Scratch one southern drone ...
 

As I was leaving a department store this afternoon, I looked up and saw a drone flying overhead. Well, another guy in the parking lot apparently did, too. He reached into the back of his pickup truck, took a rifle out of the gun-rack, pointed it at the drone, and shot the thing out of the sky with a single well-placed bullet. As it crashed into a nearby field, he calmly put his rifle away and drove off.

I smiled, and drove off too.

I generally don't hold with firing guns in populated places. That bullet has to come to rest somewhere and someone might be under it.

In this case, I'm inclined to be sympathetic to the intent, if not to the deed.

One way to guarantee a spell of stupid is to give a passel of boys a bunch of new toys.

I have to ask: What about using a gun in a public place to damage someone else's property is it that made you smile? Wouldn't the better action have been to call the police, since this person obviously just has committed at least one crime?

I can't speak for sundialsvcs, but if it were me, I would say it's for the same reason the Robin Hood tales have such staying power, though Robin Hood was a scofflaw.

It's somehow satisfying to see the obnoxious get their comeuppance, even if one disapproves of the delivery system.

Furthermore, the proliferation of hobbyists' drones is so recent that the drone operator (droner?) may indeed not have committed a crime here in the State, other than against decency, comity, and good sense.

I'm not going to bother to pull the links.

There's a case working its way through the system now where one idiot shot another idiots drone when it was flying over his property.

The droner lost round one and the judge said it was kosher b/c the droner was invading privacy.

The droner appealed. Legal eagles are saying this case could end up resolving questions that have been left open since the 30's about just how much of the airspace over your property the guberment owns and what can legally operate in that space; whether you like it or not.

And on top of that, in another set of reg action proposals, Amazon and some other tech companies are trying to get the FAA to set a commercial drone zone from 35 feet to 400 feet.

All I can say is that once we can afford property out in BFE, with the nearest neighbor at least 5 miles away, I'll be setting up a frequency jamming tower that will kill any of the things that fly over my property!

"Meh ..."

Q: Since when did it become "a gigantic legal issue" when someone shot at someone's "radio-controlled airplane?"

A: Well, it didn't, until some over-zealous "21st Century Spy Company" decided that their "radio-controlled airplane" was actually "commercial aircraft!"

. . . simply because they calculate that a consumer's bullet won't be able to reach an altitude of 400 feet . . . (wrong)

. . . thus allowing them to spy on everyone below them, "with Federal protection!!"

Okay, I think that it is more(!) than "too late" to begin demanding some hard answers to these very-fundamental issues. If "the National Security Agency," as a duly-appointed Agency of my Federal Government, "wants to launch a spy-bot," maybe(!!) that's something that I will have to fight. But, otherwise, I'm more than ready to assert my supposedly-"Constitional Right" against "unreasonable search."

The airplanes that fly over my property (or, my shopping malls ...) are not, so far as I know, "equipped with cameras." And, so far as I know, no individual or corporation(!), that chooses to fly a camera-equipped device over my head, is immune from the consequences of their action.

"Where do we draw the line?" Only at the point where someone actually dares to draw it. Only at the point where someone (many someones ...) says: "Beyond this point, you may go no further."

"Your friends at Google," as I see in a sticker on the window at Starbuck's ... "are no 'friends' of mine!" And I don't mind being "the first person in the world" (if I am, as I most-sincerely doubt, the 'first' person ...) to say so.

"You've gone one helluva way beyond 'a Search Engine,' my friend. And I, for one, will not allow you to become Big Brother!"

... "Inquiring Minds Want To Know" ... (Will anyone else on Planet Earth stand with me?!) :(

I once found a bullet embedded in a shingle of my mother's house.

Some moron probably fired it on New Year's eve.

The difference between "drones" and "RC aircraft" is the data stream, as this episode of Radio Times points out:

http://whyy.org/cms/radiotimes/2013/...drone-program/

Now any darn fool can have his own data stream.

I will be blunt. I see only mischief in the offing. In the hands of the persons so inclined, "drones" are the new "upskirt." And far too many persons are so inclined.

We are "living in interesting times" where virtually anything is possible, but where we are not starting to ask, nor to attempt to answer, the hard regulatory questions of what is, and what is not, "okay."

I am not willing to accept the fact that, when I take a new route home from work, I start getting "junk" emails from businesses in that different area of town. I'm not willing to accept that, when I send a document to someone in an e-mail, I start getting "junk" that expresses obvious knowledge of what that private-to-me document contained.

When you send a letter, the Post Office doesn't steam-open every single one. When you make a telephone call, there are (supposed to be ...) laws against wiretapping. But every form of electronic communication that you send over the Internet is supposedly "fair game." Likewise, scanners read your license-plates and apparently have no difficulty at all connecting that plate to "you."

