So now it's not the people killing the innocent people who are responsible!!!!!!!!!
Right. Just like those innocent exclamation points you just dragged in aren't my fault.
When someone who is in the business of slaughtering other people sets up shop in a place deliberately chosen to make sure that a fight against him will cause people around him to be hurt, yes, that's his fault. You would obviously prefer that said slaughterer just be allowed to continue to slaughter because, well, at least that way nobody gets hurt, right? Yeah. Someone whose weekly activities include driving around Afghanistan dragging school teachers out in to the town square and shooting them in the head for the evil act of teaching girls to read... we definitely don't want to interfere with that. If ten other people who choose to LIVE with that guy get killed when he dies, that's definitely much worse than ten school girls getting burned alive every week while he goes about his jihaddi business, no question. You've got it all figured out.
Yeah, you're doing a fine job of coming across as lucid and credible. There's a reason people are reacting to your comments as if they were shrill and unhinged. Because that's how you communicate. That you think that's effective says plenty about your overall world view, and says all anyone needs to know about whether or not you're processing your low-information take on things in a rational way. You're not.
So there are millions of police interacting with hundreds of millions of people in the country, and that's your definition of "regular basis?" But the many orders of magnitude higher number of times that they do no such thing isn't a "regular basis?" Do you even listen to yourself?
You just stand by it without acknowledging that the targets in question deliberate drag innocents into their mess, routinely using them as human shields. Regardless, you're of course trotting out that line without citing any actual authoritative numbers. Nothing new there.
One has to wonder. How would the public react if, say, the Mexican government used a drone to kill a global criminal in Los Angeles.
Leaving aside for the moment the fact that foreign governments HAVE killed people in the US, many times, it's a bogus question. The difference between Los Angeles and rural Afghanistan is that there's actually a law enforcement system and courts available for the Mexican government to talk to... which is why criminals can be extradited to Mexico. There's no such mechanism in place when dealing with a murderer who's deliberate hanging out in the Yemeni desert because he knows that the only way he'll get arrested is for a large group of armed men (with the attending logistics and supply chains) to physically come after him, and probably end up in a firefight in whatever village he's using as shelter. Talk about a scenario that gets innocents killed. Or, we can wack the car he's driving in, killing him and his posse, who choose to hang out with him.
Show me a scenario where the Mexican government wants to go after a person who's been (for example) putting people with bombs on airplanes headed into Mexico City... and the person is in Los Angeles, and the US government is NOT helping to arrest that person. Then we can talk about how Americans would react if Mexico had to go to extremes to take the guy out. But that's exactly the point: the situations aren't the same, and that scenario won't happen.
A more sensible question would be: how would Americans react if the government of Pakistan stopped sheltering terrorists and instead helped deal with them, removing the need to deal with them by other means?
Except you're in an exchange with stupid Americans talking about an stupid American issue and stupid American businesses and their being subject to a stupid American law. And you're doing so on a stupid American web site with a primarily stupid American audience. I get it, you think we're stupid. Why are you here?
No it does not apply to the magazine when it is printed and sent via a truck and then van and then motorbike.
Why not? Some small publication with a small audience has no way to invest in a custom delivery method, and has to rely on a slower, more regulated, less efficient common carrier. But a larger, more successful publisher sees the benefit of making special arrangements to make sure their audience gets a more timely, more efficient delivery of their printed product. The analogy is completely valid. Forcing people who run private networks to not strike deals with large operations in order to move their data with priority is like making it illegal to make special arrangements to deliver major newspapers because it's not fair to tiny publications that don't generate enough interest to produce the revenue needed to do the same.
Waaaah! It's not FAIR that my tiny web site or tiny print material audience isn't seen by the businesses I deal with to be the same as a hugely popular site or publication. Waaah! Too bad. Handling traffic from YouTube isn't the same as handling some pirated porn torrent site on somebody's laptop plugged into a campus network at a school in rural Latvia. And that's just fine. Why should that student in Latvia have ANY influence over how a private network run by a company in suburban Chicago chooses to prioritize its traffic as it serves its customers?
