Christopher Wray should be put in prison. It is illegal to attempt to crack someone else's encrypted data without their consent.
Silly person, laws only apply to the little people. I'd have thought the last couple of decades, especially the last decade, in US politics would've made that clear to even the most dense.
"Law for thee, not for me."
The Rule of Law in the US is a Norwegian Blue pining for the fjords. It wouldn't 'voom' if you put fifty thousand volts through it.
The dudeâ(TM)s a billionaire. Heâ(TM)s obviously not exactly suffering due to the persecution from the repressive Chinese government - sounds like heâ(TM)s more of a gadfly than a dissident.
So if you're not poor and/or personally oppressed (maybe you were lucky enough/smart enough to escape?), then you have no right to oppose corruption/oppression occurring in your own birth-country?
Can you break down the qualifiers for these various social classes and their respective rights/responsibilities/entitlements, please? We need a handy guide so we don't overstep our class privilege and speak out of turn, and thus possibly disrespect our class betters.
Perhaps YouTube will reverse this darksided decision.
It all depends on who is appointed/gains power in China and therefor how much continued or even ramped up pressure Google receives from Chinese leadership. It's possible Google might reverse their decision after the politically-sensitive Chinese appointments are concluded, but I would not lay great odds on that occurring. Particularly if those officials revealed as corrupt in those videos gain/retain power. Google has discarded taking either the high ground or the low ground and is taking the "amoral ground" and hedging their bets because they can.
The irony here is that even if they put a gun to everyones heads and forced them to ruin encryptions' value by compromising it with 'backdoors' (that anyone would eventually be able to discover and leverage) criminals and terrorists would not just use non-compromised encryption (copied from before the ban on 'real' encryption), they'd use codebooks and other types of obfuscation (book ciphers, and so on; the list is endless) that have been used for much longer than we've had computers, and goverments and cops would be back at Square One again: needing to do REAL police work, not just be jackbooted thugs with guns forcing their will on everyone. Are they really so blind to all this, or is it just another power-grab?
Of course it's another power-grab. That's almost a given for almost everything Western governments are trying to implement in the encryption/security field. The mistake here is in assuming they're telling us the truth when they tell us they will use it exclusively against criminals & terrorists instead of mostly as another general domestic surveillance tool for politically/ideologically-driven motives.
They know as well as we do that real terrorists and criminals will simply use other secure methods. They are simply the cover-story poster-boys for propaganda purposes. Western leaders could not care less about a few hundred or thousand people dying from the occasional terrorist attack, it's the ability of law-abiding, peaceful people being able to organize effectively...without government snooping/interference...in order to change their governments/laws along with the ability of whistle-blowers to reveal government lies & criminality that scares the shit out of them, and is what they ultimately seek to destroy.
The problem with it is the fact that it calls home to Russia with data about the system(s) it runs on. Kasperski's own web page says this.
Relations between the west and Russia have soured a bit, and people like Obama and Clinton and other war mongers have been pushing for a conflict with Russia. It's not a big stretch of imagination that a Russian General would utilize kasperski's AV software to deploy a Stuxnet type code on U.S. systems if a military conflict came about.
We can't take that chance
Russians have no particular interest in me, pose no threat to me personally, and cannot throw me in prison. My own government, on the other hand, incarcerates a huge percentage of the population and poses a significant and local threat to my life & freedom and have also been shown to use illegal/unconstitutional methods and practices to achieve their goals. They are actually *more* criminal than those stealing CC details.
I have far more to fear from the US government than from the Russians.
Apparently they didn't have Tor or Bitcoin in 2015, so that explains why the ransomware industry grew from $24 million to over a billion in 2016!
And it couldn't have anything at all to do with the leaks of hacking tools/exploits/vulnerabilities from the NSA whose job is supposedly to help keep the US secure.
There are more than DJI drones involved if ADS-B is required,
The models of drones that are being discussed here ALL fly at much lower altitudes than the flight levels, and at the altitudes they DO fly at, jets are limited to 200 knots.
That's the point...there are more drones involved than what are being discussed here that would be affected by such a blanket requirement.
and there's little to prevent a UAV operator from sending the UAV as high as it can go, possibly placing it in general airspace.
You mean nothing but the 400 foot limit, which I believe DJI, for one, tries to enforce.
Again, there are more than DJI drones involved here, including home-builts without any restrictions whatsoever except the builder's ability & budget.
