Pretty much, now that the cost of a drone has gone sub $100, and can be flown with no real understanding of the forces involved in keeping it in the air... it is a very different risk.

Think child, or dude with a mcjob getting all drunk and deciding it would be great fun to park near an airport and fly with the real planes.

I actually mostly agree with the proposed FAA rules for the commercial variety as well: pilot license, stay low, stay away from airports, stay in visual contact. They can relax them as the technology improves.

We could do that... except that it will lead to the requirement to carry insurance, as with other situations where you can cause more damage than you are likely to be able to pay for.

Your insurance company will in turn tell you to stay away from airports or the policy is not valid, meaning you are illegally flying. The end result would basically be a drone tax, and you would still not be allowed to fly near an airport.

It seems easier to just ban drone flight near airports, and cut out the middleman.

There is a big difference between a bird, and a metal drone.

Bird strikes are a bad thing for aircraft, but mostly survivable. If you suck a bird into the engine it is going to cause a ton of damage come out as a fine mist.

Ponder for a moment the amount of energy it will take to render your drone into a fine mist. Now consider the energy content of battery or fuel. If the engine casing breaches the plane probably is coming down, or it will at least be a very bad day for all involved.

Still think it would be no big thing?

I cannot imagine any sort of reasonable risk analysis deciding it is ok to allow drone flight near an airport.

A commercial passenger jet at 700 feet is either taking off, landing, or crashing... so we can safely assume this was in controlled airspace near an airport.

Disclaimer... I am hugely drunk to an unreasonable degree which nobody my age should be.

I am all about personal liberties, and feel that our government has no business at all looking into the life of any citizen without great reason to do so. I do see a very large difference between inciting crime in a normal citizen and inciting someone with a security clearance.

Pushing a citizen into selling or manufacturing narcotics for instance is hugely different from getting someone to publish engineering details which are classified. I stand by my assessment that inciting this kind of thing in someone with a clearance is prudent and reasonable.

Knowing people who do this kind of thing for a living, they pay enough that financial troubles can be nothing other than greed or such horrifically bad life choices that it is ok to come down upon it.

If you take a security clearance you give up many of the rights you would have as a normal citizen. I would consider this level of entrapment a prudent security measure, as when nine of of ten offers are traps, the resulting paranoia diminishes the risk of actual disclosure.

That seems like a problem easily solved with a tether.

Cleaning surfaces between floors may be an issue.

I am not so sure a game AI would be a good task for a highly parallel processor which mostly handles floating point numbers.

How would you even put an AI together without a ton of branching? It would seem to me that the entire problem is check this condition, do this if true, if not check this, etc.

Hmm, I think it is fairly relevant.

It is more difficult to write a C++ compiler than C, it is also easier to be sure an optimization is safe with C code.

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/cpp.php shows C as faster and smaller than C++ in most of the benchmarks too, and that one is GCC on Linux.

In theory they should be the same, but the reality is that they are not (although it is very close.)

Really? C is quite possibly the most portable language which currently exists if you care to write it that way.

I nearly always use C for programs which must be portable due to the ease with which it can be made to run on a variety of platforms. I have quite a few which run on more than a few entirely different platforms with a simple recompile.

You can write C code which is tied to a specific operating system of course, but for any task where you have language options other than C you can generally write a portable C program which does that. The tasks which absolutely cannot be portable also tend to be the type of program where you have little to no choice of language anyway.

I also tend to pair it with another language for the UI unless I need something specific (although that really has more to do with my desire to hand projects off to someone else for minor UI tweaks, color changes, etc.) If you want portable UI code there are C libraries which can do that, although you end up with the same problems other languages with a portable UI library have (mainly lack of consistency with the rest of the UI, as you are not using the native API.)

If the project is the kind of thing where a web based UI is desirable, you can even make the UI language HTML. It is easy to have a C program bind to port 80 and respond to HTTP requests, or use CGI and a web server.

I have a program using MSVC which is about 10% faster when compiled as C (with a long enough run time that this is a several minute difference just by changing the compiler option for the language).

Maybe some features could be disabled to make it match, or maybe it is an optimization the compiler only feels comfortable using if the language is C. In any case it does seem like programs in pure C tend to be ever so slightly faster than C++. It is not really enough to matter in the vast majority of cases, other design decisions will usually matter much more.

I can see the point of wanting to keep the language as C for the Linux kernel. While they could probably define which subsets of C++ are allowed and where, it is generally a lot easier on everyone to say that the subset is C for the entire thing.

The phrase "close enough for government work" comes to mind.

Lies, base64 encoding (as in e-mail) only bumps it up to 4/3. Even when you add TCP, ATM, and all the rest you are likely to run into, it will only be about 1.5x.

A worst case there and back is more like ever so slightly above 30 than 60. To get 60 on an e-mail you would need to bounce it between a totally stupid number of mail servers to get the mail headers to become 30MB.

TFA states that they are considering it.

It also states that we were supposed to set up our own production line quite some time ago, but never did so as it was cheaper to continue buying them directly.

I am not arguing the advantages of C for some tasks, it is my favorite to this day. I really only use other languages when I want to be able to hand maintenance off to someone else (if I think I will end up maintaining something anyway, I nearly always use C.)

While I have a fair amount of code running on Linux at work, none of my servers have the X window system installed. UI stuff is usually win32 or web based (if it can be.)

I still think the answer to the "I want to use C, but also want built in objects." problem is "Use C++."