How does that apply when the newspaper is being delivered to news stands or paper boxes by trucks run by the newspaper? Not every printed publication travels through the postal mail. In fact, many of those (like the newspapers, for example) make arrangements for other delivery mechanisms specifically because it suits their business model to be their own carrier, or to hire a carrier that's a better fit for what they do. A large paper like the Washington Post or the New York Times has the economic weight to make such arrangements and they benefit from them. Should they be forced instead to use a far less efficient common carrier like the postal service because somebody writing a local printed community newspaper with an audience of 100 people thinks its unfair that there's more than one method of delivery being used, and that larger successful businesses with huge audiences have the need and the ability to make special arrangements?
but who's interest is it in besides the ISPs to not be reclassified?
Anyone who values the ability to start up and run a business according to their own tastes, serving customers according to whatever arrangements they want to make with those customers. That's who. Most will fail, as most businesses do. But just because they're in the business of running private networks that happen to make peering arrangements with other private networks doesn't make them a common carrier. They don't WANT to be common carriers, because that prevents them from making decisions, based on their own priorities, about whether and how to serve particular customers. If their decisions are bad ones, they'll lose business. We used to be all about the freedom to make bad decisions and suffer the consequences (or learn from them, and offer the market a different set of options).
The communication is between humans and humans. A human at one end craft content and store in on a computer in a accessible format. The end user then crafts a request for that information and sends it via the internet and the stored communication from the content creator is then delivered to the end user.
So you are an author who sits in front of a word processor and writes a magazine article ("crafting content," in your language). That article is then printed in an "accessible format," called a magazine. The end user (reader) then "crafts a request" by sending in a magazine subscription request, and the content is then delivered to the end user. Sound about right? We should definitely regulate magazine publishers, making sure that they can't decide how many to print, how many pages to create, which advertisers they should contract with, how often they publish, or which letters to the editor the choose to print. Because we can't have all of that unfairness, especially if the publisher decides they'd rather make arrangements themselves to deliver their printed material to news stands or find other ways best suited to their advantage to get their publication in the hands of their audience.
their claim basically is that an answer machine hooked into a phone service means that it is no longer a telecommunications service
No, that's you making stuff up. The telecommunications service is the telephone service between you and the answering machine that happens to answer the call. The telephone service between the two end points is no different when you talk to an answering machine than when you talk to a person who answers the call instead. It's exactly the protocols, the same bandwidth, the same use of the resource during the exchange... makes no difference, answering machine vs. human.
A network of computer networks passing routable packets around based on peering agreements between the operators of those separate (frequently privately owned) networks is NOT the same as making a phone call.
that email is not communications
I get it, now. You're being deliberately obtuse. You're trolling.
Their point is that having some servers pass around packets of information using a protocol like SMTP is exactly NOT like making a phone call. If you're saying that anything that is a form of communication is the same as a phone call, then please get back to hand-delivered daily newspapers, for example, and explain why that process shouldn't be subjected to the laws that impacting the publisher of a web site who wants to fatten up the network routes - even if it costs money - to make sure his audience gets a good, timely view of the content.
Their claim is so laughably stupid that the court should penalise them for making it.
As laughably stupid as not knowing how to spell "penalize?" Your half-baked vitriol on the subject is an example of exactly why this topic is a bad fit for most people, cognitively. Please don't do things like vote if it involves similarly complex subject matter. Thanks.
So you're saying that even with uber-militarized police nothing can be done about gangs?
Of course something can be done. But it's politically incorrect to do so. The most violent gangs are thick with illegal aliens from Central America. The leftier side of US politics really wants to be able to take legal Latino votes for granted. So they angle for policies that do everything possible to avoid ruffling feathers in that area... including giving sanctuary to people who end up being enforcers for MS13, etc.
To deal with gangs like that, you have to actually arrest people and then once they're in prison, actually keep them there. We don't do nearly enough of that - the revolving door has those guys right back in action after short terms, and their habits of recruiting minors for a lot of their dirty work means little or no jail time for a big part of their operations. If they're deported, they just show right back up because we have a completely porous, unenforced border. That's only true because the federal government isn't bothering to do one of its main missions (controlling the border), and that is a 100% political problem. The existence and violent toxicity of powerful, organized, nation-wide gangs (like MS13) in the US is then left to local law enforcement to deal with.
So yes, when they move to deal with a place known to be protected by a bunch of MS13 soldiers, you better believe they want to show up with heavy equipment. Would you bring a nightstick to arrest a bunch of MS13 enforcers who consider killing police officers, cartel-style, to be a sport and a point of pride?