Even at 200 knots with a reduced-power ADS-B drone transmitter
Who says it will be "reduced power"? It's well within technical capability to meet the 7 watt minimum.
That 7 watts is transmitter output power, not consumed power. Even with a very efficient final power amplifier, it's going to need at least 10-11 watts or more, and that's for *just* the final transmitter output stage, not including signal generation and driver stages for the final amplifier stage. That's a serious amount of power drain for a small drone and will seriously reduce flight endurance and performance.
There is also signal blockage from ground clutter
Not if you are up high enough that the 200 knot speed limit no longer applies.
At lower altitudes ground clutter has even more of an effect as the signal 'horizon' is that much nearer for the aircraft as well as the UAV. How much effect it will have on effective detection distances versus aicraft speed and effective warning time for avoidance will need to be tested.
Decades of avionics experience hasn't taught you that electronics systems shrink in size over time. And experience in avionics apparently means no experience in Google. I posted a link to one portable ADS-B out system already, pretty small, pretty light, but only prevented from being used by FAA regulations. Mandating ADS-B OUT for UAV would include, you realize I hope, a rescinding of the prohibition on their use. That's the rule making that needs to be done.
Size does not change basic electrical rules. A 7 watt transmitter will draw effectively the same amount of power regardless of physical size. The reason for the rules specifying minimum ADS-B-out transmitter power is to ensure there is sufficient range. Reducing the power reduces the range. Placing a ~900-1000mHz signal source at a very low altitude also greatly reduces effective range. Add ground clutter for even more range reduction.
As to your link, I thought you said that a full 7-watt ADS-B-out transmitter was "easily accommodated"? Which is it?
The ADS-B system was never designed with extreme low-altitude vehicles in mind and is a poor tool for the job in practical terms.
Or we could, you know, *not* go apeshit-authoritarian trying to track & trace toy quadrotors that have caused zero fatalities from collisions with aircraft, and those being more rare than a Nessy-sighting, and most reports being equally unverifiable.
There are far more dangerous things to worry about out there, ladders and bathtubs being two big ones.
That may sound like a lot, but at jet-aircraft speeds, 20 miles goes by in a few seconds.
Jet aircraft are limited to 200 knots in the altitudes that a UAV will be flying, at least the DJI model UAV.
There are more than DJI drones involved if ADS-B is required, and there's little to prevent a UAV operator from sending the UAV as high as it can go, possibly placing it in general airspace. Even at 200 knots with a reduced-power ADS-B drone transmitter and reduced range, that could still present a short time window for an aircraft to react. There is also signal blockage from ground clutter that brings the effective 'signal horizon' much closer. A weaker ADS-B-out transmitter would only exacerbate the effect.
The other limitation is with other aircraft's antennas & ADS-B receivers being designed around receiving signals from 7-watt and above transmitters.
Ummm, what? What difference does it make to the antenna if the 7 watt ADSB signal comes from a UAV or a manned aircraft?
That statement is in relation to a low-powered ADS-B transmitter for small UAVs unable to reasonably accommodate a standard ADS-B-out package.
Suffice it to say there's a significant amount of engineering and research, not to mention FAA rule-making/standards-defining, to be done before it's ready for hobby-drone prime-time.
The engineering has already been done, and the only rule-making the FAA needs to do is to mandate it for UAV above a certain minimum weight.
I'm sorry, but as someone with decades of experience in the avionics field, I don't believe that is true.
Seems like an exception for low power use would be easy, something pumping out half a watt to a watt would likely be visible for several miles to make nearby aircraft aware,
According to the document I linked to, intended minimum a/c-to-a/c range is 20 miles. That may sound like a lot, but at jet-aircraft speeds, 20 miles goes by in a few seconds. The other limitation is with other aircraft's antennas & ADS-B receivers being designed around receiving signals from 7-watt and above transmitters.
Suffice it to say there's a significant amount of engineering and research, not to mention FAA rule-making/standards-defining, to be done before it's ready for hobby-drone prime-time.
Why not just require all drones to have an ADS-B transmitter on them? The protocol is stupid simple could probably be done in software on the drone's microcontroller and then tack a 1,090 MHz transmitter onto some GPIO pins.
