There is, in fact, strong evidence that Russia is trying to influence our election for their own aims. Doesn't that bother you? Would it bother you more if they were trying to help Hillary? Hell most Trump supporters are mad at the media for talking about the things he says publicly, let alone when a foreign government does it. It's this far from an act of war to interfere with another country's elections, and the US has been rightly criticized for doing it to other countries before.
Nobody's denying that they're true - in fact nobody cares since all she describes is politics, and business, and book group negotiations, and... - and that's not the point. All of these Hillary scandals are washed up and never as juicy as the media makes them sound, so people just get tired. We get it, people don't like her, and people think she's secretive. But most people think she'd be a better administrator for a few years, custodian if you will, than someone with such a short fuse that he'll upend his entire campaign at 3AM - so without talking to anyone - in a fit of pique. Presidential campaigns are very serious! You can't just fuck it up because something got under your skin! What's he gonna do, nuke France one night on a whim because Hollande said something mean to him and it's been keeping him up?
I think you're attributing too much to the Times. They - several times - point out that what he did was perfectly legal and acceptable, and otherwise don't waste any time discussing it, instead discussing how the deductions work and other aspects of his finances. Any characterization of him in the article has nothing to do with legality or even ethics - it's about his skill as a businessman, at using the rules to his advantage, as a responsible citizen, and of course overall his suitability to become the President.
People hate taxes. People also try to pay the least taxes possible. We all do it - and we're supposed to, since the tax code explicitly encourages certain behaviors like charity and investing for the future. I personally reduced my tax bill last year by $1000 because I (retroactively) maxed out my HSA. But most people have to pay taxes because they get a paycheck and it's just taken out and they have no way around it. And they watch people with astonishing amounts of money (which includes Trump, regardless of his exact income) get out of the thing that they have no control over. The government spends their money, not Trump's. This feeling people have isn't really open for debate - the tax code has undergone significant upheavals due to similar public outrage before. (The creation of the AMT is just one example, but virtually every other loophole counts.)
The question is, what does your average working person think about Donald Trump as a man who is on their side? This is a question they answer emotionally, not by referring to the depreciation schedules or a philosopher. Do you think the average American is impressed or angered by Trump losing approximately ~%0 of his effective income between 1995-2013 (at least) while they lost about ~20%? Certainly he is trying to convince people that they should be impressed. But what did they think of Romney, who had very similar tax- and bankruptcy-law acumen?
Notice - I haven't actually judged Trump negatively or positively in the above text. Does it seem like I have? All I did was described facts about him and the American people. Personally I actually agree with what Romney said in 2012 - basically it's up to the legislators to make a tax code that reflects the public policy about who should pay what taxes, and if a man like Mr. Trump can avoid paying taxes then either that's what he should be doing according to our Congress, or they should fix it.
It's not patriotic to pay extra tax and nobody is seriously arguing that it is. The questions people have about him have nothing to do with money.
Section 331 of the 2012 FAA modernization act is a definitions section. Perhaps you meant section 336. You also left off a bunch of conditions: - It has to be hobby/recreational - It has to be according to the AMA's rules ("in accordance with a community-based set of safety guidelines and within the programming of a nationwide community-based organization") - It has to be less than 55 pounds or signed off on by the AMA - It has not interfere with manned aircraft - If within 5 miles of an airport, you have to call the airport - It has to be within visual line of sight
Also it says that "Nothing in this section shall be construed to limit the authority of the Administrator to pursue enforcement action against persons operating model aircraft who endanger the safety of the national airspace system."
So the section 336 exemption is followed exactly, except that the FAA says that if the drone is more than 0.55lbs it must be registered. The FAA probably argues that this is part of maintaining the safety of the national airspace system, and I think it's a case they will win considering it's based on weight. Their legal argument is basically that by codifying the Part 107 UAS rules, they have told everyone "we consider unregistered drones over 0.55lbs to endanger the safety of the NAS and will pursue enforcement actions against such persons" - which is basically all a regulation is. The plantiff's argument would have to be along the lines of "well technically the law says you can't do anything it doesn't say, and doesn't say anything about whether heavier drones can be required to be registered". Which is fair enough, but since registration is non-discriminatory (anyone can do it, the FAA won't tell anyone they can't) and free ($5 online but you can do it on paper), they'd have to argue that the registration requirement itself constitutes a burdensome regulation on top of what's allowed by the law - to which I say good luck.
Generally, laws about regulation either delegate a section of authority to an agency for them to figure out the rules, or (if the congress-folks are worried about the agency doing or not doing something they don't like, which is what happened here and with the more recent class-3 medical certification reform for manned aircraft) they lay out the shape of the rules that they expect the FAA to create. That's what the FAA did here, modulo that registration requirement. But it's up to the agency to create the laws that follow the outline in the law, and on general principle courts will yield to the regulating authority unless the disconnect is "big enough".
Laws like the Air Commerce Act and the Federal Aviation Act which give the FAA authority over aircraft in the United States? Once those laws have been passed, it's up to the FAA to figure out what the rules are. That's called "administrative law" and the "real" law says "you have to follow the administrative law".
