right... if you cannot even discuss basic flags or basic concepts, but can google, that's all that's needed to be a good competent programmer, right? Because good enough is good enough.
no wonder USA is losing its edge, with this kind of thinking.
Open book tests are terribly difficult. When I took my legal courses they were all open book, my POA(provincial offences) tests? All open book, same with traffic law, again all open book. The very best of all these tests are written by instructors who know their material and write their own questions based on the material that they've taught through the year.
That means you not only need the book, but you need to understand it, and have attended the classes to make it through the exam. People think they sweat bullets on a 80 page exam? Hah. Try 13 pages, where it's all open book and you're required to break down a full construct question that's worth 10% of the exam mark.
The thing about cheating is people assume it wont happen in offline courses. Cheating is possible whenever an entire class of students is given the same series of questions. In our world of today we don't have to do it like that anymore. We can mix things up by giving each student some exclusive questions so that they cannot get an A by cheating. The professor could simply prepare some questions specifically to be exclusive and then sprinkle these questions around so that every student has a slightly different exam.
If students cheat they'll eventually hit the roadblock.
I see where the GP was going. It's better to ask more complex questions where it tests the person understands concepts than that they can memorize. Problem is that it means the grader has to do more work when grading
Let a computer artificial intelligence generate both the test and then do the grading. This way the Professor can focus entirely on teaching.
right... if you cannot even discuss basic flags or basic concepts, but can google, that's all that's needed to be a good competent programmer, right? Because good enough is good enough.
no wonder USA is losing its edge, with this kind of thinking.
Good programming tests ask about concepts and show code and you have to pick an answer to describe what the code is doing. These sorts of tests even I would have trouble with, but these sorts of tests cannot be cheated on if the questions and code is randomly presented.
Why should people who can cram but don't know what they are doing get better marks then people who know what they are doing but are not good at craning.
What the point of craning command line flags when you don't want why you want to use them that way vs say looking at MSDN / look at the build in help ECT?
I agree but for certain tests such as tests you probably do need to do multiple choice. Simply randomize the questions and it becomes very difficult to cheat. With randomized questions then online tests become harder to cheat on than offline tests because offline tests there still might be transmissions of some sort going on because when you got 50 students in a room all taking the same test or similar test this can happen. Make the questions randomly generated and make them take the test online and from home or at a special test taking center and now it's much harder to cheat.
The problem here is that the Public University they went to sucked. It's not a problem with online courses, it's a problem with poorly designed tests. If you've taken an online course before you'll know some courses have tests which are as easy as they describe but you also know some courses have tests which are generated on the fly by some algorithm so that it's harder to cheat the test than to pass it from studying.
That is the solution, make it harder to cheat than not to cheat.
That's one of the biggest reasons why online degrees are suspect.
Of course cheating has always occurred in bricks and mortar schools, too, but it's supposed to be harder. For STEM courses, exams usually make up the majority of the grade, and are held in proctored halls. At the best schools, cheaters who are caught are dealt with harshly; usually they fail the course (which goes on the official transscript) and sometimes they are expelled.
If you want to cheat offline it's not like the professor can see everything students do while taking an exam. Most exams in college are given in a classroom where students can visually see one another, hear one another, electronics can often be in that room and can emit or transmit. Basically if you really want to make a room cheat proof it has to also be emissions proof, sound proof, and each desk has to be isolated.
This is possible but it's not something you see any of the public schools doing. I never cheated and I have the grades to prove it, but I've always been intelligent enough to know how to cheat if I really wanted to and from the perspective of a hacker it's easy. At the end of the day it's better to actually know your subjects because you'll actually make use of that knowledge in the real world and college is just training for that. If your goal is just to get into an ivy league school and rely on name brand value then cheating is a route to doing that but if your goal is to actually be good at a particular job or have the knowledge cheating isn't worth it.
And on some exams cheating can be made entirely impossible. If we want to make it impossible just put each student in a faraday cage isolated room. One room per student, and 20 rooms to allow 20 students at a time to take the exam. Let a private corporation handle the exam instead of public institutions and you'll see it's a lot harder to cheat. Finally make the test questions completely randomized so that it's impossible for the students to know in advance what will be on the exam.
