Yeah, because using my own drone to video in my own backyard is SUCH a douchebaggy thing to do, because it might possibly see over the fence I PAID TO INSTALL and catch a bit of you in your yard while I'm using it.

Its not. And its highly unlikely to fall afoul of the law. That was my point.

Well, if I'm taking video of me in my own backyard them I'm identifiable, and I'm going to hazard a guess that those people in my neighbor's yard that is in view will be identifiable, and I'm not doing artistic or journalistic operations ...

Nor are going out of your way to record them in any way; and presumably you'll blur or edit them out before you post any video/stills online... so...?

Except water vapor is the gaseous form of water; the plankton would have to be transported on individual molecules of water to reach the ionosphere.

If plankton were transportable in microscopic *droplets* in the troposphere as you suggest, a more plausible explanation is that the equipment was contaminated -- both the station itself and the gear used to test it.

Or he may have spent years building up a tolerance to iocaine powder...

I think it should not be illegal for me to fly my drone in my backyard just because the focal length of the lens on the camera it carries means it will take images of my backyard and a bit of someone else's.

It doesn't appear the law would make that illegal. It proposes to make filming people unawares from a drone illegal. Catching a "bit of someone elses back yard" while flying in your own hardly sounds like you are filming other people.

Certainly the law should not allow someone to damage my drone while I am flying it in my backyard just because they are paranoid that it might have a camera and that the camera might be catching them in its view.

I must have really missed something. Where did it say they may damage the drone in your own backyard based simply on a suspicion that it MIGHT have a camera?

If the goal is to make "doing X" illegal, then make that illegal and don't waste time adding "from a drone".

Your realize we don't actually have the draft proposal in front of us. Perhaps it merely calls out low altitude aerial photography and doesn't call out "from a drone". Perhaps "from a drone" was simply added to the news release because drone is a good keyword that gets hits, and "drone photography" is the root cause prompting this law. But perhaps, just perhaps, the proposed law doesn't specify it has to be "from a drone".

As for the rest, according to the news article:

"However, the proposal has many exceptions, which include permissible taping and photographing for mapping or artistic or journalistic purposes as long as the recording shows several residences and no individual is identifiable. The ordinance also would allow violators a defense if the person destroyed the photos or tapes upon learning of the law as long as he or she did not record or photograph children, sex or nudity or distribute the images or recordings."

So it seems pretty clear that unless you are being a douchebag, you won't run afoul of this law, and your fears about being harassed for flying a drone in your backyard where you might catch a bit of the neighbors yard are just hysterics.

I disagree. It means trust but don't rely entirely on trust when you have other means at your disposal.

Consider a business deal. You take the contract to your lawyer and he puts all kinds of CYA stuff that supposedly protects you against bad faith. But let me tell you: if the other guy is dealing in bad faith you're going to regret getting mixed up with him, even if you've got the best lawyer in the world working on the contract. So you should only do critical deals with parties you trust.

But if the deal is critical, you should still bring the lawyer in. Why? Because situtations change. Ownership and management change. Stuff can look different when stuff doesn't go the way everyone hoped. People can act differently under pressure. Other people working at the other company might not be as trustworthy as the folks sitting across the table from you. All kinds of reasons.

So you trust, but verify that the other party can't stab you in the back, because neither method is 100% effective. It's common sense in business, and people usually don't take it personally. When they *do*, then that's kind of fishy in my opinion.

Why should the platform matter, when the alleged goal is "privacy" and the taking of pictures?

The law reacts to a perceived problem, written by people who are primarily adept at things like fundraising and image management.

"residency" and "citizenship" are prerequisites for the job. "Writing good Legislation 101" isn't.

Should there be a law that makes it illegal to use a tripod with a camera to take pictures of people that violate their privacy? How about using a stedi-cam to do the same thing?

These don't generally allow different vantage points than just holding it. So the rules and norms for already in place for photography are reasonably adequate. A drone enables a heretofore generally inaccessible vantage point. It is the new "problem" in question.

Can I throw my camera up in the air to get over-the-fence shots?

If that actually becomes a widespread problem, then we can expect a new law to be passed.

Just as a law was recently passed in response to someone taking upskirts after it was found the existing laws didn't close off the loophole the photographer was using.

You are right, in the sense that the law outlawing the 'platform to take photos' is silly, that it should be a law defining what a "privacy invading photo" is and then outlawing that.

But that's ultimately a circular argument, since the definition is going to be one that includes "taking low altitude shots of people otherwise unaware, from vantage points a photographer could not normally stand, such as from a drone" anyway; and some smart ass is immediately going to ask... "what I drop my camera on the trampoline and it bounces up goes off and just happens to snap the neighbors back yard, am I a criminal now?"

The issue is not "should be", it is a matter of legality.

The law is an very imperfect expression of what society wants the rules to be, usually written re-actively to problems as they arise.

If your complaint is that its a pretty shitty system, then we agree. :)

If your complaint is that you should be able to take photos of your neighbors yard from a drone, then we don't.

C++ isn't strongly typed

Yeah it is.

Specifically reinterpret_cast. It's almost as unsafe, if not as unsafe, as good old C style casting.

Its exactly as unsafe. The difference is that it cannot happen by accident. You are telling the compiler, in very explicit terms that you WANT the reinterpret_cast behavior.