Let's say you fly the drone stupidly and get punished by the FAA. (If you fly the drone non-stupidly and follow the simple rules, that's fine with everyone.) They have to follow an internal process to decide if they punish you or not, and you get your say, but I recommend you be apologetic because they don't have to convince anyone but themselves to punish you. If you don't like it you can appeal - to the NTSB. If you don't like what the NTSB's Administrative Law Judge decides, you can appeal to the full board of the NTSB. The NTSB will only stop the FAA if the FAA isn't following its own rules or is acting "arbitrary and capricious" in its decision - that's extremely rare, though it did happen with drones a few years back (the FAA had to go through the full rulemaking process, which they've since done). If you don't like the NTSB's decision you can appeal that to the federal courts, who themselves will only intervene if the NTSB "abused its discretion, or its determination is wholly unsupported by the evidence". I don't think this has ever happened, but you're welcome to give it a shot!
Er, what do you think "kill[s] millions of Americans every year"? Only 2.6 million people died in 2014 all together. 614k of those are heart disease, followed closely by cancer at 591k. Those two are the only causes of death above 150k/yr. Unless you're saying that "our Western appetites, processed food, and a largely sedentary lifestyle" are the "countless things" we're letting by, you're talking out your ass.
Certainly drones must seem like a non-issue to you if you think the world is at least 10x more fatal than it is. For the rest of us, it would be nice if people would be a bit more responsible with their dangerous toys. Like the old-school model airplane AMA-member types - that's all anyone (including the FAA) wants out of the drone types. I think the eggs and magnet bans are stupid too (though you can still buy the magnets btw) but drones can hurt other people so they're a different category.
The FAA has broad authority over anything that flies and they have a history of declining to regulate hobbyist model aircraft. But putting out an advisory circular saying "we won't bother you if you are a hobbyist and listen to the AMA" is kind of the opposite of "we don't have any authority over this activity". "Enforcement discretion" is pretty much exactly how I would describe this.
Like most executive branch functions, and like it or not, the precise manner and timing of how the FAA carries out their mandate is up to them. It's basically like how the cops usually won't bother people for having a broken tail-light or a few MPH of speeding, but can elect to pull over people at any time for those violations. In fact, even if the town has a policy of not pulling people over for always had to understand something about airspace and keep things safe. Pre-drone, the AMA served this purpose and their fields' placements and operating rules took care of this problem. But when you can unbox your drone, charge it for an hour or two, and then send it up to 3000' on the first try, there's no funnel through the AMA like there used to be to teach people those rules. The drone registry's main purpose is to act as another funnel so that people can figure out where and when it's safe to fly. And, if they don't play by the rules, that there's at least the potential for accountability.
The drone community has brought this on themselves entirely. As even the suit alleges, everyone was OK with the model airplane rules. Drones changed the game and forced the agency's hand here. That's what happens with disruptive technology - you might as well get mad about the regulation of automobiles because everything was fine with horses. But obviously cars are much easier to use (average experience and skill goes down) and go much faster (danger goes up). Drones are similarly easier to use, which explains their popularity, and can easily go much higher and from way more places.
Yeah, easily, if you lay in some plastic wrap or something. Actually it's easier than most things as the sieve is the right shape to hold water, and the holes are pretty easy to cover - the water will even help you do it!
I hardly know where to begin. You're confusing standards with modulation techniques. You're also confusing GSM the standard (1991, TDMA, voice with GPRS and then EDGE) with GSM the "class" (which includes UMTS, HS(D)PA(+), and LTE). The latter is a set of standards defined by the 3GPP, whose scope now includes the maintenance of the original GSM standards.
CDMA is a modulation technique (actually a "channel access method", basically a way to share the medium vs an actual encoding). Other modulation techniques are AM, FM, QAM, CODFM, and OFDMA (OFDMA is one channel-access version of OFDM - 802.11G uses OFDM with CSMA/CA instead). There's a "class" of standards built on IS-95 (you may remember it as cdmaOne) that includes CDMA2000, 1xRTT, and EV-DO. These did pioneer the use of CDMA for cellphones, but everything uses CDMA nowadays, and GSM (the lineage) has used CDMA (W-CDMA) since UMTS.
The point is, in non-RF cellphone usage, the antonym to CDMA is not TDMA, but GSM. And GSM the lineage has very much won the standards war with LTE. Over 90% of devices in the world use GSM-lineage standards, including most Verizon and Sprint devices (which are right at home on LTE). Eventually the legacy IS-95 derived standards will be completely turned off and the US will have gotten over its weird not-world-standard fetish, at least for cellphones.
Anyways, Apple's built-in DACs are widely known for being better than almost anyone else's. I'm not an audiophile, and I never had to worry about whether the random headphones or stereo system or speakers I had on hand had a quality DAC, but now I do - and it'll cost more to boot (especially for a mediocre one, let alone one as good as the one Apple used to have).
The DAC argument is a good one, in particular because Apple has always had "pretty good" DACs. Now, non-Apple phones will be expensive or sound like shit (or both). Before, the $5 earbuds would simply be mediocre.
I don't doubt that those are the actual reasons, but that's not really the point. All it means is that they're pushing off their (engineering) problems on their users. Apple has a long history of deprecating stuff that (at the time) people thought was premature - but in essentially all the other cases it turns out that the new thing really is better. Serial ports, the floppy drive, non-USB connectors, CD drives in laptops, even replaceable batteries - there are tangible benefits to switching to the new thing, and they usually relate to speed, capacity, or physical size.
The headphone jack is slightly thicker than a Lightning connector (the only remaining jack) - but they didn't make the phone thinner to take advantage of the extra depth. And other than the connector itself a Lightning headphone is worse in every way, because headphones are driven by your ear technology, not the phone's. The newest fanciest Lightning headphones in 5 years (assuming this decision sticks) will never be more than today's headphones plus a built-in Lightning dongle.
