You are absolutely correct but they know perfectly well it would just be followed up with the obvious and very specific request for "All e-mails from Edward Snowden with subject matter relating to the legality of the internet monitoring and cellular meta data gathering activities conducted by the NSA".

And then they'd be right back here were they are now. Having to make the same excuse, which might have some legitimacy as those mails probably are evidence in an on going criminal investigation of Snowden; all though we all know he isn't returning to the States without some kind of immunity agreement so its rather hollow sounding. Think how hollow it would sound if it was a second excuse given.

The reality is Snowden's story about having attempted to raise the issues thru the proper channels is likely truthful and would just expose more NSA and State Department lies. The would rather just look like dicks and someone felt just shutting down the FOIA avenue would look less Dickish than being evasive.

No I think we should require a license if you are a commercial operator. If you are just flying for fun than you should not need a license. I don't think the number of aircraft that will be operated by pure hobbiests is going to be large enough to present a public nuisance.

I do think the totality of drones in the air will. So licensing commercial operators makes sense. If you fly as a hobbyist and your drone crashes causing damage or injury its a civil matter between you and injured party. If you are an unlicensed commercial operator you should face additional penalties.

I know its a fun conspiracy theory and all but I don't think the double standard is deliberate, even if it does exist.

The real-estate lobby is probably only slightly less powerful than the Hollywood lobby. I mean lets see:

There are huge tax advantages for income properties, in terms of you can take losses against capital gains on them, but you can't on a property you used as a residence? Why?

The mortgage interest tax deduction -- exists almost exclusively to increase borrowing power and willingness, which DOES NOT really help buyers and owners, it just pushes values up in general which means banks get more interest realtors and title companies get bigger commissions.

There was never any real financial reform done; and if look into the debate carefully you can't count that all up to GOP obstructionism non of the proposals from the left did much to address predatory lending or liar loans/documentation requirements.

Given how much Gall Street has tied up in it the only thing more untouchable to regulators than Hollywood might be Real-Estate.

I am usually a pretty big skeptic when it comes to regulation but I gotta agree with you here.

This seems like a federal agency operating well withing the boundaries of what it was established to do. I also think we do need some management of [commercial] drones, do to the sheer numbers and the fact that most operators are flying over other peoples properties, where crashes could cause damage or injury.

People doing purely as a hobby problem I would be more skeptical of the need to regulate them. There numbers are few enough and lets be honest most of the air craft they would be operating will remain small and light; we can probably expect incidents form their use to be infrequent enough and small enough in severity to sort out in our local small claims courts at least until that proves not to be the case.

The real-estate folks though are using the drones commercial and if we let every real-estate agent, grounds keep, delivery boy, paper boy, etc; fly a drone with no management whatsoever that is hell of lot of drones in air! Some of those crafts might start getting bigger and heavier pretty quickly as well.

I would think it would be a matter of how much contrast this thing needs to "see" the counter obvious counter measure would be to "light up" areas where a someone is likely to be a target with light of the same wavelength but from an omnidirectional source. So the bullet can see the spot the laser is painting against the background.

Should be fairly easy for situations like the inside of a car an important person travels in, and the outside of residences and office buildings and such. Now if you are the impoverished kid that is harder to do.

Yet don't you dare encrypt anything in an amateur radio band!

I have been posted before there is simply no way the NSA could have use for even the most conservative estimates for there storage capacity in that Utah data center unless they are or were planning to keep the content.

Pretty much this. If your company is big enough or drives enough revenue from its IT systems that require routine off hours maintenance they should staff for that.

That is not say that if its just Patch Tuesdays they need to; or the occasional rare major internal code deployment that happens a couple time a year or so. For that you as the admin should suck it up, and roll out of bed early once and while. Hopefully your bosses are nice and let you have some flextime for it. Knock out at 3p on Fridays those weeks or something.

If there is a regular maintenance window that is frequently used, say at least twice a week, then they need to make the regular scheduled working hours for some employee(s). Maybe some junior admin who can follow deployment instructions works 3a-10a Tuesdays and Wednesdays; but lets be fair to that person they have a life outside of work a deserve to have a predictable schedule. They should still work those hours even if there is nothing going on that week, and just use the time do whatever else they do; update documentation; test out new software versions etc, inventory, etc.

Oh definitely; and they or someone a little bigger ( Amazon? Netflix? ) who could potentially acquire them might be able to deliver profitably service dirt cheap like single digit dollars per month.