Randomly generated questions could be used to stop cheating online. I've personally taken exams like this and it's impossible to rely on a doc of any sort when you don't know what questions you'll be facing.
Simply take a course where you were already familiar with the subject matter. (I really suspect a lot of the students in the language classes I took were already fluent in the language. Boy did that suck for me.)
One of the ways I've seen online exams prevent cheating is to generate the questions on the fly and then time limit the exam so that there wont be enough time to try and find all the answers through cheating.
That being said if someone is determined to cheat and puts in enough effort it's just as easy to cheat right in the teachers face as it is to cheat online. It's not like the schools have high tech surveillance so chances are anyone who really wants to cheat already is cheating. If they receive all As in classes which rely on multiple choice exams then there is a possibility of cheating.
If the class is big enough the probability of cheating rises. One way to minimize cheating is to make each student take the exam in a sound proof fully shielded faraday cage cubical. This way they cannot see who is sitting next to them or behind them, they cannot hear, and no EMF can emit or transmit.
They always use child porn and fear mongering and pedophilia to get any bill they want passed without review. They know the word pedophile shuts down all rational centers of a parents brain and allows the politician to essentially do anything to them and their children so long as it's in the name of protecting them from pedophiles.
While in principal I agree with you I am not sure what group, country or organization I would trust to not screw it up more. I would trust myself, but then why would anyone else trust me to be internet dictator.
The Internet already is controlled by an organization in the USA which acts as dictator. I don't see how opening it up globally would make things worse. Just because the USA doesn't agree with some other countries? That has nothing to do with our interests because we are getting censorship either way no matter what so why shouldn't we put it in the UN control? At least the internet would be censored in a culturally neutral manner if it's going to be censored at all.
As things are now we are having nations fight over who gets to censor what. They are fighting for the power to censor while claiming they are fighting for freedom.
It's BECAUSE the Internet is important that we can't allow unprogressive and dictatorial regimes to sully it further.
Decentralized control is better than centralized control. Right now probably a handful of Americans control the internet and we probably don't even know their names. How is that better than the UN controlling it? At least with the UN we will know which governments and which individuals are trying to control it.
It's pretty common to believe that no central source can control the internet - and it's true for the most part - with one major exception: IANA ultimately answers to the US Department of Commerce.
In order for the internet to function, there has to be a central authority who determines who gets what IP addresses and domain names. That authority is under the control of the US. Sure you could create your own internets (yes, plural) with your own name and number rules, however if you can't all agree upon who gets what IP address blocks and domain names, you aren't going to have a very cohesive and universal network like the one we have today.
Honestly, I am perfectly fine with the US having control over that, and in fact would much rather they hold the keys rather than the UN. If the UN had their way, that would mean countries who have heavy influence of the UN (e.g. China) would have their way.
So far, the US has done a great job. Sure, we've had talks about filtering the internet (e.g. SOPA) many times, but unlike 90% of the other countries out there (Australia, UK, Germany, China, Iran, just to name a few,) we haven't acted upon any of them. Granted, we have taken extraordinary and unnecessary if not unethical measures, such as taking down megaupload, we didn't do so by ordering IANA to break the infrastructure.
The best thing about the US having control, is that we've never done anything to dismantle the infrastructure in the name of politics. The UN wants control because they plan on doing exactly that.
More governments arguing for control over the internet is better than just having one government and fewer people deciding,
"Why is no one asking the question if this stuff actually makes communities safer?"
Another good point. I would make that #3. And that brings up:
(4) Safety is not the end goal of all existence. You cannot make everything 100% safe without taking all the meaning and enjoyment out of life.
Not only that but safety for one group of people could put other groups of people in greater danger. For instance if conservative Christian families want to keep their children safe from homosexuality they ban homosexuality and use drones to spy on the communities sex lives in order to police and enforce.
This is the sort of stuff we will be dealing with. The conservative families would claim its to make them feel safer but it puts another group of people in danger of being arrested for who they are.