Old avionics guy here. One reason that would make it difficult is that an FAA-standards-compliant ADS-B transmitter would use quite a bit of power (7 watts is minimum ADS-B pulse transmitter output power, so greater than 7 watts) relative to most small drones and add a not-insignificant amount of weight/mass to the drone as well as additional power requirements. I'm not even sure it would be possible to equip the smaller drones with ADS-B Out capability to meet current FAA standards and still have the drones anywhere near the same relatively-small size/mass they currently are. Maybe it's possible with new battery/chip tech, but I don't have time to research it properly.
It might also be done with new FAA rules specifying special lower-power ADS-B specs specifically for drones below a certain size/weight but that would take time, political will, and a lot of money, not including the costs to either retrofit older drones or replace them outright if a retrofit is not possible. Also, a lower power ADS-B signal means the range is drastically reduced and thus the system's usefulness/effectiveness.
Problems will come with trying to enforce this, as it will still be extremely hard to track down owners of non-compliant drones. Typically, this sort of enforcement problem is dealt with by legislating severe punishments like lengthy minimum prison sentences for anyone they do catch, as a deterrent to others. Instead of 20-year prison sentences for possession of a joint, it will be 20 years for operating a non-compliant drone. Say bye-bye to Daddy, Junior. He flew a drone the government couldn't easily track. You'll get to see him again about the time you start experiencing male-pattern baldness, but at least you won't be killed by a DJI drone in the meantime!
For at least the past 6 decades in the US, the term "liberal" has had a radically-different meaning to the old traditional "liberal" as in "libertarian" meaning.
Only in the fantasies of right-wingers who strive to redefine anything to the left of them to be double-plus ungood.
So current-day US "liberals" believe in Libertarian principles of small central government and minimal regulation and interference in general by the government?
#IDon'tThinkSo
Better check the date on those definitions of yours, that one is about 60 years past it's 'best used by' date.
And BTW, have you actually looked up the word liberal in a dictionary? It doesn't mean what you desperately want it to mean.
For at least the past 6 decades in the US, the term "liberal" has had a radically-different meaning to the old traditional "liberal" as in "libertarian" meaning.
In the US a "Liberal" is about as "liberal"-as-in-libertarian as the DPRK is democratic. US "liberals" are mostly "Progressives" who hijacked the term after their collectivist policies totally failed both in practice and in winning any significant support at the voting booths in the early-1900s, and leadership is mainly composed of a mix of socialists and communists by either their own declarations or their actions.
I fould find all of this to be a lot more credible if Musk was seriously interested in the moon rather than just posing it as a stepping-stone to Mars or a means of addressing current objections.
Personally, I believe Musk is trying to find, promote, and harness a vision for the greater public which excites enough broad interest to get something...anything....going manned-space-exploration/colonization-wise. For the scale of Musk's space ambitions, he needs a grand vision to capture the imaginations and hopes of a very large number of people. You don't get that sort of mass-appeal with plans involving tiny micro-steps and cautious, moderate goals determined by an extremely risk-averse organization.
An even bigger problem is that there is no reason to establish a "colony" on Mars.
One reason to work to establish self-sustaining colonies is the simple fact that at present, humans are one decent-sized asteroid impact (or any massively-cataclysmic event) away from total extinction. Perhaps that means nothing to Nihilists, but most average people would opine that humans not going extinct would be a net-positive.
There's another, even more-important reason. It's because humans *need* to explore, expand, and colonize new places. They need a vast frontier to explore and expand into where those types of people who do not fit into a regulated, controlled, ruled society can escape to. That's how it's been for most of human history up until the last few hundred years, but there's vanishingly-little unexplored today and nowhere beyond the reach of any number of nations/governments/powers. People used to be able to "start over" in new lands, escape overly-oppressive regimes, and bad life-choices, where today computers never forget you or anything about you, and biometrics will reveal you to authorities. Humans behave much the same as rats when they are forced into massively-overcrowded conditions; they grow violent.
Humans also need a common goal around which to unite and work towards to minimize conflict. I'd love to see people around the world working together to explore and colonize. At the very least, it would eventually move many future real-estate and resource battles largely off-planet.
There are also resources out there, just drifting along in random elliptical orbits, of a variety of basic compositions & sizes, just waiting for someone to attach a small robot steering thruster-set to one already on a convenient path and 'park' it in orbit for convenient assimilation somewhere, all outside of those nasty & expensive gravity-wells aka planets.
