No, there won't, no catastrophe required. The limits of materials, chemical energy sources and physics are well understood. Or have you failed to notice that nothing really has changed as far as our capacity to move mass?? A 747 from 1969 flies at the same height, same speed, using the same chemical fuels as today, and it is built with the same materials. Yes, there were compressor blades made with carbon fiver [sic] in the 1960s already.
You could have said the same thing about horse-drawn carriages in the Middle Ages, and you would have been every bit as wrong. We went from hot-air ballons to the Saturn V in under a century, and now we've plateau'd. Our progress is likely to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary for a while yet, but if you think there is nothing left to discover simply because we haven't seen the same explosive growth in rocket propulsion lately that we saw around the middle of the 20th century, I'd argue that you are either naive or ignorant of history. Just because you can't foresee the next big breakthrough doesn't mean there isn't one.
But you can already go on a Mig, rent a Cessna, etc... Do you do that? Do you know anyone who does?
Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I DO know someone who rents Cessnas (...and Citabrias and Pipers and...). I've rented them for about 950 hours of flight time. I have also rented them to others, and taught some of those same people how to fly them themselves.
It's much more fun than being in a sub-orbital ballistic tin can.
Maybe, maybe not. The best part of flying to me was going some place I had never been before; I love exploring and flying opened up new places to explore. However, quite honestly, it only took a couple of years before hundred-dollar-hamburger runs got boring. I loved spin training, so I imagine acrobatic flight would breathe new life into my enjoyment of flying -- for a while -- but I'm sorry...there's something about touching the edge of space and going some place where only a handful of people in the entire history of the human race have ever gone that is beyond comparison to anything else on earth. YMMV, of course, but I'd forsake flying GA for the rest of my life in a heartbeat for a chance to hitch a ride in one of those "sub-orbital ballistic tin cans".
Personally, I kind of like this idea. Having to perform the math to convert between time zones is trivial but tedious, especially if you find yourself needing to do it multiple times a day. I can certainly see the value in having a global system where I don't have to worry about whether or not my watch, cell phone, etc. is displaying local time or time back home when I am trying to catch an airplane while traveling, for example.
Having said that, I can also see value in not having to wonder if 23:58 is in the middle of the night, the middle of the business day or during dinner when calling a family member or business associate who is in a different time zone. In other words, I doubt that having a single time zone will make life that much simpler, since we would still have to calculate whether or not it is an appropriate time to call our contacts who do not live in the same time zone we do.
Except that at this company as soon as the manager decides to fire them (before the employee has even been notified that they've been canned), their account is disabled by HR and the service desk does not have the ability to enable those accounts.
In which case, yeah, I agree -- that's a pretty stupid policy.
Actually, minus the "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" overtones, that would make a cool project, if you have an interested electronics, woodworking, physics, and/or shop instructor. Approach such an instructor (or instructors -- get them all on board!) and pitch the idea, offer the use of surplus equipment. I know I was always far more interested in classes where teachers went the extra mile to present a practical application (preferably as a class project) than in classes where teachers left the material abstract.
...if they needed a password reset, their manager had to also be verified and approve them having their password reset. Stupidest policy ever.
Where I work, as soon as we (IT) even hears a rumor that an employee has been canned, we change the password on their account; we don't delete the account until the employee's manager gives us the okay. In an environment like that, having a manager request the password reset makes complete sense, because the last thing you want is a newly fired employee calling you to reset his password so he can sabotage and/or steal confidential data.
As for a question, what, if any, notifications, waivers, etc. were required to penetrate controlled airspace in the launch area? At the very least, you would have penetrated Class A airspace (between 18,000MSL and 60,000MSL over the entire contiguous 48 states), so I presume you had to have FAA approval?
...just pointing out that provided they don't fire it into controlled airspace, no-one's going to bat an eyelid...