What does this decision get me as a user? Let's go through. Headphones are headphones; there's two channels of audio that are the result of a varying electrical signal. I don't really care what the cord to the device looks like and considerations like "do these phones work with other things? do other phones work with this?" easily dominate that area. I guess this lets them use a little extra power but there was already more than enough output to damage your ears. If there were wild battery life improvements... maybe? But someone on the other thread did the math and a headphone jack's volume of battery is good for ~12 minutes. Meh. What about water resistance? Other phones have no problems with the IP67 rating and a headphone jack - I have no doubt that it was easier for Apple's engineers, but Apple used to not push their problems on their users.
So what does that leave? They wouldn't be able to have a force-sensitive home button? Honestly I'd rather have the headphone jack. Or just get rid of the home button - it works just fine for Android - or at least make it oblate or rectangular rather than round.
I have had every non-S model iPhone since the 3G, so I'm "due" to buy this one. In addition I have apps that I rely on that only work on iOS. It should be a slam dunk. But... honestly? I knew someday I'd lose the reason to buy an iPhone, and this might be that day. Not just the headphone jack, but the whole package. It doesn't look like a bad phone as such, but the only thing I'm really interested in is the waterproofing. And I'm not careless enough with my phone that getting it ruined is a big risk. The headphone jack thing isn't a dealbreaker, mostly because I don't listen to music much on my phone, but it's damn close.
Honestly Apple is just out of ideas. I bought a new MBP last year and it was the first hardware purchase I made in my entire life that I wasn't excited about. Roughly as functional as the 5-year-old one it replaced, more in some ways and less in others, but the same price. I needed a new one because the older one wasn't really working but boy did they manage to turn something I used to enjoy into something kind of boring and depressing. I'm still annoyed about the large size of the smallest iPhone still available - I was in London a few months ago and had to use my (out of contract and unlocked) iPhone 5, and it was sooooo nice. I assumed I'd gotten used to the wider width, but nope - and I didn't miss the extra screen at all.
Guy hacked a 1987 arcade game by coding up another Z80 "processor" on an ATMega to share bus-mastering duties with the other two already there, in order to periodically mess with the RAM for the purpose of saving/restoring high scores and tweeting. He made a board that just plugs in between the CPU and the board and gives total Ethernet-ready control. It's easily adaptable to other machines, too.
Rest of the guy's site is neat too, like his hard disk controller hack that lets you root a machine by faking the cache read for/etc/passwd and is triggered by writing to a special file.
Many large chains will read that info to match you against their databases for marketing purposes just like they do for magstripes (there was never any reason to keep track of any card info).
Do you have a citation for this? I'm pretty sure it's specifically disallowed, which is why all the big stores have rewards programs (because that's the only way they can track you). I can't find any evidence one way or the other.
This is an interesting point. The signature in the US isn't considered an authenticator, it's actually considered agreeing to a contract. If you look at your receipt it probably says "I agree to pay the above amount according to the terms of the cardholder agreement" or something. The idea is (in theory) they could take you to court and say "but you signed a contract saying you'd pay!". If they have someone other than the cardholder in court over that transaction, it's not because of a broken contract - it's fraud.
In Europe, it is considered to be an authenticator, which really slows things down. They do check the signature vs the one on the card. I guess chip-and-signature at least means that someone can't clone your card and use their signature, at least not trivially. They'd have to get your card and then match whatever was on the card, or erase the signature somehow.
That is a fair complaint. It's because the chip on the card actually has to know how much the bill will be before it generates a one-time authorization code for that specific amount. Presumably with the magstripe the terminal could let you enter everything, then only at the end talk to the network. Though come to think of it there's no reason you couldn't do that with the chip, just have all the "user interaction" stuff take place during scanning, then leave the card in until the total is rung up. I guess that's either specifically disallowed by the networks, or the manufacturers/stores just figure it would freak people out to leave their card in for a few minutes.
It's really not that bad. It takes exactly the same amount of time, the only difference is it feels longer because you have to leave your card in while it authorizes. But there's no extra round-trips or computation or anything - the card gets challenged with the amount, and it generates a one-time code for that amount that gets sent instead of (or alongside?) the card number. For the annoyance of leaving your card in the reader, skimming becomes impossible. I've had my debit card skimmed, which was annoying enough because I was a college student with no money, but then the bank screwed it up and I had to escalate with them to fix it. No more skimming is A-OK with me.
It must be exhausting to be the author. Going around all day, finding - at best - minor inconveniences to be annoyed about. Not to mention that they clearly didn't go into the article with any kind of an open mind and just found stuff to complain about. No nuance at all. I can't find one valid complaint in the whole article that's not "the software isn't 100% yet" (...sure?) and "some merchants will need new equipment eventually" (it's called a cost of doing business?). And this gets the "utter disaster" label?
The only disaster is that they insisted on chip-and-signature instead of chip-and-PIN. Not only is it less internationally compatible, but it's less secure - not that PINs are secure, but it means the restaurant can't take your card, they have to bring a reader to the table. I'm still mad about that choice, but it's typical USA, right? Here's this international standard we'll implement like 80% of the way. At least chip-and-sign cards still work in most automated machines in Europe, so it's a small improvement, but I die of embarrassment a little every time they have to call the manager over to interpret this weird new "make them sign the receipt" display and find a pen. Unfortunately the author doesn't even focus on this, other than "but the FBI said to use chip-and-PIN and they didn't do it!" line.