For that matter, it would probably be easier to build giant orbiting colonies at Earth/Moon La Grange points, and later move on to Mars & beyond. It could provide the orbiting infrastructure for such a large undertaking and the facilities and orbital resources/processing/manufacturing to keep a Mars colony supplied until it achieved self-sufficiency. I could even see building one orbiting colony at an Earth/Moon La Grange point plus another in the Mars/Deimos/Phobos system (however, just for the record I strongly caution against putting any organization in charge with the initials 'UAC').
The whole "Russia!" scare the MSM and Democrats are pushing is really embarassing at this point and is only serving to distract officials from conducting actual government and intelligence work, while they continue on this wild goose chase, or witch hunt, or whatever you want to call it.
How about 'wild-goose-riding-witch hunt'?
Agreed. Sadly, the US Left seems determined to jump that Russian shark at the nation's expense.
Looks like we even broke Slashdot for a few days.:) My druthers would be to send Bush and Obama to the Hague, end illegal spying & civil forfeiture, then we can go argue amongst ourselves about the merits of capitalism and workers owning the means of production. Cheers.
Agreed, except for sending them to the Hague. Heck, the EUrocrats might put them in charge, since some of the largest EU nations are '5-eyes' members!
Leavenworth and/or possibly a firing-squad sounds better to me. Have a good weekend.
If there are a sufficient number of individuals among 'The People' who share a common opinion/view that the SCOTUS is getting it wrong and should be abolished, they can amend the Constitution and disband the SCOTUS.
Oh come on. They've done that three times this week already.
Oh wait, they haven't. Ever.
No. *You* "oh come on". That's disingenuous and you disappoint me in going there, as you usually have much better arguments.
There are plenty of provisions in the US Constitution that have never been done "ever" like calling up the unorganized militia, holding a Convention of States, etc etc etc. That does not mean they are irrelevant. Many things laid out in the Constitution are of the "break glass in case of emergency" category but are nevertheless perfectly valid and cromulent.
Actually, he doesn't. "The People" doesn't just consist of him and people who think like him.
Nice strawman you've built, there.
Please cite where I said any one of 'The People's' individual opinions mattered more or less than others.
If there are a sufficient number of individuals among 'The People' who share a common opinion/view that the SCOTUS is getting it wrong and should be abolished, they can amend the Constitution and disband the SCOTUS. They could even abolish the current government altogether if they had a sufficiently-large majority. Therefor 'The People' are the final arbiters of what is and is not Constitutional.
You seems to be confusing how the law *is* with how you think it *should be*. You're certainly entitled to that opinion, but yours carries no weight; SCOTUS' does.
Actually, as a member of 'The People' his (and others in the same group) opinions weigh *more* than that of the SCOTUS.
The People are the final arbiters of Constitutionality, not the SCOTUS, Congress, the POTUS, nor TLAs.
The preceding was paid for by the Pedophiles for ShanghaiBill election committee.
I thought he was only supported by Nazis and the KKK?
No, that's probably me you're thinking of, at least according to many Leftist Slashdot A/Cs & trolls without any history, logic, or facts with which to refute my posts.:D
Did they also forbid to change anything when better ideas come up, because all I hear is how people who have died 200 years ago had a good idea.
Changes are made by amending the US Constitution. Adding an amendment requires a 2/3rds-majority of the States voting in favor.
I hear it in such a way that it sounds as if since then no smart people where born.
It's simply that those in positions of power in the US know they cannot persuade the people in 2/3rds of the States that they need to surrender even more powers, liberties, & control to the Federal Government, and so they seek to work around Constitutional restrictions on government power with Solipsistic redefining of words and similar dishonest tactics. Tactics used to suborn one Amendment will also work on others which some may hold more dear. Such tactics undermine the Constitution as a whole and thus the protections against government tyranny and oppression.
Except we don't have a democracy in the US. We have a corporate state similar to fascism. Corporations have captured the government and run it for their benefit. Actual voters are irrelevant.
"The only winning move is not to play."
The US Founding Fathers knew this in the 1700s and is the reason they wrote the US Constitution to severely restrict the central government every way they could.
They knew that a large, powerful government inevitably becomes corrupt & tyrannical because of basic human nature, as it is simply too good a target for the power-seeking, criminal, and corrupt elements of any society.