Ummm...he did fire it into controlled airspace. In most of the contiguous United States, any airspace over 1200 feet above ground level (AGL) is "Class E" airspace. Okay, I don't know exactly where he launched from, so he could have been in one of the exceptions where the floor of Class E airspace is "as published", but even then, anything above 18,000 feet above mean sea level (MSL) and below 60,000 MSL is "Class A" airspace (see the 14 CFR 91 and the Aeronautical Information Manual for more information on and Class E airspace). I would assume he notified FAA before launch, and received permission to penetrate at least the Class A airspace; I'm not sure if any notification would be required to penetrate Class E, since (for aircraft at least) there is typically no regulatory requirement to contact air traffic control before entering the airspace.
Which emphasises the point - the criteria needed to 'impress' random slashdotter x seems entirely arbitrary and unrelated to any real milestone.
Well said. IMHO, not that this is any less arbitrary or random or related to any real milestone, this guy launching a ~$10K rocket to well over 100,000 feet (30,400m, for my metric friends) is indeed impressive. I've been following a guy (solidskateboards, IIRC) on YouTube who routinely launches a sorbitol/KNO3 rocket to around 5,000 feet, which I thought was plenty cool enough...but 100k feet...wow.
We tend to be short-sighted, greedy, and in many other ways, stupid. That's inherent in our DNA, unfortunately. If you haven't noticed, governments haven't been doing a particularly good job of cleaning up after themselves in space, either. So we basically have a choice: lobby to do a better job in space than we've done so far on earth, or lock up the heavens and stay here on our own polluted little planet.
I understand -- and even share -- fouling up space as well as the earth, but I really don't think that preventing private exploration of space is the answer. It's going to happen sooner or later; let's just push to make the companies that are moving in that direction as responsible as possible.
Please excuse what may be an ignorant question. I've never done any SMD work, but I've done plenty of through-hole soldering, which I learned from my dad when I was just a kid. I remember he used to put heat sinks on all of his semiconductors before soldering so the heat from the iron wouldn't damage the devices. Have you ever (literally) fried a chip or other semiconductor by using a frying pan to bulk solder all of the components on your SMD boards? How much of a margin is there between melting the solder and melting your components?
And I was totally unprepared for academic failure in college.
Absolutely. I skated through high school -- I did my homework; after all, I may not have learned as much math in 5th grade as I should have, but I did learn *something*, lol -- but I never, ever studied for tests. Despite that, however, I maintained a solid B+/A- GPA, and graduated in the top 12% of my class. In hind sight, I could have done better if I had tried, but I believe I said something above about how kids don't always understand the impact of their decisions yet?
Anyway...by the time I got to college, I didn't know how to study because I had never *had* to study before, and like you, I was completely unprepared for college. I failed CS101 (that was ego -- I signed up for the class knowing I didn't meet the prerequisites, i.e., how to program in Pascal), I did fine in Analytic Geometry, but took two semesters to pass Calc 1, three semesters to pass Calc 2, barely squeaked through Differential Equations, got my backside handed to me in Stats...it was an eye opener to say the least.
It was crushing to have kids around me who knew more and were smarter and better prepared.
I wasn't crushed that other people were doing better than me since I was never the *best*, but I was really frustrated that I wasn't doing nearly as well as I expected. It was like having a glass of cold water thrown in my face to realize that while I may have been a little above average in grade school, jr. high and high school, I was mediocre at best in college. Big fish, little pond, and all that. Suddenly, "good enough" wasn't anymore, and I had never acquired the skills to go the extra ten or twenty per cent.
I have accounts on both Facebook and G+, but you're more likely to catch me on G+. I created a Facebook account because I'm a part-time youth pastor and the kids in the youth group are using Facebook, which makes FB an easy way to communicate with them. However, after using FB for a while, I decided that the youth group and some of my other friends (some of whom I've known since I was in elementary school -- a big deal for a military brat like me) don't mix so well. On the other hand, most of my geek friends are on G+, so that's where I find myself actually being social:) There's just more signal to noise on G+ for me, whereas FB is pretty much the opposite. Consequently, I'm gradually migrating my *personal* social networking to G+, and just check in on FB to communicate with the youth group.