It is not a case of choosing those [faces] that, to the best of one's judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those that average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.
Considering you can dial 911 without even decrypting the flash or having a SIM card (just press the 'emergency' button), I'd say a relatively minor thing like "unverifiable image" won't have any effect.
It depends what you mean by fastest. As you note we have a perfectly good word for "the time it takes for a bit to make it out the other end" - latency. Most people probably intuitively associate bandwidth with speed, though, because it's most directly relevant to what they do, which is try to transfer quantities of data. If it takes 1 minute to download a movie on one connection and 10 on another, but both are identical latency, most people will say the former is 10 times faster - because it is, for what they use it for. A gamer who has specific needs might prefer a lower-bandwidth but lower-latency (or jitter) connection, but probably wouldn't call it faster - they'd say it was lower latency because they know most people associate speed with bandwidth. Your dump truck wouldn't be called the fastest, but if the typical person had a mountain of soil they wanted moved and called up the earth-moving companies to give them a bid, the one with the biggest trucks would probably be able to bid the shortest time.
Of course, if it's a more direct routing, it may indeed be the lowest-latency link between those two points.
Yeah the Phenom thing is a good one, we were trying to figure that out earlier in hangar flying. (Also a PPL.)
This is certainly a military "area denial" test, with the secondary effect of "aviation users, let us know if there's any gotchas we didn't know about as we move to GPS-only" (NextGen). Probably there will be no actual impact, and if there is, between pilotage, dead-reckoning, and VORs pilots should be just fine. If they aren't, they really shouldn't be flying anyway. IFR makes things slightly more interesting, but then again they have ATC to work with.
Aviation GPS is unlike your car or phone, and it comes with a wide range of self-monitoring built in. First RAIM and now WAAS can tell you if you're experiencing a degradation of sufficient magnitude to mess up your navigation - in particular, a RNAV approach - and you need to switch to an alternate (or go missed, for the approach case).
The interesting thing here is that WAAS will be affected, but the FAA doesn't require you to have a non-GPS backup to operate under instrument flight rules (IFR) if your GPS is WAAS. So I guess if you're IFR you should just not go there...? Or have a backup... (for this one case)? That's the only thing that's weird to me. They need a better story here.
The military does these things all the time. Not sure why this one is making the news - here's an identically-sized one from 2015 (the reason for the identical size rings is just line-of-sight plus earth curvature to those altitudes)
Selective Availability (the system you're talking about) was turned off permanently in the year 2000 by Clinton, and the new satellites don't have the capability.
The rationale was that GPS is too useful and too important to screw it up globally, and that it was easier to just deny adversaries the capability on an area basis rather than a global basis. Like, say, what they're doing now as a test.
SA didn't even work that well since people were working around it - basically discovering the error and broadcasting a correction, using systems called DGPS.
I am a private pilot and the only tortured thing here is how the service tried to get around "holding out" and "compensation". Obviously the FAA doesn't see it this way. If you are a private pilot you're held to a lower standard - of training, medically, during the examination, and for the aircraft - than a commercial pilot. Which is held to a much lower standard than an airline pilot. It's not really that safe, either - the GA fatal accident rate is comparable to motorcycles, and that doesn't include a bunch of PPL cowboys feeling pressured to go in marginal conditions, which this service would surely promote. Would you jump on the back of a random motorcycle with an unknown driver?
A bunch of people have said that you can't be paid to fly. It's worse than that - you can't receive any benefit in exchange for your flying. All you can do is offset your losses. The safest thing is to pay your own way, then everything's legal. If you split costs with your buddy and he buys you a steak dinner, the FAA will kick your ass. Yes, this has happened. So too did they punish the guy who ferried his bar-owning friend's customers to the bar "as a favor" when the charter flight fell through. Even though they couldn't find any direct compensation, they still won on the theory that "there's no way someone is out $2k without at least a quid pro quo, and in any case think of the passengers who were expecting a charter flight to commercial standards"
Most people are used to licenses - rights - that can't be easily taken away. Like your drivers' license - that's a court case if they want it. Being a pilot means you have a certificate and it can be taken away much more easily (i.e., no courts involved) if the FAA feels it is appropriate. And they have no trouble convincing the oversight (the NTSB administrative law judges are the highest you can go) that their interpretation of the "holding out" rules is the correct one.
Flytenow didn't shut down because the FAA said "no", at least not directly. They shut down because once the FAA publishes an opinion of how they see the regulations and intend to enforce them, you'd be stupid as hell to fly if they said "we think this is against the rules and will prosecute people for doing it". It'll stick, too, barring "arbitrary and capricious".
If you can find an example of people "lawyering" with the FAA and succeeding, I'd like to see it. There's plenty of examples of people thinking they've found a loophole and are smarter than the FAA lawyers - but they all forget that the FAA isn't bound by the letter of the regulations (they're not laws!) and that they're allowed to punish people for what they meant to say so long as it's reasonable regardless of whether it's explicitly written down. The FAA's intent is very clear - you can go camping with your buddy and split the costs, but you can't be a charter service. If they think you're basically being a charter service, they'll burn you regardless of how you try to wiggle out of it.
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There is, in fact, strong evidence that Russia is trying to influence our election for their own aims. Doesn't that bother you? Would it bother you more if they were trying to help Hillary? Hell most Trump supporters are mad at the media for talking about the things he says publicly, let alone when a foreign government does it. It's this far from an act of war to interfere with another country's elections, and the US has been rightly criticized for doing it to other countries before.