It's the same basic concept in regards to computer network security in that a central computer serving 'dumb terminals' is a simpler system to suborn/corrupt than a network of individual computers, each with their own security systems to defeat.
People who want a large, powerful government capable of providing for their food, medicine, education, employment, and personal safety that is not corrupt, authoritarian, and elitist, want what has never been and will never be.
>merely by asserting that they think maybe that person had committed a crime. But they aren't asserting that the person commited the crime. They are asserting the items were criminal or were bought with proceeds that were criminals.
See, the item commited the crime. Not the person. The Bill of Rights is fuzzy with regards to a thing's rights.
I agree, it's BS and I would hope some Supreme Court in the future will seal this up.
Slashdot Mirror
Christopher Wray should be put in prison. It is illegal to attempt to crack someone else's encrypted data without their consent.
Silly person, laws only apply to the little people. I'd have thought the last couple of decades, especially the last decade, in US politics would've made that clear to even the most dense.
"Law for thee, not for me."
The Rule of Law in the US is a Norwegian Blue pining for the fjords. It wouldn't 'voom' if you put fifty thousand volts through it.
It's dead, Jim.
Strat
Wow, that's not Orwellian at all.
Strat
The dudeâ(TM)s a billionaire. Heâ(TM)s obviously not exactly suffering due to the persecution from the repressive Chinese government - sounds like heâ(TM)s more of a gadfly than a dissident.
So if you're not poor and/or personally oppressed (maybe you were lucky enough/smart enough to escape?), then you have no right to oppose corruption/oppression occurring in your own birth-country?
Can you break down the qualifiers for these various social classes and their respective rights/responsibilities/entitlements, please? We need a handy guide so we don't overstep our class privilege and speak out of turn, and thus possibly disrespect our class betters.
TIA
Strat
Perhaps YouTube will reverse this darksided decision.
It all depends on who is appointed/gains power in China and therefor how much continued or even ramped up pressure Google receives from Chinese leadership. It's possible Google might reverse their decision after the politically-sensitive Chinese appointments are concluded, but I would not lay great odds on that occurring. Particularly if those officials revealed as corrupt in those videos gain/retain power. Google has discarded taking either the high ground or the low ground and is taking the "amoral ground" and hedging their bets because they can.
Strat
...I, for one, welcome our Chinese internet overlords.
Strat
The irony here is that even if they put a gun to everyones heads and forced them to ruin encryptions' value by compromising it with 'backdoors' (that anyone would eventually be able to discover and leverage) criminals and terrorists would not just use non-compromised encryption (copied from before the ban on 'real' encryption), they'd use codebooks and other types of obfuscation (book ciphers, and so on; the list is endless) that have been used for much longer than we've had computers, and goverments and cops would be back at Square One again: needing to do REAL police work, not just be jackbooted thugs with guns forcing their will on everyone. Are they really so blind to all this, or is it just another power-grab?
Of course it's another power-grab. That's almost a given for almost everything Western governments are trying to implement in the encryption/security field. The mistake here is in assuming they're telling us the truth when they tell us they will use it exclusively against criminals & terrorists instead of mostly as another general domestic surveillance tool for politically/ideologically-driven motives.
They know as well as we do that real terrorists and criminals will simply use other secure methods. They are simply the cover-story poster-boys for propaganda purposes. Western leaders could not care less about a few hundred or thousand people dying from the occasional terrorist attack, it's the ability of law-abiding, peaceful people being able to organize effectively...without government snooping/interference...in order to change their governments/laws along with the ability of whistle-blowers to reveal government lies & criminality that scares the shit out of them, and is what they ultimately seek to destroy.
Strat
The problem with it is the fact that it calls home to Russia with data about the system(s) it runs on. Kasperski's own web page says this.
Relations between the west and Russia have soured a bit, and people like Obama and Clinton and other war mongers have been pushing for a conflict with Russia. It's not a big stretch of imagination that a Russian General would utilize kasperski's AV software to deploy a Stuxnet type code on U.S. systems if a military conflict came about.
We can't take that chance
Russians have no particular interest in me, pose no threat to me personally, and cannot throw me in prison. My own government, on the other hand, incarcerates a huge percentage of the population and poses a significant and local threat to my life & freedom and have also been shown to use illegal/unconstitutional methods and practices to achieve their goals. They are actually *more* criminal than those stealing CC details.
I have far more to fear from the US government than from the Russians.