Aside: LadyAda is on G+? I need to check that out...I just bought an Arduino Uno and the LadyAda web site is an absolute treasure trove for learning Arduino and electronics!
C'mon, I don't know GPP, and I don't know you, so maybe I'm off the mark. However, from my experience, I'd say you are mistaking emotionally maturity for intelligence. They are not the same thing, and expecting a child who has an IQ greater than most adults to also have the emotional maturity and wisdom of an adult is a recipe for disaster.
I was no child prodigy, but I was at the top end of average when I was in grade school. I ended up in a public schools system "Talented and Gifted" program (which I really enjoyed). In 5th grade, my teacher -- who was new to teaching -- had a brilliant idea to allow us to go as far and fast as we could: math class would be entirely self-paced. She gave us the materials to learn, and a program to follow. We would take a pre-test before starting a new chapter, then we were to read the chapter, do the work in that chapter, and take a post-test to verify that we had really learned the material. We would grade our own work, except for the post-test, which she would grade. Being (slightly) above average intelligence, but no more emotionally mature than anyone else in 5th grade, I quickly figured out that I could blow off all the course work, take a few days to goof off, and take a post-test, then proceed to the next chapter.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out how well that worked. For the first few chapters, I pulled it off, but once we got to the new material that I hadn't been exposed to before, I started blowing all the tests. Several phone calls home to my parents later ("I don't understand why Mike is suddenly having so much trouble in math..."), I realized that *saying* I had done the course work and actually *doing* the course work lead to vastly different outcomes...but by then, I had a lot of catching up to do.
Child prodigies often have amazing intellectual skills (more or less by definition, right?), but they typically *don't* have the experience and maturity to understand how society works. It's unrealistic to expect a child to understand how decisions now can impact their life ten or twenty years later. That's why children have and NEED parents. Sure, GPP could do some community college work now to get his grades up and go on to a better school for a BS, MS, or PhD, but cut him some slack on his decisions as a kid. I wouldn't have done any better in his place, nor, do I think, would most of us.
Gotta say, I pretty much agree with everything you said here, although if you aren't rich enough to post your own bail, there are bail-bond companies that will gladly front you the money (with interest, of course) until your trial, when the court returns the bond money. If you skip out on that, however, you've got bounty hunters chasing after you, because the company that bailed you out wants their money back, so you might not choose that option unless you were looking at life in prison or the death penalty...
...and technically you're not supposed to loan out a car without knowing who you loaned it to...
While I am having a hard time coming up with an example of when and why you might do this, I am having an equally hard time finding any laws that require you to know to whom it was loaned. Do you have a reference for that statement?
...and making sure they are properly licensed and covered by insurance.
And that's just flat-out wrong. 1) You don't have to have a license to drive a car. You just have to have a license to drive on a public road. Consequently, I can very easily come up with examples of where you potentially might not need to make sure that a driver is properly licensed (although you might be required to do so by your insurance company; see item #2). 2) At least in my state, you don't license the driver; you license the CAR. Therefore, although it is necessary for me to insure that my car is properly insured*, there is no requirement for me to verify that the driver is properly insured, because you CAN'T insure the driver here.
*In some states, there is no requirement for insurance at all. Hawaii, for example, does not require insurance because their laws state that, regardless of who was at fault for the accident, you pay for repairs to your car, and the owner(s) of the other vehicle(s) pay for repairs to that/those car(s).
How do you propose to update maps or download mission data, then? If it's got the ability to transmit and receive information in any form whatsoever, then it's got the ability to be hacked, and without the ability to transmit or receive data in some form, a Predator or Reaper drone is less useful than my Air Hogs Hawk Eye helicopter...which for anything beyond goofing off inside my house, is pretty useless.