Nobody's denying that they're true - in fact nobody cares since all she describes is politics, and business, and book group negotiations, and... - and that's not the point. All of these Hillary scandals are washed up and never as juicy as the media makes them sound, so people just get tired. We get it, people don't like her, and people think she's secretive. But most people think she'd be a better administrator for a few years, custodian if you will, than someone with such a short fuse that he'll upend his entire campaign at 3AM - so without talking to anyone - in a fit of pique. Presidential campaigns are very serious! You can't just fuck it up because something got under your skin! What's he gonna do, nuke France one night on a whim because Hollande said something mean to him and it's been keeping him up?
I think you're attributing too much to the Times. They - several times - point out that what he did was perfectly legal and acceptable, and otherwise don't waste any time discussing it, instead discussing how the deductions work and other aspects of his finances. Any characterization of him in the article has nothing to do with legality or even ethics - it's about his skill as a businessman, at using the rules to his advantage, as a responsible citizen, and of course overall his suitability to become the President.
People hate taxes. People also try to pay the least taxes possible. We all do it - and we're supposed to, since the tax code explicitly encourages certain behaviors like charity and investing for the future. I personally reduced my tax bill last year by $1000 because I (retroactively) maxed out my HSA. But most people have to pay taxes because they get a paycheck and it's just taken out and they have no way around it. And they watch people with astonishing amounts of money (which includes Trump, regardless of his exact income) get out of the thing that they have no control over. The government spends their money, not Trump's. This feeling people have isn't really open for debate - the tax code has undergone significant upheavals due to similar public outrage before. (The creation of the AMT is just one example, but virtually every other loophole counts.)
The question is, what does your average working person think about Donald Trump as a man who is on their side? This is a question they answer emotionally, not by referring to the depreciation schedules or a philosopher. Do you think the average American is impressed or angered by Trump losing approximately ~%0 of his effective income between 1995-2013 (at least) while they lost about ~20%? Certainly he is trying to convince people that they should be impressed. But what did they think of Romney, who had very similar tax- and bankruptcy-law acumen?
Notice - I haven't actually judged Trump negatively or positively in the above text. Does it seem like I have? All I did was described facts about him and the American people. Personally I actually agree with what Romney said in 2012 - basically it's up to the legislators to make a tax code that reflects the public policy about who should pay what taxes, and if a man like Mr. Trump can avoid paying taxes then either that's what he should be doing according to our Congress, or they should fix it.
It's not patriotic to pay extra tax and nobody is seriously arguing that it is. The questions people have about him have nothing to do with money.
Section 331 of the 2012 FAA modernization act is a definitions section. Perhaps you meant section 336. You also left off a bunch of conditions:
- It has to be hobby/recreational
- It has to be according to the AMA's rules ("in accordance with a community-based set of safety guidelines and within the programming of a nationwide community-based organization")
- It has to be less than 55 pounds or signed off on by the AMA
- It has not interfere with manned aircraft
- If within 5 miles of an airport, you have to call the airport
- It has to be within visual line of sight
Also it says that "Nothing in this section shall be construed to limit the authority of the Administrator to pursue enforcement action against persons operating model aircraft who endanger the safety of the national airspace system."
So the section 336 exemption is followed exactly, except that the FAA says that if the drone is more than 0.55lbs it must be registered. The FAA probably argues that this is part of maintaining the safety of the national airspace system, and I think it's a case they will win considering it's based on weight. Their legal argument is basically that by codifying the Part 107 UAS rules, they have told everyone "we consider unregistered drones over 0.55lbs to endanger the safety of the NAS and will pursue enforcement actions against such persons" - which is basically all a regulation is. The plantiff's argument would have to be along the lines of "well technically the law says you can't do anything it doesn't say, and doesn't say anything about whether heavier drones can be required to be registered". Which is fair enough, but since registration is non-discriminatory (anyone can do it, the FAA won't tell anyone they can't) and free ($5 online but you can do it on paper), they'd have to argue that the registration requirement itself constitutes a burdensome regulation on top of what's allowed by the law - to which I say good luck.
Generally, laws about regulation either delegate a section of authority to an agency for them to figure out the rules, or (if the congress-folks are worried about the agency doing or not doing something they don't like, which is what happened here and with the more recent class-3 medical certification reform for manned aircraft) they lay out the shape of the rules that they expect the FAA to create. That's what the FAA did here, modulo that registration requirement. But it's up to the agency to create the laws that follow the outline in the law, and on general principle courts will yield to the regulating authority unless the disconnect is "big enough".
Laws like the Air Commerce Act and the Federal Aviation Act which give the FAA authority over aircraft in the United States? Once those laws have been passed, it's up to the FAA to figure out what the rules are. That's called "administrative law" and the "real" law says "you have to follow the administrative law".
Let's say you fly the drone stupidly and get punished by the FAA. (If you fly the drone non-stupidly and follow the simple rules, that's fine with everyone.) They have to follow an internal process to decide if they punish you or not, and you get your say, but I recommend you be apologetic because they don't have to convince anyone but themselves to punish you. If you don't like it you can appeal - to the NTSB. If you don't like what the NTSB's Administrative Law Judge decides, you can appeal to the full board of the NTSB. The NTSB will only stop the FAA if the FAA isn't following its own rules or is acting "arbitrary and capricious" in its decision - that's extremely rare, though it did happen with drones a few years back (the FAA had to go through the full rulemaking process, which they've since done). If you don't like the NTSB's decision you can appeal that to the federal courts, who themselves will only intervene if the NTSB "abused its discretion, or its determination is wholly unsupported by the evidence". I don't think this has ever happened, but you're welcome to give it a shot!