Strat
Apparently they didn't have Tor or Bitcoin in 2015, so that explains why the ransomware industry grew from $24 million to over a billion in 2016!
And it couldn't have anything at all to do with the leaks of hacking tools/exploits/vulnerabilities from the NSA whose job is supposedly to help keep the US secure.
Thanks, NSA!
Strat
That's the point...there are more drones involved than what are being discussed here that would be affected by such a blanket requirement.
Again, there are more than DJI drones involved here, including home-builts without any restrictions whatsoever except the builder's ability & budget.
That 7 watts is transmitter output power, not consumed power. Even with a very efficient final power amplifier, it's going to need at least 10-11 watts or more, and that's for *just* the final transmitter output stage, not including signal generation and driver stages for the final amplifier stage. That's a serious amount of power drain for a small drone and will seriously reduce flight endurance and performance.
At lower altitudes ground clutter has even more of an effect as the signal 'horizon' is that much nearer for the aircraft as well as the UAV. How much effect it will have on effective detection distances versus aicraft speed and effective warning time for avoidance will need to be tested.
Decades of avionics experience hasn't taught you that electronics systems shrink in size over time. And experience in avionics apparently means no experience in Google. I posted a link to one portable ADS-B out system already, pretty small, pretty light, but only prevented from being used by FAA regulations. Mandating ADS-B OUT for UAV would include, you realize I hope, a rescinding of the prohibition on their use. That's the rule making that needs to be done.
Size does not change basic electrical rules. A 7 watt transmitter will draw effectively the same amount of power regardless of physical size. The reason for the rules specifying minimum ADS-B-out transmitter power is to ensure there is sufficient range. Reducing the power reduces the range. Placing a ~900-1000mHz signal source at a very low altitude also greatly reduces effective range. Add ground clutter for even more range reduction.
As to your link, I thought you said that a full 7-watt ADS-B-out transmitter was "easily accommodated"? Which is it?
The ADS-B system was never designed with extreme low-altitude vehicles in mind and is a poor tool for the job in practical terms.
Or we could, you know, *not* go apeshit-authoritarian trying to track & trace toy quadrotors that have caused zero fatalities from collisions with aircraft, and those being more rare than a Nessy-sighting, and most reports being equally unverifiable.
There are far more dangerous things to worry about out there, ladders and bathtubs being two big ones.
Go get 'em, Tiger!
Strat
There are more than DJI drones involved if ADS-B is required, and there's little to prevent a UAV operator from sending the UAV as high as it can go, possibly placing it in general airspace. Even at 200 knots with a reduced-power ADS-B drone transmitter and reduced range, that could still present a short time window for an aircraft to react. There is also signal blockage from ground clutter that brings the effective 'signal horizon' much closer. A weaker ADS-B-out transmitter would only exacerbate the effect.
That statement is in relation to a low-powered ADS-B transmitter for small UAVs unable to reasonably accommodate a standard ADS-B-out package.
I'm sorry, but as someone with decades of experience in the avionics field, I don't believe that is true.
Strat
Seems like an exception for low power use would be easy, something pumping out half a watt to a watt would likely be visible for several miles to make nearby aircraft aware,
According to the document I linked to, intended minimum a/c-to-a/c range is 20 miles. That may sound like a lot, but at jet-aircraft speeds, 20 miles goes by in a few seconds. The other limitation is with other aircraft's antennas & ADS-B receivers being designed around receiving signals from 7-watt and above transmitters.
Suffice it to say there's a significant amount of engineering and research, not to mention FAA rule-making/standards-defining, to be done before it's ready for hobby-drone prime-time.
Strat
Why not just require all drones to have an ADS-B transmitter on them? The protocol is stupid simple could probably be done in software on the drone's microcontroller and then tack a 1,090 MHz transmitter onto some GPIO pins.
Old avionics guy here. One reason that would make it difficult is that an FAA-standards-compliant ADS-B transmitter would use quite a bit of power (7 watts is minimum ADS-B pulse transmitter output power, so greater than 7 watts) relative to most small drones and add a not-insignificant amount of weight/mass to the drone as well as additional power requirements. I'm not even sure it would be possible to equip the smaller drones with ADS-B Out capability to meet current FAA standards and still have the drones anywhere near the same relatively-small size/mass they currently are. Maybe it's possible with new battery/chip tech, but I don't have time to research it properly.