And keeping your checksum values on non-writable disks (like CDs)...
Not just the checksum, but statically compiled commands used to run the Tripwire-like program. If the detection program uses, for example, the 'find' command to find all of the files on the system* then a competent attacker could always corrupt the 'find' program to ignore '/usr/local/bin/.myHiddenRootkitDirectory/*' and you'll be none the wiser.
*You don't want to limit your search to files that have already been checksummed, because one of the things that you can find is that new, compromised files have been added to your system. Consider this classic attack: your path is edited to contain './' (the current directory), and a compromised 'ls', 'find', 'cd' or other common tool is written to your home directory. Guess which file you run when you log in -- the compromised file or the one supplied with your system? If you find all of the files on the system, then verify that 1) you have a checksum for the file, and 2) verify that the checksum is correct, you minimize the danger of this kind of attack.
True, but what is the alternative? If simply not showing up in court was all that was required to beat a conviction, then how many criminals (not just traffic misdemeanors, but real crime) would show up in court?
I honestly don't see a problem with having to challenge an allegation to have it overturned. If you were truly guilty until proven innocent, then the photo radar tickets would all have returned guilty verdicts because the drivers did not prove that they were either not driving the car or driving the car but not speeding when the violation occurred. What actually happened -- in Anchorage, at least -- was that the photo radar couldn't positively identify the driver, and since the owner of the car was not necessarily the driver of the car at the time and date of the alleged infraction, the tickets were thrown out.
IIRC, it wasn't a matter of proving whether or not the violation actually happened; it was a matter of positively identifying the driver of the vehicle. But, as I said, it was over a decade ago, so take that with NaCl as required;)
With all due respect, if you think it's a good idea for any government agency to kill *even a single person* without any oversight whatsoever, then I humbly submit that you, sir, are either an idiot or you are completely ignorant of what has historically happened when any person or group of people has acquired unlimited authority. It has *ALWAYS* been a bad thing, and it always will.
Your prejudiced rantings against religion -- and I'll agree that many, many evil things have been done in the name of religion, but so have many, many good things -- only suggest that it is more likely idiocy than ignorance...although I sincerely hope I am wrong. If it's merely ignorance, than education can fix the problem, but if it's idiocy? Not so much.
For America, as a whole, you are correct. I, however, am an American, and I've been saying this since GWB made his speech after 9/11 about how we were going to hunt down the terrorists and anyone who wasn't for us was against us. I got chills (not the good kind) when I heard him say that, and, unfortunately, history has not proven me wrong.
I haven't followed the story close enough to be 100% certain of the facts in the case, but I understand it, this was not entrapment. The FBI did not present him with an idea and then a means to accomplish it; he started looking around on his own, and someone he knew alerted the FBI who THEN placed bait somewhere that someone who was ALREADY LOOKING for the means to carry out the plot would find it. By definition, that's not "entrapment". That's a legitimate sting operation.
Look at it this way...if you have never considered hiring a hooker, and a sexy, undercover cop approaches you and offers to have sex for money, that's entrapment. If, however, you are cruising the red light district in your town, asking "how much?" to every prospect that catches your eye, and one of them is an undercover cop, that's NOT entrapment...and that is more or less what I understand happened in this incident (piped to sed "s/prostitution/plot to blow things up/g" of course).
Anyone who's ever gotten a ticket in the mail...would argue that we're already far beyond that point.
Hey, look -- I'm admittedly as paranoid and leery of government as anyone else here on/., but I gotta say that you are mistaken on that point. About ten or fifteen years ago here in Anchorage, Alaska, they tried setting up photo radar to catch people speeding in school zones. IIRC, EVERYONE who challenged the photo radar tickets in court beat the accusation.