And strongly typed means you can't change the type.

Casting doesn't change the type of the thing being cast. It just lets you treat the thing being cast as if it were a different type. typeof(x) never changes.

So, roofers would regularly be violating privacy?

Only if they went up there to take pictures of the neighbors instead of fix the roof.

Did he violate her privacy (during the day, it wasn't obvious from the outside that the elevator walls were see though so if she was a visitor, she might not have known).

First she was sunbathing on the roof of a smaller building adjacent to a taller one. Even if she didn't know the elevator was see through it would have been pretty obvious to her that there was would be all kinds of windows and such on the building overlooking her.

Second, like a lot of law, intent comes into play.

She wasn't really in a private place (given the building next to her that you were in was taller; and second, all you did was happen to see her in your normal course of doing what you were doing.

Now, if you'd rented a room on the top floor, brought your telescope and camera, and spent the day looking for undressed women to photograph and post onto your blog --- then that's an ENTIRELY different class of behaviour, and I really shouldn't even have to explain that to someone.

Even a child can tell the difference between the happenstance of seeing someone naked, and going out of their way to see (and photograph) someone naked. I find it amusing (disappointing!) that so many on /. try to pretend one is the same as the other.

How much of the high price of smartphones when purchased up front comes from an expectation that hardware will be subsidized by an inflated monthly bill for voice and data service?

I actually think you are right here, that a considerable amount of the price is inflated due to the cost rarely being directly paid, preventing competitive pricing to take effect.

We can however, use wifi tablets as a proxy for the pricing. A basic ipad Mini wifi runs $400, a galaxy tab pro 8.4 runs $329; the cheaper galaxy tab 4 runs $250. These are all for devices with ~8" screens give or take.

If we assume (and I concede its significant assumption) that the "savings" by shrinking the screen to ~5" is offset by higher costs making it that small... and then add a $100 cellular radio markup on it.

Then premium phones in a properly competitive market would run $350-$500. Instead of $500-$700.

So it MAY be inflated pricing due to carrier subsidy arrangements; or it may be the assumption that shrinking to 5" actually costs quite a bit more than we allowed for.

If I had to guess its probably a bit of both.

Doesn't add as much as you think.

Bestbuy charges $100 between an LTE tablet and the wifi only one.
Apple charges $129 between an LTE tablet and the wifi only one.

Much of THAT is just profit.

So your $600 to $700 phone? Less than $100 goes towards the "cellular radio" capabilities.

well, I can see my neighbors back yard from my deck.

Then that has nothing to do with the post you were replying to.

You see in the post you replied to it was stipulated that they had taken steps to secure their privacy, by blocking your normal view.

If you can see it from your deck, then it should be obvious to you that have NOT taken steps to make their backyard private from you.

Now if you had to climb onto your roof and hang off the chimney to get a view that would be different.

Are you seriously saying I can't take a picture from my back deck?

Out of curiosity, even if it were legal, do you honestly think you should be taking pictures of the neighbors in their backyard?

Do you honestly not think that this would be the height of rudeness, even if it were legal?

(Do people *really* want to take over Battle.Net accounts when their spouses die?)

If I die tomorrow, my family should absolutely inherit access to my steam and gog and other accounts. My kids play those games daily right now.

Why should they have to re-buy everything just because I got hit by a bus?

Did you know Apple was considered part of the PC market in 1992, and had whopping 19 percent share?

Its entirely beside the point. Virtually nobody was comparing Apples to Intels to Sparcs based on benchmarks to make a buying decision.

The decision to buy Apple or Intel or Sparc was made based on OTHER factors (software availability, features, etc), and THEN a buying decision within the chosen platform was made based on price/performance etc.

If the platform chosen was intel, then MHz was the primary performance benchmark buyers used.

Did it compare directly to Apple or Sparc? No, but nobody cared, because by the point you were looking at Intel MHz numbers, you'd already ruled out buying an Apple or Sparc, and were not looking at them. So the inapplicability of a comparison was irrelevant.

Look at the subject line on this thread. "performance never measured in MHz". That's false. Lots of people measured performance in MHz, because it was a genuinely useful metric for a lot of common buying scenarios for over a decade.

This whole argument is silly. Nothing you have said refutes the fact that mhz WAS in actual fact usefully used as a performance metric.

Was it perfect? No.

Did it apply to every platform or comparison scenario? No.

Does any of that matter in the slightest to the question of whether "performance was ever measured in MHz"?

A big resounding: No.

Given that rolling roadblocks are illegal, perhaps the autonomous cars will avoid participating in one.

Hypocrites that ask for it deserve no sympathy.

And yet sympathy funded her kickstarter to the tune of $150,000. Again, if your point is that she's deliberately inciting the abuse to collect on sympathy, then you also have to concede the abusers are chumps playing into her hand.

Well, complaining about behavior while engaging in it is like slapping a 'kick me' sign on your back

How was she engaging in the behavior she was complaining about? Was she sending rape-death threats? or writing games wherein you could beat up people she didn't like?

Simply being critical of the gender stereotypes and tropes in video games hardly rises to that level of abusiveness? Give me a break. You can disagree with her all you like, but she was not dishing out what she received.