No, this is them annoying some of their customers (people who want to fly illegally in the DC no-fly zone) in an attempt to preempt knee-jerk over compensating by federal authorities. The feds would rather just ban the devices entirely, period.

In the Washington DC area, flights of any kind are and have been for many years very severely controlled. The DC Flight Restriction Zone (the "DC FRZ") is a 30-mile-wide circle in side of which it is illegal to fly any sort of remote control device of any kind at any altitude. So, yes, it sucks to be in the suburbs, seemingly a long way away from the sensitive downtown areas that include the White House, the Capital, Reagan Airport, the CIA campus, and all of those other high-profile places and people ... but, too bad! Federal offense with stiff fines and possible jail time if you're caught. That includes kids with $20 bought-it-at-the-mall 6" pink plastic helicopters playing around in their back yard. Yes, it's ridiculous. On the other hand, it's a rare week when a trio of big helicopters doing runs like the one between the White House and Camp David don't go thundering over the tree tops of suburban Maryland. You can hear them coming quite a ways out, and if you were prepared, you could easily have a modest quadcopter or more substantial hexa up to over 1000' feet and be at the same altitiude as (or above) Marine One by the time it and its decoy siblings flew directly over your house on the way to a routine presidential golf outing. That's the sort of thing that has had the DoD, Secret Service, HSA, and FAA all uptight. Mind you, a person flying a more or less radar-invisible foam and plastic RC plane could have done that many years ago, too.

And so we have a 700 square mile area where flying a 3-pound DJI quadcopter is very, very illegal, and has been for years. That DJI is updating their GPS-aware flight control firmware to make it impossible to fly their devices in that area is a sign that they don't want their products to be simply banned outright. We are not at the sweet spot of rational rules and implementation on this one, not even close. And of course someone with true mal intent isn't going to be bothered by the rules or the firmware limitations anyway.

I suspect that the mania will be tempered by the fact that it will be fairly easy to classify all sorts of projects, that you were already doing, as "IoT" if you wish to seem super cutting edge and so on without actually making any changes.

There's a vague sort of notion about what "IoT" is supposed to be, cobbled together from some mixture of analogies to SCADA and industrial control systems and science fiction; but it is broad and ill formed enough that all sorts of things that can connect to a network in some way, and any and all software associated with them, can be covered without stretching the truth too hard.

Plus, until the various squabbling factions decide how to actually make the 'things' interact usefully with each other(the current preference seems to be 'appoint either Google or Apple as Feudal Oligarch', with 'don't even bother, everything you buy will have its own terrible app!' as the runner up), the 'internet' bit is really just being used as a convenient remote access to the control panel(and for monetizing users, of course), which is much less hairy and challenging than actual interactions among things in some conveniently configurable and/or emergent-without-being-pathological way.

Any guesses about how many existing 'embedded system that connects to the internet in some fashion' projects were dubbed 'internet of things' in order to bring this new buzzphrase to prominence?

Yeah, yeah, I know, at some point the scale and pervasiveness of embedded connectivity may reach a point where it is different in kind, not just degree, from past use; but I submit that we aren't there yet by a nontrivial margin. For the moment, "IOT" seems to mean 'has a terrible smartphone app' or 'last model, you connected to the serial port to configure the system; when we revised the hardware it turned out that adding ethernet would be cheap and lots of customers wanted it, so we added it.'

I agree that an update to 802.11 would be nice, unauthenticated management frames are a potentially nasty issue; but the rest of the argument is nuts.

All sorts of crimes can be committed by means of a speech act(indeed, many crimes are hard to commit without some means of communicating, fraud, extortion, ransoming hostages, etc.); but that doesn't give them constitutional protection, any more than the argument that your god demands blood sacrifice would provide protection against murder charges.

This is classic Locke stuff: a restriction aimed at restraining speech is illegitimate and illegal; but that does not imply that the mere use of speech to commit a given act necessarily covers that act under the protections given to speech. Same with religions. Restrictions targeted at a given exercise of religion are unacceptable; but this does not protect someone who breaks a law established for suitable unrelated reasons.

There's also the (only partially related) matter that 'radio interference' need not always imply "really loud white noise or other stochastic garbage at the appropriate frequency". That's often the easiest way, and for relatively primitive radio systems that have very few features to exploit it may be the best one; but if RF emissions specifically tailored to cause a radio system to fail aren't 'radio interference', what exactly is? Higher level attacks offer substantial advantages in power requirements, precision targeting, resistance to noise-mitigation mechanisms, and so on; but just because they aren't pure noise doesn't make them not interference.

That seems like a fairly slim bit of legal weasel-wording given that nowhere is "your airspace" in the slices of spectrum that wifi uses. I would certainly agree that 'containment' should only be performed in 'your airspace'; but there is no such space.

In private buildings that don't offer guest services or otherwise accommodate outsiders, you can certainly disconnect anything you don't approve of from the wired LAN, and ask anyone operating a hotspot to leave or be removed for trespassing; but the notion that you enjoy preferential rights to that spectrum by virtue of owning the building is simply unsupported.

