Nonsense. You shouldn't be in a place where you endanger manned aircraft in the first place.

In the second place, that system depends on ATC providing traffic separation services to the manned aircraft, which they do not do for VFR flights.

Third, it depends on the pilot actually seeing the target to avoid it. Smokey air, turbulence, pilot busy flying and looking for the drop site, not a very good recipe for seeing a small drone before it hits you.

Fourth, it depends on the area having radar service. No radar service, transponders don't do anything. If you are low enough to get good video of the fire, you're probably under the radar coverage area.

And finally, the weight and cost of putting such a system on a DJI Phantom, for example, would make the drone unable to fly.

Yeah, the directional antennas used for the transponders are those huge spinny things you often see near airports. Actually, the largest spinny thing is the primary radar which depends on the radio echo. The smaller spinny thing mounted on top is the transponder antenna, called secondary radar. Very large and very not portable. You won't have time or ability to set one up near a fire site, and if you did you'd have to worry about coverage. You have to have them in the clear so they can see far enough to be worth it.

It's not a feasible solution to this problem. It's a solution suggested only by people who hate drones to the extent they want to see them eliminated from the skies altogether.

I'm telling you in a polite way what a ridiculous idea you have and that putting such a transponder on a drone will not keep them out of the way of manned aircraft and will not allow manned aircraft to avoid them. When you are a pilot on a firefighting aircraft you do NOT want to be distracted by trying to identify traffic that may collide with you. THAT IS WHY THEY PUT A TFR UP IN THE FIRST PLACE. It is a big KEEP OUT sign intended to make the operation safe enough to continue. Other aircraft in the area are a hazard for which the only mitigation is to stop flight operations until they leave.

Firefighting aircraft do not appear magically directly over a fire and then magically disappear after dumping their loads. They have to get from the landing area to the fire and then back again. As a drone operator, you have NO IDEA what the flight path of the firefighting aircraft will be since they have to consider weather and winds and desired destinations in their planning.

And it's not a "flight line" -- that's the place where the airplanes park.

You can make "dangerous" illegal. And putting an aircraft into a no-fly zone just to take pictures is not just stupid, it is dangerous -- which is why they put temporary flight restrictions over active fires in the first place.

If you're the pilot of a firefighting aircraft, you understand and mitigate the risks of flying over fires, and through experience those risks and means of mitigation have become reasonably well known. You are not "afraid", you are appropriately cautious.

Drones, on the other hand, are not a well defined risk and can show up in front of you without any notice. Yes, if it means you might crash into an active fire area*, you are scared of drones.

* said areas are typically mountainous and have few readily available landing areas. "Controlled descent into terrain" is the best way to describe the result.

In SOME airspace SOME aircraft have to carry transponders that TRANSPOND to radar interrogation with the code assigned by ATC. It's not a broadcast, it's not a "license code", it's not associated with any specific aircraft until ATC assigns it.

And this would remove the risk of collisions exactly how? "Oh my, there's a drone somewhere in the area. It's ID is ... I guess I can fly right through it because it IDd itself..."

The other examples I listed disprove the claim that companies have to lower prices to "maximize profit". The water rates did not go down here, for example, when taxes were added as line items. The cable bill has never gone down, and certainly not when more taxes were added as line items. My ISP, ditto. My phone bill, ditto. The last hotel room I stayed in gave me the price without taxes, and then added them on after I was standing in the lobby checking in.

And the last airline ticket I priced showed me the prices without tax, and then added the taxes at the end after I had chosen to buy the ticket.

In none of those cases did the companies involved lower their base prices to make up for the taxes -- which meant I was paying them in full. That doesn't mean some companies don't do that, it's just becoming less common as taxes start to show up as specific charges instead of being lumped into the price.

By the way, since the taxes I'm talking about apply to all providers of a specific service (room taxes at a hotel, for example), those providers know that their competitors will be charging their customers more so they don't have to cut prices to compete. Gas taxes are a shining example of this -- they apply to all gas sales and not just to one company. A rising tide lifts all boats, to adapt a phrase.

The radio frequencies being used are license-free publicly-owned resources. WiFi doesn't work by magic, it takes bandwidth in the radio spectrum.

When you are streaming random numbers just to be using the bandwidth, you are interfering with other users. Even other users who are not using Google's access points.

I agree. Having courts step in to decide the appropriate level of response to a technological issue is even dumber. Either the defendant(s) are or are not following the contracts or laws. Making up a contract or law that the defendants should have to obey and filling in the blanks as to technical details is right out.