But none of that has to happen. Controlling the border and not tolerating tens of millions of illegals in a shadowy cash economy rife with internal, organized crime - it's a matter of political will. But because there are politicians who are too timid to talk plainly about it, and who would rather play identity politics in a craven hunt for votes, we have a system that perpetuates rather than addresses the problem. And the local cops get to risk their necks as a result. If I were in that line of work, yeah, I'd want an armored car when serving warrants, too.
In absolute numbers, more white people are shot by police than black people, but the former also make up a significantly larger chunk of the population (63% white vs 12% black).
But if you're going to make everyone look at it through the lens of skin pigment, then you also have to do what the producer of those statistics did: take into account the demographics surrounding high crime rates. Police shootings rarely, rarely occur outside the context of the cops interacting with someone in the middle of a violent or headed-towards-violent situation. Though the media is focused on things like that idiot campus cop who shot the guy trying to speed away from a traffic stop, that's NOT the sort of thing that makes up, in any meaningful way, the larger body of numbers. Take into account the wildly higher rates of violent domestic disputes, basic street crime, robberies, and (if nothing else) gang warfare, and the percentage of police shootings involving people of one skin tone relative to the percentage of that skin tone in the population takes a back seat to what that percentage is actually doing when it comes to the sorts of activities that bring wary cops rushing to the scene.
If one insists on comparing skin color percentages in the wider population, compare skin color percentages involved in violent crime before doing math about how often cops have violent encounters with a given group. Or, skip the whole skin color thing, and focus on geography. In places where cops have a hugely higher rate of violent criminals and behavior to deal with, they end up having to use force more often than in places where the population is much less routinely violent.
No, actually. I'm just describing something I pay for, and which I like. I know that's not fashionable, but it actually is possible to like a company and it's products/services. On balance, I think Amazon is a remarkable operation. Not shy about it. The more people who check them out and also use their services, the better it gets for me. I generally - though not always - like what Bezos is doing outside the context of Amazon directly.
True, but I find that I can pick up 90% of what I need through Prime. And the fact that I get to watch a rebooted Top Gear that Amazon is paying to produce - a nice bonus.
I have to say, I keep stumbling across new reasons that I like Prime. Had a gig this evening, and needed some spendy batteries. A couple of clicks this morning, and they were on my doorstep in the afternoon. It only takes a few events like that in a year to make Prime worth the modest cost. But so many other little goodies that Bezos keeps tossing in to remind me why it's good to stick around. I have enough parts and pieces shipped in that it pays for itself in time and shipping costs regardless. The rest is frosting on that cake. It will be interesting to see how much of a production budget Amazon gives these guys to make their particular form of entertainment. I anticipate lots of drone footage of cars doing entertaining things.
Except, they guy said he shot it while it was hovering IN his back yard. Not high overhead, not even high. "IN" his back yard.
Hint: also illegal to operate in close proximity to people, especially people who are on their own property, and don't want it there...)
Actually no, no it's not. Toy model aircraft aren't subject to any such law, FAA-wise. Yet, at least. If anything, we're talking about good old fashioned reckless endangerment, which has nothing to do with model aircraft in particular, but could be a charge in such a case (just like it would be if they were throwing lawn darts over the fence, or hit somebody in the head with a stray baseball).
The FAA has guidance about such matters. But flying a toy around like that has absolutely zero FAA restrictions in and of itself, with regard to people on the ground. It's likely to be a different story when such a machine is used commercially, but again, zero relevance in this case.
A good starting point would be to recognize the airspace above private property as part of the property, up to the level allowed to commercial aircraft. That would mean that drones could only fly above designated land surfaces.
Except there is ample precedent for that NOT being the case. Has nothing to do with neighbors flying toy copters around, or someone flying a Cessna at 500'.
If a drone is hovering "in" your suburban back yard, then shooting it with a shotgun is wildly inappropriate, because you're shooting at an angle barely above the horizontal. We also have no idea if the guy's toy copter was hovering "over" his yard, or just near it. It's much more difficult than most people think to gauge a small quadcopter's actual position over objects on the ground. I've yet to meet anyone who hasn't personally operated a given machine for many, many hours who was ever correct about that sort of thing.