With drones in the air, the access to crime scenes by news helicopters and planes will be a thing of the past. The neat thing about this issue is that the gov. can say "I didn't pass any laws restricting news access to sites, it was the feds!" since the FAA will have final determination regarding access to the airspace.
Sounds great until you recall that even the military and the industrial complex that builds the drones can't seem to keep them under control. Remember that Iran now has all the cutting edge tech of a front line drone in their front pocket and also by extension, so does China. Post-mortem conclusion is that we were arrogant about the security of our com link and failed to see this one coming though we knew that they were working hard on it. Now just suppose that they decide to hack one of these drones and fly it into a school. Who is to know that they were to blame. Pilot error, computer glitch, GPS jamming, soft/firmware issue,... You get the idea, people die all the same. These drones are simply toys and serve no real purpose in our kind of civil society other than to monitor the odd idiot that runs from the state police for going 10 miles over the speed limit. The cost is high and the returns are low. but we can still put our heads in the sand to another civil liberty being taken away in the name of better security. BS!
There could be many more of them per police officer (let alone police force) than is feasible for helicopters.
They're much smaller and more agile, allowing access to your daughter's hot tub^W^W^W^W more private areas.
They're much easier to make silent, thus enabling stealth surveillance.
They can operate 24/7/365 in aggregate.
They'd be in the hands of people who do things like this.
Each police officer could in theory operate thousands of drones all around the city. The drones could go from being large UAV's to toy airplane size, to insect size, to the size of dust particles, depending on how much money the police have and how drone is defined.
In practice the smallest drone would be nano-dust which is about the size of a flake of rice. This would be too expensive today but if mass produced by the police all around the country the price would go down to the point where we'd have a police officer practically everywhere without any way to stop it. It would be 24/7, and the problem is some drones can see through walls, hear through walls, so yes a drone can see you smoking a joint in your house or see you having gay sex with your wife.
What I want to know is how these drones are more of a threat to privacy than a manned helicopter flying around doing the same thing.
If you don't understand the privacy implications of UAVs, how about if they were made really small, smaller than birds? small like insect small, like fly small, and were spread by the tens of thousands throughout the city to pick up conversations, capture video, etc?
Spire said it right, this sort of thing scales ridiculously easily. The drones will get smaller, fly for longer, get smarter, and there will eventually be thousands of them swarming an area. Honestly if this doesn't disturb you then wait until nano technology allows for even better surveillance.
The main thing I could see them making sense for is replacing helicopters for following suspects if on a chase (a drone would be a lot cheaper and you could have a few engaged). But there are of other valid peaceful governmental uses of drones:
* Surveying the city. You could use them to get an idea of what areas of town needed more work than others. You could do weekly flyovers just to see if streetlights were out in an area. You could build up a highly detailed aerial map of your city/county/state and then let the people make use of that data to make cool mapping products.
* Work in tandem with other sensors to get video on an area where needed ASAP. Video of traffic accidents moments after they occur (or any sudden drop in traffic speed). Video of an area where gunshot detectors picked up shots.
I don't at all understand the concern over drones, they are simply cameras that are more mobile than traditional surveillance cameras. Are people concerned with drones also concerned that police cars have cameras in them?
Obviously if you included weapons on the drones that's a whole different matter, but I've not heard anyone say they are considering weaponizing them.
It's only a matter of time before they claim the drones need weapons to keep people from destroying or jamming them.
There are 2 big issues here that the politicians need to start considering, much more than they have been:
(1) The fact that a certain technology CAN be used, and might even represent monetary savings, is largely a different question that whether it SHOULD be used.
(2) That improved technology works both ways: not only do you have the ability to move surveillance to the sky, but also: civilians have drastically improved ability to bring it down. And strong motivation to do so.
Why is no one asking the question if this stuff actually makes communities safer? I don't think this particular kind of surveillance will stop murders or find missing children. This kind of surveillance will be used to look into peoples houses to find marijuana plants, or meth labs, or just to give people tickets.
What is up these politician's asses? Besides their heads, I mean.
This isn't a war. But some of the politicians seem dead set on making it one.
Hint, politicians: today it is not only quite possible, but not even that difficult to make a drone-killing missile in one's basement, complete with propeller- or heat-seeking electronics. And they'd never see it coming. ("Missile" might be misleading: it might be simpler and cheaper to make a self-guided ballistic projectile.)