Notice that this is not "the State's" doing. These are profit-seeking private corporations ... or, at least, this is what they claim to be ... and there are no restrictions on what data may be gathered, from what source(s), or what may be done with it. This data isn't "Top Secret." It isn't "Secret" [i]at all.[/]

And now, camera-equipped model airplanes are flying overhead, and companies want them to be protected like "commercial aircraft." A company is excited to be able to emit sub-audible sounds from television programs which an app in your pocket, unknown to you, can detect in order to inform an advertiser, without your knowledge or consent, what you're watching. It's easy to see that the company could simply record, and analyze, what you are saying to one another "in the comfort of your own home." ("Hey, it's not wiretapping, you know! So, it must be 'okay!'")

Enough.

An entire body of law, that does not exist yet, is long overdue.

And it is people in our industry who are "remaining silent" on these important issues. We're fools to think that the sh*t won't hit the fan, in some calamitous way, and that we won't be "the ones in the firing line, with our hands in the cookie-jar," when it inevitably does. When someone uses the Internet as an instrument of terrorism ... and they will, to commit atrocities "never before imagined" (even though they are, in fact, quite easily 'imagined') ... then there will be unholy-hell for us to pay.

"National Security" doesn't mean what it did in WW2 or the Cold War, but our thinking about it has apparently not changed. We're still thinking "Top Secret," i.e. that information is only "secreted" within the bowels of The Guv'mint. That's just not true anymore. Information is now available everywhere, to who-knows-who, and do we really have to wait until after "something happens" to know that "something's wrong?" I think not. But, I fear so.

Frankly, I fear our commercial overlords, if anything, more than or political overlords.

Articles like this one are innocent to the point of being naive, as they continue to "trust" corporations and to view anything that is done as "okay," just as long as the justification given is called, "marketing." I seem to recall that people for hundreds of years have been successfully "marketing" things to people without knowing every theoretically-obtainable detail about them.

Wouldn't it be nice if the only thing that happened is a price-change on a pair of pants? What if, instead, a data miner from 10,000 miles away determines exactly what your habits are ... exactly when your daughter, say, is "home alone" and they know that the surrounding houses are also empty, and they walk up with a hunting rifle and then walk away, knowing that there will be no witnesses?

What if this started happening all over the country, at totally-unpredictable intervals, revealing that the perpetrators weren't talking to one another but that they somehow possessed near-perfect information about thousands of people? Wouldn't that mean, like, war?

Go ahead ... "let's talk ... war." Let's consider, say, that the USA has been blasting-away at people in the Middle East, while never actually "declaring" war there, for more than 15 years with no sign of stopping. And yet, at the same time, it has "imported" literally millions of people to work at jobs in order to save a few farthings in payroll taxes ... many coming from the exact same regions. (They also "exported" the data-centers, and all of the data in them, to "the happy little cloud," once again putting those data centers in "cheap places" ... such as ... uhh...)

Go ahead. Think like a bad guy ...

Psychopaths and enemy agents look exactly like everyone else. But, burning in their heart behind that neat business suit and beatific smile is ... pure hatred. Hatred enough to allow them to re-imagine what "war" actually will be in the 21st Century. Hatred enough to allow them to be "hideously imaginative." And to form groups.

Warriors from another land, sent in "to make war," also in these days and times would not need to create conventional armies and to sail in conventional troop carriers to invade another land in a "conventional" way. If your purpose was to "lay an enemy's country low," you would read The Art of War and take it to heart. You would know to "strike where the enemy is not looking, and in a manner that he does not expect." You would also know that you have unlimited time to prepare, not because he couldn't see what you are up to, but because he refuses to do so.

Go ahead. Be afraid. Be very afraid. (In other words, be wise. These evildoers are not omnipotent ... merely opportunistic.) Put your thinking-cap on (not your tin-foil hat), and start trying to think like they might. It's not difficult to do. You just have to dare(!) to do it.

Be afraid enough, for once, to start challenging the insanely foolish decisions that are being made by "those who make decisions by refusing to have the guts to make them," even though they are in the echelons of power where such things must be decided and implemented. "I did not do anything, because they did not come for me. Then, they came for me." We don't have to experience these possibilities as a prerequisite for realizing the imperative to prevent them. We don't have to be caught flat-footed. Again.

Signed,

Cassandra

I'm with you, brother.

The article may have seemed trusting, but, to anyone who could read what it stated, it was chilling.

We now know what that "deal with the devil" is titled. It's titled "Terms of Service," and signing it signs away your privacy and your soul.

It's way overdue for a revolution.

Instead of worrying about drones, you should be worried if this moron is elected.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/23/politi...ort/index.html