It depends on how you define "author". There's a legal definition for the purposes of copyright law, but that's not really the one that applies here.
Really, in the OP's case, I'm surprised this is such a big deal. It sounds like the company in question didn't do anything legally wrong, and the OP was being truthful as well, and so the OP should just say "well, they paid me to write it, I wrote it, then I guess they took my name off and put their name on it". For purposes of showcasing his skills that should be just as good.
And really, having that come up in an interview seems unusual. I guess somebody didn't believe what was on his resume and looked into it, and then was looking forward to confronting him about it in the interview?
The proper response would be what I said before, and if there's any question after that, ask the interviewer how he'd like you to prove it. He really shouldn't doubt what you said at all (after all, it would be a mighty blatant lie at that point -- the interviewer was probably more expecting some backpedalling), but if he does, and he has the skills to ask questions about it, have him do so.
You aren't seriously suggesting that we replace timezone data with DNS lookups, are you?
TZ data does change often -- the summary itself says 4-6 times a year -- but not nearly often enough that doing it via DNS or anything similar makes sense. And not every application has 100% Internet access -- many have 0%, and even those that usually have access don't have it 100% of the time (but instead 99.999...%).
DNS doesn't have a provision for "well, I had data, but it's a few days out of date, and I can't seem to refresh it, so here's the old data" that I'm aware of. A small change could be made to enable that, where each JVM basically works as a slave of the TZ master zone, but really -- it's using a grenade to kill an ant.
In this specific case, the fix is likely to be for somebody to write a tool to import the TZ updates from the formats that it is available in (such as the ones used by *nix systems) into the one used by the Sun/BEA (now both Oracle) javas and insert it.
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That said: This hasn't been a problem. I know of no cases of RC to full sized aviation mid-airs.
Here's one for you.
I imagine they happen with some regularity at places where R/C and manned aircraft share the airspace -- for example, at Torrey Pines before R/C use was banned (not sure what the current status is.) Of course, nobody was arrested in those incidents and I don't even know that there were any injuries -- but there were some collisions.
isn't its 5,000 max for ultralight aircraft. anything above crosses into commercial.
You don't seem to have a clue what you're talking about.
The maximum weight for an ultralight in the US is 254 lbs.
As for commercial use, that depends on the use, not so much the plane. If you're getting paid to fly Cub (at around 1000 lbs) -- that's commercial and requires a commercial license. If you're just flying it for fun, no -- but you will need a private or sport pilot license for it.
Those rules are simple. We stay under 400ft.
There is no such rule for R/C planes.
FAA advisory circular 91 57 suggests that, but it's not a rule -- that's why it's called "advisory".
The AMA rules (not law, but we can call them rules) say stay under 400 feet if you're close to an airport, unless you coordinate with the airport.
Most powered R/C flights are indeed under 400 feet, but glider pilots break that ceiling with every good flight.
Modern electric RC trainers like a slow stick are almost unbreakable.
A slow stick is very easy to break. It's relatively easy to fix as well, but it's far from "almost unbreakable".
A much more durable plane would be a foam flying wing like a Zagi -- motor in the back, foam everywhere else. That's much more likely to survive a hard crash than a slow stick.
As far as the FAA getting on people's case, it usually doesn't matter if it's a R/C plane or drone at all -- what matters is if the use is recreational or commercial.
FAA regs specifically mention AMA rules. So yes, they are included in FAA regs.
Citation required.
Show me where the FAA regulations specifically mention AMA rules and give them the weight of law. (And no, Advisory circular 91 57 isn't it.)
Most single engine planes are under 5k lbs.
In general an ultralight has to be under 254 lbs and there's some other limitations. And then you don't need a license to fly them, but they're still subject to many of the FAA regulations -- in particular about where they can fly.
Ducted fans are horribly inefficient for anything that is to hover. Using ducted fans would decrease the performance and/or increase the cost by a large margin.
They work better for high speed airplanes, but even then an exposed prop is more efficient.
Well, they also literally break their penis off in the queen if they're lucky :)
the FAA forbids the operation of unmanned aerial vehicles over crowded areas such as Manhattan.
But that isn't really true.
A standard "line of sight" controlled R/C plane is an "unmanned aerial vehicle", but isn't explicitly banned from flying over crowded areas. Not by the FAA, anyways -- Manhattan might have regulations of their own, and it might be a controlled airspace which would complicate things -- but wouldn't automatically and completely ban use of such aircraft.
The "FAA Advisory Circular 91 57" basically says not to do so, but it's advisory -- it doesn't amount to a forbidding of such an action. The AMA regulations largely mirror what the circular says -- but it's just rules for a hobby association, and the only thing you lose by not adhering to them is you risk your membership and your insurance through the group (if you're a member, of course.)
This quadcopter may or may not have been an actual drone -- I don't know if it was autonomously controlled or not. Maybe it was just a standard R/C model flown in a crowded location, and just happened to have a camera on it? I'd expect a little more ... precision from something that was flying itself. What seems more likely is that the pilot wasn't very experienced and lost track of the orientation of the craft. If so, he should have never tried to fly in such crowded conditions, at least until he got the hang of the quadcopter and maybe not even then.