I'm not suggesting that I would do that. I don't even have a basement. But you can count on the fact that somebody would.
They aren't fooling anyone with this drone crap. Why is it okay for the police to fly drones over our houses but it's not okay for us to fly drones over the police to monitor their activities at all times?
Why do the police get to use encryption, but if we try to use it then we are terrorists? Some stuff is none of LE business. When we are on our own property, in our own homes, and aren't hurting anyone else, they shouldn't be flying drones or wiretapping or trying to scan inside our houses with satellites. We should be asking the people who support this idea who the enemy is and what they are looking for?
It's like we take it as if they have a right to search us in our homes and look for stuff, but aggressive searching almost always leads to a crime if you know what I mean.
Because if they start looking into houses with unmanned drones and listening to everyone I'm sure there are enough laws to lock up everyone I know.
This is not just a bad idea, it's a treasonous idea. Unless we are declaring war on American citizens there is no reason to destroy communities with these drones. What is next? Allowing the police to attach guns and bombs to these drones?
At this point the text based email will slowly be phased out as multimedia video and audio are phased in until email is unrecognizable. Skype for instance may be the email replacement.
You don't solve the dangers of science by killing scientists. This is the same sort of crap that the Israeli and US government is sponsoring in Iran.
IMO, it was a good idea, but executed far too late. You might make the case that once you hear "Iran is researching nuclear weapons" on the nightly news, it's already too late.
You absolutely can at least mitigate the problems of science by killing scientists, but it has to be done early enough, before the research is successfully carried out.
What are the problems of science and why blame the scientists? Whoever is funding the scientists might be who you want to blame.
Slashdot Mirror
right... if you cannot even discuss basic flags or basic concepts, but can google, that's all that's needed to be a good competent programmer, right? Because good enough is good enough.
no wonder USA is losing its edge, with this kind of thinking.
Open book tests are terribly difficult. When I took my legal courses they were all open book, my POA(provincial offences) tests? All open book, same with traffic law, again all open book. The very best of all these tests are written by instructors who know their material and write their own questions based on the material that they've taught through the year.
That means you not only need the book, but you need to understand it, and have attended the classes to make it through the exam. People think they sweat bullets on a 80 page exam? Hah. Try 13 pages, where it's all open book and you're required to break down a full construct question that's worth 10% of the exam mark.
The thing about cheating is people assume it wont happen in offline courses. Cheating is possible whenever an entire class of students is given the same series of questions. In our world of today we don't have to do it like that anymore. We can mix things up by giving each student some exclusive questions so that they cannot get an A by cheating. The professor could simply prepare some questions specifically to be exclusive and then sprinkle these questions around so that every student has a slightly different exam.
If students cheat they'll eventually hit the roadblock.
I see where the GP was going. It's better to ask more complex questions where it tests the person understands concepts than that they can memorize. Problem is that it means the grader has to do more work when grading
Let a computer artificial intelligence generate both the test and then do the grading. This way the Professor can focus entirely on teaching.
right... if you cannot even discuss basic flags or basic concepts, but can google, that's all that's needed to be a good competent programmer, right? Because good enough is good enough.
no wonder USA is losing its edge, with this kind of thinking.
Good programming tests ask about concepts and show code and you have to pick an answer to describe what the code is doing. These sorts of tests even I would have trouble with, but these sorts of tests cannot be cheated on if the questions and code is randomly presented.
more tests need to be open book / open Google.
Why should people who can cram but don't know what they are doing get better marks then people who know what they are doing but are not good at craning.
What the point of craning command line flags when you don't want why you want to use them that way vs say looking at MSDN / look at the build in help ECT?
I agree but for certain tests such as tests you probably do need to do multiple choice. Simply randomize the questions and it becomes very difficult to cheat. With randomized questions then online tests become harder to cheat on than offline tests because offline tests there still might be transmissions of some sort going on because when you got 50 students in a room all taking the same test or similar test this can happen. Make the questions randomly generated and make them take the test online and from home or at a special test taking center and now it's much harder to cheat.
