Batteries aren't really cost effective for storing the amount of energy that we'd need to power the electrical grid from sunset to sunrise.

That said, even if we we ignore the possibility of storing energy or transporting it long distances to handle the moving (east to west) peak sunlight hours ... even if we can can only get half of our energy from the sun, that's still half of our energy that we didn't have to burn fossil fuels for.

We don't need batteries for that to be a false dilemma.

Remember that the bag's Zigbee radio is broadcasting the bag's location constantly in real time, whereas the child's embedded GPS transceiver is using an accelerometer to help predict when the child will zip across the roadway; plus the child's Wi-Fi chip, network path, etc., will all add latency. If that child's GPS receiver has lost signal due to interference, it's going to need to rely on inertial navigation and its own free-running clock to send the predictions of future locations to the car, and those might be out of sync, depending on how long the child has spent in the basement.

Oh, wait. Children aren't having embedded ADS-B chips surgically implanted yet? And random trash bags don't have Zigbee? Hasn't someone been thinking of the children?

I heard a great quote from a filmmaker who encouraged his cameramen to take big risks: "If you're going to soar with the eagles, you can't expect to crap like a canary."

They shot mountains of unusable trivial footage, which cost them a ton of cash. But they also produced some spectacular, memorable films, which catapulted them and their clients to huge popular success. He realized that he had to risk his business to succeed, and he won. Not everyone who takes those kinds of risks succeeds, but companies that take no risks generally don't explode with success, either.

One alternative is to abolish fines, and send people to jail for an amount of time relative to the infraction. Everyone gets about 22,000 days [source: The Moody Blues] so the punishment would be equal regardless of income, right?

As others have said, every person is different in their abilities and limits. And I know nothing about your friend's situation, so I can only tell you about the situation I've worked with.

My aunt was born with cerebral palsy, and she has always had much better control over her feet than her hands. Her solution was to place an ordinary trackball under her desk, (the large kind, not the marble sized one) and she uses her bare foot to control it.

Because it's foot operated and she can't really clean it effectively, it gets dirty much faster than a desktop trackball, and so she ends up replacing it more often than you would a mouse. But overall it's been a pretty cheap investment, and one that works for her.

Turns out I was wrong here -- the ordinance does already exist :

Of course, that ordinance is so vague that it effectively bans all hobbyist R/C airplanes in the city -- including at the two R/C club fields in town -- all the time, not just just during SXSW. It also bans paper airplanes. And kites. And frisbees too. (Letting your bird fly is OK, however, as birds are not devices.)

And it's been this way since at least 2003, though I don't think anybody really thought that it might apply to all of these things until now. Selective enforcement of the laws is rarely a good thing, and now that the cat is out of the bag it'll be interesting to see how this will be selectively enforced after SXSW is over.

It'd be pretty easy to do, really. Create a quarantine VLAN, and if someone's spewing bad packets, flip them into it. Once inside, there could be all kinds of safety rails. All DNS requests would be hijacked and rerouted to the ISP's special quarantine DNS server. Packets would only be allowed to destinations where a valid DNS request was previously made. No routing would be allowed through the network: all packets must either have a source or destination address within the VLAN. SMTP traffic would be restricted to a few per day, with only a few recipients per day. Some destination ports could be closed, such as IRC. If they were DDoSing a site, perhaps with the LOIC, the address for that site would be completely unreachable from within the VLAN. The account holder would get warning SMS and Email messages, and all port 80 web traffic would be silently proxied and injected with scripted pop-up banners. They would say something like "Some computer on your home network is attempting to damage other computers on the internet. This is likely due to a computer virus or other computer infection. In order to restore service, and avoid falling trap to an online scam, please telephone us immediately using the phone number printed on your most recent billing statement from BigISPco. Your internet connection will remain severely limited until after you have your computers repaired and cleaned, you call us to restore service, and we verify that your computer is no longer attempting to attack other computers."

Long time ago I had a co-worker who made a mistake where he lost a lot of un-recoverable data. He went in to our boss to offer his resignation. My boss said "Hell no! I just paid $100,000 for you to learn that lesson, so now I need you to make sure that kind of thing can't happen again."

423.003 likely did not apply there, because that's not really private property and I doubt the intent was to "conduct surveillance". (The term has a specific legal definition -- "Observation and collection of data to provide evidence for a purpose" -- and I'm not sure Texas has a more specific definition. Is looking for a cool picture "providing evidence"?)

Also note that APD's supposed ban says nothing of cameras, only of "drones". (No, contrary to what the media may tell us, R/C aircraft do not all have cameras or missiles.)

And of course "Reckless conduct" is vague enough that they could probably apply it to anything.

What probably did apply there is this NOTAM from the FAA which prohibits flying under 3000' over stadiums shortly before, during and shortly after events. State police don't normally enforce FAA regulations, but it's certainly possible.

That won't apply to the city of Austin during SXSW, and 423.003 probably won't apply to public spaces, but certainly, APD could try "reckless conduct" -- and even if the charges were eventually dropped because they don't really apply, that doesn't beat the ride downtown.

The city council could pass an ordinance, which APD could then enforce, but as it stands, unless the ordinance has been passed recently, no such ordinance exists.

That said, the parks and recreation department did recently decide to ban all R/C airplanes in all parks (page 11), with the only current exceptions being the HCAM and ARCA fields. That said, those rules only apply to parks -- if you fly from a street, or your driveway or a school or something, they don't apply.

(Oddly enough, I don't think anybody even knew about the ban. Based on the response I got from the city, I was the only person city wide to comment on it (and no, I was not in favor.)

In any event, if somebody is flying over a crowd, they might be able to find a law to charge somebody with. But if not over people and not over a park, not in a dangerous manner ... I don't see where they'd have any say in the matter.

That's not enough. A drone could be flown autonomously using inertial navigation, or even dead reckoning, needing no external RF guidance. They have to be able to bring them down without praying that jamming all RF will work.

On the other hand, hobbyists have had model rockets for 50 years and there's been no rain of home-made ballistic missiles on the White House. Maybe it's just not a big deal.

Just remember, the Secret Service treats imminent threats to the POTUS as doomsday scenarios. No bat-shit crazy response is completely off the table, regardless of unintended consequences.

I suspect they've already done all the controlled environment testing they can. As you know, deployment in the field is the ultimate test. Washington is saturated with RF noise, with legitimate transceivers operating on every possible frequency and at varying levels of power. Being able to play "spot the drone amidst the noisy backdrop" is hard enough. Being able to 100% protect the President is something they have to get right the first time, and every time. Responding harshly to too many false positives may also create a nuisance backlash, so they may just be tuning their rejection filters.

And when the museums feel this has gotten out of control, they can address it. Complain to the museum so they know it's a growing problem. Otherwise, yeah, deal with it.

We banned tripods at our exhibit a few years ago as they cluttered the aisles, and we offered the photographers the chance to arrive before hours to take their shots. If selfie sticks become a problem, we'll ban them, too.

Too many jerks who froth at the mouth when they read a headline like this instead of reading the summary, or, god-forbid, the article itself. They remember being told something about 1984 being a totalitarian dystopia, and confusing it with their lives.

Yes, we live in a camera state, and there are now even more hidden cameras than Orwell could have imagined would be possible. But no, not every camera is watched 24x7 by the Ministry of Truth. Not every camera's footage is available to the authorities on a whim.