There is no information that the drone tried to ram the helicopter, you are making that up. What information we do have indicates that the helicopter rushed the drone then gave chase when it left the area. From this the police charged the people with reckless endangerment because their helicopter got close to the drone. If there was reckless endangerment it was on the part of the police.

Baring other details being released IMO this isn't much different than the police arresting photographers photographing them for wiretapping or violating their privacy and other such nonsense. The police created this situation deliberately so they could charge the guys. Not much different than the video's of them screaming stop resisting while they beat someone unconsciousness that isn't resisting.

Congress is OK with corporate welfare. It's those god damned poor people that shouldn't be getting anything.

And most important of all and ignored totally by everyone is that every single plane the airforce has ever developed had these same growing pains. They all have massive cost overruns, groundings and unexplained crashes.

They've spent the bulk of the money quoted for the planes. All those R&D dollars are gone. At this point the planes cost about $120 million a piece to build, which isn't that much more than an F-18. That's nothing, but because they include the R&D that's already spent you end up with dollar amounts that look massive. The less we buy the higher the amortized costs are.

The F-35 is likely to be the last manned fighter ever produced. We've signed almost a dozen countries up to buy some and spread the costs out. It's going to totally streamline all the parts acquisition and maintenance and leave us with a single plane that handles almost every manned role. In time robotic aircraft or drones are going to take over all the dangerous roles. But that time is still decades off and we need something to keep our defense better than everyone else until that point. Air power and navy are two areas I have no problem with out government spending money on. They can be used to deny an enemy entry to the Americas and our separation from the Asian continent is one of the things that provides our best protection.

Guam IS part of the US not some random court. He's been indicted in a federal court of the US.

And he's Canadian for those that missed the joke. Or was, he surrendered his Canadian citizenship so he can pretend he's a real American. Otherwise when he talks about making gay people illegal, forcing women to be barefoot and pregnant, abolishing access to birth control and abortion people might question why this Canadian is pretending to be a Texan with values completely the opposite of the nation he held a passport in.

But in the case of the Asiana crash the biggest problem were the meat bags in the seats. They weren't talking to each other, they didn't understand the systems they were using (one of the systems was telling them they were off the glide path for the entire landing and in fact was showing bigger and bigger divergence) and the lead pilot had only spent something like 40 hours flying a 777.

You can't design around stupid. Stupid people are far to ingenious. The biggest recommendation out of the safety review of the Asiana crash was that the pilots needed better training, in particular talking to each other, questioning each others actions and more flight time with the new systems including simulators.

The pilots actually set the autopilot at one point, this autopilot has only one function, that of maintaining an elevation. They did this thinking the autopilot would control the approach speed for them and it took them minutes to realize it wasn't doing anything (because that's not what it did). On top of this they thought they could pull a huge airliner out of a dive in less than 100' vertical (they waited until they only had 100' (30m) of elevation before trying to gun it and "go around"). That's like trying to make a u-turn in bus on a one lane road. Those are simply not things you can design around and I suspect there is very little you could do to prevent stupidity like that.

IMO it's not that much different than the Atlantic crash in the airbus where one pilot was flying correctly, the co-pilot was pulling back on his stick constantly and the computer was set to average the inputs. They didn't talk to each other and ignored 77 audible warnings that the plane was in stall. The plane literally fell 50,000 feet before it disintegrated. In that case there is at least an argument that the planes systems should have given feedback to each pilot that the other was doing the opposite of what they were doing. But even that is a band-aid over a meat bag problem where two humans aren't telling each other what they are doing and they both have their hands on the controls. You can't anticipate stupid where you expect capable and intelligent operators. This isn't an automobile where we hand anyone with an IQ of 60+ a license and set of keys. This is a system that's supposed to require tens of thousands of hours of flight instruction before you're ever even let touch the controls of a commercial flight and decades spent in the assistant seat before you're ever allowed to be in charge.

I think all this heavy automation can be a disaster waiting to happen if we aren't careful and require pilots to routinely fly the plane without the automated systems. They should be there only to assist the pilot and help prevent errors, not to the fly the plane, because if we want automated systems to fly the plane we should just get rid of the pilots completely.

The transatlantic crash was blamed on lack of pilot/co-pilot communication. The co-pilot was pulling back on the stick endlessly.

777 was apparently due to a cultural issue of the co-pilot refusing to question the pilot.

These are all issues with people, not the electronic systems. Something that can be solved with training. Two crashes out of 100,000 flights is not a trend.

777 failed because the pilots ignored the warnings offered by the electronic systems, not because the electronic systems failed. The plane warned them a dozen times they were too low and they ignored it. This is just like the transatlantic flight that went down where the pilots listened to 77 warnings that they were in stall and did nothing to prevent it apparently because they thought they knew better than the electronic systems.

Pilots routinely fly on instruments these days anyway, this is particularly true and night and in bad weather where visibility is minimal to non-existent. Think of landing a plane in thick fog, an operation that is common these days. The scary thing would be loss of instruments and electronic control systems. That would require pretty much total failure of the electrical and hydraulic systems and the backup systems. Something I don't believe has happened in a commercial airliner in more than 20 years.

Though I agree with you, there should be windows for emergencies if they lose everything else and only have windows it's not going to be easy to land the plane because they'll have lost all instrumentation and hydraulic assist. That might be one of those times you just bend over and kiss your ass goodbye.

Don't be absurd, they can't smell the content but they CAN smell the circuits. Of course the dog can smell the circuit board. Whether it's the solder, the board itself, the IC's or the chemicals used to treat the board the dog can undoubtedly smell it. Hell I can smell new circuit boards and humans have terrible sense of smell.

