You are confusing "own" with "control". He is right, you are wrong. The standard land deal in the US has mineral rights and air rights. You own core of the earth to space. But, like the power lines under your property that you don't control, you don't get to dictate the rules for commercial flights over your property.

Unlikely. I'd expect that 99.9% of helicopters "brought down" by a drone will be from boom strike (or other "pilot error") from the pilot's reaction to seeing one, not the impact itself. How would a dron differ significantly from a bird strike? A larger bird would be similar in weight to a drone, and with similar speeds. Does every hawk strike kill the helicopter?

Define "drone". Now, read your first definition, and tell me if it includes amateur RC aircraft. How about unguided model rockets?

You aren't acting like a pilot. Define the class before defining the rules around it.

I've yet to see a definition of "drone" that didn't include model rocketry or RC model airplanes. Like RC, the military drones are primarily flown by humans remotely using RF to control them. So most definitions that catch one catch both.

Perhaps you should define "drone" before launching into problems with "drones", as that includes model rockets, and the RC models.

Back in the day, we called this concept the "Software Preisthood"

It wasn't complementary.

1) I am not threatened by "everyone" learning to program

2) don't buy a bunch of stupid apps, and,

3) Apparently, you're a programmer, so write your own apps. :)

Ah.. but I thought remote access was a niche application, no longer relevant enough for developers to care about?

That's a bit much. I suspect what you are hearing is that Network Transparency is a niche application.... Remote access while vastly less important than it was 20 years ago is still used. Which is why Wayland supports it and supports it better than X11. This is what I keep saying you cannot confuse remote access which is far better with Wayland and X11's specific methods of remote access. BTW we know KDE and Gnome are going to support remote because they have been working with Wayland already.

I use Stumpwm along with the pager from Lxde.

LXDE is in the process of becoming LXQt. It fully intends to support remote using Qt's system. As per the June 2013 announcement Hong Jen Yee (PCMAn) is waiting on the freedesktop guys to tell him the messy details are worked out, right now they've told him what not to use in Qt 5 if he wants to easily be on Wayland and along with Razor they are making sure that LXQt doesn't use that stuff some of which is being backported to LXDE. I suspect that LXDE will never be native Wayland. I do know they are ripping out X11 dependencies from the LXDE codebase to make such a port easier if they choose to go all the way but they don't intend to.

However getting to your use case: LXDE right now works beautifully with SOC configurations. That's why it is exist. So the kind of lighweight dumb system you are asking for now that you want it for LXDE become much easier. These are sold all over Asia using LXDE based distributions and they are cheap (generally under $200, often like $125). I'm not sure if they include additional languages or even test against English but even if this is not a "just go out and buy this" it certainly is a proof of concept. So there you go: If you want to use LXDE you will have terrific support and get an upgrade.

As far as Stumpwm none of the X11 windows managers will work with Wayland. Window management for most is a rewrite from scratch. You can use Stumpwm for X11 on Wayland of course. However Stump isn't really a window manager as much as a programming exercise demonstrating how to do windows management in LISP. So in theory you got lucky while someone is going to have to port it to Wayland, it very well might be pretty easy. However to complicate this under Wayland the display server, window manager and compositor are complied into one process there is no abstraction like there is in X11. So Stumpwm while getting to run native on Wayland is easy to do anything useful with it it is going to need to be hard paired with a display server and compositor. I don't see any evidence that Stump will go there. So let's assume Stumpwm as an end user product is gone even if it still exists as a teaching tool.

Moreover I'm not sure the culture is going to allow you to be able to just casually change window managers under Wayland. For example LXQt will only be tested against its own compositor which will be tuned to LXQt. You can run other applications but when you run LXQt (again the version of LXDE that will exist on Wayland) you have picked your GUI.

This BTW is where you get huge advantages. You LXDE top to bottom can be compiled for the SOC hardware (the way Android works today) so you will see huge increases in battery life and much better performance.

By texting I mean SMS. You have something that lets you do that from your computer?

Yes. There are many solutions. Apple's built in Messages application does this. http://mightytext.net/ works for Android.

Why keep upping the hardware requirements when we have a working solution already? Aren't the landfills full enough?

We don't have a working solution already. X11 doesn't work. New OSes / features up hardware requirements. That's the norm.

But i'm not even sure you are being environmentally sound. Even on the kind of crappy hardware you are probably burning about 3GB / hr of network for remote X usage assuming this is all wired (wireless is more) or about $.03/hr in electricity over a WAN (wired LAN is close to 0). Or about $.25 / day ~ $50 / yr. The landfill is less environmentally destructive than all the electricity you are using by consuming all that extra bandwidth to have everything sent to you post processed instead of storing the bulk locally and just getting instructions.

Congrats for not understanding almost all of what you read. Stellar.

