"Are you looking at saggy tribal titties again, Anon?"
"No, mommy, I'm looking at -flip flip flip- the Aral Sea."

I recommend a project that auto-edits slashdot headlines to avoid trailing prepositions.

Poor headline grammar is something up with which we should not put.

If you're on the RHEL security/patch list, you may have noticed a huge number of updates to ksh over the past couple of months. I found this odd -- until the recent shellshock thing went public. Perhaps this class of attack works against ksh as well? Looks like code reviews of core OS binaries may be ramping up since heartbleed.

People have been playing with long-range RC for many years.

And there have been various autopilots, orientation tools, and FPV-style links for a long time. Greatly predating the kids-with-multirotors era.

Which is also true of traditional RC aircraft, which have been flown for decades - with plenty of opportunities to get up into the path of full-scale aircraft. The carnage has been incredible, one plane after the next falling out of the sky.

The problem isn't going to be people shooting crop health, checking their gutters, doing an aerial during a TV shoot, or getting real estate photos. The problem is going to be malicious users. Just like wrong-headed people who choose to be malicious with lead pipes, shotguns, or kitchen knives.

A bunch of laws telling law abiding people not to fly their camera robot over 400' will mean exactly nothing to someone who doesn't care about laws.

The question was why this is interesting to the slashdot audience. The answer is that this demographic is interested in how the government looks into and acts upon things that most people think of as not-really-public-stuff.

Regardless of your take on how the editor wrote the headline, the concept here (the government empowering trash collectors to police your behavior after looking through what you throw out) is right there in keeping with the government doing all sorts of other things that involve prying into your behavior with an eye towards controlling it. Technology is the most common or at least a highly visible venue for that sort of intrusion these days, so other blatant examples of government micromanagement (like looking through your trash) serve nicely to remind technologists of the larger underlying issues, and that there ARE such issues.

OK, you got me. For a moment there I thought you were taking yourself seriously, and having a rant, however misguided. It's a shame there's no satire/sarcasm tag to reward you for your sense of humor. That was a good one!

Maryland's rain tax is a fine monument to, and classic symptom of its lefty/progressive entrenched government monoculture.

Which state are you talking about? If a state doesn't have a coherent, functional military with the resolve to fight against these guys, then there's nothing else up their sleeves to use. Iraq wasn't ready for this. ISIS just kidnapped another 68 Iraqi soldiers to use as extortion leverage, and has killed a bunch more using suicide bombers. Recent recruits there have no stomach for fighting people like that with only what Iraq has that passes as its own air power for support. Their "little finger" isn't nearly enough to protect and hold the dam in Mosul, for example, let alone stamp this group out of existence.

Because "warmist religion" is indeed a convenient shorthand way to refer to the thought process of legions of people who opine on this topic.

Well here in our state, we've now got a rain tax. So all they have to do is tweak the law that makes guesses about how much grass you have (and this how much you should be charged each year when it rains X amount), and instead make guesses about how much wind-interfering surface area your house has, and how that might be disturbing, through turbulence, the mating habits of a special sub-species of gnats.

Not that you'd like to make a useful point by actually speaking of substance or anything. No, it's just "you're wrong, and I know secret things that you don't." Which is always a sure sign that you don't, actually. My perspective is shaped by daily reality: higher premiums, wildly higher deductibles, millions of people still not covered, millions of people now covered by charging other people for their consumption, more national debt, and a coming tsunami of yet more rate increases for millions of people. Yay, it's "Affordable!"

Other than the fact that they can use it to pay off more muscle, to make up for not always being able to attract enough true believer goons. Also works for buying supplies, getting people on airplanes, and other things that you can't get with ammo left in the dirt by the fleeing Iraqi army.

In places without the rule of law, everybody (with the muscle) IS doing it. That's why it's a major industry in certain parts of Africa, Central America, and the Middle East. Which of course you know, but would rather ignore.

This sentence is impossible to parse.

But I'll take a guess. You think that 30,000 guys armed with millions of dollars, fanatical recruits, and huge numbers of weapons abandoned by fleeing Iraqi forces, are unable to walk into village and towns and kill people? How complicated do you think this actually is? Your need for a fantasy narrative is making you invent something far to complicated, and you're now confusing yourself and writing incoherently.