Slashdot Mirror
No, there won't, no catastrophe required. The limits of materials, chemical energy sources and physics are well understood. Or have you failed to notice that nothing really has changed as far as our capacity to move mass?? A 747 from 1969 flies at the same height, same speed, using the same chemical fuels as today, and it is built with the same materials. Yes, there were compressor blades made with carbon fiver [sic] in the 1960s already.
You could have said the same thing about horse-drawn carriages in the Middle Ages, and you would have been every bit as wrong. We went from hot-air ballons to the Saturn V in under a century, and now we've plateau'd. Our progress is likely to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary for a while yet, but if you think there is nothing left to discover simply because we haven't seen the same explosive growth in rocket propulsion lately that we saw around the middle of the 20th century, I'd argue that you are either naive or ignorant of history. Just because you can't foresee the next big breakthrough doesn't mean there isn't one.
But you can already go on a Mig, rent a Cessna, etc... Do you do that? Do you know anyone who does?
Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I DO know someone who rents Cessnas (...and Citabrias and Pipers and...). I've rented them for about 950 hours of flight time. I have also rented them to others, and taught some of those same people how to fly them themselves.
It's much more fun than being in a sub-orbital ballistic tin can.
Maybe, maybe not. The best part of flying to me was going some place I had never been before; I love exploring and flying opened up new places to explore. However, quite honestly, it only took a couple of years before hundred-dollar-hamburger runs got boring. I loved spin training, so I imagine acrobatic flight would breathe new life into my enjoyment of flying -- for a while -- but I'm sorry...there's something about touching the edge of space and going some place where only a handful of people in the entire history of the human race have ever gone that is beyond comparison to anything else on earth. YMMV, of course, but I'd forsake flying GA for the rest of my life in a heartbeat for a chance to hitch a ride in one of those "sub-orbital ballistic tin cans".
Personally, I kind of like this idea. Having to perform the math to convert between time zones is trivial but tedious, especially if you find yourself needing to do it multiple times a day. I can certainly see the value in having a global system where I don't have to worry about whether or not my watch, cell phone, etc. is displaying local time or time back home when I am trying to catch an airplane while traveling, for example.
Having said that, I can also see value in not having to wonder if 23:58 is in the middle of the night, the middle of the business day or during dinner when calling a family member or business associate who is in a different time zone. In other words, I doubt that having a single time zone will make life that much simpler, since we would still have to calculate whether or not it is an appropriate time to call our contacts who do not live in the same time zone we do.
Except that at this company as soon as the manager decides to fire them (before the employee has even been notified that they've been canned), their account is disabled by HR and the service desk does not have the ability to enable those accounts.
In which case, yeah, I agree -- that's a pretty stupid policy.
Actually, minus the "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" overtones, that would make a cool project, if you have an interested electronics, woodworking, physics, and/or shop instructor. Approach such an instructor (or instructors -- get them all on board!) and pitch the idea, offer the use of surplus equipment. I know I was always far more interested in classes where teachers went the extra mile to present a practical application (preferably as a class project) than in classes where teachers left the material abstract.
...if they needed a password reset, their manager had to also be verified and approve them having their password reset. Stupidest policy ever.
Where I work, as soon as we (IT) even hears a rumor that an employee has been canned, we change the password on their account; we don't delete the account until the employee's manager gives us the okay. In an environment like that, having a manager request the password reset makes complete sense, because the last thing you want is a newly fired employee calling you to reset his password so he can sabotage and/or steal confidential data.
Cool -- thanks for the info! I may have to give a surface-mount project a try.
First, let me say...very, VERY cool.
As for a question, what, if any, notifications, waivers, etc. were required to penetrate controlled airspace in the launch area? At the very least, you would have penetrated Class A airspace (between 18,000MSL and 60,000MSL over the entire contiguous 48 states), so I presume you had to have FAA approval?
...just pointing out that provided they don't fire it into controlled airspace, no-one's going to bat an eyelid...