Er, what do you think "kill[s] millions of Americans every year"? Only 2.6 million people died in 2014 all together. 614k of those are heart disease, followed closely by cancer at 591k. Those two are the only causes of death above 150k/yr. Unless you're saying that "our Western appetites, processed food, and a largely sedentary lifestyle" are the "countless things" we're letting by, you're talking out your ass.
Certainly drones must seem like a non-issue to you if you think the world is at least 10x more fatal than it is. For the rest of us, it would be nice if people would be a bit more responsible with their dangerous toys. Like the old-school model airplane AMA-member types - that's all anyone (including the FAA) wants out of the drone types. I think the eggs and magnet bans are stupid too (though you can still buy the magnets btw) but drones can hurt other people so they're a different category.
The FAA has broad authority over anything that flies and they have a history of declining to regulate hobbyist model aircraft. But putting out an advisory circular saying "we won't bother you if you are a hobbyist and listen to the AMA" is kind of the opposite of "we don't have any authority over this activity". "Enforcement discretion" is pretty much exactly how I would describe this.
Like most executive branch functions, and like it or not, the precise manner and timing of how the FAA carries out their mandate is up to them. It's basically like how the cops usually won't bother people for having a broken tail-light or a few MPH of speeding, but can elect to pull over people at any time for those violations. In fact, even if the town has a policy of not pulling people over for always had to understand something about airspace and keep things safe. Pre-drone, the AMA served this purpose and their fields' placements and operating rules took care of this problem. But when you can unbox your drone, charge it for an hour or two, and then send it up to 3000' on the first try, there's no funnel through the AMA like there used to be to teach people those rules. The drone registry's main purpose is to act as another funnel so that people can figure out where and when it's safe to fly. And, if they don't play by the rules, that there's at least the potential for accountability.
The drone community has brought this on themselves entirely. As even the suit alleges, everyone was OK with the model airplane rules. Drones changed the game and forced the agency's hand here. That's what happens with disruptive technology - you might as well get mad about the regulation of automobiles because everything was fine with horses. But obviously cars are much easier to use (average experience and skill goes down) and go much faster (danger goes up). Drones are similarly easier to use, which explains their popularity, and can easily go much higher and from way more places.
The problem is the user doesn't care because it doesn't affect him, right? The whole problem here is that other people are affected.
Yeah, easily, if you lay in some plastic wrap or something. Actually it's easier than most things as the sieve is the right shape to hold water, and the holes are pretty easy to cover - the water will even help you do it!
Sieves are fun! Wait, what were we talking about?
I hardly know where to begin. You're confusing standards with modulation techniques. You're also confusing GSM the standard (1991, TDMA, voice with GPRS and then EDGE) with GSM the "class" (which includes UMTS, HS(D)PA(+), and LTE). The latter is a set of standards defined by the 3GPP, whose scope now includes the maintenance of the original GSM standards.
CDMA is a modulation technique (actually a "channel access method", basically a way to share the medium vs an actual encoding). Other modulation techniques are AM, FM, QAM, CODFM, and OFDMA (OFDMA is one channel-access version of OFDM - 802.11G uses OFDM with CSMA/CA instead). There's a "class" of standards built on IS-95 (you may remember it as cdmaOne) that includes CDMA2000, 1xRTT, and EV-DO. These did pioneer the use of CDMA for cellphones, but everything uses CDMA nowadays, and GSM (the lineage) has used CDMA (W-CDMA) since UMTS.
The point is, in non-RF cellphone usage, the antonym to CDMA is not TDMA, but GSM. And GSM the lineage has very much won the standards war with LTE. Over 90% of devices in the world use GSM-lineage standards, including most Verizon and Sprint devices (which are right at home on LTE). Eventually the legacy IS-95 derived standards will be completely turned off and the US will have gotten over its weird not-world-standard fetish, at least for cellphones.
Er, but they could've done that already. Lightning audio output already works, doesn't it?
Yes, it does, since iOS 5.1.1: http://www.apogeedigital.com/p... (and many others)
Anyways, Apple's built-in DACs are widely known for being better than almost anyone else's. I'm not an audiophile, and I never had to worry about whether the random headphones or stereo system or speakers I had on hand had a quality DAC, but now I do - and it'll cost more to boot (especially for a mediocre one, let alone one as good as the one Apple used to have).
The DAC argument is a good one, in particular because Apple has always had "pretty good" DACs. Now, non-Apple phones will be expensive or sound like shit (or both). Before, the $5 earbuds would simply be mediocre.
I don't doubt that those are the actual reasons, but that's not really the point. All it means is that they're pushing off their (engineering) problems on their users. Apple has a long history of deprecating stuff that (at the time) people thought was premature - but in essentially all the other cases it turns out that the new thing really is better. Serial ports, the floppy drive, non-USB connectors, CD drives in laptops, even replaceable batteries - there are tangible benefits to switching to the new thing, and they usually relate to speed, capacity, or physical size.
The headphone jack is slightly thicker than a Lightning connector (the only remaining jack) - but they didn't make the phone thinner to take advantage of the extra depth. And other than the connector itself a Lightning headphone is worse in every way, because headphones are driven by your ear technology, not the phone's. The newest fanciest Lightning headphones in 5 years (assuming this decision sticks) will never be more than today's headphones plus a built-in Lightning dongle.
