The airspace above your property is public, and not an extension of your property.

Only above X feet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I was thinking more along the lines of sending up an anti-drone drone to grab it and drag it back down. After that you can rely on the legal precedent of "finders, keepers" to add it to your drone collection.

Catchers have been doing this since before there were catcher's mitts. And if there is no rule against it, it is not 'technically' anything, much less cheating.

You're all thinking in terms of technical implications; I'm thinking in terms of economics.

How many people can you find who can't flip a hamburger or fill a box of french fries?

Making everyone a programmer--indeed, the whole concept of universal access to college--is just a campaign to make a minimum wage job out of *everything*. College itself is a great thing, and good higher education options are important for a society; but access to those options needs restriction, and not by quota or the color of your blood.

Giving absolutely everyone unrestricted access to career education means a strong job market in a field only encourages everyone, unknowing of how many actual jobs are available and how many of their peers are entering that market, to go into vocational training for that field. After that, you have ten times the trained professionals ready to take up those jobs than there are jobs available, and so unemployment increases, employer negotiation power goes up, employee power goes down, and, with that, salaries and benefits decrease as well. Were I the type to maximize my systematic abuse of my employees, I would lobby heavily for a public college infrastructure--loans-based especially, but also free college, even if it were paid for entirely by taxes on businesses--in order to put my employees constantly on low ground, allowing me to stomp all over them as I see fit.

The bare reality is businesses need us. That's not an ego statement or a rally cry; every business have a strategy to execute, the vital plans required to maximize their profits, and that strategy relies on the capability to perform certain types of labor. Just like a merchant requires salesmen and inventory managers, a software company requires programmers; an aircraft company requires engineers; and a construction company requires construction workers. Without trained, if not experienced, laborers available in the market, these businesses must pay exorbitant salaries to hire talent from competitors, greatly increasing costs; on the other side, their talent may be hired away, greatly increasing risks.

My own economic theory suggests this creates a good argument for free, public college: raising costs and risks (risks only become greater costs) raises the cost of products; and, as I've said many times, we increase wealth by *lowering* the cost of production--lowering labor costs, essentially, by reducing labor or reducing the unit cost of labor--and so it seems reducing these costs and risks will bring us cheaper products and, thus, greater residual wealth and opportunities for new markets, meaning new jobs. Unfortunately, this direction also implies the middle-class will shrink--we lower cost by squeezing down middle-class salaries--and the power and wealth of the great many laborers is diminished, which is socially not in line with my own philosophies.

Fortunately for my philosophies and for my grasp of economics, this is not the only way to reduce those risks and their associated costs.

As a matter of strategic management, businesses routinely project what load they will put on their resources in the future--indeed, that's what work performance information and human resource management are for. Even the most oblivious employers I've worked for have 2-3 years of foreknowledge about what departments they need expand; of course, since there is so much available labor out there, they simply squeeze everyone they have (in management, this is called "running lean") until they break, and then put out "urgent need" postings just before collapse. Management is, however, fully capable of predicting their labor needs, and approves the hiring budgets 6-18 months before hiring actually begins.

With the public effectively barred from college by the barrier of sheer individual cost, the labor pool for these needed skilled laborers drops as I suggest. Those "running lean" tactics don't work. Instead, as Miyomoto Musashi observed, a successful business would strategically hire on unskilled but eager entrants, shifting low-skill work (think refactoring, code clean-up) away from their high-value employees. Such work requires a great deal of time to perform, but comparatively little time to verify (git merge request reviewed by senior programmer), and so this displacement gains a relative reduction in cost immediately. At the same time, on-the-job training, off-site training, and funding of the employee's college education allow the employer to build a more competent and useful employee in steps: as skill improves, so does the range of tasks the employee can complete effectively--as does his speed and effectiveness (correctness) in performing those tasks.

This strategy places the cost and risk of job training on businesses, and allows them to balance away the cost and risk of hiring fully-trained employees by carefully displacing time-consuming tasks from highly-utilized, high-value employees to those lower-value employees. Further, the actual risks are smaller for a business than for an individual: a business often genuinely knows what employees it will need in 6 months to 3 years's time, at least to a high degree of certainty, and knows it isn't hiring 5 employees to fill 1 slot. The salary run-up of hiring professionals from other businesses will increase costs greatly over just training, and so salaries may rise, but only to the actual value of an employee--the value of building an employee rather than buying one, not the value the employee thinks he is worth, so long as he'll settle for what he's offered.

At the same time, a divide is made between labor you have, labor you can acquire, and labor you can create. This puts more power in the hands of the individual laborer, commanding higher salaries and better job security; and it also raises the value of that employee to the business, justifying that power. If an employee finds himself suddenly unemployed, he is valuable, immediately-available labor, most valuable to businesses with multiple entry-level positions open, as he will bring the immediate benefit of multiple entrants and more quickly produce the full benefit of a trained professional (which reduces risk of training taking too fucking long, thus leaving you somewhat short on man power).