Ummm...he did fire it into controlled airspace. In most of the contiguous United States, any airspace over 1200 feet above ground level (AGL) is "Class E" airspace. Okay, I don't know exactly where he launched from, so he could have been in one of the exceptions where the floor of Class E airspace is "as published", but even then, anything above 18,000 feet above mean sea level (MSL) and below 60,000 MSL is "Class A" airspace (see the 14 CFR 91 and the Aeronautical Information Manual for more information on and Class E airspace). I would assume he notified FAA before launch, and received permission to penetrate at least the Class A airspace; I'm not sure if any notification would be required to penetrate Class E, since (for aircraft at least) there is typically no regulatory requirement to contact air traffic control before entering the airspace.
Which emphasises the point - the criteria needed to 'impress' random slashdotter x seems entirely arbitrary and unrelated to any real milestone.
Well said. IMHO, not that this is any less arbitrary or random or related to any real milestone, this guy launching a ~$10K rocket to well over 100,000 feet (30,400m, for my metric friends) is indeed impressive. I've been following a guy (solidskateboards, IIRC) on YouTube who routinely launches a sorbitol/KNO3 rocket to around 5,000 feet, which I thought was plenty cool enough...but 100k feet...wow.
Welcome to the human race.
We tend to be short-sighted, greedy, and in many other ways, stupid. That's inherent in our DNA, unfortunately. If you haven't noticed, governments haven't been doing a particularly good job of cleaning up after themselves in space, either. So we basically have a choice: lobby to do a better job in space than we've done so far on earth, or lock up the heavens and stay here on our own polluted little planet.
I understand -- and even share -- fouling up space as well as the earth, but I really don't think that preventing private exploration of space is the answer. It's going to happen sooner or later; let's just push to make the companies that are moving in that direction as responsible as possible.
Please excuse what may be an ignorant question. I've never done any SMD work, but I've done plenty of through-hole soldering, which I learned from my dad when I was just a kid. I remember he used to put heat sinks on all of his semiconductors before soldering so the heat from the iron wouldn't damage the devices. Have you ever (literally) fried a chip or other semiconductor by using a frying pan to bulk solder all of the components on your SMD boards? How much of a margin is there between melting the solder and melting your components?
And I was totally unprepared for academic failure in college.
Absolutely. I skated through high school -- I did my homework; after all, I may not have learned as much math in 5th grade as I should have, but I did learn *something*, lol -- but I never, ever studied for tests. Despite that, however, I maintained a solid B+/A- GPA, and graduated in the top 12% of my class. In hind sight, I could have done better if I had tried, but I believe I said something above about how kids don't always understand the impact of their decisions yet?
Anyway...by the time I got to college, I didn't know how to study because I had never *had* to study before, and like you, I was completely unprepared for college. I failed CS101 (that was ego -- I signed up for the class knowing I didn't meet the prerequisites, i.e., how to program in Pascal), I did fine in Analytic Geometry, but took two semesters to pass Calc 1, three semesters to pass Calc 2, barely squeaked through Differential Equations, got my backside handed to me in Stats...it was an eye opener to say the least.
It was crushing to have kids around me who knew more and were smarter and better prepared.
I wasn't crushed that other people were doing better than me since I was never the *best*, but I was really frustrated that I wasn't doing nearly as well as I expected. It was like having a glass of cold water thrown in my face to realize that while I may have been a little above average in grade school, jr. high and high school, I was mediocre at best in college. Big fish, little pond, and all that. Suddenly, "good enough" wasn't anymore, and I had never acquired the skills to go the extra ten or twenty per cent.
Yup.
:) There's just more signal to noise on G+ for me, whereas FB is pretty much the opposite. Consequently, I'm gradually migrating my *personal* social networking to G+, and just check in on FB to communicate with the youth group.