You might smell a bouquet of flowers, the dog can smell every individual flower, everyone that touched the flowers and every insect that interacted with the flowers. There is no comparison for humans, we simply can't imagine a depth of smell that vast.

And the supreme court ruled that even if there is evidence that the dog was broken or the handler was lying (a case where a dog supposedly indicated on the same guy twice and no drugs were found either time) as long as there is some test in the past that indicates that the dog works that there is no evidence of misconduct on the part of either the dog or handler.

"Parallel construction" is illegal. Evidence collected illegally and the knowledge gained from that illegal act cannot be washed off and sanitized by giving it to someone not part of the illegal act.

The police are trying to use the supreme court exception for private citizens violating peoples rights not tainting a future police investigation. If the Supreme court allows this blatant violation of rights I'll be very disappointed because they've just allowed the state at will to violate people's rights as long as the one who violates the rights doesn't do the investigation. Now all you need is a group of cops that runs around violating everyone's rights but doesn't actually investigate anything. There should be law enforcement personal in jail for this parallel construction nonsense.

The numbers of watts from installed panels is growing at 400% per year. Yes, overall that number is small when compared against total US power output, but it's not small and it's currently displaced almost a dozen power plants.

Prices continue to fall, bulk PV panel prices are below $0.40 a watt. Installed panels in utility scale installations are now cheaper than nuclear without subsidy. If costs continue to fall they will be inline with coal with subsidies within a year or two and probably by the end of the decade will be at cost parity with coal by 2020. Investment in solar power generation has soared, solar city was turning down investment money last year because they couldn't spend what they'd already acquired. Right now you could contract to have solar installed on your house, under a system like solar city use, that installs and maintains the solar panels, finances the transaction over 10 years, and provides you a guaranteed monthly power rate that is lower than what you pay right now. And after 10 years you own the panels outright and are guaranteed another 15 years of power of at least 80% of the output (panel warranties are 25 years) for no additional money. There is someone in your local area right now offering the same deal.

We are on the cusp of a major revolution. We've finally hit the point where the research and industrial production has brought panel prices down exponentially. On top of this the same amount of silicon will buy you 20% more wattage in just the last 5 years and the research continues to accelerate. As prices fall more industrial production comes on line and more economics of scale come into play and prices will fall more. This is on top of research into PV modules using non-silicon base materials that are far cheaper to make such as the thin film silicon and the Cd-Te PV. First Solar for example use a cadmium-telluride PV module that has extremely cheap base materials and uses a roll to roll production process that is so cheap it has sold out their production for the next few years.

I don't disagree that fission is needed and that we need to use gas as a stop gap in getting rid of coal. But, we should be planning right now for an energy generation scheme that is post hydrocarbon because it's not that far off. If we want the full benefit of Solar we need to devote research dollars to developing real energy storage schemes because it's not going to be very long before we're producing more solar energy than we can use during the day. (Germany already see's summer days with negative power prices). Nuclear is a nice backstop but I don't believe we will need to double or triple the number of reactors as you suggest though that may depend on how cheap energy storage is in comparison to nuclear. I suspect storage will be magnitudes cheaper once we actually try to implement it.

With energy storage there is more than enough solar energy striking this planet every day that simply putting panels on the roof of every structure would generate 3-5x the amount of power we currently consume in the US.

The reason people always talk about solar not being capable is because it's assumed that storage is unworkable. IMO the assumption that storage can never work is a myth propagated by the hydrocarbon industry. We've never tried to build storage on the grid, California's requirement that a percent of the grid must be storage by 2020 will test just how silly the notion that storage can't work is. There are hundreds of promising energy storage mediums that could translate abundant solar energy into night time power with very little power lost and with a properly interconnected and managed grid this would work nationwide.

Solar, wind and hydro combined could easily replace all generation. Add in nuclear as a backstop and you wouldn't need a hydrocarbon again. Of course there are very powerful, connected and wealthy people with 80% of their money invested in hydrocarbons that will do anything to see that stopped, including pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into a takeover of one of the national political parties to ensure there is legislation that will prevent this transition.

How is asking you to do exactly the same as what you were asking of me a straw man?

The first reason would be it's Europe and not the US. Each state in Europe is a sovereign entity. The second would be that this is not a constitutional item, it's a court ruling that expands a constitutional issue and is vague on it's face with very few guidelines for application. The third reason is combining 1 and 2 you have an intentional vague ruling that will be interpreted differently in all sovereign member states based on their own common law. The fourth is that Europe has a loser pays system, if Google guesses wrong about the applicability of those 3 words they not only pay damages they cover the legal expenses of the victor and they don't get to claim their action was in good faith. And the fifth is that my question was an example intended to show how intentionally vague the court ruling was and didn't not expect a response. Yours was a sarcastic straw man about a completely unrelated issue.

Google would try to convince judges that it interpreted the judgement in a reasonable way simply because the alternative seriously threatens their business model.

You don't get it do you? It's not a threat to their business at all. No search engine is going to challenge these delisting requests and everyone will remove the same data (because no one is going to remove it from just one search engine, in no time there will be businesses offering to remove data for people, it will probably be the SEO companies). With every search engine removing the same data from their indexes there is no competitive disadvantage for them. These search results will disappear all over Europe whereas Google and other US engines won't remove the listings from their US indexes this puts all European search engine competitors at significant disadvantage to their US counterparts as the Europeans will likely just start using the US indexes for these searches.

Or in other words it's completely unworkable and stupid attempt to create the memory hole without the ability to filter the entire world.