(Warning-PDF) http://www.ads-b.com/PDF/UAT%2...
It might also be done with new FAA rules specifying special lower-power ADS-B specs specifically for drones below a certain size/weight but that would take time, political will, and a lot of money, not including the costs to either retrofit older drones or replace them outright if a retrofit is not possible. Also, a lower power ADS-B signal means the range is drastically reduced and thus the system's usefulness/effectiveness.
Problems will come with trying to enforce this, as it will still be extremely hard to track down owners of non-compliant drones. Typically, this sort of enforcement problem is dealt with by legislating severe punishments like lengthy minimum prison sentences for anyone they do catch, as a deterrent to others. Instead of 20-year prison sentences for possession of a joint, it will be 20 years for operating a non-compliant drone. Say bye-bye to Daddy, Junior. He flew a drone the government couldn't easily track. You'll get to see him again about the time you start experiencing male-pattern baldness, but at least you won't be killed by a DJI drone in the meantime!
Strat
So current-day US "liberals" believe in Libertarian principles of small central government and minimal regulation and interference in general by the government?
#IDon'tThinkSo
Better check the date on those definitions of yours, that one is about 60 years past it's 'best used by' date.
Strat
And BTW, have you actually looked up the word liberal in a dictionary? It doesn't mean what you desperately want it to mean.
For at least the past 6 decades in the US, the term "liberal" has had a radically-different meaning to the old traditional "liberal" as in "libertarian" meaning.
In the US a "Liberal" is about as "liberal"-as-in-libertarian as the DPRK is democratic. US "liberals" are mostly "Progressives" who hijacked the term after their collectivist policies totally failed both in practice and in winning any significant support at the voting booths in the early-1900s, and leadership is mainly composed of a mix of socialists and communists by either their own declarations or their actions.
Strat
I fould find all of this to be a lot more credible if Musk was seriously interested in the moon rather than just posing it as a stepping-stone to Mars or a means of addressing current objections.
Personally, I believe Musk is trying to find, promote, and harness a vision for the greater public which excites enough broad interest to get something...anything....going manned-space-exploration/colonization-wise. For the scale of Musk's space ambitions, he needs a grand vision to capture the imaginations and hopes of a very large number of people. You don't get that sort of mass-appeal with plans involving tiny micro-steps and cautious, moderate goals determined by an extremely risk-averse organization.
Strat
An even bigger problem is that there is no reason to establish a "colony" on Mars.
One reason to work to establish self-sustaining colonies is the simple fact that at present, humans are one decent-sized asteroid impact (or any massively-cataclysmic event) away from total extinction. Perhaps that means nothing to Nihilists, but most average people would opine that humans not going extinct would be a net-positive.
There's another, even more-important reason. It's because humans *need* to explore, expand, and colonize new places. They need a vast frontier to explore and expand into where those types of people who do not fit into a regulated, controlled, ruled society can escape to. That's how it's been for most of human history up until the last few hundred years, but there's vanishingly-little unexplored today and nowhere beyond the reach of any number of nations/governments/powers. People used to be able to "start over" in new lands, escape overly-oppressive regimes, and bad life-choices, where today computers never forget you or anything about you, and biometrics will reveal you to authorities. Humans behave much the same as rats when they are forced into massively-overcrowded conditions; they grow violent.
Humans also need a common goal around which to unite and work towards to minimize conflict. I'd love to see people around the world working together to explore and colonize. At the very least, it would eventually move many future real-estate and resource battles largely off-planet.
There are also resources out there, just drifting along in random elliptical orbits, of a variety of basic compositions & sizes, just waiting for someone to attach a small robot steering thruster-set to one already on a convenient path and 'park' it in orbit for convenient assimilation somewhere, all outside of those nasty & expensive gravity-wells aka planets.
For that matter, it would probably be easier to build giant orbiting colonies at Earth/Moon La Grange points, and later move on to Mars & beyond. It could provide the orbiting infrastructure for such a large undertaking and the facilities and orbital resources/processing/manufacturing to keep a Mars colony supplied until it achieved self-sufficiency. I could even see building one orbiting colony at an Earth/Moon La Grange point plus another in the Mars/Deimos/Phobos system (however, just for the record I strongly caution against putting any organization in charge with the initials 'UAC').
