There is still generally a big difference between drones and RC aircraft.

RC aircraft do include many of the quadcopters and traditional devices that are controlled by line-of-sight from a controlling box. The key difference is that RC aircraft are not fully autonomous.

Drones are the ones that can fly with autonomy, be programmed with routes, and otherwise do things independently from the radio controller.

These specific devices feature GPS-driven autopilot, dynamic routing, and automated photography systems. The website also lists some auto-drop functionality to deliver small packages to GPS coordinates. They can fly autonomously to GPS locations, take actions, fly elsewhere, take actions, then fly home.

While they do offer a regular controller box and can operate as normal RC aircraft, they are also GPS-drivable, programmably autonomous, and capable of fully automated flight and fully automated recording, so these Dragonflyer X6 devices very firmly fall into the 'drone' category.

Depends on where you live, I suppose.

Here in the heart of the Rocky Mountains our search and rescue organizations are separate from law enforcement, covered under the department of public safety. Basically search and rescue is a sibling organization to the county sheriff offices.

I agree with the representative; I do not want the local LEOs to use drones for just about any reason. But I don't mind other governmental agencies, like search and rescue, fire departments, the department of wildlife resources, and other non-LEO organizations, using them for public good.

Reading the rest of the article (yeah, who does that) has more of the little gems.

The quotes fro the headlines were from a PR drone. They write PR, but they don't know the actual secrets. They are not the ones who are called in to a private executive meeting with the legal team.

When they question Mark Chandler, the executive general counsel who does hear the legal secrets:

“We ought to be able to count on the government tonot interfere with the lawful delivery of our products in the form in which we have manufactured them,” Chandler wrote. “To do otherwise, and to violate legitimate privacy rights of individuals and institutions around the world, undermines confidence in our industry.”

We ought to trust... people need to trust... because that is good for business.

Chandler didn’t say if the company knew of the NSA interdiction program, nor did the executive acknowledge if Cisco participated in the interception of packages delivered to certain customers.

Thank you!

It is amazing at how quickly people jump from the word "mental illness" to "homeless, homicidal, criminally insane."

The vast majority of humanity has a mental illness at least one in their life. It may be trouble coping with a death. It may be trouble overeating or starving yourself. Most executives, politicians, and a large number of law enforcement officers are all sociopaths. Even issues like premature ejaculation can be linked to mental illnesses, either short term or long term.

NO MORE STIGMA. "Mental illness" almost never means "homeless, homicidal, criminally insane", just like "physical illness" almost never means "hospital intensive care on life support, a living vegetable."

Mental illness can range from the equivalent of a physical illness of a cold, or a bigger infection, or a life-long treatable condition like diabetes, or it can be severe like aggressive brain cancer.

The article headline and so many of the replies, including yours, seem to just focus on a tiny subset of mental illness. STOP THE NEGATIVE STEREOTYPES

Sure, people who suffer severe and extreme levels of depression do have trouble with these things.

But mental illness covers a huge swath of conditions.

That skinny girl who has anorexia, that is a mental illness. That person who keeps his desk really neat at work has mild OCD which is a mental illness. Chances are very good that your boss or your grand-boss, and almost certainly your CEO and other executives, are all sociopaths, also a mental illness.

Dyslexia, ADD and ADHD, caffeine-induced sleep disorders, dysthymia (mild depression), stuttering, insomnia, and premature ejaculation all fit under the "mental illness" umbrella.

DON'T FEED THE STEREOTYPES. Because clearly, as you suggest men suffering from premature ejaculation due to mental issues "often have trouble getting good jobs if any jobs at all".

Nearly every human being suffers from mental illness during their life, even if it is only briefly. You wouldn't make such broad claims about other illnesses, but mental illness has such a horrible stigma in western culture it is disgusting.

It isn't the only one. Quite a few conferences dedicated to cryptography and security have been held outside the US because of the ITAR controls and other regulations that treat encryption as weapons and security systems as terrorist devices.

Cryptographic systems were listed as arms until about a decade ago, and even today some security technologies are potentially on the list. Even if they aren't on ITAR any more, attending the conference is certain to get your name entered to all kinds of US-based lists. Rather than risk being considered for international arms dealing and international terrorism, quite a few conferences take place anywhere but the US. The risk both to the conference itself and to those who might attend the conferences are just too great.

Austria, Switzerland, France, Malaysia, ... many countries are still more popular for security conferences than the US.

I know, this is /. and the vast majority don't RTFA.

Here is perhaps a better summary for this story:

School system in the state is terribly corrupt. $100M given to school, with requirement that another $100M must match it. Over $200M is given to the system. ALL THE MONEY in the known-to-be-corrupt system was spent by politicians, union groups, and administrators, NONE OF THE MONEY was actually spent on students.

Throwing more money at the people who are known to be corrupt will not correct the corruption problems. To fix corruption requires actually removing those who are corrupt and implementing strong accountability systems that also remove those who are corrupt or underperform. Right now the politicians in the state are among the most immoral corrupt politicians in the world, the teachers union is strong enough that once hired you have a job until you die no matter how bad you teach, and administrators are protected by both the political and the union sides.

Throwing more money at them is like throwing pretty little fish into a piranha tank hoping it will make a beautiful fishy ecosystem. The natural result should not be surprising. You need to dump the tank and start over.

And yet the patent still went through.

Patent officers reportedly only check existing patents. They cannot be experts in all fields, but searching the patent database is easy.