The problem here is that the Public University they went to sucked. It's not a problem with online courses, it's a problem with poorly designed tests. If you've taken an online course before you'll know some courses have tests which are as easy as they describe but you also know some courses have tests which are generated on the fly by some algorithm so that it's harder to cheat the test than to pass it from studying.
That is the solution, make it harder to cheat than not to cheat.
That's one of the biggest reasons why online degrees are suspect.
Of course cheating has always occurred in bricks and mortar schools, too, but it's supposed to be harder. For STEM courses, exams usually make up the majority of the grade, and are held in proctored halls. At the best schools, cheaters who are caught are dealt with harshly; usually they fail the course (which goes on the official transscript) and sometimes they are expelled.
If you want to cheat offline it's not like the professor can see everything students do while taking an exam. Most exams in college are given in a classroom where students can visually see one another, hear one another, electronics can often be in that room and can emit or transmit. Basically if you really want to make a room cheat proof it has to also be emissions proof, sound proof, and each desk has to be isolated.
This is possible but it's not something you see any of the public schools doing. I never cheated and I have the grades to prove it, but I've always been intelligent enough to know how to cheat if I really wanted to and from the perspective of a hacker it's easy. At the end of the day it's better to actually know your subjects because you'll actually make use of that knowledge in the real world and college is just training for that. If your goal is just to get into an ivy league school and rely on name brand value then cheating is a route to doing that but if your goal is to actually be good at a particular job or have the knowledge cheating isn't worth it.
And on some exams cheating can be made entirely impossible. If we want to make it impossible just put each student in a faraday cage isolated room. One room per student, and 20 rooms to allow 20 students at a time to take the exam. Let a private corporation handle the exam instead of public institutions and you'll see it's a lot harder to cheat. Finally make the test questions completely randomized so that it's impossible for the students to know in advance what will be on the exam.
Randomly generated questions could be used to stop cheating online. I've personally taken exams like this and it's impossible to rely on a doc of any sort when you don't know what questions you'll be facing.
Simply take a course where you were already familiar with the subject matter. (I really suspect a lot of the students in the language classes I took were already fluent in the language. Boy did that suck for me.)
One of the ways I've seen online exams prevent cheating is to generate the questions on the fly and then time limit the exam so that there wont be enough time to try and find all the answers through cheating.
That being said if someone is determined to cheat and puts in enough effort it's just as easy to cheat right in the teachers face as it is to cheat online. It's not like the schools have high tech surveillance so chances are anyone who really wants to cheat already is cheating. If they receive all As in classes which rely on multiple choice exams then there is a possibility of cheating.
If the class is big enough the probability of cheating rises. One way to minimize cheating is to make each student take the exam in a sound proof fully shielded faraday cage cubical. This way they cannot see who is sitting next to them or behind them, they cannot hear, and no EMF can emit or transmit.
They always use child porn and fear mongering and pedophilia to get any bill they want passed without review. They know the word pedophile shuts down all rational centers of a parents brain and allows the politician to essentially do anything to them and their children so long as it's in the name of protecting them from pedophiles.
Both regimes killed how many scores of people doing it? Also, both ended up being more oligarchies than communist utopias.
The USA killed even more people in the name of capitalism. How many people have the CIA got killed via death squads etc?
While in principal I agree with you I am not sure what group, country or organization I would trust to not screw it up more. I would trust myself, but then why would anyone else trust me to be internet dictator.
The Internet already is controlled by an organization in the USA which acts as dictator. I don't see how opening it up globally would make things worse. Just because the USA doesn't agree with some other countries? That has nothing to do with our interests because we are getting censorship either way no matter what so why shouldn't we put it in the UN control? At least the internet would be censored in a culturally neutral manner if it's going to be censored at all.
As things are now we are having nations fight over who gets to censor what. They are fighting for the power to censor while claiming they are fighting for freedom.
It's BECAUSE the Internet is important that we can't allow unprogressive and dictatorial regimes to sully it further.
Decentralized control is better than centralized control. Right now probably a handful of Americans control the internet and we probably don't even know their names. How is that better than the UN controlling it? At least with the UN we will know which governments and which individuals are trying to control it.