Strat
The whole "Russia!" scare the MSM and Democrats are pushing is really embarassing at this point and is only serving to distract officials from conducting actual government and intelligence work, while they continue on this wild goose chase, or witch hunt, or whatever you want to call it.
How about 'wild-goose-riding-witch hunt'?
Agreed. Sadly, the US Left seems determined to jump that Russian shark at the nation's expense.
Strat
Looks like we even broke Slashdot for a few days. :) My druthers would be to send Bush and Obama to the Hague, end illegal spying & civil forfeiture, then we can go argue amongst ourselves about the merits of capitalism and workers owning the means of production. Cheers.
Agreed, except for sending them to the Hague. Heck, the EUrocrats might put them in charge, since some of the largest EU nations are '5-eyes' members!
Leavenworth and/or possibly a firing-squad sounds better to me. Have a good weekend.
Strat
No. *You* "oh come on". That's disingenuous and you disappoint me in going there, as you usually have much better arguments.
There are plenty of provisions in the US Constitution that have never been done "ever" like calling up the unorganized militia, holding a Convention of States, etc etc etc. That does not mean they are irrelevant. Many things laid out in the Constitution are of the "break glass in case of emergency" category but are nevertheless perfectly valid and cromulent.
And you know that as well as I do.
Strat
Actually, he doesn't. "The People" doesn't just consist of him and people who think like him.
Nice strawman you've built, there.
Please cite where I said any one of 'The People's' individual opinions mattered more or less than others.
If there are a sufficient number of individuals among 'The People' who share a common opinion/view that the SCOTUS is getting it wrong and should be abolished, they can amend the Constitution and disband the SCOTUS. They could even abolish the current government altogether if they had a sufficiently-large majority. Therefor 'The People' are the final arbiters of what is and is not Constitutional.
Strat
You seems to be confusing how the law *is* with how you think it *should be*. You're certainly entitled to that opinion, but yours carries no weight; SCOTUS' does.
Actually, as a member of 'The People' his (and others in the same group) opinions weigh *more* than that of the SCOTUS.
The People are the final arbiters of Constitutionality, not the SCOTUS, Congress, the POTUS, nor TLAs.
Strat
No, that's probably me you're thinking of, at least according to many Leftist Slashdot A/Cs & trolls without any history, logic, or facts with which to refute my posts. :D
Strat
Did they also forbid to change anything when better ideas come up, because all I hear is how people who have died 200 years ago had a good idea.
Changes are made by amending the US Constitution. Adding an amendment requires a 2/3rds-majority of the States voting in favor.
I hear it in such a way that it sounds as if since then no smart people where born.
It's simply that those in positions of power in the US know they cannot persuade the people in 2/3rds of the States that they need to surrender even more powers, liberties, & control to the Federal Government, and so they seek to work around Constitutional restrictions on government power with Solipsistic redefining of words and similar dishonest tactics. Tactics used to suborn one Amendment will also work on others which some may hold more dear. Such tactics undermine the Constitution as a whole and thus the protections against government tyranny and oppression.
Strat
Except we don't have a democracy in the US. We have a corporate state similar to fascism. Corporations have captured the government and run it for their benefit. Actual voters are irrelevant.
"The only winning move is not to play."
The US Founding Fathers knew this in the 1700s and is the reason they wrote the US Constitution to severely restrict the central government every way they could.
They knew that a large, powerful government inevitably becomes corrupt & tyrannical because of basic human nature, as it is simply too good a target for the power-seeking, criminal, and corrupt elements of any society.
It's the same basic concept in regards to computer network security in that a central computer serving 'dumb terminals' is a simpler system to suborn/corrupt than a network of individual computers, each with their own security systems to defeat.
People who want a large, powerful government capable of providing for their food, medicine, education, employment, and personal safety that is not corrupt, authoritarian, and elitist, want what has never been and will never be.
Human nature. It's why we can't have nice things.
Strat
>merely by asserting that they think maybe that person had committed a crime.
But they aren't asserting that the person commited the crime. They are asserting the items were criminal or were bought with proceeds that were criminals.
See, the item commited the crime. Not the person. The Bill of Rights is fuzzy with regards to a thing's rights.
I agree, it's BS and I would hope some Supreme Court in the future will seal this up.
Well, there *is* a certain twisted logic.
IoT = Internet of Things
PoT = Prosecution of Things.
It's simply a case of feature-creep among Things.
Stop further empowering Things.
Strat