Like others have said, it gets it from the interstate commerce clause. And judicial justification goes as far back as Gibbons v. Ogden, 22 U.S. 1 (1824) when the Court said "the power to regulate navigation is as expressly granted, as if that term had been added to the word 'commerce' ." Also during the Marshall court it interpreted the clause to grant intrastate, interstate and non-commerce powers to Congress.

Then in City of Burbank v. Lockheed Air Terminal, Inc., 411 U.S. 624 (1973) the court clearly states federal authority in all matters of aviation. And it's not just the Supreme Court but also numerous state courts that find the same when local governments try to assert the right to regulate airspace. There's really no controversy here.

I don't understand the comment. Congress created the FAA. That's how it got the power to regulate. The FAA is one of these many entities we have that are quasi-legislative, quasi-executive, and quasi-judicial, all in one department. If you're a strict constructionist, you argue that the constitution doesn't allow Congress to delegate their power to make laws to another body. The political reality that's accepted, however, is that the many government departments don't make law, they make regulations. And in this case that's what Congress has done, they've delegated it. And in the handful of cases it gets challenged by local governments, like noise ordinances (from stupid whiners who build houses next to airports) and banner towing, they eventually are rejected by the courts as unenforceable by the state, due to federal preemption which actually explicitly is in the constitution.

Flight is a federal government interest, even before powered flight, because it's been a military concern. Then came the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Then came airmail, operated by the Post Office which of course is overseen by Congress. Then the Air Commerce Act as a result of two things: aeronautical accidents and the states demonstrating complete ineptitude at dealing with the problem, and commercial interests in aviation convinced the federal government it should be federally regulated. Then comes the Civil Aeronautics Act, creating the Civil Aeronautics Authority which is the precursor to the FAA. So it's always been federal.

It only really made sense to regulate it at a federal level.

Yes it has been tested in many state courts. In a handful of cases it ends up going to the state supreme court, like this one, where they basically get irritated that lower court judges don't understand federal preemption.

FAA has no jurisdiction over small commercial drones, judge rules A few things are problematic. One is the FAA's idea that a "model aircraft" and "drone" are the same thing, except the former is private use and the latter is commercial use. I think that's absurd. They should distinguish based on their momentum (mass times speed) because that's how people get hurt. The things that won't hurt people should operate only below 1000' AGL, and the things that do hurt people should operate only above 1000' AGL except when taking off or landing. The other thing it ought to be based on is how autonomous it is. If it's always operated within direct visual range of a human, by remote control, then at least historically that's a model aircraft. And if it's something that can accept a program to fly somewhere (warehouse in Queens to a landing pad on top of a building in lower Manhattan) then that's a drone. And I don't see why a private flight vs a commercial flight would differ when it comes to the categorization of the aircraft. Commercial operations, however, just like in pilot certification, should require more experience and training on the part of the operator. So the FAA is probably going to have to certify operators for at least commercial drone flight operations.

The reality is, the number of stupid people with more money than sense is what's going to dictate the amount of regulation

Anyway, the judge merely rejected the FAA's claims because the FAA has no regulations for model airplanes or drones. Not because they don't have the authority to create such regulation.

Congress. Everything related to flying (one or more persons inside an aircraft) is regulated by the FAA. It isn't just the airspace, it also has sole power to certify pilots.

The FAA has authority over all "flights" inter- and intrastate. Flights being by ultralight, glider, airplane, rotorcraft, lighter than air and several others that do not include kites and model airplanes. If you want to pilot a hot air balloon from your yard to your neighbors yard you have a pile of FAA regulations to adhere to starting with medical certification. The pilot certification is exclusively the domain of the FAA, there is no state that issues pilot certificates.

If your state says airplanes can't fly over someone's property without permission, it's void. It's no different than the concept of mineral rights which you do not automatically own either, just because you own surface rights. Imagine how impossible it would be for pilots to get the permission of land owners to overfly their property. This is the regulation that applies to property overflights. A flight in a sparsely populated area can't operate closer than 500 feet to a person or property.

A drone outside your window is a nuisance, so at least police power should surely apply to that.

Congress wrote the legislation creating the FAA and the president signed it. It's federal law and federal law preempts state law. This has come up numerous times with respect to local banner towing ordinances, and every now and then some local nutjob judge asserts the town/county's police power as applying to planes towing banners. Always, and quickly, they properly get sense slapped back into them by a more competent higher judicial authority.