I have accounts on both Facebook and G+, but you're more likely to catch me on G+. I created a Facebook account because I'm a part-time youth pastor and the kids in the youth group are using Facebook, which makes FB an easy way to communicate with them. However, after using FB for a while, I decided that the youth group and some of my other friends (some of whom I've known since I was in elementary school -- a big deal for a military brat like me) don't mix so well. On the other hand, most of my geek friends are on G+, so that's where I find myself actually being social
Aside: LadyAda is on G+? I need to check that out...I just bought an Arduino Uno and the LadyAda web site is an absolute treasure trove for learning Arduino and electronics!
C'mon, I don't know GPP, and I don't know you, so maybe I'm off the mark. However, from my experience, I'd say you are mistaking emotionally maturity for intelligence. They are not the same thing, and expecting a child who has an IQ greater than most adults to also have the emotional maturity and wisdom of an adult is a recipe for disaster.
I was no child prodigy, but I was at the top end of average when I was in grade school. I ended up in a public schools system "Talented and Gifted" program (which I really enjoyed). In 5th grade, my teacher -- who was new to teaching -- had a brilliant idea to allow us to go as far and fast as we could: math class would be entirely self-paced. She gave us the materials to learn, and a program to follow. We would take a pre-test before starting a new chapter, then we were to read the chapter, do the work in that chapter, and take a post-test to verify that we had really learned the material. We would grade our own work, except for the post-test, which she would grade. Being (slightly) above average intelligence, but no more emotionally mature than anyone else in 5th grade, I quickly figured out that I could blow off all the course work, take a few days to goof off, and take a post-test, then proceed to the next chapter.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out how well that worked. For the first few chapters, I pulled it off, but once we got to the new material that I hadn't been exposed to before, I started blowing all the tests. Several phone calls home to my parents later ("I don't understand why Mike is suddenly having so much trouble in math..."), I realized that *saying* I had done the course work and actually *doing* the course work lead to vastly different outcomes...but by then, I had a lot of catching up to do.
Child prodigies often have amazing intellectual skills (more or less by definition, right?), but they typically *don't* have the experience and maturity to understand how society works. It's unrealistic to expect a child to understand how decisions now can impact their life ten or twenty years later. That's why children have and NEED parents. Sure, GPP could do some community college work now to get his grades up and go on to a better school for a BS, MS, or PhD, but cut him some slack on his decisions as a kid. I wouldn't have done any better in his place, nor, do I think, would most of us.
Gotta say, I pretty much agree with everything you said here, although if you aren't rich enough to post your own bail, there are bail-bond companies that will gladly front you the money (with interest, of course) until your trial, when the court returns the bond money. If you skip out on that, however, you've got bounty hunters chasing after you, because the company that bailed you out wants their money back, so you might not choose that option unless you were looking at life in prison or the death penalty...
...and technically you're not supposed to loan out a car without knowing who you loaned it to...
While I am having a hard time coming up with an example of when and why you might do this, I am having an equally hard time finding any laws that require you to know to whom it was loaned. Do you have a reference for that statement?
...and making sure they are properly licensed and covered by insurance.
And that's just flat-out wrong. 1) You don't have to have a license to drive a car. You just have to have a license to drive on a public road. Consequently, I can very easily come up with examples of where you potentially might not need to make sure that a driver is properly licensed (although you might be required to do so by your insurance company; see item #2). 2) At least in my state, you don't license the driver; you license the CAR. Therefore, although it is necessary for me to insure that my car is properly insured*, there is no requirement for me to verify that the driver is properly insured, because you CAN'T insure the driver here.
*In some states, there is no requirement for insurance at all. Hawaii, for example, does not require insurance because their laws state that, regardless of who was at fault for the accident, you pay for repairs to your car, and the owner(s) of the other vehicle(s) pay for repairs to that/those car(s).
How do you propose to update maps or download mission data, then? If it's got the ability to transmit and receive information in any form whatsoever, then it's got the ability to be hacked, and without the ability to transmit or receive data in some form, a Predator or Reaper drone is less useful than my Air Hogs Hawk Eye helicopter...which for anything beyond goofing off inside my house, is pretty useless.