Nonsense. I've been hit in the face by #8 birdshot used by a gunner over 200 yards away. If I didn't have field glasses on, I'd have lost an eye.
We'd have to see a lot more detail about where the copter actually was, the angle at which Dad shot it, etc. My observation, as someone who flies drones of several sizes and who has also shot many things out of the air using a variety of shotguns and loads, is that there's essentially no safe way to do what this idiot did.
Separately from that: the FAA is quite clear that shooting at ANY aircraft is a crime. Big time.
People getting married at 16 did so under the guidance of closely kept family - something that's far less common these days. When the culture was more agrarian and infant death rates were much higher, you started hatching out babies as early as possible while everyone involved is young and resilient. We now have a much, much lower rate of multi-generational households (when that was common, that 16 year old husband was very unlikely to be the one calling the shots about the family business, farm, finances, etc). We're also expecting young people today to be tuned into a LOT more information and complexity than their counterparts from a century ago.
This. Nobody is an adult at 18. Not even close. Most people don't have their cognitive act together, and any sort of capacity for rational behavior (if they're ever going to get there) until, these days, they're the better part of 30.
But knowing to not shoot selfies of yourself being a total jackass is something that can make some sense a lot earlier than 18. If some 15 year old can know enough not to drop his pants in front of his grandmother or in front of his classroom at school, he already has what it takes to know not to do it online. He just has to be taught that. Which involves, you know, parents. Who give a damn about their kids' future.
And for YOUR benefit, if you have enough discipline to run your own business that happens to use the same type of technology. I suppose you consider the wireless connectivity you use every day to be a "rape of the commons" every time you connect to a web site that runs advertising in order to pay for their operations? Rape! Rape rape rape! Eeeeevil businesses doing things like... delivery antibiotics to your hospital. Rape rape rape!
You're so right. Only people who HATE businesses should be recommending regulations. Only people who've never had the energy to organize a croquet game, let alone the biggest retailer in the world, should propose changes to a huge body of regulations. A fine idea.
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So now it's not the people killing the innocent people who are responsible!!!!!!!!!
Right. Just like those innocent exclamation points you just dragged in aren't my fault.
... we definitely don't want to interfere with that. If ten other people who choose to LIVE with that guy get killed when he dies, that's definitely much worse than ten school girls getting burned alive every week while he goes about his jihaddi business, no question. You've got it all figured out.
When someone who is in the business of slaughtering other people sets up shop in a place deliberately chosen to make sure that a fight against him will cause people around him to be hurt, yes, that's his fault. You would obviously prefer that said slaughterer just be allowed to continue to slaughter because, well, at least that way nobody gets hurt, right? Yeah. Someone whose weekly activities include driving around Afghanistan dragging school teachers out in to the town square and shooting them in the head for the evil act of teaching girls to read
Shut up you idiot.
Yeah, you're doing a fine job of coming across as lucid and credible. There's a reason people are reacting to your comments as if they were shrill and unhinged. Because that's how you communicate. That you think that's effective says plenty about your overall world view, and says all anyone needs to know about whether or not you're processing your low-information take on things in a rational way. You're not.
So there are millions of police interacting with hundreds of millions of people in the country, and that's your definition of "regular basis?" But the many orders of magnitude higher number of times that they do no such thing isn't a "regular basis?" Do you even listen to yourself?
so I stand by the points I made
You just stand by it without acknowledging that the targets in question deliberate drag innocents into their mess, routinely using them as human shields. Regardless, you're of course trotting out that line without citing any actual authoritative numbers. Nothing new there.
One has to wonder. How would the public react if, say, the Mexican government used a drone to kill a global criminal in Los Angeles.
Leaving aside for the moment the fact that foreign governments HAVE killed people in the US, many times, it's a bogus question. The difference between Los Angeles and rural Afghanistan is that there's actually a law enforcement system and courts available for the Mexican government to talk to ... which is why criminals can be extradited to Mexico. There's no such mechanism in place when dealing with a murderer who's deliberate hanging out in the Yemeni desert because he knows that the only way he'll get arrested is for a large group of armed men (with the attending logistics and supply chains) to physically come after him, and probably end up in a firefight in whatever village he's using as shelter. Talk about a scenario that gets innocents killed. Or, we can wack the car he's driving in, killing him and his posse, who choose to hang out with him.