Pretty handy for growing up in a slack-jawed yokel country who's politicians never let teachers adopt the metric system, but I digress...
Eh?
Politicians have never stopped teachers from teaching the metric system in this country, and schools have taught the metric system for decades starting at a young age.
But it's often taught in the context of science and while the students do learn enough about it to use it "in the real world" -- the US still doesn't use it for everyday things, and so they don't get practice using it and don't truly grow comfortable using it (unless they go into science) and as adults they still know the metric system but are more comfortable with the Imperial system and so don't really support laws to move more things to the metric system, and so things stay the same.
But certainly, it's not politicians "not letting teachers teach". And remember, today's politicians were yesterday's students.
Actually, I've already ditched Gnome. I liked Gnome 2, but so many of the features I liked and actually used were removed for Gnome 3 that I finally bit the bullet and just switched to XFCE. I miss some of the features of Gnome 2, but not Gnome 3.
And if I hadn't, removing middle button paste and not even making it an option would have run me off even faster. At least I spent some time trying to like Gnome 3 before giving up.
Seriously, they can have my middle mouse button paste when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
and I can not recall ever seeing any RC person doing that.
Line judges in R/C pylon races wear helmets or hard hats.
Pilots usually do not, however -- the risks are not large enough to justify them. That said, this situation shows us that they are not zero.
It's hypothetically possible that ISPs might be influenced to route traffic to physically pass through a NOC where taps are in place, the extra hops causing latency.
In that same vein, it may be that the NSA is equipped to record/decrypt certain types of data, but not others.
For example, suppose they could decrypt normal traffic just fine, but not VPN traffic. So to discourage VPN use, they make it unpractical for normal use by slowing it to 5% of the speed it should work at. They could break it entirely, but they want to remain covert, so they just slow it to a crawl.
The user knows that its still working -- so he doesn't set to "fix" it (either by using different ports, algorithms, providers, etc.) but instead tries to deal with it, then gives up, sending important data over unsecured lines that the covert government agency can easily capture/decrypt.
Now, all of this seems extremely unlikely -- but it's another hypothetical possibility.
Personally, I suspect his issues are much more mundane (overloaded lines, QoS slowing his VPN packets, etc.) and much less nefarious. But tracking such things down can be difficult.
Modern cameras are easy to detect and destroy without leaving any physical evidence. All you need is something capable of sending out a pulse of near-infrared light and then looking for the highest return signal. Visible light will work too, but since we're being sneaky and all. All digital reflect light in the same direction as it is received; an optical quality not found naturally.
Um, are you trying to say that digital cameras are retroreflectors? If so, they are not.
Now, it's possible that the sensor is -- though I've seen no evidence of this -- but don't forget that the sensor is generally behind some lenses and possibly a shutter.
I do recall a system being deployed in movie theaters designed to prevent filming of the movie with IR signals, but this doesn't require that a digital camera be retroreflective -- instead it just relies on the fact that digital cameras are sensitive to IR and our eyes are not. Using such a device it would be pretty easy to make pictures taken not come out (as long as the IR source was very close to what you're trying to protect) but it won't damage your camera unless it's so incredibly powerful that it's uncomfortable for humans to be near.
an optical quality not found naturally.
Um, yes it is. You mentioned cat's eyes already, but there are other things that exhibit this property naturally as well.
Just shoot a high power laser on a very short duration wherever this quality is found, and you'll burn out the CCD of any nearby digital camera. Be warned however; while this won't happen to humans, animals like cats have eyes which produce similar effect.
Yes, cats have retroreflective eyes.
But any laser strong enough to damage a camera CCD (especially through a closed shutter, or a camera not even pointed at the laser) will also damage human eyes. And cat eyes, though the retroreflective property isn't why.
I don't know where you're getting your information, but you seem to have misunderstood much of it.
but U-238 has a half-life of 4.5 * 10^9 years.
So you're saying we've got some time?
You know what else has a similar half life? Potassium-40, at 1.25 billion years. The average human body has about 160 grams of potassium, hence about 0.000117 x 160 = 0.0187 grams of 40K; whose decay produces about 4,400 disintegrations per second (becquerels) continuously throughout the life of the body..
But at least potassium isn't quite so nasty chemically as uranium. We have a lot more to fear from U-238's chemical properties than its radioactivity.
should have noticed it well before it made it to print
Also, much peer review happens after it goes to print. After all, that's the purpose of printing it in the first place, to get it out to more people.
I'm not sure if the person who discovered this bit in the supplemental information is a "peer" or not -- but if so, it looks like peer review worked perfectly.
Please stop using the word 'lawyer' as some sort of substitute for 'wizard'. It's like when media reports use 'scientist'.
I don't know the protocol for wizards, but if you ask a rocket scientist for his thoughts on a new cancer treatment in a context where it's important that he be correct (i.e. not casual conversation), he'll tell you that he doesn't know (unless he really does know both fields -- rare but possible) and suggest you ask somebody else. He might even have somebody in mind.