And keeping your checksum values on non-writable disks (like CDs)...
Not just the checksum, but statically compiled commands used to run the Tripwire-like program. If the detection program uses, for example, the 'find' command to find all of the files on the system* then a competent attacker could always corrupt the 'find' program to ignore '/usr/local/bin/.myHiddenRootkitDirectory/*' and you'll be none the wiser.
*You don't want to limit your search to files that have already been checksummed, because one of the things that you can find is that new, compromised files have been added to your system. Consider this classic attack: your path is edited to contain './' (the current directory), and a compromised 'ls', 'find', 'cd' or other common tool is written to your home directory. Guess which file you run when you log in -- the compromised file or the one supplied with your system? If you find all of the files on the system, then verify that 1) you have a checksum for the file, and 2) verify that the checksum is correct, you minimize the danger of this kind of attack.
True, but what is the alternative? If simply not showing up in court was all that was required to beat a conviction, then how many criminals (not just traffic misdemeanors, but real crime) would show up in court?
I honestly don't see a problem with having to challenge an allegation to have it overturned. If you were truly guilty until proven innocent, then the photo radar tickets would all have returned guilty verdicts because the drivers did not prove that they were either not driving the car or driving the car but not speeding when the violation occurred. What actually happened -- in Anchorage, at least -- was that the photo radar couldn't positively identify the driver, and since the owner of the car was not necessarily the driver of the car at the time and date of the alleged infraction, the tickets were thrown out.
IIRC, it wasn't a matter of proving whether or not the violation actually happened; it was a matter of positively identifying the driver of the vehicle. But, as I said, it was over a decade ago, so take that with NaCl as required ;)
With all due respect, if you think it's a good idea for any government agency to kill *even a single person* without any oversight whatsoever, then I humbly submit that you, sir, are either an idiot or you are completely ignorant of what has historically happened when any person or group of people has acquired unlimited authority. It has *ALWAYS* been a bad thing, and it always will.
Your prejudiced rantings against religion -- and I'll agree that many, many evil things have been done in the name of religion, but so have many, many good things -- only suggest that it is more likely idiocy than ignorance...although I sincerely hope I am wrong. If it's merely ignorance, than education can fix the problem, but if it's idiocy? Not so much.
You, sir, are my new hero. That was absolutely awesome :)
^This is why stereotypes are bad^
For America, as a whole, you are correct. I, however, am an American, and I've been saying this since GWB made his speech after 9/11 about how we were going to hunt down the terrorists and anyone who wasn't for us was against us. I got chills (not the good kind) when I heard him say that, and, unfortunately, history has not proven me wrong.
I haven't followed the story close enough to be 100% certain of the facts in the case, but I understand it, this was not entrapment. The FBI did not present him with an idea and then a means to accomplish it; he started looking around on his own, and someone he knew alerted the FBI who THEN placed bait somewhere that someone who was ALREADY LOOKING for the means to carry out the plot would find it. By definition, that's not "entrapment". That's a legitimate sting operation.
Look at it this way...if you have never considered hiring a hooker, and a sexy, undercover cop approaches you and offers to have sex for money, that's entrapment. If, however, you are cruising the red light district in your town, asking "how much?" to every prospect that catches your eye, and one of them is an undercover cop, that's NOT entrapment...and that is more or less what I understand happened in this incident (piped to sed "s/prostitution/plot to blow things up/g" of course).
Anyone who's ever gotten a ticket in the mail...would argue that we're already far beyond that point.
Hey, look -- I'm admittedly as paranoid and leery of government as anyone else here on /., but I gotta say that you are mistaken on that point. About ten or fifteen years ago here in Anchorage, Alaska, they tried setting up photo radar to catch people speeding in school zones. IIRC, EVERYONE who challenged the photo radar tickets in court beat the accusation.