Videos are 5x slower than reading

Yep. And they're extremely difficult to deal with contextually, unless you take the time to generate a full transcript - ugh. So (a) waste your time watching, (b) waste your time writing up a transcript, (c) take the time to post... and (d) everyone has already moved on.

Most video "stories" are for droolers. If you can't write it up, it often isn't worth saying. Exceptions being movies of Pluto, that sort of science-y goodness. I don't think I've ever seen *anything* on the idiot box that was worth a full page of actual cogent explanation. And "interviews".... ffs, just write it down.

Well said. Yes. I'd mod you up, I have the points, but I've posted, so the broken slashcode won't let me. So kudos, anyway.

Make the slashdot UID the new UID for incoming ex-slashers. New users get numbers beyond the current max.

Perhaps the new owners will finally fix the massively broken and stupid moderation system that the previous and current owners have left bereft of badly needed attention:

o Moderators can't post with ID. Stupid. Utterly, completely, stupid. Pointless. Ridiculous.
o Moderators have zero accountability for what they've done -- only for what they might do later
o Absolutely no effective mechanism to remove bad moderation (and that really screws up threads here)
o AC's unjustly penalized, many of the site's best posts never rise above the noise level
o Trolls go un-handled -- the AC low-runging is a punt at not having to work at moderation. But it doesn't work.
o Perversely limited set of mod types leaves moderators unable to moderate reasonably
o Limits on mod ranges penalize the very best posts (and don't adequately address the trolls, either, because...
o On slashdot, troll is effectively equal to AC with one person disagreeing, and...
o Because we can't attribute the "disagree" to the mod, it can't be remediated except by the...
o Random and future-behavior-only-focused meta moderation system.

And then we have:

o Ridiculous delays between posts for ACs AND for logged-in users. Big convo? Too bad for you.
o Inability STILL to handle many character entities after all these years. Not to mention UTF-*8, omg.
o Retarded signature limits. C'mon. Bad sigs should be moderated. It takes a lot of chars to use HTML.

And of course there are the short-bus elephants in the room:

o "Editors" that know nothing about editing. Or writing. Or what constitutes a "story"
o The "firehose", a way to vote up stuff that won't get posted -- can be a total waste of time
o And the continuous mucking about with the parts that worked, making them NOT work,
      while all of the above, which ACTUALLY needs fixing, goes unfixed.

I'd fire the bloody lot of them, frankly.

OK... it certainly is the case that Wayland remote will work worse with dumb terminal type setups. Wayland is assuming the the box remoting into is smart. A phone is plenty smart to run Wayland, and if you kept your applications light (i.e. about 10 years old) would be able handle the toolkits. So for your lapdock type setup you could actually run your desktop applications in a way that is comfortable over mobile data and not chew up insane amounts of data. Again as is usual for the actual use case you are describing Wayland is likely far better than X11. Not far better at doing things the X way but far better at doing the same function as long as you are willing to not cut against the grain.

As far as security goes the receiving machine can have an unwritable filesystem (or unwritable from the OS running Wayland) or be virtualized and just blow away and restore the image after use.... You can achieve the same security with smart as you do with dumb.

But if you want actually dumb, then you need to virtualize your screen. Then you talking something like VNC. Wayland makes use of smart so doesn't support dumb as well. Smart is the more common situation today....

Availability of choice is something that has made Linux great for a very long time. Will there be no future development in this area? Is it going to be QT/GTK forever?

Any toolkit can have Wayland remoting. That's going to be a standard part of writing new toolkits in say 10 years.

Providing network support at a layer between the toolkits and what Wayland provides would be fine by me so long as it meant that this layer was what the toolkits or applications are coded to talk to, not Wayland directly.

In theory Wayland supports that. In practice it isn't going to be what's going to happen so I don't consider it particularly relevant. In practice it happens at the toolkit level and applications pick up their remoting from their toolkit unless they want something more complex.

But... if I don't have my lapdock on me remoting the phone to a computer would be a handy way to handle long-winded text conversations.

That's session sharing. What's better is not remoting the conversation to the computer but that the computer syncs with the phone and has a copy of the conversations at all times. Many messaging systems already provide that. I do that today. No reason to remote just push the data.

I see something like moving the remote support out to the toolkits as making this dream far less likely.

I disagree it makes the dream far more likely. To actually be remote you need good WAN behavior on high latency connections, like a cell phone. That's unfixable not available with X11. Everything else is just using a secure potentially unwritable image for remote machines (VM...) and enjoy. Yes when your main OS changes toolkits (something like KDE 5 to 6) you will need to update your dumb images to match but that's not hard in your scenario.

"Veteran IT Journalist Worries That Online Privacy May Not Exist"

Translation: Don't worry about abuse. Just accept it.

Or it could become a Kinja blog under the Gawker umbrella. *shudder*

I honestly think giving it as a present to moot would be better than that.
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