... and the person is in Los Angeles, and the US government is NOT helping to arrest that person. Then we can talk about how Americans would react if Mexico had to go to extremes to take the guy out. But that's exactly the point: the situations aren't the same, and that scenario won't happen.
Show me a scenario where the Mexican government wants to go after a person who's been (for example) putting people with bombs on airplanes headed into Mexico City
A more sensible question would be: how would Americans react if the government of Pakistan stopped sheltering terrorists and instead helped deal with them, removing the need to deal with them by other means?
stupid American spelling
Except you're in an exchange with stupid Americans talking about an stupid American issue and stupid American businesses and their being subject to a stupid American law. And you're doing so on a stupid American web site with a primarily stupid American audience. I get it, you think we're stupid. Why are you here?
No it does not apply to the magazine when it is printed and sent via a truck and then van and then motorbike.
Why not? Some small publication with a small audience has no way to invest in a custom delivery method, and has to rely on a slower, more regulated, less efficient common carrier. But a larger, more successful publisher sees the benefit of making special arrangements to make sure their audience gets a more timely, more efficient delivery of their printed product. The analogy is completely valid. Forcing people who run private networks to not strike deals with large operations in order to move their data with priority is like making it illegal to make special arrangements to deliver major newspapers because it's not fair to tiny publications that don't generate enough interest to produce the revenue needed to do the same.
Waaaah! It's not FAIR that my tiny web site or tiny print material audience isn't seen by the businesses I deal with to be the same as a hugely popular site or publication. Waaah! Too bad. Handling traffic from YouTube isn't the same as handling some pirated porn torrent site on somebody's laptop plugged into a campus network at a school in rural Latvia. And that's just fine. Why should that student in Latvia have ANY influence over how a private network run by a company in suburban Chicago chooses to prioritize its traffic as it serves its customers?
How does that apply when the newspaper is being delivered to news stands or paper boxes by trucks run by the newspaper? Not every printed publication travels through the postal mail. In fact, many of those (like the newspapers, for example) make arrangements for other delivery mechanisms specifically because it suits their business model to be their own carrier, or to hire a carrier that's a better fit for what they do. A large paper like the Washington Post or the New York Times has the economic weight to make such arrangements and they benefit from them. Should they be forced instead to use a far less efficient common carrier like the postal service because somebody writing a local printed community newspaper with an audience of 100 people thinks its unfair that there's more than one method of delivery being used, and that larger successful businesses with huge audiences have the need and the ability to make special arrangements?
but who's interest is it in besides the ISPs to not be reclassified?
Anyone who values the ability to start up and run a business according to their own tastes, serving customers according to whatever arrangements they want to make with those customers. That's who. Most will fail, as most businesses do. But just because they're in the business of running private networks that happen to make peering arrangements with other private networks doesn't make them a common carrier. They don't WANT to be common carriers, because that prevents them from making decisions, based on their own priorities, about whether and how to serve particular customers. If their decisions are bad ones, they'll lose business. We used to be all about the freedom to make bad decisions and suffer the consequences (or learn from them, and offer the market a different set of options).
Except we're talking about US companies and a US law, here.
The communication is between humans and humans. A human at one end craft content and store in on a computer in a accessible format. The end user then crafts a request for that information and sends it via the internet and the stored communication from the content creator is then delivered to the end user.
So you are an author who sits in front of a word processor and writes a magazine article ("crafting content," in your language). That article is then printed in an "accessible format," called a magazine. The end user (reader) then "crafts a request" by sending in a magazine subscription request, and the content is then delivered to the end user. Sound about right? We should definitely regulate magazine publishers, making sure that they can't decide how many to print, how many pages to create, which advertisers they should contract with, how often they publish, or which letters to the editor the choose to print. Because we can't have all of that unfairness, especially if the publisher decides they'd rather make arrangements themselves to deliver their printed material to news stands or find other ways best suited to their advantage to get their publication in the hands of their audience.
their claim basically is that an answer machine hooked into a phone service means that it is no longer a telecommunications service
No, that's you making stuff up. The telecommunications service is the telephone service between you and the answering machine that happens to answer the call. The telephone service between the two end points is no different when you talk to an answering machine than when you talk to a person who answers the call instead. It's exactly the protocols, the same bandwidth, the same use of the resource during the exchange ... makes no difference, answering machine vs. human.