It's pretty common to believe that no central source can control the internet - and it's true for the most part - with one major exception: IANA ultimately answers to the US Department of Commerce.
In order for the internet to function, there has to be a central authority who determines who gets what IP addresses and domain names. That authority is under the control of the US. Sure you could create your own internets (yes, plural) with your own name and number rules, however if you can't all agree upon who gets what IP address blocks and domain names, you aren't going to have a very cohesive and universal network like the one we have today.
Honestly, I am perfectly fine with the US having control over that, and in fact would much rather they hold the keys rather than the UN. If the UN had their way, that would mean countries who have heavy influence of the UN (e.g. China) would have their way.
So far, the US has done a great job. Sure, we've had talks about filtering the internet (e.g. SOPA) many times, but unlike 90% of the other countries out there (Australia, UK, Germany, China, Iran, just to name a few,) we haven't acted upon any of them. Granted, we have taken extraordinary and unnecessary if not unethical measures, such as taking down megaupload, we didn't do so by ordering IANA to break the infrastructure.
The best thing about the US having control, is that we've never done anything to dismantle the infrastructure in the name of politics. The UN wants control because they plan on doing exactly that.
More governments arguing for control over the internet is better than just having one government and fewer people deciding,
The only thing they are worried about is that the US would not control it.
I think giving the UN control of the internet would be a good thing. No single country should control something as important as the internet.
"Why is no one asking the question if this stuff actually makes communities safer?"
Another good point. I would make that #3. And that brings up:
(4) Safety is not the end goal of all existence. You cannot make everything 100% safe without taking all the meaning and enjoyment out of life.
Not only that but safety for one group of people could put other groups of people in greater danger. For instance if conservative Christian families want to keep their children safe from homosexuality they ban homosexuality and use drones to spy on the communities sex lives in order to police and enforce.
This is the sort of stuff we will be dealing with. The conservative families would claim its to make them feel safer but it puts another group of people in danger of being arrested for who they are.
With drones in the air, the access to crime scenes by news helicopters and planes will be a thing of the past. The neat thing about this issue is that the gov. can say "I didn't pass any laws restricting news access to sites, it was the feds!" since the FAA will have final determination regarding access to the airspace.
Niiiiice.
They can use drones too.
Sounds great until you recall that even the military and the industrial complex that builds the drones can't seem to keep them under control. Remember that Iran now has all the cutting edge tech of a front line drone in their front pocket and also by extension, so does China. Post-mortem conclusion is that we were arrogant about the security of our com link and failed to see this one coming though we knew that they were working hard on it. Now just suppose that they decide to hack one of these drones and fly it into a school. Who is to know that they were to blame. Pilot error, computer glitch, GPS jamming, soft/firmware issue, ... You get the idea, people die all the same. These drones are simply toys and serve no real purpose in our kind of civil society other than to monitor the odd idiot that runs from the state police for going 10 miles over the speed limit. The cost is high and the returns are low. but we can still put our heads in the sand to another civil liberty being taken away in the name of better security. BS!
Why would anyone fly a drone into a school?
There could be many more of them per police officer (let alone police force) than is feasible for helicopters.
They're much smaller and more agile, allowing access to your daughter's hot tub^W^W^W^W more private areas.
They're much easier to make silent, thus enabling stealth surveillance.
They can operate 24/7/365 in aggregate.
They'd be in the hands of people who do things like this.
Each police officer could in theory operate thousands of drones all around the city. The drones could go from being large UAV's to toy airplane size, to insect size, to the size of dust particles, depending on how much money the police have and how drone is defined.
In practice the smallest drone would be nano-dust which is about the size of a flake of rice. This would be too expensive today but if mass produced by the police all around the country the price would go down to the point where we'd have a police officer practically everywhere without any way to stop it. It would be 24/7, and the problem is some drones can see through walls, hear through walls, so yes a drone can see you smoking a joint in your house or see you having gay sex with your wife.
What I want to know is how these drones are more of a threat to privacy than a manned helicopter flying around doing the same thing.