The fact is, we have no need for building this tall. If the Arab world didn't have more money from oil than they know what to do with, they'd never spend the money on such a project in the first place.

Many of our current skyscrapers have problems with unoccupied rooms/floors, as it is. You can try to recoup money on tourism - but that only makes so much sense. The higher the building, the more you've got invested in heating and cooling, electricity, maintenance, etc. etc. -- just to get the same tourist dollars the "other guy" used to get with his tall building that USED to be the "tallest one" before you beat him.

Carbon fiber technology is worth pursuing, so sure - this has some engineering and scientific interest. But realistically, no ... We've got plenty of space on this planet for people without resorting to these measures.

I happen to be one of the people who admires many of Jobs' business decisions and ideas. But he was also known to "overshoot" reality at times, with expectations that went beyond what was reasonable.

I think he was desperately looking for solutions for a "post PC" world, where people would give up traditional computers, in exchange for a superior device. (After all, in the sci-fi "Star Trek" universe, nobody was carrying around a laptop computer, right? The computer was just built in to the environment so you could speak commands to it.)

I really like my iPad, especially since I started taking the train to and from work each day in a 1 hour long commute. It's the ideal device to read the news on, check email, waste time on Facebook, play a casual game or two on, etc. But it's really just a convenience item in the modern world. It's never been anything much more than a big version of Apple's smartphone, without the cellular voice call features.

Indeed they can. Unfortunately they decided to let the people responsible for ACPI actually follow through on that, and then decided that it would make a good bootloader.

What I find most baffling about the whole affair is how something that one would ordinarily think of as a fairly overtly malicious exploit, spoofing the appropriate management frames to break a network you don't have authenticated access to the configuration interface for, became a 'respectable' tool for 'management', even included out of the box in fancy commercial products from vendors with risk averse legal teams and so on.

This seems like the place where somebody who has been dealing with enterprise wireless gear long enough to have observed the change might be found. Did this 'feature' cross over from what was initially a proof of concept by a security researcher? Was it recognized as a possibility before the standards had even been hammered out and was available from day one? Do we know what vendor adopted it first? Were there any who specifically didn't offer it for legal, rather than technical, reasons?

At this point, it is certainly the case that at least some wireless management consoles adopt a very...possessive...tone, detecting 'rogue' APs, despite those APs being no more or less legitimate than any others, in terms of spectrum use, and offering 'containment' or various similarly clinical euphemisms for dealing with them. How, historically, did it come to be that this nasty DoS trick went all legitimate, even as generalized hacker hysteria can get you a stiff dose of CFAA charges for almost anything that involves a CLI and confuses the DA?

I'd love to have my hands on all the versions of various vendors' wireless management and administration packages, to see how this feature evolved over time. I can certainly see its appeal; but I find it hard to believe that nobody had serious doubts about its legality from time to time.

Less likely. The FCC is pretty clearly within their powers in saying that you aren't allowed to intentionally interfere with other people's Part 15 devices by using your own to generate disruptive RF.

There is no obvious coverage for forbidding the sale of devices having a Part 15 radio component; but lacking a software configuration for providing network access to other devices with that device. They might be able to shove it into the conditions of a spectrum auction, and make it binding on the buyer; but it's more of an FTC problem.

Does anyone know why they wouldn't sidestep the infeasibility of particularly long cable runs by having the elevator climb the walls of the shaft directly, rather than being raised and lowered on a cable? I imagine that a cable and counterweight arrangement is more energy efficient for shorter runs; but if that isn't an option wouldn't a cog railway style mechanism, with 'track' on one or more walls of the elevator shaft, result in a system where the weight that has to be moved doesn't change at all with the height of the building? There would be some additional weight per unit height from the track structure; but that would be static and connected to the building's frame rather than being forced to support its own weight.

Too energy intensive? Wears too quickly? Safety breaks infeasible leading to risk of sickening plummet to doom?

You have no idea what you're talking about. A passing car is louder than a small, well-tuned quad with quality balanced rotors at ground level. 30' in the air? Barely audible. There are noisier ones. I work with a 25-pound octo that sounds completely horrifying, and I know when and where to operate it. But thanks for speaking out of ignorance - it helps to put all of this stuff in perspective.

Or, you are yourself a toxic seed planted by The Man in order to foment FUD and make good people not want to be part of these projects. Or something like that. Give it a rest with the absurd conspiracy crap.

I've flown that exact same piece of equipment at 3:00 AM, just for fun. Not on Pennsylvania Ave in downtown DC, of course. But if the guy's a hobby flier up late on a weekend night playing with this quad copter, maybe trying to get a couple of cool scenic night time shots, is that so hard to believe? Or is your tinfoil hat so tight that you're also going to assume I can't possibly have been up late updating firmware, swapping some motors around, and then stepped outside in the low-traffic, peaceful night time hours to test my handiwork? Can't be! I must be an FBI stooge! Please.