The real question is to what degree is a drone an aircraft, vs a toy like a model airplane or a kite. If it's the former, the FAA will regulate it. If it's the latter, they won't. Since Congress has already said the FAA needs to come up with rules for commercial use of drones, it seems pretty clear they're going to have some authority over drones, possibly something along the lines of how it regulates ultralight aircraft already.

The boss needs to understand he's going to have to spend money no matter what. Either the money goes to Microsoft, or it goes to an additional support person, and possibly a service contract with Canonical or Red Hat. The difference is partly ideological: as a company do you want to support free(dom) based software; whose flavor of that ideology to you want to support? And partly technical: Choosing the right strategy for the users' present and future use cases. So the dilemma here is it sounds like the company doesn't have a person filling the BT role, it's just a CEO who maybe thinks this is just a way to save money and the IT person who really isn't in a good position to make this decision because he's an implementer rather than a resource acquirer and allocator. You need a mandate and a budget to do this no matter what.

Software licensed for use is in effect a lease or rented. It isn't purchased, isn't an asset, the buyer has no right to full code access, including no right to share the code with anyone they want. And yes public institutions should have this ability, they already function this way when it comes to public archives, and buildings. It does not mean the government must directly hire programmers, they can hire one or more services to meet this function if they don't have sufficiently sized or competent IT staff on hand. But the right to code access and right to share it with anyone means vendor lock in isn't possible. It means document formats can be read 50 years from now. And it means public funds endure longer and benefit more people.

It's seems self-evident the immensely wasteful resources being spent on proprietary software. The Federal government alone has 30,000 licenses for renewal for XP? Imagine every single seat by every federal, state, county and city government in just the U.S. how massive those licensing fees are. And by EULA we have no right to read documents produced by this code 50 years from now, unless we've paid an on-going mafia fee to the people locking public records behind proprietary formats.

It's not OK. Fortunately governments are slowly waking up to the fake this is a serious archiving problem at the least, if not also simply a misuse of public funds to depend on single provider software, especially for general purpose software like what's under discussion.

This is malfeasance. It's arguably fraud.

From the outset the arrangement was unethical because the government is renting software rather than owning it, which means having full rights to understand, maintain, and modify the source code. But now the government is taking it a step further by convincing Microsoft to be a slum lord, and Microsoft is accepting this status rather than evict the tenant, destroy the dilapidated building, and enable easier migration to proper tenancy adhering to modern standards.

The incompetency required by government legislators and government IT to get into this situation, planned a decade in advance to the apparent dissonance of public decision makers, should be very concerning to the public.

No one should support the government distorting the (imperfectly) free market in this manner.

Windows XP was sold with an explicit, well documented time frame for support and updates. The market made a choice. And now a segment of that market is having buyers' remorse, proposing that the government needs to step in and alter the outcome. We shouldn't support legislation causing an alternative outcome, the consequences of decisions need to be felt by all parties. Otherwise the rest of us end up subsidizing the bad decisions of others who obviously regret their choice and are dissatisfied with reality. Oh fucking well.

Getting rid of the evidence that it was a suicide? To do that, you need some erratic flight movements to suggest discoordination/struggle for control, while the flight data record has well over 10 hours of record time the cockpit voice recorder is less than 2 so you need to fly at least two hours after any event/conversation that would hint at the true nature of events in order to overwrite the CVR. And then the flight ends up in the middle of the ocean, ensuring a long search, possibly a search that we give up on, at such depths that any physical evidence is long gone. This is also almost indistinguishable from a non-nefarious but idiosyncratic explanation, that one or both pilots had become pathologically bored flying ordinary easy flights while only being able to simulate what they were really interested in: being heros. They come up with an emergency scenario that would actually test their capabilities. And they failed. This isn't unheard of. Flight instructors regularly simulate emergencies for student pilots, and while rare they do sometimes go too far, or don't recover properly or soon enough and an actual accident ensues.

Because it's useless infrastructure and data collection, even on the day of the flight it was 1 in 93000 planes that went missing in this fashion. Why doesn't it blow your mind there isn't a parachute for every person and piece of luggage on board? We have the technology for everyone to have their own escape module. Should we do that?

Why specifically a 777? There's a large population of cheap DC-10's for sale. That's a lot less suspicious for Phase I of a two or more phase attack plan than stealing a 777.