What does this decision get me as a user? Let's go through. Headphones are headphones; there's two channels of audio that are the result of a varying electrical signal. I don't really care what the cord to the device looks like and considerations like "do these phones work with other things? do other phones work with this?" easily dominate that area. I guess this lets them use a little extra power but there was already more than enough output to damage your ears. If there were wild battery life improvements... maybe? But someone on the other thread did the math and a headphone jack's volume of battery is good for ~12 minutes. Meh. What about water resistance? Other phones have no problems with the IP67 rating and a headphone jack - I have no doubt that it was easier for Apple's engineers, but Apple used to not push their problems on their users.
So what does that leave? They wouldn't be able to have a force-sensitive home button? Honestly I'd rather have the headphone jack. Or just get rid of the home button - it works just fine for Android - or at least make it oblate or rectangular rather than round.
I have had every non-S model iPhone since the 3G, so I'm "due" to buy this one. In addition I have apps that I rely on that only work on iOS. It should be a slam dunk. But... honestly? I knew someday I'd lose the reason to buy an iPhone, and this might be that day. Not just the headphone jack, but the whole package. It doesn't look like a bad phone as such, but the only thing I'm really interested in is the waterproofing. And I'm not careless enough with my phone that getting it ruined is a big risk. The headphone jack thing isn't a dealbreaker, mostly because I don't listen to music much on my phone, but it's damn close.
Honestly Apple is just out of ideas. I bought a new MBP last year and it was the first hardware purchase I made in my entire life that I wasn't excited about. Roughly as functional as the 5-year-old one it replaced, more in some ways and less in others, but the same price. I needed a new one because the older one wasn't really working but boy did they manage to turn something I used to enjoy into something kind of boring and depressing. I'm still annoyed about the large size of the smallest iPhone still available - I was in London a few months ago and had to use my (out of contract and unlocked) iPhone 5, and it was sooooo nice. I assumed I'd gotten used to the wider width, but nope - and I didn't miss the extra screen at all.
Now this is cool: http://spritesmods.com/?art=twitter1943
Guy hacked a 1987 arcade game by coding up another Z80 "processor" on an ATMega to share bus-mastering duties with the other two already there, in order to periodically mess with the RAM for the purpose of saving/restoring high scores and tweeting. He made a board that just plugs in between the CPU and the board and gives total Ethernet-ready control. It's easily adaptable to other machines, too.
Rest of the guy's site is neat too, like his hard disk controller hack that lets you root a machine by faking the cache read for /etc/passwd and is triggered by writing to a special file.
Many large chains will read that info to match you against their databases for marketing purposes just like they do for magstripes (there was never any reason to keep track of any card info).
Do you have a citation for this? I'm pretty sure it's specifically disallowed, which is why all the big stores have rewards programs (because that's the only way they can track you). I can't find any evidence one way or the other.
This is an interesting point. The signature in the US isn't considered an authenticator, it's actually considered agreeing to a contract. If you look at your receipt it probably says "I agree to pay the above amount according to the terms of the cardholder agreement" or something. The idea is (in theory) they could take you to court and say "but you signed a contract saying you'd pay!". If they have someone other than the cardholder in court over that transaction, it's not because of a broken contract - it's fraud.
In Europe, it is considered to be an authenticator, which really slows things down. They do check the signature vs the one on the card. I guess chip-and-signature at least means that someone can't clone your card and use their signature, at least not trivially. They'd have to get your card and then match whatever was on the card, or erase the signature somehow.
That is a fair complaint. It's because the chip on the card actually has to know how much the bill will be before it generates a one-time authorization code for that specific amount. Presumably with the magstripe the terminal could let you enter everything, then only at the end talk to the network. Though come to think of it there's no reason you couldn't do that with the chip, just have all the "user interaction" stuff take place during scanning, then leave the card in until the total is rung up. I guess that's either specifically disallowed by the networks, or the manufacturers/stores just figure it would freak people out to leave their card in for a few minutes.
It's really not that bad. It takes exactly the same amount of time, the only difference is it feels longer because you have to leave your card in while it authorizes. But there's no extra round-trips or computation or anything - the card gets challenged with the amount, and it generates a one-time code for that amount that gets sent instead of (or alongside?) the card number. For the annoyance of leaving your card in the reader, skimming becomes impossible. I've had my debit card skimmed, which was annoying enough because I was a college student with no money, but then the bank screwed it up and I had to escalate with them to fix it. No more skimming is A-OK with me.
It must be exhausting to be the author. Going around all day, finding - at best - minor inconveniences to be annoyed about. Not to mention that they clearly didn't go into the article with any kind of an open mind and just found stuff to complain about. No nuance at all. I can't find one valid complaint in the whole article that's not "the software isn't 100% yet" (...sure?) and "some merchants will need new equipment eventually" (it's called a cost of doing business?). And this gets the "utter disaster" label?
The only disaster is that they insisted on chip-and-signature instead of chip-and-PIN. Not only is it less internationally compatible, but it's less secure - not that PINs are secure, but it means the restaurant can't take your card, they have to bring a reader to the table. I'm still mad about that choice, but it's typical USA, right? Here's this international standard we'll implement like 80% of the way. At least chip-and-sign cards still work in most automated machines in Europe, so it's a small improvement, but I die of embarrassment a little every time they have to call the manager over to interpret this weird new "make them sign the receipt" display and find a pen. Unfortunately the author doesn't even focus on this, other than "but the FBI said to use chip-and-PIN and they didn't do it!" line.