I don't want pretend to understand all the dynamics involved with the network to cable co contracts, FCC must carry requirements, local monopolies granted to cable companies, etc.

That last one was never hard to enforce, but how will $MUNICIPALITY enforce the cable monopoly agreement against a cable company like Areo with no cables? Suddenly they or someone like them are going to be a new player in the game like the SAT TV providers were, and it will at least slowly shift the balance somewhat.

Right, its a complex balance of power the networks have with the cable operators and what they really don't want is people making waves.
Just looks at the fights CBS and ABC have been in lately (NBC is a little different given they are COMCAST subsidary ).

On the one hand royalties from Areo might be a new revenue stream on the other hand premium cable seems to be where the eyeballs are going to the point the cable operators have started expressing less willingness pay to carry the networks. Its probably a smallish number of very vocal cable subscribers that push them to continue to pay CBS's extortion fees. If those folks could just pick up a cheap Areo subscription well it might actually weaken the hand of broadcast networks to charge the other cable operators. ABC has nothing to worry about though because their parent Disney will just make carrying ABC a condition of carrying ESPN which no cable operator would dare drop.

I don't think its fair. A modern web application is expected to do a whole heck of alot more than COBOL as it was originally designed even envisioned. You can still bang out a simple shell script or procedural program in Ruby today without knowing much of anything but we just don't consider those things 'applications' anymore.

Hell COBOL (propper) isn't really even interactive, its read in records, and write out some other records. You needed something like CICS to do much of anything interactive and guess what its not so easy to use or understand anymore once you go there.

Lets not even talk about the job control stuff to get your program running in the first place; normal people were never expected to handle that, it was the job of the OPERATOR who HAD EXTENSIVE TRAINING to do that.

So really its just not true.

Applications are more complicated to build today fundamentally because they are more complex in terms of what they do. Could it be simplified yes, we could fix lots of the technical kludges by replacing http and other web technologies with some truly stateful application delivery protocol and languages + libraries but it while it would be simpler it would not be simple.

His view of the past is skewed, things were never really available to regular people. There was always specialized professionals in the background handling the details. Except for a breif period in the late 80's and early 90's during the height of the PC revolution. Those machines though were a great leap backward in terms of what the limitations were as compared to the mainframe, and in leaving those limitations like (single user) behind we have put all the complexity back in.

We can make an argument the framers would not have found it reasonable as well. Just look at how our courts function.

We have a formerly strong but at least still strongly worded 4th amendment that at the time it was written would have greatly inhibited spying. "The right to be secure in ones papers and effects" in the late 18th century left the state with following you around in public and asking people what you were up to without much ability to compel them answer.

The we have the innocent until proven guilty concept, and the beyond reasonably doubt standard; which again show the intent of our societies founding document was very much to ensure the rights of the innocent were protected even at the expense of letting the guilty escape punishment and public safety allowing offenders to go free if we were not reasonably certain they were really offenders.

So all the necessary for security arguments are fundamentally invalid because the very purpose of the organization "The United States of America" is to "Secure the blessing of liberty to ourselves..." Actions that infringement on liberty is incompatible with our national objectives. The "General welfare" argument does not hold either, look at the phrasing government is to "Promote" the general welfare but "Secure" liberty; the framers absolutely intended liberty to trump welfare where required.

That would be security problem in itself. The sucuritly line at a big airport is like the perfect freaking place for a suicide bombing; lots of people in at least for many airports a pretty confined area.

Easy way to trigger you bomb to just wait for a current across the pins. Letting people 'plug stuff in' in the security line seems like a terrible idea to me.

In theory if you can't get through the security check you are allowed to leave with your property. In practice people have been prevented from doing so.

If someone does arrive at the security checkpoint with a $600 dollar tablet that happens to have a dead battery, for their $130 flight is the TSA going to let them just leave?

Right, but that can probably be pretty well managed with opiate pain killers, for any major procedure it generally has to be anyway. Addiction issues aside they risk of cardiac, respiratory failure, liver and kidney damage etc, is much lower when you are not using as many drugs and in such high dosages to leave someone unconscious.

There is also the issue that these drugs stress the body during the already stressful surgical procedure.

I am not a medical professional but if there was a safe way to just turn off someones awareness during a surgery and then limit anesthesia to post operative pain management I suspect safety could be improved a great deal.