A network of computer networks passing routable packets around based on peering agreements between the operators of those separate (frequently privately owned) networks is NOT the same as making a phone call.
that email is not communications
I get it, now. You're being deliberately obtuse. You're trolling.
Their point is that having some servers pass around packets of information using a protocol like SMTP is exactly NOT like making a phone call. If you're saying that anything that is a form of communication is the same as a phone call, then please get back to hand-delivered daily newspapers, for example, and explain why that process shouldn't be subjected to the laws that impacting the publisher of a web site who wants to fatten up the network routes - even if it costs money - to make sure his audience gets a good, timely view of the content.
Their claim is so laughably stupid that the court should penalise them for making it.
As laughably stupid as not knowing how to spell "penalize?" Your half-baked vitriol on the subject is an example of exactly why this topic is a bad fit for most people, cognitively. Please don't do things like vote if it involves similarly complex subject matter. Thanks.
So you're saying that even with uber-militarized police nothing can be done about gangs?
Of course something can be done. But it's politically incorrect to do so. The most violent gangs are thick with illegal aliens from Central America. The leftier side of US politics really wants to be able to take legal Latino votes for granted. So they angle for policies that do everything possible to avoid ruffling feathers in that area ... including giving sanctuary to people who end up being enforcers for MS13, etc.
To deal with gangs like that, you have to actually arrest people and then once they're in prison, actually keep them there. We don't do nearly enough of that - the revolving door has those guys right back in action after short terms, and their habits of recruiting minors for a lot of their dirty work means little or no jail time for a big part of their operations. If they're deported, they just show right back up because we have a completely porous, unenforced border. That's only true because the federal government isn't bothering to do one of its main missions (controlling the border), and that is a 100% political problem. The existence and violent toxicity of powerful, organized, nation-wide gangs (like MS13) in the US is then left to local law enforcement to deal with.
So yes, when they move to deal with a place known to be protected by a bunch of MS13 soldiers, you better believe they want to show up with heavy equipment. Would you bring a nightstick to arrest a bunch of MS13 enforcers who consider killing police officers, cartel-style, to be a sport and a point of pride?
But none of that has to happen. Controlling the border and not tolerating tens of millions of illegals in a shadowy cash economy rife with internal, organized crime - it's a matter of political will. But because there are politicians who are too timid to talk plainly about it, and who would rather play identity politics in a craven hunt for votes, we have a system that perpetuates rather than addresses the problem. And the local cops get to risk their necks as a result. If I were in that line of work, yeah, I'd want an armored car when serving warrants, too.
In absolute numbers, more white people are shot by police than black people, but the former also make up a significantly larger chunk of the population (63% white vs 12% black).
But if you're going to make everyone look at it through the lens of skin pigment, then you also have to do what the producer of those statistics did: take into account the demographics surrounding high crime rates. Police shootings rarely, rarely occur outside the context of the cops interacting with someone in the middle of a violent or headed-towards-violent situation. Though the media is focused on things like that idiot campus cop who shot the guy trying to speed away from a traffic stop, that's NOT the sort of thing that makes up, in any meaningful way, the larger body of numbers. Take into account the wildly higher rates of violent domestic disputes, basic street crime, robberies, and (if nothing else) gang warfare, and the percentage of police shootings involving people of one skin tone relative to the percentage of that skin tone in the population takes a back seat to what that percentage is actually doing when it comes to the sorts of activities that bring wary cops rushing to the scene.
If one insists on comparing skin color percentages in the wider population, compare skin color percentages involved in violent crime before doing math about how often cops have violent encounters with a given group. Or, skip the whole skin color thing, and focus on geography. In places where cops have a hugely higher rate of violent criminals and behavior to deal with, they end up having to use force more often than in places where the population is much less routinely violent.
No, actually. I'm just describing something I pay for, and which I like. I know that's not fashionable, but it actually is possible to like a company and it's products/services. On balance, I think Amazon is a remarkable operation. Not shy about it. The more people who check them out and also use their services, the better it gets for me. I generally - though not always - like what Bezos is doing outside the context of Amazon directly.
