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Comment It's probably about money (Score 1) 222

I would bet that there is money involved in this somewhere. Just as every other regulatory agency, they need money to operate. Further, they continually need to justify their existence. Technology can't be uninvented. Picture this: A small group of UAV companies need to make money and keep making money without the fear of Joe-schmo and his home-built UAV cutting in on their territory. The formal companies get together and hire a few lobbyists to convince the FAA that the home-built UAV is dangerous and needs to be regulated in the form of expensive annual certifications. The companies that could afford the lobbyists can also easily afford the annual license fees. The little guy can't so he's forced to go away. The FAA is happy to have the additional revenue and probably some baksheesh from the lobbyists so they go along with it.

Comment Something's gotta give (Score 2) 819

I'm wondering at what point are the consumers going to rebel against all of this. The whole luggage debacle has to be included in this discussion too. First, the airlines decided to start charging for checked baggage. The customers responded by not just switching to carry-ons but finding the biggest carry-on possible and getting one for each of their kids too. Trouble is that overhead storage can't accommodate one of these for every passenger so now the extras have to get checked at the door and they don't get charged for this either. The result is more pissed off customers and departure delays. The real question is why this had to happen in the first place. Was it the additional cost of fuel? Unlikely because fuel costs are directly related to weight and the planes know how much they weigh. Is it then the higher cost of fuel? Maybe but if domestic production of oil has been increasing over the past ten plus years and is now surpassing imports to the point of producers wanting to export, why are the fuel costs still as high as they were ten years ago? Or is it labor costs which never go down?

Which leads us to the seating arrangements. Adding 10 more seats puts another roughly $5000 revenue per flight assuming that the flight is fully booked. Would you be willing to pay an extra $33.33 for one inch of legroom? If people aren't willing to spend $25 to check a bag, $33.33 must make people apoplectic. What would you be willing to give up to bring those costs down and the comfort level up?

Comment A practical question (Score 1) 98

What if such cyber attacks are a form of misdirection or rather click-bait? Here's the scenario: launch a cyber attack on a bank but you're really not interested in any data you might get or rather the attack makes the target think that you're after data. The target then tells its customers to change their passwords. It's only then that the attacker gets what their after i.e. account holders' NEW passwords.

Comment Re:Nobody has explained this to me sufficiently ye (Score 1) 531

IMHO, this isn't the same as residential electricity because you either have it or you don't. Okay, sure there are the few residential exceptions that might need three-phase or something like that. The watts used for one device will work just fine for another device. Most houses have a 200 amp service and that's all most people are ever going to need. That 200-amp service has been the same 200-amp service for 50 years. And if I use 10,000 watts all day, that doesn't mean my neighbors won't be able to run their fridge.

My point is that eventually, a few people will want to get full-blown 4k video through their connection to multiple TVs in their house and that's going to take major infrastructure upgrades. Most people aren't going to need all that so do you think they'd be willing to subsidize a few high-bandwidth users? Do you expect the ISPs to just eat the cost of keeping up with bandwidth demand? One thing is for sure, government regulation rarely precisely targets the entity in private sector it's intended to. Take a look at your utility bills and see how many regulatory fees are being passed on to you even when you don't use the service.
Stats

Statistics Losing Ground To CS, Losing Image Among Students 115

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the big-bad-data dept.
theodp (442580) writes Unless some things change, UC Davis Prof. Norman Matloff worries that the Statistician could be added to the endangered species list. "The American Statistical Association (ASA) leadership, and many in Statistics academia," writes Matloff, "have been undergoing a period of angst the last few years, They worry that the field of Statistics is headed for a future of reduced national influence and importance, with the feeling that: [1] The field is to a large extent being usurped by other disciplines, notably Computer Science (CS). [2] Efforts to make the field attractive to students have largely been unsuccessful."

Matloff, who has a foot in both the Statistics and CS camps, but says, "The problem is not that CS people are doing Statistics, but rather that they are doing it poorly. Generally the quality of CS work in Stat is weak. It is not a problem of quality of the researchers themselves; indeed, many of them are very highly talented. Instead, there are a number of systemic reasons for this, structural problems with the CS research 'business model'." So, can Statistics be made more attractive to students? "Here is something that actually can be fixed reasonably simply," suggests no-fan-of-TI-83-pocket-calculators-as-a-computational-vehicle Matloff. "If I had my druthers, I would simply ban AP Stat, and actually, I am one of those people who would do away with the entire AP program. Obviously, there are too many deeply entrenched interests for this to happen, but one thing that can be done for AP Stat is to switch its computational vehicle to R."

Comment Nobody has explained this to me sufficiently yet (Score 1) 531

I understand the user community's desire to have all content be treated the same. But let's assume for a moment that tomorrow, net neutrality is passed and ISPs are no longer able to charge some customers (provider or consumer) more for priority routing/transmission. What incentive do they have to continue to invest in the infrastructure when they have a near-monopoly over the end-users? Consider television distribution. Pretty much everyone has a choice between one cable provider and two satellite providers whose feature set is virtually identical these days. Those companies have little incentive to do things that end-users want e.g. a la carte channel lineups. Maybe eventually it will happen but it might take years and the possible threat from internet content distribution to get them to do anything. So back to the ISPs. End users have a choice between their local cable company and their local phone company. Net neutrality takes away a potential revenue stream. Why then would they continue to either invest in upgrading their technology or continue to keep everyone's rates low or both? Why wouldn't they jack up the prices of the service level necessary to serve up Netflix or whatever for everyone regardless of whether or not the customer uses those types of services?
Earth

Numerous Methane Leaks Found On Atlantic Sea Floor 273

Posted by samzenpus from the bubbling-up dept.
sciencehabit writes Researchers have discovered 570 plumes of methane percolating up from the sea floor off the eastern coast of the United States, a surprisingly high number of seeps in a relatively quiescent part of the ocean. The seeps suggest that methane's contribution to climate change has been underestimated in some models. And because most of the seeps lie at depths where small changes in temperature could be releasing the methane, it is possible that climate change itself could be playing a role in turning some of them on.

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