That's really what all this business about making everyone into a programmer is: cheaper IT. Programmers are expensive, so let's turn everyone into a programmer so they'll be the modern-day burger flipper. Girls are shit negotiators, and business is IT heavy, so let's get more girls into IT so we can push salaries down. So on and so forth. The same, really, is true of broader individual access to college: it relieves businesses of their social responsibility to build a workforce by relieving them of the consequences of not building that workforce--consequences which everyone has forgotten, and so they imagine businesses prospering in an endless stream of gold and silver while poor people die in the streets without any way to get jobs or college degrees, not considering how these businesses are getting any work done without anyone to work for them (they also imagine labor create jobs, and so having 1000 people with IT skills means having 1000 more IT jobs available).

That, of course, is a particularly later focus of my overall goals. I want to get a Citizen's Dividend passed first, and then remove the minimum wage once it's no longer necessary--once people with zero income are able to afford housing and food--so as to first confer that "minimum standard of living" to people who aren't fully employed, and to second spread the transition to widespread automation over a longer time period (hopefully weakening its negative economic impacts, and giving us time to recover along the way) by way of reducing labor costs. I'll fight the more difficult economic issues after I've solved poverty--that is, after I've gotten the solution implemented; I haven't yet decided if I should follow my education reform with college economics policies, or run both in parallel and keep emphasis that the two issues are separate.

So, you're saying that going from Windows 7 to, say, Windows 2000 is not a downgrade, but just a lateral change?

Or going from IE6 to IE11 isn't an upgrade, but just a change?

You really don't see how going from an older version with fewer features to a newer version with more features ins't an upgrade? Or maybe you're just being pedantic about the definition of "upgrade"?

Hitler did, in fact, collect up all the guns while explaining that the S.S. would protect everyone. They then proceeded to protect everyone from living in communities with jews, gays, or anyone they didn't like. Second Amendment nannies are so up in arms about everything that restricts their firearm freedom, in part, because of that example; they are, of course, loonies, and nobody will listen to them as they scream loudly into the night about a government which wants to "protect" us by expansion of domestic spying and enforcement power.

That's the OnePlus One. The OnePlus Two gives additional RAM on top of NAND; the One only gives 64GB or 16GB of storage as options, with the same amount of RAM. I was discussing Bacon.

It's not simply that. This is an incredible example of careful diplomatic speech. Read something like Off Armageddon Reef (a better example than The Gap Cycle or Dune) and you'll see this shit all over the place--importantly, with attention drawn to it for storytelling purposes. In context, there's a whole several paragraphs around the statement discussing the theft and publication of secret information, for which Snowden must face trial; but, when examined closely, the blunt statement I describe is in fact made.

On a technicality, you can take apart my analysis and show that no such thing was ever said--which is exactly the point. The listener will hear the statement I describe: "If something is wrong, speak up; but don't expect to escape consequence, as do all men who fight and die for what they believe is right." The speaker can, of course, point out the context of the statement and show no such thing has been stated.

This is how politicians work on a large population over a long span of time. The statements they make incite a certain type of thought, certain emotions, specific beliefs and understandings in response. Things like, "Remember that God has ultimately given us all the ability to think, and to know evil from good when we see it," which a pastor can point out was in the context of those around us--our peers, our parents, our secular leaders--may lead us astray, all the while catching the Church in that sweeping statement--a heretical proclamation that the church may be wrong. Such a pastor could protect himself even from the Spanish Inquisition, claiming he was protecting the Church from outside influences who would lead their good followers away, all while setting up for his followers to recognize and resist a corrupt Church.

It really is an amazing thing to watch; unfortunately, it's much more terrifying to observe in real life than in fiction.

As a pilot, I cannot agree more. Some of the cockpit controls out there are downright obnoxious, especially for rotary wing.

I have a friend who is a Harrier jet pilot, and I have heard some horror stories on landing those on aircraft carriers.

Usually, we are told what *not* to do, and so unless explicitly forbidden (e.g., do not do X before this time), we will assume it will be alright. This is clearly an engineering and a documentation/training failure.

It's easy to blame the pilot, but if anything, he's a tragic victim of poor design.

Completely agree. You don't have to be able to bang out an OS, but man, if everybody just knew how to grep through some files or automatically run an SQL query, dump the results into an Excel file and email it to somebody, the world would be a better place.

Pick your poison. Get robbed by your coworkers or get robbed by your boss. You're still getting robbed. But I bet your coworkers will rob you less, given that they're being robbed by the same process.

Resistance was futile!

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