True, but I find that I can pick up 90% of what I need through Prime. And the fact that I get to watch a rebooted Top Gear that Amazon is paying to produce - a nice bonus.
I have to say, I keep stumbling across new reasons that I like Prime. Had a gig this evening, and needed some spendy batteries. A couple of clicks this morning, and they were on my doorstep in the afternoon. It only takes a few events like that in a year to make Prime worth the modest cost. But so many other little goodies that Bezos keeps tossing in to remind me why it's good to stick around. I have enough parts and pieces shipped in that it pays for itself in time and shipping costs regardless. The rest is frosting on that cake. It will be interesting to see how much of a production budget Amazon gives these guys to make their particular form of entertainment. I anticipate lots of drone footage of cars doing entertaining things.
This. No fooling.
Hint: also illegal to operate in close proximity to people, especially people who are on their own property, and don't want it there...)
Actually no, no it's not. Toy model aircraft aren't subject to any such law, FAA-wise. Yet, at least. If anything, we're talking about good old fashioned reckless endangerment, which has nothing to do with model aircraft in particular, but could be a charge in such a case (just like it would be if they were throwing lawn darts over the fence, or hit somebody in the head with a stray baseball).
The FAA has guidance about such matters. But flying a toy around like that has absolutely zero FAA restrictions in and of itself, with regard to people on the ground. It's likely to be a different story when such a machine is used commercially, but again, zero relevance in this case.
A good starting point would be to recognize the airspace above private property as part of the property, up to the level allowed to commercial aircraft. That would mean that drones could only fly above designated land surfaces.
Except there is ample precedent for that NOT being the case. Has nothing to do with neighbors flying toy copters around, or someone flying a Cessna at 500'.
If a drone is hovering "in" your suburban back yard, then shooting it with a shotgun is wildly inappropriate, because you're shooting at an angle barely above the horizontal. We also have no idea if the guy's toy copter was hovering "over" his yard, or just near it. It's much more difficult than most people think to gauge a small quadcopter's actual position over objects on the ground. I've yet to meet anyone who hasn't personally operated a given machine for many, many hours who was ever correct about that sort of thing.
Nonsense. I've been hit in the face by #8 birdshot used by a gunner over 200 yards away. If I didn't have field glasses on, I'd have lost an eye.
We'd have to see a lot more detail about where the copter actually was, the angle at which Dad shot it, etc. My observation, as someone who flies drones of several sizes and who has also shot many things out of the air using a variety of shotguns and loads, is that there's essentially no safe way to do what this idiot did.
Separately from that: the FAA is quite clear that shooting at ANY aircraft is a crime. Big time.
People getting married at 16 did so under the guidance of closely kept family - something that's far less common these days. When the culture was more agrarian and infant death rates were much higher, you started hatching out babies as early as possible while everyone involved is young and resilient. We now have a much, much lower rate of multi-generational households (when that was common, that 16 year old husband was very unlikely to be the one calling the shots about the family business, farm, finances, etc). We're also expecting young people today to be tuned into a LOT more information and complexity than their counterparts from a century ago.
This. Nobody is an adult at 18. Not even close. Most people don't have their cognitive act together, and any sort of capacity for rational behavior (if they're ever going to get there) until, these days, they're the better part of 30.
But knowing to not shoot selfies of yourself being a total jackass is something that can make some sense a lot earlier than 18. If some 15 year old can know enough not to drop his pants in front of his grandmother or in front of his classroom at school, he already has what it takes to know not to do it online. He just has to be taught that. Which involves, you know, parents. Who give a damn about their kids' future.
You own that space right now.
No, no you don't. And you sure as hell have nothing to do with what's going on at 200, let alone 400 feet.
for their benefit
And for YOUR benefit, if you have enough discipline to run your own business that happens to use the same type of technology. I suppose you consider the wireless connectivity you use every day to be a "rape of the commons" every time you connect to a web site that runs advertising in order to pay for their operations? Rape! Rape rape rape! Eeeeevil businesses doing things like ... delivery antibiotics to your hospital. Rape rape rape!
Ooh good business writing regulations. (Score:1)
You're so right. Only people who HATE businesses should be recommending regulations. Only people who've never had the energy to organize a croquet game, let alone the biggest retailer in the world, should propose changes to a huge body of regulations. A fine idea.