If you don't understand the privacy implications of UAVs, how about if they were made really small, smaller than birds? small like insect small, like fly small, and were spread by the tens of thousands throughout the city to pick up conversations, capture video, etc?
Spire said it right, this sort of thing scales ridiculously easily. The drones will get smaller, fly for longer, get smarter, and there will eventually be thousands of them swarming an area. Honestly if this doesn't disturb you then wait until nano technology allows for even better surveillance.
The main thing I could see them making sense for is replacing helicopters for following suspects if on a chase (a drone would be a lot cheaper and you could have a few engaged). But there are of other valid peaceful governmental uses of drones:
* Surveying the city. You could use them to get an idea of what areas of town needed more work than others. You could do weekly flyovers just to see if streetlights were out in an area. You could build up a highly detailed aerial map of your city/county/state and then let the people make use of that data to make cool mapping products.
* Work in tandem with other sensors to get video on an area where needed ASAP. Video of traffic accidents moments after they occur (or any sudden drop in traffic speed). Video of an area where gunshot detectors picked up shots.
I don't at all understand the concern over drones, they are simply cameras that are more mobile than traditional surveillance cameras. Are people concerned with drones also concerned that police cars have cameras in them?
Obviously if you included weapons on the drones that's a whole different matter, but I've not heard anyone say they are considering weaponizing them.
It's only a matter of time before they claim the drones need weapons to keep people from destroying or jamming them.
That is the question we should be asking. We have a right to know what the police are hoping to find with this surveillance.
Clarification:
There are 2 big issues here that the politicians need to start considering, much more than they have been:
(1) The fact that a certain technology CAN be used, and might even represent monetary savings, is largely a different question that whether it SHOULD be used.
(2) That improved technology works both ways: not only do you have the ability to move surveillance to the sky, but also: civilians have drastically improved ability to bring it down. And strong motivation to do so.
Why is no one asking the question if this stuff actually makes communities safer? I don't think this particular kind of surveillance will stop murders or find missing children. This kind of surveillance will be used to look into peoples houses to find marijuana plants, or meth labs, or just to give people tickets.
What is up these politician's asses? Besides their heads, I mean.
This isn't a war. But some of the politicians seem dead set on making it one.
Hint, politicians: today it is not only quite possible, but not even that difficult to make a drone-killing missile in one's basement, complete with propeller- or heat-seeking electronics. And they'd never see it coming. ("Missile" might be misleading: it might be simpler and cheaper to make a self-guided ballistic projectile.)
I'm not suggesting that I would do that. I don't even have a basement. But you can count on the fact that somebody would.
They aren't fooling anyone with this drone crap. Why is it okay for the police to fly drones over our houses but it's not okay for us to fly drones over the police to monitor their activities at all times?
Why do the police get to use encryption, but if we try to use it then we are terrorists? Some stuff is none of LE business. When we are on our own property, in our own homes, and aren't hurting anyone else, they shouldn't be flying drones or wiretapping or trying to scan inside our houses with satellites. We should be asking the people who support this idea who the enemy is and what they are looking for?
It's like we take it as if they have a right to search us in our homes and look for stuff, but aggressive searching almost always leads to a crime if you know what I mean.
Of course they don't want to use the drones to assassinate American citizens. They just want to arrest American terro er... I mean criminals.
Because if they start looking into houses with unmanned drones and listening to everyone I'm sure there are enough laws to lock up everyone I know.
This is not just a bad idea, it's a treasonous idea. Unless we are declaring war on American citizens there is no reason to destroy communities with these drones. What is next? Allowing the police to attach guns and bombs to these drones?
At this point the text based email will slowly be phased out as multimedia video and audio are phased in until email is unrecognizable. Skype for instance may be the email replacement.
You don't solve the dangers of science by killing scientists. This is the same sort of crap that the Israeli and US government is sponsoring in Iran.
IMO, it was a good idea, but executed far too late. You might make the case that once you hear "Iran is researching nuclear weapons" on the nightly news, it's already too late.
You absolutely can at least mitigate the problems of science by killing scientists, but it has to be done early enough, before the research is successfully carried out.
What are the problems of science and why blame the scientists? Whoever is funding the scientists might be who you want to blame.