Same goes for lawyers. Yes, they specialize in things -- they have to. If your business has a lawyer that handles most of your stuff, you can start with him. If it's over his head, he'll refer you to a lawyer that specializes in that area of law. If your lawyer (or wizard, rocket scientist or medical doctor) can't tell you when a question is outside the scope of what they know and refer you to somebody else, then they're not a very good one.
What if you're an online start-up, with little legal know-how? Are you really going to resist demands from such a high level?
If you have little legal know-how and are confronted with an important legal issue that could have serious ramifications if you screw it up, you consult with a lawyer.
If you are smart, this is always the case, be you a startup, a large company or an individual.
A small company probably won't have a lawyer on payroll, but certainly, they can still pick up the phone and call one. It'll cost some money, yes, but even small businesses need lawyers for lots of things, so the concept should not be foreign to them.
Now, if you're saying that "legal know-how" means knowing when an issue is important and could have serious ramifications, well, that doesn't require much skill. If you receive a demand from the government of any sort and it's not something you're familiar with, a quick consultation with a lawyer would be prudent. Especially if it just plain sounds wrong.
Now, your lawyer may very well advise you to just give them what they want, but still, asking him was the right thing to do.
A bigger problem is the gag orders that tend to come with these orders, where you can't even tell somebody that you received them. You can generally still consult with a lawyer, but even so, they really do fly in the face of the rights we used to think we have.
My phone did it's first Amber Alert a few months ago.
It was screaming in a tone that I had never heard before, louder than any noise the phone had ever made. It sounded like the fire alarm, but it was coming from my pocket. Scared the crap out of me, could have caused an accident had I been driving. Fortunately it was during the day, not while I was asleep. Another one happened the next day, and then I figured out how to kill the alerts and did so. If I could make it a quiet tone, then OK, but this terror beep? No, and it didn't seem to be configurable.
As for a few minutes of missing sleep, let's say it's five minutes. Multiply that times four million, and that's 38 years lost for an action that probably won't do anything to actually find the missing child. It does add up.
Actually, the cost is greater than that, as disrupting people's sleep causes them to sleep poorly, and they may drive more poorly the next day, do their job more poorly, etc. It could possibly cause fatal accidents, etc. It's quite possible that by alerting everybody about this missing child, they've actually caused a few deaths.
With any luck the next President will be from the sensible party
Which party is the sensible party again?
In the U.S.
In cases of works made for hire, the employer or commissioning party is considered to be the author
... is considered to be the author for purposes of copyright law. The employer owns the code.
HOWEVER, that doesn't mean they sat down and wrote it. They paid somebody else to do it. It depends on how you define "author". There's a legal definition for the purposes of copyright law, but that's not really the one that applies here.
Really, in the OP's case, I'm surprised this is such a big deal. It sounds like the company in question didn't do anything legally wrong, and the OP was being truthful as well, and so the OP should just say "well, they paid me to write it, I wrote it, then I guess they took my name off and put their name on it". For purposes of showcasing his skills that should be just as good.
And really, having that come up in an interview seems unusual. I guess somebody didn't believe what was on his resume and looked into it, and then was looking forward to confronting him about it in the interview?
The proper response would be what I said before, and if there's any question after that, ask the interviewer how he'd like you to prove it. He really shouldn't doubt what you said at all (after all, it would be a mighty blatant lie at that point -- the interviewer was probably more expecting some backpedalling), but if he does, and he has the skills to ask questions about it, have him do so.
I wonder if this is related to the problem BBC found with providing a time-zone accurate data to global users.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/06/06/012207/bbc-clock-inaccurate---100-days-to-fix
It would not be related.
The TZ updates have been available up until now, and the BBC could just get a support contract if that was the problem.
There might be some risk associated with providing a time service accurate everywhere, when you can't possibly know how the users depend on it ...
Absolutely.
You aren't seriously suggesting that we replace timezone data with DNS lookups, are you?
TZ data does change often -- the summary itself says 4-6 times a year -- but not nearly often enough that doing it via DNS or anything similar makes sense. And not every application has 100% Internet access -- many have 0%, and even those that usually have access don't have it 100% of the time (but instead 99.999...%).
DNS doesn't have a provision for "well, I had data, but it's a few days out of date, and I can't seem to refresh it, so here's the old data" that I'm aware of. A small change could be made to enable that, where each JVM basically works as a slave of the TZ master zone, but really -- it's using a grenade to kill an ant.
In this specific case, the fix is likely to be for somebody to write a tool to import the TZ updates from the formats that it is available in (such as the ones used by *nix systems) into the one used by the Sun/BEA (now both Oracle) javas and insert it.
The 5th Amendment is not a tool for the guilty, but for the innocent.
More realistically, it's a tool for both.
Properly applied, it's kept many an innocent man (or woman) out of jail -- and many a guilty man as well.
Not taking advantage of the right has sent quite a few guilty people to jail -- and more than a few innocent people as well.