Yes, I would prefer the patent office said "That is standard art". But on the other hand, they DID issue the patent.

Given the choice, would you prefer Amazon hold the patent, or the patent be held by "XYZ Technology Holdings", a shell company of "SueEmAll Inc", a shell company of "TrollCentral", all existing to sue everybody? Amazon is most likely to just sit on the patent until it expires. The same is not true for patent trolls.

Actually, Amazon claims it was for defensive purposes only.

They noticed that there was very little prior art and they used the process for a huge number of photos on their site. Amazon claims they were concerned that a patent troll would get a patent and then sue Amazon.

In some ways that is a good thing. If their patent was denied for prior art, then it means the patent system (or at least one clerk) understood that there was prior art, and Amazon could have said "We tried to patent it, USPTO denied it, so the troll's patent is invalid."

Instead, since the patent came through, it means the USPTO could have just as easily given the patent to a troll, so it was a hopefully correct action to prevent them from fighting a patent battle later.

Time will tell, but considering the nature of how Amazon has been using its patents, this is probably fairly safe.

On a related note, I just got to kick a cop off my parking lot today.

cop: But I sit here every day during my lunch, and I patrol the parking lot.

me: I'm sorry, but it is posted that this is private property and you need permission to be here. You don't have that permission. Please leave.

cop: Are you saying you don't want 'protection' on your property any more? You want no cops on the street anywhere near here, cars getting broken in to, thefts going on?

me: I'm saying you don't have permission to be on my private property. Either get permission, or leave. You can sit on the street or other public areas.

cop: You don't want a fight with me. I'm a cop.

me: That is correct, I don't want a fight. So let me make this clear. *hit 'talk' on my cell phone where I had already dialed the police department.*

phone: Police dispatch

me: Yes, I have an officer on my property without permission. He says he comes here every day on his lunch break, named (name read from name tag). Will you please forward me to his supervisor?"

cop: (muttered profanity) FINE! *Revvs engine, speeds out of lot.*

phone: This is the office of blah blah, please leave a message.

me: Message about belligerent trespassing officer who swore at me when I asked him to stop trespassing.

I'm hoping to get a call back very soon.

Officers need to learn that they are not above the law. Even under the pretense of patrolling a neighborhood, officers need to be reigned in whenever possible.

The only thing that would have been better is if his profanity and revved engine would have been caught on the recording.

I have been surprised how few others have mentioned Asimov's laws.

For the train argument, the law says save the most lives by number. No debate needed.

For the car crash, run the numbers, especially if you know the number and locations of passengers. If the choice is between a small car with just a driver and a minivan full of children, 1 high risk injury versus 7 lower-risk injuries, 1 is better than 7.

Where it gets tricky (and Asimov wrote several of these) are in cases that numbers are hard to determine.

When the choice is between an older civil servant with a high probability of survival and a young child with a low probability of survival, the robot chose based on survival probability. The lawyers and statisticians agreed it was correct based on the odds. The civil servant whose life was saved disagreed and suffered from survivor's guilt. From his life choices and his career, he would have willingly given his life for the child no matter how low the odds were. A variant of this ended up in the I, Robot movie.

Another one posed not just by Asimov but also sometimes faced in real life: If you can only save the life of the mother or the infant, and it is guaranteed at least one will die, and the odds of saving the either individual are slim, which do you work on? Those who study law, medicine, and ethics have reached the consensus that you focus on saving the mother, not the child.

Getting closer to the challenge of autonomous vehicles: Swerve left to hit the 5-year-old, swerve right to hit the 17-year-old, inaction hits them both, at least one must be struck. Again you can play the odds; the 17-year-old is bigger and probably has a better chance of survival.

Perhaps taking it further, hitting a 5-year-old child or an elderly great-grandparent, both have high risk of death, the algorithm designer may decide that the young child's longer life is more valuable than the elderly person's short remaining life. Assigning a number is hard, but something that is increasingly important in autonomous decisions.

As far as the law and liability is concerned, you still must play the numbers game. An autonomous vehicle is going to keep a log of that type of decision. Hit the single-passenger instead of 7 children, that is easy. Hit a large vehicle instead of unprotected pedestrians, again easy. Hit one child instead of two children, fewer fatalities is better.. As long as the paper trail shows the least statistically bad option was taken in the circumstances, it is difficult to argue it was the wrong action. The statistics themselves may be up for debate, but choosing the least-bad option in an all-bad scenario is typically the best option.

And the organization-wide license upgrade from Office 2010 to Office 2013 is how much?

More divisions than that, but basically yes.

My favorite was back with one of the many MP3 lawsuits circa 2005, where the music groups sued the MP3 hardware makers. I forget which one of the countless suits it was.

Sony/BMG Music was a plaintiff as part of the music cartel, Sony Electronics was a defendant as an mp3 device manufacturer. The judge dismissed Sony from both sides of the suit.

No, there is certainly demand. The high definition video is way better than what you can stream.

The flaw is the DRM. Players must be constantly updated with new security features to play the discs, and even then it takes minutes for the menus and other garbage to load. Then you finally get in to the movie.

I can't really stand the disks any more due to the roughly 5 minutes before putting in the disk and getting the player running. Instead I rip the main movie to my backup drive and watch it on my PC hooked up to my TV and sound system, but the video quality of full 1080p is much better than streamed video or standard def DVD.