This is the Keynesian beauty contest:
It's used in Britain and Australia for connecting the TV antenna to the TV, basically their version of an F connector.
Considering you can dial 911 without even decrypting the flash or having a SIM card (just press the 'emergency' button), I'd say a relatively minor thing like "unverifiable image" won't have any effect.
It depends what you mean by fastest. As you note we have a perfectly good word for "the time it takes for a bit to make it out the other end" - latency. Most people probably intuitively associate bandwidth with speed, though, because it's most directly relevant to what they do, which is try to transfer quantities of data. If it takes 1 minute to download a movie on one connection and 10 on another, but both are identical latency, most people will say the former is 10 times faster - because it is, for what they use it for. A gamer who has specific needs might prefer a lower-bandwidth but lower-latency (or jitter) connection, but probably wouldn't call it faster - they'd say it was lower latency because they know most people associate speed with bandwidth. Your dump truck wouldn't be called the fastest, but if the typical person had a mountain of soil they wanted moved and called up the earth-moving companies to give them a bid, the one with the biggest trucks would probably be able to bid the shortest time.
Of course, if it's a more direct routing, it may indeed be the lowest-latency link between those two points.
OS X to macOS? What's next, system10?
Yeah the Phenom thing is a good one, we were trying to figure that out earlier in hangar flying. (Also a PPL.)
This is certainly a military "area denial" test, with the secondary effect of "aviation users, let us know if there's any gotchas we didn't know about as we move to GPS-only" (NextGen). Probably there will be no actual impact, and if there is, between pilotage, dead-reckoning, and VORs pilots should be just fine. If they aren't, they really shouldn't be flying anyway. IFR makes things slightly more interesting, but then again they have ATC to work with.
Aviation GPS is unlike your car or phone, and it comes with a wide range of self-monitoring built in. First RAIM and now WAAS can tell you if you're experiencing a degradation of sufficient magnitude to mess up your navigation - in particular, a RNAV approach - and you need to switch to an alternate (or go missed, for the approach case).
The interesting thing here is that WAAS will be affected, but the FAA doesn't require you to have a non-GPS backup to operate under instrument flight rules (IFR) if your GPS is WAAS. So I guess if you're IFR you should just not go there...? Or have a backup... (for this one case)? That's the only thing that's weird to me. They need a better story here.
The military does these things all the time. Not sure why this one is making the news - here's an identically-sized one from 2015 (the reason for the identical size rings is just line-of-sight plus earth curvature to those altitudes)
Selective Availability (the system you're talking about) was turned off permanently in the year 2000 by Clinton, and the new satellites don't have the capability.
The rationale was that GPS is too useful and too important to screw it up globally, and that it was easier to just deny adversaries the capability on an area basis rather than a global basis. Like, say, what they're doing now as a test.
SA didn't even work that well since people were working around it - basically discovering the error and broadcasting a correction, using systems called DGPS.
All paraphrased from the wiki, of course.
I am a private pilot and the only tortured thing here is how the service tried to get around "holding out" and "compensation". Obviously the FAA doesn't see it this way. If you are a private pilot you're held to a lower standard - of training, medically, during the examination, and for the aircraft - than a commercial pilot. Which is held to a much lower standard than an airline pilot. It's not really that safe, either - the GA fatal accident rate is comparable to motorcycles, and that doesn't include a bunch of PPL cowboys feeling pressured to go in marginal conditions, which this service would surely promote. Would you jump on the back of a random motorcycle with an unknown driver?
A bunch of people have said that you can't be paid to fly. It's worse than that - you can't receive any benefit in exchange for your flying. All you can do is offset your losses. The safest thing is to pay your own way, then everything's legal. If you split costs with your buddy and he buys you a steak dinner, the FAA will kick your ass. Yes, this has happened. So too did they punish the guy who ferried his bar-owning friend's customers to the bar "as a favor" when the charter flight fell through. Even though they couldn't find any direct compensation, they still won on the theory that "there's no way someone is out $2k without at least a quid pro quo, and in any case think of the passengers who were expecting a charter flight to commercial standards"
Most people are used to licenses - rights - that can't be easily taken away. Like your drivers' license - that's a court case if they want it. Being a pilot means you have a certificate and it can be taken away much more easily (i.e., no courts involved) if the FAA feels it is appropriate. And they have no trouble convincing the oversight (the NTSB administrative law judges are the highest you can go) that their interpretation of the "holding out" rules is the correct one.
Flytenow didn't shut down because the FAA said "no", at least not directly. They shut down because once the FAA publishes an opinion of how they see the regulations and intend to enforce them, you'd be stupid as hell to fly if they said "we think this is against the rules and will prosecute people for doing it". It'll stick, too, barring "arbitrary and capricious".
If you can find an example of people "lawyering" with the FAA and succeeding, I'd like to see it. There's plenty of examples of people thinking they've found a loophole and are smarter than the FAA lawyers - but they all forget that the FAA isn't bound by the letter of the regulations (they're not laws!) and that they're allowed to punish people for what they meant to say so long as it's reasonable regardless of whether it's explicitly written down. The FAA's intent is very clear - you can go camping with your buddy and split the costs, but you can't be a charter service. If they think you're basically being a charter service, they'll burn you regardless of how you try to wiggle out of it.