I didn't say I couldn't see a reason, nor did I say they should be outlawed. I just said if they're outlawed for everyone else for whatever reason, no-one should get a free pass just by claiming they're somehow in a different category.

What a bizarre claim. Glaciers in Alaska are melting like they want to quit the party early. There are glacier overlooks constructed where you can no longer see the glacier in question. Fairbanks has had a 50% increase in frost-free days over a century, and overall the rate of warming in the Arctic is roughly double the rest of the world. Temperatures have risen about 4 degrees F overall, and winter temps are up 6 degrees. Arctic sea ice has been shrinking steadily. Snowfall is up a little due to increased evaporation but not enough to counter the glacial melting. Sea ice that has protected settlements for centuries or milennia has vanished and forced the relocation of several villages.

The glacial melting is dramatic. Some of the melting has been attributed to other factors than climate change, specifically that of the Columbia Glacier. The majority of glaciers in the world are in retreat, but the warming effects are most visible in the Arctic.

The landscape is visibly changing. By the time I am old it will be unrecognizable. Cassandra, you have my sympathies.

There is already technology available in some high-end models that will monitor the driver and take steps to warn them if they appear to be losing concentration. That technology is surely going to save lives sooner or later, given the amount of road accidents caused by tiredness or falling asleep at the wheel.

I'm as concerned about creepy surveillance and illusory security as much as the next geek, but image recognition technology does have positive applications as well.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you -- in fact, I suspect from your choice of phrase that we would very much agree on the basic principles of how laws should work -- I'm just saying the law should apply equally to everyone. If certain areas are acceptable for this kind of hobby, they should be acceptable for other similar "drone" flights. Equally, if for whatever reason certain areas are not acceptable in law for general "drone" flights or if the default in law is that these devices aren't considered acceptable but they are then allowed under specific conditions, the same rules should apply for hobby aircraft with similar characteristics.

The speed of light is a hard constraint, akin to the "clock rate" of the universe. It is the greatest possible change in spatial coordinates for a given unit of time. Thinking of it in terms of a speed or speed limit is less useful: it's a fundamental property of the universe. One consequence of this is that photons do not experience time in any meaningful sense between emission and absorption. Another more relevant consequence is that if any event (e.g. a spacecraft) does exceed the rate of event propagation (i.e. c) then you can construct a reference frame in which that event is observed to be propagating backwards in time. The speed of light and causality are fundamentally linked. If you want a universe in which FTL exists, you want a universe in which effects can precede their causes.

There is room for Einstein to be wrong. However, Relativity (and by extension causality) has been confirmed on every scale that we have been able to observe so far, from the sub-atomic to the intergalactic. Beyond that there is some gray area, but you'll note that we do not experience the universe at either extreme; whether or not Relativity applies to sub-sub-atomic particles, it certainly applies to us. It is an accurate description of the geometry of the universe at human time and distance scales, and at human energy levels, and at scales and energy levels far beyond what humans can harness. In order for what you want to be true, Einstein would have to be wrong -- not wrong in the sense that Newton was wrong, but wrong in the sense that the Flat Earth Society is wrong. And at that point we may as well give up science; if causality isn't true then empiricism takes a pretty hard knock.

You and Thanshin should quit spamming this thread with examples of human ignorance and rectify some of your own. Your argument is not very far removed from saying, "But we don't know everything about gravity! Maybe in the future things will fall up!". It's not entirely ludicrous to suggest that events can propagate through spacetime faster than events can propagate through spacetime, or that spacetime can be warped such that the shortest path between two points is less than the "true" distance, but it's at least 99% ludicrous, and championing the narrowest of possibilities while being ignorant of the (well-tested) established theory is not very rational. The geometry of spacetime is very strange and unintuitive, but if you're going to argue that it could be different then you should probably know how it works first.

I'm sorry for those losing out here, but I also don't see why they should be allowed to operate unmanned aerial vehicles with surveillance capabilities any more than anyone else.

Paragraphs 6 and 7 appear to me to say that, if you put code covered by a patent of yours in a GPLed work, and distribute it, anybody downstream will be able to use that code according to the GPLv2 regardless of your patent. This isn't as extreme as GPLv3, but it could affect patent enforcement.

(Of course, I don't approve of any patent that could apply to software, so this doesn't bother me.)

If all that was happening was providing information, that could be useful. Staying longer in parking spots isn't. In this case, people with the app and money and the willingness to break the law get all the parking, while people who aren't in the system have real problems. This system favors one class of people at the expense of others, and overall degrades the system by reducing the number of cars who will be in a slot over time.

FIFO would make sense. This ain't it. Providing information would be useful, but this isn't helpful.

If we're in a state where almost all parking spots are occupied almost all the time, then parking is pretty much at capacity, and the only thing that will alleviate it is to get fewer cars around (not going to happen, most of the time), or to have the average stay in a parking spot shorter. This method makes the average stay in a parking spot longer, and hence fewer cars can find spots per unit time.

Damn, did I leave my sarcasm detector in my other pants?

I find it highly unlikely that a judge would consider this anything other than selling a parking spot. Judges tend not to be convinced by complicated logical arguments that violate the spirit of the law. At least at our income levels.

You're missing the point about legitimate reasons. Being in a spot for personal reasons is fine. Being in a spot because nobody's paid you to leave it isn't. That appears to be the law.

FWIW, this was my first comment in the thread. You seem to be confusing me with other people.

What I am saying is that computer languages have variable amounts of unnecessary complexity, and that this is generally bad. It's bad for men, it's bad for women, it's bad for the autistic and the non-autistic. The reason it is there is not that men don't care, but that people really don't know what to do about it. It may affect women more than men, but I've seen no evidence that women are inherently better at language design than men, and no evidence that men wouldn't want programming languages with less unnecessary complexity. If you can coherently explain why the number of women in programming affects this, please do.

Programming language design isn't magic, and doesn't automatically change to be nice to women.

Using pure virtuals solves nothing here. In order to override a function in C++ so it's properly polymorphic, the signatures have to match, and that applies whether one function is pure virtual or not.

Huh? Are you saying everybody should hand-code assembly without any sort of framework?

Buffer overflows should be managed by the language. Any security feature that the language can handle should be handled by the language. This frees the programmer to think about what's going on on a larger scale. Humans are really not good at making sure every instance of a common pattern is handled correctly, and compilers are.

I'm afraid I only have examples of where they weakened cryptosystems, not when they secured data. They may not actually be good at all of their jobs.