Now he's just heard it -- from you.

And just what will authorize this politician to be "booted out"? Could that require, perhaps, a LAW? And thus his campaign promise is being enforced by force of law.

Everyone on /. who wants to see Obama booted out for not closing Gitmo please raise your hands.

Can you imagine the chaos that would ensue if every politician who made a promise that turned out to be impossible for him to keep, or was misinterpreted by the opposing political parties, was simply booted out? You'd spend more time in elections than you would with someone actually running things. The congress would empty overnight, state governments would stop doing anything because they lack a quorum, and even city councils would be hamstrung.

Wait a minute, that might not be a bad thing after all. Off with their heads, I say!

Every penny of gas taxes legislated by states and local municipalities is paid by the customer -- none of it is paid by the gas company.

I have half a dozen taxes on my phone and cable and electric and water bills that are paid for in full by me without a penny of it being paid by any of the companies involved.

There are about a dozen (guessing) taxes applied to every plane ticket sold in the US. Guess who pays those taxes in full?

I occasionally hear ads from stores who say "buy from us and we'll pay the sales taxes", but those are rare. Guess who pays the sales taxes in stores normally?

Some taxes don't get fully passed along, but it is increasingly common for more and more of them to become a line-item on the bill and the customer pays them.

Simple intersections don't have turn lanes. They have two roads that cross.

So in addition to the median in the center that a simple intersection doesn't have, a roundabout has physical dividing barriers in each of the approaching roadways, forcing those roads to be widened to allow space for them.

You said most of the roads, not most of the roads 100 years ago. Today they're built for cars. I've see a lot of roads in European cities that haven't been rebuilt, but I see few urban roads in the US today that are still 100 years old. Certainly not enough of them to say that most of them are.

And they're not built with the idea that a policeman will pull you over and make you park there for three days. I don't know what manual you think I should read that would explain that one.

They can't be the same size. Where do you get the space for the median in the middle? It has to come from somewhere.

I've yet to see a stop sign that needs power, and what is "self regulating"?

That depends on what they are replacing. I'd say that a main route that has to come to a stop because someone on a side street has entered the circular roadway is making things less efficient. Compare all the cars on the main route that don't have to do anything special and the few cars on the side street have to stop and wait for a few seconds, versus every car having to slow down and those on the main road being forced to stop so side street traffic can have immediate access.

You don't know where my area is, so your insult is particularly stupid.

At a roundabout you need to yield to traffic in the circular roadway. Since that roadway is going ONE DIRECTION, you need only look the direction the traffic is coming from to know if you need to yield or not. Traffic you see looking the other direction is going away from you and you don't need to yield to them.

Yes, people can go the wrong way around. It's pretty easy to detect that with a quick glance. If there's nobody in the circle, there's nobody going the wrong way.

I don't care what the traffic coming from the right is going to do.

Not in my state. He must be out of the lane next to you. I.e., for a two lane road, you must stop and remain stopped if there is anyone in the crosswalk. I would guess that your state laws are similar.

Sorry, but I know the law. You assume that the sidewalk can be the crosswalk, and that isn't how the law is written.

The lines are irrelevant. We have crosswalks without lines -- in fact, many more of those than ones that are marked. The only benefit from lines is when a courteous pedestrian steps outside the lines and allows traffic to proceed before it could otherwise legally. (E.g., on a two lane road where there is no traffic he needs to worry about coming the other way, he can step out of the marked crosswalk as soon as he gets past your car and you can go.)

Fortunately, cities cannot just slap paint on something and change the laws of the state. That's what painting lines on the sidewalk to try making them into crosswalks would be doing. Imagine the confusion when someone from out of town comes visiting and knows state law.

All you'll do is make the "standing on the corner chatting with someone" problem worse. Yes, there are people who stand on the sidewalk taking to other people. If you make the sidewalk part of the crosswalk you will force traffic to stop for no reason at all, and eventually traffic will learn to not stop when there is a reason.

I have no idea where you got this from. Who is forcing people to park their cars and not drive for three days? Is just visiting a store in an urban area and arriving by car supposed to be considered a crime sufficient to justify such nonsensical punishment? Do we not value the concept of "considered innocent until proven guilty" enough that we would force someone to park for three days just for being stopped for a traffic infraction?

Allowing people free access to visit downtown businesses and do so from distant places is hardly "molly-coddling".

Citation required. Most of the urban roads I've seen have been built for cars, and have the markings to prove it.

We had a traffic circle where we couldn't keep the locals from going clockwise. It's gone now. Good riddance.